I think in today's globally connected economy we are all inescapably guilty of exploiting the land and the poorer people abroad. Short of living in a cave and wearing sack cloth we can't help being a small cog in the vast economic machine that is destroying the planet. Whatever steps you take to reduce your carbon footprint, you'll end up harming some other aspect of nature. There's things we don't even know we're doing. I have the cheapest mobile phone, I've had it for years as I don't want a shiny new one for the sake of it. The coltan rare earth metal that manufacturers use inside all our phones is mined in the Congo. The miners live out in the wild as they mine the coltan. To eat, they kill the local gorilla population for the meat. So, even my cheap mobile phone is responsible for decimating the gorilla population in the Congo. It's a web of pollution, death and exploitation to get palm oil, clothing, technology, etc, etc.
A huge percentage of our goods comes via gigantic container ships. Whales release a stress hormone that can be detected in the earth's oceans. During Covid, when economies were hugely affected, the amount of cargo ships delivering items across the world was reduced drastically as nobody was out buying stuff. Experts who were monitoring the waters noticed a huge reduction in the whale stress hormone during this time. The whales benefited from less activity from cargo ships. These experts said it was the reduction in engine noise that relieved the whale's stress. There's a myriad obscure reasons that we are all caught in this net and we can't escape it. I apologise for the depressing tone of my comment, but sometimes I despair. Is throwing my tins in the blue bin and my cardboard into the brown bin really helping anything? (I do love rummaging through charity shops, though! 😁).
One last thing. George Carlin said he kept reading that we're destroying the planet. He said don't worry, the planet will survive just fine, and will recover from anything we do to it. It's ourselves that we're destroying, and we won't recover and we won't survive. Meanwhile, the planet will just wave bye-bye to us and continue spinning through space.
