I think pointing out specifics would be counterproductive but I will just say that the mods have shut down threads before. I agree everyone has been cordial so far.
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I have actually been tracking this thread since the beginning. It just seems as if this is a LaCava thread, not a wdw thread?
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I blame the originator of the thread! (Crap,it wasn’t me was it? Nope, good! )
Edit: I don’t really blame anyone
I don’t know how many forum users set their views, but I don’t think as many users see threads in LaCava?
I am saying that as an explanation on why Matt might have posted it here?
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Where you live makes a big difference with your perception and perhaps, understanding of environmental issues. Living in California, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are myriads of environmental regulations. Some make sense. Other regulations have us scratching our heads. We don’t get single use plastic bags at the store (I bought a whole box of single use shopping bags because raw meats and fish leak!) and eateries can’t use styrofoam food containers (they use a paper cozy or two paper cups). And @Pod, we used disposable diapers, even though the plastic liners take forever to degrade away from sunlight!
I live by the motto that I should be a good steward of what I have been given. And I want to leave our world a better place for our children. While I believe it is true that non first world countries pollute more than first world countries currently do, I believe that we should each do our part to be a good steward of our environment. I’m an environmental engineer, spending my career in government, working on wastewater, stormwater, and groundwater issues. But I drive a minivan. My husband and I drive well over 100 miles a day (that’s a lot less than when the kids were growing up and had activities). We do not own a hybrid or electric car, and we do not have solar panels. We eat meat 
in moderation and certain organic foods. My grandpa was a butcher so I really enjoy red meats. And I love my aerosol hairspray! We use paper plates, napkins, and paper towels regularly but they can all go in our green waste bin.
But we recycle/reuse most everything. Our garbage company collects weekly garbage, recyclables, and green waste (including all food waste). It recycles clothes twice a year. We have a 20 gallon trash bin. Some weeks, our trash bin is empty because we recycle and compost so diligently, and limit single serving stuff. We save the water used to wash fruits and veggies to water our yard. We hang our laundry until it is mostly dry before throwing it in the dryer. We don’t litter and support litter pick up in our community. We don’t wash our cars at home because soaps (even those labeled biodegradable pollute), and heavy metals and oils from our cars run into the storm drains and into waterways we want to use for recreation and/or provide habitat for wildlife. We use mugs and water bottles. We use mesh bags for our produce instead of plastic. My kids live in Southern California. They don’t have green waste recycling and they don’t ban styrofoam food containers.
American scientists return to their homelands in third world countries to influence environmental legislation and help with clean up technologies. I know. Some of my coworkers are those scientists and a few of them have dedicated their retirements to their native homelands to help address environmental issues.
In our quest to pursue technology and modernization, America has polluted our environment. We spend trillions of dollars cleaning up every year and still we are battling the pollution. We have dry cleaning solvents infiltrating into newly built homes in Silicon Valley (Try selling one of those multimillion dollar homes right now!). Heavy metals and solvents continue to contaminate groundwater in old industrial areas around the SF Bay because of past mishandling and disposals. Fish and shell fish in SF Bay are contaminated by mercury and PCBs. There has been a health advisory on eating Bay fish for more than 2 decades. This is challenging for poor people who want to fish to supplement their food supply. I support a cradle to grave requirement for products.
Regulations drive technology. I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area my whole life. When I was a child, the Bay used to stink because of minimal sewage treatment requirements. Regulations required a higher level of treatment. I can attest that vastly improved the bacteria and smell issues!
So rest assured. The plastic straw “ban” will drive someone to produce a better paper straw!
I don’t advocate returning to the cavemen days. I support enjoying life, which includes flying! I had time to type all this as I’m on a PLANE to visit my kids in Southern California!
I did take the train to the airport thought. Just landed in San Diego. My daughter will be picking me up in her gasoline car! And we are going to Costco to pick up rib eye steaks for dinner . Tomorrow, I will drive her car to Irvine to visit my son. I’m sure he will want steaks, too. By the way, he can see Disneyland fireworks from his apartment.
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I concur with everything you wrote above, and especially want to comment on this
Very often, when I’m on I-90, I see the absolutely enormous windmill blades coming through enroute to other parts of the state. It concerns me very much that Wyoming just opened a landfill for these things, and are anticipating taking 900 of them right off the bat. 900 !!! There’s also a solar panel field nearby that locals are increasingly suspicious they’re going to have to deal with, despite claims from the company that it’s still operational.
Do we even know the lifespan of a wind turbine or solar panel? Do these companies post a bond to cover clean-up? (I don’t expect you to know, @stlouie,these are rhetorical questions 
). Apparently, recycling fiberglass wind turbine blades is not commercially viable at this point, so we’re just going to stick them in the ground like all our other trash
My state has been a victim of rapacious out-of-state companies before, who destroyed and poisoned the land and then left. A hundred years later, some towns have not recovered, and we have several Superfund sites. Needless to say, some of us have a bad feeling about this.
Clean energy can be quite dirty up close . We might be fooling ourselves on this whole issue of renewables and lowering our carbon footprint- there is no free lunch. Until we can use fusion, of course.
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Oh. My. Goodness.
It never dawned on me that those windmills might actually stop working. I am not a fan of them in the first place, but the whole idea of them needing to be dismantled and accounted for is mind blowing and to think how widely impressed some are on their usefulness. What irony. And I will just stop there.
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I just wonder if we’re getting into worse problems than we’re getting out of. We’ve definitely done it before.
Case in point- wildland fire suppression, which was SOP for at least 75-100 years. Look where that’s gotten us. Old, beetle-infested forests riddled with dead standing timber just waiting for a single lightning strike to turn into an inferno. Fires like that are not natural, they incinerate everything & sterilize the ground.
I spent 13k clearing out and trimming up 5 acres. Imagine what the government has to do to take care of the majority. There’s over 100 million acres of wilderness land, which can’t be cleared, and many times more than that is National Forest.
Lots of times we thought we had the answer. In Wyoming, they say there’s enough room to bury wind turbine blades to “last for 100 years”. I think we said the same thing about the buffalo.
And I will just stop there.
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When you blow the seeds of a dandelion, you can never gather up those seeds again.
No community deserves to be the armpit of America. I’m sorry that we treat WY like an armpit.
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Am I in trouble again ?
No-one reads La Cava. Well, I don’t. And I have my settings set to hide it.
This thread was inspired by the fact that I have noticed a definite change in how I see the world. I do feel guilty about the fact I fly business class to Orlando twice a year. I’m not going to stop doing it, but I feel bad about it.
And I really notice waste much more than I used to. And it annoys me because it’s so unnecessary.
And I admire companies that are trying to do something about it. In some respects, Disney is one of these. And maybe that makes me feel less guilty about doing all that flying, if I’m encouraging a company with responsible environmental practices.
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Just don’t steal other people’s avatars. 2 or 3 more times of doing that and I’ll be in real trouble!
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And some posters rarely leave La Cava…
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Well, the landfill thing is WY’s own idea. Maybe it’ll be okay, but I wouldn’t want it in my backyard. It’s a beautiful state (almost as beautiful as MT 
). I grew up there. But nothing is so big that it can’t eventually be destroyed.
I took one look at a 1000+ post daily open thread and realized it wasn’t worth the time investment to keep up to date on everything people are posting there. I get plenty out of my involvement in the WDW / Disneyland forums.
This must be one of those rare times that, “Nobody goes there anymore- it’s too crowded.” is applicable.
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Lol, I was trying to say that I understand why you post in other areas but I believe, technically, this topic is a LaCava topic.
LaCava, is not only the daily thread. Just like the Walt Disney category is not only questions about Touring Plans. I tried to re-pin the “what LaCava is” . I think I look at LaCava differently, coming here at a time when chat was “no fun allowed”. Conversations off topic , such as our impact on the environment, to me, belong there- not in the Walt Disney World section, but that is just my opinion. I understand that you want people to read your post, so it is here 
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Can someone please explain what “La Cava” is? Thank you!
La Cava del Chat is the area of the forum that is only visible to subscribers. You can talk about anything there and it doesn’t come up on a google search. The rest of the forums are visible to anyone.
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Is this pinned for you?
https://forum.touringplans.com/t/the-bar-is-open-updated-9-10-14-please-read/1751/7
It was created so that off topic conversations had an appropriate category.