The “going green” craze of the late 2000s

The environmental version. I remember especially in 2008 everybody was talking about reducing their carbon footprint. but some reason I started to hear about it less as 2009 went on and by March 2010, nobody was talking about it. I mean there was once a TV channel called “Planet Green” that aired maybe 2 years and was replaced by “Destination America.” There was even a Super Bowl ad that even mocked it.

It saddened me to see that go. I'm a passionate environmentalist, and that's sort of the reason I went to law school. I want people to take environmental protection seriously, so it bummed me out to see people treat that as a fad rather than a substantive societal change.

Here's your answer:

"From 2002 to 2006, the conserved land in the Amazon rainforest almost tripled and deforestation rates dropped up to 60%. About 1,000,000 km2 (250,000,000 acres) have been put onto some sort of conservation, which adds up to a current amount of 1,730,000 km2 (430,000,000 acres)." (Cormier, L. (April 16, 2006). "A Preliminary Review of Neotropical Primates in the Subsistence and Symbolism of Indigenous Lowland South American Peoples". Ecological and Environmental Anthropology. 2 (1): 14–32.)

Simply put, people got complacent. People assumed the problem was solved, so we stopped trying to solve it.

Also I think 2015-2016, with people complaining about SJWs, electing a right-wing president, etc., taught me that history repeats itself. People forget how culturally liberal the '90s were, and I remember adults at the time talking about returning to a time free of scandal. Hence Bush. American society, at least, backed off from the trajectory it had originally set, as we became more concerned with stuff like tax cuts and terrorism.

Yeah, I would also have to agree that the focus on environmentalism has never truly went away; that has at least been the case here in Australia. I consider 2008 to have been the first year where environmentalism and more specifically, climate change, began to receive mass acceptance in the mainstream. It was no longer a niche topic. The first internationally held Earth Hour was a huge event, and I mean huge. It received extensive coverage on the news for days and many cities across the globe participated in the event. My Mum and I personally took part; we decided to go for a walk through our housing estate to see how many people had switched their lights off for the hour and the majority of them did. People were right into it. Ironically though, I can actually remember the event having fallen out of favour by 2010, but there has definitely still been a focus on environmentalism since then.


Those were big topics of discussions here too. There were people who threatened to boycott BP altogether; I can remember my Dad saying that he would never get fuel at a BP petrol station again, though he (like many people) never followed through with it. Also, the Carbon tax was a controversial election issue here during the 2010 election; it was introduced a year later, however it sparked a lot of debate and many were opposed to it.