What can we do?

Listening to a special report on Marketplace about global consumerism and sustainability this evening (after shopping, while driving back home for an hour, and watching a line of cars going off into the distance). At 11:26, there's this exchange with the host, and geography prof Jared Diamond. He's studied the downfall of the Mayans and so forth, and published a book chillingly titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Ryssdal: "The same way I would imagine there is no one thing you can point to where you can say 'that is the tipping point of decline,' is there one thing that can be done to reverse that?" Diamond: "Yes. And that is to stop looking for the one thing that we can do to reverse the decline."

Regardless of the context, great response. The rest of the interview is rather worth it as well. The show as a whole is hit and miss. Good data, but some oddly framed (the real Simpsons were stupid). And the bumper about recycling Conex containers was insane; those things are expensive, and heavily re-used. No one throws them away.