It might be my social circle, but I know a lot of boomers who are very sympathetic to younger generations and seemingly support policies young generations believe boomers never supported.

I know you're being sarcastic, but my point is that the boomer everyone hates seems to be an elusive thing to me. I don't think a generation of mostly working class people orchestrated an economic downturn for their own benefit. I think we'd all do the same thing were we to have the same opportunities.

A lot of obvious priorities today were likely non-obvious before, too.

There's immense risk in assuming people are stupid. In identifying their stupidity, you're likely imagining your own knowledge or intelligence. There's a very good chance that it's all illusory or at least very incomplete. Also, consider that when you analyze another person's failure and find solutions, it doesn't mean you wouldn't have failed in the same way they did under the same circumstances.

I know where I live a lot of bad decisions were made around resource extraction for example. Logging was booming and many people became quite wealthy from it. You could earn enough to buy a home and pay it off in ten years, sometimes less! That's crazy today. And we say, man, those idiots, how could they not know logging would collapse? How could they not know it would harm the environment so much? They obviously didn't care, they just wanted money for themselves. I was one of those people.

But then I dug into the research and history of the industry, only to discover that concerns around monoculture forestry, forest hydrology, watershed preservation, and the myriad other concerns are actually fairly recent. The best early work I could find on monoculture forestry in coniferous forests was from the 80s; by that point it was way too late. We're already reaping what that sewed. Modern forestry practices are informed by this research though, and our practices are actually far better than they were. As for hydrology, I found some work that would be considered high quality and relevant today, but it too was from the late 80s. Prior to that, we simply didn't know with certainty that cutting swaths of forests would impact the local climate in the way it does, or that there would be broad repercussions for biodiversity, river morphology (this research is particularly recent).

(edit: I don't mean to say no one could see any issues with it; there was clearly concern and that's why there was research into the matter. What I mean is that the data wasn't compelling or commonplace such that people could look at forestry and say with certainty what the outcomes would be. We've continued to do the same thing with agriculture; even today we seem to eternally hope the consequences of the pressure we put on our ecosystems won't cause too much damage to keep carrying on... But we know it's causing damage nonetheless. It'll take more data and more damage before people stop and say shit, I guess we better slow down!)

So maybe the best question we can ask ourselves is not what the "boomers" did wrong, but what are we doing wrong today? How are we letting down our future children and grand children? What can we do to be more cautious, and what can we do to buffer them from our mistakes?

There's far too much effort put into blaming rather than living our values and making things better.

Phew, what a vent.