Holidays
This has been my year for awakening to environmental responsibility at the personal level. Concern for my own impact has never been far from consciousness this year, and this holiday season is no exception. As I sit in my room at the B&B here in Lawrence, KS, I’m aware of the bubble of heated air we’re trapping on four sides from the winter outside, to the extent that even though it’s only 45 or so degrees outside, I’m writing this in a T-shirt and with nothing on my feet but a pair of socks. It seems that this B&B (which we did not select based on its environmental consciousness) hasn’t yet made the conversion to low-flow shower heads or toilets, and we have a full-sized refrigerator here in the room with us; I don’t know how efficient it is, but the fact that it’s almost completely empty can’t mean that this huge cold box inside an artificially heated room is helping things very much.
Even the two strings of conventional lights on our Christmas tree at home consume 123 watts of power...definitely not helping to lighten the mood for environmentally-conscious minds out there. Having seen this, just driving past some of the Griswoldian displays full of reindeer silhouettes and illuminated nets cast over shrubbery is enough to make me shudder.
I’m reading How to Live a Low-Carbon Life by Chris Goodall in my quiet hours on this trip, and I have to say it’s not improving my outlook so far. Even the New York Times, in a perhaps common topic talking about China and business, is talking about the environmental and health impacts of moving steel, coking, cement, and other production capacity today. I started offsetting the carbon generated by cross-country travel a few weeks ago on a business trip, and plan to buy more offsets both for this trip and the business trip I took last weekend, but this is a mere drop in the bucket. Our system is massively broken when it takes real effort to find food that didn’t travel 1500 miles or more to my plate, and every single move you make through life carries with it some sort of environmental degradation. I currently live in the southern US, where we’re starting to make hard choices about whether to use the water we have to continue supporting critical habitat for endangered species…or to drink.
I’ve read pretty widely about the science behind climate change (or global warming - because the globe as a whole is warming, even if the grounds of your specific gated community aren’t), and the only risk or controversy here is the possibility that things are going to hell much, much faster than anyone predicted…not that it’s not happening at all, or that we industrialized humans didn’t cause it. If you want an introductory course in this science, try Field Notes from a Catastrophe. Besides, not acting because not everyone is acting is a lame excuse, because one person’s poor behavior is never a valid excuse for a rampant, plundering riot. Seriously, this is the kind of argument you might expect from a three-year-old. If the US as a nation is concerned that China isn’t bound by Kyoto, please let’s remember that up to 33% of China’s environmental problems come directly from products they’re exporting to us and the rest of the Western nations…if you want them to participate in a global environmental program, just stop buying so much shit, and you’ll force their hands.
Speaking of consumption, this really is the magic bullet that can deliver real, effective reductions now. Simple acts like improving the insulation in your attic to R38 (which will cost about $500 if you have a 1300 square-foot house in FL right now, so you can extrapolate from there) or installing low-flow shower heads and modern toilets (since the early 90s, these have been mandated to use 1.6 gallons per flush or less) can save you a ton of money in heating and water bills, and reduce your impact on the environment at the same time. For attic insulation, I’ve read that the payback time is only about 6-9 months. If you don’t already have them, you can buy canvas bags to cart your groceries home and help slow the multi-million-bag stream of plastic grocery-store bags into landfills that happens in the average American city. These bags - though biodegradable - probably won’t, since the compression that happens in the landfill prevents normal bacterial decomposition. (I once saw an article where anthropologists had found hot dogs from the 60s still intact in some layers of a landfill…and these were at one time at least marginally edible!).
So, we’re offsetting the carbon used in flights here and there, we’re improving the insulation in our house, we’ve signed an agreement with a local CSA to get a 32-week supply of vegetables from a local farm, and late last year we installed a SEER 17 high-efficiency air conditioner/heat pump. We’re still not doing nearly enough, but we’re still learning. I just wish this weren’t so hard to learn about and implement, so maybe my parents would get involved in real conservation efforts. In the end, if the average Joe can’t engage in real conservation casually as part of his day-to-day life, we’re all in for a long, depressing ride.