Happy New Year!
The new year brings new opportunities to turn this ship around and repair relationships with our natural world. For generations (not long ago) the cycle of a year started in spring, closely aligned to growing food. Somehow time has to be measured and starting in January is as good as any month.
At least a year is a useful timeframe to measure things and compare. Measure to reduce bad, increase good. Some have been on that road for a long time.
I see various tools popping up to measure emissions. Simple ones are adding up your spending from your card transactions at your local supermarket and apply an average emissions number. These apps are early stage, so the averages are not necessarily what your own personal spending would represent. For example, I try to keep plastic food packaging to a minimum, bring my own bags from previous shops to fill up at the bulk station, don’t eat meat and dairy, go for the unpackaged vegetables etc. The software tells me a number and all I can do is try to reduce that number by spending less, travel less, consume less.
One can see quickly that reduction of emissions is tied to reduction of consumption. In the future the data will become more sophisticated so the individual items with their own emissions factor will come into the equation. I am not even touching on the privacy issues here.
If I choose to buy from a local supplier through the supermarket vs imported plastic wrapped resource problematic foods, it gets messy. Plastic wrapping and food miles are not included in anyone’s footprint calculator. Food consumption is yet to be included in many calculators.
I used to think that it’s easy. Measure a baseline and commit to reduce emissions, not just by reduction but also behaviour change. Going with the same set of measurements one can plan and chart a trajectory towards a reduced number of emissions. But, as the measuring tools get more sophisticated and potentially more personalised instead of using sector averages, the new numbers will hardly be reducing as the old numbers were not close to actuals, not by a long shot.
And what about the release of stored carbon in the new subdivision where I hope to build a small passive house? The ground was completely scraped, all biodiversity that existed there was annihilated. The runoff from the silt is going into the lake, the trucks exchanging gravel and soil from someplace else are spewing out emissions that go into no one’s footprint.
So while danger lies in getting bogged down in the details, the big ticket polluters are not held accountable. Small businesses can’t afford to hire consultants to produce confusing numbers. Big businesses can, but they just pass the cost to the customer, while making the same amounts of profits, or more!
It is so tempting to go along with the new green ideas, mainly offsets. I will offset my last year’s emissions via John McArthur’s Carbon Shop. I’m living offgrid, do minimal travel and eat a whole-food plant-based diet. But when I imagine telling my future grandkids that’s what I did, it already sounds pathetic.
I wonder how many people actually do want to do more, want different subdivisions, staying away from big box stores, live closer to the land, with public transport and bike tracks and are willing to give up the car if there is a shared scheme. Shop 2nd hand, repair, reuse and reduce.
Somehow I think there are more and more of us. And that’s why I keep going, keep putting ideas out in my community, getting mostly nothing back but maybe it’s sinking in over the years.
We can all be part of the movement, consumers en masse are incredibly powerful but not while separated. I keep remembering Malcolm Gladwell: “The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” And yes, wildfire in the context of global warming is a painful pun.
So, what will you tell the kids?