i'm a hypocrite

I'd like to share some examples of ways I feel like a hypocrite:

1) I gave up coffee, because according to waterfootprint.org, every cup we drink represents an unconscionable 140L of water used in its production. So I drink tea now - only 30L/cup. Do I feel wonderfully self-righteous about this move? In fact, I do not. 30L/cup is still a waste, and in fact it's probably more like 45L/cup for me because I use 3 teabags per pot instead of 2, which is what I believe the number is based on. And I drink at least four cups a day, so 120L/day (versus the previous 6 cups of coffee or 840L/day). Better, admittedly, but still harmful. Even if we all suddenly drank *only* water - all 6.7 billion of us - we'd still be producing waste and using up water faster than is sustainable.

2) I discovered that using our laptop instead of our desktop PC uses a lot less energy - 90W versus the 700W of the PC +monitor. So we use the laptop as much as we can. Excellent. But we still use it, and occasionally it gets left on when nobody's sitting at it, and occasionally I forget to turn the power bar off at night so it stays idly on. Better for the planet, but still not good for it.

3) Grocery shopping, I often have to choose between local, organic, and cost. But I also want to factor in packaging, processing, chemicals used in preservation, and water used. No matter what, I always lose. Even if we go to the farmer's market and buy straight from the producers, they've still trucked all their stuff in, we often drive the ten blocks because we have my daughter and we'd rather not have a cranky/overheated/cold toddler for an entire return trip. Besides that, though, often things are more expensive! Today I paid $10 for five cloves of "Mennonite garlic" grown locally and organically. Gonna have to use it very wisely (am, in fact, preparing to plant a few cloves thereof and grow my own - only rainfall-fed, mind you).

4) I'm a musician by trade. But I almost never play in Hamilton, where I live. Instead, I drive the 65km to Toronto, by myself, at over 80km/hr (apparently this is the optimal speed for conserving gas. I drive considerably faster than that), both ways. And so that's also easily in excess of the 312kg of CO2 I would produce driving more slowly (based on the MNR's estimate of 2.4kg of Co2/L of gas). I'd love to take the GO Bus, but it doesn't run at the hours I need so I'd never be able to get home the night of a gig, so playing music would always mean at least 12 hours away from my family. I don't use the AC, it's a pretty efficient car, and sometimes I can even carpool with a bandmate, but even with all these things all I can do is occasionally harm the environment less, but I cannot actually do it any good.

...see, particularly in North America, where our culture is built around consumerism, it's all-but impossible not to harm the planet by what we do every day, no matter what it is. We shower, wash dishes, wash clothes, flush toilets, use electricity, drive places, use our computers and gadgets, listen to music and the radio and watch TV, eat stuff grown more than 50km from our houses, some of us eat meat... we're really buggered. Carl Sagan, and now David Suzuki, says that, "if you were to reduce the Earth to the size of a basketball, the biosphere would be thinner than a layer of varnish, and that's it! That's where all life exists, and nothing within that system can grow forever!" (David Suzuki on CPAC, Oct 2008).

And so, more than ever, I am concluding that the only hope for our species' survival is a major push toward population decline. It is completely counter-intuitive and goes against everything our genetics and evolutionary imperatives tell us to do, but it's the only real solution.