giving up

This blog went quiet for a couple weeks because I've been overwhelmed by the increasing amounts of terrible information about the state we're in.

I will press on, though: first, things I'm currently trying to give up, and then, an excellent essay I read last night about why changing your own "footprint" isn't really good enough.

The Current, on CBC radio, has been doing a season-long series on the state of water in our world, called Watershed, and on of these programs they talked about something called our "water footprint."

Essentially, your water footprint is the amount of water you as an individual are responsible for consuming (note the turn of phrase): for instance, the average kilo of beef takes 15,500L of water to produce, the average cotton shirt takes 2700L of water, and the average cup of coffee uses 140L of water.

It was that last one that struck terror into my very core. I had developed the habit (mostly at work) of drinking at least 10 cups of coffee a day, which meant 1400L of water daily before I even took a sip. I resolved to cut down and, if possible, cut out coffee entirely from my diet. it's been difficult, but a week ago I retired our coffee maker, replaced by a bodum which I use only once every few days... cutting my consumption from around 120 cups a week (16,800L of water) to maybe 4 (560L). Do I enjoy this? I do not. I am trying to drink more tea instead (30L/cup) and have taken to making cold drinks with the lemon balm we have growing in our yard (assuming a 1:1 ratio for water).

You may have noticed, though, that I also mentioned meat. According to waterfootprint.org, it takes 15,500L of water to produce 1kg of beef, 4800L of water for 1kg of pork, and 3900L of water for 1kg of chicken. Beyond that, the First Canadian Edition of Living in the Environment (G. Tyler Miller Jr., © 2008) says that it takes 7kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, 4kg of grain for 1kg of pork, and about 2.2kg of grain for 1kg of chicken... so all in all, meat production is wasteful and harmful to the environment, and if I influence the corporations by what I do and do not buy (supply and demand), then enough of us cutting our meat consumption may eventually send a message. So last night I had one soy burger and one lean portion-wise PC hamburger. Did I love the soy burger? I did not. But I could live with them if I had to.

Before bed, though, I stumbled my way over to Orion magazine, where an article entitled "Forget Shorter Showers - Why personal change does not equal political change" caught my eye. The basic idea that author Derrick Jensen puts forward is that a) we have been taught that our consumerist and capitalist attitudes are what really matter - that our private little crusades to eliminate waste and environment-harming products in our own lives are enough to make a real difference - but that in fact these simply lead to complacency and a false sense of piety, and that b) the major contributors to climate change and the destruction of the environment are the corporations, not individuals (see the article for exact numbers, but it's around 25% individual and 75% corporate).

But the thing that really hit home for me was this:

...the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

...I had, as recently as this past weekend, begun to say out loud that I thought maybe the only solution to the environmental catastrophe was human extinction (which would make these people happy), and was feeling very depressed as a result. But Jensen offers a simple solution:

Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it.

So yes, DO try to curb your own habits, because it will help, but to really make a difference, we cannot continue to believe that harm reduction in our own lives is the ultimate act of environmental stewardship. Instead, we must actively become involved in reducing the harm that is being done by industry, corporations, and our governments.

the greater of two evils

I drive to Toronto from Hamilton a fair amount, for gigs and recordings mostly. I'd love to take the GO Bus instead - I actually hate driving - but it doesn't run later than about 12:30am and I am almost never done playing before about 1:30, so I am forced to drive. Alternately, I could do the gig, stay at a friend's, and then come home in the morning, but then I'd miss hours of morning time with my family, and often I'd have to get up super early to get home early enough for my wife to get to work on time.

So I drive. But it's this family time thing that causes another problem: according to the US Department of Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists, driving fast can use up to 33% more gas than keeping to the speed limit, and as we've seen, every litre of gas produces 2.4kg of CO2, so that's a lot more CO2 being emitted over time. When I leave for gigs, I give myself around an hour to get there from home. But I know, for instance, that the Tranzac can be a 45-min. drive, door-to-door, if I drive 120km/h instead of the posted 100km/h. So for that extra 15 minutes of time with my family, I opt to drive faster rather than use less gas. On the way home, all I want to do is collapse in bed, so I also speed home.

There are many examples of this kind of problem for me: my coffee pot uses 1200W of electricity. My microwave uses 1100W. Thus, if I make a pot of coffee, the most energy-wise thing for me to do is to turn it off right away, and then nuke it cup by cup as it cools. That way, instead of using 1200W of power for an hour or-so, I use 1100W in bursts of 1:45 (this is my optimal coffee-nuking time). But I'd say at least half the time I prefer to leave the pot on so I don't have to take the extra step - which probably takes about 2 mins total - of nuking my coffee before I drink it. Ironically, after that first hour I do like to turn it off so it doesn't start to taste burnt, and then I start nuking the stuff anyway (aside to coffee purists: I know this anaethema to your being. I would love to be a coffee snob, but I really just don't have the palate, which in the end is better for the Earth anyway. so ha). 

On a related note, the coffee I buy is fair-trade organic stuff, actually from PC (which is a little suspect, but at this point ignorance is bliss), and to offset the cost I also buy bags of roasted barley, which I then use in a 2:1 ratio for brewing. It does make a slightly nuttier taste, but it's not unpleasant and it saves both money and arable land. I also harvest the dandelions that grow in our yard, clean and dry the roots, and then grind them up in my bean grinder to add, about a tablespoon at a time, to the mix. According to the University of Maryland Medical Centre, dandelion root (ideally dried for at least a year according to some herbalists) is very good for the endocrine system; liver and kidneys both benefit. And it takes some of the bitterness out of coffee, so everyone wins. Well I win anyway. And I think that's it for today. 

[addendum: a recent article in the Manitoban says that putting the windows down instead of using AC does save gas but only when you're driving slower than 80km/hr; below that speed, using AC can increase your fuel consumption by as much as 30%! Above 80km/hr though, having the windows down actually creates so much drag that you ultimately use more fuel than you would blasting the AC]