lifestyle update

so... this isn't the same kind of post, because as I said previously I do have a bunch of research-heavy ones in the works but none of them is quite ready. Instead, I thought I'd just give you a little window into things we've been trying to do at our house to be more environmentally responsible:

1. we have started saving our little one's bath water at night, keeping the plug in and using a bucket to fill the toilet tank. It felt wasteful to just let all that water get used for 15 mins (tops) and then to drain it, so we've been thinking about this for a bit, and we finally did it. It's not easy-peasy, but we're getting used to it fast. Next month's utilities bill will ultimately be the verdict
2. we are getting eggs from a local producer, about 2 dozen at a time, every 2 weeks. She's a friend of my mom's and has an organic (chicken) farm, meaning they're grain-fed and free range, and she had too many to eat herself, so she's started selling them. $4 a dozen!
3. we bought plastic wrap for our windows. When we moved in we replaced some of the crappiest windows with new (more) energy-efficient ones, but we still have 3 huge ones that let a lot of heat out. So in the absence of an extra $1500 to replace the windows, we'll try this and see what happens.
4. I'm still trying to hang laundry outside, even when it's less than 10 degrees. Things have been drying surprisingly well, particularly on windy days and when I manage to get everything on the line by 9:30am at the latest. When it doesn't all dry completely, a quick run in the dryer - 10 or 15 mins - finishes it off, which is still better than all of it for an hour on high heat.

...I think that's it. I've been riding my bike more, too, though it's getting cold enough that that's becoming less and less palatable. OH and I've been biking over to the Farmer's Market (less than a 10 min ride) weekly to pick up apples and other produce. Baby steps! Dr. Reese Halter, author of The Incomparable Honeybee, was on The Current yesterday, and said, "...if everybody does one thing different, and we all collectively join hands, that is a Stanley Cup ring; we win!" - it's a little cheesy, but it's more positive than I am generally able to be, and it may even be true. It's worth a shot, certainly.

consumerism

I have said in previous posts that I think the only viable option to the environmental cataclysm we are hurtling toward is population reduction. The reason, however, that population is the big problem as I see it is that, generally, western society (or more broadly, developed and indeed developing nations) does not want to change. The public does not have anywhere near enough will to change our way of life to slow down the course on which we're headed. Concluding that nothing can be done, though, is a little defeatist and fatalistic, I admit.

In fact, with the global economy in its current state, now might be just the time for us to start moving as a society toward a less goods-based way of life. Until recently, North American life has been driven by consumerism - the more you and I buy, the better the economy does, and the wealthier you and I become, basically. After the 9-11 attacks, GWBush infamously asked for "your continued particpation and confidence in the American economy." In other words, if we continue to buy stuff, our economy will keep running as it always has, and we'll be okay, both in terms of our standard of living and in terms of our level of psychological comfort, going on as much as possible as if nothing had happened. Seven years later, though, "business as usual" caused one of the most colossal failures of global markets ever, and inarguably the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (stay tuned for a future post about the Depression itself).

So far, though, the majority of the effort to recover has been to "get things back on track," trying to return us to the very system (primarily of credit and debt) that crippled us in the first place. We have such short memories!

Common sense (and physics) tells us that we cannot have unlimited resources on a finite planet. Last year sometime a friend of mine sent me a link to this chart which estimates how much of everything we have left on Earth to use before it just runs out. It's conjecture and it's based on some scientific data, but even if have twice as long as it tells us, we're still going to run out, whether it's in our own lifetime or that of our children or that of our grandchildren. And so we need to curb our consumption, one way or another, whether that means each of us consuming less, or fewer of us on the planet consuming the same amount.

Our culture feeds us *so* many messages about the relationship between who we are, what we're worth as people, and what we have, that many of us get hoodwinked into believing it. If we could figure out how to free ourselves from our stuff - to be satisfied with what we have - then we as a species might have a very different, much richer future ahead of us.

coming soon

just to keep you up-to-date

I'm working on a number of different ideas right now, so expect new posts soon:

• religious evangelism vs. environmentalism
• consumerism, the economy, the Great Depression, and the environment
• how the Judaeo-Christian worldview has contributed to our destructive environmental attitudes
• is the environmental crisis being blown out of proportion/ is the environment really doing better now, as some are suggesting?

...lots of meat in there, and lots of reading to do on my part to get things ready. So sit tight; don't touch that (mouse)dial.

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.

desperation

It's been long enough that at this point I may actually start repeating things I've already written, but no matter. The reason it's been so long is that I have become depressingly overwhelmed with where we're at and with how much needs to be done for us to make any sort of real change in the momentum of climate change. James Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis, said in an interview a couple of months ago with David Suzuki ("the Last Call") that he thought we had passed the point of no return, and that nothing we could do now would change where the climate is headed. Suzuki was audibly horrified, and went on to talk to environmental guru (/entrepreneur) Al Gore, who disagreed and said he thought Lovelock was misguided... but I don't think so. I think I agree with Loveloc. I told my dad this, and he pointed out that in fact this is Malthusian thinking (see this not inaccurate Wiki for Thomas Malthus).

I have already said that I find trips to the grocery store crippling: last time I went I stood in front of the organics section of shampoos looking at ingredients and labels trying to figure out which ones were biodegradabale, not tested on animals, hadn't used any pesticides in production, might also be local, and didn't cost a mint. At least 15 minutes later I walked away empty-handed, convinced that my decision not to wash my hair at all is still the soundest (stopped in May of 2008).

But this is just a symptom of the larger disease: we humans can do very very little that is actually good for the environment. At best what we get to choose between is things that are bad for the planet and things that are marginally better for it.

At a global population of 6.7billion (source: the CIA World Factbook) - expected to double within the next 25 - 40 years - our biggest environmental challenge is ourselves. There are simply too many of us to survive on this planet. We are this close to using up what little there is left of the Earth's natural resources, and at that point we will be stuck.

The environmental movement, at its core, is about the preservation of the human species, as in fact are basically all major paradigms and certainly all political philosophies. Ironically, if the planet keeps becoming more and more hostile to human life, we will almost certainly experience a mass die-off (such as may not have been seen since the introduction of oxygen to the atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago (The "Oxygen Catastrophe" - again, Wikipedia is simply the easiest source here, but this is a well-accepted scientific theory) - talk about environmental disaster!), and then the planet will begin to recover. The Earth, it turns out, would be better off without us at this point.

the new singing blog

I intended to write a new post ages ago. Since the last one, though, I have become increasingly depressed and despondent over the state of the Earth. It seems to me we humans can only choose between things that are bad for the environment and things that are "better" for the environment, but that in fact very little we do is actually good for it. With that in mind, here's something I've been grappling with, in the form of a poorly-recorded, technologically frustrated little ditty.

the myth of recycling.mp3

text:

recycling's a sham

they can't recycle all your jam jars or your CDs

or the newspaper you don't read

or even all the stuff that they tell you that they can recycle

cause in fact it all sits around

waiting for a slow boat to China

recycling's a joke

well i guess it's better than nothing

but really what it is that really we all need to do

is be satisfied with what we have

and stop consuming so much shit.

stuff can't make you happy

stuff can't love you back

but your neighbours

would love to come for dinner

don't need that funky gizmo

don't need that new TV

but your mom is lonely

and loves it when you call.

...

see you next time, when maybe Pro Tools will decide to play nice with Vista (not likely).

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.