The Green Family: Run a 5k

This is the last time I'll look at lifestyle changes, because these ones will bring you down to about 5 ha, and they will probably hurt.

All of the following:

1. Meat occasionally (once per week, with eggs and dairy daily)

2. Processed, packaged or imported foods 50% of the time or less.

3. Carpooling 50% of the time with a distance cap of 300 km/week, OR up to 100km/week of transit travel with no driving.

This will get you to 5.2 ha, for our average family of 4 in a suburban detached house. If you want to go lower, you are now looking at relocating into a smaller house that is close enough to everything that even transit is not often necessary. You can also give up meat altogether, or processed, packaged or imported foods. If you did all of these things, it would reduce you to 3.6 ha (assuming a house between 1000 & 2000 square feet, family of four, some transit and no driving, no meat but some dairy/eggs, and very little processed, packaged or imported food). I'll assume that this is probably already beyond where most of you are comfortable going, and now we'll turn to non-lifestyle activities.

This month: The Big Picture

There's a reason the world is in the mess it's in, and I hope that by now you can see it's not just because we're all lazy, unmotivated, uneducated slobs who don't care about the planet. In fact it is impossible for anyone in North America to consume only their fair share. And it's not because our fair share is some draconian extreme that no one should be expected to limit themselves to; it's because there's a lot of waste and inefficiency embedded in the system where individual lifestyle choices have no impact.

In my first post I used the example of the energy distribution system. Approximately 80% of electricity is lost between the generating station and the user. Your conservation efforts are therefore working only on a pool of the 20% of electricity that makes it to your outlets. General consumption is another one. You can buy the xyz product that comes without the excess packaging, but both of them still required resource extraction, refining, manufacturing, storage, shipping, and retail space. The bulk of environmental impacts will be created well before a product is packaged for shipping, and reducing the packaging (while good and necessary) will not meaningfully reduce a product's impact.

Everything in North American society was built on the assumptions that resources were limitless and the environment's capacity to absorb wastes was inexhaustible. Neither of these assumptions were true, and now that they are becoming problems, changing course is difficult. If we are going to build a sustainable society, it will have to be one in which human needs and human rights can be met within the context of much less than 1.7 ha per person (since the global population continues to grow, while the planet does not). Knowing the big picture will help you support solutions that move us toward that kind of society, in whatever way presents itself (which, yes, may sometimes involve spending money, but a lot of times not).

In December you learned a bit about your local environmental issues; now it's time to look at issues on a larger scale. What follows is a list of links to environmentalist magazines and blogs (books will come in a later post). Consider this a tour of your green information neighbourhood, a familiarization with where to go, what to read and who to talk to when you want to know what is really going on.

Blogs

Gristmill

DeSmogBlog This one is explicitly devoted to clearing up misinformation put out by global climate change skeptics. A good source for when you need a comeback to "well I read in x magazine last week that...."

Sustainablog

TreeHugger This is a good consumer resource for, as they put it, making environmentally sensitive product and service choices.

WorldChanging

Publications

Alternatives Journal is a Canadian environmental news magazine magazine.Light on product reviews. This is not a shopping publication.

GOOD is not specifically an environmental magazine, but definitely comments from a pro-sustainability perspective.

These are the only two I'll include here today (but feel free to suggest more in the comments if you know of any) because it's easy enough to find green magazines on the rack at the drugstore that are all about selling green products.

Posted by Andrea at February 5, 2008 9:58 AM under The Green Family

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