I see a haze of pollution floating over
San Francisco today. It is January 2015, and the 8th Spare the Air
day in a row with no rain on the horizon. And yet we all jump in our cars and go
about doing things and consuming like any other day. We have obligations, after
all. I am often driving kids to and from school and classes. My husband drives
30 minutes down the Peninsula to his job. We go out to dinner, go to the
movies, visit friends. We drive to the airport to go on vacation. We buy gifts.
We board a cruise ship for a week over Christmas break. Today, I sit in
standstill traffic smelling exhaust, trying to make it over to Oakland in time
to see a movie at the Piedmont Theatre with a friend. It is 15 miles away, and
I abort my plan after I realize I won’t make it in time; it would take an hour
to get there. My kids and husband drive up to Tahoe to ski for the weekend, but
there is no snow. I order new clothes and food from Amazon that will be delivered
very quickly to my home in a pristine cardboard box. I have Mission Chinese
food delivered, or Spicy Bite, or whatever I want.
Am I doing enough to be sitting in my
plug-in Prius and eating a largely organic and vegetarian diet? Is it enough
that I only drink California wine and tap water made sparkling with my Soda
Stream? Am I doing my part in composting and recycling and even taking my
plastic bags to Safeway for recycling? Is it enough that I correctly dispose of
old batteries, light bulbs, pharmaeuticals, paint, chemicals, and electronics?
Is it sufficient to reuse items instead of putting them in the trash and typically
bringing my own bags to the store?
What should I really be doing to save
our ocean, our air, our planet? Should I stop drinking coffee and eating
bananas because neither can be locally produced? Isn’t it great that I just had 2 low-flow toilets and shower heads
installed? Does this really help, or is it just a miniscule drop in a very large
bucket? Is it better for the earth that our cars are hybrids, or should we have
not purchased new cars in favor of using the old ones as long as possible like
that lady who had nearly 600k miles on her car?
Should we sell our cars – yes, our
family has 2 – in favor of only using public transit and bicycles? Should we
switch schools and jobs so all of that would be practical? Should we all be
living in the same place, our extended family making up a tribal group, the way
people used to live? Should we never take another airplane flight or drive to
see my family in Idaho and Washington? Should I not remodel my house? Is it
wrong to want to travel the world? Should entire cities move and become more densely
populated to use resources more efficiently? Should we never buy another
packaged product that produces waste? Should my lifestyle look more like someone who lives in Mozambique, using only 1 gallon of water per day compared to the world average of 13? (The average American uses 80 – 100 gallons of
water per day at home.)
Is the problem already so big that only drastic action
will save us? Or is it true that every small action makes a difference?
What about the polar bears and the
massive extinction that our oceans are facing as of last week? I say “last
week” because that is when I heard the news story. I know, though, that this
has been a long time coming and also a crisis that has been brewing since the Industrial Revolution. What about the birds dying in some unknown goo in the San Francisco Bay right now that isn’t really getting cleaned up, because clean-up is
generally paid for by the petroleum industry? What about the millions of pieces of plastic trash and discarded fishing nets that kill sea life?
What about that new fact that the coral reefs around Cuba
seem to be doing much better than reefs adjacent to populations that have not
been living in austerity across the last 50 years?
Should we all really be talking about
population control as the real culprit of environmental degradation now that
there are over 7 billion people in the world, compared to only 1 billion in
1800 and many fewer than that for the bulk of human history? The population of
humans has skyrocketed in the last 200 years, corresponding with the Industrial
Revolution. Should we be alarmed that, in 1970, there were only half the people
there are now on our planet? Why is anyone who cares about the environment
having more than 2 children if this is true? Perhaps lifestyle matters less
than the sheer number of people trying to eat and live well? What will our
earth be like for my 2 kids age 6 and 9?
Should there be some kind of social
contract if technological health care will generally keep us all alive into our
eighties? Should we think long and hard about how we are living and the
resources we are using, if we want to share what we have with several billion
more people?
Am I overly panicked? Would I lead a
happier life if I just didn’t think about all this so much? It seems like the
people around me who are proceeding with their lifestyles unquestioningly seem
to be having the last laugh because they are not stressed out. Whatever I might
do to “do my part” may not have any significant impact anyhow, so perhaps the
best action I could take for my own mental health and that of my family’s would
be to have fun and do what I want while it lasts? To stop being so serious and
OCD about all this?
How can I take drastic action – and is
that even necessary – if no one else stops using their cars or taking flights
or consuming or adjusting their normative lifestyle in any significant way? How
is change possible?
Deep breath with eyes closed. I am
comforted by images of air far more polluted in Beijing, but my sense of
despair persists. I know that this air is the consequence of my lifestyle, my
country’s demand for so many things.
I want to do things differently, to
know that my actions today made the earth a bit better – cleaner, more
educated, more peaceful, more collaborative both with other humans and
cultures, but also with other species on land, in the air, in the oceans and
fresh water around me. I will feel more at ease if I know I am doing my part to
tread lightly, and ideally, leave my world better than I found it.
But what should I do to keep our earth
clean and healthy? I saw Al Gore’s movie An
Inconvenient Truth, and I know he was criticized for publicizing that movie
from the comfort of private jets and 2 exceedingly large residences. I try to pay attention
to how I can live greener and educate my kids to be good stewards of the earth.
I have a friend who is a green builder, and I live in a place where a lot of
people are trying to do their best to minimize their environmental impact.
However, I don’t know how to practically do this on a day-to-day basis or if we are doing enough, and I
have the sinking feeling that most people around me don’t either.
I would like to have my marching
orders, a play book, step-by-step instructions, a “how to” guide, whatever you
want to call it, based on the best information we have, to take sufficient
action today to ensure a healthy planet for the future.
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