A Green Year

Here I am, a year on from the culmination of my slow green epiphany (...yes, ok, technically a year and a bit).

After a year, what has changed?  What's the point? What's the answer to the question "Is living greenly weird or difficult?"

What has changed?

In the physical world, in some ways, not a huge amount has changed; The climate is a tiny bit warmer, but technically not even warmer than record-breaking 2016, or record-breaking 2015 - 2017 only gets a bronze medal in the 'hottest year since 1880' competition. There's a little bit more plastic in the ocean, a little bit more CO₂ in the atmosphere - gradual slippery-slope stuff that's been happening continuously for a century.
However, it feels like there's been an explosion of media attention to these issues. From the David Attenborough's "Blue Planet" episode that highlighted the effects of ocean plastic on marine wildlife, to the discovery of a huge patch of plastic bigger than Greenland in the Pacific to the East on New Zealand, to the study finding that 83% of drinking-water worldwide contains plastic, plastic waste has a much higher profile than it did a year ago.

Does the coverage make a difference?  Apparently yes; in New Zealand, at least, in lieu of an actual ban on single-use supermarket bags (which Argentina have had for over a year), some supermarkets have decided to phase them out voluntarily. And after Trump announced the withdrawal of the US from the historic Paris Climate Accord, a number of individual US states have pledged to continue their commitment to greenhouse gas reduction, so hope is not lost even for one of the worlds greatest producers of greenhouse gasses, despite their beloved president's best efforts.
On the other hand, maybe it just feels to me like there's been a media explosion. Perhaps it's just that, now that I actually give a fig, I notice that kind of news more. Just like that global spate of news about horrible things happening to small children, which coincidentally kicked in when I became a parent.

In our own house, there are certain things that haven't changed:

• car use - we didn't have one before, so can't use one less,
• mileage - we work from home, so can't shorten the daily commute,
• fashion - we were never really the kind of people who need a new wardrobe every year, and my thrifty wife is a clothes-swapper and op-shopper from way back (for my part, the mere act of entering a clothing store brings on hyperventilation and a nasty rash - hate those places!).

You know when you write a "TO DO" list, sometimes you write down things you've already done, just so you can get the sense of achievement from crossing them off straight away? Yeah, I just did that.

However, there's no doubt that other things are quite different. Before starting this thing, I was taking out a largish plastic back of oozy garbage every single night. Now take out a small paper bag of mostly dry rubbish maybe once or twice a week. Not literally 'zero' waste, but a pretty huge difference in output nonetheless; waste that a mathematician might say 'approaches zero'.

The biggest factors in that reduction were:

• composting our food waste, which had the obvious-when-you-think-about-it side-effect of contributing to our small rooftop garden, and
• buying food from places that allow you to bring your own packaging.

It's really hard to avoid plastic packaging entirely, so we fall back to recycling whenever possible, which we were kinda doing before, but it's now starting to affect choices we make in the supermarket as well.

A recent post on Zero Waste Chef, "9 Items I Banned from My Kitchen and How I Replaced Them" is actually a fairly good summary of things that have changed for us:

1. Replace single-use plastic wrap...
2. ... and plastic bags with reusable glass jars and metal containers

Jars!

3. Don't buy bottled water, just use tap water [we boil it and let it cool overnight before chilling it in bottles, to get rid of the chlorine taste]
4. Don't buy plastic-bottled fizzy drinks, make them instead [I now make ginger beer and lemonade every week, it's delicious!]

Ginger beer!

5. Get rid of that ridiculous coffee-pod thing (yes, we did have one of those, but in my defense, we didn't actually buy it) - ZWC recommends a french press instead, but I personally prefer my Presso espresso contraption.
6. Tea-bags out, loose leaf tea in [who knew that tea bags actually contain plastic? not me!]
7. Paper towels...
8. ...and paper serviettes can be easily replaced by washable 'panchitas' (which is what our younger daughter for some reason calls the fabric squares my handy wife cut out of old t-shirts for all our wiping needs)

Panchitas!

9. Processed food can be replaced by actual food, prepared much more cheaply, from scratch, in our actual kitchen - who knew!

Sourdough!

Indeed, my masa madre (the Spanish term is much more evocative that the prosaic English 'sour dough starter') recently had its first birthday, and although we didn't actually have a party, that intimidatingly bubbly jar that gets fed every day, needs to be taken into account during holiday planning, and every now that then makes an escape attempt, is definitely another presence in our household, much like our cat Felicia.

Apart from saving a whole bunch of crappy plastic packaging, it's also much healthier food, and saves us money!

All the yogurt-making, sour-dough baking, and ginger-beer brewing I've been doing has sparked a new-found glimmer of confidence in the kitchen (well, really more of a "decrease in incompetence" than "increase in confidence", but I'll take it), enough to spur me to order a copy of The Art of Fermentation which will hopefully arrive any day now!

However, I ordered a physical book that will be brought to my house by jet plane and petrol van - sorry about those greenhouse emissions! Which brings me to my next question...

What's the point?

So this is all great and everything.

But when confronted with statistics like the million plastic bottles bought per minute or that emissions from farming cows are worse that those from cars (which themselves are a nightmare). What the hell difference can my not buying 300-odd bottles of water per year make? We haven't sworn off meat (yet at least), but even if we did, what's the figging difference?

Charles Eisenstein, in his interview for Happen Films' documentary "Living the Change" expressed these doubts pretty cogently:

There's part of me, when I go to recycle my bottles or compost my waste, it's like well, "what good does it do?" I'm just subtracting one plastic bottle from the enormous trash heap that gets shipped to India and is making new mountains in India and China of waste. What does it matter, one bottle different? 

You can say, well if everybody did it, then it would make a difference. So, you have to do your part. But, part of you will say, well, I'm not everybody. 

And, if everybody does it then it doesn't matter if I do it.

And where's my putative consumer power, when I can't even find a bottle of vinegar that doesn't come in a plastic bottle, so I can choose to buy it?
In the face of the storm-front of the news, and when swimming against the tide of an industrialised consumer food system that provides Coke/Pepsi style 'choices' between things that are effectively identical (or Marmite/Vegemite if the fizzy-drink allusion is too polemical, or Catholic/Anglican, etc.) the intensity of conflict along the battle front give an illusion that the differences between the products are important, and that the choice is therefore a real one. But it's not a cake-or-death choice, it's a death-or-death choice. In the face of the apparent impossibility of change, why struggle?

And it's not a karma-like thing, where if I just recycle enough, then my personal oceans will stay at the same level, and I won't be poisoned by the plastic in the food chain; we're all in this boat together, and there are an awful lot of us knocking holes in the hull. As I said in my first post, the solutions are in the hands of those with the responsibility for managing our shared rights, responsibilities and resources; governments. So instead of 'voting with your dollar', you should 'vote with your vote'! Unfortunately, I'm not a citizen of the country where I live, so can't even do that!

Sad face emoji here.

One way to face the occasionally overwhelming sense of futility is to recognise that, while the small green things you do might have negligible direct effects, they can also have indirect effects, which make them worthwhile; in particular, they can help change what's considered normal in a society. If, in your social circles, you only have one green-freak friend who does composting, you're not likely to do it.  But if you discover that nine our of ten people you know compost their food waste, you're much more likely to do it, simply because that's what people do.
It is, in fact, the same social force that got us into this mess in the first place - mostly people unquestioningly buy bottled water and drive their car to the shops 100 metres away simply because that's what people do. So if we can manage to shift the 'what people do' goal-posts to include 'drink tap water and cycle everywhere', then inexorable gravity towards the average that exists in all populations will pull people to a good place. How can you achieve that? By doing the right thing, and letting your people see you doing it.

Eisenstein's own answer is:

For me, it comes down to relationship and ritual.

I like to save my compost and use composting toilets for example, not because I've done some calculation that this is gonna save the world, but because it's a different kind of relationship with the beings around me.

That 'relationship' is presumably tied up with the concept of 'interbeing' he also talks about:

[Interbeing] means more than interconnection or interdependency, which kind of suggests separate selves having relationships. 

Interbeing is more of an understanding that we are relationship, that my very existence depends or draws from or includes your existence. My well-being is intimately connected to your well-being or to the well-being of the river, the ocean, the forest, people across the world, and so forth. Because I'm not really separate from you. 

And, that means that in the story of interbeing, I know that whatever I do to the world will come back to me somehow.

Although this is all straying into territory that is, frankly, getting a little abstruse for my comfort, I suspect it boils down to something similar to the real reason I persevere with all this when it seems hopeless: It's the right thing to do.

Sometimes you do things for ethical reasons that go beyond actual consequences; you don't refrain from murdering because you might get caught, you refrain because that's the right thing to do. Obviously not everyone thinks this way, there are, after all, murders. But I'm still (perhaps naively) hopeful that most people are decent and civilised, and enough of us, in the end, will do the right thing.  Most people don't murder; hopefully at some point most people won't pollute unnecessarily.

But even if they do, I'm not going to.

Is living greenly weird and difficult?

But is this actually difficult?

The answer, it turns out, is remarkably similar to the one I got when I asked someone "Is having children expensive?"

It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

There's a spectrum of green-ness, and in 2016 we were down at the unconscious 'lite' end of green; as difficult as putting some rubbish in this bin rather than that bin.

Some of the things that I've started doing in the last year, which I'm very chuffed with myself about are, let's be honest, still down that end of the spectrum; preparing food from raw ingredients, composting, having a garden. These things are new and weird for me, but actually totally normal parts of life for a large proportion of New Zealanders, and probably Argentines too.  But I still let myself feel chuffed.  These things are easy but make a fair amount of difference.

Buying from farmers instead of supermarkets, and buying without packaging were a challenge to figure out at first, but relatively straightforward once you get into the swing of things, although they both require a little more fore-thought and organisation. Sometimes you fail; you forgot to bring the jars, you didn't have time to go to the organic market, whatever. The 'zero' in Zero Waste is asymptotic anyway. What counts for me is what we manage to do 95% of the time, not what happens on the days of disorganisation, forgetfulness, and exhaustion.

Further towards the 'hard' end of the spectrum, there are things we haven't tried, which might (or might not) qualify as 'difficult' or 'weird' - solar power, vegetarianism, veganism, using 'family cloth' instead of toilet paper, off-grid living, composting toilets, building an earth ship.  These things, I don't know about, but some of them seem to me to require so much research beforehand that maybe they can never become mainstream.

But actually one of the hardest things so far, which again is similar to the processing of becoming a parent, has been managing the fire-hose of conflicting opinions and information. Are paper bags just as bad as plastic bags? Is cotton as evil as fleece? Does pollution caused by making a solar panel cancel out the fossil fuel it saves in energy generation? Is all plastic evil, or just single-use plastic?

And those are just the green-internal conundrums.  Some of this stuff bumps into other spheres of concern, from the theoretical to the everyday; Are single-use plastic syringes an environmental cataclysm, or a marvel of modern disease prevention? Does fermenting our own food increase the risk of an outbreak of botulism in our house? Am I ruining my daughters' childhoods by never allowing drinking straws?

This last question is a part of the wider question: Is this actually weird?

Frankly, my natural personal response is "so what if it is?" The strictures of normality aren't generally my top priority.

But maybe this should be reformulated: "Could this ever be normal?"

The answer to this question is probably more important; If it never could be normal, then we're in trouble as a species. But that doesn't force an answer, it just implies some consequences.

However, the 'weirdness' correlates closely with the 'difficulty', so the answer depends, in the end, on where on the green spectrum you fall; living in an Earth Ship will possibly always be weird (cool maybe, but weird). But recycling is already normal.

So maybe in the end it comes back to shifting the goal-posts of normality; influencing the definition of 'what people do'. So for now, we'll just keep swimming...