Author: Andrew Nind

“theories, beliefs and practices die one generation at a time.  But the conversation and battle must start somewhere” Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, 2017

“people would prefer to live in a world … in which we do not squander either our own lives or the natural gifts on which our children and the rest of the living world depend.  But a small handful, using lies and distractions and confusion, stifle this latent desire for change” Out of the Wreckage, George Monbiot, 2018

There are plenty of campaigns.

In 2017, an old man named David galvanized public attention to the plight of ocean life being destroyed by plastic waste.  In 2018, a young woman named Stacey has created a stir with her documentaries on the harm caused by throwaway clothes.  A similar documentary that looks into our individual energy consumption would be good, but the associated pollution is invisible and therein less likely to shock us.

That said, it can be unhelpful to take aim at a single issue, however shocking it may be in itself, without considering the overall situation.  When it comes to the environment, we can easily undo the benefit of any specific action we take, if we do not have a holistic appreciation of our impact across all forms of consumption.

In June of this year, a comprehensive study of diet and its planetary consequences was published by Oxford University.  Its lead author, Joseph Poore, was quoted in the press as saying that “the vegan diet is the biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth … far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car”.  Poore was making the point that our diet has other effects, apart from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including acidification, destruction of forests and loss of bioversity.  But the comment – or at least the way it was reported – was distinctly unhelpful.  And also untrue.  Whilst humanity’s biggest impact is via diet, that is because most of us eat every day, whereas something like flying is done relatively infrequently and by only a small percentage of the world’s ‘richest’ people.

But if I make a trans-oceanic return flight, it is easy physics to establish that my pro rata CO2 emissions into the atmosphere amount to a small number of tonnes … which is comparable in terms of GHG with a year’s worth of a meat-eating diet.  The latter is more complex to establish, but all of the studies done to date, including Poore’s, support the finding that one person’s annual food consumption equates to a few tonnes of CO2 (or less if you are vegan).  So in simple order-of-magnitude terms, that return flight is a year’s scoff, at least when it comes to GHG.  Maybe no trees were chopped down, no biodiversity obviously lost, at least not immediately – but giving the impression that it’s ok to fly and drive because you have become vegan is certainly not doing the planet any favours.

The impact budget

It would help if we could think in terms of an overall impact budget, an amount that each of us can ‘spend’ if we want to live sustainably, so that if we splash out here, so to speak, by making a long journey say, we need to cut back there, by changing our diet or halving the number of shopping trips.  Ideally, we would have an intuitive understanding of our relationship with nature; but this is hard to achieve in today’s world.  Instead, we could be taught – approximately is fine – how our various actions in life affect the planet.  This could start in schools.

For instance, many schools encourage international charity trips, to Africa or South America say.  They are justified on the basis of broadening pupils’ awareness of conditions suffered by people in developing countries, and the need to encourage a sense of global interconnectedness and mutual responsbility in the next generation.  (And there is a sense of adventure, which perhaps is an unacknowledged motive.)

Leaving aside such difficult questions as whether or not the practical benefits for the visited communities outweigh the organisational effort, or whether a sense of global empathy requires global travel, it is perfectly reasonable to state the following: an endeavour which is justified on ethical grounds should consider all of the ethics.  Schools, in this travel example, should explain the enviromental side-effects and their potential consequences for vulnerable communities – even a high-level treatment is better than none at all – and invite discussion about the trade-offs.  I made this point in a school talk once; I have not been invited back.

It would not be difficult for schools to give pupils an overarching appreciation, in roughly quantified terms, of our typical impact on nature.  By way of example, here is a graphical summary of our GHG emissions, calculated on the basis of a typical four-person household in Great Britain:

How-do-WE-affect-the-planet

The fact that such analysis is relatively straightforward – at least in summary form that is approximately but not precisely correct – begs the question why it doesn’t seem to be produced in places of general learning as a matter of routine?  Why are people unaware of the effects of their lifestyle – their new cotton jeans or home heating, Christmas shopping or summer holiday?  Is it because of a focus in school curricula on ‘essentials’ like sums and spelling, which don’t leave enough time for topics like how we could live in a way that can be sustained?  Is it misguided disdain for the imprecise?  Or is it a reticence to delve into areas that appear to be complex and controversial?

Energy vs electricity

Or is it the result of a tendency to focus on narrow bottom-up analysis rather than broad top-down awareness?  Based on my own experience at work, top-down approaches are currently held in low esteem.  In the world of Big Data and powerful laptops, a common assumption is that an analysis which is heavy on detail, even if much of it is irrelevant or spurious, is considered more professional than one which is light.  This encourages ever more segmentation and specialization.

It is easy then to mistake a narrow vista for the panorama.  One illustration from my working life is the common confusion between ‘electricity’ and ‘energy’.  In Europe, we are making progress in replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources – hydro, wind and solar – which now account for about one quarter of the total electricity generation in Europe.  Several countries have targets to generate most of their electricity from renewable sources in the coming decades.

However, this is often described as ‘energy’, which is a source of confusion.  We use energy in three main ways: for heating (and cooling), transport and electricity.  The largest sector in terms of CO2 emissions in Britain (and also the U.S.) is now transport, even excluding international aviation.  Energy is also embodied in the goods we buy, most of which are imported into GB: the CO2 footprint of these is also greater than from domestic electricity generation.  So if we fully decarbonize our electricity sector, that is good … but we will still be producing around 80% of our current emissions, other things being equal.  Other things are not equal unfortunately – aviation is growing strongly for instance.

There is considerable enthusiasm for electric vehicles, and – in the fullness of time – electric heating in the form of heat pumps.  That is also good, but it will very substantially increase demand for electricity.  The targets for decarbonizing electricity are based on current ‘traditional’ use, i.e. not accounting for the tripling of demand that will occur if we use electricity for our ground transport and all our heating.  It is not impossible to meet the EU’s targets of overall decarbonization by 80-95% from 1990 levels by 2050, but it would require an enormous economic transformation, one that most forecasters are not yet assuming.

Seeing the panorama

In focussing on the vista of electricity consumption, it is easy to miss the panorama of overall energy use.  Or, indeed, focussing on the vista of energy use, it is easy to miss the panorama of overall environmental impact.

If we could nurture and foster this overall awareness, we could make better headway towards a sustainable future.  If George Monbiot is right, we have amazing capacity for altruism and empathy with the natural world, and just need to free ourselves from our selfish mores and economic structure: revolution can happen quickly given the right catalysts and organisation.  Even if it takes longer – if, to adapt Walker’s quotation, consumption habits die one generation at a time – we might, just about, have that much time left.

 

 

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Is it conceivable that we could exchange our dreams for ones that are sustainable?  Is it possible to take the question seriously without being distracted or offended?

Communication today: distraction and outrage

Throughout history, keeping a person’s attention has always been difficult.  I suspect even Cicero, the great Roman orator, had trouble preventing some people from drifting off in the middle of one of his speeches.  Maybe he was tempted to deliver them standing on his head, a tactic once threatened (but sadly never executed) by a former university lecturer of mine frustrated by the inability of us not-especially-bright students to understand what he was saying.

But in the age of electronic media, the task has become a lot harder.  Many of us spend our waking hours going from one interruption or distraction to the next, in the lulls between them waiting to be interrupted.  It is a pattern of consciousness familiar to those with office jobs trying to cope with their e-mail, news addicts, and anyone on Facebook.  With so much to occupy our thoughts and desires, it is not so easy to concentrate all the way to the end of a sentence, let alone the end of an entire article, e-mail, conversation or report.

Cicero made enemies, Mark Antony being the most obvious example, through the reliable but relatively laborious strategy of writing and delivering in public a series of disrespectful speeches.  Today, he could achieve the same effect with a quick tweet.  Electronic communication has made it amazingly easy to give offence, and to lose a receptive audience in the process.  As Americans say, it ‘reads cold’ in the absence of a human voice or visual expression; and if the topic is related to something moral or ethical, the reader is quick to sniff out an odour of superiority emanating from the writer.  And if readers feel criticized, in addition to having numerous other calls on their attention, the writer has an even more difficult job to maintain their focus.

By being quick to reject a message if it seems moralistic, we make ourselves impervious to any insight it might otherwise, albeit painfully, provide.  For example, whatever one’s views on organized religion, the following sentence offers food for thought in spite of the clumsiness of its metaphor: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  No doubt, each quotation of this ilk halves the readership of a blog post in an instant, as it triggers psychological defense mechanisms against moralizing, misogeny, hypocrisy, do-good-ism, kill-joy-ism, …

Can’t buy me love

And yet – if we can manage to put these emotional triggers to one side – it is an interesting comment about what does, or does not, make us happy.  Back in the 1960s, Paul McCartney penned a simpler version: “money can’t buy me love”.  But money is only one of the ways by which a person can become rich.  Without necessarily owning a large house or boasting a large bank balance, we can travel the world, try lots of novel experiences, read lots of interesting books and learn all sorts of stuff, see great films and shows, eat amazing foods, meet lots of wonderful people, …

The previous sentence probably articulates the ‘purpose of life’ for many of us.  It is what our education system and media jointly endorse.

Stimulation and response

There is though a problem: the yawning gap between what we experience and what we assimilate.  It is possible for the onslaught of data (factual or otherwise), and visual imagery, to impair creativity and sensitivity, judgement and reason.  In one of his books (does it matter which one?), Alain de Botton comments that most ‘well-educated’ Westerners today are better read, in the sense of having read much more, than ancient philosophers like Cicero.  We are not necessarily wiser than them as a result.  Many science graduates know more physics than Einstein with arguably less to show for it.  Einstein could not be bothered to remember anything that was easy to look up in a textbook, but today our values are different and we measure ‘intelligence’ in terms of a person’s ability to answer factual questions quickly.  Television programmes like University Challenge, Eggheads, Pointless, Mastermind, QI and so on might seem to be just fun and not serious, but they reveal what we think it means to have a ‘good brain’.  It seems to mean a smattering of knowledge on a very wide range of subjects, combined with rapid recall.  The zeitgeist refuses to countenance the possibility of being ‘over-educated’ like Wilde’s character Algernon, or Dickens’ M’Choakumchild in Hard Times.

In a similar vein, we assume it is impossible to be too well travelled, to know too many people, or to have had too many experiences.  And yet our energy, devotion and capacity to make sense of the world are not without limit or invulnerable to fatigue.  Just as soil can become depleted from over-use, so we can become depleted and depressed from over-stimulation.  Maybe this varies from one person to the next; and we should be taught to recognize our individual limits.

Otherwise, we start to miss the value within.  We become a bit like Lady Dedlock in Bleak House: bored and irritable at spending time in the country away from the glitz and glamour of London high society.  Boredom is telling, because it often (usually?) manifests a dulled sensitivity, a temporary failure to be enthused by the qualities of the person/place/experience that we perceive to be dull.  The problem may lie with the observer, not the observed.

Environment

So what does any of this have to do with the environment?  I think that our high octane way of life contributes to a low boredom threshold and depression if we are not ‘on the go’.  So we seek happiness through a combination of buying stuff, homes, travel, rich food, and big parties.  All of this requires a lot of energy, land and resources; and leads to a high level of pollution and destruction.

Is our education system helping?  In many ways, it encourages the dream.  In addition to loading us with plenty of information about the external world, maybe it would do well to teach us how to be kind to ourselves and see the value in the seemingly ordinary.  That life is ‘in here’ and not just ‘out there’.  That the ordinary person next to us, and the one inside us, is not only as important but as intrinsically interesting as a politician, sportsman or celebrity in the news.

Maybe it is as important to learn about ourselves as it is to learn about numbers bond and spellig.  Why are we so restless?  Is a lot of it about fear – fear of death, immigrants, sexual predators, financial loss?  Is some of it personal dissatisfaction, because we are exposed to celebrities, fashion models and sports stars, and it is hard not to compare ourselves unfavourably against them; and because our education system tells us the world is our oyster, so we are failing if we do not make the most of it?

This is speculative, because I do not know what I’m talking about.  But nor through history have some of our best novelists, artists and poets, who have relied more on thoughts and feelings than encyclopaedic knowledge.  Perhaps the latter is better suited to computers than people.

And perhaps, with an increased emphasis on caring and psychological and physical health, our education system could help us to develop more of a sense of security and belonging, and dreams that are commensurate with sustained life on our planet.