I just bought carbon credits to offset the trip my folks and I are taking to Barcelona in April. Now, I know that doesn’t actually undo the air travel, but I felt compelled to do something. Just saying “Ah, f**ckit” isn’t sufficient anymore.
Yesterday, I finished The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. That was a chewy read — the most chemistry and biology I’ve encountered since high school. And even though most of it washed over me, I do find that I’m better able to understand the issues in each day’s news items about climate change.
This is the trick: how does one get active without getting all activist? In a world geared to the cult of individual freedom, where the word “enough” is anathema, almost unpatriotic, what do I do with this compulsion to do right? I feel it driving me, like it’s ingrained. My parents must have hammered this message in from an early age, about being good and thinking of others, ’cause it just doesn’t switch off. I can’t just do what I want if I know it’ll have an impact on other people — and these days it’s impossible not to be aware of the effects of every little action.
Guilt is a crappy motivator. It may work for short spells, but people will inevitably react against such heaviness, because we just want to live, not be forever negotiating our every move. And it’s not like this change has to be difficult; what I read yesterday convinced me that it can be painless and ultimately profitable, but there’s just so much inertia and vested interest at the personal, corporate, and political levels making it difficult. Whatever entrepreneuring person gets in there and makes this cool, fun, and compelling has a big future ahead of him or her — like my friend Fidel, who has been negotiating with the organisers of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, showing them how smart buildings made with environmentally-sound materials can be safer for the construction workers, less expensive to build and maintain, and be the paragon of aesthetic appeal — in other words, no compromises, so no excuses other than habit for avoiding the opportunity.
And hopefully “cool” will be why we change these things, not because shorelines and countries get washed away or completely dessicated as we move into a state of emergency.
I really, really don’t want my book to be annoying. Where is the funny in this?
