Just Another Cop-out

“Mother Earth will still survive long, long after we have made the one race extinct that deserves it. Ourselves.”

“The good news is that we'll destroy ourselves long before we destroy the Earth's capacity to nurture life.”

These are two responses to recent articles I wrote.

Not to single these two out – it’s a surprisingly common response – mankind deserves to die, ho hum. Earth will be fine once we’ve gone.

Well, no it won’t.

This attitudinal meme is, in fact a cop-out. It denies responsibility by assuming that nothing needs to be done since we’ll be gone in a few years anyway. It gives us permission to carry on going the way that we’ve been going.  It ignores the urgent call of action to which each of us need to be responding right now.

It is just one of the dangerous and toxic mindsets that keep us in our cycle of devastation.

We are irretrievably damaging the earth and the oceans. This article found at Mindfully.Org and the TED talk below by marine ecologist and palaeontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jeremy B.C. Jackson map the extent of our destruction.

Your Significance

I’ve been talking to people about plastic pollution. The conversation always ends up in the same place.

“We don’t have a choice” people tell me. “The fridge you buy, the car you buy, the camera, the cellphone – all of these are designed with planned obsolescence in mind. Eventually it costs you more to maintain than to buy new. Often repair is simply not an option.”

Or, “Everything in the supermarket is packaged in plastic. There simply is no choice.”

For anyone who has looked seriously at this issue, it quickly becomes clear that making the change to zero impact is an extremely inconvenient and difficult undertaking.

Aside from the fact that *ahem* not having a planet to live on is shortly going to become a much more serious inconvenience than seeking out sustainable products, the great tragedy in this sort of thinking is that people tend to go to that “all or nothing” place. Feeling helpless in the face of the various barriers to entry, they choose to do nothing, believing that any change they make will be insignificant.

This is simply not true.

There are various sources of plastic pollution. They are all things that you as a consumer can directly affect. However, affecting them will take varying degrees of effort on your part. For instance, getting your supermarket to stop offering you cooking oil packaged in plastic is a project that will take months or years of petitions, lobbying and protests. Taking a cloth bag along to pack your groceries in is entirely within your reach.

But how much difference will you actually make?


Consider Chris Jordan’s depiction of the number of plastic bags used in the US every five seconds.

The image above is a zoom in from the original here showing 60,000 plastic bags, which is how many bags are used in the U.S. every 5 seconds!

Just in case you didn’t get that… EVERY FIVE SECONDS.

Imagine if everyone in the US stopped using plastic grocery bags. Nothing else, just that. Yes, the difference would be significant.

We love to point fingers at the Yanks for being such bad litterbugs. But if you stand outside Pick ‘n Pay for half an hour and watch the number of plastic bags walking out, you start getting that nasty creeping feeling that our contribution per capita is not far behind.

Let’s run some of our own numbers. Conservatively let’s assume that you fill three shopping bags every time you go shopping – it’s at least that many a week, right? That equates to 156 bags a year.

You might be thinking, “Meh – that’s not so bad”

And yeah… 156 bags a year makes you a bit disgusting, but it certainly isn’t an ecological disaster.

It does however, become a problem when you consider that there are 49 million South Africans all taking home a minimum of 3 shopping bags a week.

That’s seven billion six hundred forty-four million bags every year. Twenty million bags. Every day.

Now imagine if everyone in South Africa stopped paying their thirty cent guilt tax for plastic grocery bags and got into the habit of taking their own bags along to the supermarket. Nothing else, just that.

Yes, the difference would be significant.

Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution

Co-founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and artist Diana Cohen brings the Pacific Gyre trash heap problem back home to where it belongs in this insightful talk.

What to think about when you buy a soft-drink

So I went to the corner café this morning and while standing around waiting for service, my eye fell onto their notice board where all their soft drink prices were posted and saw:

500ml soft drink in a plastic bottle: R8

500ml soft drink in a glass bottle: R6 (that includes the deposit of R1 which you get back if you take the bottle back).

I asked Guida who runs the café why she’d arranged things that way. She sorta snapped at me that those were Coca-Cola’s set prices – not hers.

It made me wonder why, in heaven’s name, we even have plastic bottles?

Guida had no idea.

I phoned Coca-Cola (the holding company for the Valpre bottled water brand incidentally) up to ask them if the price difference was some half-hearted attempt on their part at trying to be eco-friendly or if bottling in glass was in fact cheaper for them in the long run. I was met with wtf? and they put me through to a lady who told me she’d find out and get back to me.

We’ll see about that.

But on to more important things. Like our choices in the matter.

While a lot of us like to comfort ourselves with the argument that plastic is recyclable, how many of us actually recycle our used bottles? 

In fact… have you *ever* handed a plastic bottle in for recycling?  

Well have you?

Huh?

Huh?

OK assuming you have. If plastics are actually being recycled, then, considering the mountains of available garbage, where exactly are all the products made from recycled plastic mmm?

Ya just don’t see them, do ya? OK I'm being unfair there are like... four scattered around the internet... ok maybe more but they hardly represent a comparable production share. Comparable to the amount of trash we have, I mean.

As pointed out at Ecology Centre (and we all know somewhere deep down inside of ourselves that this is the case) most collected plastics are not recycled. Not even the ones collected for recycling.

Our hero, Captain Moore backs this up in  this eye-opening talk.

This means that (if it doesn’t blow away or get washed away) your bottle will end up in a landfill where it will sit and leak toxins out into the soil for the next thousand or so years.

 If your bottle doesn’t make its way into the landfills it will end up in the same place as the rest of our orphaned trash. The sea; where it will turn into this.

While if you had chosen a glass bottle, you would have been responsible for this.

And that is the most eloquent argument of them all.  Here are some more good reasons to choose glass.

The important thing is to realise that our responsibility doesn’t end when we throw that bottle away. It becomes part of our personal carbon footprint. If there was no market for Coke in a plastic bottle you wouldn’t find it on the shelves.

UPDATE 15 DECEMBER

Yeah. Still no answer from Coca-Cola. Jus' sayin'.

UPDATE 27 DECEMBER

Nope, still nuttin'

What you Probably would Rather Not Hear

I made myself very unpopular with someone the other day.

The lady in question makes “healing jewellery” out of semi-precious stones. I think she sells about R4000 a week. Good business.

Now I’m not one of them, but there are people out there who believe that crystals have curative properties. And being the earth loving, lentil eating, patchouli wearing activists that they are, there is a huge outcry among them regarding unethical crystal mining.

Unethical crystal mining incidentally is where you get a crowd of callous non-vegetarian Mexicans with beards to rip crystals from mother earth using explosives, tractors and cranes.

Ethical crystal mining is done by asking the brownies to grow them in their little gardens after which they are lovingly hand harvested and traded for cow’s milk.

But seriously. Crystal mining comes loaded with ethical problems like child labour, explosive open cut mines and chemical pollution; just like any industry that maximises profits to feed global demand.

I had to ask:

“Are you aware”, I probed gently, “of the ethical issues surrounding crystal mining?”

“Oh yes” she said. “But they’re going to blow the stuff up anyway and as long as I’m not personally doing it… “ her voice trailed off here as her thinking scattered into sub-cognitive fog.

Well you can imagine how the rest of that conversation went. But as I was driving home I thought about the general state of things and realised that we are all guilty of this kind of dumbed-down inertia.

Somehow we don’t connect our sushi order with the near extinction of blue fin tuna, now being fished from the worlds oceans at a rate of 20,500 every fifteen minutes. We’re not thinking about the pending water crisis as we flush nine litres of fresh, drinkable water down our toilets every time we go pee pee. We’re not realising that the plastic bottles, Styrofoam containers and bags we see lining our beaches and streets wouldn’t be there if we weren’t buying the soft drinks, fast food and groceries that came in them.

It’s actually bizarre that this kind of cognitive dissonance exists considering that a) most of us care and b) most of us know the drill.

We need to grow up about this and understand that we are not the victims of corrupt big business, or incompetent government. Big business only exists because of our Rand by Rand contribution.

No one holds a burning flame under the seat of your pants to shop at three-layers-of-packaging-Woolies instead of supporting a corner grocer where you can purchase fresh vegetables that come in an eco-friendly cardboard box. 

No one forces you to burn all your lights at night, use disposable diapers, buy plastic toys for your kids, buy soft drinks, buy plastic bags to carry your groceries home in, avoid public transport, swap out your cellphone every two years, print your emails, buy fast food, use your tumble dryer or buy first hand appliances.


We need to realise that we are directly responsible for the dire big picture situation we find ourselves in. It is not the fault of some amorphous “them”. It is our own consumerist apathy that has made things the way they are. We are no longer in a position to assume that things will change without our contribution.

Perhaps we need to stop caring so very much about this and instead, start to look at it in real life terms. Ethics can go to hell. Our ability to curb our consumer mentality is directly related to our continued capacity for survival. 

 Simply put, if we don’t understand our personal contribution to the global crisis, if we don’t start changing our choices, we will find ourselves within the next twenty years living in a world where acid oceans, climatic chaos and poverty will be our heritage.

Save some water

One of the many global issues that we face is that our water supplies are no longer keeping up with us. This article covers the why, the how and the just how serious is it.

Now if you think about the fact that every time you go pee pee you waste an average of 9 litres of fresh, drinkable water you have to ask yourself.... "have we gone f$*ing bananas?"

One ridiculously simple adjustment will cost you absolutely nothing and lower your impact immediately:

Fill a two litre Coke bottle with water and stick it into your cistern - your toilet will flush less 2L. Add a couple more if you can get away with it. Experiment - go on, it's fun. That way you'll only waste 3 - 7 litres with each flush instead of 7-9.

Plus you get to give yourself an extra pat on the back for keeping one plastic bottle out of the Gyres. Just think... if we all do it that could add up to thousands and thousands of bottles safely tucked away in our cisterns instead of in the ocean.

As a responsible urban activist, you should take a couple of bottles to work and fix their toilets too. It's the right thing to do.

Another great water saving option here

Visit this...

Mindfully.org  has oodles of wonderfully informative articles to let you know what's really happening out there. You probably want to pace yourself - it's pretty depressing; that said, ignorance might have been bliss a few years ago. Now it just the recipe for making things infinitely worse.