Truly Outrageous

No impact/low impact/whose impact?

Via blogger lrapps I learned about Low Impact Week, an online campaign organized by Crunchy Chicken that runs June 1 – June 7. The week focuses on decreasing one’s personal environmental impact in one of seven areas: energy consumption, water usage, food habits, paper product dependency, garbage, single occupancy vehicles, and long-term planning. I don’t blog much on environmental issues, and when I do it’s usually because environmental and social justice concerns overlap in a pretty unavoidable way – the Save Punalu`u campaign, for example. (FYI, you can find an article on the state’s continued negligence of cultural sites in favor of more, more, more development here.)

In the Real World, though, I actually think quite a lot about my impact on my environment (mostly with guilt, lately, as I’m learning to drive). Like lrapps I try to limit my use of plastic bags and disposable cups, take-out containers, etc. I’ve forked over a buck to get taken off junk mail lists. I spend extra cash on those energy saver lightbulbs and I unplug all my appliances before I leave for work in the morning. I’m a pescetarian (aka FAKE VEGETARIAN, there, I said it before you could). I have thought a lot in the last several months about promoting local/sustainable food choices, which is actually just an excuse for weekly trips to the farmers’ market.

That said, I do all of these things very imperfectly and within my limited means, which is probably why I don’t blog about environmental health and awareness. There’s also the undeniable privilege involved in living an environmentally friendly lifestyle in America. No Impact Man is not hurting for cash. Neither were most of the regular shoppers at the eco-store where I worked throughout college. My reluctance has also been shaped by arguments around why we’re sending sanitary pads to refugees in Africa instead of Diva Cups. Eventually you can save a whole lot of money living eco-friendly, but damn there are some start-up costs.

Recently, though, I’ve come across some writing on how harmful environmental practices and poverty are intricately connected. Alternet posted a doozy of an article on how longer work-weeks use more resources with little or no payoff in productivity (at least at 40+ hours/week). Not only that, but it costs us more to live so that we can work these long hours.

Unsurprisingly, the United States is the world’s largest polluter. Housing a mere 5 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for 22 percent of its fossil fuel consumption, 50 percent of its solid waste, and, on average, each citizen consumes 53 times more goods than a person in China, according to the environmental nonprofit, Sierra Club.

When people work longer hours, they rely increasingly on convenience items such as fast food, disposable diapers, or bottled water. Built-in obsolescence has become standard business practice — just throw it away and make more — leaving mountainous landfills in its wake. “Earning more often means spending money in ways that are environmentally detrimental. We’re finding that to compensate for lack of time, you actually need more money to work those extra hours,” says Monique Tilford, acting executive director of the Centre for a New American Dream, a Maryland group promoting environmentally and socially responsible consumption. “When people are time-starved they don’t have enough time to be conscious consumers. The overarching theme of our organization is to remind Americans that every single dollar they spend has a carbon impact, to make the connection.”

Reading it over, though, I think the wallet impact is just as significant. This is a crucial point. Environmentally destructive practices are making us poor, not just in the future, but right now. Obviously this doesn’t just apply to Americans, either. Oxfam has just released a report to this effect, timed to coincide with the G8 summit in Germany. From the summary:

There is a deep injustice in the impacts of climate change. Rich countries have caused the problem with many decades of greenhouse-gas emissions (and in the process have grown richer). But poor countries will be worst affected, facing greater droughts, floods, hunger, and disease.

The impacts are already hitting vulnerable communities, where people are starting to adapt their lives to this reality. In South Africa, less frequent and less reliable rains are forcing farmers to sell their cattle and plant faster-maturing crops. In Bangladesh, villagers are creating floating vegetable gardens to protect their livelihoods from flooding. In Viet Nam, communities are helping to plant dense mangroves along the coast to diffuse tropical-storm waves.

Climate change is a challenge to current models of economic growth: all countries will have to find low-carbon paths to development, in order to keep global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But given their historic role in causing the problem, rich countries now have two extraordinarily clear obligations: to stop harming, by massively cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions, and to start helping, by providing compensatory finance so that poor countries can adapt, before they suffer the full impacts of climate change.

Tackling climate change requires an unprecedented level of global co-operation. The G8 summit in Germany in June 2007 brings an important opportunity for rich countries to demonstrate their commitment to achieving such co-operation. The task of G8 leaders at Heiligendamm is clear. They must set a global target to keep global warming below 2 degrees, and commit to reducing emissions in their economies by 2015.

I think Low Impact Week is a great idea, a great way to raise awareness about cheap and convenient ways to encourage folks to make environmentally conscious decisions – which is a great way to start thinking about the bigger political moves that need to be made. But we have to get past the image of rich hippie tree huggers yelling at everybody eating Big Macs, and the class problems of eco-chic consumerism. We need the well-off to pay up, act responsibly and support more affordable sustainable living options for all of us, not just buy some hemp-soy blend yoga pants (I promise you, they exist… fine, I OWN THEM) and fly 10,000 miles to India for a meditation retreat. Like every other approach to fighting poverty, we have to resist smugness and complacency. It’s not news who wins from short-term waste and long-term damage in the name of productivity. As Rachel Carson (who would have turned 100 this week) said in 1964:

Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels are allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry. More than one scientist has raised the question of whether a spirit of Lysenkoism may be developing in America today, the philosophy that perverted and destroyed the science of genetics in Russia and even infiltrated all of that nation’s agricultural sciences. But here, the tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit any party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production.