Eco Worrier Series - Falling off the Edge of the World

Individually we can live anywhere from zero to about 120 years of age, then we die; it’s a biological certainty everywhere except in the annals of science fiction.  As a species we also have a use by date.  Scientists provide murky prophecies by dissecting the entrails of our environment, from the microbes of disease to the pH level of our seas and the health of our atmosphere.

Some days it seems we’re leaning hard on the kill switch, as though by some subconscious collective desire we’re keen to get on with our extinction phase.   Against all genetic reasoning I’ve kind of got to like the idea that we end.  I can console myself that I’m not alone in this. We’ve always had a fascination with the end of the world, and looking back at popular culture it’s interesting to note the change in plot lines, from the alien fearing days of the Day of the Triffids and War the of the Worlds, to man-made post apocalyptic scenarios such as Mad Max, through to the growing popularity of environmental disasters with such movies as Waterworld and The Day after Tomorrow, and the BBC TV series, Outcasts.

It’s a theme littered throughout literature too. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, death, war, famine and pestilence have always been waiting in the wings. I like Pratchett and Gaiman’s concept in Good Omens of the four sidling into society and providing us with the means to our own end, like calorie-less food, till we all, by personal choice, gorge ourselves to  emaciation.  It’s clear - while they court us with death we groom their horses.  There are few options for extinction that do not require our assistance.    

But it wasn’t till I’d read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman that I started to seriously consider an earth without humans.  Weisman posits that, for whatever reason, we no longer exist, and explores what would happen to the earth from an hour later through to millions of years – and it seemed, at least at first, that nature can grind us down fairly quickly, that our traces would be, if not wiped up with a wash cloth, obliterated by time and those all powerful microbes. Towards the end of the book it seemed as if it was one of those cleaning jobs that once tackled one realises the item in question may no longer be of an aesthetic or practical value and it would be easier to throw it away, start again. 

But nature has less of a throw away approach and eventually our damage will be undone.  Though until such time as a plastic chewing microbe evolves polymers will be one of our most lasting mementos.

Will we go out with a whimper or a bang? The disaster movies proliferating prefer the CGI excitement of the bang theory - it makes for better ratings.  Though I suspect our descendants will eke out a marginal existence for centuries till they’re no longer viable.  Inevitably our reign will be over.  It will take millions of years for other species to evolve and rule the earth. I wonder if they will find us in peat bogs and disturbed cemeteries. What will they think of us?  Will they sift through our bones looking for clues or will they chew on them? 

There are days I wax lyrical on human extinction, but most times I cling feverishly to the hope that the environment we live in can survive our excesses, and that we can reduce them to the point it can do so on a long term basis and that our descendants will laugh at our naivety as we do at our ancestors’ fears of falling off the edge of the world.

Eco Worrier Series - Carbon Natural

Carbon fixation is a scientific process. But it’s not the kind of fixation I’m talking about. If carbon had been white it might have had a chance, but its colour coded for evil, an insidious atom that proliferates at our every action. It’s the second most plentiful element in our bodies at 18.5% of our mass. It’s popular in the universe, being the fourth most abundant element behind hydrogen, helium and oxygen. If it’s an evil, then it’s a necessary one. We wouldn’t exist without it. It comes in different forms or allotropes from diamonds, which we revere, to dioxide, which we, increasingly, don’t. And in all likelihood the text you are now reading is created by specifically arranged blobs of it, and it’s a lot of these combinations of carbon in our reading matter that has us all fired up on the atom with the highest melting point of all the elements. 

It’s the 810 gigatonnes and climbing in our atmosphere that causes the atmos-fear. Carbon is a stable atom, but the amount of it in our atmosphere is de-stablising its ability to control our climate.  We can’t even exhale without it; my eco-worrier paranoia comes to the fore, cringes and wonders - should I cut down on breathing? 

The average person inhales around 25,000 times a day filtering 10,000 litres of air for oxygen and producing approx 900 grams of CO2, more if physically active. With over 6 billion of us that’s close to 6 trillion tonnes of CO2 a day.  Seems like one of those figures meant to restrain your desire to sigh and instead consider draconian population control. But don’t hold your breath! What we are exhaling is fast cycle CO2 - it was absorbed by eating plants and animals that ate plants.  Emitting this CO2 doesn’t make any difference to atmospheric levels as it would have decomposed and re-entered the environment within a short time period anyway. So breathe easy. 

It’s become a much maligned substance, but, like our decision to consider guns evil (when it’s the person using them), or that money is evil (when it’s the love of it), carbon is the scapegoat side effect of our lifestyle.   

Carbon is naturally sequestered in coal, oil, and organic matter over millions of years and we’ve become adept at extracting it. We have a myriad of techniques devised to access the stored energy to do everything from increase the carbon value in our toast (by burning it) to converting it into plastic boxes plugged into fossil fuel based energy sources  used to exchange electronic information, sometimes all day, in the thermostatically controlled atmosphere of a home or office. 

We are so inventive with the stuff, we drop it below –78.5o and use it to make dry ice to augment  nightclub atmosphere in which we toss back drinks livened up with little bubbles made of the same stuff. There seems to be no end to the things we can do with two oxygen atoms covalently bonded to a single carbon atom. 

It’s difficult to visualize 391ppm of carbon suspended in the atmosphere. The problem is it’s invisible to the eye and odourless and unless you have a Photo acoustic Field Gas-Monitor handy you can only measure its effects by the number of magazine articles and news bulletins the subject generates.  

However, when we drive to work and flick switches on electrical appliances we can visualise our contribution to the carbon equation by understanding that on average, for every litre of petrol we burn, 2.4 kilos of CO2 is created and this pollutes 10,500 litres of fresh air. Every kilowatt hour of coal produced electricity creates approximately 1 kilogram of CO2.  An average household uses 15 kWh a day, polluting 65,000 litres of air. 

For the eco-worrier, when it comes to the carbon cycle, the best advice is to get on yours and don’t be frightened to exhale!

Confessions of an Eco-worrier

Radio broadcasts, news segments, blogs, emails, newspaper headlines, books, casual conversations, any of these can promote an eco-panic attack.  There are many contributors to these attacks; the issues of over-population, deforestation, profligate resource use, acid seas, oil spills, loss of biodiversity, toxic food processes, soil salinity, water shortages and peak oil – that’s if we can see beyond that great mushroom cloud of global warming. Not sure if it was the length of that sentence that has me breathless or if I’m suffering an eco-panic attack.

The problems are overwhelming. With commitment we could (probably) solve them. But we don’t. It’s like watching a tsunami approach from under a beach umbrella and remarking on its size while sucking on a pina colada. It’s like closing your eyes while driving down a winding hill. It’s like rolling every morsel of commonsense ever known into a ball and sitting it in a dusty corner of a museum to await labelling.

Eco Worrier symptoms are; an obsession with knowing and understanding everything that’s happening on a global scale; reading scary books that read like sci-fi novels of gloom, doom, despair and the end of the world as we know it, (and we don’t feel fine); watching movies, many of them the earnest preachings of movie stars turned environmentalist evangelists, and that fist of fear tightens. This is no longer just the preserve of the side of the road loony holding the ‘end of the world is nigh’ sign.  This is mainstream. It’s flashed in front of us constantly; CO2, global warming, sea level rise. This feeds our fears, but we’re so darn busy feeding our families and paying the rent we can’t commit nearly enough time to doing everything that’s becoming mandatory – changing our own personal world 360 degrees.  This increases the desire to do more, yet the fear and guilt do not enliven us – they paralyse. We become spectators at the arena of environmental destruction. We don’t want to watch, but not to is too great an indulgence and so we open our eyes, and do everything we can; read those scary books, change those bloody light bulbs; install the insulation; but we know, deep inside, it isn’t enough.

So this eco-worrier, having resolved to do something more, looks outside and sees the flotilla of modern society on the rivers of no change. While I can’t see the carbon atoms accumulating I know they are there.  I see their birth as I drive impatiently behind logging trucks lugging themselves up steep slopes as they deliver the combined tree life of thousands of years to its ultimate destination as toilet paper and the print out of the email I received last week on the ten stupidest road signs I’ve ever seen.

I’ve decided to do my bit, no matter how small, only to step outside and it seems so very few others are.  The panic rises, what does my incalculably small contribution mean?  Is it meaningless? Is all this eco-worrier business without point? Am I squandering my hard earned on solar panels when I could fly to Bali in winter and relax? But it’s too late; it requires some serious abstinence of thought and conscience to do so. No matter how hard I push down the guilt it has floatation devices and keeps bobbing back up. This annoys me. Here I am, trapped in the eco-worrier cycle with no way to get off. I am now a thwarted, frustrated, angry participant in this global experiment in energy extravagance. And I still haven’t done much more than change my light bulbs.

If this sounds familiar, you  might just be a fellow eco-worrier, one of a growing demographic.

In the end I’ve come to the conclusion that...

I can’t afford to feel overwhelmed, nor guilty, I don’t need perfect knowledge, a lot of money, heaps of time. All that does is compound the problem and stops me from doing what I can.

My actions will not save the world, that should never have been my goal. It’s about doing the things that are within my power to do, that’s all I can. I don’t think of it as an obligation, I think of it as an adventure.

So why don't we throw in the trowel?

The alternative to home sustainability is no longer possible. I have no romantic ideals about over consumerism and rampant resource use. I could not tolerate living a life without understanding that it has energy constraints.  I cannot with any degree of composure eat meat seven days a week or create enough rubbish to choke a river or two. I want to do the right thing and if that means eating more zucchini than I’d like. Then we all will J

Our family’s personal contribution to saving the world won’t amount to much. But we are doing what we can. And sustainability at home, even stripped of its romantic overpackaging is still pretty good. We might have to spend time spreading poo, carting around mulch and pruning, but the taste of a real, dribble juice down your chin apricot for those few weeks we get to eat them are worth it. If it means we have a glut of them and I spend ten consecutive nights preserving them on a wood fired stove. I know it’s not romantic, but I do enjoy pulling them out of the pantry in the middle of winter and feeling thankful for our previous efforts. Sustainability at home has its own rewards but I don’t need rose coloured glasses and lyrical phrases to clog up the truth of it all.  And I certainly will never need to put a nappy on a bloody chook. I hope you don’t either.

I also hope you enjoyed that series of raves.

I think somewhere I can dig out a rave or two of being an eco-worrier - interested in having your inbox subjected to more?

Myth Ten : Organic shmanic!

There are days I wish I’d never done all that agonising research about soil microbes, and nutrient run off. There are days that reaching for a bottle of quick fix for every weed and pest known and shamelessly spraying it everywhere sounds a darn sight better than hand picking 28 spotted ladybirds, and squishing snails by moonlight. 

Trev - Save me from straw!

Someone once told me that there’s something weird about having your friends over for dinner (play hide the zucchini on the plate), providing them with a glass of your best vintage elderflower champagne before handing them a wooden mallet we called exsnailaburs and a torch and telling them that before they get dessert they need to take their ex-snailabur into the garden and whack the hell out of every passing snail.  The snails had got to plague proportions by that stage. They’d even got into my letterbox and partially eaten my first royalty cheque.  How much easier would it be to spread piles of innocent looking, commercially available and cheap as chips, pellets. 

Squishing pear and cherry slugs while thinking on which pest I hate most is not conducive to the romantic image of sustainability, of all those butterfly filled gardens. Because darn the butterflies, if you’ve done your research you know every butterfly starts as a caterpillar.  Let me pull off their wings, I love you, I love you NOT! 

I tried an experiment in organic weed death. It involved expensive bottles of pine oil, which kind of worked, but when you worked out the cost, I’d better off paying someone to pull them for me. I tried cider vinegar, and it was relatively successful but same story. I’ve tried pouring boiling water, torching them, and various other assassinations but in the end in an organic garden nothing beats blisters.

So there, you have my ten most unpopular misconceptions on sustainability at home. I’ve missed a lot. Climbing on the roof in thunderstorms to make sure your  tank gets filled.  Discovering your son has swapped all his home grown nutrient rich organic school lunches for Uncle Toby’s Roll ups. It’s endless. But we’re still doing it. We fall off the wagon every now and then. Sometimes I forget my glasses when I’m in the chocolate aisle and the éclairs trapped behind a mountain of plastic are deemed psychologically worth it. But for the most part we are good. Not perfect. Never perfect. But we are pretty good. So if those nappied chooks have got me this far in my rant, in my sustainability at home crisis, why am I not throwing in my trowel?

Tomorrow: Why we haven't thrown in the trowel... and why it's all worth it!

Myth Nine: Everyone understands the need to get sustainable.

Myth Nine: Everyone understands the need to get sustainable.

I’ll never forget standing at the local school with a group of 4WDriving city mum’s who were admiring their French nail polish jobs  while I hid my dirt rimmed jobs behind my back. One of them was complaining about what to give the kids for breakfast and named a number of processed off the shelf options. Me, being naturally stupid, laughed and said,

‘Yeah well, if we want peanut butter on our toast I have to think about it three months in advance, gotta grow it before we can eat it’.

Caleb's self made Lego tool to stop me feeding him pumpkin

There was a deathly silence, a shuffling of feet, a rolling of eyes and a nearly audible internal dialogue from each of the mothers, something along the line of ‘whacko!’

I’m not saying they’re wrong, but being driven to be as sustainable as possible in the highest 4WD owning town in Australia was not a great conversation starter seven years ago.

I used to bike Caleb to school on my tip shop bought bike and he’s sit on the back and pretend to shoot 4WD all the way to school. Some of them thought he was waving and even waved back.

I tried to barter my chook eggs for other staples in the neighbourhood but one neighbour wouldn’t eat our eggs because the yolks were too orange and, ew, my nappiless chooks had touched the ground. She much preferred to know they lived in cages, well away from dirt.

I felt alone. But then I often felt my aloneness just as  keenly when I met up with other sustainable folk – because I realised that it was a competition, and that the only way to win is to trample someone else’s attempts at sustainability at home.  I hate to say it, but someone is always greener than you.  It’s not a competition people, it’s a complementation.

Myth Ten : Organic shmanic!

and after that... why it's all worth it!

Myth Eight: It's a Cornucopia of Produce

Myth Eight: It’s a Cornucopia of produce

Quite frankly there are always far too many Zucchini’s – and never enough watermelons. Yet they come from the same family.   I want to know why? Living seasonally is a great concept, but what about the hungry months of spring when it’s old and hoary potatoes, limp carrots and mouldy cabbage?

Myth busted: living seasonally and out of the garden is difficult and your culinary skills are often challenged by the repetitive nature of your main ingredients.

You can always try giving it away.  I’ll never forget offering a neighbour excess zucchini, he swore at me. I won’t repeat the exact words, but the nature of it was pretty much on the level of, ‘not on your nelly’ and he leapt a fence to safety.  He makes himself very scarce around peak zucchini season every year. 

I‘ve discovered that giving them away is a successful strategy in warding off less favoured neighbours. I have more  strategies to deal with zucchini, planting less never seems to be one of them. Why do punnets of zucchini come in nothing less than 6? I find opening the back door and throwing them to the pigs works for a while, but after that they start looking at you funny and I worry about them pushing through a fence. Cooking zucchini up with a 50% ratio of something more interesting and putting it in a jar can reduce their numbers.  My favourite one though is going out early in the morning and picking the female flowers , stuffing them full of fetta cheese and chilly and deep frying them in a light batter.  

The truth is growing your own is managing the glut while craving mangoes and other delicacies that won’t survive a frost.

Tomorrow: Myth Nine - Everyone understands the need to get sustainable.