Being really lazy and Carbon offsetting
A friend of mine extols the benefits of being creatively lazy and how this is a great way of ‘saving the planet’. She told me that in the place where she lives you have to pass a squeegee after taking a shower to get the water off the cubicle, this so annoys her that she took to taking very very quick, but efficient, showers (these showers are a bit longer than the VIP, Very Important Parts approach but still pretty quick) They got even more rapid when she cut her hair short, thus, she maintains, helping reduce her personal planetary burden, which seems like a good thing. She also hated the effort needed to go and buy soap and shampoo so started making them herself, she now exchanges her products with her neighbours for eggs and suchlke. She also got fed up cutting with the effort needed to cut firewood to heat her house and built herself a well insulated tiny house which hardly needs heating. This also involved getting rid of a lot of clutter which reduced the cleaning and dusting that she hated doing.
Whilst my friend has been doing that big companies are buying and selling carbon credits, basically continuing polluting but ‘offsetting’ their emissions through tree planting projects and suchlike. I worked, doing Permaculture design stuff, for a farm in a country in Africa, they had planted an area with citrus fruits which were all burned because of a wildfire. The neighbouring ‘farm’ which extends over several hundred hectares was planted with Teak trees by a German company to ‘offset’ their pollution. A simple way to clear the undergrowth under Teak is to set fire to it, a good way to hunt the fleeing animals as well. Unfortunately fires set like this are pretty uncontrollable and regularly burn into the neighbouring farms.
The solution we proposed for the farm where we were working was to use a paddock intensive grazing system (a lot of cows on a small surface for a short period) this is to reduce the combustible load left by free ranging cattle which was how they were being run. The paddocks being created using barrier plants that don’t burn easily and movable barriers. Hens accompany the cattle. That wasn’t all of course we also designed water retention systems and resevoirs that could be opened to flood areas under threat form a wildfire. The systems we designed won’t just protect the farm but have many other benefits. That said we were having to act because, as so often some people or companies, or governments are doing the right thing but in the wrong way, at the wrong time or without taking into consideration any possible secondary negative impacts.
Because of this we are too often making things worse. Another example I came across was in a village in a European country where an NGO had decided to ‘help’ the inhabitants. One thing they did was to arrive with pots of paint and headed off to mark, blaze the trail, of the various walks that tourists could enjoy. Sounds like a good idea but they didn’t take into consideration that women from the village offered their services as guides and suddenly had no takers. It’s also dangerous as the area has a big population of wolves and bears which they locals know about and know how to avoid or deal with.
The image that comes to mind is a horse with blinkers on, focussing on what is directly ahead and not seeing the bigger picture. For a company wanting to carry on ‘business as usual’ carbon offsetting sounds like a great deal, unfortunately it is, in the main, a big fraud. The majority of carbon capture schemes used in carbon offset trading, at best, at worst they are damaging or destructive, sometimes they shift the carbon pollution elsewhere. Many other of these schemes would have been done anyway, with others the beneficial impacts are exagerated.
Perhaps the most insidious part of all this is it relieves the pressure being put on industries to radically change and become carbon sinks rather than carbon sources. Another problem is that carbon emisions usually go hand in hand with other types of pollution and, as with conjourors, we find ourselves looking the wrong way. We continue to buy from a polluting company soothing ourselves with the idea that it’s ok because the company is offsetting their carbon pollution and ignoring the rest.
Once again we see what could be a good transitional system being deformed, abused and distorted by various industries and those people who have discovered another way to make money, by trading carbon ‘credits’. It was become a fetid mess that is simply making things worse. An ethical company could, for a defined and short period, offset their carbon pollution whilst they make the efforts needed to become a carbon sink and eliminate all types of pollution and environmental destruction that happen along their supply chains.
A similar thing is true with the so-called circular economic approach. It is being leaped on by various companies but adapted by them in order that they don’t have to change too much. This means that the circularity that they boast about is basically greenwashing and we are caught again looking the wrong way. Some people may think that it’s better than nothing but in today’s world with the crises we are in it’s simply not enough.
At some time we’re going to have to bite the bullet and accept that certain industries will have to disappear, others will have to be radically reorganised and transformed, with a minority there will just be a few adjustments to do. We must take the blinkers off and face up to what we have done and continue to do, we’re not teenagers who won’t tidy up their bedrooms! It’s getting a bit late but it’s not too late, that said ‘too late’ is coming fast, faster than many climate scientists had previously envisaged.
On a positive note and as an example of what we can do I’d like to mention the ‘Let’s do it’ movement that started in Estonia in 2008 when thousands of people came out and tidied their country up. This has since evolved into Let’s do it world, World cleanup day. Maybe we could expand to include ‘cleanup our neighbourhood’ once a week?
When designing food production areas Permaculture designers often use mulch systems to reduce or eliminate unwanted plants from a chosen area. Mulch works by cutting off the light to the unwanted plants which means they die. Maybe it is time to extend this concept and start eliminating socially and environmentally destructive industries by ‘mulching’ their revenue stream, we stop buying their products. This would also involve redesigning our local communities and, as with the farm we designed, we eliminate a threat and at the same time reap dozens of other benefits. A car free city is healthier, cleaner, less dangerous and less noisy, road space would be freed up for other uses and so too the carparks. Governments have a role to play in this and all they have to do is STOP doing what they’re doing. For example, many European governments massively fund road building and leave rail networks underfunded, Europe is covered with abandoned rail lines and massive road infrastructures. Enter rude word here.
We are continually encouraged to live, as in the land of the red Queen: ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’ My friend, of whom I wrote at the begining of this article and along with so many others, has decided that there is a better way. Not necessarily doing nothing but doing what needs to be done in the right way, at the right time and taking into consideration all the secondary consequences of any action or inaction.
It’s up to each of us to take our blinkers off and get on with sorting things out, and it’s urgent.