One of the parts of my life that I like best is the opportunity to go places.
And one of the things I am convinced of is that we all need to be conscious of the rate at which we gobble natural resources, and how much we rely on the wages of people who work for the tiniest fraction of what we consider our time to be worth. I don't like living in a world where an SUV is still considered a reasonable car for a suburban family, and where California produce is the same price or cheaper than the equivalent item from Ontario (and, perversely enough, cheaper than it is in California). I don't like the cosmetic use of pesticides, or even the non-essential use of any sort of pesticide. I'd toss out the term integrated pest management, but I'm pretty sure that's not quite what I want it to be either, since it still assumes pesticide as the normal solution, not the last resort. I think we overuse antibiotics, keep our homes too warm, and don't have a viable plan for our downtowns. I think we still oversubscribe to a transfer-of-technology model of development, where we spend as much energy convincing our target audience of the ways our chosen technology will make their lives better as we could spend to first understand the system and find locally-grounded ways of building capacity. I don't like that outsourcing our labour-intensive tasks is the norm, and that the income differential is so great that low-wage economies see this as a huge bonus.
And I really like to go places. This makes me a hypocrite. Have you noticed that those of us who work in areas defined as climate change, or development, or capacity building, we spend a lot of our times in planes? It's exciting to be around the incredibly smart people I get to meet. It's thrilling to see stuff first-hand. But it comes at a pretty huge cost. By the end of this year, I will have done the equivalent of two trips around the world at the equator in 2006 (not all of it for work). I will have followed this with a third lap in an automobile (not all of it for fun). I will have spent just over a third of the nights of this year away from home, and all of that involved driving or flying. I don't feel good about this.
It sucks, being grown up enough to see far too clearly that our lifestyles don't entirely support our goals. I don't like the size of my footprint. I don't think carbon offsets are good enough. I want to keep going places. Like the rest of my fellow industrialized world citizens, I only make the easy sacrifices.
The clocks changed. It's dark. There are no more leaves on the trees, and there is no snow on the ground. I'm on the depressed side lately, ok?
Posted by Johanna at October 29, 2006 07:29 PM