Do You Really Want to Save the Planet? Really? Really?

Our planet is in big trouble. We see the increase in violent storms, the forest fires, the heat domes, the droughts and floods, the mass extinctions, the polluted lakes and rivers, the dwindling fish stocks, the oceans choked with plastic. Most people agree that we should try to ‘fix’ these problems.

The good news is, I believe the planet can be saved. Though it may be too late to put it back the way it was even a few decades ago, we can halt, or at least slow, any further damage, and begin to repair what has already been done.

The bad news is, it will require you to make some major sacrifices. Remember sacrifices? Probably not. They used to make up a regular part of people’s lives. For a lot of years now in affluent societies, the concept of sacrifice has been virtually unheard of.

Well, if you want to save the planet, it’s going to have to make a comeback.

The fact is that almost nobody is being honest about the solution to the world’s ecological problems – not businesses, not politicians, not journalists, not even most environmentalists. Why? Because the solution involves making drastic changes to our current way of life – changes that very few are willing to accept. Those changes may seem scary, but the alternative is even scarier.

So what do we have to do?

ALL of us (not just your neighbour, or the guy across the street, or people in other countries – but you, me, and everybody) have to massively cut down on our consumption of the Earth’s resources.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s look at a few major themes. I realize that it may not be possible for you to implement ALL of these changes, but you MUST conform to them to as much as you possibly can if you want to save the planet. As I mentioned above, this will require sacrifices.

1. Food
   • Eat fresh food. Avoid anything that comes in a package, a can, or a bottle. The positive side of this rule is that by doing so you will automatically be eating healthier, living longer, having a better quality of life, and using far fewer medical resources.
   • End, or at least drastically reduce, your consumption of meat. The raising of animals (especially cattle) for food is massively destructive to the planet. If you want to see just how destructive, check out the movie: ‘Eating Our Way to Extinction‘. A positive side of eliminating meat is that far fewer animals will be raised under abhorrent conditions, mistreated, and inhumanely slaughtered.
   • Don’t eat at fast food restaurants. This one should be easy. These establishments’ consumption of resources and generation of garbage is massive. There is no reason for anyone to eat at these places. If you continue to do so, you are effectively declaring that you don’t give a shit about the planet.
   • If you go to a coffee shop, demand that your coffee be served in a mug, not a paper cup, lid, and sleeve that will all be thrown in the garbage seconds after you’re finished using them. If the shop can’t or won’t do that, go to another shop. And don’t take coffee to go. The same applies to all other eating or drinking establishments.
   • Eat food that is produced within a few hundred miles of where you live (even closer if possible). This probably means that you will have very limited access to some exotic foods, and your available choices will change with the seasons. Remember what I said about sacrifices?
   • Don’t eat processed foods – at all. Like fast food restaurants, there is no basic need for them. Cook your own food – it’s not hard. Even I can do it.
   • Don’t buy more food at a time than you need. Use everything you buy, and as far as possible, throw nothing away.
   • If you find it difficult to comply with the above rules (ie. Your grocery only sells food from thousands of miles away), DEMAND that they change their policies.

• Shopping
  • To as great an extent as possible – buy nothing. Of the three Rs – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, by far the most important is the first – Reduce. More than anything else people do, shopping is killing this planet. And the pathetic thing is, many of the things people buy, they don’t even really want.
  • If you must buy something, buy something used. There are countless used clothing stores, thrift stores, etc., where you can buy beautiful things that have been used before. Many times they’re in perfect condition.
  • If you absolutely must shop, shop far less often. Don’t buy a new TV every year. Buy a new TV every 10 years (or more). Of course, then you won’t have the latest model with all the new bells and whistles. Sacrifice.
  • If something you own breaks, fix it. A few months ago the zipper broke on my cheap winter jacket. I found out that fixing it would actually cost more than just buying a new jacket. I fixed the zipper anyway – one less jacket in the city landfill.
  • Put an end to planned obsolescence. DEMAND that companies produce products that last a very long time, and that can be easily repaired. Of course, this means you will probably have to pay much more for these products. Sacrifice.
  • Don’t shop online – period. When you try on a shirt at a clothing store and don’t like it, it’s usually returned to the rack. When you do the same online, it’s often either tossed in the garbage, or racks up thousands of additional CO2-generating delivery miles being sent somewhere else. As with eating at fast-food outlets, when you shop online, you are effectively declaring that you don’t give a shit about the planet.

• Travel
  • To as great an extent as possible, don’t travel. Planes, ships, cruise ships, and even trains, are massive polluters.
  • If you must travel, the shorter the distance, the better. Go to a local park or a national park rather than to Europe.
  • Don’t drive. It’s well known that cars are a major source of pollution and CO2 emissions. Note that I don’t say it’s okay to drive a Tesla or other electric vehicle. Electric vehicles, while operating, don’t contribute to greenhouse gases. But in every other way (maybe even more so) they contribute just as much to the destruction of our world. The same mines that dig up the steel, copper, graphite, aluminum, etc. for a gas-powered car, are necessary for electric cars. The same factories build them. The same infrastructure is required to deliver them. So why do environmentalists continue to push for people to buy them? I don’t know – ask the environmentalists.
  • The best form of local transportation is walking. And as with eating fresh food, it has the additional benefit that it will make you healthier. If you absolutely cannot walk to where you’re going, the next best is probably a bicycle. Not able to cycle? Public transit is probably next. Of course, dead last is a car.

• Power and Water
  • Do you see a pattern forming here? As above, to as great an extent as possible, use none – don’t leave lights on, and use items that consume as little as possible. Do you really need an electric can opener? If you’re 80 years old and have severe arthritis, it might be necessary. For most younger, healthy adults, I don’t think so. And like many of my suggestions, the tiny number of calories you burn opening a can by hand will be a benefit (however slight) to your health. Of course, if you followed the first rule in the Food section, you wouldn’t need a can opener anyway.
  • Air conditioners are one of the biggest consumers of electricity. Do you absolutely have to have one? If not, don’t. If you have to have one, only use it when absolutely necessary, and at the lowest setting. I’ve been in cities where it’s 104 degrees F outside, and so cold in stores or theaters that I need a sweater. Why is that necessary?
  • Do you really need a dishwasher? My wife and I have lived in something like a dozen different homes over the years. Every one of them had a dishwasher that we’ve virtually never used. In the time it takes to load and unload the dishwasher, I can wash most of the dishes by hand. And a side benefit is that you expend a tiny amount of energy washing the dishes instead of sitting like a lump waiting for the machine to do it for you. Don’t forget that, not only do these appliances use power themselves, they also had to be BUILT. You might argue that yours is only one little dishwasher – well, as of 2019, there were more than 139 million housing units in the USA alone. If each unit has a dishwasher, that’s 139 MILLION dishwashers. Think about the mines, factories, transportation systems, delivery infrastructure, and power generation that went into building them and delivering them. These are just examples. The same applies to many other appliances of questionable value.

In a nutshell, what I’m suggesting is that we should all voluntarily accept a significant drop in our standard of living. The above sacrifices may sound like too much to endure. The fact is, they wouldn’t make much real difference to your life. When I was a child growing up, the world was basically the way I’m suggesting. My parents had the same fridge, stove, iron, etc. for forty years. They never owned a dishwasher or an electric can opener. Note that we weren’t poor. That’s the way everybody lived.

This was back in the early sixties (yes, there are people still alive who lived back then). I’ve done some research on stats from that era. The suicide rates were FAR lower than today. The violent crime rates were FAR lower than today. Apparently people back then weren’t so unhappy after all.

There’s a lot of talk today about the ‘green economy’. There’s this kind of utopian vision of us all living substantially the way we do now, only magically, everything’s electric. Even more magically, somehow, there’s no destruction of the planet. This is complete and utter fantasy. For us to go fully electric, billions of fossil-fuel-burning machines would have to be tossed in the trash heap. That in itself would be a major environmental catastrophe. Every one of those machines would have to be replaced with an electric one, in the most destructive mining and manufacturing frenzy the world has ever seen. And where will all the power come from to run these new electronic wonders? Remember, everything will be electric: cars, trucks, intercontinental passenger jets, semi-trucks, trains, fishing boats, tankers, container ships, cruise ships, cranes, tractors, bulldozers, tanks, fighter jets, mining machines, farm combines… There’s no such thing as ‘clean’ energy, and there’s no such thing as ‘green’ energy. There isn’t an electricity-generation system in existence that doesn’t inflict major damage on the planet.

The problem is, we’re asking the wrong questions. The question shouldn’t be: ‘should I drive a gas-powered car or an electric car?’ The question should be: ‘should I drive a car at all?’ And the answer is – no. I watch the huge climate marches on TV and wonder: how many of the marchers have brand-new iPhones? How many have multiple big-screen TVs? How many buy the latest fashions every year? Do they understand that it’s individual behaviour, probably including their own, that’s driving climate change? If you want a chilling depiction of the impact of that behaviour, watch the movie ‘Freightened‘, which talks about international shipping. As you watch, keep in mind that shipping by sea is only one destructive element of human consumption – there are many more. Also keep in mind that the current magical thinking is that someday the 77% of the planet’s population currently living in the ‘third world’ will be sharing in all this wealth and buying at the same pace. Imagine the consequences if that were to actually happen.

As I’ve already pointed out, the environmentally destructive mines and plastics factories required to build gas automobiles are equally necessary for electric ones. In fact, many additional mines will be required to make the batteries that electric vehicles need. Those mines are currently excavated by fossil-fuel powered machines. Many are in distant, uninhabited areas where there is very little infrastructure. Are they planning to build massive solar arrays, or wind farms in the wilderness of northern Canada just to power the electric mining machines for a single mine? Once built, EV batteries have a fairly short lifespan, and have to be recycled (or tossed out), and replaced by new ones. The same goes for the components of so-called ‘green’ power generation. Many apologists, including many environmentalists, expect you to believe that all this green infrastructure will somehow fall from the sky – that no destruction of the planet is required to produce it. This is obviously hogwash.

In fact, if we made the changes to our lifestyles that I suggest above, it’s possible that we could continue to use fossil fuels – that the drastically smaller CO2 footprint could be safely absorbed by the earth’s ecosystem. That is pretty much what happened up until recently. The SCALE of use is more important than the technology used.

Notice that virtually none of the activities I’ve outlined above involve the government. I haven’t screamed for the government to act, or accused them of sitting on their hands. That’s because, not only are governments unwilling to do anything about the current crisis (though that’s true), they are unable to do anything about it. As long as our economic system is based on constant growth, and the public continue to behave like the shopping automatons they’ve been programmed to be, the environment will continue to deteriorate. Affluent nations are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s ecological problems. A large fraction of their populations would have to adopt the measures above in order to save the planet. If they choose not to, nothing any government does will help.

Where the government can play a role is in defining what the new society will look like. The rape of this planet is completely ingrained into our economy.  Adopting the policies I’m suggesting would be catastrophic for our current financial system. We’ll need a new paradigm if we are to achieve any kind of soft landing. Government (and economists, and many others) will have to come up with a way of life that doesn’t depend on constant growth. I honestly believe that this can be done, but it will be a herculean task. Saving the planet will not be easy.

So, do I expect everybody that reads this to run out and make the changes I’m suggesting? In a word, no. I have no expectation that it will ever happen. And that’s too bad, because it’s absolutely necessary, and not doing it will have catastrophic consequences. As the survivors of the coming catastrophe huddle in the burnt out, smoking slag heap that was once an Earthly paradise, maybe they’ll reconsider whether they needed that second jet-ski, or that extra 100 pairs of shoes. Maybe they’ll question whether the Hummer they used to drive, or the big-screen TV in the bathroom, were really necessary, and whether they really needed to buy a new iPhone every year. But other than writing this essay, and trying to practice this lifestyle myself, there’s not a lot I can do.

So, do you really want to save the planet? I believe it can be done. If you actually care about it, and about a future for your children, don’t just march around with a placard. Look at your own lifestyle, then get going. Time is of the essence.

Remember, you heard it here.