It can seem in the busy, busy life of the Noughties, that environmentalism is just another sticking pin in the race-track of our daily schedules, tripping us up as we race around the A4 page of a timetable; expressing dismayed, disapproving looks over the shoulders of loved ones as we give them new, shiny and entirely non-biodegradable birthday gifts that we had to buy in a mad rush; or poking its exasperated head out from behind the photocopier/printer when we accidentally, irretrievably send a 150-page document to print. But let's not be negative. "Environmentalism", whether you see it as a trendy new fad, an annoying phase that will pass, or (more positively) a new, more conscious way of living that has far more advantages than disadvantages; or (if you're not a hedonist) an essential, logical step towards our long-term survival, is here to stay. Non-conscious living (fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your position) must become a thing of the past. Becoming aware of the consequences of our actions is now essential, something that our largely secular society has lost the ability to do. Conscious living will not be a dramatic change or new concept to those billions around the world adhering to the major monotheistic faiths of Buddhism, Christianity or Islam (or even the relatively minor, smaller ones), but to do a good thing by one's neighbour, and/or participate in attempts to preserve/replenish the environment does not necessarily require conversion and/or salvation. Here are some more pedestrian, smaller and achievable 'sticking pins' that can be achieved around the household:

Composting: If you aren't already, put all your fruit and vegetable scraps in a composting bin (for apartments and households; or a composting heap for bigger places) and stick the resulting soil on your pot-plants/gardens (even public ones). Can reduce your waste output to council bins by up to 25%, not to mention give you great plants.

Organic gardening: Research shows that industrial fruit and vegetable farming accounts for up to 25 percent of carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Growing your own, while not new, can take this carbon out of the atmosphere, especially if grown organically. In an era of rising inflation, it could also save you precious pennies!. If you rent a CBD apartment that is windowless and balcony-less, community gardens can be great to join - or start. If you live in house in surburban residential zones, converting as much of your land to productive as opposed to ornamental gardens (unless indigenous/native) can be useful. While this takes time (my husband and I are still deciding what will grow where, given the orientation and therefore sun exposure of differing parts of the front and back yards), and especially as most suburban soil plots require years of rejuvenation, organic fertilisation and strengthening (see ABC gardener Jerry Coleby-Williams website www.bellis.info for the best example on how to do this), finding your local community/farmer's markets can keep you stocked with locally grown, fresh and even organic fruit and vegetables.

Dairy and meat: Reduce/substitute your meat and milk intake. Cows take more water, grain and non-renewable resources to maintain than any other livestock on earth, and then produce huge amounts of environmentally unfriendly methane gas from their derrieres. Try kangaroo (salty), crocodile (great steak flavour and texture) or rabbit meats; and try soy, rice or goat's milk. You can even make a 'cream' for cakes from soy, canola oil, eggs and sugar whipped together. Non-cow cheeses and yoghurts have a long way to come as yet, but if you can reduce your overall intake then the odd cheddar block or Ski yoghurt won't be such an issue!.

Walk/Cycle/Public Transport: We've all heard about this. The biggest excuse I hear amongst friends about not taking the car is inconvenience, when boiled down. And a lack of autonomy. Catching public transport, or carpooling, does require adherence to somebody else's timetable, and along with walking/cycling can require a bit more preparation. But, if you haven't bought a hybrid car, and you do have to travel regularly, these are the best options to reducing carbon emissions from transport. Even better, move to a place that is well-serviced by buses, trams and trains - our Nissan Maxima, whilst not hybrid (we're waiting for emerging technology to become more efficient, if not cheaper) would probably only travel up to 10km a week because of our proximity to public transport and walkways to the usual required amenities of shops and schools (plus pushing a 6 month old baby in a pram, as well as carrying several heavy bags of groceries, can be a bit tricky over the 2km return journey). 

Don't buy plastic: We've all heard about the stranglehold of plastic bags/bottles/flotsam immortalising themselves in our landfills and oceans and killing our wildlife. There's a plastic patch larger than the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Take our addiction to buying bottled water - if every single one of the bottles we've drunk from and then thrown away were to come back to haunt us, they would fill several houses. Shopping bags - we all know not to use them. But are the synthetic "green bags" you can purchase for use instead any better?? Being made of a tough synthetic fabric, course not!!... Plastic is not just confined to packaging (lunch boxes, cling wrap, lolly packets etc), juice and water bottles, shopping bags, credit cards or toys. It is EVERYWHERE. Cars, building materials, house accessories (kitchens, bathrooms, lights, toilets), planes, furniture, clothing. Take your harmless jumper bought from most retailers to stave off the winter chill - most likely made from 100% acrylic = plastic. Or your pantyhose made from nylon - plastic again. Or your pants/skirt made from a rayon/polyester blend - that's right, plastic all over. Mattresses? Unless you buy futons, most mattresses are polyester foam, plastic springs and cotton/polyester covering - they will live almost forever in the dump when you next decide to get a new bed and toss the old one out. Even when you buy materials made from all natural materials, such as cotton, silk, linen, wool, hemp, wood or steel; you have to be careful that they have been organically grown (cotton and wool) and that no human rights abuses have occured in its production (cotton, silk). Or that it has emitted thousands of tonnes in carbon emissions just to reach your local shops (check for made in Australia, not made in China/Egypt/India/UK/USA). Then of course you want to make sure that in its processing with dyes, dye mordants (fixers) and flame retardents that the residual chemicals aren't going to harm the environment - or you, of course!. And remember, that's just with the natural materials. Research is only just starting to show that the chemicals used to make most domestically used plastics leach into the human body. There's a lady in the US who is trying to live without plastic and is blogging about it - check out lifelessplastic.blogspot.com

Buy local: Let's take coffee and tea in Brisbane. My husband, son and I just spent a weekend in Clunes and 'discovered' Byron Bay Coffee - Rosebank, Zentveld's, Ewingsdale, Eltham Valley. Locally and mostly organically grown, with a great flavour, and only just 'down the way'. Who needs all those international brands with dodgy human rights records on their coffee plantations, especially as the heavily dose the trees in artifical fertilisers and pesticides? And I've drunk Madura Tea, from Murwillumbah (near Byron) for 12 years - Australian made and owned, though they do also supplement their tea with imported leaves sometimes, unfortunately. But they seem the best local option on the market.

Be waste wise: Ultimately, this involves asking yourself as you reach out to buy something - do I really need it? It's only in the last 100 years that we have stopped trying to find, make, grow or otherwise do without the things that we spend a large proportion of our time purchasing, consuming, sorting and storing before throwing away. Re-using and recycling have attempted to counter our consumption addiction but at the end of the day, these also cost energy/produce waste. Better to consume far less, and THEN re-use and recycle.

This summary is a very brief overview of one person's suburban attempt to make life simpler, as well as preserve the earth. But as you can see, they can involve some large lifestyle, if not ideological changes only at first. But living consciously, if preferable to wholesale religious conversion, is living simply as well.

Imagination seems a lost art in our age of information technology, so let’s take a few minutes to indulge ourselves. Imagine if the whole world was blind. Just for a second.

Imagine by closing your eyes, lifting your face, and taking a deep breath. What can you see? Nothing at all. After a while, what can you hear? All of a sudden, lots of things. The hummm of the computer, the birds, the quiet whirr of the fridge, the ticking clock, distant traffic/people. What can you smell? The coffee you’re drinking, the slightly bitter odour of garlic from dinner the night before, the grass outside. Your thoughts become so prominent they might echo. The longer you keep your eyes closed, a fear, or mild anxiety may unfold, as, without eyesight, the world is new again.

Now imagine if all of us – friends, family, strangers – they couldn’t see either. There’s a knock at the door – you get up – eyes still unseeing – and feel your way down the stairs to the front door (if such buildings were ever built in a blind world), feeling the smooth surface of the banister for the first time, the length of footfall between stairs, and open the door, fumbling. You hear your friend “Hello!.” and you judge who they are and how far away they are by their voice, perhaps you feel a slight draught from their breath, or from erratic arm movements, as they try to find the open door. You extend your arm until both your hands meet by accident. You embrace in greeting, each of you finding out what the other is wearing from the feel of the clothes. Your friend comments on the weather because they’ve felt the course woven wool of your jumper and expresses agreement on the cold. You, feeling the thin t-shirt on your friend, remark that they must be immune, but neither of you can see whether the jumper or t-shirt is old or new, black or white, clean or dirty, etc etc.

It’s now not hard to imagine the small talk, the conversations, the judgments that are foregone in an unseeing world. There’s no talk about a bed hair, a good/bad hair do, or any hair at all, because you can’t see your own, or another’s hair. There are obviously no mirrors to check or groom oneself in front of. Clothes become purely information signals about the weather (sunny? drizzly?) or where you’ve been (outside in the snow, inside next to the fire, lying on grass), based on their feel, texture and smell. There’s no talk on whether it’s Prada, Addidas or Billabong because nobody can tell from looking, nobody can see the mismatch of colours and nobody can see the brand label sticking out from the collar, giving away its authentic/imitation status. It’s the same with makeup, jewellery, shoes, cars, pets, takeaway coffee cups, or anything else you might visit upon a friend. Nobody can see, and while we’re imagining that the whole world is blind, let’s assume living is community based anyway, so you all live within walking distance of each other, any clothes are handmade locally, and gym memberships are non-existent. Fitness is gained from hunting and gathering for food, and weight is a purely sensory affair. Are your family members/friends cuddly or bony? Are they heavy to carry, or light on embrace? Do they need a lot of material to keep warm, because of their large structure, or smaller cuts of the same cloth? Certainly there are no thoughts about a person’s thinness or fatness, beauty or ugliness, or whether they’re sexy or unsexy, corporate or sporty, athletic or slovenly. Anorexia or obesity may only occur as secondary symptoms of another illness, and even then you would have to ask/pinch another to know they were even suffering from it. There are no thoughts on whether anybody’s subscribing to a culture/sub-culture, whether they belong to a group (the airforce; King’s Beach surfers as opposed to Bondi Beach lifesavers; or the local knitting group) because there’s no point wearing the ‘uniforms’ that denote these things if people can’t see.

There’d be no Westfield shopping malls for people to shop for clothes, jewellery, accessories; no Bunnings to accessorise house and garden. Indeed, in a world where people weren’t able to see, there perhaps wouldn’t be notions of property and possession; money, commodities, financial markets; let alone house, garden, roads, towns, cities, and all the associated paraphernalia. Oil would be a pesky substance one may never encounter – there’d be no cars in a blind world, therefore no need for petrol, gasoline, petrochemicals and thus plastics – besides which, could the chemical science required to develop synthetic materials, or any science for that matter, really occur in an unseeing world?

There’d be no wars based on race, creed or religion; as apart from the fact that a person would be unable to be identified (and perhaps racially discriminated) by their looks, it would be very difficult to start a war with an enemy you could only tangibly sense with your ears, nose, hands and tastebuds. State sovereignty would be rather pointless in a world without maps and therefore borders; and due to the lack of intercontinental travel, the world really would seem flat, and confined to the area safest from the elements/predators. There’d be no race to the moon, espionage networks, Cold War, nuclear arms race, transnational corporations, visual (if any) technology, stars, sun, moon, day, night.

Before we get too carried away with an idea of a blind utopia/dystopia, however, it should be stated that, the human condition being what it is, and evolution having been what it has been, biologists would probably argue that we would have learnt to physically overcome our lack of eyesight anyway and control, possess and exploit our physical environment, rather than adapt to it (as we have done); and sociologists would probably argue that, having done this, we would still seek to form groups, attract one another in non-visual ways, conquer, dominate, find other forms of discrimination to inflict and wars to fight. The High-Pitched Shriekers against the Gravelly-Toned Mumblers, perhaps.

The ego, it seems, affects all the senses. At least we have a choice - we can close our eyes, if not our minds, easily enough – if only to big bums…

(This blog, written ages ago and awaiting its very non-blind author’s editing, is dedicated to Kylie Johnson nee Corlett, a friend who has always turned a blind eye to peoples faults, flaws, and immaterial appearances, and who loves with open arms and heart and eyes closed in joy. Happy 31^st birthday KC. Xo)

True sustainability

Part i. Introduction - Sustaining the earth

“sustain… v.t. bear weight of or support, esp. for a long period; endure, stand; undergo or suffer (defeat, injury, loss, etc.);…uphold; substantiate or corroborate; keep up (effort etc).” The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 1986, Oxford University Press.

It has been proven that the current global warming and climate change crisis is as a result of our excess consumption as a human race, which has produced excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and other warming gases in the atmosphere – excess consumption of petrol and petroleum or plastic products, of virgin rainforests, of meat and dairy foods, and the requisite energy and water such consumption costs. In addition, the waste from this consumption is also adding to the climate change crisis – as our landfills and sewers bloat and grow, they too release gases and pollutants that require more energy to contain and treat – but more often than not they are released into the atmosphere or environment.

All of this has resulted in a call for more “sustainable living”, or, living in a way that ensures the Earth’s long-term survival, and therefore our and our children’s health, well-being and quality of life.

The time of enduring change, of supporting the Earth’s natural processes, of adapting to our environments as opposed to trying to control them has come.

As has often been written (if not practiced) before, truly sustainable living involves more than just reactive measures to external prompts. It involves more than limiting showers to 4 minutes because the local or state governments have set water restriction guidelines due to an inconvenient drought; it involves more than reducing electricity usage (especially air conditioners!.) because it may seem de rigueur for the time being; it involves more than cycling to work, or catching public transport because the price of petrol is unpalatable (as an aside, just in case you hadn’t caught on, it also means more than voting for whichever political party is going to guarantee low petrol prices).

Living sustainably involves proactively seeking to reduce your individual consumption and resultant non-degradable waste to the point where you can fulfil all your personal and household requirements without it (literally) “costing the earth”. It means foreseeing the consequences of one’s actions, however minor, and seeking to reduce the impact on other people, or the environment at large.

In order for sustainable living to become a reality, the differences between “want” and “need” in individual consumption; and between “re-usable/recyclable/degradable/non-degradable waste” in individual waste management need to be asked  and addressed at a deeply personal level.

The historical and current lack of sustainable practices in our lives, and the fact that it affects every dimension of our daily lives, explains the difficulty in reducing global warming and stopping climate change – sustainability may involve (deeply) uncomfortable self-assessment, and even more uncomfortable adjustment to new ways of thinking and acting.

However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that such change, however painful, is necessary in order for our (not to mention future generations) survival.

To come in this series:

ii. Material addiction and the consumption transaction

iii. The culture of waste

iv. Ethos and accountability

v. Pro-activity & conclusion