4.6 Reasons Why
UncategorizedWhen someone has information that they want to impart on others, they make a decision about how to present it to their audience. For example, a teacher will often choose a simple yet engaging presentation or activity in the hopes of making a complicated subject more accessible to their students. My professor of Cultural Anthropology during my Sophomore year did just that. She introduced us to a website called www.footprintcalculator.org. If you are not familiar with this website, I would highly recommend checking it out. It is basically an online database that surveys the user on their lifestyle and habits that affect carbon emissions and other resource utilization, and then based on the user’s answers, the website tells them two related numbers. First, there is the “Personal Earth Overshoot Day,” which is the date of the year when Earth’s resources would be completely depleted if every human lived like the user does. Second, the user is told how many Earths would be needed to sustain all humans living the user’s lifestyle.
The first time I did the survey, they did not have the overshoot number, (that must be a new feature since last time I visited the site) but they did have the amount of Earths needed, and mine was a whopping 4.6. I felt a myriad of emotions when I saw that number, the most prominent being surprise, guilt, and shame, ambition, and curiosity. I wanted to see which parts of my lifestyle were contributing the most to this 4.6 number, so I decided to retake the quiz and toggle my answers to see which categories would influence my results the most. I tried seeing what it would look like if I took public transportation more often, or lived in a house without electricity and running water, or if I got all of my food from the farmers market, but the biggest surprise happened when I put my beef, lamb and pork consumption from “often” to “never.” My number became 3.6. I had saved a whole Earth simply by eliminating red meat from my hypothetical diet. 3.6 is by no means a sustainable number, but it was much better than where I had started.
I think my shame and guilt stemmed from knowing that we do only have ONE Earth, not 4.6, and that we were seriously stretching its resources, so that means in order for me to live the lifestyle I was living, others were living one devoid of all the luxuries I enjoy. I know there are people who probably live a lifestyle eliciting an Earth number much higher than mine, and I know that many of them are also U.S.-Americans. I actually didn’t realize how built-in to U.S.-American society climate apathy is until I lived in Germany for a while. We have A/C on all the time instead of opening windows, and we do not cautiously separate all of our trash, and public transportation here is a joke. I think I saw one pick-up truck the whole time I was in Europe, whereas here the Ford F-150 could be our national mascot.
What I ultimately took away from this experience was that I was not living sustainably, and while some things (like my house or the way I could get to work) couldn’t easily change, I could stop eating pork. I had never really liked eating animal products anyway. Each time I did, I would feel so bad that I would dissociate completely and pretend the chicken I was eating had been an evil chicken who tried to kill all the other chickens and so I was helping by eating him. I liked bacon and ham alright, but not enough knowing I could be saving massive resources. So three years ago I stopped eating pork. Six months later, I stopped eating beef, lamb, or any type of red meat.
The lifestyle change hasn’t been super easy, but it hasn’t been very difficult either. I was happy that I did it in phases over time, instead of all at once, because it has been easier for me to maintain and not get overwhelmed. My changes are not through, but I feel proud that I am moving in the right direction rather than deciding not to care and continuing on wasting my 4.6 Earths. This experience made me feel inspired and hopeful for a while. I felt like if all of us individuals decided to work together, we could really do this! We could save the world! But then further education made me realize that even if a lot of individuals carpooled more and were careful about leaving the lights on, that would never offset how unregulated corporations would act.I believe this is where the media needs to come in. In the United States, my experience with the media covering the climate change topic has been very disappointing. Usually, the mass media will do one of two extremes here: they will ignore it/ outright deny it (either out of a political/ corporate agenda or false balance between “scientific” viewpoints), or they will fear-monger and resort to alarmism Dooms-day talk in order to keep scared people glued to their TV’s and help their ratings. The result is most often “denial, paralysis, or apathy rather than motivating individuals to action” (Dilling, 22). Instead, the U.S. media should be reporting substantiated data and claims, as well as helping to mobilize people to vote for governmental regulation, instead of trying to blame and shame the individual citizens. This is the way to move forward, and it needs to be happening on a global scale.
Sources:
- www.footprintcalculator.org
- Lisa Dilling; Susanne C. Moser (2007). “Introduction”. Creating a climate for change: communicating climate change and facilitating social change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–27. ISBN 978-0-521-86923-2.