Author’s Note: One of the bench marks of realizing how horrible a relationship was, is knowing how wonderful the right one can be. So, I want to point out my current relationship is better than I ever thought one could be, and it helps clarify how awful and unnecessary many of the other things I experienced were.
Realizing I Don’t Have to Prove I’m Right
When you know you’re right about a subject, your fast draw reaction is to demonstrate why your position is correct. If you could just explain yourself, it would be impossible for others to not embrace your conclusions. But…
I’m sure you’ve seen the state of our Ununited States, or should I just say the States. Thinking you can convince someone of something which, if they were to admit it was true, would make them look foolish, wrong, or damage their Cultural World View, is between impossible and difficult, or could become a yearlong ordeal. If you think it is a simple matter, you haven’t argued with many people and are disregarding the obvious reality.
Instead, I learned I don’t have to prove I’m right. Doing so is an agonizing waste of time. My job isn’t to teach the world. If something is next to impossible, I have better things to do. I know the truth and so do the people I want to spend time with. You may think the irrational person could gloat or you should prove yourself, but if it’s just wasted time and words, the best stance is silence and avoidance. Soon you will be free.
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2.How Important is it to Maintain Your Healthy Friendships
I’m sure you’ve heard one of the first things toxic people do it try to separate their mate from their support network. Family and friends will be constantly insulted and put down. No matter what happens, if you don’t respect the person who’s speaking the words, you don’t have to respect what they say.
I’ve had some of my friendships for over 40 years, and I’ve never dated anyone for much over a decade. Unless you have found your real lover, relationships come and go. Friendship and family usually last a lifetime while more often than not, relationships eventually fade. Stay true to your friends, the dysfunctional mate wants them to abandon you, because in a tight spot, good friends always have your back and will help you get back onto your feet.
3. There Are Times You Have to Work Harder
If the house is a mess, you don’t like it that way, but you know the other person is doing far less than their share of cleaning, you must let it go. Just because they are a dysfunctional loser, you aren’t required to join them. If they won’t get off their ass unless you’re done cooking them dinner it doesn’t mean you have to live in squalor.
One of the first things you should do when you find yourself locked within a horrid relationship, is no longer think of yourself as a couple. Change your attitude, your other is now just a shitty roommate you can’t get rid of yet. Just because they are a lazy waste of space, doesn’t mean you must live with dirty dishes and cluttered rooms. Remember, if you were living by yourself, you’d have to do all the work. Just think of your life as you are already living by yourself and required to do everything and just do it. No need for you to live like a loser too.
Many rebel against such notions thinking it’s not fair or if you do everything the partner will just dig in and do less. Don’t look at it like that. Instead know you are being strong, they will have less to try to bitch about, and you are just practicing for when you are finally free.
4. Life is Almost Never Fair
I’d like to say life is never fair, but once in a while it comes up even, like if you and three buddies all pitch in ten bucks for some pizza, but when was the last time that happened? Thinking life should be fair will just slow you down and you’ll make yourself depressed. Someone always does more and usually that someone ends up being you. If it isn’t, you might be the villain in this article.
Once you understand you’ll never even the scales, it gives you the freedom to do whatever you like. Your life is meant to be lived by you and you are the yardstick used to measure your self worth. Don’t worry if you are doing too much, if you’re doing things which make your life better, do more. Soon you’ll drop the slop, and everything you’ve done to improve your life will elevate you and empower your new beginning.
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5. Letting Lies and Insults Go
Why should you care about what an illogical, ignorant, or lying person says? This goes back a bit to number one on this list but if you don’t respect how a person is living or what they are saying, you certainly don’t have to acknowledge when they are trying to pick a fight or manipulate you.
This can dip into gaslighting and other forms of control. Ignore the bait and don’t validate them with an argument for there is little to gain arguing with someone with mental illness.
They want a reaction out of you. Even a negative one shows you have a passion for the relationship. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Better to just nod your head and walk away. The best reaction is often no reaction. What a toxic person says doesn’t matter and it will matter less as soon as you escape and never have to hear their imaginary nonsense again.
6. Keep Your Possessions Separate
Sure, maybe legally you may each own all your things together, but there are things which you know are yours and with community items like frying pans and end tables you can always buy better versions later. If you are with a selfish toxic mate, you are probably going to lose most of your things but don’t be bitter. You’ll be free and it will be worth it.
Depending on how bad things are getting and how much capital is on hand, I would suggest renting a small storage unit. Each day on your way to run all the errands, while your partner binge watches some trashy series, drop a box or two of your things off at the unit.
Do this because…
The crappy partner can’t break them in a fit.
They can’t try to steal your things later.
You aren’t arguing over what is whose in the middle of a caustic break up
Moving into a new place is so much easier. Half your things are already packed.
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7. You Need to Prepare an Escape Plan
This is often difficult. Your name may be on a lease, or if you own your home, ouch. Also, there could be children involved. Still not living in the same place isn’t the same thing as not living up to your obligations. You could still pay your rent and, if allowed, care for your children. Still, in these days where raising your voice counts as domestic violence (Its the law. Look it up.) you need to set up a safe place to escape to. If you are with an irrational person for whom you are providing, they aren’t going to want you to leave and will do everything in their power to make you stay.
Standing around in your house packing while they scream at you or looking up rentals while they hover over you isn’t going to work. Driving around with a car packed full of your things with no plan isn’t much better. Friends can help but they’ll be ten times happier to know your needs in advance. Don’t just show up and ask to crash on their sofa for a month. In most cases I would recommend you have a place to go before you break up and if you are smart enough you might already have a sofa of your own there.
I’ve written about homelessness before, but mostly in regard to myself. People without traditional housing have been in the news more lately. If you don’t like it, too bad, you had better get used to it because the amount of homelessness in our country and worldwide is just going to be increasing as the woes of our troubled environment closes around our species like a industrial vise.
The lack of affordable housing and the number of people who are forced to sleep without adequate shelter is a truly terrifying situation. Perhaps in the past people could just live off the land and claim an unoccupied area for themselves, but for the most part those days are long gone. If there are areas where this is still possible, they are usually regions where no one wishes to live, and surviving is hard like the individuals living out of vehicles in the deserts north of Quartzsite Arizona and on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert in California. Otherwise, some people are just tossing up tents and hoping for the best, while others don’t have such basic supplies.
Books on this issue could fill bookshelves but I wish to, as usual, take this in a different direction than people usually go. Dipping for a moment into the bipolar nature of our current style of politics in this country lets take an overview of how each side regards the homeless. The left tends to see this as a horror which needs solving but has a hard time doing so. The Right tends to see the larger amounts of homeless in the “Blue States” as an indicator of the Left’s failure to provide for their own, while chasing the homeless from the Red States into the Blue States which just stretches the resources of those trying to find a solution for their own issues.
The Homeless as Heroes:
Thinking of people without stable housing as heroes might seem strange to some people. Of course, some of their day to day actions might appear to be heroic efforts compared to those of us who drive by them in our airconditioned/heated cars. When was the last time you walked ten miles to recycle cans in 110 degrees? Could you hump everything you own from one place to another all day just to try to bed down in a world of danger where no one wants you?
However, this isn’t the type of heroics I seek to discuss here. Again, I’d like to break down some of our modern ideologies down party lines. There are certainly many issues the Liberals and Conservatives endorse. I’m going to focus on one of the biggest platforms/beliefs systems for both sides of the fence and then prove to you how no one does better at them than the majority of our homeless.
Are you ready? It might be time to buckle in and get ready to throw your hypocrite hat into the nearest oil drum fire.
Why Liberals Should Respect and Admire the People Surviving Without Housing
There is no population more environmentally healthy than the Homeless:
I’ve touched on this before. I’ve also outlined the data within the first several WildernessPunk articles which came out in the beginning of 2019. But to quickly summarize, there are almost no real environmentalists in the United States. The average person in the US has a Negative Environmental Impact about 7 times higher than the average individual in India. Most of us use ten or twenty times the resources and create ten to twenty times over the amount of pollution the United Nations recommend each of us use yearly.
It doesn’t matter if you recycle like a madman, bike to work, or become a vegan, I hate to say it, but if you are reading this, you’re an environmental criminal. Yes, we should do everything we can to take the edge off and try to live more simply, but yeah, almost no one in the USA is an environmentalist with the exception of the homeless.
A short list of things most people without housing do not participate in:
Driving
Using Utilities
Huge Amounts of Water Use
Streaming
Consumerism
Online Consumerism
Eating Exotic Foods
A Short List of Environmental Practices Many People Without Housing Engage In:
Recycle and Reusing Discarded Items Bound for the Landfill
Consuming Food which would have Gone to Waste
Utilize Less Desirable Living Spaces
Caring for Previously Unwanted Animals
So if concerns over Climate Change and protecting the environment are some of the most important issues we face, please realize all the homeless you see are doing twenty times a better job at protecting the Earth than anyone you know.
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Why Conservatives Should Respect and Admire the People Surviving Without Housing
For this to work I’m going to have to make an assumption, but since the assumptions is predominantly true, I’m going to make it and if you’re a Conservative and it doesn’t apply to you, I apologize in advance.
What I am proposing is, in the eyes of the New Testament, the homeless are being better Christians than you. Some of them more than others, but let’s face the facts as the Christian holy book lays them out.
Christian Hierarchy of Holiness:
God
Jesus
The Profits/Saints
Priests
Christian Families
This religion elevated individuals breaking away from the idea of the family and wandering alone. Having time to think on your own in quiet contemplation was considered far more holy and closer to God than being part of a family. Priests are considered more devote and prove it by forgoing romantic relationships and family. Jesus himself is quoted saying, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John ii 4) Avoiding sex is considered closer to the divine and lonely people living in the street are usually loners and don’t start families.
Of course, there are many families who endure homelessness together, but by Christian standards they would also be more holy. Everyone is guilty of consumerism, gluttony, and not giving what they could except those with nothing left to give. Score one more for the unhoused.
Lastly, many experts in the subject put the percentage of homeless individuals suffering from Mental Illness at 25% those others claim it is closer to 50%. In either case illnesses like schizophrenia will force people onto the streets if they don’t have outside support. One of the most common systems of schizophrenia is hearing voices. These voices often instruct a person on what is right and how they should be living a better life.
So Christains I would ask you this, what is more holy than an individual who has forgone his property, is wondering alone through the deserts, and being inspired by mysterious voices?
Make of this what you will but just remember the next time you walk by an individual living out there in the sun, whether you are a Liberal or a Conservative this guy is rocking out your belief system twenty times better than you.
I’ll admit it. WildernessPunk has been a bit glum of late. I could go into why being gloomy and doomy is quite appropriate for our current slice of the moment, but I’ll save such things for a different time. Instead, I’d like to look back on WildernessPunk. In a few days it will be the 6th anniversary of WildernessPunk, and since I might, very appropriately, be celebrating off the grid on that actual day, I feel it would be okay to jump the gun a little bit and talk about WildernessPunk now.
WildernessPunk began on August 1st 2016. The first posts were written in the forests and deserts of the west and at times in hotel rooms. I was homeless, living out of a backpack, with just my bicycle and borrowed laptop to keep me company. My life was a wild ride of freedom and wonder mixed with challenges, sadness, and anger.
Most of us can look back at our former selves and often cringe at the horrible situations we allowed ourselves to get into. At that time my life had exploded as I had finally broken the hold a narcissistic leech had on my life. Unfortunately, this newfound freedom came at the cost of not seeing my young boys, losing my employment, my ride, and everything else I owned. I had managed to grab my backpack, but little else.
WildernessPunk at that time had been part journal, part philosophy, and obviously fueled in some degree by anger. I also had the goal of somehow raising enough cash and trade through creative internet use to fund living in the woods. It was an exciting time and part of me still misses the adventure. Although sleeping in a torn-up tent in the woods, with two rat chewed blankets when the temperature is below freezing might not be as fun as it sounds.
Flash forward a while, after embracing a bit of Lokiness, I managed to get most of my things back, achieved a divorce, and relocated to Tucson. It didn’t take long for my life to improve. I reconnected with my lost love, jump started my RPG games, and began the slow and dangerous journey toward seeing my boys again.
As my life changed, I knew I needed to change WildernessPunk too. There is a big difference between riding my bike 10 miles to a hidden encampment and sleeping next to the most wonderful woman I have ever met.
So WildernessPunk became less of a journal focusing on my attempt to live between the worlds of technology and wilderness. It changed its focus to how one could remain true to these ideals and goals while living in an urban setting. My hope was not to shame or depress people, but instead to help give them the tools to create a lifestyle which would help lower their Negative Environmental Impact.
I also sought to dig into the real facts which involved mankind’s interaction with its environment. I wished to help dispel falsehoods and shine the light on things which may have escaped our notice.
Then two things happened.
After years of enduring caustic venom, having police called on me when I had committed no crime, and driving 1000 miles a weekend, I managed to get full custody of my boys.
Covid hit the world.
While other writers were finishing novels and starting new projects, my writing slowed down as I took up home schooling and caring for my kids 24/7 during lockdown.
Perhaps another change came over me as well. I was profoundly in love and living the best years of my life. Patton Oswald said something similar too, “It is hard to be grumpy when the butterflies of happiness are dancing through your heart.”
While I was living my own ups and downs during this time, and it was mostly ups, my country and much of the world was getting kicked square in the nuts.
45 and the religious right are doing everything they could to remove human rights, promote racism, and increase poverty. But the USA wasn’t the only country embracing totalitarianism and fascist beliefs. Like scared children who are just smart enough to foresee their upcoming grim future, some people need Big Brother to tell them what to do. Whether it is a Sky Daddy or a cult leader, there are humans who, in their heart of hearts, want someone to tell them what they should be doing.
And then they want to tell you what to do and how to live.
We need to face it, some people are worried about the health of our planet and issues like world poverty, overpopulation, and extinction, while others are more interested in censoring books, banning lifestyles different from their own, and promoting the validity of ancient myths. This is a strange dichotomy to put it mildly. I might observe it is more than a bit odd that the group which believes they will live eternally is more concerned with the here and now, while the group which thinks their lights will one day extinguish are trying to protect the Earth’s tomorrows.
So what should we be doing? What should our attitudes be in 2022?
Let’s dive into the painfully obvious. We’ll call them the Fantastic Five.
Organized religions are doing more harm than good and need to be weakened and dismantled at every opportunity.
You would have burned me alive for being an atheist a few centuries ago, so fuck you, your time has come.
We need to do everything in our power to protect the 12% of the natural environment which is left on the globe.
Humans have grabbed up 88% of the Earth. That’s enough for one species. We need to have a chance for there to still be some biodiversity left before the fossil fuels wells run dry and we won’t have the power to destroy everything with the ease we have now.
The number one priority in every country should be to have their largest line item be renewable energy.
We fought wars in the Middle East for over a decade. We wasted enough money blowing people up to put solar panels on every building in the USA. We would have never needed a drop of Middle Eastern oil ever again and maybe those fascist countries would have to rethink their crimes against their own people when their purses went dry. Cut the military budget by 5% a year and use this money for renewable energy research. I think Captain Obvious just called and wants to talk to the President.
We need to rethink what is virtuous
Is the mother driving her kid to a dozen activities a week a great mom or a selfish environmental criminal? Does raking your lawn make you a responsible neighbor or are your destroying the natural habitat for animals, while doing your part to waste resources, and contribute to global warming? Are you into nature because your drove 120 miles on Sunday to take a great hike or are you 100 times worse to the environment than the guy who played video games on his television?
Remember it isn’t the other guy. Every choice we make either helps, hurts, or really freaking hurts this world.
No one in the USA is really an environmentalist except the homeless. Consume less. Quit buying crap, and focus your capital on education and projects which help you save money and the environment at the same time.
Do you agree? Do you think I’m crazy? Perhaps you believe I’m overreacting. But as the gas prices rise, you’ll have a choice, you can either go broke trying to live in the paradigm of the past or you can create your own.
Alright, I know, I’ve gotten a little heavy with my last few WildernessPunk articles. The Last War, I mean, ouch. So instead of dragging some new atrocity into the light, I’m taking a more positive proactive view of our modern cultures and the pastimes many of us enjoy. Most likely we all don’t occupy ourselves with the same activities. Some people do a wide variety of things while others possess a narrower focus.
I would also mention some activities bleed together and many involve actions which could cause an increased pollution trail; such as playing softball, but then BBQ after the game, or grabbing a hotdog at a concert. Also, things like ‘taking a vacation’ are too vague and possess too much variety to address as a topic. I’m not going to dive into these side pocket issues but instead shine my spotlight on…
Common Leisure Activities and their Environmental Impacts:
If I didn’t mention your leisure activity please forgive, but with the data I’m about to outline below, I’m sure you could figure it out if you were so inclined.
As Blackrain79 says, “Let’s jump right in.”
Music Concerts
Like many things on this list, this activity usually involves some level of transportation to accomplish. Let’s say 10 miles with a medium car creates 7 pounds of carbon. Of course, the bands will need some juice to play these days and the concert hall has lights and plumbing, but if everyone is turning off their lights and lowering their environmental controls before they go to a concert, this could be a win for the environment. Enough people must go and be there for long enough for the energy they aren’t using at home to counter act the individual transportation cost and the carbon print of running the show.
Let’s assume you bring a date, drive a round trip of ten miles, and stay there for 4 hours. 3.5 pounds for driving – Your normal 2 pounds an hour x 4 (8) = in the positive 4.5 pounds let’s minus .5 pounds for some power running in your absence, and also to keep my head from spinning, so you are currently up 4 pounds of good karma. Assuming they have a small kitchen they are creating about 800 pounds of pollution while you are there.
Conclusion:
If you drive 10 miles, going to a concert is environmentally friendly as long as more than 200 people attend the concert. If you don’t drive this would be about cut in half so only 100 people would have to be there. If there is no restaurant on the premises, you could probably tack another 50% off the number of people needed.
Reading
Like everything else this could have a wide spread. If you buy a few used books at once and then share them, you are probably knocking it out of the park, while ordering the new 50 Shades of Whey in a huge box from Amazon makes you an environmental criminal. Also, are you burning a light while you read or plugging in a device to do so?
The Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden determined it takes reading 11880 pages on an ebook to counteract the environmental cost of making it compared to buying normal books. But keep in mind this is just for its construction, not its use.
The average reading device creates 7.5 pounds an hour.
The average book creates 7 pounds of pollution to build. (I’m going on the high end here, but some agencies put it as low as 1.3 pounds and several companies have moved to using mostly recycled products)
If it takes you 10 minutes to read 6 pages this means 36 pages an hour, so if the average book contains 360 pages, reading a book on a cell phone or a device creates about 75 pounds of pollution. So reading a page book is more than 10 times better for the environment than reading an ebook on your phone and this is only after you read 33 360 page books to counterbalance the environmental construction cost to make an ereader. (We’ll get to cell phones later and you won’t be happy)
For the last decade I’ve been hearing ebooks were better for the environment. I guess that myth was a few thousand percent wrong. Putting it another way books beat reading on your device or cell after the first hour of reading.
Shipping a book to your house. I had a hard time finding this amount online, so I’ll just drop this fact here. In 2020 Amazon created over 113 billion pounds of pollution transporting goods to people’s houses. 113,740,000,000 pounds.
Printed books could help damage biodiversity, however once the price is paid, we can get 10 hours of enjoyment. Compare this to 10 hours of watching television (.2 pounds an hour) and if you’re watching television by yourself you get 2 pounds of pollution. Yet nothing is easy. More than one person could be watching the television at the same time. But you could also resell the book or hand it down to someone. The same book could be read dozens of times and of course you could be buying it used.
Conclusion:
Forget about your ebook reader or doing anything extra on your cell. Try your absolute best to never order anything which needs to be shipped to you. However, if you buy 50% of your books used and try to have some of your books read more than once, your reading hobby is probably slightly more efficient than watching television.
Television
I saw several different stats presented online. Some were as low as .009 an hour and other rose much higher but I’m going to go with a television creating .2 pounds of carbon an hour. Of course, there was the basic construction of the television, but for most families this is watered down quickly by the sheer numbers of hours the TV is used. Also, in theory, the trail per hour could be divided by the number of people watching.
Conclusion:
When I was a child, watching the television all day was considered one the worst things you could let your kids do. This could still be the case in some respects but as far as having an impact on the environment television, compared to many activities is a big win for the environment.
Surfing the Web/Social Media
This obviously covers all computer use so it doesn’t matter if you are surfing the web or writing an article like this. Also, many people use social media and play games on their cells and not computers, but don’t worry, we’ll get to them later.
Using a computer creates about .4 pounds of pollution an hour or about double that of a television or one 18th as much as a cell phone. This number compared to an hour of driving (42 pounds) is barely noticeable. (Note that if you are streaming on your laptop or playing online video games this amount roughly doubles)
Conclusion:
While not a harmless as reading a recycled novel, or even watching television, computer use is pretty low on the environmental impact scale.
Role Playing Game
Alright, on to my favorite. Again, we need a half dozen books to get started, but keep in mind I used a book last weekend which I purchased in 1979 and have used every year since. At 7 pounds a pop, the 6 new books I bought for Dungeons and Dragons 5e had less of an impact than an hour of cell phone use and I’ll be using them for decades. I buy figures which are now made of plastic and paint them, so materials are being created and transported to my town for me to buy. Then again, I’m using as much plastic as the container of orange juice I hope might get recycled and these figures will last long enough for my grandkids to use.
There are common things like, yes we’ll have lights on and maybe heat controls going, but if I was home they’d be going anyway and, like a concert, if 5 people are using less at their homes because they are at my house, I’m going to allow this to cancel out my use of power for the event itself, if anything I’m saving on general electricity use by gathering people together.
Conclusion:
After some initial cost, which is quickly watered down over the decades and five households using the power of one, it is quite possible Role-Playing Games might be one of the few activities on this list which helps the environment, although in the end this will be balanced by how far the players drive to your event and if any of them carpool etc. (FYI I have carpooled to gaming sessions a lot lately, but from 2017-2021 I exclusively rode my bike to games held at one of my Game Master’s homes.)
3 players 30 miles of driving = 21 pounds of pollution. Maybe minus 1 for more people sharing the climate control and you do have a heavy price tag of 20 pounds per session which isn’t good. However, if you can assume adults would have probably driven the same amount on a Saturday anyway and are heading to my place instead, I think we can still consider RPG as an activity which can potentially lower the carbon cost for a small group.
Hiking
Hiking itself does little to hurt the world, but many nature lovers forget their enjoyment of nature can be a selfish act. With so many of us living in cities how far do you have to drive to get to a decent hike? I’ve heard many people bragging about how far they traveled to prove how much they groove on nature, but if you drive 80 miles on a Sunday to hike a remote trail, are you a nature lover or a nature destroyer? Would you be kinder to our world if you didn’t put your pleasures first?
Conclusion:
With driving creating .7 pounds of carbon per mile this can be a sticky issue. Perhaps multi-tasking like shopping on the way home or collecting wood for your fireplace during the hike can curb this waste some. If you really like to hike, it might be proper to pay for your hike by doing things such as not eating meat for a week after your hike or only watering your garden with gray water for seven days.
Camping
Similar to hiking, much of the real cost here is driving to the site. While camping we might eat more, consume more meat than usual, and pound a few extra brews, but it isn’t like we wouldn’t be eating at home. We could also be saving on our cooking carbon cost by using coals from a fire which we would have burned anyway. We’ve already determined driving creates .7 pounds of pollution per mile. However, if I’m lowering climate controls, using televisions, computers, water, and electricity while I’m camping (55 pounds a day, let’s suppose you bring this down to just 15 while you aren’t at home), this all but cancels out the carbon footprint of my drive if I only travel 115 miles per 3 days of camping.
Conclusion:
While not perfect, camping can be a lower impact activity. If a person is hunting or collecting firewood during the trip this could be lower still.
Hitting a Tavern
At the risk of sounding repetitive it is all about the driving here. If you turn off your lights and lower your climate controls, you are actually helping the environment as long as you walk or ride your bike to the place. The tavern will be using lights and climate controls, but they would have them on if you weren’t there anyway. (For similar data see Music Concerts)
Also note buying beer on tap is much better than buying bottles. Also drinking at a local brewery is much better than drinking beers shipped across the country. At home if you only buy cans and recycle them you are lowering the environmental cost by 20%.
The closer the better, and if you decide not to drink and drive this is actually a plus for environment. Sure, the beer has a carbon footprint while being created and transported, but if you were going to have a few beers at home anyway…
Gardening
This seems like an environmentalist’s slam dunk. You are getting exercise, recycling seeds, and food waste, and creating food with a much smaller carbon footprint. Still seeds are produced, processed, and shipped. Are you using fertilizer? Did you transport mulch over distances?
Conclusion:
We might not be getting off without a hitch, but if you compost and use seeds found in your food, recycle your grey water, and reuse seeds from your own garden, this might be one of the few hobbies, if done right, which could lower your footprint instead of increasing it.
Restaurants
So obviously much of the carbon footprint will be similar to the same meal at home. If you eat a cheeseburger your pollution trail is huge whether you eat at home or out. Like other hobbies mentioned above, in theory, if everyone lowered their climate controls before they all went to the same place it could take some of the edge of the pollution price, but did you drive there for just one meal? Obviously if I make say 60 meals per trip to the grocery store, my gas price is divided by 60. If I take the same 4 people out to eat that would take care of 4 meals and, let’s be generous, and say I get 2 more from leftovers. So just in terms of gas use, eating out wastes 10 times as much gas as making your own meals. Same thing, more or less, if you have food delivered to your door.
The average restaurant creates 1,300,000 pounds of greenhouse gases and pollution a year. This equals 3616 a day. Say the place is open 12 hours a day and your dinner lasts 2 hours. This would mean they are creating roughly 300 pounds of pollution while you are there. (Some of this includes the whole back story of the food’s production and transport so it not entirely occurring there within those two hours) Assuming a typical American has an active 12-hour day, this would mean if you were home, on average you would be creating roughly 2 pounds of greenhouse gases an hour (This would mean 4 pounds for your 2 hour stay). Although to be honest every time we prepare and consume food our output spikes considerably but let’s just be nice and said you turned down your air conditioning, cut all your lights, walked to the establishment, and this made your use even out to average. So if over 75 people are eating in the restaurant at once you could in theory be consuming less. If 150 were present you’d be cutting you footprint in half, but if only 25 people are there you are part of an increase in your own imprint per hour by 3 fold. (12 for 2 hours instead of 4)
Conclusion:
If you can walk to a place and turn everything off before you leave, eating out might be a wash, or even an upswing, but if you add 3.5 pounds per person to drive two people ten miles there would have to be over 200 people eating there for you to break even. If only a 100 people were eating there you are creating a footprint about twice your average.
Video Games
As stated above running a television for an hour creates much less use than a cell phone (See Above). Therefore, if you are playing the games on your television your energy use is low. However, if you’re streaming it doubles the use. Either way you are still using about one 60th the power playing them on your cell phone requires.
There is also the cost of constructing the game controls and individual games, although they might give you more hours of pleasure than some products we purchase so that lowers their overall pollution cost. However, lights and climate controls are also involved with most indoor activities.
Conclusion:
Playing video games is just a few levels worse for the environment than watching television unless you are playing them on your cell in which case you might as well fire up your diesel truck for an hour and cook lamb on the engine.
Sports
This depends a lot on the sport. If you are walking to the corner to play a round of hoops with a ten-year-old ball, you are barely creating a ripple. However, if your hockey goalie needs pads to be shipped here from China, it is going to be a big environmental ouch. If I must drive my kid 30 extra miles a week to make it to soccer games, this isn’t going to help matters either. And obviously, all golf courses should be destroyed, or at a bare minimum only be watered with recycled sewage waste.
Conclusion:
A bigger swing in possibilities with this one, so hard to nail it down precisely, but obviously if you are using items for long lengths of time and not driving to make it happen, your trail is minimal, but you can also jack up your footprint if you toss out your ideals to insure you and yours can do whatever they wish regardless of price.
Cell Use
This might surprise some but running your cell phone for an hour creates 7.5 pounds of population, roughly equal to driving your car a mile. As stated above this is roughly 18 times the use of a laptop.
Conclusion:
Save your cell for texting. Try use it as little as possible and unless it is an emergency or you hate nature, never stream data or play video games with it.
Giant Concerts/Events
Much of the environmental costs of these things is the trash remaining behind and the trampled land. Have you ever seen the forest after a rainbow gathering? It will probably take it 10 years to recover. Of course, many events take place in areas where all life has already been removed. Usually, these events involve a lot of driving, sometimes hundreds of miles, so that’s a big loss. Food and other supplies are transported out to these events for your needs. The carbon footprints for these events are colossal but are also divided by the number of participants. Carpooling and other tricks could help lower this cost further, but if you’re driving a few hundred miles it’s hard to think of this as anything other than a big environmental fail.
Eating the transported food can be considered a huge additional loss, but if you’re lowering your energy use at home while you are gone, we’ll just give you half credit the campers get. However, keep in mind that if you bring your own supplies you are closer to camping stats other than the colossal mess let behind.
Conclusion:
Like camping we can just bottom line it with the driving involved. Since the concert goer is only getting half the credit of camping due to consuming transported goods, which include the bands themselves, one household can only drive about 60 miles before starting to accumulate a carbon debt. If you are driving 600 miles, which is probably less than most people are doing, you are creating 400 pounds of pollution. Of course, carpooling multiple households which are reducing their homes climate controls and energy use could cut this in half or by a third.
Many people enjoy large events, but I hope they don’t ever call themselves environmentalists.
Going to the Movies
Like other hobbies mentioned above if you lower your output at home and a large number of people share the luxury of the theater, this is probably not the worst thing you can be doing as long as you aren’t driving too far. When I was a kid, we had to drive 30 miles to a movie so that would be a huge dig. With it only being four miles from my home currently, a monthly trip to the movies isn’t too bad.
Conclusion:
One of the stronger choices on this list as long as you don’t overdo it.
Poker/Cards/Board Games
These requires a certain number of resources to construct, and sometimes ship from China, but as long as they are used for years or even decades, a night sitting around a table rolling monopoly dice does little harm. Card games would be even better for the environment.
Conclusion:
As long as the games are chosen wisely and used often this is probably a big win because modern families could certainly be doing other activities instead which would create much larger footprints.
Coffee Shops
Like other things mentioned, as long as you lower yours and share a place’s climate control with others, you start with a potential upswing. At the risk of sounding repetitive, how far you drive plays a huge factor in whether you might be saving a few Watts versus creating 15 pounds of filth. However, with each cup of coffee creating, on average, half a pound of pollution the more you drink once there, the larger your footprint would be.
Conclusion:
If you can walk there, you might have a reasonable chance to not be an environmental villain if you only have a cup, but if you drive 10 miles and drink 2 cups you just added 8.5 pounds of pollution to the environment.
Creating Art
This is another one which includes a wide spread of activities. If you are a kid drawing in an old notebook with a nicked pen, I wouldn’t worry too much. Certain paints and supplies have heavy environmental tolls, and these products should be researched before purchase. Also, if you ordering items built in China, this is a giant kick. Many artists dumpster dive their supplies and recycle objects around their home to help with their creating. Such things certainly lower your work’s impact.
Conclusion:
Much like sports, with proper choices this can be a great activity and often makes the world a more enjoyable place. However, one should remember to curb selfish choices if you wish to help this planet.
The Real Conclusion:
This ended up being a long list, but I hope you found it useful to discover all this information in one place and this has also made you reevaluate some of the other activities you enjoy and gave you the knowledge to decide what’s best moving forward.
In the end I’m not telling you what choice to make, I’m just reminding you that every choice you make is an environmental choice.
Author’s note:
Some hobbies are just so painfully obvious, regarding hurting the environment I didn’t bother to mention them. If you are into destroying the forest and deserts by four wheeling and pumping chemicals into the water with jet skis, you are on your own and probably didn’t dare to read this article anyway.
Long before I owned a computer or there was even a hint of there being an internet, I published a small underground Zine called C.H.A.O.S Collected Humans Against Outdated Systems. The year was 1992 and I was working with my friend Sasha who would go on to become a college professor who currently teaches at the Keene State. Sasha and I didn’t always agree on everything but when it came to politics and protecting the environment, we were on pretty much the same page.
40 years ago, we each made some predictions about the future. Maybe someone should start a religion about us, because unfortunately most of our predictions have come true or are certainly heading that way.
One of Dr. Davis’ articles which has stuck with me for 40 years was An Alternative, which I have mentioned before. This is the idea humans need to preserve as much of our natural environment as possible with the assumption the human machine will one day grind to a halt. Then, with at least some of our biosphere in one piece, it will be easier for it to jump back to where it was 10,000 years ago.
My prediction was equally dark and involved the creation of new anti-terrorist laws (hmm did this happen in 2001, I think I nailed that one). Once created, these laws would be expanded to include monkey wrenchers and environmentalists which take a more extreme stance toward protecting the environment (This has happened as well). These laws will set up a system where the people in power can call anyone a terrorist and lock them up without due process.
This is all being done in preparation for The Last War.
The Last War: The Last War will be the final battle for the Earth which will take place between people who place comfort and capital over life and the continued ability for the planet’s ecosphere to survive as we know it and the people who support all life and the ability for it to continue to exist in its current forms.
If you don’t think this battle is coming, I’m sorry to say you will be proven wrong because it has already begun.
The quality of life in the USA and other areas is already declining and has been for a while. Villains such as tRump are being elected because people don’t have the same opportunities and capital their parents and grandparents enjoyed. Let me ask you to ponder this, if people are already steaming mad because they can’t buy a home or have a job which pays half as much as their father and their money stretches half as far, how are they going to feel when they can’t afford to drive their car? Are the folks who are willing to vote for a racist rapist when they still have a job, going to be against digging for oil in the middle of the Grand Canyon if it will help them afford a gallon of gas? I think you know the answer to that one.
What will The Last War be?
In my opinion, The Last War was started by the rich who will do anything to maintain their wealth, and the corruptible masses will support them. If you think they won’t you must have been in a coma since 2015. Let me toss out the headlines from an election in the future.
The Left: We have a hard fight ahead of us and to do right by our country we are going to have to tighten our belts and make sacrifices for the general good.
The Right: The Left are trying to tax gasoline until the price is so high people can’t afford to drive to work or take their children to school and now they want to force us all to drive electric cars. I don’t know about you, but I always thought America was the land of the free and we deserve a choice. Vote for me and I’ll bring back the prosperity of the past and…
Most people take the easy answer over the idea of having less, or when they are asked to do things in a harder manner. Also, in 20 years, more people will have less than their parents and grandparents and they could feel like they have been screwed over and deserve what others had and will be spitting mad about it. Which way do you think they’ll vote?
We may have other hot button issues in 2022. Things like gay marriage and abortion may be lost. Schools will probably start giving every kid a handgun and a concealed firearm permit when they graduate high school, but I’m going to make a new prediction.
They say it’s all about the economy stupid. However, most of the economy comes from the Earth in one manner or another. Minerals, food, oil, natural gas and almost every product we consume comes from our planet. What’s going to happen when there is less to mine, eat, and use to make jet skis? The CEOs aren’t going to want to stop their cash flows and their supporters want cheeseburgers and cheap gas. So what’s going to happen if we let it? The corporations are going to go after the last 10% of the natural earth we have left. Some people are going to try to stop them, and we will enter The Last War.
Perhaps you’ll have heard it here first. I’ll give it another 20 years before we are in the foxholes either metaphorically, or certainly for some it will be literally.
Hello, welcome back if this isn’t your first time, and let me quickly state, I’m not usually like most writers. During the pandemic lock down, some took time to finish novels and brought their writing to a new level. Pah, why be so predictable. Me, I wrote less and spent more time with my kids, but since the pandemic is over(ish) I guess it is time to pick up my pen and laptop and dive into the meat of these seriously messed up times we are living in. Where to start right? But instead of reviewing subjects which have been reviewed a thousand times before, I will endeavor to focus on one concept at a time and here goes.
Recently, I was having a conversation with a gentleman, and I causally brought up the issue of overpopulation. He told me there is no overpopulation and bringing it up was racist. Let’s break this down to his two points 1. There is no overpopulation of humans. 2, To mention there is overpopulation is a racist thing to do.
Overpopulation
What would too many humans on the planet look like?
Resources are being used more quickly than they can be replenished.
Animals are being overharvested for food and going extinct due to the destruction of their environment.
Humans are occupying more than their fair share of the planet we share with millions of animals and a multitude of plant life.
The quality of human life is decreasing.
There are obviously more issues which could be discussed but this isn’t a term paper.
Resources:
Humans began to irreversibly change our environment long before the current era. Before the raise of Rome, much of what we now consider the Middle East was overgrazed by human’s nomadic herd animals and turned grasslands, which once sported a wide variety of animals, into near lifeless deserts which have only grown over the past four thousand years. While traveling through Tunisia in North Africa, I was told by a local guide that the country had killed off almost all the non-domesticated animals which once lived there three thousand years in the past.
Between 2002 and 2012 the Earth lost 880,000 square miles of forest (High Resolution Maps of the 21st Century Forest Cover Change. Science 15 November 2013) Our planet’s wilderness areas have dropped from covering 100% percent of the Earth to merely 22% percent. Also, only 11% of our photosynthesis takes place in these wild areas. (Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, “Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world.” 2009)
Lastly the amount of land required to exclusively feed all of humanity, which remember was once zero, had grown from nothing to – in our lifetimes.
In my opinion, does humanities growing use of resources indicate our species has an overpopulation problem?
Yes
Overharvesting
It is clear the oceans are being overharvested. The number of fishing vessels increased from less than a million to 4,000,000 since 1970 yet even with this increase the yield of fish has dropped two thirds. (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome 2012) One might argue if we plant crops how can we be overharvesting them? However, human crops are now covering over 40% of the Earth’s surface (James Owen, Farming Claims Almost Half Earth’s Land,” Published December 8, 2005). How many resources are being using for just one species and the animals we’ve domesticated for our uses? 200 years ago humans and our animals were 1 percent of the biomass of mammals on this planet, but currently we are over 90% (Christian Schwagerl “The Anthropocene,” 2014). Personally, I think if we must clear cut forests and destroy hundreds of animals and their homes forever, this counts as overharvesting. If you don’t think ruining the planet for other life forms so you can have a cheeseburger is not a system of overharvesting, I think we should have a long talk.
Are Humans overharvesting the Earth?
Yes
Human Occupation
10,000 years ago 100% of the Earth remained in its natural environment, today only 22% of the Earth’s land has retained its natural environment. We are approaching having over 50% of this planet’s lands covered in human farms. I think this sums it up, moving on.
Is the increase in the lands humans occupy a sign over Overpopulation?
Yes
Quality of Human Life
This is a tougher one because look, we have a computer in our pocket now and door dash and… five roommates. Yes, in many ways the quality of human life has improved. There is less poverty than ever before and over all human’s life expectancy is increasing, (except in the USA).
However, is living in a city better than the country? This is hard to gauge, but as rent and real estate costs roars through the roof, for many, the dream of having their own place is just that… a dream. For others, they can only afford to live in tiny apartments with extra roommates and family. They are the lucky ones compared to the growing numbers of homeless and with rentals the way they are, coming up with 3000$ to move into a new place while you are living in a car or park might be one level below impossible. Some people, myself included, have been ‘blacklisted’ (if this term has its roots in some racist BS please forgive me) by the corporations which own most of the rentals currently and will refuse to rent to people who might not have settled some old debt with a landlord who evicted them years ago. These people, myself included, remain unable to rent a place no matter how much cash they have in their wallet.
I guess it comes down what improves the quality of a person’s life. Are younger folks spending time on their phones because it is better than hiking, or because the hiking trail was paved over, and they can’t afford a car to drive to a different one? Would a couple like to observe animals in the wild, but they can now only see them on YouTube, so they stay home and relax on the sofa. Another couple dreamed of moving into the country, but they are required to stay in the city because their whole family lives with them.
In the end, quality of life is more ambiguous. Who had it better, a settler who had forty acres to spread over but dies at 51, or the dude who works at JiffyLube but enjoys his cable package up into his 80s?
Out of the 4 measures I used to determine whether overpopulation was real, 3 were a strong yes and the last might be considered a tie at best. So given this, I’m going to conclude overpopulation is a real issue and it certainly wouldn’t be out of hand to state we are in an overpopulation crisis. However, we still have another claim to investigate.
Is Claiming there is an Overpopulation Problem Racist?
I see where this concept is probably coming from. “Oh no, the brown people are overpopulating their countries, using up all their resources, and now trying to come here and take ours.” Yep, that would be racist. Or if we take more of a fascist view, “Those other type of people are having too many babies.”
Part of me wonders if this is some shield, used by the left, to help them avoid the root causes of almost all our troubles we currently face on this planet. “Wow, overpopulation, that’s a problem almost impossible to solve, but if I just think racists are concerned with it, I can just ignore it, because to admit it is an issue would make me a racist.”
Many on the Right tend to ignore any problem which would decrease their cash flow and profit remains more important than nature, so we shouldn’t expect much help from them on this issue. They may complain about it and perhaps it can dip into racist rhetoric, but is the Left going to do any better steering their policies away from confronting the negative effects of overpopulation and shying away from this reality by categorizing overpopulation discussions as a boogie man which will associate themselves with a racist paradigm?
Is being concerned about our oceans being overfished racist? Is demanding lumbering companies attempt to replant the forests they cut down racist? Is trying to eat a healthy diet and create less waste racist? Is trying our best to think of ways plants, animals, and humans can continue to live on this planet safely racist?
Neither the Left or the Right has any excuse not to do everything in their power to make this planet better for their grandchildren and preserve every form of life we can. And I wish to end on a positive note for people who have made it this far. I’m not trying to be a gloomer/doomer, I want things to improve and if you want to help here are the 3 top things you can do without too much effort to help our planet.
Attempt to limit your food waste as much as possible. Discarded food is the leading cause of unnecessary pollution in the USA.
Create a compost, grow a garden as big as possible, and recycle water as much as you can.
Consume less.
Thanks again for making it this far and welcome back to WildernessPunk. You’ll be seeing more of me.
A few thoughts before I dive in. First, I know we all get hit over the head with the three Rs. The second is, since I’ve already covered Reduce and Reuse in the last few articles, we can fast forward to Recycle. Still bored… don’t worry I’m going to WildernessPunk this and get to the core of this issue. Recycle is the last of the our list of six ideas we can all accomplish to lower our Negative Environmental Impact (NEI)
Here’s a quick review of those six ideas
Minimizing Food Waste
Commuting by Bicycle, Walking, Buses
Use Energy Wisely such as high efficiency devices and keeping them unplugged
Consume less
Eating for a Climate Stable Planet
Recycle, Reduce, Reuse
Yep, yep Recycle. All of us do it, or at least I hope so. But are we recycling enough? More likely, we’re trying to recycle too much. Too much, one might think recycling is one area where more would always be better. We might like to think the Recycle fairies find some use for all the items we imagine we’re keeping out of the landfill.
But what happens to the items we put into our recycle bins which can’t be Recycled? Could we be creating more problems by trying to Recycle to much? What happens to things which can’t be Recycled when they arrive at the recycling department?
So are we doing more harm than good by Recycling more than we should? Chances are… yes. So let’s dig in and hash all this out so we can be good WildernessPunkers, shall we.
First off, what we can Recycle will of course vary from country to country, state to state, and town to town. So um, we’ll just focus on where I live. It might not be exact, but at least it will help educate us on a general system which should be close to accurate for most of us.
Like always, let’s strive to keep this simple and make a few lists. The first will be what we can recycle and the second will be things you might think are okay, but are not.
Commonly Recycled Goods
Cans, but make sure things like soup cans are clean
Plastic, water bottles, other drink bottles, clamshell fruit or take-out containers, rigid plastic like detergent bottles
Paper, junk mail (plastic windows on envelopes are fine), newspapers, office paper, shredded paper in clear plastic bags, and cardboard
Plastic bottle lids, but only if the bottle is dry and they are screwed back on
Plastic lunch containers, if they are clean
Cardboard cereal and pasta boxes
Aluminum foil, pie pans etc, but only if free of food
Milk containers, again as long as they are clean and dry
Shampoo bottles if clean and dry
Cardboard, but condense and remove tape
Glass jars, label can stay on but loose the lid
Items which cannot be Recycled
Plastic containers which have not been cleaned and dried
Styrofoam
Plastic straws
Juice bags
Plastic bags
Prescription bottles
Batteries
To go coffee and soda cups
Bubble Wrap
Pet food bags
Election Signs
Yard Waste
Hazardous waste, not in curbside, but some companies can help
Smaller items
Yes, I know some of this is a bit tedious, but if you really care about saving the Earth and stepping up to knock down your NEI, then this is good to know. Putting items into the recycle bin which can’t be recycled is much worse than tossing it into the landfill. It can break down the machines and cause whole truckloads to be contaminated and thrown into the landfill.
Also in case you were wondering…
“When done thoughtfully, recycling is cost-effective. Less energy is required to make products from recycled materials than to produce them from raw materials.” Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star
And just for a fact teaser here are a few stats.
There’s a reason people say to recycle paper and save the trees. According to Waste Management, recycling 500 average phone books could save between 17 and 31 trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 463 gallons of oil, 587 pounds of air pollution, 4,077 kilowatt hours of energy and landfill space. https://bit.ly/2JcL7JX
So I’m going to leave this here. Over the past few months, I’ve done what I’ve set out to do and covered, in a brutally realistic manner, what each household in the USA could, doesn’t, and should accomplish to lower our NEI as individuals and as a country. Of course more could be done and a greater insight gleaned with continued work, but more often than not, a simpler approach is more likely to succeed than an exhaustive data explosion.
On a person note, I’m not sure about all of you, but I know I’ve learned a lot by collecting this information. We often suffer from accepted delusions and I hope I’ve helped pop a few erroneous thought bubbles.
I would also like to state, I’m pleased to have completed this process. Not only because of the positive benefits of sharing, but also because of some of the darker places my research brought me too. We have a long way to go, but as my uncle’s show used to say, “Knowledge is Power.”
And come on America, we got this. We’ve stepped up before and we can do it again, especially when this might be the most important thing our species has done in 10,000 years.
You may know I outlined the top six techniques the average person can step up and try to accomplish to help themselves lower their Negative Environmental Impact (NEI). Fourth on our list of environmental doom, is our desire to consume.
For many of us this can become difficult because it contradicts the generally accepted Cultural World View in this country, and much of the world, which states more is better. Our whole lives we’ve been told; make more money, buy more things, experience more of the world. This is designed to light a fire under us, but really lights a fire in the middle of our environment, because as I outlined recently in WildernessPunk, the Use of Juice, the more money one has, the worse their lifestyle is to the environment and the larger their NEI.
But let’s steer the rhetoric away from the use of utilities (and food which we also covered) and for this article, focus on the concept of how much material goods we consume. Since a huge amount of energy goes into producing the items you consume and transporting them to you, obviously purchasing less and using them longer will not only help your wallet but also the environment.
So here comes the jingle, recycle, reduce, reuse. Consumption is where this comes to play. However, it should probably go reduce first. Reduce what we need to use before we even start. Reuse everything we can whether we buy it, find it, swipe it, or harvest it. Then, after all this, it would get either recycled at the curb or donated to a thrift store.
So yeah, yeah, blahbahidyblue, you can find these ideas in a lot of places, nothing too radical here. Alright, where does WildernessPunk fit in? Probably in the battle between reuse and hoarding. Hoarding is mostly bad and nasty. Remember the above, having more makes more waste, so we shouldn’t strive to have more, but also we shouldn’t be part of a replacement culture either. Oh it broke, get a new one. This isn’t helping. I’m not saying we should keep the broken VCR in the closet, no, recycle such things.
Where things get tricky is how far do you go in keeping things around to reuse. We don’t want to live within piles of slowly rotting crud or have back yards which our neighbors wish to condemn, but also having a little extra doesn’t hurt the environment any. Everything we reuse saves a huge amount of energy. We should have the right to be able to reuse our gear, but I also don’t want to be the crazy guy keeping the plastic buckets with no bottoms. So where do we draw the line?
This has always been a tough question for me. On one hand, I hate throwing things away which can be reused in some manner and having the supplies you need in the middle of a project is a huge boon. Finding a way to reuse some old thing you have saves time, money, and helps lower your NEI. Yet, hoarding sucks. Having too much junk is a pain in the ass. Personally I enjoy the Spartan look for rooms where I live. I might not always achieve it, but I like it.
So what is the answer?
Let’s try to bullet point a positive outline for this conundrum.
Start by owning less. Less mess and less waste automatically happen.
Be obsessive about using everything you can instead of buying something new
Stay organized so you know where the gear you could reuse is
Donating things to charity is another way of reusing
Gift things to friends
Go through your older things often and reuse, donate, organize, and purge
Actively use stored items for utilitarian purposes and art
If you keep these concepts in mind, I don’t think things will get too bad, but it does bring up the thought, where again, lessening your NEI is not always a pretty thing. If you’re dumpster diving for lumber, instead of buying it, because you want to make a Tiki Lounge, it may not look terrific piled up against your neighbor’s fence while he waters his manicured lawn. But then again, if you’re living right, your NEI for lawn maintenance might be about a hundredth of his.
The bottom line is usually the less income you have, the less of a NEI you create, but it doesn’t have to be this way. One can use those extra resources wisely and create a place of beauty, which lives in greater harmony with the Earth. Create beauty, promote life, and also remember, if you have to move, less is always more.
I’m hoping most of the folks reading this also read my last WP post, The Number One Thing, where I discussed how the easiest thing we can do in this country to combat Climate Change is insuring we minimize food waste which causes huge amounts of methane to enter our atmosphere. This limits our personal contribution to climate change while helping our country, and also our personal finances along the way.
But how do you top a concept which can be embraced by everyone cross culturally which also has a huge positive affect on everything from environmental health to blue collar worker’s wallets?
The answer would be to find something even better.
But first I wanted to toss out a Mission Statement of sorts for WildernessPunk, you know because we’re so professional and all:
WildernessPunk is the concept of moving past accepted norms in the pursuit of engineering a life which minimizes our environmental impact on our planet.
A little more WP Housekeeping. For the Hell’s of lit, I went ahead and started a WildernessPunk Blog and FB page. I’ll start posting an old posts on both of these every day. I’ll still post new WP posts here on my main page, but in the future there will probably be a benefit having them all in the same place.
So back to this find something better concept.
There are many different lists and suggestions to be found on the internet and within the reports written by environmental scientists. However, many of these lists involve legislation and making huge sweeping changes in our technology or culture. But what about things which rely on the individual? What could you do tomorrow to help without needing to call your congressperson, collecting signatures, or investing a few thousand dollars?
Let’s compile a list of the top contenders. I know we talked about minimizing our food wastage, so I’ll just place this at the top of the list.
Ways an Individual can Lower their Negative Environmental Impact (NEI)
Minimizing Food Waste
Commuting by Bicycle, Walking, Buses
Use Energy Wisely such as high efficiency devices and keeping them unplugged
Consume less
Eating for a Climate Stable Planet
Recycle, Reduce, Reuse
And Eating Bugs
After a review of the current literature, this is the list of top things we can each do on our own which were mentioned in the most of the various articles. Of course there are dozens of things we could do as a party or a country or a world, but most experts agree individuals should be doing as much of the above list as possible.
I might blow off the eating bugs idea. I mean it’s just so simple why outline it, unless you want to discuss how to build ant farms for fun and dinner. However, since I already started with the first one, I might take a WildernessPunk crack at the others. Perhaps we all might learn something.
After my last adventure, I feel refreshed and ready to change the direction of WildernessPunk down a different one of its Arrows. This time diving into the issue of Climate Change. You know, the whole thing about keeping our planet alive.
Often, in this stage in human existence, we’re informed of and confronted with the ills which infect our world. Usually it becomes overwhelming and we feel powerless to have any serious impact on the situation. Yet, if it is an issue, such as Climate Change, which is caused by each one of us, couldn’t each one of us to do something to help?
It makes sense. If I contribute to a certain percent of an issue, let’s say X percent. Then my behavior should then affect X of this issue. If we all change our X percent, then we have changed the whole situation for the better.
Sure, I understand each of our contributions to Climate Change in theory runs about .000000013%, however if you multiply this number by digits which end in a lot of zeroes this can change quickly.
So, as mentioned in the title, what is the Number One Thing we can each do to reduce our contribution to global warming? The answer changes from country to country. In less industrialized countries the answer is to educate the population on reproductive options. I’m also going to mention another huge factor which would help underdeveloped nations, since it will relate to the #1Thing in the more industrialized countries.
.
The other big issue in underdeveloped countries is food waste. But unlike how food gets wasted in countries like the USA, in less developed countries a huge percentage of food goes bad before it can reach the consumer. So better preservation, along with transportation and reproductive education, are key components to lowering how underdeveloped countries contribute to Climate Change.
But things are different in the more industrialized countries such as the USA. Here, more food is wasted after purchase and is sent to rot in the landfills. This rotting food is one of the primary causes of methane which our NASA lists as the third leading greenhouse emissions on the planet. https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/ Whether it rots on the way to the store or after you toss it, the results are the same. Our titanic production and wasting of food are one of the leading causes of Climate Change.
Yes, there are many ways we could all help lessen our Carbon Footprint. We could become vegan, ride our bikes to work, and use our cooling systems less, but each of these things have something in common. They would all involve a large change in behavior and the discomfort brought about by sacrifice.
This is why getting stricter with what food we allow to go to waste is the Number One Thing we can all do in this country to combat Climate Change. The primary reason I believe this is not only how easy it would be, but also all the positive benefits it would have for all of us. Let’s review some of these below.
The Positive Benefits of Limiting Food Waste:
Wasting less food saves money
Buying less, each visit, allows for alternative methods of transportation such as walking and biking
Using less food leaves more for other humans and animals
Wasting less food produces less methane emissions
Creates less materials to throw into landfills
Uses less resources to transport food
Requires less water to irrigate crops
Wasting food costs, the USA 165 Billion a year
The USA currently wastes 40% of the food produced
Yes, look at those last two. If the USA wastes 165 Billion on food each year https://cnn.it/1vuse8P and the USA has 119 million households https://binged.it/2sMA6EI that means each household wastes roughly 1386.55$ dollars a year or 115.54$ a month.
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Wrap you head around this for a minute. 115.54$ is enough food for a lot of families to live off for a whole week and it’s thrown away. Let’s look at this from a different angle. If 40% of the food is wasted, this means 40% of the water used to irrigate it is wasted. 40% of the gas used to ship it to us is wasted. 40% of the time used to grow, harvest, transport, stock, and sell is wasted. This is a colossal amount of resources our country is throwing on the landfill which is just helping destroy our planet faster.
I’m not asking cowboys to become vegan here. I’m just asking people to help make our country stronger while getting a little more exercise and saving yourself hundreds of dollars. If you can’t motivate to do it for your environment or your country, then just do it for yourselves. See you at the bike rack in front of Safeway.
WildernessPunk 