Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller
NY Times has posted an article today discussing climate change, food sourcing, reliance on cheap energy and generally the motivation for people to actually do anything about the impending doom that is climate change.
If you don’t want to read the full article, I think a good summary of what Michael Pollan is trying to say is
‘If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.’
Additionally, the main out-take is:
…the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind….
This article gently supplements a number of others, where others e more severly discuss global food shortages:
West Africa and Canadian bread
Using crops for biofuels – instead of food
Caracas, West Bengal, Mexico, Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa
start growing your own food now!
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