Plastic Picnics

Finally, after a cool and wet spring, we have arrived at the summer picnic season! We all look forward to times of “dining out” with family and friends, especially since that option is only available here in Southern Manitoba for a few months every year.

My concern is that such events have become “plastic picnics.” I have an image clearly etched on my mind that leaves me with a feeling that something has gone wrong with our picnics.

Two or three families have just finished a picnic in the park – perhaps a family gathering or simply friends getting together. The feast is over and now the picnic tables are piled high with garbage, mostly some form of plastic, styrofoam or paper. Cups, plates, cutlery, food containers, bags, wrappers, pop and water bottles and everything else you need for a modern picnic.

But this is only the beginning of the unfolding tragedy. Now you see a couple of the adults swooping up all these disposables into a couple of large plastic garbage bags. And bingo – they hit the garbage can! And now all are free to enjoy their post-picnic rituals. Nothing to take home! As a matter of fact, it only took ten minutes to erase any evidence that there had even been a picnic in this place – except of course for the over-flowing garbage bins.

Now this may be an extreme example of our picnic habits. But, truth be told, it is closer to reality than we care to believe. Perhaps, if these picnickers had separated their disposables and deposited them in recycling bins there would have been at least a partial redemption of sorts. “But hey, we’re out here to enjoy ourselves, so don’t make us feel guilty about our burgeoning landfill site just out of town!”

I think it is time to rethink our picnic habits. Some of us are old enough to remember picnics before the throw-away culture overtook us. And I don’t think the quality of our “outings” was lower then. Perhaps it was even higher.

So here is the challenge. Plan for a “throw-away-nothing picnic” this summer or at least see how close you can come to this standard. Here are some ideas to make it happen:

•  Purchase a set of light-weight dishes, cups and cutlery for the family and take them with you to the picnic in their own special container. Take it back home when the sun sets and wash its contents together as you reminisce about the good time you had.
• If you are going alone, always bring your own non-disposable plate, bowl, cup and cutlery. You may stand out like a sore thumb, but you will be a positive example.
• Plan for a “finger-food” picnic that cuts down on the need for dishes.
• If you happen upon a picnic unprepared, consume only those items that don’t require the help of disposable products. A few awkward moments perhaps, but also a chance to begin a conversation about a less polluted planet.

Jack Heppner

The Paradox of Efficiency

The advent of more efficient electric lights ought to be hailed as a great step forward for energy conservation, since lighting consumes a hefty 6.5 percent of the world’s energy supply.

But human behavior regularly confounds expectations, and in this case we find a seeming paradox. Researchers expect energy efficiency increases to raise the amount of energy consumed in lighting. It’s basic economics, in a way.

Surely light is a good thing. And the law of demand in economics suggests that if the price of a good thing goes down, people will always want more of it. (The concept of “enough” has never really caught on in economics.)

This was the case when gas lighting replaced candles and whale fat – cheaper light led to higher demand, including street lights (!). The conversion to more-energy-efficient electric lights led to another increase. A typical resident of the western world now consumes 100,000 times as much light as he would have had he lived in western Europe in 1700. 

Light is so much in demand that the increase in consumption wiped out the gains from efficiency, so more energy rather than less was used. The same is expected to occur in the future, as solid-state lighting replaces today’s compact fluorescent lamps. This was recently reported in Economist news magazine. They’ll be better for the environment, if and only if we were satisfied with today’s level of lighting. But we won’t be, if history is a judge. Efficiency is expected to increase by a factor of 3, while consumption of light is expected to increase by a factor of 10. We’ll need twice as much energy to make that light.

We’ll have brighter indoor lighting, better-lit retail spaces. And, security-obsessed as we are, we’ll light up outdoor spaces that are currently dark. That would be a good thing in some neighborhoods, but it has side-effects.

If you haven’t seen the Milky Way lately, get your views in now. Light pollution (combined with air pollution) already obscures all but the brightest stars in urban areas.

More efficient cars don’t lead to less gasoline consumption, either, in case you were wondering. Cheaper car travel makes private transportation more attractive relative to public transportation. With more efficient cars, people drive more.

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue those gains, it just means we can’t expect relative prices to make us virtuous people. We still have to confront the culture of “more” in the context of well-lit 24/7 consumerism.

This is known as Jevon’s effect. This is another reason we should embrace a carbon tax if we want to move to a more sustainable future.

Eric Rempel

Let’s Talk about our Lifestyle

I find critical thinking, particularly about the way I live and the life choices I make, inherently uncomfortable. When I do the critical thinking, I invariably find that too many of the choices I make favour what gives me pleasure on the short run. My long term welfare, and the welfare of others takes second place. I suspect I am not unique, and I suspect this is why we all avoid this kind of thinking. The course of least resistance is certainly to avoid that critical analysis of the choices we make – too assume, and to live as if the good times we now experience will continue forever, and that our consumption has no effect on others. We would rather not think critically about our lifestyle – the lifestyle most people in the affluent West live, and the lifestyle most of the rest of the world aspires to. Yet, if we have any concern about the future of the civilized world, someone needs to think about the long term viability of this lifestyle. And, like it or not, since we live in a democracy, that “someone” needs to be “all of us”. That is hard and uncomfortable, because as we do that we soon realize that our lifestyle can only be justified by believing at least one of the following:

ñ    The  resources essential to our way of life will last forever.

ñ    The resources will last long enough for me and nothing else matters.

ñ    They will last long enough to find more and then those will last forever.

ñ    It's not my problem. I deserve everything I have.

ñ    We are doomed anyway and I can’t affect anything.

Wow! Really!? That's shocking! In fact it’s too shocking. So we continue with our denial.

A recent survey polled 9,000 individuals in 22 countries about their attitudes on energy. It found 90% were concerned by rising energy costs, and 76% by the prospect of shortages; 83% were concerned by climate change, and 89% thought it was important to reduce their country's reliance on fossil fuels. But barely a third thought they should be using less energy; the remainder believed their governments should find new sources, stat. Now doesn’t that say it all – about us.

Yet, yet, deep down we all know we need to curb our consumption. There is a growing interest in simpler living.

So let’s talk about it. Spend some time with us at Summer in the City. We will have a booth “somewhere” on main street and we invite you to join us for some conversation as to how we move this agenda forward in this city we consider home. Let’s have a discussion as to why a carbon tax would (or wouldn’t) be good for all of us. Let’s have a discussion about how a more energy aware set of building bylaws would lead to a better city.

We will also have an assortment of fact sheets and brochures you can take home with you. We believe that together we can make a difference.

Eric Rempel

Twenty Years

I will be 27 years old this year, so perhaps my scope is a bit small, but when I think about the passing of twenty years it seems to me to be a long time. A lot can happen in a day, much less a year; and being only 26 years old, I’m well aware that much has changed in my lifetime. Twenty years, in terms of our planet, is a drop in the bucket; but in terms of the way we humans change our world, and change the way we interact with it and with each other, twenty years holds an awful lot of change. Or does it?

Reading a book from 1990, I came across a section on “The Ecological Crisis.” I was continually surprised to find the dates of references to be no later than 1990, because they read like today’s newspaper. Twenty years ago, we faced the same ecological issues we face today, including climate change, water and air pollution, threats from non-native species that lack predators in their new environments, overflowing landfills, and the extinction of as many as two dozen species per day, to name but a few. We’ve come so far since then in technology, human rights, health, and many other areas; why hasn’t the headline changed for ecology?

That’s not to say that we’ve done nothing. In 1990, when I was six years old, there were only two ecological problems that I was aware of: acid rain, and the hole in the ozone layer. Both of those issues have, to some extent, been solved by new technology. But what hasn’t changed at all was the real cause of those issues: human consumption of fossil fuels, and the over-use of chemicals. Since 1990 our culture has changed dramatically, our access to information has never been better, and our connectivity to one another and the rest of the world is almost beyond belief – yet when it comes to the environment, we’ve merely replaced one chemical with another rather than change our behaviour. And these are for our environmental successes: there remain the issues of deforestation, destructive mining practices, extinction of species, and of course climate change, that we’ve hardly begun to address.

Since 1990 we have seen some improvements in the way we think: attitudes about things like recycling and smoking have changed dramatically. Green has become chic. But attitudes and actions do not always go together, and if we want to live responsibly in this world, they must. I don’t expect human behaviour to change as quickly as technology, or even as quickly as attitudes; meaningful trends take longer to develop than fashion or technology. But what if we didn’t wait for the trend to develop, and instead were intentional about making a change, as individuals, as communities, and as a nation? If we set our minds to it, there doesn’t seem to be much that we can’t accomplish in a very short time. Let’s make the next 20 years count.

Jeff Wheeldon