Environmentally Responsible, not Green

I love dolphins, birds and rainforests as much as the next person and used to regard myself as Green, an environmentalist. In fact I wrote the first environmental policy for the Oxford college where I worked in the early noughties.

However now I find that being 'Green' seems to entail ditching all my old school tech and investing in a load of smart technology with built-in obsolescence and believing in scary sounding concepts like 'global compliance' and 'depopulation', I am having to revise my position and thus Green identity.

My idea of being environmentally responsible is somewhat different;

• Rescuing heritage buildings and retro-greening them in preference to demolition and erection of glass and concrete blocks with a 50 year life span.
• Walking, cycling or busing most places but occasionally driving a 16-year old car containing no unnecessary electrics or air conditioning but which has outlived its carbon footprint, passess its yearly emissions test, runs on unleaded and is easy to repair.
• Expecting clothes to last at least 5 years.
• Seldom flying
• Recycling
• Remaining child free
• Not wasting food or anything else (if I can help it)
• Being an almost-vegan (aside from the odd bit of cheese)
• Ignoring most fashion and fippery (ok unless it's a REALLY cute piece of jewellery)
• Eschewing so-called 'smart' technology including the Internet of Things, which are all just a waste of electricity and batteries to perform simple tasks I am more than capable of performing myself.
• If I could buy a computer that lasted a decade and a mobile phone ditto, I'd be delighted, but computers tend to have a 5-year lifespan tops, even with upgrading works and you are lucky to get 2 years out of a mobile phone before the manufacturers cease support for it and it becomes increasingly unusable. You cannot even remove the battery from new phones any more.
• Being strongly opposed to scrapping pefectly good cars, utility meters, boilers and street lights in favour of over-engineered, ugly and inflexible new ones, which claim to be green, but will take years to prove it and meanwhile could have detrimental affects on our health.

In a nutshell my own personal environmentalism translates into 'being sensible' and not buying stuff for the sake of it.

'Extinction Rebellion' and Greta Thunberg have to all intents and purposes, been put out of a job by the current CV crisis.
Enter various wealthy public figures, stage left, to opine that the world is 'over-populated' and that de-population measures will need to be adopted.

Whoah! Let's stop right there shall we?
1. Who are these (mostly unelected) public figures to make these decisions and without public consultation or consent?
2. How is there an ethical means of shrinking the world population within the next ten years beyond making free contraception universally available to all and tax breaks and other financial incentives to encourage people to have fewer kids? (and yes, I do want my enormous tax break for having none!).
According to 'Freakonomics' human beings respond best to financial incentives for behavioural changes.

If there is no ethical, consensual and transparent means of bringing this about, how is the architect of de-population any better than Mr H.itler? How is de-population any different to g.enocide?

If you adulterate a human being's food, environment, air, water or medicine to compromise their natural health and life span, this is murder. As for wars, whether military or germ, these are not ethically acceptable population thinners either.

I do not consent to this world and nor should you. You can bet your bottom dollar that the super-rich are not going to be affected by it, same as they are exempted most other human issues.

If you think I am being melodramatic, do your own research.  It doesn't take many clicks to find verifiable evidence on independent news sites. And it's a head frack to say the least.

Only don't forget to speak out and share the knowledge when you do. Bad things happen when good people do nothing. Moreover...

Stop, Don't Jump!

I have been on a number of suicide prevention courses during my university career, in case I should ever come across a student in distress. Meanwhile national suicide levels continue to rise, particularly among the young, I suspect, as the act becomes more socially acceptable as a means to solve one's problems - an unintended consequence of the push for assisted suicide for the chronically ill - though no suicide charity has dared to speak up so far.  Which prompted the following thoughts on whether a more unconventional approach might be called for if I were to come upon a youngster on the brink.

Stop, Don’t Jump!

Stop, don’t jump!

I’ll have that dewy complexion, those bright eyes, that salon hair, if you don’t want them

I’ll have those admiring male looks, those limitless job opportunities, that chance to start over.

I’m a great believer in recycling unwanted pert breasts and precision perfect teeth

I could do with a new pituitary gland, a new pair of ears, 20/20 vision,

And knees that don’t creak

Which look wow in mini skirts

Your restless energy and raging hormones will be put to good use by me.

It’s true what they say that youth is wasted on the young

You just drink, smoke and fritter it away

Or at the first obstacle, call life a day.

But who asked you to cure cancer?

Just don’t be an a**ehole and look when you cross the road.

That’ll do for starters.

Maybe a random act of kindness here and there?

If you can tear yourself away from your smartphone long enough.

But if you can’t manage life’s basics, hand your meat suit to me

Let me try on that all over tan for size.

I’m sure it’ll fit.

I’ll pout for the rest of your selfies

Send your friends updates so they’ll never know

And you do carry a donor card, right?

What, you’ve decided not to jump after all?

Bugger!

©LS King 2017

Confessions of a Former Green

As the child of vegan, tree-hugging, organic-gardening atheists long before it was fashionable, let alone de rigueur, I had little choice but to grow up believing that green was good.

Nightmares about overpopulation even drove me to the GP at 18 and again at 23 to request sterilisation. On both occasions I was turned down on the grounds that I was 'too young' and would be 'bound to change my mind later'.  Last week I heard on the radio that 20 years later young women like me are still being turned away from their GPs on the same grounds, no matter that it is apparently possible for a four-year old to receive trans-gender treatment on the NHS these days and over a decade before reaching the age of consent (is this even legal?) who is clearly not deemed 'too young' to know his/her own mind, let alone required to go through the myriad phases, moods and experiments of a standard-issue child, before finally deciding who and what they are.

But to get back to the point, scared rigid by the oft-repeated threat in children's encyclopaedias that 'the world's oil supply is predicted to run out in 20 years' - a rolling '20 years' in hindsight it would seem, I was 100% wholeheartedly in favour of being green and lived frugally and carefully for years, doing my bit to recycle every jar, every piece of string. purchasing very few new clothes, until I realised my behaviour was sailing dangerously close to my parents' joint hoarding habit which meant we hadn't had friends to visit since 1981, and taught myself the reverse joys of throwing away 'that might come in handy one day'.

As I grew older, it dawned on me that my efforts were completely eclipsed by even truer greens in the family - my grandparents - to whom all such ideology was anathema. Childhood poverty the Depression and wartime rationing had dictated their green credentials.

I penned the first green policy of several early workplaces on my CV, before such things as Green Officers and even Global Warming (now Carbon Reduction) Managers came about, let alone a whole 'industry' of green experts, whose job it seems is to write impenetrable and interminable reports to help each company satisfy various industry benchmark criteria which they have created. Even Pest controllers now market themselves as 'Environmental Services', no matter that most of their activities are the opposite of harm-free when strong poisons and chemicals are deployed.

My green policy documents included such common sense tips as 'only fill the kettle with the amount of water you need' or 'swap your power shower head for a normal shower head' or 'Wait until you have a full load before using washing machine and program on economy cycle'. I pick up other people's nowadays and scarcely understand the jargon contained within. As if in sympathy, power bills have also become unreadable so we cannot tell what we use and what it costs any more.

Bit by bit, my commitment to greenness was being chipped away, not least when an anti-car activist of my acquaintance was espied taking driving lessons!

Now I don't know if global warming is true or not. We've had a few ice ages when no one was apparently around to cause them after all. And new motorway banks always seem to sprout up within weeks of the rock blasting, thus proving some kind of natural resilience. This doesn't mean I am a climate change denier, just an independent. Especially since I have noticed all the green taxes being levied by various governments make it somewhat expedient to carry on promoting that the world is in trouble. Well it may or may not be, but the world's management does not seem to be taking it seriously enough if so. Consumerism and built-in obsolescence is being allowed to continue unabated for starters. Countries are allowed to use carbon-offsetting to carry on polluting! For all our green pretensions we have never lived in a more materialistic or more throwaway age. Even buildings which used to last at least 100 years are constantly replaced with some in central London being bulldozed and rebuilt on average every 5 years. We have never lived in an age of greater global population. The list goes on of why it's hard to take the green thing wholly seriously for all the pious proseltyzing on the subject.

But to get back to basics, of course saving things and not wasting them is a good idea and absolutely fits into the 'good ideas box'. We should value earth's resources more than we do and not take them for granted. We should think of future generations and the type of world we want them to inherit (ie one careful
owner, though it may be a bit late for that). We should strive to be reasonably
minimalist when it comes to too many possessions, unless of special sentimental value, in which case they are generally recycled from previous generations anyway. This is the type of brass tacks greenness I understand.

I am not and never could be an extreme green who advocates 'depopulation'.
And what is that anyway? I think they should explain themselves. To 'depopulate' suggests some sort of fascistic activity with sinister overtones once human beings are already born and possessed of human rights. Free contraception, properly distributed and encouraged around the world, and I'm on board!

As for me, my main personal contributions to greenness have been lifelong veganism (unless you count the air miles of my mangos and spirulina), minimal personal flights (around 2 a year), oh, and no ankle biters, despite the unhelpfulness of my GP.