Helping or Hurting (Part 2)

I'm not the only one who must face questions about how best to go green and what the implications are of each decision made.

       I just finished reading David de Rothschild's "Global Warming Survival Handbook".  This delightful book discusses 67 ways to help stop climate change, and lists 10 additional ways to cope with a climate meltdown if all else fails (including buying a camel, and developing scaly skin). 

    But the very fact of the book itself raises some environmental questions. For example, although the book is 160 pages long, its content might have been reduced to a simple list of the 77 essential skills.  This might have been printed on perhaps three pages of paper, instead of 160.  Although it is printed on recycled paper, surely recycled paper should not be wasted any more than non-recycled paper.  

       To save even more paper, the contents might simply have been e-mailed or posted on a web site, thereby avoiding not only the use of paper, but also the electrical power required to print and manufacture the book. And consider the further environmental costs of transporting the book to bookstores and book distributors -- the fuel used to truck or fly it from where it is produced to where it is sold, the paper or plastic used to package it, and so on. And if you order it from Amazon, for example, there will be the further packaging and transportation costs of getting it to you. Don't get me wrong. It's a worthwhile book, but is it helping or hurting?

       And consider the life of the author, David de Rothschild, who Wikipedia calls an "adventurer and environmentalist".  I mean, it sounds like the guy has some noble causes in mind, but the fact is that he draws attention to them by skydiving, traveling the world, etc.  He might want to consider the environmental costs of these actions.  His own book points out that flying on an airplane is a highly effective way to "dump a whole lot of warming gases into the atmosphere really quickly". For all the good he is doing for the planet, he might do a whole lot of good simply by spending his life sitting really still.  Not that I mean to attack him. Indeed, I would be happy to marry the cute, smart, 30-year-old multi-millionaire. Sorry, Tom.  But his life choices do have environmental implications. And who knows exactly where the line should be drawn?

       I do not intend to spend the whole month questioning such decisions, however. And to prove my own commitment to change, I drove my healing body parts to the store yesterday to buy recycled paper towels and compact flourescent light bulbs -- using fuel and adding CO2 emissions to the atmosphere along the way, and carrying the items in plastic bags made only partially from recycled materials. I'll discuss these purchases in the future. 

       But I do hope the environment comes out ahead, in the end.