Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher's Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids—and Everyone Else by Elizabeth Cripps

Author:Elizabeth Cripps [Cripps, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

Moderation, Not Materialism

Respect is—or should be—absolute. But what about the other things we do and use, day by day?

Recycle, reuse, turn down the heating, buy energy efficiency technology, buy green energy, conserve water, maybe drive an electric car—and boom, you’ve tackled climate change. That’s what governments would have us believe. Or so scientists Kimberley Nicholas and Seth Wynes discovered when they surveyed Canadian high school textbooks and government resources from the United States, Canada, and the European Union. Politicians not only like to make this all about individuals, they also like to advocate round-the-edges tweaks that won’t ruffle feathers among vested interests.8

That’s unfortunate because most of these aren’t the big-ticket lifestyle choices, as far as carbon emissions are concerned. There are four of those, according to Wynes and Nicholas: don’t fly, go car free, go vegan, and have one fewer child than you would otherwise have done. The last one is complicated—and we’ve discussed it already—so I’ll focus on the other three.

“Travel fresh” and “holiday local,” says grassroots movement Take the Jump, based on research by the University of Leeds on achieving sustainable urban living. Ditch the private car for cycling, walking, public transport, and ride-sharing, and take just one flight every three years. According to Founders Pledge, a global community of entrepreneurs who commit to give a portion of their personal proceeds to charity, shifting to an electric car saves two tonnes of carbon a year, while giving up your car altogether saves 2.4. Taking one return transatlantic flight comes at a carbon price of 1.6 tonnes. For an internal European flight, it’s 0.08 tonnes.9

When it comes to diet, it’s all about the plants, but not about all plants.

Not everyone advocates going completely vegan, but there’s a clear consensus that most people should eat more plants and a lot fewer animal products. The top carbon priority, according to Mike Berners-Lee, is cutting down on cow and sheep products, while you can help combat antibiotic resistance by not buying from farms that give preventative antibiotics to healthy animals. (If you’re wondering how you can tell, Berners-Lee is pretty blunt about that too: “It is fairly safe to assume the worst unless you know otherwise.”10)

But did you know that rice from flooded fields has twice the carbon footprint of the equivalent calories in oatmeal or potatoes or bread, and three times as much as maize? I didn’t, until I saw a study of nearly forty thousand farms, confirming it. And as smug I might like to feel as a vegan, I can’t. Not when dark chocolate has an average carbon cost of 2.3 kilograms per 50 grams.11

How our food gets to us matters too, though it’s not always as simple as “local good, everything else bad.” “There is no place for air freighted food in the twenty-first century,” says Berners-Lee. He recommends checking the country of origin, then figuring out whether the food would last long enough to travel by ship, train, or lorry. Bananas, apples, oranges, yes; strawberries, grapes, asparagus, no.

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