Turning My Eco-Anxiety Into Action. C for Effort and F for Impact.
Tags: Climate Action, Ecoanxiety, Environment, Politics, Climate Change

Turning My Eco-Anxiety Into Action. C for Effort and F for Impact.

Hey-ho, could be worse. How would you grade my progress report?

Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

Have I been eating less meat and dairy? Have I gone vegan?

It’s 2020 and I’m reducing dairy. I usually have a generous pouring of organic milk with granola on mornings. Goodbye to that. Farewell to a habit of tea with added milk. Hello to lovely herbals that stand strong without any milk at all. That’s how I’m going to reduce my dairy consumption. Tea with milk will become an occasional treat.

And I’m not replacing milk with processed almond or soy or oat or rice or ANY substitute. I eat almonds, soy, oats and rice – but I like them solid.

In 2018–2019, I reduced how often we cook lamb and beef in favour of chicken, since chicken rearing impacts the environment less. Though I’m growing two teenage boys, one of whom goes to the gym four times a week, I decided some years ago that we won’t buy more meat as they grow. From a health point of view there’s no need, so the same quantity of meat will just go a longer distance each week. If we run out of meat before the next grocery shop, we can have a meat-free meal.

A generous helping of well-seasoned home-cooked lentils, kidney beans, black beans or black-eyed peas works well as a source of fibre, protein, and minerals, filling in any gap created by eating less meat.

I have not gone vegan and I’m not convinced I should. Going vegan may be right for you however. But that’s a discussion for another article.

Have I been buying less clothes?

If you saw me every day of every week you wouldn’t bother to ask. I’ve had an economical wardrobe all my life. That doesn’t mean I buy cheap clothes. It means I buy clothes that I wear till they aren’t fit to be worn — and I clothes-shop on an as needed basis. At home, I still wear items that are older than my marriage — and I’ve been married more than twenty years.

I’ve passed on clothes from my elder son to his younger brother all his life. I’ve accepted second hand items from a friend’s older son for my eldest and saved money in the process (He wore one of those winter coats for four years!). I buy school uniform pieces in excellent condition for my six year old at their school’s frequent second hand uniform sales. I’ve never bought a summer uniform dress for her new. Why spend £10 or £15 on something you can pay 50p for? Especially when you might only need it for two months anyway!

I buy my own clothes new — but given that I don’t grow much anymore and I can wear them forever, I allow myself that.

Am I recycling plastic?

Seeing baby birds on nature documentaries unable to fly because the plastic they mistook for food makes them too heavy; seeing the rubbish found in the bellies of whales; knowing our food supply and even human mother’s milk is contaminated with micro-plastic; all this motivates me to direct as much plastic as possible into recycling and out of dumps and water ways.

When the Ocado delivery person brings my groceries they take any plastic grocery bags for re-cycling into new ones but just last week the delivery man was explaining that they aren’t allowed to take other plastic bags that may have the recycling sign, e.g. packaging for toys and the thicker quality plastic bags that the UK groceries call Bags-For-Life, so …

…I may need to collect those separately and drive down to the local depot in my petrol-burning car. Or I could take the diesel-burning bus to the local depot. Going by bus would reduce the number of petrol-burning cars on the road by one, for perhaps half-an-hour.

Every week we collect ironed shirts from a family business ten minutes drive down the road. They return our shirts on hangers, under a plastic protective cover. For a year, I’ve intended to do something about this. I already return the cover for re-use but I could do better than that. I could switch to more durable fabric options. Or we could iron our own shirts at home, burn some calories and reduce our driving all at once.

What are the odds that we’ll switch to ironing our own shirts by next weekend?

Funny how feeling motivated and understanding the problem doesn’t automatically cause me to change as many behaviours as I possibly can, as fast as I possibly can! What a complex irrational creature I am! That’s why I need systemic changes in laws and regulations via politics. My individual action and yours will always be self-limited, even with our best intentions.

Am I refusing plastic?

I began to shun the expensive (it adds up) pointless purchase of single-use water bottles about 18 years ago and I’m always annoyed with myself when I need to buy a plastic bottled drink on a long outing. My coffee cup was actually made from recycled single-use coffee cups. How cool is that?

If I don’t bring enough bags to the grocery store I just take the extra items ‘unbagged’ to the petrol-guzzling car and pop them in the trunk.

That car again. It seems to turn up everywhere with all that petrol being burned every time. Surely, I didn’t start its engine just to pop into the grocery story? Surely, I batch my errands to reduce my driving time?

Yes in fact, I do. Batching errands is also good for daily productivity.

Am I planting trees? Am I using Ecosia?

Sadly, I’m not planting trees. As a tenant, I’m expected to maintain the garden landscape, not alter it. But I can look out for volunteer opportunities to plant trees away from home and I will try Ecosia this year. Ecosia is a search engine that supports the planting of more trees, the more we use it. It seems to work as an extension to Google Chrome and the site tells you how many trees Ecosia’s actually planting.

I could grow my own kitchen herbs without breaching my contract with my landlord though. That would reduce my consumption of little recyclable plastic bottles or glass bottles too, while adding in a minuscule way to the carbon capture effect of greenery.

Am I running an energy efficient home?

Not really.

Actions I must take this year:

Favour energy efficient light bulbs on purpose. (I might be buying them by accident. I don’t even know!) Avoid having the boiler on by default on evenings when no one needs a bath. Avoid pre-heating the oven for longer than needed.

Actions I can’t take this year:

I can’t install solar panels because we’re renting. Unless we undertake the cost of installing them in lieu of the equivalent cost of rent. That’s worth exploring. I can’t switch to a home that uses the Passivhaus standard for energy efficiency because I live in a country where political priorities have not favoured building new homes and upgrading existing ones with the objective of energy efficiency. We had a chance in December 2019 to elect a Labour government with policies that would revolutionise energy efficiency for housing stock across the country but sadly the Brexit wind blew that opportunity out of reach for another electoral cycle.

Am I driving less?

What’s lost in taking the train or bus is time. But is it really lost if I have a good book with me? I can’t read when I’m driving and I’d rather be reading. I’m reading Preti Taneja’s ‘We That Are Young’ right now and it beats burning petrol by 100:1.

I’m consciously driving less but it takes a more organised, thoughtful, efficient me to drive as little as possible.

Yesterday, I could have replaced about 40 minutes of drive time with two train journeys but if I missed both of those trains my entire journey could be delayed not just by the extra walk time or train journey but by a whole hour. They run twice every hour so the odds of missing them are high. The extra reading time would have been great but what about my main work that day, the chapter of my novel I wanted to write? So I went by car.

My errand wrapped up earlier than expected and back at home did I get straight to work on that chapter? No. I wasted about an hour on unplanned social media time first — so I might as well have taken the train.

(The pathetic truth is my reading the love and hate tweets for and against the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Harry and Meghan, did nothing for the environment or for writing that chapter).

Do I buy local?

I consciously choose UK suppliers over non-UK ones when ordering on Amazon. I consciously buy UK meat and dairy for the most part (but that’s easy because it’s widely available, no cheers there).

But we buy bananas weekly that come all the way from South America and the Caribbean.

Either we stop buying bananas — or feel guilty till ships and planes go green. Would it be energy efficient to grow tropical fruit in artificial environments in temperate countries? Wouldn’t we be undermining the economies of the Global South if we stopped buying their coffee, cocoa, avocados, coconuts and bananas?

Yes, it’s complicated. But buying local does reduce the carbon impact of transporting food over long distances. Local community co-op style food production could make it easier to buy local — with bonuses of stronger, healthier communities producing food together, but that’s a vision for another article.

Am I reducing food waste?

Our fridge and freezer are each as high as my hips so it’s hard to buy more food than we can eat. When my daughter is persuaded to eat the ends of her sliced bread, yes we’ll be doing even better. So our food waste consists more of peelings, seeds, tea bags and egg shells than edible or spoiled food that never got eaten. Meanwhile, our council sent us a leaflet to assure us the food waste they collect goes towards generating electricity for the grid and compost for farmers. So that’s all good news.

Am I political?

Hell, yes! You must have noticed. I’m political at every opportunity. It’s a lack of political will and long-term thinking that got us into this mess. Only a politics guided by evidence and compassion, a politics that believes the mammoth task of re-building our energy supply, economies and communities to new and necessary green standards is possible in the first place; only such a politics can facilitate the systemic changes we need.

This story of how I’ve been doing on these ten aspects of individual climate action was inspired by Theo Sheppard’s :

Our conversations and actions don’t amount to systemic change but they signal to business, investment and politicians that we, the people, are ready for change. We know we don’t have a lot of time left.