Hi Everyone,
If you don’t like the title, you probably won’t like the content either. This is what I mean.
Do you remember a simplier time, life? It was twenty plus years ago when my daughter took a school bus to and from elementary school. She was happy everytime I picked her up, or dropped her off until a growing number of children in her class were being picked up and dropped off everyday. As each year passed more children were being chauffeured and the line of cars wrapped around the block grew.
Twenty years ago the Internet was limited to limited online shopping and online banking. Back then most women watched HBO’s, Sex In The City, for entertainment. Cell phones in North America were big, bulky and expensive. No one in North America had text messaging, email capabilities, or banking on their phones. Europeans had text messaging, SMS, decades before any North American and they put that to good use. Children as young as 6 or 7 would commute to and from school on public transit and text their parents when they arrived. Few European children got or get chauffeured to or from anywhere.
Let’s flashforward to when my daughter and I are living back in Canada. She came home from high school and told me that the large majority of the students in her class have never been on public transit and have no idea how it works. Shocked and disgusted I asked her what she meant and she told me again. She said because their parents, or someone, has driven them to wherever they needed to go, including school, some of the kids in her class have never taken public transit. Walking anywhere, even for teenagers, wasn’t an option.
Let’s flashforward again to last Friday. It was the day that cities around the world had people, the large majority of them students, protesting their governments’ lack of climate change policies. Really? Perhaps we should consider John F. Kennedy’s saying, “It is not what your country can do for you, but it is what you can do for your country”. Before we start accusing governments of what they aren’t doing, maybe we, or the large majority of us, should consider what we are doing. This is what I mean.
If you online shop more than a few times a year shame on YOU!! Do you have any idea how bad that is the for planet? Let me inform you. First whatever you think you need has to be made and get from the manufacturer to a distribution centre. It is generally driven there in a truck which will be packed so tightly there won’t be room for a piece of paper. Then whatever you think you need has be unloaded and then driven to a place in a large distribution centre. Then whatever you think you need is ordered by you and someone drives around the large distribution centre, picks it, tags it and drives around the large distribution centre until their “car” is full. They drop off whatever you think you need for someone to scan, and packs it into a box which is far too large. Because the box is too big, bubble wrap is placed around whatever you think you need with maybe a bit of paper. Then whatever you think you need is put on a truck. If you believe that whatever you think you need is needed right away, it will be put on a truck that will not be full. In fact there may be room to fit a large sofa, but fret not, you will get whatever you think you need as soon as humanly possible.
For anyone who doesn’t know, it takes a growing amount of human energy and natural resources like water for hydro electricity, trees for cardboard and paper and oil for all the plastic of the bubble wrap to process all of those online orders. And a growing amount of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, etc., come from the vehicles that deliver whatever you think you need to the distribution centre and to your door.
Now if you want to argue that whatever you think you need will be delivered to a distribution centre of the store you are shopping at keep in mind that it will normally not be repackaged. And it will not be delivered to the store in a half empty, truck. That truck, and the products it will deliver will be tightly packed to save on packaging and to save on gas, labour and energy overall. Sure you might drive to the store/mall but you would most likely buy more, or do more than one thing and not be on a first name basis and know the personal life of the delivery person.
So if you want to save the planet, stop, or cut back, on your online shopping, use public transit, and stop blaming governments for what you think they aren’t doing because they can’t control how much you decide to kill the planet, you do. And just as a head’s up, it takes anywhere from 500 to 2,600 litres of water to make ONE T-shirt. Instead of, IMHO, teaching students how to protest, when they really should be in school, teach them to save the planet.
Thank you for reading, A. Rebel’s Rant! ;D
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