I see there is some discussion on the blogs of environmental issues. As a lover of nature I am always interested in preserving the health and beauties of our planet. The problem is that there is often as much subjectivity as objectivity in our discussions. Man after all is part of nature; we are none other than one of the numerous species living on earth. Is an elephant knocking down a tree OK and a man cutting it down not OK?
Look again at your favourite landscape, are there not a few old stone cottages carefully nestled somewhere in the scene? But surely not a copper mine nor a gravel pit. Somehow we have decided certain human activities are OK and others not OK. But surely, unsightly as they may be, a pit or a mine do little real damage to our planet. The grand canyon is considerably bigger than most mines. Should we fill in the Grand Canyon?
On my journeys to Paris I cross the Beauce. It is the largest cereal growing area in Europe. Huge flat, treeless, hedgeless fields growing wheat, barley, sugar beet, maize. Each time I travel there are a few more eoliens powerfully turning their mighty blades. With about 30 so far, from a distance, they look majestic. I wouldn’t like to live next to one though. Just as the farmers are finally getting taken to task and required to reduce the nitrate pollution so that the villagers can again drink the water from their taps, so they wake up in the morning with these enormous noisy behemoths on their doorsteps. So is this the way to keep the Maldives above water? One country’s saving grace is another man’s polluted doorstep.
Well no it’s not actually. The thing about the environment is that we do what we want, not what we need to do. Sarah is courageously seeking to recycle her vegetable waste. To what gain? Filling a landfill with carrots and turnips is no big deal. The vegetable matter quickly decomposes and mixes with the soil. Yes there is the transportation to the tip but there is also the plastic bin to be manufactured and transported. Wouldn’t it be better for Sarah to cut out her frequent trips back to the UK? There we really do have CO2 and noise pollution with some NOX and SO2(3) as well. The massive cement runways at the airport with the inevitably polluted water runoff.
When I came to France in 1973 almost all journeys by plane arrived at Orly Sud, and you went to Orly West for onward travel. In 1974 the Camembert, Roissy 1 was opened and Orly Sud largely closed. Since then we have had Roissy 2 A,B,C,D,E,F,G. Many regional airports take international flights and are growing rapidly. And if you return to Orly Sud, what do you find? It’s chock a block with flights and being expanded.
Oh yes I know we all deserve a holiday. But when I raised recently on Shane Richmond’s blog the issue of the wasteful and abusive use of airplanes I received a solid round of insults with nobody supporting my opinion. Suddenly the consensus opinion that we should do something about the environment had disappeared. Is it really more important to recycle a few cabbage leaves than fight the ridiculous culture of excessive air travel?
For I know something about the ridiculous excesses to which air travel has gone. Having for two years arrived at Roissy airport at 6 am each Monday morning to start my weekly visit of an average of three countries. I was not alone in my exhausting Odysseys; at 6 am there is no problem of traffic on the péripherique, but there is a massive jam at Roissy as all the international managers take their early morning flights. Yes, with globalisation there has developed a business model of heavy centralisation which requires endless travel. An international group is run as if it is just one firm. But instead of simply walking down to the sales department you now take a flight to wherever.
Hand in hand with the evolution of this business model of centralisation has arrived the mainly English phenomenon of second homes in the sun with the frequent Ryanair flights to do the weeding and pick up some wine.
So if we are really serious about the environment shouldn’t we do something about this air travel? Hiking the cost of car travel is going to cause many problems for poor people but eliminating a lot of air travel is just going to slow down equity buyouts and restructuring as well as reducing the number of English in France. Not many downsides? Not for me, but for the readership of the Telegraph we would be attacking their very way of life. Back to recycling cabbage leaves.
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In a striking paradox, Sir Richard Branson has pledged the next 10 years' of profits from his train and airline services, an estimated $3 billion U.S., to fight global warming -- much of which is caused by jetliners such as his own. There would seem to be a much simpler and cost-effective solution but that, presumably, would not be a sound corporate move.
Meanwhile, the latest proposals for deregulating service between Europe and the U.S. are likely to result in dozens more airlines flying between the two continents with consequent lower fares and millions more travellers. It doesn't bode well for the planet.
Do you know what? I'm just so fed up with all this global warming, carbon footprinting, greeny stuff ... I'm fed up with it being rammed down my throat all day and every day - recycle this, recycle that, polar bears, early spring, late winter ... it just goes on and on.
Of course we must slow down the destruction (it cannot be stopped) but as you say, Richard, for every cabbage leaf, bottle, newspaper we recycle, how many new factories open up in China or India, for example? The beauty of our landscape is being destroyed by wind farms which serve to no purpose whatsoever except make a gross amount of money for the suppliers and the 'commune' that allows them to be built.
I am against this eternel travelling abroad (cooo, look, we can go to wherever for a fiver for the weekend) - what does one get out of a capital in a weekend trip - booze was cheap, food 'funny', couldn't understand the lingo, got my wallet stolen - sounds like a whole ball of fun, doesn't it?
Why do businessmen leap on 'planes to go to meetings? I'm sure a large amount of this form of travel is just an excuse - we live in a computer world - have they never heard of video-conferencing?
Maybe this is a British thing - living on an island. Living on the continent of Europe we are spoilt - excellent roads and train services that link cities in a far more civilised manner than Dan Dare or QuesyJet.
Billions should be invested in decent trains and tracks in England to get people off the road, the price of train travel should be attractive (cheap attractive, not expensive attractive), and in Europe the lorries should be put on the trains too.
I do my bit, like everyone else, but I shall soon become a complete anarchist if the Big Brothers of the world don't just shut up about my carbon footprints.
There's an excellent column in the Boston Globe today; well worth a look. You'll have to cut-and-paste this:
www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/03/21/what_american_sacrifice/
Or you could Google "Derrick Z. Jackson" and click on his latest column
Oops! Only half that extremely long url seems to have made it. It should be:
www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/ar
ticles/2007/03/21/what_american_sacrifice/
Yes It's a good article. The horrendous waste of energy by the US is appalling.
I always remember visiting a US colleague's enormous home with just three people living in it. There was a ginormous fully equipped kitchen. We ate take away off cardboard plates because nobody liked emptying the dish washer. At the end of the meal we emptied plates, cups, plastic knives, plastic bottles, plastic table cloth into a vast garbage bin.
Kitchen design is quite an art. It has to be based around handiness and never having to walk far to get a chopping knife. Those colleagues obviously had one that looked great but was totally user-unfriendly.
I am just a tiny bit cynical about the carbon footprint merry-go-round since that Channel 4 documentary on the influence of the sun...
I can't speak for the rest of Canada but Toronto has some excellent recycling programs in place, including plastic bottles now. And they're recently added a refundable deposit to wine bottles to encourage their return. Plus, the city hands out free composters to householders.
I agree entirely with how preposterous the size of many houses over here has become. But it can also be a matter of perception. My wife and I live in a small, old (by our standards -- 1885) terraced house downtown. We find it adequate for our requirements but do sometimes wish for a little more room. Our neighbours are a very traditional Portuguese family -- nine of them, three generations, in an identical house. They've told us they wonder sometimes what we do with all the space...
They may be enormous, but I'd love a huge American house! My chalet is in fact more than big enough but I have so much junk that we seem to trip over stuff all the time.
I saw a very interesting programme the other day about an organisation in New York (don't ask the name) and the members live on what they forage from dustbins...it was an eyeopener. Shops throw out perfectly good stuff as they have daily arrivals and don't have enough room to stock stuff. The guy who started this off said that New Yorkers throw away 50% of the food they buy. They had an open evening where members cooked food that they had collected - it looked delicious!
Louise That reminds me of my first visit to the US. I went to a university full of New York Jews, rich ones. I was with a friend and the American students arrived at breakfast, took four or five different plates of things and ate one or two only. The tables were chock a block with the food they didn't eat until the waiters cleared it awway.
So after a few days, instead of saying we were going 'to eat breakfast' we said 'we are going to leave breakfast'. Maybe it's still going on. The problem is there is big volume but no taste.
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