Saving the Planet
Yup, as a species we are big trouble, and we are in big trouble. We’ve pretty much damaged the planet—atmosphere, water, and soil—beyond repair. We’ve known it for decades, and we’ve known that it was Western technology and culture that were largely responsible. In 1970 when I was in Mr. Shaw’s grade five class at Highland Public School in Galt, Ontario, we did units on pollution and overpopulation and the FLQ crisis. I learned how quickly a supposedly peaceful and happy country could tip back toward the war my parents had lived through. I learned to be angry at people who threw their garbage out their car windows onto the highway. I learned to be scared about not having enough clean water and food if we used up and ruined too many of the world’s resources. Mr. Shaw was a wonderful teacher, and I’m glad he told us some important truths.
I expect that I changed a lot of my ways of interacting with the world because of Mr. Shaw, then also David Suzuki, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gwynne Dyer, and the Green Party and others. I don’t own a car, though I do accept rides and occasionally rent a gasoline-powered vehicle. I don’t eat many animal products. I buy used clothes—but new shoes every couple of years. I wash my dishes by hand: the equivalent of a full dishwasher in only 5.5 litres of hot water. I haven’t used laundry detergent since 1997 (really! the water and agitation will clean your clothes just fine in cold water, unless you’re an auto mechanic). I don’t own a clothes dryer—I use a rack.
Those of us who live comfortable food-sufficient urban lives and who want to stop climate change and save the planet often do the minimum we can in order to make our consciences quiet. We recycle paper and plastic. We buy hybrid or electric vehicles. We use LED lights and seal our windows. Maybe we donate some money to good causes, vote for candidates who espouse environmentalism, or show up to protests against pipelines. Is it going to be enough? I don’t think so. We need to do more than whatever we each currently consider a sufficient level of action.
In Lent in 2020, I was taking part in a challenge through my church not to buy any single-use plastic for forty days. My biggest challenge was cheese, I confess. I stopped going to Subway once every week or so because the servers had to put on single-use plastic gloves to make my sandwiches, and I didn’t feel right about that. (I know, the ingredients were likely delivered to the store in boxes and palettes wrapped in cling film, and so on back through production.) I thought that it was definitely possible to cut down my contribution to the more than 150,000,000 tonnes of single-use plastic just from packaging manufactured worldwide each year—only 14% of which actually get recycled and only 2% recycled effectively, according to the UN (see 2016’s https://www.unep.org/resources/report/single-use-plastics-roadmap-sustainability, p. 22 of full report in English). I was rather depressed when I realized that even if we recycled all our current plastic effectively and never made any more, those molecules are all still going to be around in a thousand years causing harm to ecosystems. But I felt slightly hopeful.
Then suddenly in the middle of March 2020, the possibility of improvement seemed much further away, as packaging ramped up to record levels and single-use plastic use soared. It’s a lot harder nowadays to avoid packaging. Our plastics manufacture must be increasing at ever more alarming rates.
I assume that “how did the pandemic change you?” and “what will you keep from how you did things during the pandemic?” are now questions most of us hear a lot. I did try to make my life less product-oriented and plastic-enclosed. Like a lot of middle-aged and older white women, the big thing I did was make sourdough bread every week. I’ve given that up now because I live by myself and that was too many carbohydrates, with bread plus things made from the discard such as crackers and pancakes.
But there are some things I changed about my lifestyle that I’m continuing with and that also help me walk more gently on the planet. At the beginning of the lockdown, when people were oddly panicking about toilet paper, I said “but you don’t need to use toilet paper!” Then, months later, I finally asked myself “why are you still buying toilet paper, then?” And I stopped. I now use a cloth—an old handkerchief or a builder’s blue towel, usually—then rinse it out after use, wash my hands, and throw the cloth in the laundry once a week. Don’t be shocked! It’s not gross, and it keeps such a lot of paper out of the garbage system. When we went back to working in person at Simon Fraser University, I brought a cloth and a ziploc bag to the office to use there. Now I’m going to keep one in my knapsack for when I’m neither at home nor work.
Another change I made to my lifestyle during the pandemic was to make my own shampoo and cut my own hair. I’ve gone back to getting a haircut once per semester, because I usually can’t get the back of my head to look right by myself, but I’ll continue making shampoo and keeping it in a reused jam jar. The recipe is truly simple: ¼ cup liquid soap (I don’t make my own yet, but use my organic dish soap), ¼ cup water, and ¼ teaspoon vegetable oil (I use canola). Shake it gently before use, then pour a little into your palm. It doesn’t lather and it isn’t perfumed, but it does a fine job cleaning my hair!
I keep on simplifying my life and my spending, even in light of increased packaging. The lesson I want to offer is that you can always do more than you think you can: choose little things that will make a genuine difference to the planet and keep adding one or two more each year. If you’re not ready to give up toilet paper, try giving up laundry detergent for a month and see what you think. If you’ve got a stain, you can dampen the cloth and rub some soap into it before washing. But really, laundry detergent is mostly bubbles, perfume, hydrogen peroxide to bleach your clothes, and a bit of blue dye to fool your eye into thinking your whites are whiter. You don’t need it. Do a little more for the planet each year, leave a little less garbage on it, try to buy less plastic, and maybe we can all feel a bit more hopeful.
And thank you, Mr. Shaw: it was a pleasure to be in your class, and I learned a lot from you.