Road Trip I

[dewline]

I am starting to feel guilt over having gone on two family road trips across Canada as a teenager.

Ecological issues involved. Also, exhaustion.

More on different topics tomorrow.

Comments

[sabotabby]

I'm not feeling guilt over these sorts of things. Guilt is not generally a productive emotion. When the 100 companies responsible for 71% of carbon emissions start taking steps to reduce theirs, or governments take their supposed rhetoric seriously, or even when I stop hearing people who refuse to make the slightest lifestyle shifts tell me they're voting Green whilst shovelling a steak into their mouths, maybe then I'll feel guilty for things I have done/did as an individual.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Guilt for individual (or small interlocked group) actions is counter productive for things that require collective action.

Don't sweat the small stuff

[frith]

Cross-country road trips are a fabulous way to truly appreciate the width and diversity of the Canadian landscape! An airplane ride does not do the country justice. A cross country round trip cost what, 20 fill-ups? And divide that up by the number of occupants in the car. Now I fill my tank about once a month, but I avoid driving and I suspect the average car owner refuels a lot more often. So if I make a few wild assumptions, if you've avoided using a car for a few months any time in your life since you've first acquired one, you've compensated for your CO2 contribution from those two road trips.

That said, there are lots of other things to ponder, such as single use anything, throwing out anything that still works, microplastics that get shed into the waterways every single time laundry gets washed, the environmental cost of mining/manufacturing/transporting anything bought and the environmental cost of storing movies/pictures/music/files on the "web" (storage centers require massive amounts of energy to keep the equipment cool).

I see a society so invested in a perfect, germ-free, tamper-proof, state-of-the-art bubble existence that no real changes are going to occur. We're just going to ban straws and plastic bags, have a few feel-good demonstrations and call it a day.

[notasupervillain]

I feel this way too a lot, but remember: our problems are collective and systemic, and real solutions will be collective and systemic. Individual change is valuable, but just me living a monastic life wouldn't fix the problem, and my happiness is important too.

If I can honestly say that I'm working to make things better on at least one metric of better, at least some of the time, it's okay that I don't do everything all of the time. I think.