Walking the walk

Had it been written up in a scientific journal, the experiment’s title might have been: “The Implications and Effects of Attempts to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions in an Average American Household.”

A year and a half ago, after much discussion and some trepidation on my part, my husband and I agreed to reduce our carbon footprint. We donated our second car, a 13-year-old junker with a failing radiator and no interior upholstery on the roof, to charity. We’re both retired and have flexible schedules, so with some maneuvering and teamwork, we thought we could easily satisfy our transportation needs with one car.

We were wrong. Or to put it more accurately, I was wrong. I missed my independence and began to feel penned in and inconvenienced. It turned out that I didn’t want to walk the walk—I preferred driving.

I am not proud of my resistance to a lifestyle change that would have potentially defied this fossil-fuel-addicted automobile culture. I fashion myself an “environmentalist,” don’t I? And yet in frequent discussions with my husband, I found myself saying, “We’re not going to save the world by giving up a car. What about people who drive Hummers, or travel a couple of hundred miles to go to a football game? One less car on the road isn’t enough to make a difference.”

Which brought up the essential question—to what degree is each of us responsible for what happens to the planet and all its living creatures, including human beings? Is there such a thing as an insignificant action? And to what degree are the larger forces responsible for the perilous situation in which we find ourselves, nearly on the brink of collapse?

Consider these statistics: As a country, we use 50 million tons of paper annually, consuming 850 million trees. Every year, 27 million acres of tropical rainforests are destroyed—that’s 74,000 acres a day, 3,000 acres per hour, 50 acres per minute. More than 20 million Hershey’s Kisses are daily wrapped in the equivalent of 133 square miles of aluminum foil. Junk mail creates 4 million tons of waste annually, 44 percent of it going into the trash unopened. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2005 Americans tossed 1,500,000 pounds of computers, TVs and other electronics. When this e-waste is “recycled” in underdeveloped countries, it releases toxins like lead and cadmium. China builds two new coal-fired power plants each week and the country’s carbon dioxide emissions will reach 8 gigatons a year by 2030, which is equal to the entire world’s CO2 production today.

These gruesome figures lead me to think that what I do as an individual cannot possibly make as much difference as what corporations and governments can do to reverse climate change. The environmental movement has, at times, put the onus on the individual to clean things up, rather than on the forces that create the problem in the first place—capitalism, corporations and institutions.

Unless we have true choices, we’re doomed. Choices like automobiles that run on alternative fuels (not made from food, as is ethanol), easily accessible public transportation systems, policies that hold corporations accountable for the resources they deplete and the pollution they create, sweeping reforms to eliminate practices that compromise our food and water, incentives to individuals and corporations for innovative green technologies, and an end to Big Oil’s grip on government policies.

Paul Hawken, in his inspirational book, “Blessed Unrest,” put it best when he said that effective reversal of environmental damage cannot be realized “by any mechanism that depends on support from institutions that benefit from the status quo. Efforts must continue to be directed to bring about institutional change, but such efforts cannot succeed unless people reexamine how they behave and consume in their own lives.”