Make 'em sweat!

Ask yourself how much you appreciate your environment, starting with your home, a place wherein you feel comfortable, at ease, yourself. Your bed, once a pile of hay from the field beyond, now probably comes in various ships from China, the towel you dried your body with might be woven of cotton from Turkey, the furniture surrounding you could once have been made down the way but now might have sailed from Brazil, Indonesia, Romania.

This illustrates how we are all interconnected. You might have carved that bowl in India which holds the fruit I bought three hundred metres away, but which grew in the Caribbean. What you all eat in Argentina or the USA is changing the weather above my head, or perhaps not if you are sensitive to diet and Climate Change. This becomes important when you realise that the average kilo of beef consumed produces 40kg of greenhouse gasses, whereas a kilo of pulses (not soya!) results in less than a kilo.

Those flowers on your table, did they grow locally or were they shipped in from Kenya? If so, like the soft fruit you love all year round, they would most likely have been flown over, producing 800 times the CO2 than items which are transported by sea. That makes you stop and think. Local really is the answer and it’ll mean changing the things we consume, use, need. This year has well prepared us for change and if we treasure the place we live, there’s really no option, for not to do so will make changes you won’t be happy with.

There’s still time for things to improve, but only if we each realise it’s up to us, not governments, not scientists, not innovators with their ways to mitigate Global Warming. What we each do mounts up and as we are all interconnected, the force we have is enormous. Simple choices such as cutting down on our consumption of meat, buying locally, turning down the heating, consuming less, these actions are powerful if we all join in. Generally, politicians’ only concern is how we perceive them, not what we need or want, so that’s another tool we each have. We can make them sweat to reduce Global Warming.