Upon the gentle persuasion of my concerned roommate, I have begun reading "In Praise of Slowness" by Carl Honore. I think my housemate was concerned at the hectic and fast-paced rate of my lifestyle of late. It is true that I often rush through my days trying to do as much as possible, and end up with little time or energy to even cook a decent dinner at the end of the day.
But in addition to helping me realize I do need to slow down and perhaps slightly simplify my life, I've also made another realization: perhaps slowing down could save our planet?
We all tend to live lives that are driven by our wrist watches. We divide our time into 15-minute or 1 hour blocks of time dedicated to tasks, meetings, reports - I sometimes even have to schedule time to just think about things. We schedule the precious little time we have on weekends to cram in as much excitement and relaxation as possible in order to recharge enough for the next week. Time is always going too fast, and there never seems to be enough of it to get everything done.
As the population grows, there is a growing complexity in our lives. Our social interactions are more complex, our politics are more convoluted, our jobs are more diversified, our economies are more textured by the multitudes of different demands placed on it... All of this drives a frantic pace of keeping up or catching up.
We factory farm to produce enough food for us all at a cheap enough cost that everyone can afford it. We mass-produce music, clothes, furniture, and more in factories that maximize time and financial "efficiency" (aka by making things cheaply and poorly). We eat bad food at fast-food restaurants so that we can rush back to work for more meetings, or more shifts, or more report-writing. And what do we have to show for all this rushing around?
Crappy merchandise that breaks easily and creates more waste than we know what to do with.
Food that has lost a significant portion of its taste and nutritional value.
An economy that is stretched and strained, and precariously perched on the hopes that no one makes too big of a mistake in their mad dash to get things done (and clearly, someone(s) made a big mistake that turned our economy sour more recently).
But how does this contribute to climate change?
Factory farming is among the most environmentally destructive activities us humans are currently undertaking. It requires massive amounts of petroleum-based fertilizers, toxic chemical pesticides that spoil our fresh water, hormones that have effects on the whole foodchain (both ours, and the foodchains affected by the traces that end up in our waterways), and a monoculture of crops and beasts that are susceptible to viruses and disease.
Of course, to get from meeting to meeting, and from home to work in time, we have to drive everywhere, so we guzzle gas and spew out CO2 like nobody's business. We fly around from city-to-city because now even driving and trains isn't fast enough to satisfy the economically-driven need to show up for meetings in Ottawa at 9 am, and be back in Toronto for lunch at noon.
We push the demand for oil byproducts miles-high in order to have cheap, affordable products made from long-lasting (?) plastics that never break down when we are done with them. (Which results in giant heaps of garbage that we have no more room for and which cause methane gas to form and escape into the atmosphere).
The pace of our life is ridiculously dizzying, and is, I think to a large part, driving our massive consumption of greenhouse gas-producing materials.
If we could slow down, I wonder how much of a reduction in GHG emissions we could realize?
Imagine if we all ate local, organic food (think 100 or 200-mile diets)? Imagine if we were all able to work in the cities we lived in, and could walk or take public transit to work? Imagine a world where people actually USED the video-conferencing freeware that already exists today (think skype, jabber, Messenger), and no longer needed those short-haul flights so frequently (which also happen to have the biggest per-capita impact on GHG emissions)! Imagine reverting back to hand-crafted furniture and other products that were built to last, and not trash within a few years.
Taking more time to accomplish our tasks means they will be well-thought-through and less prone to mistakes. Families will have more time together and society will benefit greatly from this (without research to back it up, I believe stress is probably the greatest driver of dysfunction and abuse in families). There will be more time for leisure, sport, rest and relaxation. Governments will spend less on health care, and perhaps could invest more in public infrastructure that makes our cities more beautiful and functional to live in at a local level.
And then, on the occassion that you do want to take a long-distance vacation, we won't have to feel so guilty about our carbon footprint, because a mass population living a slower, local, organic lifestyle surely counteracts a vacation abroad each year.
Just a thought. I am really liking this Slow Movement idea more and more.
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