Joanne Black
When it comes to saving the planet, you can do it one shower at a time.
In my supermarket this week, a customer was chiding a staff member because she wanted to weigh something without the packaging, but had been told it needed to be in a plastic bag. “You’re anti-green,” the customer said, accusingly. This argument might have carried more moral weight had I not seen her afterwards getting into an SUV.
There’s the rub. We each think our own green contribution, which is often nothing more than taking out the recycling, is useful, but that other people, including the 1% and the whole of the Third World, are not pulling their weight.
But it is we Westerners who are the problem. We buy things we don’t need, then buy a copy of Marie Kondo’s book to tell us how to get rid of it all, and drive private cars, fly, waste food and consume masses of energy. In other words, live normally. Much of the environmental damage in the Third World occurs to meet First World consumers’ demands.
After giving this some thought, I have come to the inevitable but dismal conclusion that the most effective way for each of us to reduce our environmental impact is to kill ourselves.
It would sure beat taking reusable bags to the supermarket as a way of reducing our carbon footprint. But, like Winnie-the-Pooh banging his head as he comes downstairs, I’m sure there must be a better way, if only I could think of it. A friend’s suggestion that I could kill other people, instead, was not helpful.
In the meantime, I have decided to save the world by starting with my shower. Somehow, it has 12 bottles in it, none of them for cleaning the shower. Eight belong to my teenage daughter. Eight bottles of toiletries is not hygiene, it’s chemical warfare.
My shower goal is to reduce its contents to a cake of soap and a bottle of shampoo. Obviously, I first need to get rid of my daughter. Here we go again: it’s always someone else’s fault, and the answer should not involve dispatching people.
During a Kiwi friend’s recent stay, I noticed the butter kept disappearing from the kitchen bench. At first, I wondered if my friend was secretly consuming it, but no. Each time it turned up in the fridge, and I remembered that in New Zealand, you can’t leave butter unrefrigerated or within a day it will be rancid. Here, despite a centrally heated house, the butter sits out all the time and, like the infamous American white bread that would need no modification to support people on a journey to Mars, handily it never goes off.
However, US butter makes my baking fail, so for baking I buy Finnish or Irish butter, which are the only other options in our supermarkets.
If I could buy New Zealand butter here, I would. Doubtless, generations of Kiwi trade officials have had their spirits and careers broken trying to give US consumers exactly that choice.
American butter wrapping lists the ingredients as “Cream, salt”, and “contains milk”. These are the same ingredients as in European butter – yet European butter goes rancid if left unrefrigerated. So, why doesn’t American butter go off? Perhaps it is genetically modified. I feel I should care more, rather than merely being mildly curious. Instead, I buy both types – the going-off kind and the kind you could take to Mars.
Eight bottles of toiletries is not hygiene, it’s chemical warfare.