Let’s not scorn imperfect progress

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Imperfect progress is often the best we can achieve. When it comes to our effect on this planet, we are increasingly being urged to reduce our carbon footprints.

The case is strong. Actually it’s compelling.

Those who deny the significance of climate change are wrongheaded.

But let’s not deny, even so, that as the sense of urgency becomes increasingly heightened, and what used to be encouragements increasingly sound, to some ears, shrill and hectoring.

One upshot has been evident in recent times; the charge that the activists are themselves carbon users to the extent that makes them hypocrites.

It was rolled out against Riverton-based Environment Southland councillor Robert Guyton, on the basis that he drove to meetings in Invercargill.

Similarly, the oil protesters who travelled from Dunedin to Invercargill by cars to stage an event protesting OMV’s offshore oil drilling have copped the same criticism. As if the fact that they weren’t able to waft around the country held aloft by nothing more than their own fine words was treated as if it was proof, somehow, of the sheer impracticality of all they were seeking.

Fact is, as a letter writer in today’s edition of The Southland Times points out, the protesters came in vehicles ranging from fully electric to hybrid to carpooled to minimise the number of vehicles used.

And Guyton’s credentials as someone adopting a legitimately green lifestyle are nothing if not strong.

Both he and the protesters make the point that, as one correspondent says, there’s no Carbon Jesus who has attained a state of perfection – but this hat cannot fairly be used as a shuddup to those who in word and deed are working to improve our collective performance.

Which, you may notice, isn’t easy. In many respects it comes down to simplifying our lifestyles but as travellers and consumers – and as a nation making its living on international markets while sited far away from most of our markets – the lines can be hard to draw.

Even with the best will in the world, we can’t expect to know simply on the basis of intuition what best practices are. We need to be willing to look askance at advice coming from all sides.

The Southland Times recently wrote of a business providing milk in glass bottles to retailers. But it still contained dairy, so on that basis the critics railed. A shopper tried changing to almond milk, only to be confronted by a case that it, too, is bad for the planet. The move away from single-use plastic supermarket bags, a good thing, was criticised as not as green as it appeared.

The famous Professor David Bellamy, an ardent and educated green, on a visit to Southland could scarcely hide his irritation at the sight of protesters gathered outside a New Zealand McDonalds outfit. For all their good motivation, he heaved a heavy, bearded sigh at the sight of them each wearing jeans. Cotton, he lamented, was among the world’s most destructive crops, taking thousands of tonnes of irrigation water and extravagant amounts of pesticides and herbicides to produce a single tonne.

We seem to be particularly sensitised nowadays to nothing so much as hypocrisy. Which is OK, in fact it’s good, provided we don’t sling that reproach to use, lazily, as an argument against incremental progress.

Even with the best will in the world, we can’t expect to know simply on the basis of intuition what best practices are.

The Southland Times recently wrote of a business providing milk in glass bottles to retailers. But it still contained dairy, so on that basis the critics railed.