Helping the planet is hard work, if you do it right. | Photo: Bo Eide, some rights reserved
Society pays a token Earth Day tribute to the planet every April 22, as the internet fills with suggestions of quick, painless ways you can do things to make you feel better about your impact on the planet. And dont get us wrong: small steps are important. Putting your glass bottles in the recycling bin is a great habit to get into. Turning the light switch off when you leave the room, or closing the tap while youre brushing your teeth? Thats basic environmental hygiene.
But we all know better than to think thats all thats needed. When all of human society is based on increasing consumption of resources on a finite planet, downloading an Earth Day app or turning your avatar green isnt going to do that much to reduce your planetary footprint. Its like the campaigns for awareness of one ill or another. At some point, were all pretty much aware that the planets living systems are having trouble with our behavior. Its time to move past spreading awareness and on to getting things done.
So here are five difficult things you can do that will actually reduce your negative impact on the planet by a significant amount. None of them are particularly easy. Some of them might not be possible at all without reshaping society. But theyre actual, real, meaningful steps you can take to lighten your load on the planet. And theyre things you can keep doing after Earth Day is over for the year. In fact, thats the only way theyll help.
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Get offline and read a real book.
We might as well start with this one, seeing as KCET Redefine lives online. Its also arguably the easiest task on our list, if the least directly effective. Surfing the web has a carbon footprint, not just to run your computer and modem but the banks of computers and routers that constitute the Internet. On average, every minute you spend looking at a simple web page puts 1.2 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. That may not seem like much, but it adds up. One estimate has it that the worlds online denizens log 35 billion minutes online each month. Thats half a million metric tons of CO2 each year.
Your part of that total is pretty tiny, its true. But its still there. If youre online ten hours a day, thats a kilogram of carbon dioxide each couple of weeks. If youre an avid social media user, your presence online actually encourages others to spend more time online, either taking pleasure in what you post or wondering which giant corporation pays you to spout such nonsense. Getting offline reduces others incentives to spend time online.
And theres the equipment cost. The more processor-intensive websites get, the more we ask of our aging desktops and mobiles - and the more likely we are to add our two-year-old machines to the pile in the closet and upgrade. The resources used to build our newer and newer machines come at a significant cost to our planet, and - in the case of some resources like the ore coltan, to human rights as well.
Anything you can do to reduce your temptation to buy yourself the newest, fastest tech toys is a boon to the planet. Spending less time online isnt easy. (I continue to struggle with it myself.) But benefits to the planet will result. Plus, youll be able to spend more time outdoors enjoying that very planet.
The Harris Ranch feedlot | Photo: Chris Humphrey, some rights reserved
Give up bacon.
And, yes, other meat too, especially beef. You knew this one was coming, didnt you? In fact, this is probably one of the reasons youve considered spending less time online: every time you get involved in a discussion about the environment, or politics, or music, that one niece of yours will pipe up with some observation about the benefits of a plant-based diet. Who needs the buzzkill? I mean, bacon, amirite?
The sad truth is that your niece has a point. Even if youre able to dismiss the whole ethical issue of eating animals, the truth is that a heavily meat-based diet like the one we enjoy in North America comes at a steep environmental price. Its partly about what the economists would call inputs - the resources it takes to provide you with that burger. It takes water and land and other resources to grow plants. When we feed those plants to animals, we get less nutritional bang for our environmental buck than if wed just eaten the plants ourselves. It takes 16 times more water to grow a pound of beef than it does a pound of corn, for instance.
Thats the input. Theres also the output to consider. While much of the American public still pictures bucolic small farms as the source of their meat, more and more animal flesh these days comes from animals that spend at least part of their miserable lives in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), where theyre kept in close quarters and fattened up. Where animals are concentrated, so is their waste. A 1998 EPA study estimated that livestock in the United States produce 13 times as much effluent as all the nations human beings do, and most of that is produced at CAFOs, with predictable results. That effluent doesnt just include the urine and feces youd expect: it also includes the remains of about a third of Americas total antibiotic consumption, and thus a boatload of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
And given the overall aesthetic unpleasantness of CAFOs, they tend to be situated in poorer and more disenfranchised neighborhoods in rural America. (Less-affluent means more effluent, you could say.) Its one thing to think of bacon as a trendy snack. It kinda takes all the fun out of it to think of it as a thing thats produced by the One Percent creating intolerable living conditions for the 99 Percent. In the words of one researcher:
On the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina, families in certain rural communities daily must deal with the piercing, acrid odor
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Helping the planet is hard work, if you do it right. | Photo: Bo Eide, some rights reserved 
