I have just been inspired by Leo Hickman‘s book, A Life Stripped Bare[1] and I am motivated to do an ethical audit of my own world. I don’t know whether this will be an opportunity for great smugness, or the cause of further fretting about the daily damage I do to the planet. Probably both.
I have always been known to be a bit of a hippy, which I found harsh when I was at school, busily trying to fit in. These days I don’t give a flying organic fig what people think, and if they think less of me, then I think less of them, so there. I really did empathise with Leo’s conflict between annoyance that other people don’t make the same efforts to be ethical and green, and feelings of guilt whenever you find you just don’t want to deprive yourself of that flight to america/designer t-shirt/mobile phone upgrade.
I’ve mentioned before that I believe we should all take the future of our planet a damn sight more seriously than we do, and that it is everyone’s responsibility to try to reduce the impact that they have on this earth. That’s one opinion that I would never try to soften. Since I started working for my present company about three years ago, I’ve become more and more upset by the sheer amount of tat in the world, and it is my one-woman mission to reduce that. If I have to make you feel guilty to achieve this, then so be it.[2]
I do also try to uphold general principles about ethical living, including gaining more awareness of the behaviour of big organisations; financial institutions, and food producers in particular. So in the footsteps of the Mighty Leo, whose example is so very sound, I will do my own ethical audit. Yay, content! I do promise that this is not purely to make you all feel guilty about your lifestyles. I think everyone has an ethical boundary, and perhaps we should respect other people’s boundaries, while trying to set a good example ourselves. For example, I can understand why someone would choose to be a vegan, but I personally find that veganism doesn’t push the right ethical buttons. For one thing, I generally disapprove of manufacturing synthetic products (like mock duck, fake fish, etc) where perfectly good natural ones exist. Meanwhile my vegan friends (who I like very much), disapprove of my willingness to consume animal products. The fact that I don’t particularly want to give up pepperoni is covered in paragraph 2, above.
As a Quality Management Consultant, I used to advise clients not to implement anything until a preliminary audit had been carried out, thereby starting the process from the lowest possible baseline. They generally found this a depressing way to go about things, because they would get a report of all the areas in which they needed to improve, and it seemed like a mammoth task. But lo! said I. I have a whole load of systems just waiting to be released into your company, and everything will be better in two ticks, and you’ll have your ISO 9000 certificate before you can say free lunch? to an auditor. Now here I am commencing an audit long after starting to live what I already consider to be a reasonably ethical lifestyle; which means that not only will I have plenty of opportunities to be smug, but also the steps I need to take to go further along this road will be bigger, harder, and require more investment. I have already done the easy things.
I started off by measuring my carbon footprint, using three different carbon calculators. The one linked is the best, and not because it gave me the lowest reading, you damn cynics. It was the most detailed, but still didn’t cover things like food shopping (on which I would fail badly). It told me that I am responsible for 4.48 tonnes of Co2 emissions per year, which is only very slightly below average. How disappointing. So in fact there might be loads of room for improvement; or I need to go back and look again at the estimated mileage that I entered. Anyway, my plan is to reduce this further, and to calculate it again at the beginning of January. I would like to get it down to 3.5 tonnes.
Over the next few weeks I will write about each step of the ethical audit, including what things I’m already doing, and what action I want to take next. This series will be interrupted by the Aforementioned Plan, along with the daily linkscrape, and whatever other random witterings I feel like throwing at you. Read it or not, I don’t care.
Hahahahahahaha.
Superb. “A life-striped bear”. I sense a book deal in the offing.
I’m going to take the bloody emission test thingy, ok? Does it include methane and other greenhouse gases? I have two small but efficient producers of biogas which might push up my index.
Interesting. I did the “household” option and got a result of 7.25 tonnes per year which I was of course thinking required me to be slung instantly into the outer darkness being on the way to double your result… but then I compared to the national average and that turns out to be 10.22 tonnes per year. So I’m confused. Feeling slightly smug, but confused.
Ah, I did the individual option; I should have mentioned that. I’m not sure how they would differ, because it asked lots of questions about my household.
I did the household audit thing, and it came out really well, except for transport. But then, it didn’t seem able to cope with the entire “commuting by train” thing either, so shrug
All told our household worked out to be about 7.5-8 tonnes, most of which was transport (due to two cars, and now living in the back-end of nowhere). Not bad – considering we’re on oil central heating (which I always understood to be one step off burning tyres to keep warm), I thought we’d be much worse than we are.