In case you didn’t know it yet, the Earth is careening its way towards disaster and the little changes we make in every day life may not quite be enough. We need to do more.
For someone who spends as much time in the outdoors as I can get away with, the effects of climate change has been pretty alarming. Some of it isn’t even awful at first impression. The last few years, for instance, we’ve been getting a ton of huckleberries during the summer. Which was surprising, because we didn’t in the first few years of moving out here. Later, I learned it was because we’ve been getting more snowfall than we used to. Just to put it into perspective, we’ve had more bad winters in the last five years than in the time since we first immigrated here.
And then of course in the summer, everything burns. I’ve adjusted our backpacking schedules because the last time we tried to leave the smoke behind, we couldn’t. This picture was taken somewhere east of Whistler (my party calls this lake THE ONE THAT KEEPS RUNNING AWAY, because the switchbacks made progress seem stagnant for a good three hours or so). I’d rather deal with the cold than the smoke, so now we’re pushing all our overnight hikes to later September and October.
I’m not sure what else there is to do on a personal level. When we were constructing our house, I was also taking courses in Green Building Technology, and I tried my best to keep the design as “green” as possible. We went with a square-shaped, two-story plan to minimize the footprint and materials used. Lots of windows so daylight can be utilized as much as possible. Metal roofing, which is more environmentally friendly, in a lighter grey colour to reduce the “heat island effect” (though arguably being surrounded by trees in the middle of nowhere I’m not sure if it helps all that much).
I tried not to cut so many trees, which was difficult because the neighbour wanted to, and made a big stink about the ones that might fall on his house, but we still have most of the original ones in the yard. PEX plumbing. Heat pumps. Finally, our house was prefabricated, which means most of the walls were built in a factory before being delivered on site, which reduced waste and clean up. I even considered installing solar panels (we had a few lying around that my dad acquired somehow), but decided not to because at that point we were bleeding money from the ears.
Cost is a big issue. Despite our commitment towards going “green,” money isn’t an endless resource, especially in our household where for too many years I had to find creative ways to feed a family to keep to our budget. Meat is expensive, but so are fresh vegetables especially if you have to buy them all the time (we do bulk groceries once a month). We had to drive a gas guzzling SUV for a couple of years because we needed to haul around 6 people (we figured since we only had the 1 car in our household, it evened out). Once we could afford to get rid of that car, we got a more gas efficient one…that has less seats. So my cousin got his own car. So now we’re a 2-car household.
We COULD live closer to the city where we don’t have to drive so much, except my husband’s career is outside the city and we left in the first place because we couldn’t afford to stay there. Public transportation is a huge issue out here, with buses only showing up once an hour outside of peak hours. I don’t drive; when I worked at the office, I dealt with public transportation even when it was four hours of travel a day. I just used it as an opportunity to plot stories in my head and sleep, but I can see why most people would rather not deal with it. As my husband once told me, it’s hard to put the responsibility on everyday folks who are just trying to survive.
And yet at the state of things as they are, we’re going to have to scramble to turn things around.
Happy Earth day, and remember to put pressure on the people who can make big, sweeping changes.
Good post.