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| Photo by Cristiano Firmani on Unsplash |
Snow
When writing for A New Decade I couldn't help but feel nostalgic.
In early 2010 we just found a spot at the airport daycare for our then 16 month old baby, so I could go back to work part-time for the airline.
Colin's vocabulary covered about 20 words. One of them was "no" and it wasn't that he disagreed with us - what he actually wanted to say was "snow", it was adorable.
Colin had only just gotten his very first pair of boots
So, ten years later he's gone through an estimated 70 pair of shoes and is not afraid to say no and mean it ;-)
Ten years later, however, we can forget about a white Christmas, and we're all about climate change.
16 year olds skip school in order to protest, and seasoned people go vegan and feel guilty about flying.
Currently Australia suffers from extensive bush fires, and while this is terrible and devastating, we've had environmental disasters ten years ago as well. Haiti earthquake, BP Oil Spill, the eruption of Iceland's unpronounceable volcano Eyjafjallajökul (thank God for the copy / paste function), just to name a few.
People cry and donate because koala bears are so cute, and they need to be saved. That's noble. However, the same people don't think twice about where their burger meat comes from. Or the fact that many, many people go hungry every day somewhere in Africa.
Aren't calves and cattle cute as well? They are being taken away from their Mom right after birth, because Mom's job is to produce milk that can be sold to us, the humans.
If you're a mother yourself, you know how you felt emotionally and physically right after having your baby, and how you would feel if they took your newborn from you.
So the heifers (female calves) lead a happy life until the day they are old enough to become pregnant and give birth back to back themselves. They start doing so before they are two years old!
And then there are the bobby calves. The babies that are less than 30 days old that represent a surplus to the dairy industry because they are bull calves. Rearing them would be too costly, so they are being taken away and slaughtered for low-grade products like hot dogs and frozen dinners.
The rest of the boys need to reach a weight of about 1,300 pounds (600kg), which takes 14 to 20 months. Their job is to produce meat that can be sold to us, the humans.
The live animal transportation vehicle and the slaughterhouse are no happy places.
Stress hormones cause a degradation of glycogen in the muscles, which affects the quality, mainly taste, color and shelf life of the meat. If your meat loses water as you brown it in your roasting pan, the animal probably died feeling stressed and frightened.
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| Photo by Federico Bana on Unsplash |
I am not an activist of any kind, I drive a car, I fly overseas once a year, I eat meat and *avocado several times a week, I drink bottled water, my shampoo probably contains hidden palm oil, and my son plays hockey in a heated arena.
*In Petorca Province, the part of Chile from which we typically import avocados, about 85 gallons (320 litres) of applied water are needed to grow one avocado. As a comparison, on average, a first world person uses 80-100 gallons of water per day for indoor home use.
I have to be honest, I don't want to think about these things too much. Because guilty conscience. As much a I like nuts and berries, I don't want to live like a Neanderthal! Plus they are not in season right now.
I just think every once in a while we should, though. Think about these things, that is.
Especially because koalas - and calves - are so cute.
If there's no bad bushfire going on, koalas have an enviable life, by the way. They snack on eucalyptus leaves that make them somewhat high, and they sleep up to 20 hours. They don't drink water because it's included in their food, so they don't even have to get up to pee.
One more thing: technically they are not bears, they're marsupials.
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| Photo by Akshay Chauhan on Unsplash |
For us who live in the Northern hemisphere where everything is available to us with very little effort, it is hard to lower our - for the lack of better words let's call it - life standards.
We need a place to live that is equipped with domestic engineering, we need a means of transportation, and if we have a choice we'd rather have a fancy car than just another lemon, we need smart gadgets that operate relying on **energy consuming technology including radiating cell phone antennas.
**One Google search consumes the same amount of energy as turning on a 60W light bulb for about 17 seconds. If 40,000 searches occur in a single second, that second alone uses 12 kWh in energy. That's the equivalent of running a ceiling fan continuously for one month.
We need our food, and we tend to ignore the effort that goes into the groceries we so easily grab at the market or order online.
Underpaid workers grow, pick and ship them for us from tropical or mediterranean regions, so we get to enjoy our superfoods at any time of year, even if there is snow.
Or no snow.
I might have gotten a little off topic here, but it was for a good cause.
So what little (or huge) thing do you do to reduce your carbon footprint?
Let me know in the comments below. Hope you come back for 14 more days of chill! In the meantime why don't you visit my fellow bloggers' posts over here.
Thursday, January 2: A new decade
Friday, January 3: Beautiful places
Monday, January 6: Is that chicken?
Tuesday, January 7: Show me the way
Wednesday, January 8: Naps
Thursday, January 9: Snow
Friday, January 10: Fri-Yay
Monday, January 13: Social Media
Tuesday, January 14: Cheddar
Wednesday, January 15: Dream on
Thursday, January 16: Popcorn
Friday, January 17: Snapshot
Monday, January 20: Last meal
Tuesday, January 21: Battle of the phones
Wednesday, January 22: Sign it in ink
Thursday, January 23: Spam
Friday, January 24: May I take your order?
Monday, January 27: A cocktail, if you will
Tuesday, January 28: Bring me to you
Wednesday, January 29: Oh, thank goodness!
Things to think about... thanks, Tamara :)
ReplyDeleteThis one took an interesting turn ... Haha.
ReplyDeleteI do tend to stay cognizant to the things around me that can have an effect on other things. Society as a whole has allowed things to get to this level. But there are little things we can do as people to lower our carbon footprint -- and that's what we truly should do, especially for future generations.
The problem for koalas is that they are already suffering terribly from chlamydia. It is decimating koala populations, so their numbers were already in steady decline (eg https://www.livescience.com/62517-how-koalas-get-chlamydia.html). Australia was already fighting for our koalas before the fires.
ReplyDelete