la vie ordinaire

drawing by Giulia Rosa

     Ah, my beloved topic, environmental issues. Again. A lot has changed over the past year since I last wrote about it. Now I see much more people talking about it in both social and traditional media, more and more 'sustainable' brands appear, we have catering and retail companies ditching plastic and even school strikes for climate. My approach has changed too.  Currently I see a lot of businesses profit from selling 'zero waste' products, such as flasks, metal straws and so on. They claim to be sustainable but they make money from people's desire to buy. If earlier I used to see ads of normal everyday things (e.g. cosmetics, clothes), now ads of stylish 'zero waste' lunch boxes, cotton buds, menstrual cups, solid shampoos, bamboo straws or tote bags pop up whenever I am online. And you know what? I want these items. My consumerism wants them. And it doesn't matter that I have an unfinished bag of plastic straws, used plastic bags and perfectly fine plastic lunch box at home. Heck, I do not even need cotton buds. I am a consumer and these businesses have just simply found a new niche to earn money by still manipulating our consumerism, others use this new wave of ecology as a marketing tool with greenwashing.
         The thing is that by now we have all heard how bad the straws are and we learnt to refuse them so now we feel proud. We feel like heroes. We bought a new stylish cotton tote bag instead of using those ugly old plastic ones we have at home. We might even sort our waste (without washing it though) and encourage others to do the same in order to recycle. Now we comfort ourselves that every step counts (it does, but...), that little is enough and we feel like we are finally saving the planet. Sorry, but we are not. You see, I thought that refusing that one straw was our goal, that it was enough, that removing a tiny bit of plastic from our life was what we needed to do. Yes, we very much still do, however that is not our goal anymore. Naive optimism doesn't do much. It protects us, protects our feelings and safe spaces in our heads, protects our fragile, little, anxiety-having selves and also creates an  illusion.
    We now have Greta Thunberg (you've heard of her, haven't you?), whose attitude I quite like. It's time to panic and act as if the house is on fire, she says. And... it kind of is. But what do we do? Of course, some of us cry about starving polar bears, agree that there is a huge issue, praise Greta and then next day...we happily go on with our lives. With one plastic straw less if we feel really moved perhaps. Now talking about Greta, I admire her as a person, her courage and determination. Many people say how amazing it is that a sixteen-year-old like her can be so inspiring, can encourage and educate world leaders about the environment crisis. I say that it is terrifying how we need a sixteen-year-old child to educate and attract our and world leaders' attention to a crisis of such extent. Children should be at school, not protesting next to the parliament building, say some sceptics. I  agree with them. It should not be children who protest in the cold. It should be our leaders who take action, react to the crisis first, inform and inspire other people without a child telling, no begging, them to. So why it is how it is?
     Well, humans are beings of lazy nature and taking action requires actually doing and changing something in your life (too complicated for us?). It requires effort and ,as you do not really see results, it is a little like fighting with windmills. We, being selfish, of course expect some kind of a reward for every little unpleasant and challenging action we take (money, preferably). But in this case there is no reward (apart from preserved, clean and safe Earth of course), it is absolutely unprofitable if you think short-term. How to make one do something, give up one's habits and comfort if one doesn't get anything back? With shock? The effects of shock are short-term though. So I don't know, but some say that it kind of requires to change our economic system. Or maybe technology will be our saviour? Maybe after some time we will invent a way to clean everything? Time. Time is key word here. Unfortunately we don't have much of it (if scientists' calculations are correct) . The ones who will sufer from the envirnoment crisis the most are future generations, so nowadays humans (mainly older ones) do not bother to even think about it. They won't have to suffer, they will be, well, dead. We are ignorant because we do not feel or see this crisis and we expect that we won't.  Politicians are ignorant because they depend upon ratings; doing something would be unprofitable (at first) and requiring sacrifice. Voters who think about their own benefit would not like that, so such innovative politician would be kicked out from his position after the next election.  Voters say that they care but as soon as environment - friendly proposal emerges, they protest against it.  Neeed an example? Newly proposed car pollution tax in Lithuania.   As we can see, our society is flawed, thus environment problems overlap with political, social and economical issues so they are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to solve.
      I am sorry for all the negativity but positive approach hasn't taken us anywhere. But wait, I have criticized everything so much and yet I haven't told what we should do. I can't really tell you what to do, but if you want to, you can certainly find many directions of action (we can all begin by consuming less, using public transport, buying local produce, flying less, having a plant-based diet or joining strikes).You see, I used the pronoun 'we' in this article because I am also just a flawed, selfish human, who forgets about this crisis and enjoys the sun during heatwaves.  I watch some documentaries about climate and I get so much inspiration to help the Earth but then a day or two passes and I am back to my careless self. That is why I have to constantly remind myself to be enviroment-conscious, in fact, we all should. If we don't, then after some time there might not be our home. Or at least the home that we are used to. So it is not time to protect our feelings - it is time to panic.