Environment

Well before we began our exped­i­tion, we had decided that we could use our web­site, pho­tos and videos to take a first-person look at the state of the envir­on­ment… now hold on, don’t switch off because I men­tioned the ‘E’ word! It often passes us by that we are no longer as in tune with our nat­ural hab­itat as we once were. But it’s now drummed into us West­ern­ers that we should each be play­ing our own part in solv­ing today’s envir­on­mental issues, not passing the buck to someone else. The prob­lem is that our soci­ety likes to match the level of fuss with an equal level of inclin­a­tion to ignore it, with little regard for the topic itself.

But this one quite simple won’t just go away, no mat­ter how long we choose to ignore it. Take the time to really con­sider what you as an indi­vidual are con­trib­ut­ing to the upkeep or det­ri­ment of our planet, and what might hap­pen if we extra­pol­ated it to the other 7 bil­lion humans on the planet.

Did I just say we were indi­vidu­als? Let’s look at that word again. Indi­vidu­al­ism seems to be the ideal life philo­sophy that we’re sold these days (it was inven­ted in the 70’s to sub­due the hippy movement’s reac­tion to tra­di­tional con­sumer­ism), and to my eyes, we now — as one — strive harder and harder to ‘be dif­fer­ent’ from each other. ‘Never for­get that you are unique — just like every­body else’. I think this indi­vidu­al­ist ideal sat­is­fies a wide­spread crav­ing to com­bat the dis­sat­is­fac­tion and bore­dom with a life where we are handed food, water and shel­ter on a plate without ques­tion, in exchange for selling a huge chunk of our life expect­ancy to the sys­tem (school, uni­ver­sity, round-the-world plane ticket, job) that makes it pos­sible to hand over money in exchange for everything you need to stay alive.

We gobble up this life­style because it gives us a layer of ‘mean­ing’ to fall back on, built of big things with lights on them, man­u­fac­tured music, escap­ist lit­er­at­ure, Face­book, post-modernism, back­packs, hob­bies, cheap air-travel and pre­dict­able philo­soph­ical diatribe, now that fam­ily val­ues and rural, community-centred life­styles in rel­at­ively sparsely-populated lands are a thing ever-more con­signed to the past in the UK. We don’t mind work­ing in that ‘tem­por­ary’ office job because we all live our own indi­vidual lives once we’ve all driven home, along with all the other indi­vidu­als, to our indi­vidual homes all built of bricks and mor­tar, where we watch the same TV shows and eat food from Tesco.

There are other ways to sat­isfy this lack of mean­ing, this dis­con­nec­tion from nature — some might say human­ity — that we’re all exper­i­en­cing, rather than accept­ing or invent­ing a glossy sheen to slip and slide our way around on. Dig a little deeper.

The simple and unavoid­able fact is that we live in the same world, upon which we all place our demands, be they great or small, and we’ll all act in one way and one way alone if our lives are threatened. That’s sur­vival instinct and it under­pins the higher levels of psy­cho­logy on which we are also all the same. Look at Plato, one of the fore­fath­ers of West­ern philo­sophy, or the found­a­tions of the philo­sophy of Hinduism, or the work of Sig­mund Freud — they break down the human psyche in remark­ably sim­ilar ways. And that’s just a philo­soph­ical example. Look at the pho­tos of all the people we’ve met on this jour­ney so far. Don’t they all look remark­ably sim­ilar? If you feel as though you need to be truly indi­vidual, if you want to find some­thing bet­ter or more dif­fer­ent than the people who have funny names on your MSN Mes­sen­ger con­tact list, then get on your bike and ride off into the world, sleep in the forest, talk to strangers, chal­lenge your­self, dance in the street, mime at vil­la­gers, eat and drink with fam­il­ies who’ve never been fur­ther from their homes than the next town, sing loudly when you think you’re alone, jump in the river naked, and you’ll soon exper­i­ence the remark­able rev­el­a­tion that indi­vidu­al­ism is about as super­fi­cial as it gets, and that we’re actu­ally all the same. You’ll laugh at how ironic it is.

I want my future fam­ily to live in an inhab­it­able world, and any­one who know­ingly con­ducts their life to the det­ri­ment of that world is not only ignor­ing the frankly unignor­able fact that everything, EVERYTHING we do has an effect, but is also con­trib­ut­ing to the gradual but increas­ingly notice­able meta­morph­osis of Planet Earth into some­thing more grot­esque than the ‘rest’ of Nature would ever allow to hap­pen — and not only that, but endan­ger­ing the sta­bil­ity of the world that YOUR DESCENDENTS, your first child, their future part­ner and their chil­dren after them, will have to first endure and second put right, won­der­ing all the time why the people of our time and the times before were so blind and thought­less. I’m sorry if this sounds like a rant, but I’m not sorry for caring about the state of the world that I’ll show to my chil­dren and that they will see for them­selves as they grow up and I grow old.

This par­tic­u­lar rant will not include any sci­entific argu­ments as to the effect that we are hav­ing on our envir­on­ment. You don’t need sci­ence to look at hun­dreds of tons of smoul­der­ing rub­bish dumped on the side of the road on an oth­er­wise beau­ti­ful and dra­matic stretch of Black Sea coast­line, and to won­der why the sur­round­ing plant life is dead or dying, to look at the slope down to the sea a few metres below the other side of the road and to won­der what exactly is hap­pen­ing to the sea life down there, or to won­der what hole in the local government’s waste man­age­ment pro­gram gives loc­als need to drive their refuse out into the coun­tryside to dump it, or to watch the packs of dogs root­ing through the plastic bags and to won­der how so many strays live on the road­sides of the world today.

You don’t need sci­ence to spend sev­eral days bik­ing up a dirt track into the wil­der­ness of the Romanian moun­tains, the silence punc­tu­ated only by an occa­sional log­ging truck roar­ing down the hill to the indus­trial towns in the val­ley below, and to round a corner, look across a com­pletely unin­hab­ited alpine val­ley, com­plete with pine forests, mirror-like lakes, and snow-capped peaks rising in the dis­tance, and notice the dis­tant and muffled roar of a chain­saw on the breeze as it bites into another trunk on the edge of one of the carved-out, tree­less clear­ings that you sud­denly notice across the lake on the oppos­ite moun­tain­side, as an empty truck clam­bers back up the hill and past you into the trees, and to des­cend into the next val­ley to find the vil­lage men obli­vi­ously put­ting together a piece of machinery to slice the fresh logs into tim­ber to build the new house on the plot of land next door.

I didn’t need sci­ence to explain to me why, back in Decem­ber, I spent five pun­ish­ing days cyc­ling along the hard shoulder of a newly-built coastal high­way in North East Tur­key, hat­ing every moment of it, as I endured tun­nel after tun­nel, lorry after lorry, won­der­ing what happened to the beau­ti­ful, quiet, and dra­matic little wind­ing road that I’d been cyc­ling along for the few weeks since Istan­bul, and that I’d thought would con­tinue to the Geor­gian bor­der. All I needed was the fact that the new high­way had been opened in 2005 to facil­it­ate freight access and eco­nomic growth to explain why half of the north­ern coast of the coun­try of Tur­key had been trans­formed from a beau­ti­ful moun­tain­ous road, replete with fish­ing vil­lages, cliffs, bird life, and secluded bays and beaches, into a hideous, hyp­notic slab of fea­ture­less con­crete that las­ted for 500km and 5 solid days of com­pletely soul-destroying rid­ing. It wasn’t even busy.

The point of all of this is that we as a spe­cies have demon­strated incred­ible short-sightedness in the past, but unless the people who can make a dif­fer­ence learn from these mis­takes, it will be too late to stop fur­ther dam­age to the planet that each and every one of us relies on to keep us alive. We’ve all heard the range of pro­jec­ted con­sequences of con­tin­ued anthro­po­lo­gical global warm­ing. Do you know enough about how the world really is to take those pre­dic­tions and see the real­ity of their hap­pen­ing? Do you prefer to sit on the fence and wait for more evid­ence? Read The Weather Makers by Tim Flan­nery. Buy a second-hand copy from Amazon.

And you know those ‘people who can make a dif­fer­ence’ I men­tioned earlier? Well, you are one of them. The weight of the col­lect­ive people is far greater than that of those who attempt to manip­u­late and steer pop­u­la­tions to ends which they feel are bene­fi­cial, whether ideal­istic, selfish, bene­vol­ent or any other adject­ives you may care to attach to the ‘rulers’ of this world.

So, if you haven’t already, why not start think­ing about the impact of the way in which you live? Take a look at the things that you habitu­ally do — where you go to buy your food, how you heat and light your home, what hap­pens to your house­hold waste, how you get to and from work, if that descrip­tion fits your life. If you make some small changes in these depart­ments, you’ll not only be doing your­self and your chil­dren a favour, but the chil­dren of every other fam­ily on the planet. You might be an indi­vidual, but you’re still a human being, and everything you do has an effect on the vast and infin­itely inter­con­nec­ted flow of space and time. Will your friends see what you do and start to think about it them­selves? Did you just read this blog post, writ­ten by another human being, and start to think about chan­ging the way you live a little? (I hope so!)

The power that the col­lect­ive, not the indi­vidual, can wield, is one that causes wide­spread changes in beha­viour, or paradigm shifts. What we need now is a series of paradigm shifts to make nor­mal the ways of think­ing and liv­ing that are only just enter­ing the pub­lic con­scious­ness. You can eas­ily be part of this pro­cess, and I’ll make it easier — visit www.oneplanetliving.com. Order a copy of the One Planet Liv­ing book. I was given a copy last winter by one of the people who was involved in cre­at­ing it. It’s a little hand­book which will take less than an hour to read, but it con­tains everything we should know about our effect on the world and how we can eas­ily do some­thing about it. Read it, then lend it to every­one you know. Our kids will thank us.

This was a ‘con­struct­ive rant’ and there will be more in the future. The world is a beau­ti­ful, amaz­ing and (cur­rently) safe place for us to live. Shouldn’t it be kept that way?