Sustaining Sustainability – Keep it Up!

I’ve started asking myself in the mornings what I can do that day to halt and reverse climate change. Now before you leap in, I’m well aware that one person alone cannot make this huge change, but I’m not alone. Millions of people are also making changes and whilst it may be true that the huge polluters are nations and multinationals, this does not invalidate individual actions. In any case, these actions do not exist in isolation. Each of us, unless we are a hermit, has an effect on others. This blog will I hope have an effect on its readers. My buying habits have an effect on the places I buy from (or don’t.) I boycott Amazon partly because of its environmental impact and to help me do so I use a browser add-on called blockamazonfor.me. Unfortunately it only works on Chrome at the moment so I can’t use it on my laptop, though it’s probably only a matter of time. But at some point a person in their bedroom (or office) thought about this and devised the add-on, and now people are using it. Similar initiatives are everywhere, from supermarkets reducing plastic to shops offering to refill bottles, people are realigning their thoughts. Yes, it’s not enough, yes we have to do more – much more – and soon, but it ain’t nothing.

The trouble with thinking about climate change and my part in it is that I can end up feeling either hopelessly depressed or horribly guilty. It’s like trying to lose weight; every time you think about the problem you are overwhelmed by negativity and this is the last thing you need. So just as with losing weight, we need to develop habits of sustainability that we can actually keep up – in other words, be sustainably sustainable.

So, what are today’s things I’m doing to halt and reverse climate change? I’m going to find out if I can refill my dishwasher rinse aid bottle as a part of the plan to take all the single use plastic out of our house. And I’m going to research sources of recycled paper. Then next week I shall buy some recyclable toothbrush heads.

That’s all folks!

Kirk out

PS I’ve done the first bit of my homework and found this source of recycled paper.

Let Me Splain it to You

Just in case you’re not familiar with the word mansplaining, it refers to the tendency of some men to inform women of what they already know. A good example is this, which happened to me a few months ago. I met a man at a Council of Faiths meeting and as soon as I told him I was a Quaker he proceeded to give me a run-down of Quaker history.

The starting point seems to be that we need to be kept informed and they are the man for the job. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that we might know this stuff already – that we might even be experts in our field – that, god forbid, we might actually be able to tell them something about it! No. They are like search engines picking up on a word and spewing out information on it. Except that I haven’t googled anything and I already have the information, thank you very much.

Of course as the definition above suggests, man– is not the only kind of –splaining. I may in the past have been guilty of whitesplaining, telling people of colour about their own culture or religion, though I hope not; there’s also ablesplaining, which I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you as you already get the idea.

Basically all types of splaining are about power relations. It’s about saying ‘I know more than you about this,’ even when it is blindingly obvious that the person concerned is living with whatever ‘this’ is and is therefore the definitive expert. It’s about positioning yourself above the other person, being the expert, the spokesperson.

So now I’ve explained this, you can stop bothering your pretty little heads about it…

Kirk out