Would you like some guilt with your coffee?

via Blogdigger news, I ran across this quiz and got these results:

That's quite impressive, if I do say so myself. One would think that I keep my own personal landfill in my back yard.

However, I think my chief sins based on the questions in the quiz are: shopping at Superfresh instead of growing all my own food, eating meat once a day, and only having two people living in my (free-standing) house. Presumably, if I had a dozen kids, or lived in a cardboard box, or was a vegan, I'd be a better conservationist.

This struck me as remarkably simplistic, however. We do try to be economical with what we have, but the reality is that there is not much Amy and I could do right now to appease the good folks at the Earth Day Network. If someone was to turn around and give me an electric car, I'd take it; until then, however, we'll be using our gas-guzzling monsters. Or, if someone was to offer to transform our back yard into an organic wonderland, we'd be quite willing to accept the offer; until then, we just don't have time.

This also fails to consider that perhaps some of the other regions of the Earth could use a productivity boost. The last time I was in Uganda, I had a long conversation with a Ugandan about farming. He was hugely frustrated because the people in his area were consistently using techniques that caused there to be simultaneously shortages in some crops and waste in others. With a little education, that area could increase its productivity (and wealth) by a huge factor.

Perhaps, then, a better usage of time would be working with the genuinely poor and hunger-stricken to help them improve their own quality of life by helping to keep them from the constant threat of starvation, rather than guilt-tripping suburbanites just trying to get by.

Just a thought.

April 20, 2004 11:57 AM
4 Comments

I knew I had a bigger foot than you! My total footprint is 52 and apparently I need 11.7 planets to spread my waste around to. I will be weighed down by this guilt for the rest of this minute and will carefully reflect on how can conserve more.

On a serious note, I do think it's important to be good stewards of God's creation and I am thankful for all that he has provided us.

Pondered by Jeff Price at April 20, 2004 12:11 PM

I can't agree more that if conservationists were truly interested in conservation, they would go to third world cultures and help them stop doing the "truly harmful" things. I don't know. We should be responsible for the gift of the planet that we have been given, but I don't think that we are going to bring the world down around our ears.

Pondered by crabby at April 20, 2004 06:33 PM

I can see why this would ruin your coffee. And surely there more crucial ways to save the planet at any given point in time.

But I also think that this type of information is probably lost on large swaths of our suburban population. I live in Buckhead, and just looking around, I'd say most folks probably aren't aware of their consumption by wordly standards. How would they be? And I think that this lack of perspective is sad. Heavy-handed as this quiz is, there is a valuable nugget of truth in there, maybe not for me and you, but
for a lot of folks.

Of course, what Maphet said is true: our society is set up such that personal conservation is both terribly expensive and inefficient.

This week, chris is preaching on ther sermon on the plain from Luke 6: woe to you who are rich. What am I supposed to do with this? I didn't ask to be rich.

Pondered by abe at April 22, 2004 09:53 AM

Hmmmmmm.....I have never been a really good conservationist. Nathan could easily tell anyone that (although I am guessing that it is mostly because since he is my bigger brother he just likes to.) Also remember I am only 14, I do not have the intellectual (I think that is spelled incorrectly) wisdom that my brother and ALL of you college graduates do. I am trying though.

Pondered by Maphet's lil bro at April 23, 2004 02:08 PM