This dog's carbon footprint is lower than yours. (NEWSCOM)
Go green by being lazy
By Eoin O'Carroll | 06.24.08
Every day I come across lots of advice on how to be more green. Start your own vegetable garden. Build a compost bin. Insulate your home. Brew biodiesel in your back yard. Go out in the middle of the night and paint bike lanes on the street.
And every time I see these tips, I ask myself, “Who the heck has the time for that?”
And then I think about all the ungreen things I do, like buying a book on Amazon even though I live a three-minute walk from a bookstore. Or ordering overpackaged takeout instead of cooking my own food. Flying instead of taking a train. Driving instead of walking.
I would love cut back on these things, but I don’t have the time. Haste, as it turns out, makes waste.
In an essay at Worldchanging, John de Graaf describes the vicious circle of overwork and consumption that we have created for ourselves:
[T]he long hours we in the United States work – some 300 more per year than western Europeans – mean we are more likely to rely on “convenience” and disposable items, such as heavily-packaged fast foods and single-use goods…. [M]any people had told me they were “too pressed for time even to recycle.” Moreover, our long work hours allow us to produce and buy more and more “stuff,” resulting in a greater pressure on resources and an inevitable stream of more waste.
Mr. de Graaf goes on to note that Europeans produce about half the air pollution, use half the energy, throw away half the trash, and emit half the carbon dioxide per capita as Americans do.
He points to a study [PDF] by the Center for Economic and Policy Research that found that if those in Western Europe worked as many hours as Americans did, they would consume about 30 percent more energy. If Americans were to reduce their working hours to Western European levels, they could reduce their energy needs by some 20 percent.
De Graaf is the National Coordinator for Take Back Your Time Day, which calls upon you to take the day off, or at least carve out some time for yourself, every October 24. The campaign, a project of Cornell University’s Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy, is calling for an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act guaranteeing that anyone who has worked at a job for a year would get three weeks of vacation. Currently, the United States is the only industrial nation that does not guarantee paid leave.
De Graaf also addresses a recent trend among employers to compress the work week to four-days in an effort to ease commuter fuel expenses and ease congestion. But, as he points out, a 10-hour day is a lousy deal if you’ve got kids in day care. And how productive will you really be in those ninth and tenth hours? His solution: a four-day, eight-hour a day workweek. Sure, overall productivity would drop a little, de Graaf says, but we’d see a huge increase in morale, health, and per-hour productivity.
I see the spark of a new labor movement here (slogan: Workers of the world, unwind!). What would happen we made a coordinated effort to slack off just a little bit – in an effort to save the planet, of course? Would our businesses collapse? Would America become a Third World nation?
Or would we find that we’re able to get by just fine? Maybe we’d have less stuff, but more time to enjoy the company of our friends and families. More time to pursue hobbies and exercise. More time to spend on being a citizen, not producer or a consumer. Would that be so bad?
On that, I think I’ll call it a day. [Editor’s note: Wanna bet?]
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Comments
2. Jamierae | 06.24.08
You would think that with all this technology and increased productivity that Americans would get more time off. It’s sad that our need to have more drives and consumes us above all else (including our health, the planet’s health and our relationships.)
3. Mark Stoneman | 06.24.08
You are so preaching to the choir here. What are we getting for our productivity but so much stress that we are too tired to cook, do our own laundry, and so on. Still, even when I’m tired, I find that cooking or baking bread or something can be therapeutic—at least for someone who works with text all day and is glad of an excuse for to work with his hands.
4. Randy | 06.25.08
That dogs carbon foot print is comparable to some! Think about all of the packaging and natural resources for its food, toys and the fossil fuels used to deliver these pet items to the stores.
5. Sarah | 06.26.08
I’m glad that the CS Monitor decided to pick up this issue, I think it’s an important one for many reasons.
I don’t, however, agree with your decision to title it “Go Green by Being Lazy.” In the article you mention a few thing you might do with your time besides work:
“(M)ore time to enjoy the company of our friends and families. More time to pursue hobbies and exercise. More time to spend on being a citizen…”
Those don’t sound like lazy activities to me.
Word choice is incredibly important, and choosing the word lazy to describe this movement was a poor one. We need to get beyond the idea that if you’re not working your are lazing about. This is certainly one of the issues standing in the way of this movement’s forward motion.
6. Eoin | 06.26.08
Sarah that’s a fair point. But I think ‘lazy’ gets a bad rap. After all, what’s so bad about sitting around doing nothing? Some of those other six deadly sins are way worse.
I’d like to reclaim the word, to wear it as a badge of honor. Kind of like they did with ‘geek.’
We had a brief moment in the 1990s when being a slacker was hip, but I think the dotcommers came along and ruined it. Stupid geeks.
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1. Sheryl from Natural Living | 06.24.08
I lived in Europe for awhile and the lifestyle was much less about consumerism and much more about enjoying life. People walked more, public transportation was efficient, cheap and fast, you simply do not have room in your home for “stuff”, you work less and you socialize more.
Cities are designed around pedestrians, not cars and homes are Europeans are not obsessed with labor intensive lawns that add to pollution and water waste.
It is substantially less stressful and so much healthier. I loved it and will always miss it.