What kind of environmental parents are we?

Something is wrong with our water. The shower, usually a hot massaging drill, comes out strained; anaemic.

I crank up the hot as far as it will go without scorching, but it's no good.

Housemate Andy has installed a water-saving shower head. I curse his hide for robbing me of my steam, but then think: somewhere, a fraction of a dam does not need to be built after all.

This is my brief: to spend a month living sustainably and to describe how I go. There are many, many guides and ten-step plans for household sustainably, and I take my cue from these.

There’s a good precedent for starting at home. The term “ecology” was born out of two Greek words: logos (study) and oikos (the household).

First, though, in the great tradition of personal transformation reality TV programs, I have to perform an audit. The before-and-after shots.

I go to the Earthday network’s Ecological Footprint Quiz (http://www.myfootprint.org). This tracks how much of the earth’s resources a person consumes and compares this amount to the resources nature can provide.

I’m feeling good about this test. Hurricane Andy has already swept through our house, installing aforementioned shower head, fitting compact-fluorescent bulbs and signing us up to green power.

I don’t have the ecological liabilities of your average middle class. I don’t drive. I live in a block of flats. But I still fail. I am the environmental equivalent of a Sunday Christian. If everyone used as many resources as me, we would need 4.8 planets for life to be sustainable.

Power Out

Winter bites in and I find myself waking and shivering. I buy an oil-filled column heater, having dutifully researched the environmental pros and cons. Oil-filled is better than bar radiators, which in turn are better than fan-heaters (http://www1.sedo.energy.wa.gov.au/pages/portable.asp).

I’m toasty-warm in bed at night, but then I realise: I’m trying to change my environment to suit me; not me adapting to it. I wonder how much power I waste making my environment as I want it?

Daylight when it’s night time, balmy summer evenings indoors when there’s frost on the windows. I leave the heater off, and I wrap myself in blankets and the best thing about winter: flannelette pyjamas.

I come home from work and I want music. Luckily, my stereo is on standby: thank heavens I don’t have to bend over and turn it on at the wall. But standby power churns through resources, accounting for ten per cent of a household’s energy bill (www.sustainable.energy.sa.gov.au). Having a stereo drawing power 24-7 is like driving to a friend’s for dinner and leaving the engine on the whole night just so you don’t have to start the car up. So I turn the stereo off at the wall. Besides, it’s not like I needed another blinking digital clock.

My bag

On Sunday June 4, Randwick Council runs its Ecoliving Fair. I go along to a workshop on “Smart Shopping: Eliminating Waste”. The presenter, Keelah Lam, explains a set of principles to slash waste: reduce, repair, reuse, recycle, redesign.

These are listed in order of their positive impact on the environment: reduce comes first — the best way to fight waste is to not buy things in the first place.

It was a rude shock for me, seeing recycling ranked a distant fifth. It makes sense though: consider the energy it takes to collect a bottle, transport it to a central depot, melt it down into new glass and transport it to a packing plant. Compare that with what it takes to collect, wash and relabel that same bottle.

The plastic bag, though, is what draws heaviest fire from Keelah. My standard practice is to accept any and every plastic bag offered to me (is it because they’re free?). Replicate this behaviour across Australia and 6.9 billion plastic bags will be used this year (www.abc.net.au/science/features/bags).

Why is this a bad thing? The qualities that make them so suited to their man-made purpose — that they are strong, durable and cheap — make them a disaster when released into the environment. Estimates for the time it takes them to decompose range from 20 to 1000 years. Marine animals often mistake them for jellyfish and die; the bag is eventually re-released to kill again.

The Coles Green Bag is better, but, as Keelah explained, it’s not the optimum solution. One, they’re made in China (with the freight costs that brings) and two, it’s still plastic and hence made from non-renewable resources.

I stash canvas bags in the bottom of my backpack and pull them out when I go shopping. At the grocers, I no longer take plastic bags for each class of vegetable. Really, why do my tomatoes need to be coddled, separated from potatoes on their way to the checkout, after which point the plastic bag becomes redundant.

“No bag thanks.” I feel bad, holding up the checkout operator, fumbling my tomatoes. I’m an obstruction in this series of transactions. There’s a cost involved — in this case, lost time.

Watching the documentary The Corporation, I learnt about the economic concept of “externalities”. Externalities happen when two parties (say, the greengrocer and I) participate in a transaction (buying tomatoes) that has an unintended cost for a third party (in this case, the environment: plastic bags being released into nature).

On a big picture level, corporations often defer the environmental costs of their activity, escaping the responsibility of paying. It’s like an overgrown child that won’t pick up after itself.

By refusing the convenience, by slowing things down, we reverse this deferring of responsibility. We sheet responsibility (and cost) home to the company. My example is small-scale, but you see the same thing happening whenever industry is required to pay for site regeneration when its business is done.

This is part of a growing movement called “Extended Producer Responsibility.” Essentially, this means that the company’s responsibilities surrounding a product don’t stop the moment it passes through the checkout.

How much is enough?

But I’m wondering if shifting my shopping habits is enough. Is it all too marginal? As ethicist Daniel Maguire suggests, “If current trends continue, we will not” (www.ncccusa.org/news/03news49.html).

By altering my shopping habits, by turning off the lights, am I letting myself off the hook and avoiding the facts of our environment: global climate change (www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change), pollution and depletion of our natural resources?

All of the household strategies will help, and are worth doing, but they are market-driven solutions. If everyone in Australia stopped using plastic bags, then there would be no more demand, but perhaps convenience will often win out; consumer behaviour may tend to follow the path of least resistance.

Perhaps the ecology of subtraction needs to be joined by positive investment. Green power is a start: taking money away from conventional power generation and putting it into renewable energy: solar, wind, water and biomass (www.greenpower.com.au).

Acting as a collective is another piece of the solution and one that the church is in a great place to practice. As theologian John Haugh puts it, “The most distinctive contribution that religions, including the faith of the churches, can make to the environmental crisis is to keep their own house in order” (http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/publications/report/r-fea21.htm).

	Geoff Callahan and Peter Hobson with Maroubra Junction Uniting Church's water tank; the church's first step toward modelling sustainability.

James Pilkington and Geoff Callaghan from Maroubra Junction Uniting were talking one night and hit on the idea of turning Maroubra Junction into a model of environmental sustainability.

Geoff sees this as part of the church’s mission: “We recognised the potential of the church in the broad sense to have influence on the community. If it became more environmentally conscious it would definitely ripple out into the community. A water tank was one of the first things we thought of.”

The idea: to hook the water-tank up to the toilets in the church-hall (which doubles as a pre-school) and to fit an external tap for watering the garden.

Geoff approached Peter McGanoff, sustainability officer at Randwick City Council, for advice and got an immediate positive response. “He said, ‘You got to do it. Why haven’t churches been doing this before?’”

The process was straightforward, Geoff says. “I just made a few phone calls and Peter put me in contact with the right people. The plumber did it all in one morning.”

And the church was able to get a $2,000 subsidy from Randwick Council.

Maroubra Junction has other projects in mind: grey-water and, one-day, solar panelling.

I ask Geoff what motivates him, what claim sustainability has on our lives. “Well, it’s like being a parent. Everybody wants the best for their children. And we are the parents of the next generation.”

This is elemental stewardship; caring for the earth for the sake of the people who are not yet born.

It’s a rainy Friday morning a few days after I talked to Geoff. On my way to work I stop by Maroubra Junction Uniting. Next to the community centre, under the awning, sits the gum-leaf-green tank.

I put my hand to the coolness of its side and hear the water slowly filling up again.

Matt Fenwick