The urgency of saving our planet
Climate change can no longer be denied. Carly Thomas talks to people who are altering their daily lives to confront it head on.
‘‘People think they have to do all of the things at once and they get completely overwhelmed and don’t know how to navigate it. Figure out what you can do and start there.’’
It’s dire and there is nowhere to hide. There is plastic everywhere you go, in the earth, on the Earth, in all of our waterways, in the water we drink. Our oceans are a holding tank for it and it has been found in the socalled pristine Antarctic Ocean.
About 380 million tonnes of the stuff is produced worldwide each year.
But still we keep making it, buying it, demanding it while only recycling 9 per cent of it.
Something has to give and the effects are becoming glaringly apparent. With the capacity for information sharing growing, it’s not just the greenies seeing the crisis we are in. It’s there for all to see. Our dirty, unsustainable habits are undeniable.
Photos of sea turtles entangled in plastic, a dead albatross with plastic filling its stomach, mountains of plastic in Cambodia, the Philippines, New Delhi, white smoke billowing into the atmosphere from a plastics factory.
We are bombarded and we are all part of the crisis. Our supermarkets and shops are full of the stuff and finding an alternative can be an uphill battle. But at a grassroots level there are people pushing back, people from all walks of life who are fed up and are finding their own ways up that hill.
They are saying ‘‘enough’’ and they are making changes where they can, in their own lives and through their own choices, and many are doing it with a desperate urgency.
The Government, too, is concerned about ‘‘New Zealand’s clean, green reputation’’ – phasing out single-use plastic bags, with an eventual ban next year. People like Palmerston North plastic-free advocate Anthony Behrens say it should have happened sooner, ‘‘but it is better than nothing’’.
‘‘It’s almost like the consumer is taking back some power now and the current Government is catching up where nothing was happening before.
‘‘There has been a shift.’’ Behrens and his partner Fiona Burleigh are slowly and surely cutting out plastics after they did plastic-free July in 2017. They carried cloth bags around with them before they were a thing and have been coming up with cunning alternatives to their household’s No 1 enemy – plastic. Burleigh says they knock off solutions one by one.
‘‘It was the realisation that no matter how much recycling you do and how good you feel about going to the supermarket with your reusable bags, the rubbish bin was still full of bad stuff. Everything we bought was producing a piece of waste. We were totally tied up with this petrochemical industry. How the hell did we get to that point?’’
So they started taking their own containers to the supermarket delicatessen and Bin Inn, chip bags became freezer bags, bread is made at home, as is cheese, yoghurt, deodorant and household cleaners, and Behrens recently found out that swap-a-crate Tui beer is still a thing.
‘‘We shop in a different way,’’ Burleigh says. ‘‘We don’t go out and buy $150 worth of groceries, come home and put it in the cupboard. There’s not much in the supermarket that we can buy.’’
They know they are in a privileged position. They have the time to shop around and think through solutions with just the two of them at home and Burleigh says she knows it must be a tough line to tow with kids.
‘‘It is hard. One of the things I say to people is ‘next time’. When you think you have failed, try again, think around the problem.’’
It’s something that mum to two young kids Chris Love says is important for when you start out on the plastic-free journey.
‘‘People think they have to do all of the things at once and they get completely overwhelmed and don’t know how to navigate it. Figure out what you can do and start there.’’
Your kids don’t need that plastic toy from The Warehouse, says Love. What they need is a clean Earth. She says it frightens her to think what her kids are inheriting. ‘‘Climate change is a huge worry for me.’’
And it should be. The American Geophysical Union has stated that human-induced climate change requires urgent action and the Association for the Advancement of Science says it is a growing threat to society. Sea levels are rising, oceans are becoming warmer, droughts are intensifying, crops, freshwater and wildlife are becoming increasingly threatened, and groups like Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa are calling it an emergency.
‘‘We are playing fast and loose with living,’’ says spokeswoman Lucy Aitken Read. ‘‘The scope of what we are facing is extreme. It’s our own extinction. This feels farfetched until we hear that animal populations have declined, on average, by 60 per cent since the 70s alone, or that a recent report stated that 80 per cent of New Zealand bird life is at risk.’’
Tessa Pratt is also trying. She continues to make a difference in her life because she says the alternative to ignoring the facts ‘‘is just not an option’’.
‘‘You chuck things away, but where is ‘away’? There is no away. It shouldn’t be this hard to make things better. It shouldn’t feel like the consumer has to bear that burden all the time. It’s not fair. Big corporations should do more.’’
Pratt is training to be a midwife and, with her partner, has just bought her first home. She made her own food wraps years ago, ‘‘when I didn’t really even know about zero waste’’.
‘‘That was just me thinking plastic bags were stupid and being creative with what I had. It was then just a gradual thing.’’
She is buying in bulk, growing her own vegetables, using her own containers, ‘‘being that weird person with a bag full of rattling jars’’ and thinking through her choices.
‘‘And it’s not perfect. We are not perfect. It’s hard.’’
A new shop in Palmerston North, Be Free Grocer, is trying to make it easier.
The store is all about giving people zero-waste options, bulk dried foods, cleaning products and zero-waste household and personal care items. Owner Bronwyn Green says she wants the shop to be nonintimidating, ‘‘so not just for the diehard greenies, but for people who haven’t previously thought about it as well’’.
‘‘We aren’t judgy. There is no ulterior motive here. I am a vegan and I still feel intimidated by lots of stores out there . . . It’s about who we are and being honest.’’
The business is owned by a trio of family members: Green, her husband Dave Phillips and her mum Heather Browning. Green and Phillips met in Borneo, where they have spent the past five years volunteering for animal welfare and wildlife conservation organisation Orangutan Project.
Working with wildlife, they were faced with the realities of climate change daily and they also saw how a ‘‘not in our country’’ attitude can be detrimental when ‘‘everyone needs to take responsibility’’.
‘‘It became painfully obvious to us, while we were there, that there is a lot of placing blame on other countries – ‘We don’t do that in New Zealand. We don’t do that here’. But the longer we were in Southeast Asia we realised there is so much that we haven’t got right. So we came home. We want to make a bit of an impact in our own backyard.’’
Take some power back, says Green, do it for yourself and do it for the future of our planet. And do it now.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns there are only 12 years for us to act to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius. After that, even an increase of half a degree more will significantly up the risk of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. The time for urgency has arrived. It’s dire and there is nowhere to hide.