Before anyone can change the world he/she has to be prepared to change him/herself.  If one cannot be an example of that which one is advocating, then why expect that others will change by our words when our actions are not in keeping with them??? …« We teach only WHO we are ».  [R.W. Emerson 1803 – 1882.  Essay on Teaching & Teachers].

INSTRUCTIONS.

How would you categorise yourself as regards a sustainable life?

• 9 or 10  / 10 : A sustainability ‘warrior’ and ‘evangelist’ – on the leading edge and living a low-impact lifestyle… a beacon to others.
• 7 or 8 / 10: Doing much better than most people, but still with a way to go… perhaps hit a ‘roadblock’ (of inhibitors) and unsure whether you really want to do more or (if you do) quite how to do it.
• 5 or 6 / 10: About average or perhaps just a little better than average.
• 3 or 4 / 10:  Not very good. Don’t do much to reduce impact on the planet: perhaps just a little of sorting waste and recycling.  Do what is required by law: yes, but a wider ethical and moral responsibility: no.
• 1 or 2 / 10:  Undertake very little action relating to sustainability. Unconvinced of the need to improve / reduce impact. No-one is forcing me to do things – so I don’t…. if it was important enough then there would be strict laws and regulations and I would obey them (but there aren’t!).
• 0 : Sustainability is not an issue that concerns me at all – even if I did something, my individual contribution would be meaningless with a 7 billion world population, so there is no point in doing anything – other people’s inaction would cancel out my contribution anyway.  Not my problem.

Now that is how you perceive yourself to be … but is that how the Earth sees you?  It is time to do some ‘footprint’ tests! See task D below……………..

Footprint Scores: measuring our individual impact

[These tests will take each of you barely 40 minutes in total]

During this timetabled slot (‘créneau’) I want you all to do a couple of  Carbon Footprint tests (in English, of course) and share the results with your IES colleagues by one means or another which will usually include information like:

• how many planets would we need if all the world’s population consumed like me / enjoyed my lifestyle?
• where do I stand in relation to the average in my country/France / the world average – am I performing better or worse than M. Average?
• where do I stand in relation to the targets the nations of the world have agreed in order to reduce CO2 emissions and keep (at least try to keep) the global temperature rise under 2°C for the century?
• how much CO2 am I personally responsible for producing?
• what is my personal ‘Earth Overshoot Day‘?  [Imagine that on the 1st Jan, Mother Earth gives each citizen of the planet his/her ‘fair share‘ of the planet’s limited and depleting resources … The way you spend these resources / live your life: upon what day of the year will you run out (and have to go ‘into debt’ and ‘borrow’ from the future which will only further impoverish the planet and future generations)?

Here’s my video overview of Footprint Calculators

Here are the calculators to use:

You MUST ALL do both the FIRST TWO of the tests shown and linked below and record each and every one of your results (and be prepared to share them with your colleagues). The tests give you different outputs and I would like you to provide all of the indicators and share them with your colleagues and to work together to produce the class averages for each measure. The THIRD link is to a test that is optional but it is an interesting to do. It concerns the impacts of our food consumption choices upon the environment. The results may well surprise you – they shocked the heck out of me!

• http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/
  • My scores:
    • I am using 79% of my ‘allocation’ (i.e. what is ‘fair’ for me to use according to the global targets). And you?
    • I produce 8.2 tonnes of CO2 –  a lttle under the global average target of 10,5 tons.  And you?
    • my overall impact is 50% less than the UK average (NB. France is just a little bit higher than the UK), BUT I am consuming resources at still a full 50% more than the world average which is still unaccptable. And you?
• http://www.footprintcalculator.org/
  • My scores:
    • my personal ‘overshoot day’ (because I am consuming more than the Earth can provide in any given period if everyone lived like me) – was 3rd Sept in 2017 … but by reason of increased air travel in 2018/19 to visit ailing parents this date advanced to 17th June (my birthday, ironically) – i.e. it got worse!  For the rest of the year it was as if I had nothing left in the ‘Mother Earth Bank’ and I went into an unauthorised overdraft situation – which I (or my kids and grandkids) will have to repay/bear the costs of.  BUT! Good news: with lifestyle changes which my family and I began in 2018/2019,  our overshoot day has steadily advanced to early/mid October – we’re getting better….and in 2020/21 it may well get better still given CoVid restrictions.  I’m sure it did, actually.  …  And you?
    • we would need 1.4 Earths if everyone were to live and consume like me (which is a LOT better than the French or British average of approaching 3 planets)… but, of course, I’m still ‘failing‘ and badly – the problem being that we will only ever have just the one planet Earth and we have to share it with more and more people every day: just take a look at the live ‘World Population Counter‘ … and be prepared for a shock.  I am writing this in the middle of the afternoon, and already the day has seen births exceed deaths by 250,000…. suggesting that three populations the size of France’s (62,000,000 x 3) get added to the sum total of humanity every year….  Sharing resources and sharing them fairly is going to become much more and more of an issue with every year that passes….or for as long as the resources last…...

• https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46865204  .  OPTIONAL (but interesting!). Scroll down to the middle of the article. Embedded there you will find a calculator of food environmental impacts that, for everything from an apple to a beef steak, gives you an idea of its impact in nutrition, C02, water consumption terms and shows you how much of the world’s land surface your consumption requires.  Have a look – it is quite startling.  It might even get you thinking that there are some simple changes you can make right now which can have a significant, positive effect.  We did and it has changed our family’s consumption choices:
  • our red meat consumption has reduced dramatically from once every couple of days to once every couple of weeks
  • we continue to consume some white meat (but we haven’t increased this to compensate for the lack of red meat – in fact we now eat less of it because we have significantly increased the proportion of veg and fruit on our plates.  For me that has meant far more veg and for my wife far more fruit).
  • We have some 100% veggie meals and 100% veggie days now
  • We buy almost exclusively locally-grown (sometimes in our back garden) fruit and veg from our village market which is bio and always seasonal: lower pollution, better for our health, cheaper than buying meat and the money stays in the hands of local farmers so it helps the local economy and population.

OUTPUT REQUIRED

• Share your results for EACH of these MEASURES in class:-
  • What are the highest and lowest results [i.e. what is the ‘range’]?
  • Calculate our class average for each measure
  • Consider how this relates to the Earth’s limited resources and the world’s targets.  I suspect you may be shocked by the results.
  • What are the impacts and implications of these measures? [Remember that you have chosen to study in this area – you are interested and have made some level of commitment to the concept: your group should be out-performing others of your generation (and the rest of us!) by a long way….. Is it?  What if it isn’t?]

—————————————————————————————

Individual Consideration: 

Can the Planet Afford Me?

INSTRUCTIONS.

In the light of your scores and outputs from the footprint test tasks you have undertaken above : consider your daily life and how you are living it (what you eat, what you wear, what you spend your money on, how you live in your home, how you travel etc…. the things you do do and the things you choose not to do for sustainability’s sake or do not know how to do) and do a personal analysis and evaluation to address the question:

“Can the Planet Afford Me? …

… and What am I Prepared to do About it if it Can’t? »

If the planet frankly can’t afford your lifestyle and consumption, what is stopping you (identify exactly what the principal inhibitors are) changing to a lifestyle the planet can afford AND what will need to happen (and who will need to make it happen and how) so that you can and will change to become more sustainable?

FORMAT & DEADLINE.  To Be Advised in class.  BUT:

• Make report-style notes IN ENGLISH on the ‘Can the Planet Afford Me’ Question (as above)
  
• Consider what changes you can and WILL make
• Consider your personal inhibitors in detail.

NB. you will need these to contribute to a plenary session in our next classes – it will result in a team and group oral and written assignment.

Tony

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PLENARY.

Let’s measure ourselves candidly.

Based upon a scoring system of 1 – 10 where are each one of us and what is the range and the average performance:

1. Don’t know anything about ‘sustainability’ / ‘responsibility’.
2. Vaguely aware but uninterested and disinclined
3. Reasonable awareness of sustainability but not that interested
4. aware, reasonably interested, but not to the extent of doing anything.
5. aware and trying to some extent on some measures, but not really succeeding
6. Aware, reasonably committed and succeeding reasonably well on some measures.
7. Aware, committed and totally succeeding on some measures.
8. Aware, totally committed, and making considerable efforts and largely succeeding over a range of measures in most, if not all parts of life and consumption.
9. All of 8, above, and trying for 10 below…. but not yet made it.
10. I am Mr/Ms Responsible. I live in a Passiv Haus, I export electricity to the grid, I seek always to buy responsible/eco/bio products on the local market from small suppliers. I purchase based upon my needs and not my ‘wants’. I try to make / produce things to meet my needs without transport / import and intermediary costs. I am ‘zero impact man’. My attitude to consumption ‘lies within the Planet’s ecological means’ (Notre Avenir à Tous 1987 – World Commission on Environment and Development). My carbon footprint < 1.00.  If everyone lived like me, we could survive, the planet’s resources would not be diminished and we would be sharing things fairly.

NB. There is : was a real ‘No impact man’ in the US: a guy who set himself (and his family) of living a ZERO impact lifestyle for a YEAR.  Let’s have a look at his experience and his recommendations.  Just how far are we prepared to go…………..????

So…. where are YOU?  Where are we???

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NEXT….  we will go on to a block that addresses our inhibitors: What is stopping us?

  OK, so we are not all at 10…..   but the planet and those who are not able to meet their needs because we are too busy meeting our wants REQUIRE that we DO something to improve.  So the first Q is:-

1. What’s stopping us? (What are the inhibitors?). List them in detail and WHY and HOW they stop us.
2. WHAT will need to change to enable us to overcome these inhibitors…. and WHERE / from WHOM, HOW and WHEN might these enablers of change come about?
3. What can we learn from No-Impact Man?

FINALLY….. if I don’t / we won’t…. then ‘they’ won’t either. ….  And who is the ‘they’?  The rest of society, the rest of the world… undeveloped and under-developed countries struggling desperately to provide jobs, health-care and a standard of living that is a mere fraction of our own.  If we, the richer elements in the ‘global village’, don’t or won’t confront the reality of of over-consumption, then how can we expect poorer societies to afford to do what we will not?