opinion & features

To build a greener world, I must start with myself

In August, I flew to Montreal to visit some friends.  Two weeks after I flew home, I gave a seminar about how the greenest holiday is the holiday spent at home and about how flying is never, ever, the most responsible travel choice. As much as 90 per cent of the energy we use on our vacations we spend on airplanes.  Since 1990, greenhouse gas emissions related to aviation have increased by 83 per cent.  Was I a hypocrite for going?  

At the seminar, I talked about the advantages of being a tourist at home - how we are more likely to build real communities when we don’t flee from our neighbourhoods every chance we get. My physical survival was not dependent on a flight to Montreal.  I, like the majority of people in Canada, have more than met my basic needs for shelter, food and water.  Instead, we’re fumbling along trying to meet the emotional, intellectual, psychological and spiritual needs that take us from surviving to thriving.

we often meet our individual needs in ways that inhibit, rather than enable, other people's happiness 

One way that we (however unskillfully) try to meet these needs is through material consumption - of food, trips, knick-knacks, books, designer ‘green’ lifestyle products, electronics, fancy cookware, new clothes …    We try to fill our needs while dealing with variables that we tend to not associate with ecology: the physical, emotional and intellectual reserves we have to spend on making a living and relating with people; the psychological patterns we developed early in life that inform our relationships to people, landscapes and things.   

I am increasingly convinced that the source for a lasting solution to this planet’s current state rests precisely in the place where we confront and transform these variables.  It is because of them that we often meet our individual needs in ways that inhibit, rather than enable, other people’s happiness and the wellbeing of the planet.

as much as 90% of the energy we use on our vacations we spend on airplanes 

Designing buildings that generate, rather than use energy would probably be easier.  Creating government policy to legislate deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would probably be easier, too.  That’s why we hear calls for these things coming from activists on all corners of the globe.  But real change has to come from our hearts.  Yes, we need to keep demanding policies and regulations to ‘green’ our consumption. But if we don’t do the inner work that brings us to joyfully need less stuff, I don’t think these policies will do much good. 

Digging into the source of the current state of the planet - our minds and hearts and guts - is infinitely more difficult and infinitely more uncomfortable.  Yet it may also be infinitely more rewarding. I’m starting with the compassionate recognition that the conditions of my intellect, psychology, emotions, and spirit fertilize the roots of the ecological crisis.

I needed to fly to Montreal in August, and I don’t regret going.  But that does not mean that I give myself permission to fly around in perpetuity. Rather, it means that as I continue to develop the skills I need to thrive and celebrate life, I will keep digging in.  I will keep sitting in silence and stillness to observe the impact that my consumption has on my mind and heart and guts, and to observe how my inner life can support or weaken the planet to which I belong. 

– Alana Lajoie-O’Malley is the director of the Campus Sustainability Office at The University of Winnipeg. To comment on this or any other article in Outwords, write to letters@outwords.ca