Dear scientists, lobbyists, activists, environmentalists, and the girl with “Tree Hugger since 1997” on her Instagram bio,
Thanks to all the research you publish and nature conservation you advocate for, I now know that climate change is causing water scarcity all over the world, and I’d love to help.
But how many times a day am I really allowed to shower? And for how many minutes each?
I know we need to save water, but how much water do we need to save? No, I mean, actually how much do we need to save? How much for me, a privileged young woman living in the capital city of Thailand, compared to those in the Northeast who are currently facing their worst drought in half a century? How about my friend who likes bubble baths three times a day, can she reduce it to two and take a very short shower after lunch?
Do we spare more water for the grass and the cows since they need lots of water to become our food, to make beef burgers for those who can afford it? Or do we, using the emergency decree under constitutional law, force everyone to eat a plant-based diet forever? Or rather, should we just lick our plates clean and do them after every ten uses, or just eat off single-use plastic so we don’t have to waste water at all?
I’d really like to make myself useful, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about, and I think we might need to go back to the basics here. Like Cape Town Day Zero sort of basic. I’m trying to evaluate just exactly how many liters a day I can’t use to water my lawn, or how many times out of every five I can flush when I use the toilet.
I’m also struggling to balance my emotions of whether or not I should feel guilty with the frugal amount I consume in my luxurious life. I don’t know if I live too comfortably when it comes to depleting the remaining clean portion of the world’s 3 percent of freshwater.
All these youth climate strikers are yelling at us to come out and demand “CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW”, and other environmentalists are telling us, too, that we need to “CONSERVE OUR RESOURCES.”
But damn, I mean, sh*t, yeah I’m scared of climate change, too, but what am I really supposed to do?
When you say we need to “change our system completely through a just transition,”
How do we achieve a “just transition”?
Like what the hell is a “just transition”?
Is it a small transition, like just a transition?
But we thought you said it needed to be on a global scale?
Why’s it just transition?
After all, we are in a crisis, as you say we are, and crises causes a lot of panic, as Greta hopes it would. But panic causes confusion and alarm, often the bad kind, where people scream and run over each other (or maybe that is just Black Friday).
Now, we don’t want that to happen do we? I think what we need are very simple instructions, like the kind we’re taught in fire drills, remember? Rule number one: don’t panic.
Every year, regardless of who you are, what grade you’re in or position you hold, we all hear the fire alarm go off and look at each other and roll our eyes, “It’s that time of the year again.” We calmly stand up and form a line, walk out the door and down the stairs, tempted to sneak out along the way and go grab a coffee, yet obedient to the command anyway.
We form an assembly–where we’re supposed to be attentive to our leaders who are supposed to know how to evacuate us from danger’s way–then we’re taught the “stop, drop and roll”. We need simple procedures like that.
So I think, climate scientists, here’s maybe what we can do:
Calculate all the natural resources we have left on earth, say, like all the granola bars we have left in the house during a zombie apocalypse (or pandemic). Divide it per person according to their proportionate sizes and needs. For example, a small girl needs less to eat but better nutrition, so her bigger brother can sacrifice. Or say, with a limited supply of plastic straws, grandmas should be given first priority because the equipment aids elderly people. You, on the other hand, do not need a straw because you can sip from a cup–or do you need a sippy cup?
Then assign those portions to each person. A household can represent a city on a larger scale, and again, different cities have different needs according to their population size and working capacity. The key is to make sure industrial hubs have enough to operate, but not too much to concentrate all resources excessively within itself.
Lastly, after the specialized experts have imposed those guidelines, each person has to obey the rules. Because if people don’t follow the plan, then it fails.
But I guess some people just don’t like playing by the rules, now do they? Some authorities like to favor some players, and some players like to cheat and take more than they need. But that’s just human, right? So what do we do?
Communism?
Yeah, but basically my point was, we need to go back to the basics. We know from reading the newspaper that governments and corporations “must act on climate change now”, but what do we do if they won’t?
If governments and corporations should “be held accountable”, does this mean I’m off the hook as a polluter? But how can they conserve resources, if people like us still consume the same way we do? How can they lower water usage, if we don’t lower ours?
So how many times a day am I really allowed to shower? And for how many minutes each?
Sincerely,
Common citizen with good intentions to help climate action
