Category Archives: Sustainability

Living Change

A long time ago — that is, a few months ago — I sat down to have a think-thunk. I didn’t manage to come up with many answers, nor were all my thoughts very clear, but the essential question I was revolving around was: How shall we live?

I can turn my water off when I brush my teeth. I can reuse plastic bags as my garbage bags. I can bring an environmentally friendly bag when I go shopping.

I’m not willing to give up my books if I can help it. E-books are not the same thing as physical paper books. I can’t hold e-books in my hand; e-books don’t have that faint aroma of fresh, clean pages. This book love is definitely damaging the environment.

Like me, many people probably think that we can’t keep our current way of life and still expect everything to be fine. Our consumerist culture is not completely okay; global warming is not okay; exploiting other people and the environment is not okay. We realise that we need to change, perhaps drastically, but no one is really sure of how we will live. On the one hand, change is a natural process anyway — every generation’s lifestyle differs to their parents. We will change whether we like to or not. But maybe that is just the thing — it’s one thing to choose to change, and another to be forced to change. By the time we change because we are forced to do so, circumstances are probably quite screwed up.

So people experiment. There are people and things like No Impact Man (whom I first heard of through Genevieve), and the 100-Mile Diet. Are they really making a difference? In the grand scheme of things, their singular efforts probably don’t even scratch the surface. In the grander scheme of things, they might be the pioneers who push the movement to look for more responsible ways of living.

Right now, we can afford to play a game of this-or-that. I can turn lights off when not using them. I don’t want to give up my iPod. I can turn the tap off while brushing my teeth. I can’t give up my piano. I can travel by public transport or walk. I don’t want to give up flying. One day, I want to try the 100-mile diet myself. It’s obvious from this list that the damage I do by what I don’t give up is overwhelmingly greater than what I do “sacrifice”. But that’s kind of the truth as well, isn’t it? We inevitably leave our mark on the planet. We can only try to limit it — or we can do more. Some argue that reducing our current energy levels is not enough; we need to live sustainably. It’s an important argument.

I don’t know if this is the right way to go about changing the way I live. No one does. But I want to keep looking for and trying new ideas — or old ones; my grandmothers are experts in using everything and wasting nothing, particularly because of the wars — for living. We’ll have to change anyway. This is my attempt to change in the way I want. It’s my method of parrying the prediction that disaster will strike before we do anything, and society will change so drastically, we won’t recognise our own way of living. Give up the things I don’t need for the things I do want.

Because it’s not just the books that matter. Toilet paper is pretty high up there too.

Second Snow

Today being only my second snowfall, I am still in enough wonder and awe to believe it something beautiful.

I’m somewhat confused by Vancouver’s apparent response to what isn’t even a foot high of snow, though. A lot of people didn’t — couldn’t — turn up to class today for reasons that are beyond my knowledge. Traffic accidents seem to be the main culprit, but it’s hard to know when you live on campus. When I got to my American lit class, someone mentioned that UBC is the only post-secondary institution open today. Which really confuses me, because don’t we have what is scorned by any other Canadian as pitiful amounts of snow? Someone was telling me how in Edmonton, snow is waist-high and it’s -44’C. People still seem to manage. And don’t so-called experts predict there will be fiercer winters for Vancouver in the future? I obviously don’t know how true this is, but other people reference it, so if this is true, Vancouver seems a little unprepared…

Questions like this remind me of how foreign the city still is to me sometimes. I think it’ll be foreign to me for a long time.

Late night ramblings

(Of the literal, more physical sort: walking.)

So last Saturday night/early Sunday morning, two of my friends and I were walking back from the bus loop past the outdoor swimming pool. We were on our way back to our beds from a birthday party down in Richmond.

As a background aside, the outdoor swimming pool had always struck me as a terrible waste of resources whenever I pass it in winter. If you asked me, it just didn’t seem to be the best evidence of UBC’s sustainability. You can literally see steam coming from the pool; it’s so cold these days. Nor had I seen anyone swim in the pool, even when the sun is at its peak, since November. Maybe I just needed to hang around 24/7 in order to see people swim, but I was still skeptical about just how many people will want to swim outdoors in the winter…

Of course, I was very mistaken about that, as I am about many things. So we’re walking back to Vanier when we hear screaming, and I wonder that the pool is open at night as well, but okay. Obviously people like to go swimming at 2:30 am. There’s a guy and a girl climbing up the diving board — and it’s a really high diving board — so we watch them out of idle curiosity as we continue walking by. The guy stands there — and you know how you tuck some piece of information away in your brain without thinking about it? I don’t notice if he’s wearing swimming trunks because there isn’t an obvious solid colour, but it’s dark and I’m not thinking, so brain clicks off — and he cannonballs into the pool from way up. Cool, brain on idle mode registers.

Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirr.

Woah. We hover, our feet ready to take the next step as we glance around for the siren, and this car that belongs to Campus Security comes rolling down the road. (Oh, so they’re not supposed to be swimming at night after all. And maybe that’s why the fence is bent down and there’s a gaping hole. But wait, that car isn’t stopping. Okay, really do have to stop walking now.) We stand shock still while the car careens, without any hesitation or sign of slowing down, onto the grass and the pavement next to the swimming pool. A guard comes out and greets the stray swimmers with something along the lines of, “Having fun?”, and tells them to get dressed and get out. There are two guys in suits — proper, Men in Black kind of suits — standing beyond the fence watching the proceedings. No idea if they’re with Campus Security and were the ones who called them, or if they’re with the swimmers. Who wears suits at 2:30 am? Meanwhile, I resemble a marshmallow roll in my long winter coat.

But that was a most entertaining way of waking us up on our groggy walk back. Better than if no one ever went diving/skinny-dipping and all that heat for the water is wasted, eh?

Robots

This post was originally going to be the result of a culmination of recent events, but then I realised that it would be so long I wouldn’t sleep tonight (and no one would read it either). So I’m going to split this up over the next few days.

The first thing that happened to me in this chain of events was a robotics lecture I had last Wednesday in my Comp Sci class. One of the TAs was guest-speaking on her research; she’s developing an affordable semi-autonomous wheelchair for aged adults with cognitive difficulties (such as Alzheimer’s) in nursing homes. This is a very worthwhile project, but this isn’t what niggled me.

She told us about other kinds of robots that I’d never heard of, such as the Roomba. The Roomba is basically an automatic vacuum-machine that vacuums set rooms at set times without vacuuming the same spot over and over again. Some can also return to charge themselves at the end of a session. And then there’s this robot that’s being developed that can take a can of beer from the fridge and send it to you, sitting on your couch in front of the TV, without you ever having to get up.

Then there are very human-looking androids programmed to respond in certain ways to what you say to them. Personally, I find human-looking robots frightening (and I’m not the only one — apparently, there are studies on how the more human a robot looks, the more creeped out people get).

Or the military shooting robots strangely reminiscent of Gundam or other anime-type of giant robots with people sitting in them. I hadn’t even thought that anyone would develop these in reality, but I’m clearly not very imaginative.

And I really don’t know how I feel about all this. Technology can be such a marvellous thing — I have a deep appreciation for my hot water, electricity, and iPod — but I’m afraid of what people can do with it. We are so very good at destroying things and hurting each other. Things like the Roomba — or something more familiar, like washing-machines and driers — are wonderful time-saving inventions. But so is the beer-retrieving robot, and I have a much more intense dislike for that one. Where should one draw the line? I suppose it goes to show just how lazy we can get in our search to “save time” by getting technology to do the essentials for us. Sure, we save a lot of time, but what we do from then on? It’s very easy to just do nothing at all when there is very little left to do.

Imagine what a power outage would do on a society so heavily dependent on technology. Imagine not knowing how to use a broom and sweep because you always grew up with a Roomba. It’s not like we are very good at coping right now when there is a power outage — the more dependent we become on electricity, the more vulnerable we are as well. This is kind of a scary thought since we are not going to have electricity forever — possibly not even within our lifetime — if we gobble our resources at the rate we’re doing now. And then what? I don’t have basic survival skills; I wouldn’t know what to do if you dropped me in the middle of the woods right now.

This will sound strange, but I think I’ll teach myself and my kids basic things, like washing clothes by hand, or sweeping the floor with a broom. Just in case, you know, there is a power outage fifty years from now.