That’s the biggest problem. While plenty of people drive or play pickleball, eating is particularly widespread. Seven billion people multiplies into a big number…
Creating the food we eat has significant climate impact. Some of the factors, in unranked order:
We clear forests to create farms
We use petro-chemicals to make fertilizer
We grow plants and then feed them to animals
Chemical run-off and erosion have significant impact
We transport everything using trucks
Some foods use far more land, water and fertilizer than others
Some domesticated animals produce particularly potent gasses
We refrigerate, heat and process the food
Even if we wasted no food at all, the impact of all of these activities would be enormous.
Clean your plate?
But the food production, delivery and consumption chain is filled with waste. The biggest impact happens on farms. Food doesn’t all ripen on the same day. Harvesting it is expensive and time-consuming. Pests (and birds) harm crops. Food is fragile. The economics of putting more time and labor into grabbing one last peach is greater than the economic benefit that peach produces. And, the distance from where something grows to where it is processed or consumed is non-zero.
It all adds up, and it’s all out of the control of the typical citizen. Consumer food waste is less than a quarter of the total.
Of course we shouldn’t buy more than we need, or simply discard food that can be turned into another meal, or useful compost for a community garden.
But climate change is a systems problem, and it requires systemic solutions. When we price carbon accurately, the efficient market will start to pay more attention to harvesting the last peach, or shifting to drip irrigation, vertical farms or simple techniques that have enormous benefits.
In the US, restaurants waste nearly as much food as all homes combined–by the time the food is on your plate, most of the damage is already done.
We actually have the tools available to make an impact. Insisting on voluntary personal action is a long, difficult road, even if someone tries to build a business around it. There are hungry people all around us, and more efficient supply chains will allocate the food we’re wasting far more efficiently.
The cultural dynamic in many places of serving more food than your guests can possibly eat–as a form of status or generosity–is persistent and wasteful. But it’s just a small part of a system that needs fixing.
The shift in our industrial systems to climate resilience is a huge opportunity. It creates efficiencies and shifts our focus away from dead-end consumption. But we need to be clear about which systems have the most leverage and work relentlessly on them.
More details, references and insights on this are in The Carbon Almanac. The course that dozens of us made on LinkedIn is free this week.
It’s interesting to realize that mirrors weren’t perfected until a few hundred years ago. Human beings spend a lot of time considering our own appearance and our own feelings and most of all, our own needs.
The market produces a shift. When it’s a fair and open exchange, the customer gains in power. As a result, the selfish merchant or producer loses market share until they figure out how to build empathy into their work.
It’s not for you, it’s for them.
And if you do a good job of making it for them, then you get your needs taken care of.
Big companies and monopolies and other institutions seek lock-in so they can go back to looking in the mirror instead of paying attention to what their customers and prospects need and want.
It’s so tempting to simply begin painting a wall. After all, it’s pretty easy to lay down paint.
But it turns out that masking and dropcloths, painstakingly put into place, save many hours compared to cleaning up a mess afterward.
The same is true for what happens when we have a new hard drive or a blank document.
A file organization and backup system takes a few minutes to set up. It saves hundreds of hours in finding files, organizing versions and recovering from an (inevitable) system failure.
Using templates, master sheets and structured ways to hold data is far more resilient than simply putting some text and images on the page in a way that looks good.
Programmers who comment their code as they go ultimately get the real work done faster.
Establishing source control protocols among team members is a tiny price to pay for avoiding duplicated work.
If you don’t have time to do it right, how will you find the time to do it over?
You can tell if a house painter is any good before the first brushstroke is applied. And you can figure out if your designers, system architects or coders are good in the very same way.
Successful treaties calm things down and let us get back to what’s really important. Sometimes, the fight becomes the entire point.
Not surprisingly, when we’re busy fighting a war in our head about a previous injustice or slight, we can effectively consummate a treaty without the other person even knowing about it.
We spend much of our worrying time on crises. Our media is filled with warnings, coverage and fear of cataclysms. The big boom, the sudden end, the crash.
In fact, rot is far more common.
Things decay unless we persistently work to support them. Organizations, reputations, systems, health, investments… even our teeth. For every hockey player who lost a tooth in a game, there are a million people who lost one over time.
Fear the rot, the explosions are merely a distraction.
Roller coasters are one of the safest ways to travel (they end up where they begin, but that’s a different story).
People pay to ride on them because they feel risky, even if they’re not.
Air travel is really safe, and the airlines work overtime to reduce the perception of risk as well. That’s why turbulence is so jarring–it’s not actually risky, but it breaks the facade.
On the other hand, we regularly engage in activities and behaviors that are risky without perceiving the risk. The cigarette companies worked hard to make smoking feel macho, sophisticated and part of the crowd at the same time that they seduced people into feeling like they weren’t taking a risk with their health.
The most resilient path in most activities is to offer perceived risk to people who seek risk, while also creating resilient systems that aren’t actually risky. Because dancing with perceived risk creates growth, connection and emotional resonance, whereas actual risk leads to outcomes we don’t want.
You and I know what to do when we see a revolving door, or to speak quietly in a library. We have expectations of how the world works and what designers are saying with their work.
Here’s a photo of a device with two controls. We’ve been taught our whole lives that the bottom one, the faucet, is designed to control the amount of water flowing through a pipe. And the top one is generally used to divert water from one pipe to another, often used to control the temperature in a shower.
Unfortunately, this design has a typo. The bottom faucet was chosen by the designer to control the temperature and the top one turns the shower on and off. There’s no way to control the volume.
When you make a typographical error in your design language, you’re either being careless or seeking to lead toward a new way of interpreting the work of anyone in your field.
Over time, the meaning of something changes. It used to be that offering plenty of disposable plastic bottles was a way for a designer to communicate surplus, luxury or sanitation. Now, it simply feels wasteful and short-sighted.
It used to be that affordances in design for people with less range of motion or other disabilities was seen as grudging and mandatory, but now it communicates awareness, openness and thought…
In New York, designing a fancy restaurant to be quiet was a sign of luxury, now, restaurant designers seek to signal scarcity by making restaurants noisy.
Kerning your type is a form of communication through design, and the rise of social media has added new meaning to poorly set type as well.
A list of rules isn’t helpful. Looking for and understanding the language as it changes is.
We spend almost no time teaching toddlers about freedom. Instead, the lessons we teach (and learn) for our entire lives are about responsibility. It’s easy to teach freedom, but important to teach responsibility. Because if you get the responsibility taken care of, often the freedom will follow.
When someone points out a lack of responsibility, it can feel like an affront on freedom, when it’s actually a chance to create more freedom for the rest of the community.
You can drive as fast as you want. But you are also responsible for not running over someone in a school zone…
The speed limit is not taking away our freedom, it’s reminding us of our responsibility.
When we build a culture of people who eagerly seek out and take responsibility, we build a culture that enables a special kind of resilient freedom.
April 11, 2023
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