And Another Thing II

If you think of the “environment” or let’s take a more specific example, the atmosphere, as a space in which we can store our pollution, the by-products of our consumption, then it’s easy to imagine it as a resource. Like a resource it's finite, keep putting things into the space and one day it will be full.

During this journey from the wealthiest countries in the world (UK, France, Switzerland), to the poorest (Nepal, India), I’ve become more convinced that the way we exploit our environment is just another facet of the global social injustice that has dogged the way this planet is governed since colonial times.

For over a century, richer countries have exploited the earth’s resources, providing a comfortable quality of life for their citizens at a disproportionate cost to the citizens of poorer countries. The exploitation of energy, oil, coal, mineral resources, timber, food crops, cotton, and more, has on the whole benefited the wealthy foreigners exploiting the commodity more than the country whose soil yields it.

So it is with the pollution-storing-environment resource. The beneficiaries who are fully exploiting this resource are the highly consumptive rich nations, who need a lot of rivers, sea, landfills and atmosphere to store the waste their high quality of life produces, and they are getting this globally shared resource for a knock down price. Free.

In the case of space to put the CO2 produced by energy consumption, the US and Europe has had more than 200 years of free rein, burning first their own forests to fuel the industrial revolution, then global coal and now oil reserves. And the situation continues to be exploited unevenly. The quality of each life in the US is using up that storage space over 3 times faster than the quality of each life in India.

And the impact of overusing this CO2 storage will be paid by developing countries. Climate change associated to manmade activities will impact the tropical countries most, where weather patterns are more susceptible to changes, and it will impact agricultural economies that rely on predictable climate to grow crops to feed themselves and earn foreign exchange with which they can give themselves a decent quality of life. Poor developing countries, not by accident, are almost always tropical and agricultural.

“Saving the Environment” is a confusing way of phrasing the problem. Firstly it distances people from the problem. A head teacher in India while congratulating me on this expedition told me “It’s great what you are doing. I love the environment, trees and all that, it would be a shame if we lost it all.” as though the environment is a nice-to-have bonus, something pretty to look at on the drive to work. Secondly it obfuscates the fact that it is humanity that will suffer not the trees. The jet stream will still blow (though no one knows for sure where), clouds will still form at the top of thermal columns of air, wildlife, animals and plants will quietly uncomplainingly adapt, migrate, evolve or die out.

And humans will have to adapt, migrate, evolve or die out too. The ones best suited to adapting and migrating will be the rich ones. The ones without the money or the liberty to move freely around the planet will face the choice between evolving, and where that’s not possible, dying out.

So once again a valuable resource is being disproportionately exploited by people in wealthy nations, leaving a disproportionately high cost for people in poor nations.

I’m becoming more convinced that the mechanism for “Saving the environment” is universally linked to creating global social justice in the world. The two things are mutually dependent. In order to responsibly manage the pollution-storage-space environment there has to be social justice, and managing the environment will prevent social injustice.

Equal education, equal access to healthcare and equal access to global resources. But seeing as we can’t even eradicate poverty in the world I really don’t think we have any chance. Thank god I’m not a poor Indian.

People criticise the environmental credentials of this journey, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. I’m bored of having the same discussions and clarifying confusions about “Biofuels: good or bad?” or “The Environmental Impact of Container Ships”. There’s a bigger point. Living in the UK and especially London, it’s impossible to escape wasteful consumption and being a “valuable member of society” (which actually means working somewhere in the industrialised cycle of turning resources into commodities and delivering them to consumers – and is presumably opposed to being a worthless member of society). By taking to the road and escaping that cycle by living in a truck, I believe, means I am contributing more towards creating a socially just world and therefore helping reduce the CO2 I’m responsible to an even greater degree than the act of running my bus on waste oils. A consumptive lifestyle, complicity with unfair resource exploitation is the root cause of a carbon intensive lifestyle and the fuel I put in my truck is only part of the picture.

In an interview this week I was asked what people can do to help the environment and I said, “I don’t know, they have to figure it out for themselves.” I’m not a role model with easy pithy consumable answers, and if I said they have to quit their jobs, let all their hire-purchase electronics be repossessed, move out of the city and plant tomatoes, most people would understandably think I’m even more of a naive idealist idiot than they already do.

Buyuk Kolej

This encounter really inspired me. Aybuke, Ece and Neva, three girls from the college read an article in National Geographic Magazine about biodiesel, and persuaded their college to support them in a scheme they devised to collect used cooking oil from their canteen for Albiyobir, a local biodiesel producer.

They expanded the scheme so pupils could bring their used cooking oil from home into school too, and expanded it again for the homes in the neighbourhood to deposit their used oil at the school.

Then they went to a number of conferences and got another 70 schools to do the same thing, not just in Turkey, but internationally.

The girls have now graduated from the high school and are at university (studying law and engineering). They came back as part of a special presentation to give me some oil and told me all about the oil collection project, and the education programme that went with it, in faultless English, and left me in awe at how competent these 19 year olds are. They are now working their magic on their universities to collect oil from there too.

And to prove that they really know their stuff, they presented me with a gift of kitchen roll. Anyone that has collected oil knows the value of kitchen roll. These guys are for real. I love the thought process they must have gone through; He’s collecting veg oil around the world? That guy’s going to need some paper towels!

Credit for the project also goes to Elvan, one of their teachers who supported them. My thanks go to all the staff at Buyuk Koleje who made me feel very welcome and to everyone that collected oil for the bus.

Photos in the Gallery.

Next I am headed to the University in Konya, which has a Biodiesel Institute, where I think I’ve been asked to give a lecture!

Homefield School Genesis

I was invited as the guest of honour to Homefield Preparatory School in South London. What a great school, and some very smart kids. I was honoured to meet most of them as I presented prizes for sport and academic achievement.

While planning the talk, I developed a couple of ideas for involving the children from this, and hopefully many other schools in the project.

Firstly I’d like the children to help me with researching energy projects along the route. I’d like them to find schemes around the world where energy is being generated in a sustainable (or unsustainable) way that I can visit and document with video and images. Also I’d like to send me questions for me to find out about the energy being generated.

On a practical point, we’ll find a way of always having our immediate destination listed on the website as well as our current location to limit the geographical scope of their research. And I will produce some simple lesson plans for teachers to help them structure the research.

Then if I’m able to visit and find out the answers I’ll post the answers back to the site with video.

Secondly, I’d like kids to take the Biotruck Pledge, and tell me about their carbon saving. Again through the expedition site and external sites, kids (and adults) will be able to calculate their footprint saving and post it on the web.

At the end of the expedition we’ll total up the CO2 saving from all our followers.

Based on the response from Homefield School, where the idea was very warmly welcomed, I think this could be a really exciting aspect of the project.