EnvironMeg
What's it to me?
News flash: climate change is happening. We’ve all heard it before, right? Scientists confirm this, experts say that. After a while it melts and merges into all the other daily monotony. It’s another feature on the news whilst we compete in the daily race of ‘how quickly can I drink my coffee before I need to be out the door 10 minutes ago?’. We passively absorb this information, subconsciously sequestering it in our mind palaces with a label reading ‘bad’, right next to ‘stock markets are up’ with a label reading ‘good’. What is it about this information that makes us so emotionally binary?
More than ever we are being told to be mindful; defined as bringing one's attention to experiences occurring in the present. I believe this is where the problem lies. We are so busy worrying about the stuff in the present that we forget to consider the things which extend beyond the now. Beyond us. We’re so caught up in the fight or flight of the here and now that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. We are forgetting to zoom out. We’re so accustomed to being a grain of sand that we’ve forgotten it’s our unity making the beach. We’re becoming detached from the big things because we think they don’t directly impact us: the social, economic and environmental drivers which make civilization tick along nicely. So when that information comes knocking at our door, our internal housekeeper asks ‘what’s it to me?’.
Confession time. I forget to turn off the lights. Like the rest of us, I forget to zoom out. There’s things I know I should care more about, be more concerned for. It’s not like I don’t want to, but in that moment, I just don’t have the storage space. The time. The energy. My toothbrush is constantly on charge because the last time it needed plugging in I had to ask maintenance for help. Though I think this says just as much about my lack of dexterity as it does my environmental concern. Even now, admittedly, I’ll walk out of a room and not switch the TV off. I know it’s bad, but I’ll conjure some fantastical excuse why not to. ‘Someone else might want to watch it’ is a common clause in my mental phrasebook entitled ‘I can’t be bothered’. We do dress ups with our environmental evils, playing pretend that it’s a good deed for someone else. According to the Energy Saving Trust, 9-16% of household electricity consumption is for powering appliances on standby mode. We are all in standby mode. We never fully turn off from the now and appreciate our surroundings. If we externalized our mindfulness, I think we’d all be better off. We need to think of ourselves as global custodians, protecting the environment for the future. When that tsunami wave comes, we need to protect the beach, not just our grain. So next time that information comes knocking, we’ll genuinely think ‘what’s it to us?’. And on that note, it’s lights out.