Lately, I've been spending a lot of time considering what things I can do to make me a better person, specifically in terms of what my net "existence footprint" is, in kind of a overblown, wholistically hand-wavish way. Some of these things have become cliche - carbon footprint, energy footprint, waste footprint - and some are just the net-effect of being on the planet for a little while, both positive and negative. I think that if you're a thoughtful, observant person, these things are hard to ignore.
But it turns out that no matter what you do, you can frame it as a negative, and it can get a little neurotic and frustrating. Almost everything we do in a day has a negative impact on someone or something, somewhere.
- Drive a car? Oil is bad.
- Want to get a new car that uses less oil? Disposing of cars is very bad. Building new ones is too.
- Want a new car that uses tiny amounts of diesel? Diesel is dirty, so you're trading carbon for pollution.
- See the world? Air travel is a major carbon emitter.
- Eat more fish? Ocean stocks are plummeting.
- Use florescent bulbs instead of regular ones? Regular ones heat your house, florescent ones may take more resources to make.
- Ride a bike? Finally, a good one. Ride more bikes, people!
You get the idea. In almost every case, you can either argue against the thing you're trying to do, either because the result isn't much better than the original issue, or it's cost-prohibitive, or it's just plain hard. In almost every case the improvements are incremental, so I'm the first to admit that the feel-good-factor is a major component. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But that's just the point - once you're aware of some of these downstream effects, you have to make a choice. And that's something I've been calling the hypocrisy threshold. That's when you know that you "shouldn't" be doing something (whatever that means), that there is an alternative, but you do it anyway, and you just deal with it. You complain that the planet is heating up and we're all screwed...but you're still driving your car to work every day.
Some of these are even worse than incremental judgement calls. The way that animals are treated in the meat industry is stunningly and shockingly horrible (I dare you to go Google on it - it'll drag you right up to that hypocrisy threshold, I guarantee). Ditto for the conditions faced by people who make many of the products we use on a daily basis. The list goes on and on. And I'm still wearing the same shoes and I'm still eating meat (so far).
Clearly this is a fact of life, and each person needs to figure out where their dial is set and maybe do their best to help around the margins, even just to feel better about it. I suppose it's better to be aware of some of this stuff and be bothered by, rather than be ignorant and/or not care, but it doesn't always feel that way.