The environmental crisis and short showers

Derrick Jensen writes in this article  http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/forget-shorter-showers-why-personal-change-does-not-equal-political-change/ that individual action around climate change is woefully short of what is needed.   

This might be a reason to give up on consuming less because his exhortations to become a ‘real activist’ who subverts the system might seem just too much.  

I agree with quite a lot of what he says, although I also find myself disagreeing with his title – forget shorter showers.  Actually, I think. remember them and also consider how you might do them using less energy and less water!  

It takes a lot of mindfulness and learning to really step lightly on the earth, whilst also living in today’s developed world, and I when individuals work to achieve this, they act as models for what is possible.  I, for example, was inspired by a story in the Guardian, years ago about a retired academic living in London who had worked to minimise her personal energy use.   

She walked everywhere, seldom cooked and didn’t have the hot water on.  Her area of research as an academic had been around energy and she decided that she should learn to put her knowledge into practice. 

After reading that article, I spent some time looking at my lifestyle and tracking my energy use and managed to cut it down considerably from what it had been.  I now drive my power company mad because I use about 4 -5 units of power per day summer and winter (and I work at home!).  My consumption, however is not as low as a good friend of mine who has his down to about 1 unit per day.  I do still own a car but just recently invested in an electric bike which has had no discernable effect on my power bill and which as halved my already low car running. Most of the car running I do is to carry large items needed for the community work I do.  

I don't think these things are a waste of time and I do talk about them with people as much as I am comfortable with.   I suppose an additional step would be to talk about it more and perhaps to write about it (which I've just done).  


Derek Jensen is right, though.  it is probably not enough just to do this and my reflections on some of the things I think we need to be doing will populate later posts.