Nail it, screw it…

To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Peter Malaise thinks we’re in danger of single-track thinking on CO2– when what we need is a more holistic approach

Sure, it is possible to see our world as a big, stinking, CO2-producing unit. It’s true, too, that a lot of that is generated by human activities – and that all of us could undoubtedly cut some of our own output. But is it right to approach this world’s problems as if CO2 were the cause of all our ills? This strikes me as too reductionist.

On the other hand, I was recently invited to a conference on ‘Non-CO2 Greenhouse Gases’. This was a ‘first’ – but I’m quite confident that it won’t be the last of its kind.

Just wait – soon enough rival gangs will emerge, one ascribing all the planet’s pain to oxygen problems, another proclaiming that it’s really down to methane, or nitrogen, or hydrogen… We’ll be successively held to account for our every breath, fart or sweatdrop. And, as each view in turn gains ascendancy, we’ll have to do another U-turn, throw our existing monitoring campaigns, reports and solutions overboard, and start all over again, tackling whatever’s seen as the real problem this time. It’ll keep the consultants in business, of course, but I’m not convinced that we’ll improve matters by looking at our problems in such one-sided ways.

It’s true that we are facing unprecedented problems. In the whole history of mankind, there have never been as many people on the planet as there are now. And, even as that growth was happening, we turned away from the use of renewable resources, for food, clothing, housing and the myriad of aids and utensils we need in daily life. Instead we went over to using fossil resources – first coal, then mineral oil. In so doing, we lost sight of the need to care for such precious assets as clean water and fertile soil. We lost the habit of reusing and recycling – weakening that connection with the past and, worse, the ability to sustain our future. We got things instead.

"In a previous age the ‘waste’ of one activity would naturally have become raw material for another"

Much of what we got can be classified as ‘emissions’: smoke, heat, stench, and soluble and solid waste. This waste, too, is seen literally as ‘refuse’, and it’s piling up everywhere– whereas in a previous age the ‘waste’ of one activity would naturally have become raw material for another. In my own trade, the soap boiler would have bought the ashes, which the ash man collected from local wood fires and stoves. The soap boiler’s craft involved lixiviating the ashes with water to rinse out the potassium carbonate, from which he made caustic potash with quicklime. What was left became compost for the gardener. Now that’s what I’d call a cradle-to-cradle process…

However important it may be to cut CO2, it’s not the most fundamental issue. Ultimately, our problems are the (almost mathematical) product of wrongly chosen raw materials and energy, inadequate processing, profligate use, and thoughtless and irresponsible disposal. And of disconnected lifestyles – to which neither religion and philosophy, nor politics, have been able to bring a new type of coherence.

Cutting away feverishly at CO2 (or anything else) won’t give you a coherent answer to those problems. There is a point, too, where youreach the limits of feasibility. Try as you may, you’ll never get a ‘zero emission’ human being. Even if humans are total couch potatoes, they still take in oxygen, emit carbon dioxide, sweat, urine and faeces, give off body heat – and, over a seven-year period, replace every single molecule of their organisms with freshly made ones, and dump the old ones.

So, by all means, let’s take proper care of our CO2, and the others besides. But instead of just cutting, let’s focus on connecting things up properly, using all those emissions to our advantage in fresh approaches to extraction, processing and ‘waste’ treatment.

What we really should ‘cut’ is the idea that ‘waste’ is something that is wasted. In reality, it’s a raw material that just hasn’t yet realised it is.

Peter Malaise is concept manager at Ecover.

Ecover is a Forum for the Future partner.

20 September 2007

Peter Malaise