living green

I read Collapse by Jared Diamond not too long ago. A pretty interesting book whose main theme I'll try to sum up here: civilizations tend to collapse when they use resources at an unsustainable rate. It's a little more complex than that, but the point I'm getting to is that, after living in Cambodia for 10 months, that makes sense. I get it. Or at least more than before.

I think back on the way I lived in the States and there's so much waste. So much excess. Only I didn't think about it because that's how I grew up; that's what was normal.

Examples. Trash: I probably generate about a pint of trash a week here. If I had to guess, it would take me two months to fill up a kitchen trash can the size I had back home, where I was taking out the trash one or two times a week. Really, how much trash do you wheel out to your curb every week? Electricity: people are very conscious of electricity usage here because it's expensive. Turn off the lights when you leave the room. Unplug the phone charger if you're not using it. Don't use the fan if it's not hot enough to justify it. AC! Fugghhet about it. Hot showers are available some places, but even then there are machines that superheat the water as it comes through the nozzle. There's no boilers that keep water hot all day if people aren't using it. Dryers? Why use electric dryers when the sun will dry clothes for you? Toilet paper: okay, don't laugh, but seriously....I haven't used toilet paper in 10 months. They have butt blasters here, or ass guns, whatever you want to call them. After you're done doing your thing, you just blast your ass with water. I for one feel it's cleaner than using paper. And think about it. I figure one person uses about 24 to 36 rolls of toilet paper a year. If 300 million people in the US stopped using toilet paper you know how many trees that would save? That's a little extreme, but....just think about it....

I could go on with more examples. My point is, if everyone in the world lived the way people in the US did we would have a major crisis very, very shortly. How scary is it that China (1.3 billion people - 4 times the size of the US) is modernizing as quickly as it is? You can't blame 'em. Who wouldn't want to live at the level Western countries do? But the world's resources are not going to be able to handle it. The fact is, we can only maintain our lifestyle if we ensure the rest of the world doesn't live like we do. Ouch, right?

Anyway, I've never been a hard-core environmentalist, but being here in Cambodia certainly has added some perspective when I think about issues such as resource consumption, global warming, and what the next 30 years might be like if the world's population keeps increasing.