Submitted by Sean Lloyd
Working in the eco-industry, I constantly stress about little things environment wise. Are my friends recycling? Are they using organic body-care products? Are their products local, and not imported? I wonder if that salad is organic?
Do they even care?
All these questions were piling up in my head late last year and making me go a little bit crazy to be honest. It’s a bit embarrassing to finish off your latest Joost joke at a boys’ braai then interrogate your host as to whether he will recycle the beer bottle you’ve just emptied. It’s not part of the “bro-code” to do this.
So I just left it. This eco-guilt built up for many months last year until finally I couldn’t take it any more and went on one of the biggest benders of my life.
Jagermeister, Red Bull, vodka and Coke is what it should have read. Instead my brain saw it as this:
Glass, tin, glass, tin.
Good grief!
As the booze flowed, emotions ran high and I started suffering from booze-induced emotional eco-guilt. With every beer down it was a case of “I wonder if it’s getting recycled?” instead of “Look at that hottie across the bar”, I started to look around and noticed that there were loads of drunk people around me and then it hit me.
Everyone suffers from eco-guilt. There is no way that you can’t suffer from it. If you drive a car and watch TV, you know that you are killing the planet. And so you start to drink. These people in nightclubs simply escape their homes and pile into clubs to get away from TVs that constantly advertise the latest energy-saving devices.
Drinking leads to major hunger so you go get a beef burger. You know that beef uses large amounts of energy to make. You feel guiltier. You smoke a joint to calm down. You get the munchies.
Eat another burger. Suffer more guilt. You start drinking to try and forget the guilt. You start crying as the barman throws your bottles and tins into a regular bin. You try drink through this and forget it, but it’s a perpetual cycle of guilt. It’s a cycle of “I drink because I feel guilty” and “I feel guilty because I drink”. It’s almost certainly a direct cause of the continuing rise in alcoholism the world over.
Drinking is there to allow us to escape this eco-guilt that has been brought down upon us by world leaders and the world press. If you’re reading this and not recycling the beer bottle you’re drinking from, you’re going to eco-hell. So in that case, you might as well hit me up with a double Jameson. And a Red Bull on the side
And throw the bottle and the tin into the ocean. I might as well have a real reason to be so hammered and feel so guilty at the same time.
Lloyd works for EcoSouth Travel (http://www.ecosouth.co.za) and also runs a Cape Town lifestyle blog (http://www.slxs.co.za)
I never recycle, and don’t feel one bit guilty. I already made the ultimate contribution to the environment – I didn’t reproduce. That puts me streets ahead of most people, so I just enjoy life. Cheers!
‘Everyone suffers from eco-guilt. There is no way that you can’t suffer from it. If you drive a car and watch TV, you know that you are killing the planet.’
I disagree. Hardly anyone in South Africa actually cares. That is why you are stressed so much. You may be faithfully trying to recycle, but 95% of the rest of the population don’t bother. I recently helped out with my running club’s annual fun run. All their empty coke bottles from the race watering points, and all the glass beer bottles and tins from the braai afterwards, where thrown into the regular trash. I considered making the point that there should be an attempt to separate the recyclables, but then realized that I would be ostracized or looked down on in a way, simply because recycling is not high on the typical South African’s list of priorities. So I kept my mouth shut.
I afraid I’m going to eco hell too.
You see, I too have an eco conscious but society makes it hard for me to do anything about it. Does South Africa have an aggresive recycling program, a commitment to renewable energy, an oath to reducing acrbon emmissions? No, and with Mr shower head coming into power I doubt we ever will.
Only if a government instils an eco conscious into its citizens will the gates of ‘eco heaven’ open, right now I think it’s vacant.
@CB. So you think not having any children (yet) excludes you from having to worry about the environment? Fact is, the population density of a country is not proportional to the environmental damage that a country does. The ecological footprint of each individual is what determines environmental damage.
@shane. Most major towns and all cities in South Africa have some sort of recycling program running. You may just have to show some interest and get off your ass to make it work. When I was living in England, I had to carry my recycling in bags to the local recycling depot. Noone came around to collect it from me. Noone held my hand.
I think the main problem we’re having is that we have not instilled the eco values in South African society, and as you know, it’s hard to teach people these things when they’re older.
Unfortunately we’re stuck in a situation where we need people to want to help, to want to make a difference. But as with anything, if there are no monetary rewards associated with it then they don’t want to do it. It’s easier to throw everything in one bin and forget about it where it ends up. If you’ve ever seen a landfill ,you will realise the true extent of our carelessness.
We don’t have much more landfill space though, and once that’s reached then I guess it’s too late. Recycling needs to be taken more seriously right now if we want change.
And now I hear it’s because of money issues, but I really think our government needs to make the money available. We can buy all sorts of fancy submarines after all…but we can’t recycle? Bizarre. Let’s not even get onto Eskom dishing out some 20 million energy saving bulbs, now all the bulbs and their mercury are going into landfill and into the environment.
Until then though we have to individually be responsible for our own recycling, it’s very simple in fact.
I recycle as much as I can, but then I have to load all the bags into my diesel-powered car and take them a couple of kms to the central recycling point. So how much am I helping the environment? Dunno, I don’t have the time to do the Maths.
But we don’t see the sub-culture of recycling in this country – many people eke out a living by working the landfill sites and taking items for recycling (the M&G ran a few pages on this a year or so back, when it was World Recycling Week or something similar). So all those tins that get thrown out by the local pubs are picked up and contribute towards someone making a bit of a living. SA is rated as one of the best can recycling countries in the world, if you believe the collect-a-can marketing blurbs.
I’m not excusing South African slothfulness, I really think we can all do lots more. But then do we get to feel guilty about the landfill-dwellers who are being deprived? Please someone help me with all this guilt!
sean, i’m afraid andrew is right. it’s a gross overstatement to say everyone suffers ‘eco-guilt’. to then link alcoholism to this spurious claim is daft. i suspect there are many more relevant reasons that drive people to drink in excess – failed marriages; peer pressure; heck, just good old-fashioned fun.
you imply that incurring as well as not acting on this alleged guilt is morally wrong. if this is your stance – and quite an extreme one, in case you were’nt aware – then you’re compelled to be consistent in your logic. why not make mention of the fact that devouring countless burgers entails the wholesale slaughter of innocent sentient creatures? is this not equally, if not more, morally repugnant? are there not environmental consequences of factory farming? you bet there are.
generally, you need to make tighter arguments, sean. the one you make here is tenuous at best. i’m all for quirky journalism, but don’t think that readers out there are not smart enough to find a piece like this sophomoric and naive.
@ tired old soul — To be honest, this piece was meant to be entirely humourous. Linking alcoholism to eco-guilt is entirely preposterous, I know. But I just thought it added a new twist to this boring debate over recycling and this continual debate over the environment.
I can read regular eco-stuff at Treehugger and Urban Sprout…this was meant to be light hearted and poke fun at the entire situation, and I just managed to throw alcoholism into the debate because it came into my head at the time.
I’m also aware of the treatment of animals that are used to make burgers and yes I do disagree with the way they are treated. To be honest, and this is entirely my opinion, I think humans eating meat is entirely natural. We’ve done it for thousands of year. In nature we don’t call crocodiles murderers for eating other animals.
I do however totally disagree with the way these animals are treated during their lifetimes.
“are there not environmental consequences of factory farming?”
Of course there are, but that would require a totally different post.
I just thought by writing this we could inject a bit of light heartedness into the eco-debate and into these pages. We don’t always have to be entirely serious in life, because there’s too much to be serious about and we’ll all go mad! Well I would anyway.
whatever your intentions, the piece itself needs to be funny. which i’m afraid it just isn’t. true, it would be a fresh angle to look at environmentalism through alcoholism, but it doesn’t work. and if the idea just popped into your head at the time, i wonder if you perhaps need to think harder about your pieces.
i would be careful about stepping into very murky philosophical waters about what is and is not natural for human beings. i would be even more careful about deriving moral prescriptions from whatever conception of ‘natural’ you use.
fortunately, opinion is not synonymous with reason. so while you may have the opinion you do, be aware that in this particular instance you are very likely to be wrong. for instance, we don’t wag our ethical fingers at crocodiles because killing and eating other animals is natural for them. we don’t call crocs immoral simply because they are not moral beings. have a look at david hume on the is-ought problem and you’ll see what i mean.
lastly, discussing factory farming would actually have made your post significantly stronger. i leave it for you to figure out how.
With regards to stepping into murky philosophical waters, to be honest, I’m not interested in stepping there because debates can go on forever, and also, I write for fun. I have a very light hearted view on life, in everything I do I try have as much fun as possible. This post can go on and be very serious, but that’s not it’s intention.
Re: “be aware that in this particular instance you are very likely to be wrong”
So you are saying you are right? Well fortunately everyone has an opinion and you will by now know in life there is no wrong answer. So maybe your right is someone elses wrong? I think we are all entitled to our own opinions.
The point of this piece was to have a light hearted read, and maybe it wasn’t funny to you, but maybe did you consider that it lightened some other peoples days somewhat? Just because it’s not funny to you, doesn’t mean everyone found it to be boring. Just to be clear, this is not attacking you in any way, I’m just trying to bring my point across
This post was not to debate the meaning of life, it was a light hearted look at eco-guilt.
I could very well have gone into factory farming, but that was in no way related to this post in the first place
Oh and by the way, thanks for informing me of the “is-ought problem” While it’s too deep to discuss here, it’s nonetheless very interesting, although I’m going to have to read it further, very slowly. Opens the mind up a little