I turn over the box of strawberries in my hand, looking for the telltale maple leaf; grown in Canada. The sign above the fruit proudly proclaims “from local farms”, but it never hurts to be sure. On the next shelf, a row of American strawberries stares out sulkily. They’re two dollars cheaper, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for the reduced food miles and the support of a local business (https://www.foodmiles.com/). I leave the produce aisle feeling pretty good about myself.
When I exit the shop, I opt for walking over taking the bus–it’s only twenty minutes on foot, and besides, just another small way to help my carbon footprint (https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/). Since flying to Canada for my year abroad, I’ve been making deliberate steps to live as greenly as possible; I’ve forced the European tendency to walk everywhere on the North American country, my weekends are spent thrifting instead of shopping at the mall, and every grocery shop includes a thorough cross-examination of the item’s place of origin. I’ve always cared about the environment, but this intentional effort started after checking the carbon emissions of my flight online and finding out that my return trip alone produced 2.3 tonnes of CO2 (https://www.myclimate.org/en/information/about-myclimate/myclimate-carbon-tracker/). That’s over triple the ideal yearly average of 0.6!
A car whizzes by as I reach my house. I try not to sigh. Usually, my climate guilt is kept at bay by these efforts, but not today. No amount of positive action will ever undo the carbon emissions of my flights across the Atlantic, and for every trip I make on foot, there’s at least three cars making the same journey. How much of a difference can one person’s actions really make?
I seat myself at the kitchen table when I get in, and stare absently out at the garden. I’ll allow myself a solid five minutes of wallowing before unpacking my groceries. But then–a flurry of brown and red feathers catches my eye; a robin. I watch as it dances around the garden, framed like a picture in the glass pane of my window. Finally, it settles on an old smoothie cartoon, before beginning to peck at the seeds there. I can’t help the smile that creeps across my face; it’s my DIY birdfeeder (https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2019/01/how-to-make-a-bird-feeder/)! I learnt how to make it when looking for a more useful way to cut-down on waste and help my local ecosystem, remembering that the three R’s should be done in order; reduce, reuse, recycle. I feel the dark cloud of my mood start to brighten.
Sometimes you can feel completely useless, like nothing you do will ever be good enough to help the environment in any meaningful way, but that simply isn’t true. The actions I take do have positive impacts, even if just for the life of one bird, so I’ll keep doing them.
