The Green Life

We could go back to the barter system, if we really want to return to basics. Using only what we need, ourselves producing what we require, bartering extra with others who produce items useful to us that we cannot ourselves produce. Living in tight little enclaves, where travel is minimal. Growing our own produce, milking a cow, tending orchards and a kitchen garden. Not quite possible, not practicable, but a physician-led study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet does recommend that we become pedestrians.

That we walk about more, extend our physical selves, and eschew the use of motor vehicles. Take the bicycle, for example, out of the realm of recreation and into that of practical necessity. Use pedalled conveyances instead of mechanical ones that use fossil fuels, and leave petrochemicals out of our everyday lives, thus enhancing our opportunities to live cleaner, breathe easier. Even our food will be healthier, if we eschew the use of fertilizing chemicals.

Municipalities, claims the report, would do better focusing on the planning of a series of pedestrian walkways and give increased attention to the proliferation of bicycle lanes, discouraging the use of motor vehicles by prioritizing road use for pedal-activated conveyances. And doesn't that fly in the face of modernity and economic progress which saw advances in the presence of motorized vehicular use?

For commercial and private use, where food products were increasingly trucked long distances from source of supply to consumer, and where private vehicles led to the living expansiveness of urban areas with the formation of suburbs branching out from city centres. We've been enamoured of our way of living, stocking up pantries with exotic fruits and vegetables out of season, grown huge distances from where we live.

And coincidentally, ourselves travelling long distances from our countrified home settings into the crowded, gentility-abandoned inner sanctums of the city, where we earned a living wage. Imagine a turn-around of all that. The enlarged urban area would have to contract, or, at the very least, turn itself into neighbourhoods, and the kinds of city planning that exorcise commercial away from dwellings would have to be reversed.

Places of employment would, of necessity, have to be close to where the people who work there, live. And shopping would also have to be included. How else make it efficient for people to pedal or perambulate bipedally from home to work, to shopping, to recreation? This kind of upheaval of what we now see as the norm in a concerted attempt to deal with climate change would see a complete reversal of how society has evolved.

Our sedentary society, accustomed to driving everywhere, eating enormous amounts of food - in the process promoting obesity in all levels of the population with an attendant strain on the health industry - faces nature's blow back from carbon dioxide emissions altering the Earth's atmosphere. Where droughts, floods, heat waves, catastrophic storms, an alteration in the geographic distribution of disease-vectoring insects diminish quality of life.

Is all or any of this really likely to happen? Just asking.