Two months after the Th!nk2 in Copenhagen.  Only 19 days until the start of the Climate Change conference.  I never expected a blogging competition to influence my life in such a big degree. It seems like my daily activities are is in every aspect drenched in environmental consciousness, from the moment I wake up and eat my organic oatmeal with non-amazon bio-soymilk until I fall asleep in my second-hand sleeping couch. My behavior is changing little by little, so I can’t really describe how my ethics have been transformed so far. However, I can tell with certainty that at this very moment, I would not have entered the plane to travel to the Think Launch Event. I would have insisted, even after the two “it is impossible and way more expensive”-responses I got from the organization, on taking the train. I would have loved a 10 hour night ride, falling asleep in Amsterdam and waking up in the Danish capital. No, I do not  consider taking short-distance flights anymore, even if cheap airline companies have attractive offers.

 But… it seems more difficult than it sounds. As I wrote in one of my previous posts, even though I would wish to take the train from Amsterdam to my anthropological fieldwork spot in India, it is practically incredibly hard. First:  it would take three weeks, second: I would need to buy three visas, third: Pakistan would not allow me to cross the country because I am European and they don’t want me to become an accidental victim of terrorism, fourth: it is said to be a dangerous trip for a girl alone, and fifth: the university gives us 3 months for fieldwork, exactly from January to March. If the travel alone would take 6 weeks, there would not be a lot of time left to take fieldnotes in Auroville. To make a long story short, today I had a look on the internet in a search for flight tickets. Scrolling through it made me feel guilty. A plane, again a plane.  There are two factors left where I could look at when deciding on a plane: one obvious one (the price), one hidden one (the ecological impact). Should I go for a cheap Finnair flight of 515 euros  that stops in Helsinki, before flying to Delhi. Or is taking theEurostar to London first (an extra 80 euros) to take a direct plane to Delhi from there really significantly more environmentally friendly, as I don’t need to take a short distance flight from Brussels to London?  “Flying is carpooling in the air”, is a sentence I heard today while sitting in a Dutch train. Would that flight from Brussels to London fly even if I don’t take a seat? Do I make any impact by Eurostarring instead of flying? Or should I opt for some more effective sustainable transport: hitchhiking to London with luggage for 3 months, a bicycle journey from Schiphol to Heathrow,  is a boat maybe less polluting and less expensive? The more you think and try to do best, the more you are confronted with dilemma’s, parents who don’t understand why you even consider ‘making it difficult  and more expensive for yourself’. Wait until I suggest offsetting the emissions I cause…

Looking back at two months of blogging, though I haven’t been an as active writer as I wished to be, many things have changed. The light bulbs in the student room that my friend and I share are replaced for energy-saving ones, we didn’t purchase a new cheap bed but found our dream double sleeping couch on the second-hand website www.marktplaats.nl. It was a perfect deal: we got a soft bed for 25 euro’s, avoided buying  and producing more unnecessary stuff and waste and the owner got rid of a never-used couch that would otherwise have found its final destination at a dumpster. Furthermore, In our room we have five different waste baskets (separate ones for paper, glass, plastic, tetra and of course our compost bag (which is laying on our balcony and desperately needs a place to be useful as compost). Ok, it took us some time to find out where the different containers in our neighborhood were located (which illustrated how few people actually recycle), but now we know where to get rid of our separated waste. Only  the compostbag, where to drop it?

Nevertheless, in our daily life we try to produce as little waste as possible, Almost all vegetables we cook and eat are organic and mostly locally produced.  Meat, fish and other animal product are eliminated from our diet.  And if we purchase soy, we make sure it is organic and doesn’t come from the rainforest. Our cleaning products, including hand soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, … have an Eco(ver)-label, my new winter sweater is blue, comfortable and made out of hemp (what as did you expect in Amsterdam?). We chose to live in a student house that used only green energy with well-isolated windows and walls, which practically means we didn’t switch on the heating even once in the last 3 months. And no, we are not freezing to death. The isolation keeps the cold out and the warmth inside. And blankets are cosy and allow people to sit/lay very close to eachother sharing one for two.

 If we shop, we take our own shopping bag, made of recycled paper, with us. No plastic crap, please! And a drycleaner is not necessary if you can use a laundry tree as colorful room decoration.  Recently we started to grow our own vegetables. This initiative is one in children’s booths. Our basilicum plant and baby Ginkho Tree urgently need some company.  Showering is my personal little sin. Even though I want to limit my water waste, I often end up enjoying the relaxation of warm massaging water on my back for more than 15 minutes, which wastes way less water than the one-hour baths with foam I used to take, but still increase my daily water footprint.

If I would have read what I just wrote some months ago, I would probably be surprised. “Fjew, she sounds like an extreme environmentalist fanatic”, I would have thought while reading about hemp and a smelling compost bag on the balcony.  Still, even though I think in footprints, turn food packages to avoid certain ingredients, rather stay hungry during a trainride than buying quick fast food at the train station and see buying ‘stuff’ like cloths and electronic tools not as a process in which I ran in a shop and want the most shiny, brand-new thing I see, I don’t perceive myself as a fanatic. Yes, buying has become a conscious process of considering costs and benefits, thereby looking at the quality of the product, the country where it is made, the real necessity,  the possibility to get it second hand and a fair (but student-friendly) price… no, even while being conscious about my consumer behavior all the time,. I still have the feeling I am not doing enough. I realized how spoiled I am. Really, decreasing your carbon footprint by sustainable and responsible consumption is easier if you come from a Western country where you have easy access to organic products (at least if you search for it),  vegan options at restaurants,  a supermarket with an organic section of products that are not even more expensive than the ‘normal’ ones and the privilege to be born in a country which offers the option to switch to green energy and a good social security system and therefore not too many risks to end up homeless, sick without health care, foodless and financially broke.   Still, I don’t think this fact is any excuse for Western people NOT to change their consumer behavior. It is not because developing countries cannot decrease their emissions to the same extend, that we can just stay in our old habits of overconsumption and keep our eye folds on. I like the idea of a Green Revolution. I enjoy searching for green solutions in my daily life, convincing people to do their own part,  feel less choice distress because the overload of options is suddenly limited if you take ecology into account, but am aware of the utopian character of this dream. Like a Bulgarian guy said who I just met in the train: ‘dreaming is a start, but we should make politicians share that dream. And they won’t do that because we are going ‘back to native’ for a life in the forest. If our actions are too extreme,  they will just see climate activists as shouting irrational hippies whom they prefer to ignore”.