Formerly UCLouvain / Evolutionary biology
The translation of this testimony was generated automatically by a translation program. Thanks for your understanding.
I’m mostly concerned by the chain reaction that will come from global warming and biodiversity loss, and especially by the fact that we do not fully realise its consequences on our future life. I believe that scepticism about these phenomena is the fact of people either ignorant or having opposite immediate interests.
I definitely live in an adapted way of life with the goal of minimising my footprint on the environment. I have no car and use public transports (train, bus) to join my work (60 km). I use a bike to move in the city of Brussels. For holidays I travel by train for distances below 1500 km. For longer distances I try to avoid flights by splitting the journey in smaller pieces. I picked my destinations inside Europe for many years now. As a consumer, I rather buy local products to reduce transport distances, since these transports are mainly performed by road or air rather than railway or sea. I am not a vegetarian and do not plan to become one but I buy meat once a week as a maximum. I mostly buy organic food with the idea of reducing the use of pesticides in agriculture, and avoid packaging since they go to a trash in no time and can be replaced by reusable containers.
I don’t own the house I live in so I’m restrained in the improvement I could bring to reduce its emissions/consumption. However I live in a shared space which optimises a lot the needed space and then the spent energy to heat it (besides forcing you to live in a less selfish way and keeping you well aware that you live in a society with different people to understand and respect).
Beyond the need of dedicated political measures to reduce our ecological footprint, I feel that the most critical mater is to get free of the trap of global economy. Politics are too dependent of large companies’ requirements in an economy that aims at always diminishing expenses (taxes or salaries). As long as it is fiscally cheaper to give an employee a car with a fuel card than the equivalent increase in salary or free time, as long as regular working time increases and people still get more unemployed, as long as native local products are more expensive than foreign industrial ones, we cannot expect climate and biodiversity to recover.
Originally posted 2018-07-09 22:46:00.