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Date Local: The case against long-distance relationships
Barron Young Smith, Slate
You’re sitting in the airport terminal, rolling your copy of the Economist into a sweaty tube and waiting to see a significant other who lives far away. You’re excited. You’re aroused. But there’s something else, a nagging feeling that gurgles in your stomach and won’t go away. Is it pangs of guilt? It should be: The planet is about to suffer for your love.
Perversely, we live in a world where the sustainability consultant in San Francisco is willing to fly in an exotic boyfriend every month from Washington, D.C. All day, she helps companies “green their supply chains” and “internalize core social costs,” yet that eco-savvy seems to vanish at night, when she e-mails: Come visit!!! You might say she’s willing to be a locavore but not a locasexual.
Consider what happens when these two fly to see each other once a month. Since greenhouse gases emitted from high-altitude airplanes are thought to have several times the impact of ground transport, a carbon offset company would pin their romantic travels with the equivalent of 35 metric tons of CO2 each year. If that responsibility were divided evenly between the two, our sustainability consultant’s lifestyle would be about six times worse for the environment than that of the average gas-guzzling American—and up to 10 times worse than that of the average San Franciscan. (Indeed, for her, breaking up would be about 10 times better for the environment than going vegetarian.)
(22 October 2008)
Spotted by Holly Richmond at Gristmill: Do the locasexual motion.
Eat local, get laid
Lou Bendrick, Checkout Line via Gristmill
Lou,
I am curious about any benefits of eating seasonally — the foods or products that are traditionally or historically in abundance at particular times of the year. At one time were our bodies in sync with those seasons and the foods that were available at that time? Curious, let me know!
George
Dear George,
What a timely question, when farmers markets and gardens are overflowing with the season’s bounty! Personally, nothing makes me feel more secure than a countertop full of apples and squash. (And let’s face it, apples and squash may be the most secure place to put your money these days.) As for biological synchronicity with the seasons, the answer is yes. More on that in a moment, but first I must extol the little-known benefits of seasonal eating, which include but are not limited to:
… Desirable connections. The payoffs for eating local don’t just involve alcohol, there’s sex, too … the traditional and historically abundant foods you mention connect us to our culture, our place, and each other in surprising ways. Take, for instance, the emblem of autumn, the pumpkin. Can you imagine Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie? In fact, pumpkin pie causes such deep, happy associations that its aroma causes sexual arousal in men. Although I lack the Y chromosome, I think the equation behind the pie-aroma phenomenon goes like this:
comfort food + football + beer x memories of college girlfriend = ardor
In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries.
(24 October 2008)
George Monbiot on air travel and Love Miles
George Monbiot, Guardian
Original headline: On the flight path to global meltdown
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… the people who are most concerned about the inhabitants of other countries are often those who have travelled widely. Much of the global justice movement consists of people – like me – whose politics were forged by their experiences abroad. While it is easy for us to pour scorn on the drivers of sports utility vehicles, whose politics generally differ from ours, it is rather harder to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed, especially the freedoms that shaped us.
More painfully, in some cases our freedoms have become obligations. When you form relationships with people from other nations, you accumulate what I call “love miles”: the distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. If your sister-in-law is getting married in Buenos Aires, it is both immoral to travel there, because of climate change, and immoral not to, because of the offence it causes. In that decision we find two valid moral codes in irreconcilable antagonism. Who could be surprised to discover that “ethical” people are in denial about the impacts of flying?
(21 September 2006)
Related YouTube: George Monbiot speaks about air travel and Love Miles.
