The green, green grass of home
Sunday, March 11th, 2007Everybody is talking about carbon footprints, these days. Okay, they’re not: people are, as ever, just talking about the latest tabloid headlines or about Iraq. Still, as far as these things go, carbon footprints are quite hot. Or, as Al Gore et al would have it: “Everybody now: save Air Miles, don’t use them up!” Which is quite silly, of course. What we need to do is something else entirely.
It’s a popular misconception that overpopulation is responsible for all our carbon woes. In brief: it is not. The problem is one of resources. For environmental purposes a few million hungry, African babies are no problem at all. It’s those few, fat Western babies – each coming with a wagon load of cuddly toys and his & her outfits – who seriously clod up mother earth’s arteries. Even worse, where most African babies won’t go on to live long and wasteful lives, those few, fat Western babies grow up to become ever more wasteful adults and remain so till the far-flung future day they die.
So, our carbon worries really stem from what certain, rich individuals consume during their ever-increasing life-span. In other words: X consumption units per capita in Y years = 3xC ( a Certain amount of Carbon Crap.) In this equation the Y is the most significant element. If a person would go on a consuming spree for one weekend but then would not spend a carbon-cursed penny for the next eight decades, no ice-cap or rain forest would remove that person from its Christmas card list.
Thus, the solution to all of our environmental problems is this: don’t bother with X but concentrate on Y. The time each of us spends consuming is, in mathematical and practical terms, almost nothing compared to the time that we don’t leave any carbon footprints at all. Let’s be generous and say every last one of us would live to be a hundred; that still would leave the rest of eternity for us to be dead and mightily carbon-friendly. The only thing we need to do, in fact, is to incorporate the time we don’t leave any footprints anymore at all into our carbon calculations, so that we can do whatever we want while we’re alive and then make up for it when we’re dead.
This means that we need to do what our rich great-grandparents did and bury our dead in that old-time, opulent fashion. No more nonsense about crematoriums or cramped cemeteries. We need to build those green and generous graveyards again, with room enough per grave for each and every one of us to roll over in great style and comfort – with lots of trees and shrubs, where graveyard cats and graveyard squirrels can play survival of the fittest to their hearts’ content. In such surroundings we’ll serenely lie, our calcifying feet no longer leaving any footprints whatsoever. In our death we will repay and replenish the earth.
So, this must be the law: that each corpse in each grave will have enough square feet space to set up a small family tent above it. That, by the way, might come in handy soon enough, for if our great-grandchildren won’t be any better at family planning than we are now and run out of spending room, they can always come and build their canvas camps inside those graveyards. There they can dream of all those faraway places their Air Miles would have taken them, if all their runways had not been turned into the green, green grass of our eternal homes.
