Eco consumerism

This is going to be  bit of a rant.

I have mostly turned a blind eye to any corporation that claims to be green.  I think that when the Norwegian government refused to endorse any cars as being green, they were on solid ethical ground.  The car in and of itself cannot be green.  It uses far too many resources, pollutes far too much and encourages waste.  Even electric cars.

As a traveler I have accepted the fact that I am not green and my travel is harming the ecology of this planet.  I am getting annoyed at the travel agencies that do 'eco' tours.  The travel part of doing eco tours destroys any green aspect of this.  Some are using decent methods for minimizing the impact of damage, using horses, mules, donkeys, buses and other methods of transport to the tour site which have a lower environmental impact.  But.  Their company model is based on tourists getting to them.  And tourists, including travelers like me use a lot of high negative impact methods to travel.  Airplanes, private vehicles, mutli-passenger vans, buses, trains, boats etc all use fossil fuels and have a high impact on the CO2 count.

I have a tough time with this personally.  I love to see new places, to wander through towns and villages, take a trail through a forest and gaze upon a horizon new to me.  I struggle with taking a plane, weighing the time/cost/pollution factors and bearing it all with me in terms of my carbon footprint.

But.

I do all this while not calling myself an eco warrior or environmental advocate.   The two are irreconcilable with traveling.

Couch surfing, getting around by motorcycle, living in a tent, minimizing the meat and dairy I eat, all help to lighten my impact.  But all that does is lighten it a little, not eliminate it.  And I am far from perfect in all of the things I mentioned.

So I have a real big problem with slapping an eco label on anything to do with tourists and consumers in general.

I read an article today on the difference between two companies, North Face and Patagonia.  They both target their sales at people in the outdoor active set, and North face is by far the winner in consumer dollars, and Patagonia is okay with that.  They are okay with that because they are not driven to make more and more money.  They are driven to make better and better products so the consumers need to consume less and less.  The current marketing stance of Patagonia is please do not buy anything unless you _really_ need it.  And if you really need it consider buying from us.  Virtually every other company out there shouts to the consumer 'you need this product we sell'.

The sad truth is in our modern dollar driven world, no we do not need more.

We want more.

Do I want a better laptop?  Yes.  Do I need one?  No.

Do I want to buy....... the list is endless, but as a consumer group, what we really need is to consume far less.  Period.  The urge to buy and buy fills an emotional need, but it does not need to exist.  If you are driven to buy, it means that there is something that is missing in your life and you need to find what is missing and replace that urge before you end up on an episode of Hoarders.

Walking through a third world market I see endless amounts of low cost items.  The small trashy toys, disposable goods and items that scream planned obsolescence to me.  I also see a fair amount of used goods from the first world.  This is a disturbing trend as it is either showing how little use we make of an item, or it shows that the first world is shoving its trash on the third.

We as consumers need better products that we can use up entirely, ones that last multiple generations and have a life cycle in the decades, not days or months.   I have seen kids toys that have lasted generations, and cookware that has as well.  The few who consider this a great thing needs to get bigger and the people who demand quality goods that will stand the test of time to allow us to get off the endless buy cycle needs to turn into the majority.

The 2nd hand market is strong, and I applaud that.  Re-cycling is great, giving away things to people who will use them is terrific.  Buying a smaller home is even better.  Buying a car with great fuel economy is good.  Making the most of your current vehicle before investing in a different one is better.  Not having one at all is best.

There is a lot more to say on this topic, but I will leave that for now, and just condense my message.  If you consume anything that has required the use of fossil fuels to make or distribute do not make the error of calling it green.  At best it is green-ish.  There is a growing chunk of society that says consuming less is okay.  Join it.  There are ways to replace the urge to buy new stuff to fill an emotional hole in your life.  Find them.  Make the most of the things you have, buy quality items to last a long time.  Do not confuse want with need.

Next time you feel the obsession to impulse shop, maybe make a small item and give it to a friend.  Go for a walk.  Write a letter.

Heck, even post something on your blog.

Stuck in San Pedro

Okay, not so much stuck as just too lazy to move on.

I spent two weeks raising my Spanish fluency level from horrid to really bad.

And then I dropped my laptop about six inches onto a cement floor.

Dead hard drive, had Win7 installed on the new hard drive and went off in quest of drivers to run everything on the damn machine.  Three days later, I have full functionality back.  It is no fun tracking down drivers for NIC and wireless.  Once I got the wired connection working, it was only about another four hours to get the wireless running.

Next step is to see if there is any way of recovering the data from the dead drive.  If not I see a lot of downloading in my near future.  The old drive was 750 GB and was well over half full.......

In other tempting news, there are a number of businesses for sale around this area.  Three hostels and one resort hotel.

A brief look at the hotel scratched it off the buy list.  Lake Atitlan is slowly rising, there is no surface exit for the water, it makes its way out through fissures in the rock and the lake is now approaching levels last seen in 1974, the last time there was a major earthquake in the region.  The level of the lake fell fifteen meters in under 6 months but has since slowly crept back up.  The Hotel has several of it's buildings right on the water's current edge.

If the lake continues to rise at its current rate, one of the other hostels will lose it's cafe/bar in under 3 years.

That leaves two viable hostels to look closer at.  Both of them are doing solid business, the owners are selling for personal reasons, not financial .  It would be fun to run one for a while, but I can see myself getting tired of it in under five years and it turning into a giant drag.  It is very hard to backpack with a full hostel in your pack.

On the other hand if anybody reading this blog want to own their own business, having a steady proven income and live in a Spanish speaking country with a thriving tourist trade, send me a note.

All for now, back to filling the new hard drive.

Remembrance Day

Sometimes I think about the differences between Canada and the USA, and for the most part they are not great, but once in a while things strike me.

When Remembrance Day (it was originally Armistice Day) was first brought forward in Canada, the veterans decided that the day would be dedicated to remembering the war veterans from all wars.  There were to be no flags attached directly to the Day, as it was to honour the deeds from all sides of every conflict.

Unit flags are welcome, and items such as those, but veterans of WWII from Germany, Italy, France, England etc, have all been equally honoured here.

We are proud of our efforts as a nation in WWI, II etc, but the day is not to honour our efforts as a nation or people, but to recall that on both sides of every conflict are people, and many of those people deserve their efforts to be recognized just as much as those from 'our' side.

Who won, who was right, which side we believe deserved to win, which side we support is irrelevant on this day for me.  That you served with honour, pride and determination is what matters.

Different from what is celebrated in the USA, as there, their own county's veterans are who take centre stage.

This may seem like I disapprove of what they do, and it is not, really.  But it does highlight a difference between the cultures.