One of the problems is that it’s all so abstract, this environmentalism stuff. But it doesn’t have to be. It might help if you start thinking of every single thing you do in terms of its effect on the environment.
For example, if your kid has a bowl of cereal and throws away half a cup of milk every morning, he pours (oh shit, math again) a gallon of milk a month, 12 gallons a year (that wasn’t so hard) down the drain.
A lot of energy goes into a gallon of milk. (I’m too lazy to dig around and find out how much, but I did find stats about raising hamburger cows that you can look at in That was a nice turkey.) Things like growing and transporting cow feed. Running the dairy facility. Pasteurizing, packaging, and transporting the milk. Storing the milk till you buy it. Storing the milk after you buy it. Dealing with the milk container after you’re done with it (transporting it to a landfill or recycling facility; recycling it). All of the energy used in this process creates pollution. Then there’s the pollution caused by the cow itself, which we Californians have all heard of (most of the gas comes from the front end of the cow, contrary to popular belief). Then there are ozone-damaging gases given off by the manure of that cow, removal of the manure, processing of the manure… And then there’s the energy it takes to “dispose of” the cow when it’s milking days are over. (I won’t go into the making of Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin soup here.)
If every kid in America poured a gallon of milk down the drain every month, that would be [insert stats and do math here if you feel like it; I don't] gallons of milk poured down drains every year. Lots of gallons, basically. But if every kid in America didn’t do that, demand and supply would go down, thus reducing pollution.
So instead of letting your kid throw away a gallon of milk a month, discuss the implications of wasting food with him and set standards for your home. Teach your kids that their actions have consequences and that they have a responsibility to their planet.
The last time you thought about “where milk comes from” was probably in elementary school (or maybe when your kid was). We don’t put any thought into things like this anymore. We go through our daily lives on autopilot. But we have to turn off the autopilot and start paying attention to where we’re going. We need to get back in the driver’s seat.
Blind spot: Investigations into Bush administration suppression of global warming data