Isn’t it stunning? This is the current position of all the cargo vessels in the world. Just cargo vessels – I’ve set the filter to remove the passenger ships, the tankers, the fishing vessels, all the other types of sea traffic. The image comes from marinetraffic.com, a site that tracks vessels’ positions using AIS data. I’ve cropped it to Australia’s part of the world.
Ships are orders of magnitude more efficient than planes for moving cargo, but planes are so terribly polluting, that’s not saying much. Cargo ships use heavy fuel oil, which produces greenhouse gas emissions not only in the form of CO2, but also in the form of black carbon which has a warming impact much, much greater than CO2. The big ones use 250 tons of it each day. It’s hard to imagine that we can keep shifting stuff around the world like this and still avoid climate collapse. And one day, in the not too distant future, we are going to have to deal with climate collapse, avoid or adapt, like it or not. Avoid would be so much better and easier, alas. 🙁
Stuff. That’s the problem. The stuff that fills up Bunnings and KMart and Big W, the stuff imported from China, the plastic we use once then put in the recycling bin, where most of it gets shipped back to South-east Asia, the cotton that we send to China to be made into cloth, then Bangladesh to be sewn into garments, then back here to be worn for a season, donated to charity, then shipped to Africa, the phones, computers, washing machines, dishwashers built to be un-repairable.
If you are here, you no doubt already live at the lower end of the scale of affluent Westerners consuming stuff. You likely buy second-hand, recycle, avoid unnecessary packaging when you can. Me too. But when I look at that map, the thing that strikes me is that what I do is token in the scale of what we are going to have to do.
How do we prepare for when those ships stop, or, if we are smarter than I think we collectively are, when they start using sails or fuel that is clean and green and oh so expensive? What are the skills, the resources, the attitudes, the infrastructure that will be valuable, that will make our grandkids wander through the ruins of shopping malls with wide eyes, that will set us up for no pain all gain when prices in Harvey Norman go through the roof?
People who can mend stuff, the old skills like bootmaking and soldering and sewing could become vocations again, and the new skills like pulling apart mobile phones and building computers from scratch – or at least from a collection of chips and motherboards. There are a zillion right livelihoods in there, ways that young people can spend a lifetime developing the ability to do something so well it is a thing of beauty and awe.
Investing in stuff that is built to last generations and made to be repaired. Stuff that is genuinely necessary and useful, free of any built-in obsolescence and so well-made it’s good as new could appreciate in value more than whatever your super fund is investing in.
Local tool libraries and toy libraries and repair cafés. Communities in which the person with the working sewing machine is on sharing and trading terms with the person with the working internet connection. Car shares, mower shares, community laundries. Building a culture in which price gouging because forty-nine dollar drills are no longer available is pathetic, and the people who are doing well are the ones lending and borrowing.
Enjoying the challenge of repurposing, making do, figuring out frugal hacks that do away with not just the need but also the desire to go shopping. Celebrating handmade gifts, creators and makers.
And what else? Because the sooner we get started on this, the less that map is going to haunt me when I cuddle my grandkids.
Wow, what an eye popper! I’ll continue in my ‘small’ way to refuse, reduce and recycle. There are times when it is difficult to completely avoid buying packaged stuff, however, I try my best.
It is difficult. Our whole society is geared towards maximum economic growth, which means maximum stuff. But I think just taking it down a notch is worth doing, even if only for the purpose of getting in training!