Living Green 1: What does it look like?

In Canada society is constantly looking for ways to reduce its ecological foot print, and appropriately so. Prior to this trip, I would try my hand at the typical daily choices we can make to help conserve the environment: use public transport, ride a bike, use a travel mug, turn off appliances, turning off the tap when brushing my teeth, etc.

Maybe this is an unfair comparison, but living here in Saboba, sustainable living has taken on a new meaning. Apart from the somewhat appalling solid waste disposal system here (garbage just finds it way somewhere), life is quite low impact. Here I fetch my own water, along with the majority of the population, reducing our need for electrical pumps like those in Vancouver pumping to our homes.

Here at least 95% of the population rides a bike to work or walks, probably not out of choice but nevertheless. Because of the climate, no heating is required, and air conditioning is restricted to the upper class or office buildings. Since everybody lives on such a small income, consumption of frivolous items is quite minimal, and mending is a survival tactic all its own. If Toyota and Nissan saw the mileage that Ghanaians get out of their vehicles, they’d surely send them free trucks just for the publicity.

Everything here is repaired until it literally disintegrates or radioactive decay starts to depreciate its value. This is contrasted by Canada’s way of abandoning many automobiles as soon as they start to wear down, just a general sense of “spending over mending”. Urban sprawl? Not quite. Markets just spontaneously appear to keep people commuting relatively short distances.

For those of you who have heard of the 100mile diet, I don’t think it could be more honoured here, where 70% of Northern Region is engaged in agriculture as a livelihood. This also includes the urban dwellers. Indeed, most of my co-workers and bosses, still have farms of their own that they may pay people to work on or tend to themselves, just so that they can produce their own food.

What this made me think of was how committed we are to living green in Canada. In Vancouver we have it lucky that our climate is so mild, but for those that have traveled east of our lovely west coast, it gets colder in the winter. With that comes the ecological foot print of increased heating for accommodation. Another result is that we need to use electricity (240V) to dry our clothes 6 months of the year, for those of us that actually use a line during the summer.

Let’s ignore urban sprawl and using cars for transport, just to give us a step up. Our food consumption is anything from within 100 miles of where it was produced. For those that buy locally grown food, again, the diet becomes quite limited when the weather gets cold. Switching from fruits, veggies, and grains to meats; our meat industry happens to be the second largest contributor to greenhouse gasses after energy production. Here most of the meat I consume walked around grazing in natural fields for at least a few years before I ate it.

To wrap things up, I just wonder about all the initiatives we have to live green, such as recycling and green energy, when already our lifestyle seems to completely contradict the notion of living green. This is nothing new, but should we be living the way we are if it is not sustainable? How many of us are prepared to make the true sacrifices needed to actually switch to a sustainable lifestlye?