When I was a Lad
I’ve recently successfully completed no fewer than three score orbits around the sun on this previously-pristine planet. During that period, these are some of the changes I’ve observed that illustrate how much our environmental stewardship has gone awry. As David Attenborough said, “the garden of Eden is no more”. Let’s go back a couple of generations to a point before we had Jimmy Saviled this lovely, lonely orb of ours. Come with me to the outskirts of South London to a point in time before neoliberalism had turned everything upside-down and inside-out.
When I was a lad, I worked during the holidays as a dustman (garbage man). There were up to 6 of us on the rubbish lorry. None of the houses in those days had plastic wheelie-bins. They weren’t a thing. Everyone had a small galvanised steel dustbin. Plastic bin bags weren’t used. They weren’t a thing. Rubbish would go loose into the steel dustbin. We, dustmen, would carry a large, orange, fibreglass bin on our shoulders. People didn’t have to bring their bins to the front of the house. We would jog to the back of each house and empty the homeowner’s bin into ours. We could each fit 3–6 houses worth of rubbish into a single orange bin and then lift it back on our shoulders. While I’m happy to accept the plaudits, this isn’t an indication that I’m unbelievably strong. It’s an indication of how little waste there was back then. There wasn’t all the plastic and polystyrene packaging that we now accept as normal. We didn’t have electronic devices that constantly have to be replaced. There also weren’t obscene, Kardashian levels of consumption. We lived modest lives.
When I was a lad, there were no plastic bottles. All bottles were glass and glass fizzy drink bottles could be returned for a deposit; reuse rather than recycling. Because there was inherent material value in an empty glass bottle, there was motivation to pick them up and not have them end up in a landfill. Glass can be reused or recycled an infinite number of times without degradation.
Today, we injection mould over one million plastic bottles per minute! Plastic is not recycled. Plastic is not recyclable. The petroleum industry fabricated and still maintains this cynical lie in order to make toxic plastic socially acceptable. Plastic liquid containers aren’t just a pointless pollutant; their manufacture also contributes to the climate crisis.
To be strictly accurate, a small amount of plastic is recycled but it is less than 5% of the total and virtually all plastic ends up either in a landfill or worse; there is plastic in human blood. There is plastic in human placentas. There is plastic in human breast milk. There is plastic at the top of Everest. There is plastic in fresh Antarctic snow. There is plastic inside fish and at the bottom of all our oceans.
When I was a lad, no one had air conditioning. No houses had air conditioning. No cars had air conditioning. No one needed air conditioning. Milk didn’t need to be refrigerated. We lived in a climate that hadn’t yet been wrecked by the unrestricted use of fossil fuels and rampant consumerism. I was 21 and a student in Illinois before I experienced A.C.
Today, air-conditioners create a nasty feedback loop. The hotter it gets, the more people buy air conditioners. The more air conditioners there are, the more energy is used. The more energy is used, the more greenhouse gases are released which increases the temperature so more people buy air conditioners.
In addition, the unsustainable wealth generated by consuming the natural resources of many future generations has created middle classes in China and India that are now able to buy air conditioners and contribute more emissions to the climate crisis.
When I was a lad, the milkman delivered milk in reused glass bottles to everyone’s doorstep. He also delivered bread and eggs. His vehicle was a rechargeable electric milk “float”. Essentially, this was a personal, free, eco, reliable, daily, Door Dash service. Because, typically, the same milkman would service the same route for years and most people would order milk, like the postman and the bus conductor, and the local bobby, he became an integral, valued component of society that we all relied on.
Today, most of us have to drive to an industrial size supermarket to buy factory farm produced milk in plastic bottles that end up in a landfill.
When I was a lad, when my mum needed to buy meat for our tea, she’d ring up the local family butchers shop. Before leaving for work, she’d leave a metal pot with a lid by the back door. The butcher would pop round and leave the fresh meat in the pot. No packaging. Some people would have a rock or a weight to put on the lid to keep the local moggies away. Back in those pre-global-warming days, one could leave meat out for hours without it spoiling. In fact the butcher’s shop had meat hanging up with no refrigeration.
Today, most of us have to drive to an industrial size supermarket to buy factory-farmed, GMO-fed meat wrapped in cellophane and polystyrene.
When I was a lad, the world was chock-a-block full of insects. Before industrial farming and GMO crops encouraged the mass poisoning of our countryside, insects were everywhere. After a road trip, car windscreens and lights would be completely covered with dead bugs. It was common during a long journey to stop several times to clean the windscreen. When I arrived in the United States in the 1980s, my Plymouth Fury, Raymond, and many others had a clear plastic attachment on the front of the bonnet intended to deflect insects away from the windscreen. You can still buy these today but they’re far less necessary.
A German study found that from 1990 to 2017, flying insect biomass has been reduced by 76%. The total mass of insects is diminishing by 2.5% a year.
Today, some Chinese orchards need to be manually pollinated because of the dearth of insects.
When I was a lad, many people didn’t have a car. Cars weren’t very affordable and weren’t entirely necessary. Public trains and buses were affordable and convenient and those taking the bus weren’t looked down upon; what a strange, lazy notion it is that we judge people by the status of their bank account rather than their integrity, kindness, or humour! There were so few cars on the road that driving was brilliant. You could go bombing down country roads as fast as you dared and it was easy to pass the occasional wrinkly.
Today, our roads are congested with so much traffic that driving is positively miserable. Any journey along country roads inevitably leads to long queues where overtaking is impossible. A journey around the M25 is so frustrating there’s a good chance it’s going to bring on a bout of depression.
When I was a lad, every few weeks the “rag-and-bone” man would leisurely pass by the house on a horse and cart, ringing a handbell and looking for items to recycle. While they originally picked up bones and old clothing, in the 1970s they were mainly looking for any kind of metal to recycle. Can you imagine anything greener than carthorse-powered recycling?
Note that I’m not saying that everything today is rubbish. Many aspects of modern life are brilliant. What I would say is that, in our rush for extreme personal wealth, we’ve both ripped up the fabric of society and destabilised the health of the natural world. This happened on our watch and we did this by stealing resources from our children. By going all in on Gordon Gekko’s (the movie Wall Street) “greed is good” maxim, we’ve thrown compassion out of the window and set the stage for a race to the bottom in which the 1% win in the short term but the natural world and the human race lose in the long term.
