Q: If we can only conserve one of these, should it be water, energy or paper?
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A: This is sort of like asking a mother to decide which child she’ll rescue from a burning building. My gut reaction is “Save all of them!”
The long answer is a little more nuanced and depends on where you live. If you live, say, in Melbourne, Australia, which is in its 10th year of drought, keeping the taps off takes priority over pretty much every other enviro concern.
But since that country’s drought issues have also been tied to climate change, and 80 per cent of Australia’s energy comes from climate-cooking coal plants, keeping the lights off should be top priority for both water and energy activists.
Back here in Canada, it’s equally convoluted, since they’re all intertwined. Save one and you tend to save them all. Take water, for instance. Most Canadians aren’t too concerned about running out of fresh water except for the odd month in summer when your municipality issues an alert, or the threat of Americans bulk-buying our water comes up. (We don’t otherwise pay enough for our tap water to make us care.)
But the biggest reason to conserve H20 relates back to energy use. In T.O., for example, it’s surprisingly energy-intensive to purify and pump the stuff from the lake to our taps.
That’s right, it’s the biggest energy bill the city – and therefore we the taxpayers – cough up for. Just conserving water at home by getting a low-flow shower head can save you $100 a year and save the planet from that much worse an energy-sector headache.
Cutting back on paper overlaps on the eco karma front, too. It takes a hella water and energy to process pulp into paper. The p-and-p biz is the largest single industrial water and energy user in Canada (though its energy sources are much less greenhouse-gas-intensive than in the past).
Using 100 per cent recycled printer paper instead of conventional virgin stuff slashes energy use by 8 million BTUs, water use by 44,845 litres and send 322 fewer kilograms of trash to landfill per ton, according to the U.S.-based Environmental Defense Fund’s paper calculator.
And reducing your total paper usage helps even more.
My totally unofficial poll of enviros at four major orgs across the country did find, though, that if a gun were held to their heads and they had to pick just one resource to conserve, paper did mostly come in last.
Keith Stewart of WWF reluctantly placed paper-saving concerns in third place, since even the virgin stuff can technically be sourced sustainably (think FSC-certified), and he noted that much of the energy used to run today’s mills comes from wood waste.Conserving energy-intensive tap water came in a reluctant second (though forest-fire-stricken BC activists might not always agree).
That leaves us with the one eco child most would save in a pinch, and that would be energy. No matter where you use it – cars, houses, factories – fossil fuel energy is far too dirty, whether you’re talking air pollution, greenhouse gases or water contamination (hello, tar sands). Then there are all the ugly human rights violations implicated in getting at oil, coal and gas the globe over. And don’t forget the smog deaths it causes, adds Toronto Environmental Alliance’s Franz Hartmann.
In Ontario, stir in nuclear power issues and you’re mixing up a mess arising from uranium extraction, radioactive uranium refinery leaks, radioactive tritiated water releases, CANDU reactor accidents brushed under the table and long-term nuclear waste storage woes. It’s no wonder conserving energy comes first here.
But at the end of the eco day, Greenpeace’s Dave Martin puts it best: “All is one. Everything is just a different wavelength of energy. There are ecosystems to consider. And I have found that least is best.”
That means using the least amount of water, earth, trees and other resources you possibly can. Otherwise playing rock, paper, scissors might be the only fair way of prioritizing, say reps from the David Suzuki Foundation.
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