215_Eight Lifestyle Changes with the Greatest Impact

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 215

Eight Lifestyle Changes with the Biggest Impact.

Skipping the plastic straw may make you feel good about yourself, but its not enough. While every small change we make is truly a contribution to the big picture, we need to make substantial changes in how we live and what we do if we are going to truly reduce our personal impact on the planet.

While our individual choices for how and where we live is a deeply personal thing, we often take for granted the environmental impact our lifestyles have on a day-to-day basis. But there are a few things we can do that will make a significant difference on how each of us influences the future of our planet.

So join me for E215 Eight Lifestyle Changes With the Biggest Impact

Welcome back everyone to the Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast. This is your host Patrick and this is E215 Eight Lifestyle Changes with the Biggest Impact.

As discussions about the future of our planet become increasingly serious, and as we continue to see devastating disasters, as individuals we often find ourselves at a loss to do anything meaningful about the situation. Consequently, what I want to accomplish in this episode is to give you some tips on things that you CAN do that will have a substantial impact.

Good News Story of the Week

But before we get started lets first take about the good news story of the week. And what I have is good news for coffee drinkers, which includes me.

There has been significant research over the past 15 years on the health affects of coffee. Some researchers have even pinned coffee as a health drink due to its affect on several biological systems.

But new research out of the University of Utah has shown that people who drink 4 cups of caffeinated coffee per day were at a lower risk of developing head and neck cancer. These cancers are the seventh most common form of cancer worldwide. But coffee drinkers have a 17% lower odds of having head and neck cancer overall, 30% low rate of oral cancers and a 22% lower odds of having throat cancer.

But it should also be noted that in a very broad sense, plants that contain strongly flavored chemical compounds, such as cinnamon, ginger, garlic, turmeric, clove and tea, generally prove to be strong promoters of wellness. So, just maybe that can be extended to coffee.

So, that said, let’s move on to this weeks episode.

But one thing I want to say before we get started is that in many respects when it comes to the condition of our planet we truly need to ignore the media. Remember that the media is there to sell stories and increase their ratings. They tend to focus more on sensationalism and less on the truth. Consequently, what you hear is gloom and doom. You are going hear all about how our planet will be damaged beyond repair. Or the media focuses on the complete collapse of our ecosystems if all the bees die off.

While there may be some truth to some of these stories, what this has a tendency to do is marginalize the value of individual action. There is no doubt that the Earth will recover from human influenced climate change. If we want that recovery to include humanity then we are all going to have to work together to come up with a solution. But more often than not it is difficult to know where to focus your efforts.

Our individual choices for how and where we live is a deeply personal thing. Consequently, most of us never want to be told what do to, where to live, how to live, much less what we can eat. That said, we often take for granted the environmental impact our lifestyles have on a day-to-day basis. I believe it is still possible to alter the future of our planet. However we are going to have to make some difficult choices.

What we do know is that both personal and institutional changes are what’s needed in order to avoid the worst parts of climate change. But the quickest and most effective thing you can do is start with personal changes and then join in the push for institutional and political changes. In this episode I am going to focus on eight things you can do that will have the greatest impact.

So, you may be asking why is this important.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the average surface temperature of Earth has risen by 1.1 degrees C, or about 2 degree F. While some studies differ on what is considered our climate tipping point, most agree that it is somewhere between 1.5 C and 2.0 degrees C or about 2.7 to 3.6 degrees F. At which point it is believed we will begin to see rapid irreversible changes in our climate. It is expected that we will reach that point somewhere between 2030 and 2050. That means we have as little as ten years to make significant changes. In other words, we need to focus on changes in our lives that will have significant impact instead of focusing on the smaller things.

That of course begs the question of what we can do as individuals that will have the greatest impact on the future of our planet. And that is the focus of this episode.

Having Fewer Children

Top of the list is the size of your family. Now I did dedicate and entire episode to whether or not we should limit our population growth as a means of limiting carbon emissions. As it turns out, family size does matter. One study on this subject accounted for the impact of future descendants at current emission rates and found that having one fewer child would save almost 59 tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Not to mention the fact that a child in a developed country has a significantly greater impact on the planet relative to a child in an under developed country.

I think about this every time I come across a family with 8 to 12 children. Certainly the size of your family is a deeply personal thing but we also cannot afford any longer to ignore the impact of our personal choices. One study out of the University of Oregon concluded that not having that extra child was 20 times more effective at halting climate change than other changes people commonly make.

Interestingly enough, there is one growing radical trend of avoiding having children due to the uncertainly around the future of our planet. This movement is called BirthStrikers. However, most researchers agree that having one child per couple would be a responsible way to maintain the population. Beyond that, adopting children instead of having your own would be another way to reduce your impact.

Dietary Choices

Another personal choice of ours that has an enormous impact is our diet. A study performed by the University of Oxford found that eliminating animal products from your diet is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on the planet.

The Oxford study revealed that switching to a vegan diet would reduce an individual’s carbon footprint by 73% and we would use 75% less land if everyone on the planet went vegan. That of course will leave a lot of land available to return to its natural state which would also increase carbon absorption and storage.

While it is completely unrealistic to expect the entire planet to go vegan, there are changes we could make to our diets that would be a significant improvement. For example, what if you reduced your meat consumption my 50%? Why not make meat the side dish instead of the main course. But if you want meat on a regular basis eat something that has less impact. Going down the list, beef has the highest impact. Lamb and mutton is next on the list followed by pork. Chicken, eggs and fish have the least impact.

Some of the greatest impacts on our planet are due to the production of animal products. Things such as deforestation, water and soil contamination, loss of biodiversity and of course climate change. We have the ability to significantly reduce that impact by making changes to our diet.

Having grown up with working farms in the family I was raised to eat meat. I will admit that a good steak is one of my favorite meals. That said, mostly what we eat now is farm raised elk that is sourced locally. We also eat a lot more fish. Consequently, we have cut our beef consumption down to once or twice weekly.

But if you want to look at a potential meal plan to cut down on your meat consumption, I did come across a somewhat novel concept called the Planetary Health Diet.  Essentially this is a meal plan with a lot more fruits, vegetables and plant based proteins and limited meat. This was a concept developed for the United Nations by an independent NGO.  So go take a look. It will at least provide you with a guideline on how to get started on making some changes to your diet.

Of all the things that we do as humans, our diets make up about 20% of our carbon footprint. One study that I came across that was published in 2017 found that eating a plant-based diet saves four times more greenhouse gas emissions per year than recycling. Additionally, changing from plastic to canvas bags is about 1% as effective at reducing climate change as a year without consuming meat.

But again I am not saying that we all need to be vegan. But it would make a huge difference if we all cut down on our meat consumption even by 25%.

Food Waste

And speaking of dietary choices, next on the list of meaningful thing you can do is food waste. On a global scale approximately 35% of the food we produce goes to waste. That has an enormous impact on the environment. When we waste food we also waste all the resources that went into producing that food.

If you are at a loss for what you can do to make a difference for this planet, start by looking in your refrigerator. While it may be difficult to go plastic free or go 100% waste free, it is not difficult to go zero food waste. That is achievable right now and you will save yourself thousands of dollars per year.

Travel

Another high impact area of our lives is how we travel.  It turns out that how we get ourselves around the planet makes up about 35% of our environmental footprint. But if we break down our various means of transportation, the use of all our cars and trucks makes up about 81% of our environmental impact while air travel makes up about 8%.

Now you must know there is still some controversy over the impact of vehicle travel versus airline travel and which is the best way to go. If you are interested in some further reading, I found an article published by Yale Climate Connections called

Evolving Climate Math of Flying versus Driving. If you really want to crunch some numbers that articles provides some valuable insight and I have a link to that article in the transcript.

Some would argue that due to the high impact that our vehicles have on the environment that we should actually live car free. However, I am not sure how realistic that is given the geography of some larger countries. But, what if we thought in terms of reducing our car travel by 50%, which is what I managed to do simply by rearranging my work schedule and reconsidering for who and where I was willing to work. Additionally, we could do online conference calls. We could reduce our air travel to once a year. We could travel on higher capacity flights with few or no connections.  So as you can see there are a lot of possibilities of how we could do things to reduce our impact and not feel guilty about leisure travel and vacations.

But, once again, car and airline travel are high impact items. Compared to recycling, avoiding one transatlantic flights saves 8 times more emissions and living car free for one year saves 11 times more emissions.

Reducing Your Use of Plastics

And then of course there is the topic of reducing your plastic waste. Now I am not going to say much about this because I covered it extensively in the last two episodes. So, let it suffice to say that we should all know by now that plastic waste can now be found in every corner of the planet. We may never be about to go 100% plastic free but it is entirely possible to eliminate single use plastics from your life. 

Renewable Energy

How we power our homes is businesses is a significant portion of our environmental impact. We have the technology available today to power the entire planet off of renewable energy. Granted, there are challenges involved in making that happen and it will not come about any time soon. But it is possible for each of us to power our homes on renewable energy. Doing so will dramatically reduce your carbon footprint.

Buy It Once Buy It For Life

The products and services that we purchase are another area that produces an enormous impact on our planet. Before most of us were even born someone came up with the concept of planned obsolescence. What this means is that many products are manufactured to last only so long. Things break and you have to buy another one. It is a great way to stimulate that economy.

But the economic plan is outdated and useless. It produces a burden on the environment and costs consumers billions of dollars. Before you make a purchase, take the time to do some research and buy something that is going to last for years. I have had the same camping gear, travel gear, cookware, and travel cups for over 20 years. So, reduce your spending, save yourself some money, and save the planet. Buy it once, buy it for life.

Change Your Mindset

How and where we live is often a matter of mindset. It takes a different mindset to live off grid like I do. It takes a completely different mindset to enjoy living in a downtown area. It takes a different mindset to raise animals for meat. Many people prefer to purchase meat at the supermarket. We all have our preferences for how and where we live and what we are willing to tolerate in order to live a happy life.

But, like it or not, we are going to have to change our mindset about how we live on this planet and what we do while we still have the choice.

According to NASA, human activity has already caused significant climate change. But if we stopped our greenhouse gas emissions today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flattened in a few years and eventually plateau. However, those temperatures would remain elevated for many, many centuries.

What this means is that the effects of human activity on our climate are irreversible on the timescale of anyone alive today. But what we have to consider is that every little bit of avoided future temperature increase results in less warming that would have otherwise persisted essentially forever. And that is why our individual action is so important. Yes, institutional change is needed. But we should not use that as an excuse to not do our part as individuals.

Every single thing we do has some sort of impact on the environment. But there are things that we do that have a far greater impact than others. What this means is there are changes we can make in our lives that have a far greater positive impact than others.

Humanity’s approach to climate change is going to be a matter of adaptation and mitigation. Obviously we are going to have to adapt to climate changes that have already occurred. But we also have to mitigate additional greenhouse gas emissions by changing some of the things we are doing.

Making small, incremental changes are generally what is recommended. In fact this is what is generally seen in high school text books and government recommendations tend to center around the same approach.

Admittedly, these types of changes, such as recycling and switching to reusable shopping bags, are vital because it saves an incredible amount of waste. Making small incremental changes also helps to change our mindset. And that is a good start.

However, much more drastic changes are truly what is needed. While skipping the plastic straw may save a few sea turtles, if we do not make significant changes in a few more decades the oceans will be so warm there may not be any sea turtles.

But the good news is that I have given you eight ways in which you can alter your lifestyle, eight ways within your reach to significantly reduce your personal impact on this planet. Having fewer children will help to slow down our population growth. Considering following the Planetary Health Diet and reduce you food waste to zero. Change the way you travel. Consider vacationing closer to home. Reduce the use of your automobile. Reduce your use of plastics as much as possible and completely eliminate single use plastics. Run your life off of renewable energy. Reduce your product consumption. Buy it once buy it for life. And all of these changes will be much easier if you simply change your mindset.

Again I will be the first to admit that tremendous institutional and political changes are needed. But we have to recognize the reality of where we are and we cannot ignore the impact of our personal lives. You can’t expect the government to change tomorrow but you can. We all have to do our part and that is certainly within our reach.

So I want to close this episode by giving you a few more easy tips on living sustainably. Spend more time outside. Eat more whole foods. Plant a tree. Cook more at home. Read a book instead of watching a movie. Learn something new everyday.

Well folks, I hope you have enjoyed this episode. And I hope you will join me again next week. Until then, always remember to live sustainable because this is how we build a better future.