What Can Little Old Me Do About the Climate Catastrophe and the Increasing Heating and Living Costs?

First of all, don’t panic — then begin to make small lifestyle changes that matter, then, support a people’s power movement.

I read the article below by Sylvia and was rather gripped, both by her sense of humour and the frustration and fear regarding the ever higher energy bills people in the UK have been facing in recent months.

I think we in the Western world on a collective level, are in fact, just like her young children. In recent decades, we have grown used to luxuries and not only take them for granted but even have a sense of unconscious entitlement.

Not so long ago, it wasn’t like that.

Exactly fifty years ago in 1972, my family lived in a 3 bed terraced house in the North of England. We were the only family from South Asian, but all our white English neighbours too, did not have wall to wall carpeting. We did not have central heating. The only hot water came from a small appliance run on gas, attached to the wall. Tea was made in a saucepan placed on the gas cooker. There were no electric kettles, and few people had a telephone landline installed in their house. Of course there was no washing machine or clothes dryer or hair dryer either for that matter. Nor did we have a fridge. (Actually, it wasn’t necessary as the pantry was cold anyway).

To have a bath, my mother filled a bucket with hot water and it was carried from the kitchen, to the yard that my dad had got partially covered with a sort of roof jutting out from the wall. The only source of heat in the house, like all our neighbours, was in the living room. It was an open fireplace, with a small tiled hearth.

When the miners’ strike occurred the following winter, my mother would go out with the baby’s pram, to a nearby area where old houses had been knocked down. She gathered bits of floorboards, broken bits of chairs or whatever, and thanks to that, when there was no coal to be had, we could be warm in the living room, and dry clothes there as well.

In winter, the upstairs part of the house with no heating at all, was freezing cold. There would be icicles hanging down from the windows. You could see your breath in the air. Though the house had three bedrooms, we all slept in the one room. Two double beds for the parents and children and a crib for the baby.

There was only one household in the street which had a car, it was a retired gent who’d spent most of his savings to get it. Everyone else simply walked, cycled or got the bus. Kids could play all sorts of games on the road itself, as so few cars came by.

Most families didn’t have a TV. Or if they did, it was a small black and white one, nothing like the huge door-sized monstrosities that have become the norm in recent years.

My memories and family stories from that time, mean that I am not panicking about the sharp rises in the cost of gas and electric. I know I can do without. I can certainly use less heating. Simply wear more clothes in winter! Put a couple of blankets on the sofa when I’m reading or watching a film and wear a hat indoors. Apparently two-thirds of your body heat escapes from the head region. (Though I’m not sure if that isn’t an old husband’s tale).

In hot weather, do not switch on fans or air conditioning. Instead, when at home, wear a slightly damp top. At work, you can cool yourself by patting down your face and body with a wet cloth.

Starting with the principle of ‘waste not, want not’, we have to reduce our food waste too. This is not a bad thing. The planet cannot sustain the Western lifestyle that has got normalised through unequal, oppressive trade by corporations backed by the military and intelligence services of White Empire, rampaging all across the globe.

Over the past century, did you know the the U.K has not had one year free from invading others’ lands and waging war? Our favourite partner in crime, the USA, spends some 750 billion dollars imposing its right to take what it wants on terms it dictates, all across the world.

For too many decades, people in the West expect every luxury for themselves and their kids, and have lived in indifference and denial about the cost forcibly extracted from the peoples of the Global South, living on semi-starvation wages. And then there other multiple kinds of costs such as say, imposing monocultures, to fulfill the demand for say, beef, coffee and tea that is harming the ecosystems upon which all Life on Planet Earth depends.

So, along with incorporating habits that are less wasteful, we also need to turn outwards, towards our neighbours, towards local groups that comprise social movements such as Extinction Rebellion. To make our voices heard, to force change upon greed-filled bankers and their best friends, the politicians, there are all manner of roles that you might have the skill to contribute for a few hours week.

It is not only the most visible forms of protest that are needed like blocking a road or disrupting a shareholders meeting of a company that is plundering the earth and polluting land, sea and air…But also the support without which activists could not manage — from making food and drinks, to being a legal observer, to helping to connect activists through online meet-ups, and offer telephone support to those arrested, for example.

In the 1980’s Margaret Thatcher initiated the processes and laws which unravelled our social connections. She gave speeches about there being no such thing as ‘society’. Only silos of families and the individuals that compose them. That hyper individualism has to be rolled back.

If we in the West really live in democracies then it’s incumbent upon us to demand that our governments stop favouring big corporations with huge tax concessions and huge bailouts. And we as a society, stop exploiting people in the Global South.

We do need to pay more for our tea, coffee, oil and all the other stuff we have come to rely on, and use so wastefully and so thoughtlessly. The monopolistic growth of mega-corporations in Agri-business, Big Pharma, and in the IT world, is fed by our demands for their products, to be sold as cheaply as possible.

Life on Planet Earth depends upon the choices we now make. How about planting fruit trees all over and growing our own veg? We in the Western world urgently need to learn from the Indigenous cultures that were labelled ‘primitive’ and criminally short-sighted notions of Western ‘development’, imposed.

In societies that sustained life for hundreds of generations, decisions were made only after consideration given to the impact on children seven generations on, the children that were said to be ‘still in the soil’. Now scientists are realising that for the sake of short term profits, the insanity of using herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers has led to the catastrophic depletion of organic matter. In 30 or so years, the soil will be practically dead. And then, will our children eat gold, silver and the digitised numbers in our bank accounts?

What can we do to stop the multiplicity of catastrophic harms being done to the planet? The fact is that we citizens in the Western societies, have got to let go of our sense of entitlement to comforts that even Kings and Queens did not have in former times. That would be a good beginning.

Yes, tell your children to turn the lights off, but we the adults in the super-exploiting West need to change our mindset and habits too.