Three strikes…

Many of you know that I’m settling into Guanajuato—where Jack and I spent many winters—for an extended stay. I hope I’ll have some experiences and thoughts to share while I’m here, but this post was mostly written before I left home a couple of weeks ago.

After a nearly snowless winter last year and a dry summer, the river that runs in front of my house was so low in early November that its muddy bottom was exposed along the edges. The massive snowfall that engulfed us in early December broke records, and for a week or so it felt like a real winter was beginning. Then it began to thaw. And rain. It seems my part of Canada is heading into another unusually warm winter. I wonder how much longer it will be considered unusual.

A few weeks ago I read an article in the Globe and Mail chiding my generation—not for our past sins, which are many, but for our current reluctance to move away from our carbon-intensive lifestyles. In an article entitled “Our Planet is Growing Hotter and Greyer at the Same Time”, James Chappel points out that historically, as people reached their seventies and beyond, they tended to live more modest lives than the young. This began to change during the affluent years after World War II. His thesis is that as the population bubble of the boomers ages, its choices will have an out-sized impact on climate change. All three of his major points hit home. 

Speaking of home: Stand-alone housing, especially for one or two older people, is an ecological nightmare of heating and cooling.

Mea culpa. My farmhouse on a sprawling rural acreage has been home to just three families since it was built a century ago. The first family raised seven children here. The second nine. My own family just three. It’s hard to imagine those larger numbers; it is, by no measure, a large house. I am living here alone now, and I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather live. The house has evolved to be an extension of myself, an outer garment that I have been adjusting and altering for most of my life. It fits me perfectly. I cling to it with an irrational passion.

Soon after I read that article, as if the fates were testing me a serious young farmer, knocked on my door. It wasn’t the first time. Had I given any more thought to selling? “I think about it all the time,” I said, bumbling on about not being quite ready. By Mr. Chappel’s measure, I failed that test, and by doing so I automatically fail the next one. So, two strikes at once.

A recent survey in Richmond, BC, showed that most seniors prefer their own car over public transit, even when promised that public transport would be modified to suit their needs.

That’s just one survey, but is there any doubt it would be replicated anywhere in North America except in the largest cities? Our cars reflect our independence, and that’s something we old folks value above all else. As my friends and I nervously approach or reach eighty, we dread Ontario’s compulsory driver competency test—though it turns out to be a joke, and everyone I know is still behind the wheel.

My car is a sensible one for country living, a small SUV. I try to lump my appointments and errands into one day a week, but it hardly ever works out that way. Sometimes as often as four times a week I make the 50-km round trip to do the things that country people must go to town to do. I assuage my conscience by telling myself that, in my case, public transit isn’t an option. Very true. Back to point one.

Chappel’s final point: Before the 1960s, travel was not considered one of the benefits of getting older. But it gradually became one, as pension systems ramped up, people started living longer, and travel became cheaper.

I frequently see articles and posts extolling the virtue of travel as a form of personal growth and enrichment. That’s hard to argue. Although my own travel has not been extensive (maybe just half a strike here?), it has been frequent. In fact, I am preparing to post this from a sweet little apartment in Guanajuato, and I didn’t get here on foot.

Is this a question of weighing the personal growth and enrichment of the wealthy against the global consequences of carbon emissions? I’m afraid it looks that way to me.

I don’t buy avocados or fresh berries out of season. It’s a small and absolutely pointless statement about the sense of entitlement we have about seasonal and exotic produce. (I do buy oranges and bananas.) It also doesn’t feel like a real sacrifice, unlike selling my home and moving to a place with public transportation. I’m still resisting doing that. But at the very least, I owe it to myself and to my grandchildren to be honest, to acknowledge that I am consciously choosing a lifestyle that is, on many levels, unconscionable. And I am just the leading edge of the burgeoning cohort of self-indulgent seniors Chappel writes about. 

Nobody wants to turn back the clock to the days when seniors were locked into societal expectations of a diminished old age. And of course, we all justify doing what we want by noting—correctly—that without government and corporate action these personal choices make little difference. Still, Chappell’s argument has taken root in my consciousness—and my conscience.

The dilemma reminds me of a Quaker story, probably apocryphal, about William Penn and his sword. When, as a young man, Penn first became an active Quaker, he continued to wear a sword, in keeping with his social status. When he asked George Fox, the elder founder of the sect, how long he should continue to wear it, knowing it was contrary to the principles of his new faith, Fox reputedly replied, “Wear it as long as thou canst.” Eventually, when he could no longer tolerate the contradiction, Penn set the sword aside.

Like Penn, I am well aware of the contradictions between the life I live and the principles I claim to hold. Perhaps, like him, I will eventually feel I can no longer live with them. In the meantime, maybe I’ll stop buying asparagus in January.