Though I study climate change and its impacts on the arctic landscape for living, I don’t really study what causes climate change and what we should do about it, and so have no special expertise there. My personal take on these differ from most people’s, so I thought I’d share them.

My family and I live in a small cabin in Fairbanks that is electrically off-the-grid, heated by local wood, and has no running water. Do I think this has any measureable or useful impact on climate? Not a bit. Driving hybrid cars, recycling, etc – I don’t think any of these things are going to help, as they just address the symptoms of the problem, not the causes.

The cause of the problem, in my opinion, is our forced reliance on infrastructure, such that maintenance of this infrastructure becomes our reason for living rather than the infrastructure’s reason for existence being to help us. I’ll give a simple example from my life. An outhouse costs virtually nothing, has little to no maintenance, and is ecologically a much more sound solution than flush toilets. Plus it gives me convenient opportunities to see the aurora or shooting stars, or watch the sun shine through the trees. Though a flush toilet costs less than $100 at home Depot, to install a well, plumbing, septic tank and grid-electrical power to make it functional costs closer to $25,000. Then comes long-term maintenance, and needing to keep my house warm in perpetuity to keep the pipes from freezing, which also means installing an oil-based heating system and buying foreign oil. At this point, I start working for my infrastructure instead of it working for me, because I need money to make this happen. That is, I’ve just committed myself to working in perpetuity because I need a constant supply of money to keep this infrastructure functional, as I’m paying not just for the oil but for the army that keeps it flowing. And there are only so many ‘good’ jobs out there (like scientists or artists…), meaning that even if I get one, someone is going to have the build the cluster bombs, nuclear reactors, talking Elmos and other such useless stuff that causes most of the grief in our world. So by building codes mandating the use of flush toilets in every home, it also mandates much of the global grief in our world, in my opinion. And flush toilets are just one example of many, whether its electricity, automobiles, etc – anything that requires a constant dependence on a societal infrastructure for functionality contributes to the same thing.

So the solution is not driving a hybrid car to work in my opinion, but eliminating not just the need to drive but the need to work. That’s not to say that I thinking driving or working themselves are bad, but that having no choice but to is. I really enjoy what I do for a living, and would like to think that even if I were wealthy I would continue to do it, just at a more leisurely and rational pace where I could more fully consider the impacts of my actions. But by society demanding everyone have a job all of the time, we end up chasing our tails – for example, in our attempts to try to cure cancer we perpetuate machinery and infrastructure that actually causes much of it.

Is our goal in society really to create better jobs, as politicians are always saying? Or to live the good life, where we can volunteer our time to whatever causes please us? I don’t know what society would look like if we were all living the good life or whether that’s even possible, but I do know that anything we can do to reduce our daily dependence on societal infrastructure the better for us it is as individuals, and that this in aggregate actually would do some good for the planet. Doing your shopping once a month not only limits your driving and pollution, but also keeps more money in your pocket because you’re less tempted to buy stuff you really don’t need. Going off the grid (as opposed to grid-interties) keeps you from buying a bunch of power-wasting stuff because it simply wont work, and soon you find you don’t really need it and you have yet more money in your pocket. After a while, you realize that there is no reason to have any monthly bills, and you begin questioning why you need to work all the time and make so many compromises to your integrity. That is, if you’re just buying food in bulk and paying your property taxes, you may only need to work one or two months per year. And soon you begin growing or catching some of your own food, and begin wondering why you should be paying property taxes, since all the money goes to fix problems that you are no longer creating…

-Matt

-- MattNolan