New Years resolution

We have now entered 2010 and as always we have to make a New Years resolution. My resolution is to eat less chocolate! Why? Does chocolate have some kind of adverse impact on the environment, you might ask? It probably does, I don't really know, but what I do know is that you should never make New Year resolutions about anything important, because they never last. The chances of me eating less chocolate are about as high as the chances of me winning the lottery, but I do recognise the fact that from a health point of view I should be eating less - so the perfect resolution, I should stick to it, but it is never going to happen...


The question is if I were to make a serious new years resolution, what would it be? There are many issues I could go for. All the obvious ones (no, not losing weight) such as saving energy, eating less meat, using the car less, saving water, buy local, grow my own food - the stuff we are already working on. I have just signed up for the 10:10 campaign - save 10% on your energy usage in 2010, but this is not a resolution, it is a commitment.


I could make it a resolution to try even harder next year to have less waste at Christmas. Despite my efforts, this Christmas was still a scary experience from a green point of view. My kids received so many presents, that after the high of opening boxes, my five year old just sat in a corner looking rather overwhelmed and feeling upset that she didn't know what to play with. We have to find some way of limiting the presents next year - it is just too much, and even half the amount of stuff would be more than plenty for them. Anyway, I have almost a year to figure that one out, so a bit silly as a New Years resolution.

What would probably be a useful New Years resolution would be to learn some more facts about peak oil and global warming. As this green family project is growing quite a few people seem to have the urge to question me about all things environmental. Some of them are almost trying to challenge me to convince them that global warming is real, because like a considerable part of the population they are sceptical. The thing is I am not a scientist, and most of the scientific figures can be interpreted in many different ways anyway, so it would be pointless for me to start some explanation that I probably wouldn't even understand myself. Frankly the specifics of how global warming is happening (or not) are irrelevant to me, but what is very relevant is the unsustainable way we live.

80% of the Earths resources are used by 20% of the population -so where would we be if everybody on the planet lived the same way as us??? It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that this will not hold up in the long term. We can continue the way we are at the moment and hope for some kind of miracle to happen, or we can try to start a change now? Personally I don't really want to take the risk and that is why this green project is too important to be a New Years resolution. So my wish for 2010 is that it will be a year of discovery and learning and by the end of it we will have made lots more green progress, one step at the time. Now where was that chocolate...?