Being a Good Global Citizen

A couple of weekends ago, on a short break from my customary practice of picking the lint out of my navel, I switched to another favorite pastime for a bit of excitement … making checklists.

Like most people, I am totally nonfunctional without a checklist or five. I do them for everything; grocery shopping, work scheduling, to-do lists for today/this week/ this month/next year, worst natural disasters, world’s best coffees, books to read, movies to watch, people to avoid, things to procrastinate over…you name it, I’ve got a checklist for it.

The weekend in question, I embarked on a different sort of checklist. This one was part honest personal evaluation, part feel-good-factor boost: how good a Global Citizen am I, really? Here’s what I came up with:

No car

I don’t own one. Not that I didn’t have the standard Yuppie BMW Roadster owner dream; I just woke up before I got the Beemer. And now, instead, I’m contributing to keeping Jakarta’s taxi drivers in work, thereby indirectly helping support their families, their children’s education and, of course, their insidious cigarette habit. Besides, by using public transportation, I’ve already shrunk my carbon footprint to a petite size 4.

No kids

By not adding my allotted average of 2.5 kids to the world’s burgeoning mega-population, I have successfully reduced the global carbon footprint. Of course, according to the Universal Law of Empty Spaces, I have also made it possible for someone else’s 2.5 kids to use that free spot.

No incandescent bulbs

I’ve switched almost entirely from the cheaper, energy-guzzling incandescents to the heck-of-a-lot-more-expensive Energy Saver bulbs, which supposedly last forever. Mine don’t, due to the resident rats causing recurring chewed-out-cable-damn-the-bulb’s-fused-again problems. So around mid-month, I usually run out of lights and switch to candles. Which is all highly romantic, but a serious fire hazard when you have as many cats leaping about the place as I do.

No eating beans

Methane, apart from being highly odiferous, is also the big noisy reality responsible for ripping a great big hole in the ozone layer. Beans are notoriously methane-producing, as is evidenced by the all-time favorite kiddie rhyme I stole from a 6-year-old (you have to produce the requisite sound effects to appreciate it best): “Beans, beans, good for the heart! The more you eat, the more you fart! The more you fart, the better you feel, let’s have beans for EVERY meal!”

Not a particularly socially or environmentally friendly sentiment, that. So just to be contrary, I decided to abstain, and have now been on the bean-free bandwagon for nearly three whole days.

Hoard people!

Old magazines? I roll mine up and use them to swat mosquitoes and irritating houseguests. Gel pens? I regularly drive the salesgirls nuts at Gramedia, looking for refills for my vast collection of different sized pens. Old lighters? I come from India, where even disposable lighters could be refilled at the local market. They devised an ingenious method of injecting the lighter fluid in through the base of the lighter with a hypodermic syringe, then snapping the needle off to seal it. So in fact, your throwaway lighter was good for several lifetimes beyond the original allotment, until the base couldn’t take any more pinpricks. 

So you tell me, how good a Global Citizen am I? Here’s how I see it: I’m so good I should have a Lifetime Platinum Member Card and Preferred Citizen Status on the planet. I should be showered with freebies and held up as a shining example of exemplary personal restraint. I should have enough Frequent Flyer miles with Bluebird/ Silverbird to circumnavigate the globe at least three times, via the long scenic toll-road route.  

+ Priya Tuli

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A 50 kph national speed limit would cut transportation emissions of CO2 by 20%.
Source: http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/news/blair_juniper/comments_26.html

In Jakarta traffic, of course, that is a non sequitur. Nobody drives over 50 kph in a macet. Nobody drives at ALL in a macet. So I would like to add my feeble quavery voice to that silent chorus that really ought to be loud enough by now to take 50 percent of Jakarta’s cars off the roads each day: ENOUGH CARS!

And this:

Most rubbish comes from food and other packaging. Recycle glass, paper, cardboard, plastic, cans.

For every kilogram of waste you throw out, you produce 1 kg of CO2. An average household throwing out 1 dustbin's worth of waste every week emits 1,400kg of CO2 a year. You can cut this figure by 30 percent if you recycle all paper, glass, metal and plastic (apart from plastic bags). (Source: Quaker Green Action, 2006.)

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