Big Foot

This week I decided that working in Israel will, at this rate, only make me enough money to last half the month if I'm outrageously tightfisted (which I'm not and hate being) so the only way to go is to make dollars and pounds abroad and spend them here.

Obviously this is optimism in its most pure and unadulterated form, but they claim in every new-age video and enlightening change-your-life-forever books that all you have to do to become the person you want to be is to think positively and make it happen because you are in charge of your destiny etc etc. This, I realised this week, is utter pants because (as yet) my lifetime's efforts of unmitigated positive thinking plus all the hard work and late nights in the world mean my one dream remains unfulfilled and I'm left wondering why exactly that is. I think I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm either on the wrong path and the right one will disclose itself at some stage (like maybe I'm supposed to be a philosophy professor and write academic works and fiction isn't my path at all), or I'm being too egotistical in my tone, or maybe I'm destined to save elephants instead or become my worst nightmare - a bank clerk - and I'm kidding myself otherwise. But that's negative and negativity will have no place in this blog, thank you.






So, I spent all week scouring the web for writing work, pitching myself (literally: 'Writer for sale' in the subject heading, then 'Well, for rent anyway'), flouting my talents and my experiences, tapping on keys and attaching samples of articles and essays and personal narratives on e.g. eyeliner and mothers in law to companies, magazines, online magazines, web profiles for creative freelance people, answering ads and offering every kind of service a girl can offer except the one that involves a red light and standing in a window in my undies.

Actually, in an unplanned digression, when we went to Amsterdam a few years ago (The Damage, as we fondly call it), our hotel room was opposite just such a window with a woman dressed scantily within it, so we couldn't help but check it out. She was pretty, the girl, and the window was huge; all kinds of people walked by - mothers with kids, old women, tourists chuckling, pointing cameras and staring, but she just behaved as though it was the most normal thing in the universe to stand in a large window in a bra, pants and heels in the middle of the afternoon, and I suppose in The Damage it is. She seemed vaguely bored, so she sat on a high stool and read a magazine from time to time or reapplied her make up. A guy would come along, scale the steps and knock on the door. He'd be let in and she'd go off for a few seconds and then reappear in the window. We figured she was the bait, the lure, and some old, hideous beast was inside, but once the men were in, the door was locked and they had to make do with whatever they were given or they'd be clubbed to death with a baseball bat. It was only a theory but what else could have been going on in there? Sometimes she went 'out back' but I think it was for a long awaited cup of tea and a visit to the bathroom. Not that I was looking that closely, obviously.

Back to the point of my story. And no, Amsterdam isn't worth visiting anymore - too many tourists and English beer drinkers and seventeen year old kids getting stoned in coffee shops, which was great when I was seventeen but a less attractive way to while away my time aged thirty five when I'm supposed to be mature and interested in other things. Maybe the museums are awesome but the queue is always so excruciatingly long, I gave up both times I visited and returned to the coffee shop. I mean, the guest house.

So, the point of my yarn today is actually the environment, believe it or not, because I did three more sample articles for Newser.com, the website that condenses articles to 120 words, and one of my offerings was, in a nutshell, this:

Twin Earth: In one generation we will need “two planets” to live on if we continue depleting resources at the current rate, according to the latest report by the WWF. The effects of pollution and deforestation along with world consumption levels ‘outstripping renewal’ threaten the planet’s future prosperity and will result in increased food, water and energy costs, writes Laura McInnis of Reuters.

Behaving like financial institutions, we seek ‘immediate gratification’ without considering the consequences, which are “even graver than the current economic meltdown,” and the WWF presses world leaders to treat the ‘ecological credit crunch’ with the same urgency. But there is hope: “If humanity has the will,” the report states, “it has the ways to live within the means of the planet.”

(Whether I get this job for Newser or not remains to be seen, but, as they say so eloquently in California, whatEVER.)






This coincided with an article I read on Shabbat in The New Yorker about our carbon footprint, which, interesting as it was, didn't leave me any the wiser as to how to be a better earth citizen. Tesco, Britain's superpower supermarket, wants to label all its food so consumers can see if it was flown in or how much energy was used in its production, which Tesco admitted was a naive task to set itself and was proving mightily difficult to measure and implement. Roses grown in Kenya and lamb from New Zealand actually damage the planet considerably less than roses from Holland or British baa-lambs due to the costs of heating and fertilizers respectively, so assuming locally produced goods are more sound is, actually, unsound. The New Oxford American Dictionary named 'localvore' the 2007 word of the year due to the hugely popular phenomenon of eating food from down the road.

Entering the stage, meet the ex-economics professors devising schemes for businesses to 'buy and sell the right to pollute' through reducing CO2 emissions in exchange for allowances they can then buy and sell, because businesses can't, apparently, understand anything unless it involves monetary gain. But the real problem are the forests - they're disappearing with such incredible speed that one of the two essential carbon sponges of the earth (the other being the ocean) will be lost in the time it takes to shout, 'Timber!' And when that happens, ecosystems will disintegrate, the atmosphere will lose its equilibrium and we'll all die of suffocation and starvation, so I suppose worrying about furthering my non-existent career is pointless and I may as well crack open a beer and enjoy the last traces of oxygen with my trusty hound.








'Put another way', says Michael Specter, who wrote the article, 'according to one recent calculation, during the next twenty-four hours the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same as if eight million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and flew en masse to New York.'

I was particularly outraged by Australia debating an additional tax on parents with more than two children - like it isn't expensive enough to have a gaggle of kids - all this coming from the land that, in order to boost its population, was instigating a baby boom when I was last there in 1993/4 by plastering cutesy pictures of babies on every ad to encourage broodiness. Doubledeckerbustardos.

So what can we do? Watching a plasma TV for three hours a day adds 250kg of carbon to the atmosphere every year - double that of an LCD TV, but apart chucking out the telly there was no real clue. We can reduce energy by insulating our homes, buying a new boiler and turning down the fridge, but unless governments pay farmers NOT to destroy their forests, buying local potatoes will be like sticking a band aid over a severed torso.

In England, I go to the supermarket armed with my 'Kosher Nosh Guide', then once I know something is kosher - and if I forget my guide this is a painfully long process of reading every label and calling an equally frum friend - I check how much sugar and fat it contains. Galit came over from New Zealand last year with a chart of E numbers to avoid and checked every ice cream before we ate it to see if it contained the nasties, and all the tastiest ones did, and now we need to be aware of how far food has flown or if it's production methods are going to destroy this beautiful world we're casually annihilating before my grandchildren have a chance to visit Niagra Falls or Masada. If shopping continues becoming this complicated, an hour in the supermarket is never going to cut it. If you're ever looking for me, I'm hunched over my trolley checking labels, and at this rate, I'll be in there for a while.

(For all of you who claim you want to leave a comment but don't know how, the way to do it is by clicking on the 0 comments in blue and just freeing your thoughts into the little box. As Jonathan Safran Foer says about writing: 'What's to know? You just let it out.' Go on. Make my day.)