Human Energy Efficiency
1:41pm Tuesday 9th October 2007
I was in my garden at the weekend, doing the Autumn tidying up. After a day of chopping back, weeding and grass cutting my compost heap had doubled in size. I know I should turn it, but it takes
so much energy.
In the evening I put on Gardener’s World to check what I should have been doing – which turned out to be dividing perennials and planting bulbs. Well, perhaps I’ll do that next week
end. But Monty Don’s parting comment made me think – he said ‘cancel your membership to the gym and turn your compost’.
It got me thinking about human energy efficiency. We hear so much about using the earth’s resources efficiently – but how efficiently do we use our own human resources.
Most of us in the West eat more than we need to sustain a sedentary life style. As a result we become heavy and unfit, so we need energy guzzling gadgets to help us to do things. The less we
physically do, the less physically able we become. Our energy solidifies.
To avoid getting heavy and unfit, some of us ‘burn’ off excess energy through exercise, but this doesn’t really address the human energy issue. Just think of the guy or girl who
drives to work, sits at a desk all day, drives to the gym and spends half an hour on a treadmill, drives home, buys a takeway, eats too much, puts the dishes in the dish washer, and then watches TV.
The exercise ‘bit’ is like heat going up the chimney.
The trend towards wasting our own precious human energy is a sign of affluence and arrogance. It has almost become a status symbol. It’s like saying look at me I can afford to eat more food
than I need; I can let it solidify or burn it off through frivolous means; and I don’t need my own energy for productive work because I have access to other energies.
So what should we do? Well, probably lots of things. But the first thing is to really ‘get’ that our human energy crisis is being mirrored in our global energy crisis and that to address
the latter we have to address the former.
Shirley Ali Khan