You must have seen this: you get an E:Mail with the words "Please consider the environment before you print this email" at the bottom. It's a fine sentiment but one suspects it rarely has any bearing upon the reality of the motivation of the sender. It is a token. It is "doing our bit". You can feel good sending that E:Mail. So good you have a licence to go out and maim defenceless orphans. You get the idea. Worse of all it simply doesn't work. Just can't work. If you need to print an E:Mail then you will. You do. Period. I have seen dozen of such pages lying around at work. Knowing the people putting this platitude into their autosignature mos of us probably also know they they have no intention of doing anything really material to help the environment. Will they walk to work and stop flying? Will they forsake the Supermarket and double their insulation? Probably not. THAT is just too far. That is just too expensive. We can't be bothered with that today. Nor tomorrow....

Then there is the question is to just how much harm printing the email actually does to this thing called the "environment". Ironically of the many things we do in this life printing an email is one of the least harmful things you can do. The "environment" doesn't need protecting from your emails at all. Your emails will not slash and burn. They will not emit carbon, use up valuable resources, invade small countries or do anything bad whatsoever when made physical. If you are going to need it in your grubby paws (maybe to save battery time on your laptop computer) then print it on recycled paper with water-based inks using recycled printer cartridges - and feel genuinely GOOD. Printing stuff we can handle. This isn't cement or steel manufacture. It is only a piece of paper.

This clearly displays the yawning gap in the public's perception of the problem and the solution. We have a casual perception of this abstract thing called the "environment" and some ill defined damage we might be doing to "it". Hence it is fragile and whatever trivial thing we do to save it must be a good thing. But this is wrong. In fact nature is very robust and will long outlast us. It is mankind who is fragile and the wounds are self-inflicted. We do not harm the environment. We ultimately harm ourselves. But this is a rather long an unpalatable truth that is not going to appear on an E:Mail soon.

So follow this through to it logical conclusion. What is the worse that can happen? Your printed E:Mail and a million like them sucks in non-renewable resources for the making of printers and consumables. The paper comes from ancient timber that is then not renewed. What do we lose? Assuming we adopt a continued cradle-to-grave paradigm (ie, zero recycling) then we eventually lose everything. No more steel, no more plastics, no more oil, no more stable climate, no more trees, no more animals, no more food. Everthing is linked. The point is though that you don't deplete one part of this world without managing to eventually deplete everythng else. But you would have to print a heck of a lot of E:Mails to have this effect. Printing your E:Mail is like having a tree land on your head. It is just a million times less damaging and painful. In fact it is so painless it is a victimless crime and we keep on doing it. The usefulness of that printed E:Mail outweighs the future negative effect of lack of essental resources.

This is what is known as "discounting". Most of us do it all the time without realising it. We call it "crossing that bridge when we come to it". It is the reason we rationalise doing nothing about climate change or peak oil. Douglas Adams coined a sci-fi principle in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series called (with his typical wierd flair) the SEP - the "Somebody Else's Problem" field. Inside this wonderful technology you could move around the universe or be totally invisible - whatever you wanted. HOW it worked was SEP. It didn't matter how you solved the problem. In fact you didn't need to solve any problem. It was SEP. This is a wonderful analogy. It perfectly illustrates precisely how humans are simply not hard-wired to consider threats that are not immediate. If Peak Oil effected us TODAY we would do something TODAY. It doesn't. So we don't. The problem is deep not only in human biological wiring but also it extends o the Finance Ministries of Governments around the world. Economists love discounting. BUT it DOES have its uses. If we spent all the time worrying about tomorow then nothing would get done today. But it quckly spills over into irrationality. Just how far into the future should you discount and by how much? This is an intractable puzzle. All the Economists end-to-end will never reach a conclusion. Which is where the bit about ethics comes in.

When faced by the discounting dilemma you are left asking "is it right?". That is ethics. It involves qualitative value-judgements. It requires a sense of morality. You have to care about something that doesn't effect you directly. You need compassion. Compassion is a renewable resource but often thin on the ground. The environment doesn't care if you hurt it. But we should care about the long-term damage we do ourselves. We are the bottomline. Who cares about any individual species..... But if that one species is the link in the food chain that feeds US then we have a problem. Just consider the Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. Likewise a collapse in the availability of natural gas kills the supply of fertilisers leading to a collapse in soil fertility. Either way you could die very hungry. You can't discount hunger unless you are really really optimistic. It is too late to worry about it when you are already starving. The inconvenient truth is that WE ARE THE ENVIRONMENT. We are indivisible. We are the same thing. There is no "THEM". There is no "US". One boat. Forever. In geological time this planet will be just fine. Soon makind may be a distant memory. Whether we choose quality of quantity or vice versa is something for us to genuinely think about.

So, until then - Please consider the future of your species before printing this blog.