My plan for the second half of my life

The Hague, 10-09-2008.

Today is my 40st birthday. Over the last months, as today was approaching, I have been realising that this is probably, hopefully and in any case statistically the mid point of my life. And that makes me realise that if I want to achieve the things I keep talking about, I better get moving and put them into practice. I'm not getting any younger nor energetic, so time for action now.

With "the things I keep talking about" I refer to my concern about the environment and its deterioration due to human impact.

I want to do something about it. And I have, on a personal scale. My current impact on the environment is low. Very low as compared to any person around me in Holland. Think of No car; Rare flying; Only ecological food purchases; No domestic chemicals; Rechargeable batteries; Less meat eating and so on. But I feel this is not enough. My footprint on this planet is still too big. The planet couldn't sustain if everyone were like me.

Moreover, I want to go beyond my personal scale. I have to. For example, in my street I motivated about 30 people to start separating paper. Each month we put out around 20 garbage bags of paper. Paper that was thrown in rest-waste before. But that scale is not large enough. Only if I manage to get a really large group to join at something, it will have a significant effect. I need a good idea for that. Something that is attractive. I've been saying that for 5 years now. An idea as simple, successful and effective. As successful as the Google search-engine for example.

At the moment good news usually comes on small scale while bad news is often on large scale. It makes me feel hopeless at times. The Dutch government gives subsidy for 15 MegaWatt of sustainable electricity production while China is building thousands of Giga Watts of black coal power plants. I want that turned around. But how? I need to focus.

My plan for the coming years is to shift my work from any work that comes along to mainly work in the environmental sector. This will help me focus on environment related subjects, learn and hopefully I will come up with that one bright idea that I need. That we need. At home I plan to get rid of my motorbike, maybe get an electrical one instead, powered by green energy. I plan to install all the lighting in the house on solar panels and wind. Being practically more involved is likely going to help me be more effective on the scale I want to be effective on.

Why don’t people wake up? I can't understand it. I really don’t need to wait for another IPCC report to come out to realise we are fundamentally going wrong. This planet produces fossil fuel at the rate one single Fiat Panda consumes. Something is bound to be going totally wrong when we burn it all up at a trillion-fold rate. And we are, we continue to and even increase.

I want others to care as well.

Thomas.

PS. I also think people should stop making war, stop manipulating genes, skip nuclear energy and distribute wealth more honestly, but I think the above target already covers enough, so I'll focus on that one.