Free-D

One of the many things which strike you whilst meandering round a Castellano pueblo is the presence of so many recycling bins. It may surprise you, but the Spanish seem to be much greener than us Brits. It’s all relative of course; everyone needs to be doing a lot more; but the signs in this region at least are that awareness is growing. Salamanca appears to be particularly ahead of the game in some respects; its level of recycling rose 18% this year. Furthermore, the province now enjoys seven times the amount of solar energy than it did a year ago.

The government is also doing its bit with an earth-shatteringly unimaginative scheme which aims to help people afford less polluting cars. Everyone who owns a vehicle over 15 years old will get some kind of assistance to buy an equivalent one which emits less than 120 grams of Co2 a kilometre. Lame? Well, as I’ve said before, governments only really deal with the economy and they naturally find it very hard to force us to make the sacrifices that they know we’ll make them pay for come the next election. In other words, it’s up to us.

The good news is that there is a lot we can do, not simply recycling but using public transport (or walking!) and cutting our consumption of the basic utilities. Actually, simply consuming less in general is a good start. Cutting our consumption is an interesting, if slightly daunting proposition because it doesn’t simply demand that we “do” or “don’t do” something; it leads us to consider “how” we live and creates a space in our lives to use for something other than acquiring “stuff”. We are told so often and in so many ways that to “own something” is to “be somebody”: from deodorant to cars, everything is sold in terms of its saying something about us. Whilst I was visiting Norwich (my home town) recently, I came across something which greatly interested me; a local “anarchist” group had set up what they called a “free market”. The concept was that you brought things to leave there that you didn’t need anymore and you took what you needed from the same place. A sort of barter I suppose. Giving things away isn’t a new concept, but we could certainly indulge a bit more in this particular habit, and it would cut down on consumption without a doubt.

If we challenge our perceptions as to how and why we consume it will not only have an environmental impact but will slowly steer us into ways of living which are more community conscious, and that has to be a good thing.