I very much see the value of living symbolically, however I believe the numbers are really important too! What is the use of using less toilet paper but making long-haul flights every week? Or worse: short-haul flights?

I live in Thailand and I think the people here live a wee bit too symbolically. For example, remembering to turn the lights off when you go out of your office for a meeting, but leaving the air-con running throughout, so that it’s nice and comfortable when you’re back. An awareness of the numbers would cut through this gesture which is unfortunately completely symbolic (turning the lights off is nothing compared to turning the air-con off).

Sometimes I feel it’s better people don’t kid themselves that they ‘are doing something’, and would be better of facing the facts that they need to change radical actions (e.g. use a fan throughout the night instead of air-con). I feel it’s more honest not to do the little symbolic gestures and just live honestly that you are significantly adding to the global warming problem. There’s a chance we can ‘hide’ behind our symbolic gestures.

Thanks for the link…

While I half agree with your point about turning of mobile chargers as a symbolic act I think that there is a danger that we could do this easy, cheap, ineffective action religously and think that we have now ‘done our bit’ and not make any of the costly, sacrificial but effective changes open to us. Mobile phone chargers, green electricity tariffs and the like are red herrings.

I also greatly respect Professor MacKay’s decision to make his book on this issue available as a free download at the same time as being on sale. The message is more important to him than personal financial gain. The book is available, free, here:

http://www.withouthotair.com

Are you addressing the carbon footprint issue in your book? Andrew Jones has been invaluable for helping me rethink about this issue. My symbolic gesture there is to try and multitask by staying in a place a bit longer and seeing a number of people, doing more than one event, etc. I also try to avoid renting a car by using public transportation and ride shares whenever possible. I am also trying to support conferences and other gatherings that have a very strong web component where people can get the material and participate virtually (I’d argue that the vast majority of author/speaker type events could be done via webcasting – though you wouldn’t get the tingly feeling of meeting your spiritual superhero but that’s a dynamic perhaps we should discourage.)

That reminds me – at some point, I’d love your take on the rebranding of emergent into “emergence” – in the book I just handed in, I pinpointed the death of US emergent church ™ to be AAR 2007 and chose to ignore the “emergence” biz on the grounds that no one outside of a small insular blog circle seemed to be using these terms.