WORDS FOLLOW ME:The language of virtue

Once a week, on Tuesday nights, my Brooklyn street is lined with the bagged and sorted waste of each household for a Wednesday morning pickup by the city's waste management workers. Week after week, I see large transparent bags of plastic containers, flattened boxes and cartons, tall stacks of newspapers, and cleaned-out tins and bottles. The level of consumption doesn't go down, but people at least have their egos soothed by the idea that they are recycling.

I don't believe in recycling, at least not as currently practiced in the US. My friends whistle when they hear this, their faces furrowed into expressions of disappointment. How can anyone say that? Why won't I join with the good guys and help save the planet? And so, my credentials become suspect. "If this guy doesn't believe in recycling," I see them thinking, "God only knows what other unorthodox positions he holds."

Well, orthodoxy be damned. I've done my research, and it seems to me that, contrary to what most people think, American municipal recycling is a huge waste of money and resources. It consumes a great deal of electricity and it uses a lot of water. Distasteful as the idea might be to some, I think well-designed landfills are a better option. But so powerful has the gospel of recycling become that, by law, our refuse must now be sorted into paper, plastic, glass, metal and trash. That's the law. So, personal conviction gives way, and I'm forced to recycle like everyone else.

I have long been conscious of the volume of waste generated by the average American household, but I'm made more starkly aware of it by being in Nigeria and being part of a Nigerian household. Last night, as I was washing up the plates after dinner, I realised that the item in my hand, the item to which I was applying sponge and soap, was a small plastic bag, the kind you can zip up to store food with. What was I doing washing a ziploc bag? Also in the sink last night, in addition to porcelain plates and metal cutlery, were "disposable" plastic cups, plastic spoons, and thin plastic plates of the kind used at parties.

To state this is to state the obvious: Nigerians are more hesitant to throw things out. In our environment here, the first question we ask is not, "Can I buy this again cheaply?" but rather "Is it still functional?" If the object is still functional, we reuse it. Most of us bathe with a single bucket, not expensively-heated, water-wasting showers. We use cloth napkins to wipe our hands, not roll after roll of paper towels.

Nigeria simply doesn't have the same sanctimonious, self-congratulating language of environmental awareness. The ziploc bag was in the sink to be washed partly because, yes, we are a little poorer than most folks in the US, but also because here there's an unarticulated ethic of not wasting things. We don't care to say much about it; we simply do it. In the US, it seems to me, there is plenty of articulation, but behind it remains a culture that aggressively uses up anything it can lay its hands on.

Meanwhile, China is on its way to pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other nation (the culprit in chief, for now, is the US). European prosperity is based on bad habits too: overconsumption of resources by a populace with carbon footprints far out of proportion to their share of the world's population.

It is all but certain now that unchecked climate change of the coming years could lead to a catastrophic increase in world temperatures. When people in Brooklyn wear T-shirts extolling recycling, or when they drink expensive fair-trade coffee, or eat organic chicken, they are doing it out of a genuine concern about these environmental trends. But the element of self-righteousness in it becomes too much too bear sometimes.

Holding "environmentally friendly" positions, regardless of whether they are scientifically sensible, becomes a mark of virtue. People buy reusable nappies, but end up consuming more energy in washing them with hot water than it cost to make the nappies in the first place. They buy local flowers and vegetable grown in expensively heated greenhouses. The very phrase "save the planet" makes one shudder.

There has been a good deal of muttering recently about the increase in carbon emissions by "developing" nations like China, India, Egypt, Nigeria and Indonesia. With their huge populations and increasing prosperity, these countries are full of citizens who want electricity, cars and consumer goods. Yet, their demands do not yet meet those of the richer countries.

The science of climate change is extremely complex, and even experts are confused about the right approach to solving the problems. Actions that look like virtuous ones sometimes have systemic effects that are make things worse, and not all the virtuous actions that make things better are equally helpful in all places.

All causes have their short-hands of good and bad. From the American point of view, sport utility vehicles are bad because they consume so much fuel; bad, but very common. Those who want to save the planet look down on those who own Jeeps and Pathfinders. But, really, in the Nigerian context, with its obstacle-course roads, can we blame anyone who can afford it for having a four-wheel drive?

Bottled water is another thing that Western environmental activists decry. That's easy enough to do if you live in a place where there is portable tap water. Not so easy if you have to act as your own municipal authority, and secure and purify your own water supply.

The Nigerian households I am familiar with would never set themselves up as paragons of environmental excellence as do activists like Al Gore. However, Al Gore lives in a massive house in Tennessee with gargantuan power usage-estimated at twenty times the national average. Much of that electricity comes from coal, the largest single contributor to carbon dioxide increase from human sources.

Most Nigerians have a little rubbish bin in the kitchen that contains banana peels, onion skin, fish bones; in other words, organic waste and very little else. The amount of waste thrown out weekly is miniscule. We dry our clothes on the line outside, not in electric dryers.

Na condition make crayfish bend, true. Probably, we would like to dispose of great quantities of packaging and ziploc bags like everyone else. But our condition, far though it is from being ideal, has compelled us to embrace a more stringent form of environmental responsibility, and there's possibly a lesson for the so-called developed nations in that.

What's needed - in addition to swift action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now and develop alternative sources of energy - is some humility by the richer countries where the aspirations of other countries are concerned. Unfortunately it appears that, for now, the language of virtue is all on the side of Western nations, while the actual virtue itself is being disproportionately shouldered by the poorer countries in the Global South.