We sometimes eat strawberries in the winter. Added to this is the purchase of Ethiopian roses passed through the Netherlands, the bamboo toothbrush from which we forgot to remove the nylon bristles before throwing it away, cans of Coca-Cola, Amazon deliveries Prime Express, heated terraces… This is how a slight feeling of guilt wins over 85% of our fellow citizens “concerned regarding environmental issues” (Elabe, 2019), but altogether imperfect. How then justify the acquisition of an iPhone 13, a few days following the publication, on February 28, of the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to which the worst is yet to come?
Sorry to participate in global warming, to know that the polar ice cap and glaciers are melting faster than expected, that our children will experience small nuclear accidents and be caught in the eye of two or three cyclones without perhaps ever seeing tits , how to survive our bad conscience? Unless we hide in a papier-mâché coffin – and even then, there will remain our polyethylene fillings and hips – we often try to make do with the figures of our carbon footprint (which indicate on average 9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent2 per person per year instead of the ideal 2 tonnes to achieve neutrality in 2050). Torn between a polyester sweater or a road trip in a Jeep and our ecological goodwill, we try to escape, by means of small inner negotiations, from this very unpleasant state of tension that psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”. “There are animals more touching than others, believes Cathy Morin, a young retired teacher. To enjoy lamb chops, I need to verbalize my barbarity. And I evacuate from my mind all these images that smell good meadows. »
doses of dopamine
Meat, in particular, gives us a hard time. Despite our (more or less precise) knowledge of environmental impact and our awareness of animal welfare, only 2.2% of us say they have adopted a pescetarian diet (fish and shellfish allowed), vegetarian or vegan (Ifop, 2020). For the others, what is played out around the tasting of the flank steak with shallots, the barbecue chipolatas and the sautéed rabbit hunter, is highly strategic: how to silence our guilt to cheerfully send our meal down our throats without hindering the pleasure of our taste buds? There’s procrastination (tomorrow I’ll stop), relativization (who tells you that my sliced pig suffered? And, conversely, who tells you that a little plant doesn’t suffer in its own way?), the drive ( in front of a rare steak, I get out of my normal state), the minute of silence (I regret and I move on) and the very visible compensation (I eat a meal = I sort the waste) on the model of certain airline companies ( one trip = one tree planted). Better: thanks to “plogging” or eco-jogging, which consists of running clean by picking up litter found on the road, I doubly extinguish my feeling of having been undeserved: mine and that caused by others, whose waste I collect. plasticized errors.
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