Karma Neutral

There’s a lot in the news about climate change and how we as individuals can have a smaller carbon footprint and how countries can and should move towards being carbon neutral.

On a personal level, our carbon management has a karmic component. It’s ‘good karma’ to reduce the amount of carbon we use, whether this is in terms of walking to the paper-shop rather than driving, whether we read the news online rather than buy a newspaper, or even whether we make our own (good) news rather than consume that of others.

Those who are inclined to say such things say that, in an ideal world (call it paradise, Eden, or a golden age), we perform neutral karma (we are karma and carbon neutral). One way to illustrate this is to compare our method of obtaining and eating food now, with the way it might happen in an ideal world.

Our present method is to eat fruit that was grown in a land far away (picked, packed, ported, priced and put on a supermarket shelf). As you can imagine, a lot of carbon is involved in such a transaction – definitely not the best way to go if you want to be neutral.

Alternatively, in a better world, consider a fruit that is picked from the tree, eaten immediately and the seeds deposited straight into the earth. If the fruit were not eaten, it would have fallen straight to the ground and the seed would have ended up there anyway, so eating the fruit has made no difference to the natural process.

It would probably help the world a lot if we all try to be more neutral with regards to our effect on the planet. I’m going to give it a go. Who’s with me?