Two friends of mine once published a shocking piece of journalism about the environmental impact of singleness and divorce. Both authors were then active in movements for sustainable culture and environment. They had hoped to start a movement connecting sustainable environment to sustainable home life.
One obvious place to start: mass singleness and easy divorce are environmental catastrophes. They result in drastic increases in resource use. Perhaps, they argued, we should tax long-term singleness and no-fault divorces just as we would any other luxury good or known pollutant? Let’s get the word out: The Green New Deal begins with a proposal of marriage. And a sustainable environmental policy is founded on stable families. Here is their original article.
-Your Saint, Jerome
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Save the Planet, Get Married!
Jonathan Price & Diederik Boomsma
Environmental activists want us to change our lifestyle to save the planet. We must drive less, fly less, eat less meat, and take fewer baths. Green political parties and activist groups such as Greenpeace design policies to stimulate green choices, and to tax polluting ones. Bookshops are full of cheerful little guides which tell us how to reduce our carbon footprints by growing our own vegetables, using shampoo but not conditioner, and going on one long holiday instead of several sort ones.
Yet amidst all this detailed advice, these green knights remain silent on two of the most important ecological catastrophes: the explosive growth in singles, and increased ease of divorce. In other words, the decline of the bourgeois family both as cultural ideal and reality.
Singles use 40 to 60 percent more space, electricity, gas, water and other resources than the married, and they produce far more waste. They use up to 90 percent more space. After a divorce, the former spouses suddenly need two fridges, two washing machines, two flyswatters, and two toothbrushes. More singles means more cars, more houses, and smaller portions of precooked food packaged in more plastic. More cheap junk.
The dramatic effect of single living on the environment seems to be common sense once it has been thought through, but it has also been extensively documented in scientific journals such as Nature. According to research from the University College London the modern single is “an ecological time-bomb” not only compared to his married friends but also to the traditional widow or thrifty spinster. A publication of the American National Academy of Sciences states that in 2005 an extra 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 2400 billion litres of water were used in America as a consequence of divorce. To put this in green perspective, that’s nine times the total production of renewable energy in Holland in the same year, and about three times the total water use of all Dutch households put together. All those windmills’ work negated by American divorce! Similar increases apply to waste production and use of space. And this is only the increase after divorce; the extra amount of resources used by all modern forms of singleness (compared to marriage and traditional singleness) is much, much higher.
It is therefore very bad news for Mother Earth that all over the world—from China to Colombia and South Africa to the USA—both the number of divorces and singles are growing quickly, and alongside them the increased use of limited resources. To tip the scales against our planet even further, many countries are expediting divorce processes, and social attitudes often celebrate rather than regret this phenomenon. Singles now abound. Again to use the Dutch as an example, already in 2010, 48 percent of the dwellings in Amsterdam had only one person living in them. In Stockholm, it was 60 percent. Families can scarcely afford to stay in these new ghettos of singleness, even when they want.
The American report concludes: “As global human values continue to shift toward greater autonomy and choice, the environmental impacts of increasing divorce will continue unless effective policies to minimize household dissolution are implemented.” Some environmental scientists conclude that governments should therefore actively discourage divorce and long-term singleness.
It is said that a better environment begins with yourself. But not by yourself. Saving the environment begins with a wedding! This may be an ‘inconvenient truth’ for many green activists. Yet, instead of protesting against multinationals and America, or making checklists of green minutia to implement in your daily life, they should campaign for traditional family life, and recognize that the family is not only the cornerstone of a good society but also of a healthy planet. Hippy communes, monasteries, old folks homes, and student residences may also work. But how many of us would want to live in one long-term?
European green parties and activist groups like Greenpeace tend to be left wing, individualistic, and morally libertarian. So perhaps it should not surprise us that this crucial issue remains a strong taboo for them. Nevertheless, if they took their own ideals seriously, they would propose an eco-tax for singles, and an even heftier eco-tax on divorce.
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Major Citation:
Proceedings National Academy of Sciences
Environmental impacts of divorce
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/51/20629.full
Abstract of citation:
Divorce is increasingly common around the world. Its causes, dynamics, and socioeconomic impacts have been widely studied, but little research has addressed its environmental impacts. We found that average household size (number of people in a household) in divorced households (households with divorced heads) was 27–41% smaller than married households (households with married heads) in 12 countries across the world around the year 2000 (between 1998 and 2002). If divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries. Meanwhile, the number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33–95% greater than in married households. In the United States (U.S.) in 2005, divorced households spent 46% and 56% more on electricity and water per person than married households. Divorced households in the U.S. could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households. Furthermore, U.S. households that experienced divorce used 42–61% more resources per person than before their dissolution. Remarriage of divorced household heads increased household size and reduced resource use to levels similar to those of married households. The results suggest that mitigating the impacts of resource-inefficient lifestyles such as divorce helps to achieve global environmental sustainability and saves money for households.
Related Articles:
Divorce Found to Harm The Environment With Higher Energy, Water Use
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/03/AR2007120301797.html
A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce Is Not Green
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071203190625.htm
The authors
Mr Diederik Boomsma is now a member of the Parliament of the Netherlands
https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerleden_en_commissies/alle_kamerleden/boomsma-dt-nieuw-sociaal-contract
Dr Jonathan Price is a don in Oxford.
https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-jonathan-price