“There are kids starving in Africa.”
Many of us heard some variation of this when we were kids. The joke is, many of us thought that the garbage disposal sent the food we didn’t eat straight to Africa.
Little kids don’t have a very good sense of how the world works, but this kind of thinking shows up even when we’re adults.
We’re told to take shorter showers because water is a scarce resource. It makes sense if you live in a semi-arid climate like I do, but if your part of the world has abundant water, no one is shipping your unused water to sub-Saharan Africa.
Even the common advice to turn off your lights, while it will save you money, won’t make that electricity available in parts of the world where electricity is unreliable or nonexistent.
Certainly, there are good reasons to save water and energy, but the real reasons are more complex than we often tell people.
I think we do them a disservice by oversimplifying.
