Ruth Carruthers: Put a jumper on
A look at our massive over-consumption of energy.
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In the 1970s, around one in 10 people in the UK were obese. Today, it’s one in four and by 2050, we are expected to be a “mainly obese society,” according to David A. Kessler in his book The End of Overeating.
But when was the last time you watched a nature documentary and saw a fat wild lion or an obese chimpanzee swinging from a tree? Never, I bet. That’s because the entire animal kingdom is geared towards energy conservation, apart from man that is.
Regardless of the time of year most plants, animals and millions of people across the globe struggle to eat enough each day to survive. Yet here in the West, we eat so much that we have to go to a gym just to work off the excess calories by using a machine that eats energy too. We need energy to burn energy that we didn’t need in the first place. I mean, how crazy is that?
Gyms are great for fitness, training and recreation, but when I look at them from an energy perspective, they seem ridiculous.
Natural selection has pushed animals towards a number of energy-saving mechanisms: bears hibernate, birds have hollow bones, frogs can slow their metabolism when they need to. Humans, on the other hand, walk around buildings in the middle of winter stuffing junk food into their mouths, wearing just a t-shirt whilst complaining they are cold.
Spring may be in the post but every shop, library, home and car is still belching out heat – just in case the ‘big freeze’ decides to rear its ugly head again. It’s Scotland, it’s winter, we’ve had centuries of freezing weather so why not put a jumper on and turn the heating down a notch?
So it’s no wonder we are all finding this whole ‘save energy, save the planet’ thing difficult. We can hardly regulate our own energy needs, let alone that of our houses, cities and the planet as a whole. To get a handle on this climate change situation it seems to me that we need to start with ourselves, learn a bit about our own energy needs and how to deal with them, then apply our findings in a wider context.
Okay, maybe we can’t sleep all winter, slow our metabolisms or grow a fur coat. But so what if evolution didn’t dish us out one of those tricks? We got the most sophisticated brain’s on the planet, didn’t we? So let's use them. You don’t need to be a genius to stop eating too much, put a jumper on when it’s cold and turn down the heating on this planet while we still can.
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Put a jumper on (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (4)
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A recent study by the University of Madeupolis has shown that one power-generating gymnasium full of career-driven financial advisors and estate agents could power a town the size of Renfrew for a week.
It was also shown they would run faster by being shown videos of Jeremy Clarkson in bermuda shorts eating a steak pie.
Food for thought.