For most of us in our everyday lives, even if we have accumulated solid knowledge and developed good critical thinking skills, there is simply limited time to exercise our full capacity for reason.
We end up accepting things on faith. We fall for logical fallacies. We grasp onto the nugget of truth underlying a fallacy and run with it.
This is true of many things about which I have written recently. Many fall under the “natural” fallacy, the erroneous assumption that something is better because it is “natural.” Organic foods are better than GMOs. Herbs are better than pharmaceuticals. Fluoride in our water is dangerous. These are all nonsense, but it is easy to see how people with limited time and rudimentary scientific literacy could look at them, take the kernel of truth in them (eg., fluorine is a toxic element) and say, ‘ok, that makes sense.’
It is also easy to see how unscrupulous people might peddle them for profit.
A lot of the time, however, things like these seem relatively innocuous.
Recently, an organization called Polar Bear Habitat posted on Facebook a unique tip for dealing with used Jack-o-lanterns. Apparently, polar bears love to eat them and the facility in Ontario—which looks a lot like a glorified zoo to me, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt—is willing to take the pumpkins for bear food.
A little more research revealed bears are not the only animals who love the large orange gourds. In fact, they are a treat to animals from squirrels to giraffes.
A polar bear care facility is perhaps a better destination for perfectly good food than a landfill, but what piqued my attention was one of the reasons the habitat gave for donating rather than tossing our leftover Halloween decorations. They said it helps reduce our carbon footprint.
A noble goal, to be sure, but if they think it actually does that, they do not fully understand the carbon cycle.
Let’s start with basic scientific principles. In a closed system—which for most intents and purposes, the Earth is—the law of the conservation of matter applies. That is to say there is a finite number of carbon atoms within the system, the same number there were a million years ago and the same number there will be a million years from now, give or take a negligible few that manage to achieve the Earth’s escape velocity and drift off into space.
The vast majority of carbon is locked up in the Earth’s crust in sedimentary rocks. There is so much carbon in rocks, 100 million petagrams, or 100 million trillion kilograms, most people cannot even conceive of the quantity.
A comparatively tiny amount of carbon circulates within the atmosphere, a mere 750 trillion kilograms to be more or less precise. There are also varying amounts in terrestrial ecosystems, the oceans, soils and, of course, Brad Wall’s favourite place, economically viable hydrocarbon deposits.
It is the carbon in the atmosphere we’re concerned about, though, because that’s the stuff that is driving climate change.
In terms of pumpkins, while they are growing, they are readily exchanging carbon with the atmosphere through photosynthesis in which CO2 is converted into and stored as carbohydrates. Some is released back to the atmosphere as a product of respiration.
Guess what else respires? Polar bears. Like all animals, they inhale air and exhale CO2. They also fart as a result of digesting food, such as pumpkins, also releasing carbon back from whence it came.
If the pumpkin rots instead of being eaten, it releases its carbon as a result of decay. If the bear dies, it rots and also releases whatever carbon it has temporarily sequestered while living. One way or another, sooner or later, most of that carbon is getting back into the atmosphere. It’s like, say, a cycle, which is why we call it the carbon cycle.
Okay, it is more complicated than that, but my point is these interactions are normal and natural and, as I intimated, this particular activity seems to be pretty innocuous, providing we pretend we didn’t use non-renewable hydrocarbons to light up all those Jack-o-lanterns. In any event, putting them in the dump or feeding them to bears is essentially a net-zero proposition.
There may be other good reasons for keeping them out of landfills, though, such as the cost of maintaining landfills.
The real problem, of course, is releasing huge amounts of previously permanently sequestered carbon, as in the case of extracting and burning coal, oil and gas.
So, even if the ultimate fate of our pumpkins is not making a difference one way or another, what is the harm in believing we’re doing a good thing by recycling them?
For one thing, by doing something we think is helping, it decreases our motivation to do something that actually will help.
Or worse. It is fairly well-established that people are rationalizers. Doing good gives us licence to do bad. For example, ‘I worked out, that means I can eat this entire chocolate cake’; or ‘I took my kids to the park so now I can go out and get trashed at the bar’; or ‘I took my pumpkins to the bear habitat, that makes it okay to drive this massive gas-guzzling pickup truck even though my urban lifestyle dictates I only need a compact car.’
We waste a lot of time doing things ostensibly to help the environment that do not actually help the environment. When something like pumpkin recycling comes up, we might want to start with the question: Is this actually doing something or is it just assuaging my conscience?
