LifeStyle & Sustainable Living

Source: Jo-Anne McArthur - We Animals In the earlier article , I wrote about the story of “Japan Bullet Train Thinking” and what we should learn from it to “Act Fast” in   tackling climate catastrophe! I also wrote on where the world is currently and its trajectory towards Paris agreement of keeping less than 2°C Global warming . I mentioned that fossil fuels, food, transportation & building are main sectors to address climate change which contributes to more than 50% of Greenhouse gas emissions or as per the book “The Carbon Almanac” The Four Horsemen of Carbon Apocalypse , the 4Cs: Coal, Combustion, Cows and Concrete projected to account for 70% of our climate change problems. Fossil fuels were discussed in detail earlier which I recommend reading first to get continuity and in this part 2, I will describe about Food sector.   Food: There are various estimates of food and agriculture impact on greenhouse gases ranging from 14% to 87% considering various factors ...

To understand the story behind Japanese Bullet Train thinking, we need to go back to 1958 when Japanese Government ordered their Japanese Railways (JR) to come up with a quickest way to travel between Tokyo and Osaka. JR Engineers took this as a challenge and came up with a proposal a few months later with a train that can travel up to 100 km/hour speed which could be fastest train at that time if it was approved. To their surprise, Japanese Government mentioned to their JR engineers, we need a train twice as fast as your proposal. Shocked with the response from the Japanese Government with the speeds of 200 km/hour which could only be imagined in sci-fi movies, JR engineers undertook an impossible project and lifetime mission as the Government said they can spend how much ever money needed to make this a reality.  The engineers understood that to reach unimaginable speeds of 200 km/hour ambitious future train, a completely different way of thinking and systemic changes are require...

  Photo Credit: https://www.ozassignments.com/preventing-health-threads-through-lifestyle-change-for-students/ In case if you have missed my earlier article , I encourage you to read Part 1 to get the full story and flow. In Part 1, I discussed about some of the internal factors like time, company, and motivation which are in our control to bring some lifestyle changes. In Part 2, we will discuss about Shareable factors. Shareable Factors: Shareable factors are those that we can control partially but there is some influence externally, so we need to make conscious efforts to overcome some of these challenges that pushes us to comfort zone and not to consider healthy lifestyle choices. Let us see some of them. Convenience Tim Wu a law professor at Columbia wrote an article in NYTimes about The Tyranny of Convenience in which he talks about 2 waves of convenience and mentions “If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second pr...