The Tour de France is a prime example of this. Riders drink from bottles and then just throw them away at the side of the road, or they eat an energy bar or cereal bar and again simply discard the rubbish. In theory, in the Tour, there is a team of sweepers following the race who pick up all this litter. But on steep mountain passes, the bottles and wrappers that go over the edge just tumble down into the valley below, where they are not recovered by the race. They lie festering and polluting the landscape until discovered by someone out for a walk—ruining their outing as well as damaging nature.

This also happens in ski mountaineering competitions, where competitors throw their wrappers away on high mountain ridgelines.

Added to this, young, impressionable racers watching their heroes are being taught these bad habits.

This practice is disgusting and should be stopped. The authorities should make it an offence punishable by a time penalty significant enough to discourage it. Speak to people you know who run clubs or manage sports, and start suggesting that this behaviour is controlled—and, hopefully, stopped completely.

So said the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, 2,500 years ago.

I find the current outspoken efforts by so-called ‘environmentalists’ to resist change a bit misplaced. I consider myself environmentally aware. I try to keep my environmental footprint as small as possible by reusing and recycling, as well as by being energy efficient in every way I can.

I don’t, however, adhere to the popular set of opinions that say in order to be environmental, we have to stop using oil, stop quarrying the land, stop using water, etc.

The planet has always changed and adapted as time goes on, and it will continue to do so. We are not the only animal on the planet that has overused natural resources. We are often led to believe that oil and coal are finite resources and that we’re using them all up. The reality is that they are produced at a certain rate, and we are consuming them faster than they are being recreated. This is a common stage of many ecosystems, and a typical result is that usage drops to a rate similar to production. This will happen, and we don’t need to worry about it too much. It will happen naturally, as the scarcity of the resource drives up its cost—making other options (solar power, ground-source heat pumps, wind power, etc.) more viable.

Neither is quarrying really the devil it’s made out to be. I live in the French Alps, and in our valley there are a couple of quarries. They are eyesores—granted. But their output is needed to build houses for people to live in. On a smaller scale, ants and marmots do the same sort of thing—digging holes in the earth to build their homes. We don’t see many environmental groups hanging around marmot sanctuaries with placards, though.

We have quite a few big glaciers here. The damage they are doing to the mountains in this area is phenomenal. They are ripping great gashes down them, dragging rocks along, and dumping piles of debris (moraine) as they go. This is far more disfiguring and destructive than the two small quarries—but I don’t see anyone suggesting we try to melt the glaciers to stop them. Far from it. In fact, people are up in arms because the glaciers are melting.

And what is wrong with using water? We can’t use it up, can we? If we flush more water down the toilet, what happens to it? Is it really ‘wasted’? Does it somehow disappear, never to be used again? No—it just heads back down to the sea or ocean, like all water, to be evaporated once again and repeat the cycle. Does using less water in France mean that those without water in Africa will get more? No, it doesn’t. We should be encouraging people to help support the building of wells and water treatment facilities in places with water shortages, not making them think that flushing the toilet less often will somehow help people without water halfway around the world.

It strikes me that the whole airport shopping system is very environmentally unfriendly and should be rethought — ideally even legislated against. I don’t mean banned entirely, but there should be some legislation to prevent people from buying bottles of gin or vodka in duty-free, then putting them on a plane and flying them halfway round the world to another airport that sells the same items.

I haven’t had the time to sit down and work it out, but I would imagine that the amount of carbon produced by flying these items around the world is not insignificant. Yet it’s a totally unnecessary exercise, as practically every airport sells the same stuff.

I recommend that all airport shopping be moved to the arrivals area. That way, all this waste would be stopped immediately — without anyone losing out in any real way.

Once upon a time, when we didn’t want something anymore, we just threw it away. But ‘away’ has gone away—the things we throw away end up somewhere. The rubbish that we don’t want in our back garden will have to go somewhere else: into somebody else’s back garden, or next to somebody’s bit of land. So, by keeping our own personal space clean, tidy, and free from pollutants, we are selfishly passing the problem onto someone else. You might think you have every right to do so because you pay your taxes, and these include rubbish disposal. But that doesn’t make the landfill site any better looking, it doesn’t save the local living creatures from suffering the poisons the landfill site has leached into the surrounding earth, or from the fumes belched out by the vehicles used to transport that rubbish around the world. Nor does it help the desecration caused to the earth by the mining required to build those vehicles and waste handling plants, or to provide them with fuel and electricity.

I have recently become more and more aware of the amount of rubbish I bring home with me every time I go to the supermarket—rubbish called packaging. When I get home, I can fill a bin bag with stuff I have just bought that I didn’t need; stuff that was there solely to assist in the sale of what it contained. The cardboard box around my tube of toothpaste, for example, or the cardboard box used to make my round pot of hummus square so it will stack easier, when the round pot was all that was really needed. The list goes on and on.

Supermarkets are becoming one of the dominant forces in the world. They could be considered to have more power than our governments in their ability to dictate prices and control farming issues. If supermarkets wanted less packaging, then manufacturers would produce less packaging. If supermarkets had to dispose of the packaging themselves, then they would want less packaging. If you were to take any unnecessary packaging off your shopping items as you put them into your bags at the checkout and leave it there, then the supermarket would have to deal with it. They would have to place it in their bins and pay for its disposal. If everyone did this, pretty soon supermarkets would be racking up huge disposal bills, and they would have their manufacturers provide stock with as little packaging as possible. If this happened, we would all have a bit less to throw away, and the world would be a little bit nicer because of it.

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“Away has gone away” is a quote from Michael Braungart in the book Cradle to Cradle.