Arcadia Ireland

Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 outbreak, the conversation around sustainability has been turned on its head. While the message was gradually beginning to penetrate in recent times, the new normal sees planes grounded, employees working from home, and shops, restaurants and businesses closed around the world. Carbon emissions are about to fall off a cliff.

("Covid-19 heralds the new normal in sustainability", Irish Times, April 3rd 2020)

Like many of us, in an attempt to remain positive each day, I've been taking stock a little more of the things that I am grateful for at the moment. This has helped me to become clearer on the benefits I've experienced while working from home the last 6 weeks. There are pros and cons I believe to this new way of working and I see many positives. I also have to think though of the things I miss the most about my "old life" and one of those is my daily walk to Fishamble Street where Arcadia in Dublin is located!  A 4 km walk enables a good dose of cardio, decent amounts of endorphins to flow, time to make the odd personal call, a chance to listen to the news, podcasts or a new album on Spotify or just block out the world and stay with my own thoughts. From 8 am - 9 am most days in my "old life", it is what I would know as the best form of self-care. I'm also mindful that for many though, their commute may be the part of the day they dislike the most.  Quite often people are crammed into underground modes of transport or sitting in a lane of traffic for the best part of two hours. I know that many of us may even have to leave comfortable warm beds at 4 am to beat the queues and get to work on time. It is therefore easy to understand why many people now rate the lack of commute as being one of the greatest benefits of working from home during Covid-19.

Personal to Environmental benefits during Covid-19

There are psychological, emotional and even physical benefits to not having a commute but there are also many positive effects this is having on the environment. One man in Dublin in his love of bird watching and listening has commented on how nature is so much more obvious at the moment. He can hear the birds sing in the morning which would usually be drowned out by the sounds of cars, trucks and other things that create noise and pollution. People have commented on how clean our towns and cities have become or how much fresher the air feels. In the silence of the morning, walking through an empty, clean, airy place, it often feels like we have stepped onto a different planet. 

Shopping

There are much fewer shopping trips in my life. I now travel to the shop for what we might call a "big shop" once every 9 days. This is new and a good thing. It has forced me to take that notebook out again and actually make a list of the dinners we will have as a family for the week and the foods that we will need to make that happen. Towards the start of this, people began to bulk buy in Ireland and as a result, probably wasted a lot of food, but overall, I believe this has slowed down now that we are in a different phase. We have less food waste in this house because there is better planning. 

Cars

We have two cars at the house for the past ten years. Last week we had an incident whereby one of our two cars simply wouldn't start because the battery had gone flat. Simple explanation, we hadn't used this one in almost 5 weeks. There was a chunk of that time where we were self-isolating and couldn't leave but the other times, we were down to one car. No fuel, no pollution, win win! This has forced us now to actually think about our need for two cars. I wonder will others start thinking the same way.

Fast Fashion

During orientation this year we showed a video on fast fashion which highlighted the harm it creates to the environment. Fast fashion is generally inexpensive designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to meet new trends. When I think of fast fashion, the first store that comes to mind is Penneys or Primark. In January we can buy bikinis for our Summer holidays and towards the end of August we can buy tinsel for the Christmas tree!  The Irish love the store Penneys/ Primark and I believe that many other countries have a fondness for their inexpensive, stylish range of clothes. There is a huge environmental cost to this “disposable clothing” type of shopping though and right now who knows how much money they are losing.  They, like many of the other fast fashion havens closed their doors weeks ago. They are one of the fewer stores who do not offer online shopping so there has to be benefits with the loss in shopping there and the production part too. According to an article in the New York Times, “more than 60 percent of fabric fibers are now synthetics, derived from fossil fuels, so if and when our clothing ends up in a landfill (about 85 percent of textile waste in the United States goes to landfills or is incinerated), it will not decay”.

Food habits

It feels like everyone is baking banana bread these days! I've seen probably over a hundred cookery videos shared in the last few weeks and I think one of them contained meat as an ingredient (Noelle your sausage rolls looked great by the way!). I wonder are we eating less meat in general these days? For one, I imagine that it would be easier to stock up on and store peas, beans, lentils and other canned foods than try use or store meats until a certain date. I wonder are we also thinking differently about food and shopping too. Perhaps as people sit in the financial uncertainty of all of this, we are seeing this as an opportunity to become a little more mindful of how much of something we actually need. Perhaps people are realising that we buy out of habit and not always out of necessity. 

Recreation

Finally, Ireland’s 2 km radius for exercise, short travel has allowed people to use this distance for a walk, run or cycle as a form of recreation, perhaps much like the old days. In my neighbourhood, the local bike shop has seen a huge increase in the amount of people now leaving old bicycles back in for a makeover and repair.  Play zones, bowling alleys, cinemas, arcades, clubs, pubs with extortionate amounts of energy usage are not an option right now so maybe we are starting to think differently about what it means to have fun and relaxation.

Paper

When we closed our doors in March, we also left behind quite a large printer and many reams of A4 paper! Since working from home, I for one, have not printed one single page on our home machine. I doubt that I am alone and this has to be a good thing. On week one I bought myself a good old- fashioned notebook (remember that thing we used to write in?) and have been using it ever since when usually I might print out a sheet because it is easier to read than on screen. As a center I think we were very mindful anyway when it came to paper usage but I still see this as a benefit of this whole new way of working. 

There is no doubt that we are using technology more these days to try facilitate a new norm. However, I believe that even within our feelings of restriction of movement right now, we are moving the world in more ways we might have imagined. I believe that it is forcing us to look at the old way we have done things and ask key questions to enable the creation of a better world. Do we need that second car? Could we walk instead of drive? Do we need to eat meat every day or throw out a half-used ingredient or could we be more resourceful?

Food for thought perhaps.

Next week for Wellness Wednesday I will talk about my attendance at a webinar on Anxiety and Depression during Covid-19