Toilet paper. Really quite overrated.

When Christian Wolmar wrote an article on Guardian’s Comment Is Free recently appealing for people to give up using toilet paper, reactions included “who’s going to pay for a bidet for every toilet in the land?”, “can’t a guy just have a shit in peace?”, “I already recycle my cans and bottles, I’m buggered if I’m giving up my quilted Andrex”, and “I swear to god, these Greens will not be satisfied until we’re all volunteering, gladly, to throw ourselves into a vat of piranhas, for the good of Gaia”. There were supportive comments, but generally speaking, suggesting you quit using toilet paper, in the Guardian, well that’s the mad ranting of another dahl-munching leftie who knocked their real ale over because they banged their tambourine too hard to All Around My Hat.

Wolmar’s comment was prompted by another article about how in the US, the Natural Resources Defence Council has revealed that over 98% of the toilet roll purchased is made from virgin wood. The American bottom is apparently too sensitive to have recycled products anywhere near it, people possibly imagining that in the first wipe they’ll have wood splinters the size of HB pencils piercing their backsides, or beaver hair irritating them as they sit down for Monday Night Football. In Europe and Latin America, according to the article, up to 40% of toilet paper is made from recycled products, which presumably to American tastes makes our bottoms as unattractive as our teeth.

Reactions to the Wolmar article were partly Carry-On-At-Your-Convenience titters because a lot of people tend to be coy about taking a dump (unless you’re one of those people who announce their imminent bowel evacuation to the house with a rolled-up newspaper under one arm and the look of an expectant parent). Toilet roll adverts feature puppies and butterflies and all sorts of soft things designed to make us feel like defecating is some kind of transcendental experience, where if toilet roll adverts were completely honest they’d say nothing more than “This is effective at wiping fecal matter from your anus”. Sorry, hope you weren’t eating. And yet people buy toilet roll that has been quilted, infused with aloe vera, played with by puppies, gently rolled between the thighs of Tahitian virgins and fluffed by meadow breezes. Then cover it in shit and flush it down the lavatory, quilting and all.

The alternative to toilet roll suggested by Wolmar is to use water to clean ourselves after defecating. For some, this conjures up images of squatting over holes in the ground, flies everywhere. They appear to be unable to entertain the possibility that a cheap hose attachment can be added to a normal flush toilet without either having to turn their bathroom into the Mumbai slums or find room for a new bidet, and unless they’ve tried it they might not realise that it is actually far cleaner than using toilet paper. Squirt, dab dry, and away. Look at it this way – if your hand was covered in poo, would you wipe it or wash it before you ate?

But this is all academic, because a lot of us are fed up with being lectured about what we need to do next to protect the environment. Getting rid of toilet paper is only one of the things we could do to mitigate climate change, but we’re already up in arms about rat-infested rubbish that is only collected once every fortnight, being expected to wash cans and containers for recycling, putting bricks in our cisterns, eating meat less often or having to listen to a word George Monbiot says. You can hear an entire society clapping their hands to their ears and shouting “No more advice!” when another thing gets added to the list of Your Green Obligations, like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace are some authoritarian regime who want to suck all the fun out of life and turn us into soap-dodging hippies.

Not all of the advice that we’re given about what we can do to ‘be greener’ will be 100% effective. Not all climate change is caused by human activity. Not every one of the dozens of species extinctions that happen around the world every week is caused by human activity, this is true. People have rightly learned to be sceptical about statistics and studies when the newspapers can’t make their minds up from week to week whether coffee and red wine are good for us or bad for us. It’s also easy to see hypocrisy left, right and center. Emma Thomson appears on TV protesting the building of a third runway at Heathrow, a short while after she has flown up and down the first two runways to work in the US. Stephen Fry has been flying around the world looking for endangered species for his series Last Chance To See – flying in airplanes that use fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases that may well damage the habitats of the species he is filming.

That all said, even in the face of ambiguity about statistics, science and hypocrisy, it is widely acknowledged that human activity is to blame for accelerating climate change and species extinction. Swathes of tropical forest are being felled, wildlife habitats being fragmented, directly because of our demand for paper and palm oil. Even the most conservative estimates of anticipated climate change and species loss may be woefully inadequate. We are, according to some reports, on the verge of the sixth mass-extinction in the Earth’s 4.8 billion year history. And why should we be immune from this extinction? If the 4,800 million year age of the Earth were viewed as one year in time, humans would have arrived not just on the last day of the year, but at only two minutes to midnight. Barely time enough to pour champagne and find someone for an awkward snog as midnight strikes. We’re newbies, even if we are smart enough to have invented the iPod.

Claiming that ‘these scientists don’t know what they’re talking about’ or ‘these Greens won’t be happy until we’re brushing our teeth with twigs and shitting in the woods like bears’, as if people who are attempting to put forward some kind of solution are crackpots and we have time to wait for the jury to come in is little more than using reasonable doubt as an excuse for deliberate, bloody-minded ignorance and laziness. Dismissing environmental activists and scientists as ‘these greens, tree huggers and crackpots’ is as much of a waste of time as environmentalists labelling those who dispute the scientific evidence for climate change as ‘deniers’, arguably a reference to holocaust denial and an attempt to stigmatise such a stance. Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail was recently labelled as one of the top ten ‘climate change deniers’ by George Monbiot, for such statements as “the theory that global warming is all the fault of mankind is a massive scam based on flawed computer modelling, bad science and an anti-western ideology”. As loony as that statement appears to be to me, she’s entitled to say it.

In 1992, the UN adopted the precautionary principle for preventing climate change. It says that “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”. The other aspect of the precautionary approach is that the burden of proof of climate change and the risks we all face falls to those who would have us act to prevent it. If Melanie Phillips or David Bellamy dismiss the hazard of human-driven climate change, it is down to scientists to provide the evidence that they are wrong, but the precautionary principle also says, basically, that the risks are too great to do nothing while we wait to find out.

Phillips, Bellamy and others who dismiss what they see as alarmist talk of rampant climate change don’t offer any solutions, because they don’t even believe there is a problem. Indeed, the Daily Mail recently campaigned against low-energy light bulbs in the light (no pun intended) of an imminent ban on the sale of traditional light bulbs, even giving away free incandescent bulbs. The Mail saw the removal of traditional light bulbs from sale not as a measure to increase energy efficiency but as a petty Eurocratic move to rob people of good reading light and foist overpriced, dull, new-fangled light bulbs onto us all.

Whether it is low-energy light bulbs or hosing your backside, what some people see as just more hard work and some others see as infringement on our liberties by anti-Capitalists with hidden agendas are just more of the things that add up to a precautionary approach to tackling climate change that may, just may, affect all of us.

The reality of our situation in the future will be somewhere between the Roland Emmerich-directed apocalypse suggested by some, and the absence of anything in particular suggested by others. Where on this scale you think we’ll be is down to you, but chances are you’re neither a mung bean-eating hippie or Melanie Phillips. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not triple-glazing your spectacles or knitting your own underwear just yet. Just don’t knock the hose until you’ve tried it.

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