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Lazy, Selfish or Stupid?

I’ve Been Trying To Figure Out The Answer To This One For Nearly 50 Years

Pathless Pilgrim
5 min readJan 15, 2022

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In this day and age, when absolutely everyone must surely be aware of the climate crisis, why do more people not cycle?
Photo by Flo Maderebner from Pexels

I put the wrong bin out. That’s what started this train of thought.

We have a brown bin for recycling, a green bin for garden waste and a grey bin for non-recyclables, which get emptied on a rotational basis. I put the wrong colour bin out and the binmen didn’t take our rubbish.

With the bins full, that meant a trip to the municipal recycling centre. Whenever I need to do a skip trip, as we call it, I hook up the trailer and pile in as much rubbish and junk as possible to make the trip worthwhile before strapping it all down with bungee ropes.

Nothing unusual so far, but bear with me. You see, back in 1987 when I was seventeen, my parents offered to buy me driving lessons but because I was very environmentally conscious at that age I declined. Even at that time, it was very obvious to anyone whose head wasn’t buried in the sand that there was a brewing climate crisis and that the internal combustion engine was a large factor in that. I didn’t want to be one of the masses of people contributing to global warming by driving a car everywhere and so I opted to use either public transport or, more often than not, to cycle.

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Pathless Pilgrim
Pathless Pilgrim

Written by Pathless Pilgrim

Vegan for almost 40 years with a first-class degree in law. Animal rights, ethics & social justice. Download my FREE eBook at: lllpg.com/Veganism/

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