Making Reparation: Offset Your Life - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 148

It shouldn't be too difficult to apply many aspects of this example
to others. Seting a low threshold for a carbon footprint, sorting out
whether we should make any exceptions, and ofseting those exceptions
carefully—while regarding those offsets as a temporary measure—will
enable us to reduce our overall carbon footprint responsibly.
But in that case, this example teaches us that we should begin to offset
every aspect of our carbon footprint, in effect, to offset our lives entirely.
Since offsets are relatively inexpensive, most of us could afford to calcu-
late all our greenhouse gas emissions annually and compensate for them.
Because most of us use energy in rough proportion to our income, it fol-
lows that most of us with more money could afford more offsets, and
those who need them the least would need to purchase the fewest. Even
then, of course, they might be too expensive for some. Nevertheless, if all
of us did our best, and all of us who could afford to do so offset our lives,
we would make a real difference for the biosphere even without govern-
ment action. And because we would be linking this practice to a prior,
systematic atempt to reduce our carbon footprints as far as possible, we
would be going even further to eliminating the harm we do to the planet.
By taking these steps, we would be following through on our commit-
ment to make reparation. Indeed, that reparation would be visible both
in the greatly reduced harm we cause in our own lives and in the active
transformation we would make possible here and elsewhere. As people
around the world shift to less harmful practices, as renewable energy
plants come online, some version, however limited, of undoing harm to
the Earth will take place.
But if that is the case, why stop there? We should also contribute to
organizations that restore ecosystems where we live, that actively protect
wild spaces, waterways, wetlands, and wildlife preserves, and that not
only protect but also dare to restore damaged landscapes. Even further,
if purchasing offsets can do so much good, why shouldn't we contribute
money to those organizations quite apart from ofseting per se, enabling
them to go much further than they would otherwise? If our lives are truly
about reparation, we could commit ourselves to purchasing twice, or
even three times, what we would need to do to offset our carbon foot-
print, doing what we could to decrease the harm brought about by the
society in which we live.