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More orgasms, less waste: why these are life goals we should all aspire to

Lisa Scott has a few environmental regrets, but it’s never too late to start making amends.

Research tells us the average woman takes 13 minutes to orgasm. It took me 46 years –just in time for the end of world. You bet I’m pissed off. Look, before you ask, I definitely had a decent crack at it, but rather than pleasure earthquakes that obliterate your capacity for speech, all I’d ever had were minor gladness trembles, like when you slam the front door and a glass vase threatens to fall, and then explode – even rocks on the mantle a little – but never actually does. So, for a while I guess (okay, three years), this whole orgasm thing has rather turned my head and when I finally came up for air recently it was to discover Doomsday just around the corner. Like Nero, I’d been fiddling while things burnt.

With my reproductive end days coinciding with climate catastrophe (another thing that turned out to be just as big a deal as everyone said), current rising sea levels are strangely in tune with my own tendency to want to drown people. It’s a confusing time, alright.

By this stage of the proceedings the Romans were hard out with orgies and appointing horses as Senators, and all they had to deal with was a fallen Empire, not ruinous global extinction.

So while some here in north Otago still deny climate change, even as it laps the tops of their gumboots, the time has come, as the Walrus said, to talk of many things: of single bananas wrapped in plastic and the fact that coffee will soon be $10 a cup, oysters inedible and all the cokeheads straight, as plantations shrink, seas inundate lowlands and the floating island of plastic spreads. Sorry if that bums you out, might I recommend some sex? I find it helps me.

While the callous make destination bucket lists for places we will be unable to visit in future – no more holidays to Bali, Bali will soon be one big swim-up bar – and by travelling there thus hasten its demise, I say there’s no time like the present to wake up and smell the environmental Armageddon.

It’s not like we weren’t warned. Sure, they mucked up with anti-vaxxing and brought back the measles, but the hippies, our psy-trance Cassandras, were spot on about our reliance on oil and coal, the too-muchness of everything, our lack of moderation; but we just kept buying light-up rainbow unicorns and slapping another Styrofoam-packaged steak on the barbie. Humans are the only animal that will cut down a tree, turn it into paper and then write ‘Save the Trees’ on it.

We are the worst class of eejit. What did we think was going to happen? Did we think the Almighty would say, “Well kids, you’ve buggered this one – luckily, here’s another I prepared earlier”?

“You’ll regret that later in life,” an ex once said to me when I got a tattoo in India. I did in fact, regret it, after three rounds of IPL proved it wasn’t made of ink, more likely soot. However, we’ve got a lot more reasons for remorse than blurry Ganeshas these days – reaping, as we are, the hangover of shop-a-holic behaviour, the mountain of unrecyclable shite: cheap toasters and boogie boards, fast fashion, shiny magpie crap. I’m no better than anyone else, in many ways I’m the perfect consumer – which, by the way, is not a compliment the way ‘perfect predator’ is for sharks.

I’m going to stop being such a thing-hog and turn my stuff-glutted life around. Because if I don’t, while the younger man will be in his 70s when Earth becomes uninhabitable (I’ll be insane or have died stepping backwards off a cliff taking a selfie), it’s our children who’ll be forced to live underground like Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, time travel their only hope of breathing fresh air.

We can still turn this around. Me, I’m not going to buy anything until I consider its environmental footprint. Nada, no plastic, and more pollination. Instead of screaming, “A bee!” I’ll say, “Hello bee, come in, sit down, would you like a glass of wine?” I’ll buy local and well-made, even if it’s more expensive, so I never have to throw it away. And while I’ve long believed that facts have no place in a happy life, I’ll make an effort to be informed, no matter how scary the truth. I already regularly embrace a plant-based diet in the form of the world’s biggest, hairiest vegetarian and he is why I know it’s never too late to learn something new.

There you have it: more orgasms, less waste. I think these are life goals we can all agree on.

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