Sour Grapes: HYPOCRISY!

To Catharine Fulton

I read your ramblings about how badly you believe Icelanders treat the environment.

You are a person who gets paid for producing huge stacks of paper, sent to various places in the country, with left overs to be destroyed monthly to make room for a new stack of the same.

There is one word that fits your behavior perfectly: HYPOCRISY!

You refer to your eyes hurting in the ramblings. I suggest that they are just totally blind regarding your own targeted polluting behavior.

R. Ragnarsson

Dearest Ragnar S. Ragnarsson,

Thank you for your email.

In publicly critiquing the environmental practices of the country in which I live, I am doing my small part to hold policy makers accountable for the decisions they make on behalf of the Icelandic nation. I am also imploring my fellow Icelanders to do better in their daily lives for the sake of the world. I think that is an important practice for everyone to engage in — neither Iceland nor Icelanders lack room for improvement.

And nor does the Grapevine! You reference my editorial from Volume 20, Issue 7 in your email and while I consider myself a conscious consumer, actively striving for a zero-waste home and living a car-free lifestyle, I do, as you rightly pointed out, work for this magazine so let’s look at its emissions. The Reykjavík Grapevine is published 18 times per year in 20,000 copies. Looking at the data, that would bring the estimated total carbon footprint of the Grapevine’s annual 360,000 copies to 54 metric tons of CO2.

That’s the equivalent of 42 Icelanders taking one round-trip flight between Reykjavík and Tenerife. Or 270 cars driving from Reykjavík to Selfoss once.

The good thing about the Grapevine is that, unlike the emissions of, say, an eight cylinder rally car, our newsprint is recyclable.

So, Ragnar, if you’re reading this be sure to toss it in the blue bin when you’re done.

Cheers,

Catharine