Amateur Brain Surgery

Even though The Nurse is banged up, she’s still environmentally aware.

Tapping away on her keyboard late into the night, The Nurse has been trying to identify the single most effective thing she can do to help the environment.

OK, so she can’t do much from in here. HMP XXX isn’t exactly stuffed with consumer goods and packaging ripe for recycling. She isn’t given enough food to dream of wasting any. She has no lightbulbs. Her carbon footprint – stuck as she is in a cold, dank eight by four foot cell -must be tiny.

Several weeks into her research The Nurse came across this week’s edition of New Scientist magazine. Always a good way to get to the crux of any scientific, economic, cultural or social matter.

The Nurse would be hard pressed to express things better than New Scientists’s journalists. So she won’t bother. Here it is verbatim, straight from the horse’s mouth:

Q: What is the single most effective thing I can do for the environment?

A: Over a 75 year lifespan, the average European will be responsible for about 900 tonnes of CO2 emissions. For Americans and Australians, the figure is more like 1500 tonnes. Add to that all of humanity’s other environmentally damaging activities and, draconian as it may sound, the answer must surely be to avoid reproducing.

It will come as no surprise that The Nurse seldom has occasion to be smug. No chance of parole, surrounded by nutters, forgotten most of the time, half starved and constantly fighting chronic boredom. Her life’s hardly a picnic.

But, unwittingly, she has found herself rocketed to dizzying heights of morality. The Nurse doesn’t have children. She is child free and, as such, has managed to achieve the single most effective way to help the environment known to man.

The Nurse has given the world a precious gift. She wonders whether, if they knew, they’d forgive her and let her out.