https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/29/eco-friendly-going-green-poor-cost-diary
(You have to read the linked article to understand this overly long post!)
I'm going to pick apart this poor woman's article! Not that I didn't feel a lot of kinship with her as she attempts to navigate modern life while trying to make wise, conscientious choices. I did. And I often feel the same kind of despair because honestly the whole system is against us! We have developed into a culture, a society, an economic system that relies on over-consumption to power it. It is not sustainable and it is extremely frustrating at every turn to try to change. I get it. So I am not really going to pick it apart, rather I am going to dialogue with the author. If she were sitting in my living room saying these things, this is how I might likely respond to the things she notes.
I'm going to respond as a Catholic. I think being Catholic makes all this much easier to take. For one thing, we are forbidden to despair, so any time we are headed in that direction, we have to choose to take a different course. And also I think when you have a broader, religious perspective on this issue which involves so much rethinking things and daily sacrifice, religious asceticism helps a lot. We are supposed to be taking up our burden, our cross, our yoke, joyfully. To live a life of sacrifice brings you closer to Jesus, who is Love Incarnate. Living in the western world where there is so much material wealth, even for those in poverty often, having to give up stuff is a counter cultural deal. And that's a good thing! That keeps us detached from worldly things. The poor get to enter the narrow gate pretty easily compared to the rich, or so Jesus says!
The first thing I am going to note is the fact that she seems to be a recently divorced woman with an 8 year old son. The break down of marriage has a horrendous effect on our whole society, in every way. But most women who are single are poorer than they would be married. And now her son is going to be part of the statistic that shows what a horrible problem broken families are to children. I don't know this individual's situation so I can't comment on her particular circumstances. There are times when divorce seems the only alternative. If your spouse is violent to you, cheating on you (although some couples manage to forgive and move so it depends on the situation), or if they up and leave you and there's nothing you can do about it and for some reason divorce is a better alternative than remaining married but apart, it happens. But overall our society has accepted easy divorce the minute you get unhappy, dissatisfied, find out your spouse is irritatingly human, etc. I think this approach to marriage is part of our consumer culture. When we get dissatisfied we don't work to fix things, we throw them away to try something new. I think there really should be something like a 3 year wait period before you can begin divorce proceedings. And during the wait period, it is required that you attend counseling. It isn't fair to the children to be so unstable. There's a lack of commitment, loyalty, resiliency in deciding to marry and there's a flightiness, self-indulgence, emotional neediness fed to us by our consumer, advertisement driven culture that makes us seek an escape valve the minute things get uncomfortable. Consumerism runs on us having immature impulsive desires all the time. And that bleeds into our relationships. Here's an article that does a great analysis on this.
The rush of having to deal with every day busyness, especially when you as the single mother and responsible for everything makes convenience an overwhelmingly attractive force. You don't have the slow time needed to make things at home, or for basic upkeep even. If you are a single mother desperately trying to make ends meet, you don't have much time to do things that would tread more gently on the environment. You just don't. So you wind up spending your hard earned income on disposable stuff and McDonald's. I don't think this woman did though. She seems very health conscious, but I think she's atypical here.
She did lose her job which is totally depressing and scary. She's only making ends meet by doing piece work, gig stuff and working part time. That sounds very hard. But again, I want to get back to family and how our weird understanding of it, our dysfunctional relationships feed into all this. She talks about renting an old house. But the image of her and her son alone in some old house is a forlorn one. I thought as I read, where's her family? No grandparents? No siblings willing to open their house? Again I know families are often alienated from each other. We have such a toxic culture in terms of learning how to relate, forebear, forgive, get along, work things out, and such a warped idea that to be truly successful you must be completely independent in all things. I think a more familial, community oriented way of doing things is far healthier for both us and the planet. So she's working hard to air condition her old house for two people, her son and herself and feels guilty about it. If more people lived together, we'd have less need for so many air conditioners! This is a real sticking point for me. Around me there are so many huge McMansions housing 1 to 4 people with the a/c running 24/7 from about May through September. In these houses, you could comfortably house many more people than that. We all just require way too much personal space. It's over indulgent. And takes a lot of air conditioning. And of course our houses are all now designed to be dependent on a/c to be comfortable. She does use blackout curtains to keep heat out which is a smart idea. Bravo to that!
Packing lunches for her son and also saving leftovers. She complains that she bought cloth sandwich wrappers for her son's lunches. I've never seen these, but I did buy some supposedly reusable 'eco-friendly' things that almost looked like pencil cases with velcro (plastic!) closures. They also molded quickly. You have to remember to get the food out and to rinse the thing right away. Unfortunately if you forget the lunchbox in the car until the next morning, you are already out of luck. So these things weren't made with kids in mind. And I think they are a bunch of greenwashing anyway. I think it is far better to just get some sturdy, will last forever, plastic or tin sandwich boxes and just reuse them ad infinitem (of course kids are notorious for losing things, so they might not last as long as you'd wish, which could be an issue money wise.) Also there are wax paper sandwich bags still around. They work really well! Of course the wax still comes from a petroleum by product. You can get more natural stuff but it is harder to come by and more expensive. There's something called Stashers, which are silicone resuable bags that zip lock like plastic bags. These are good but hard to dry and of course more costly, initially. So I do think getting down the right way to pack a kid's sandwich can be tricky. I sympathize. The truth is the kids have to get into the habit of always remembering to bring stuff home and clean them out right away.
One thing that really did strike me as whiny in the article was her complaining about having to wash out plastic bags and hang laundry on the line as too time consuming. Oh come on. That to me is being a little too attached to convenience. And why isn't her son helping her with this stuff??? He's 8. At that age they really can be helpful, not like when they are 3 or 4 and make everything take twice as long.
Another thing that to me seemed over the top in terms of trying really hard to find hardship where there wasn't any, was complaining about not having a dishwasher. Somewhere someone published a study, I suspect done by a company that manufactures dishwashers, saying that running a dishwashing machine is more environmentally friendly than washing dishes by hand. I strongly doubt this one, yet it is taken as gospel truth by everyone because I think they don't like to hand wash dishes. It's very convenient to convince oneself of this. I think the study must have compared the most efficient, theoretical dishwasher with someone who stood over the sink with hot water pouring out of the faucet for 30 minutes straight. In that case, maybe, but here's my problem with all this:
1) Most people have to rinse dishes anyway before they are put into the dishwasher, otherwise the bits of egg yolk, pasta, potato, peanut butter very likely will get baked onto the dishes and the pasta stuck to the twines of your forks, etc. Sometimes if you don't rinse something off, it will get sprayed in a fine grit on some drinking glasses or something and then when you unload you find you have a hard time cleaning the glasses of it by hand. Did this dishwasher test include having to rinse everything before putting in? Because that can take a lot of water!
2) Water conserving dishwashers take forever. This means that sometimes you wind up using more dishes, glasses, etc than you would need simply because you can't wait for the darn dishwasher to finish it's job. And this is even with putting it on the shortest cycle. And the whole time it is using electricity to run, to spin the spinner, to heat up the water and of course water itself.
On the other hand, especially if you just have two people like the woman and her son in the article, you can conserve water while washing your dishes. You don't have to run hot water the whole time. You can soak the dishes in soapy water and then drain and then soak in clean water with minimal amounts of water. I know you can do this because I did this for years. And even washing dishes that had piled up for a family of 7, I still got everything washed much faster than a dishwasher. So honestly bemoaning the fact that she and her son didn't have a dishwasher struck me as a bogus complaint.
She talked about buying beeswax covers for $28 dollars to replace plastic wrap. This to me was not a good judgment call. I do very well without any plastic covers and have for years. I use old jars and tubs for leftovers or I simply turn a saucer or plate over a bowl and put it into the fridge. I do sometimes use aluminum foil, but I can make one box of foil last for months. I rinse off used foil, if I can and reuse it for other things and when I am completely done with it and it is falling apart, I ball it up and put it into recycling (for my county it must be the size of a fist to be recyclable so I will combine other foil into the ball.) Aluminum is something that is highly recyclable, there is a market for it and it takes far less energy to recycle it than to mine it.
So she could have foregone the beeswax stuff and spent that money on nice sandwich containers.
With all this, hindsight in 20/20, you know? So I don't blame anyone for getting caught up in greenwashing that goes on in marketing things that don't actually work so well as swaps for plastic. I've done it too.
Packing cans of sparkling water in her son's lunch - She stopped sending aluminum cans of sparkling water because her son said that he can't finish a whole can and that to recycle at the school they must empty the cans first but there's no place to. We actually ran into this problem at our parish and our solution was very simple. We put a bucket next to the recycling bin and tell people to empty out any liquid in the bucket before throwing it into recycling. If I were this lady I would call the school and tell them to handle this better! We need to advocate! And there are many really simple solutions that aren't happening simply because no one has thought of them! But the fact that the school itself hasn't thought of this means that they are probably not recycling at all since they haven't taken the effort to do it properly. So this means they are lying to the tax paying public and not teaching the kids good habits. BAD. So on this point I would play gadfly (nicely) and work with the school to step up their game in this regard. We can't wait for other people to do this for us.
I totally get being frustrated at having to shop at two or three or four stores to avoid excess packaging. I can't wait for the day when Loop comes to my area. I have yet to get my act together about this. Shopping is so complicated. I buy my coffee and fruit and veggies at one store and then my bulk grains and milk in a glass bottle at another and if I want to get deli meat and cheese in my own container I have to go to a third store. It's rather ridiculous. I often daydream of opening my own bulk general store where there are old fashioned meat and cheese counters where someone behind the counter gives you the exact amount you need in your own container or in old fashion butcher paper. And everything else is sold in bulk.
I completely sympathize with this woman's frustration in terms of trying to reduce one's waste. Our whole system is set up to run on gasoline and convenience. It is an uphill battle but it really is starting to seep into the mainstream more. Slowly. More and more outlets are reporting on the devastating effects our over consumption is having. Manufacturers are starting to take notice. The plastics industry is panicking and trying really hard to produce more and more plastic in the short time they see available to them. This sucks royally but I do think it can be taken as a sign that they see the writing on the wall, though their response is truly evil.
The tone of the article tends to be woe is me. I get that the premise is that it is harder for poorer people to be more environmentally conscientious because it costs money. And partly that may be true, but the thing is being forced to be frugal leads to avoiding over consumption. A lot of zero waste stuff actually dovetails quite nicely with living simply and being frugal. You are already making do and making an art out of it. And that's a really good thing. Making do is the opposite of being spoiled. It's resourceful. It forces you to get your pleasure somewhere else than having everything shiny and new. It makes you have to not care about fitting in or doing whatever the groovy moms are dictating as cool this season. It helps you stand on your own two feet a bit. A lot of really is an attitude thing. If you see yourself as a victim then it's a depressing pain, but if you see yourself as a counter culture warrior embracing good choices, then it is empowering and uplifting.
Individual people and concerned groups are resourceful and trying to come up with solutions. I like being part of that community of people bringing change, rethinking their lifestyles. It's refreshing at the same time as being frustrating. And every victory feels so good! I don't think going down the vortex of self-pity as victim is very useful. Instead, be a warrior! And while I am sorry for her job insecurity and necessarily having to live a low consumption lifestyle as a result, a lot of people do this on purpose! They choose to give up a lot of disposable income in order to pursue a more simple life that is more economical and ecological. What if she embraced that choice as well? Honestly having natural limits (no money!) takes a lot of anxiety out of decision making in terms of consumption. If you can't afford it, you don't even have to consider it. It's like teaching the value of hard work and money to rich kids, it can be very artificial. Whereas if the kid knows that if he helps out in terms of chores, getting odd jobs, helping with a family business, being entrepreneurial, finding paying work and he knows he is contributing, that teaches those values naturally. So some of this is attitude and societal expectations. It is hard though, we are so steeped in it, it does take a lot of energy to free ourselves from the group think that says woe is me, everything isn't easy and convenient for me. But of course I don't want to dismiss the anxiety that underlies everything when one's job situation is precarious.
Anyway, those are just my random thoughts on this article. I didn't even get to every point. People are welcome to add their two cents!
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