Making room for sustainability in your life

Sustainable living is a complex science. The conscious consumer is faced every day with green dilemmas that at first glance may seem impossibly hard. The most important part to leading a more sustainable life, in my opinion, is to make decisions that work for you. If asked to make major life alterations in a short period of time even the most the most committed environmentalist will eventually throw in the towel. That’s why adopting small changes incrementally over time and making sustainability work for you is usually the best way to go. However, when faced with difficult decisions about our consumption habits, such as choosing between organic food grown far away or local food produced using pesticides or other chemicals, we can approach it several different ways. We can simply choose the product that boasts features that are most important to us, such as organic food for our own personal health versus supporting a local food system in our community. The issue you feel stronger about is the right choice. Luckily many local producers who are part of our local food system believe in sustainable agriculture and produce food without pesticides. The other option is to turn to environmental scientists. There are internationally accepted methods for determining the sustainability of a product or food item, such as Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) or the concept of food miles. These tools allow us to look at a more comprehensive picture of the environmental burden of the product from a “cradle to grave” perspective. In the case of food miles, food is tracked literally from its origin to your table based either on weight or calories provided. These and other methods often provide the basis for product labeling, called eco-labels. The use of eco-labels is typically an attempt by various nations’ governments to avoid what is often called “green washing”; a company’s claim that their product is greener than the next without any science to substantiate those claims. “Green” has become the newest trend and everywhere you turn companies, products and services are all touted to be “green”, “environmentally friendly”, or “natural”. But without standards for these claims, the words are meaningless. It’s really just about marketing. You need to look for credible labels, or do a substantial amount of research yourself. A good place to start learning about eco-labels is at eco-labels.org. This domain is now owned by Consumer Reports, but it’s a well-managed project that is now hosted at greenerchoices.org. While we all certainly need a minimum amount of food and goods to survive, of increasing significance are our consumption habits. The idea of curbing our consumption, not just doing without, but by also substituting quality over quantity, is equally or more important than making the choice between for example, local and organic. It’s of course not a new idea, denying what some would claim is an intrinsic drive for consumption can be traced to the voluntary simplicity movement, Quakers, the origins of several major religions including Christianity and Buddhism, and the Spartans to name a few. The bottom line though, is avoiding the crappy quality goods that don’t last and that you probably don’t need, sold by Wal-Mart and its likes. Consider whether you should be buying before you consider what to buy.