Help! I’m trapped in a sustainability rabbit hole!
This post is about sustainable living, but it is also about being kinder to yourself in the process. Remember: sustainability is the opposite of burnout, in all forms! It is easy to get discouraged. Every time you change one behavior, you realize there are three other things that you are doing wrong. You come across an Instagram post and discover 10 new environmentally-friendly brands that you need to buy RIGHT NOW to replace your existing storage containers and cleaning supplies. You ask Google a simple question like: “is it better for the environment to use a plastic fork or a bioplastic fork for my child’s birthday party,” and you are steered down a rabbit hole of other questions — “Where was the plastic fork made?” “What materials are used in the bioplastic?” “Do you have access to a commercial compost facility that will accept bioplastic?” (Well Google probably won’t be helpful enough to state variables as questions like this, but there would be a lot of competing articles to sift through.)
It could be a full-time job to figure out all the steps required to live a perfectly sustainable life, and it’s possible that once you follow every thread of sustainability to its logical conclusion, the result is a life that doesn’t sound appealing. Not everyone wants to live off the grid and grow their own food to support a vegan diet. On the other hand, it seems like the little changes that are easier to make can’t possibly be important in the face of Australia burning down, ice caps melting, and plastic debris overtaking wildlife from oceans to deserts. This is the kind of extreme thinking that gets us nowhere, so I want to pull you out of the rabbit hole today. You can pull me out tomorrow, OK? Deal?
First, you need to cut yourself some slack. We live in a world that runs on price signals, and those signals fail to include costs to human health, biodiversity, and the environment in the way our economy has operated in recent history. Each person who tries to identify and account for those costs in their daily life roams off the beaten path and explores new territory, which is never a predictable and easy task. Don’t be discouraged — just keep putting one foot in front of the other!
Second, moving off the grid might reduce your individual footprint on the environment, but unless you stay engaged in society, nothing will change for anyone else and, therefore, for the planet. Even if we had the most compelling leaders who wanted to push through policy to account for the costs I mentioned above, no action would occur without a constant message from constituents and customers — like you and me — that we care. A food scrap recycling program exists in my community purely because of the grassroots effort put in by a group of motivated volunteers, who made the political lift possible for our environmentally-aware town supervisor.
Third, spend a minute thinking about what you want to achieve with the changes you make. One goal could be to reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible. After all, carbon emissions are a leading cause of global warming, and we all want our planet to remain a hospitable place for our children and grandchildren. Another goal could be to aim for a zero-waste existence in which everything in your household is used, reused, recycled, or composted, with nothing going to a landfill or incinerator (and no cheating by tossing things into a public trash can!). Landfills are a significant source of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, and the process of adopting a zero-waste lifestyle forces you to cut down on what you buy to start with, reducing your carbon footprint.
Taken to their extremes, both of these approaches feel very challenging. Trying to unravel the supply chains of our globalized world to calculate the carbon footprint of each item you might buy, from food to clothing to furniture, takes a herculean effort, even with resources. And while we have cut down our weekly garbage load in my household, getting to zero seems equally impossible for us.
I am still struggling with my vision for sustainable living, but the image I keep coming back to is that of a circular economy. In a society underpinned by a circular economy, people buy what they need, reduce the number of things that they do need, they reuse those items over and over, and they consider the end-of-life options for that item, with a goal of recycling or composting anything that remains. In this perfect circular economy, it is easy for people to act in this way because products have been designed with this cycle in mind, and policies support the circle. Obviously, we don’t live in this perfect world, but I still like to keep the image of the circle in my mind as I go through my daily life, and I am training myself to think more circularly as I buy and use items with the five “R”s: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot (compost).
Finally, when I need cheering up, I like to add another “R” to the mantra list of five: regrow. Planting flowers that pollinators will love, planting trees, cleaning up garbage that has escaped into the environment — these are things that we each can do to reconnect with the earth and be reminded of why we bother sorting our PET from our paper and our food scraps, or why we didn’t buy that fun but junky toy, or why we stared at two different containers of milk for 10 minutes in the grocery store to discern which one was the more sustainable option, from farm to packaging. What I believe is that it isn’t about making the perfect decision; instead, it is about keeping that vision of a circle in mind as you go through your daily life, learning more about how a circular economy would differ from our existing system, and being willing to step up with your time and voice to support initiatives that promote that vision.
Just keep journeying, one step at a time! And I am always here if you fall down a rabbit hole!
