You may know I outlined the top six techniques the average person can step up and try to accomplish to help themselves lower their Negative Environmental Impact (NEI). Fourth on our list of environmental doom, is our desire to consume.
For many of us this can become difficult because it contradicts the generally accepted Cultural World View in this country, and much of the world, which states more is better. Our whole lives we’ve been told; make more money, buy more things, experience more of the world. This is designed to light a fire under us, but really lights a fire in the middle of our environment, because as I outlined recently in WildernessPunk, the Use of Juice, the more money one has, the worse their lifestyle is to the environment and the larger their NEI.
But let’s steer the rhetoric away from the use of utilities (and food which we also covered) and for this article, focus on the concept of how much material goods we consume. Since a huge amount of energy goes into producing the items you consume and transporting them to you, obviously purchasing less and using them longer will not only help your wallet but also the environment.
So here comes the jingle, recycle, reduce, reuse. Consumption is where this comes to play. However, it should probably go reduce first. Reduce what we need to use before we even start. Reuse everything we can whether we buy it, find it, swipe it, or harvest it. Then, after all this, it would get either recycled at the curb or donated to a thrift store.
So yeah, yeah, blahbahidyblue, you can find these ideas in a lot of places, nothing too radical here. Alright, where does WildernessPunk fit in? Probably in the battle between reuse and hoarding. Hoarding is mostly bad and nasty. Remember the above, having more makes more waste, so we shouldn’t strive to have more, but also we shouldn’t be part of a replacement culture either. Oh it broke, get a new one. This isn’t helping. I’m not saying we should keep the broken VCR in the closet, no, recycle such things.
Where things get tricky is how far do you go in keeping things around to reuse. We don’t want to live within piles of slowly rotting crud or have back yards which our neighbors wish to condemn, but also having a little extra doesn’t hurt the environment any. Everything we reuse saves a huge amount of energy. We should have the right to be able to reuse our gear, but I also don’t want to be the crazy guy keeping the plastic buckets with no bottoms. So where do we draw the line?
This has always been a tough question for me. On one hand, I hate throwing things away which can be reused in some manner and having the supplies you need in the middle of a project is a huge boon. Finding a way to reuse some old thing you have saves time, money, and helps lower your NEI. Yet, hoarding sucks. Having too much junk is a pain in the ass. Personally I enjoy the Spartan look for rooms where I live. I might not always achieve it, but I like it.
So what is the answer?
Let’s try to bullet point a positive outline for this conundrum.
- Start by owning less. Less mess and less waste automatically happen.
- Be obsessive about using everything you can instead of buying something new
- Stay organized so you know where the gear you could reuse is
- Donating things to charity is another way of reusing
- Gift things to friends
- Go through your older things often and reuse, donate, organize, and purge
- Actively use stored items for utilitarian purposes and art
If you keep these concepts in mind, I don’t think things will get too bad, but it does bring up the thought, where again, lessening your NEI is not always a pretty thing. If you’re dumpster diving for lumber, instead of buying it, because you want to make a Tiki Lounge, it may not look terrific piled up against your neighbor’s fence while he waters his manicured lawn. But then again, if you’re living right, your NEI for lawn maintenance might be about a hundredth of his.
The bottom line is usually the less income you have, the less of a NEI you create, but it doesn’t have to be this way. One can use those extra resources wisely and create a place of beauty, which lives in greater harmony with the Earth. Create beauty, promote life, and also remember, if you have to move, less is always more.
You can check out some of my fiction here, where they power everything with nuclear, who knew?
WildernessPunk 