Being green doesn’t mean a return to the Dark Ages
OVER the past 30 years, many actions to help the environment, such as recycling, have gone from being seen as the preserve of hippies and eco-freaks to being second nature (if you’ll excuse the pun) for many of us.
Sadly, despite the mainstreaming of actions such as recycling, a view still seems to persist in sections of society that being more in tune with the planet necessitates a return to something like the Dark Ages.
I’ve often grappled with why some people rail against almost anything they consider to be green, and I’m sure it has something to do with being force fed a diet of consumerism for 70 or so years.
There may also be a hangover from periods of harsh austerity after the Second World War, with people sick to the back teeth of having little or nothing, then having access to a raft of new products through the fifties and sixties.
Whilst this railing against deprivation is an understandable natural reaction, I think that we have also been guilty of buying into (if you’ll excuse another pun) a world where shiny and new equates to happiness and signals success.
When I first began writing about environmentalism and the need to consume less of our finite natural resources, a common retort to any suggestion that we as consumers were responsible for over consumption was an accusation that us greenies were determined to see everyone wearing hair shirts and to suck all the pleasure out of people’s lives.
Thankfully, a growing proportion of people now realise that we can’t simply go on burning up resources without paying a price, and appreciating that happiness can’t really be achieved through accumulating ‘stuff’.
Being green isn’t about deprivation, it’s about achieving a balance and making considered choices about how you live. There are many ways you can reduce your personal impact on the planet and reduce your carbon footprint.
Living sustainably doesn’t have to mean negative sacrifices, and whilst some green decisions rely on having sufficient income to choose the more sustainable option, many options can help save money – so if money could buy happiness, at least you’ll have a little more in your pocket to try.
One of the biggest impacts on the planet comes from all of us buying too many things that we don’t really need.
Whether it is food that we end up throwing away, fast fashion items that never make it out of the wardrobe until we take them to the charity shop, or even worse, bin them, or gadgets we never needed in the first place.
On a personal level, I like nice things,
including quality clothes, so I try to buy the best I can afford, and increasingly shop second-hand.
To me this isn’t a sacrifice, it means I now have items in my wardrobe I couldn’t have afforded new.
I’ve also cut down massively on single use plastic items and, in recent years, having realised just how much plastic I still send for recycling, have tried to cut some plastics out completely.
One area where we could all reduce plastics is by not buying into the marketing hype around all manner of cleaning products.
Not only do many contain chemicals derived from oil, but many are also just not needed or can be replaced by more natural products.
Many, many years ago I bought a book which included recipes for home-made cleaning products using ingredients such as white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda.
Making your own back then was seen as a bit odd, but it worked, and miraculously the marketing folk have cottoned on that we’ve remembered that these traditional methods work – so they’ve added them to their products to ‘greenwash’ us into buying them.
One of the unexpected outcomes of the pandemic was that many folk also realised how important things such as spending time with family or a visit to a favourite greenspace were – not everything we do has to be about spending money over consumption.
Being green can also help us be happy, and taking action ourselves is one way to counter the sense of despair at the prospects for our precious planet.