Baby Steps To Sustainability

Since the mid eighteenth- century, many countries have sought to streamline daily routines into marketable little packages, to "save us time" that we can spend doing more pleasurable things. In some ways, industrialization has helped: we no longer need to forage for "toilet paper" -- we have products today about which our ancestors literally only dreamed.

Industrialization comes at a cost. Maybe the original intent of streamlining practically everything was in the name of efficiency, but the result seems to have only complicated the matter. With all this industrialization, one would think we would have so much more free time. But as I have grown further and further into living simply and sustainably, I noticed that I had more time than ever.

Small steps, when compiled over time, make the biggest differences with the greatest ease of transition. To be sustainable means exactly that. We have to make reasonable goals to sustain the effort of thinking of our lives in a more simple way.

If we think of industrialism as like a drug, it's a little easier to figure out how to get away from it. First, industrialism skews our perspective: all signs point go, never stop. This makes it especially difficult to quit using industrialism because it doesn't show us its effects. We are literally reinforced with messages telling us to go, go, go, despite deforestation, air pollution, oil spills, enslavement, unfair trade and all the other problems associated with industrialism.

You don't have to get rid of your car to be sustainable,  you just have to walk sometimes. You don't have to be a vegetarian to be sustainable, you just have to eat vegetables more often. You don't have to buy organic to be sustainable, you just have to figure out when it's important to buy organic and then stick to it. Not everything needs to be purchased organic because some things don't require many pesticides to grow.

It's about being awake, seeing through the marketing campaigns, the greenwashing; it's about treading lightly. It's about living.

All signs point go. But we need to stop.

One of the most successful methods of controlling people is to confuse them. It takes time and space to untangle the knots and realize what is real and what isn't.  In many ways, our industrial system prevents this time and space from existing. We've got to go, go, go, all the time. Our busy lives constantly getting busier as technology claims that it's making it simpler.

Choose one thing you'd be willing to "give up" in the name of sustainability. It should be a reasonable goal. If you've taken baby steps, comment about what kinds of things you have done to get you living leaner and greener in the 21st century.

Photo credit: Keri Marion