Hey Guys!
Lucky you, this week I’m finding extra time to write. So here’s a bonus post! It’s a little less personal than the last post but will hopefully plant some important seeds to get you thinking about different ways you can be more sustainable in your life! For your benefit and for the benefit of our beautiful Mother Earth.
If you had brought up the term “sustainability” to me 10 years ago, I wouldn't have even the slightest clue of what it meant. Now it’s a term I strive to base my life and values around. Something I hope resonates with my children and they carry that into their futures, wherever their futures may take them. Now, when I started to consciously become more “sustainable”, I had to really consider what that meant for me and my lifestyle. What was I able to do? Will these changes remain consistent? What’s important to me to try to protect? It’s easy to just get caught up and overwhelmed in sustainability. There is SO much information out there and it is impossible to read, learn and incorporate everything into your life at once. As with all things worth doing, you have to sit and think about where you’d like to start.
Some key takeaways from my journey (which is always changing and expanding) is that nowadays, people are marketing sustainability. It’s currently a buzz word that makes people feel good when they purchase something labeled sustainable. It’s not always that easy. If you see a box store such as Target, Walmart, etc. claim that they’re being sustainable…they’re most likely not. They’re typically the ones using sustainability as a buzzword. If you’re looking at buying more sustainable/ethically made clothing, it will not come from a super convenient store such as Target. I know, I know…THE PEOPLE LOVE TARGET!
This leads me to my next takeaway. The hardest part, and a part I still struggle with is giving up convenience. For the last couple of years, the majority of my clothing has been secondhand. There are a few personalized items I’ve gotten over the years from Etsy and a few things as gifts, but I do try my hardest to not buy anything new. There are so many thrift stores out there nowadays and it’s easy to find even couture thrift stores. But shopping at thrift stores requires actually going in and looking through clothing instead of ordering a new wardrobe online. It also requires patience. You may go in and find ten items you want to buy and the next time, you find none. Instant gratification and impatience have got to go in our society if we’re truly going to live in a more sustainable way.
The last and quite possibly the biggest takeaway is to “vote with your dollars”. A phrase I’ve been trying to live by more and more recently. A few examples of how I practice this:
No longer shopping at Amazon- this one was HARD and still is at times. Especially after the convenience grew and grew and grew during the pandemic. Toward the end of the pandemic, there was a LOT of information coming out about the very poor working conditions provided for Amazon warehouse workers and even more so, unattainable delivery goals and peeing in bottles for the delivery workers. Looking the other way is simply not an option for me. When I found out this was happening, I immediately stopped ordering from Amazon and we let our Prime account expire. Like I said, this journey is still on-going and I am certainly not perfect. We cave and watch a show here and there on Amazon using someone else’s account. Which now, as I’m typing this all out, sounds absolutely ridiculous to me that I ignore the big picture problem to watch a show. I’ll be working on that extra from now on.
Refillable glass waters- We use refillable glass gallon jugs for our drinking water. I live in Florida and I can tell ya right now, there is not one small part of me that would drink this tap water. To be honest, almost every time I brush my teeth I think to myself, “I should really be using our drinking water for this”. So again, thanks to writing this post, I am going to make more of a conscious effort to use my drinking water to brush my teeth. Does that sound crazy?? Yeah, probably. But you know what else is crazy? How people are just okay with the crap quality of water we’re offered. And it’s not just crap water in Florida, it’s everywhere. Is it convenient to go to the grocery store every other day to fill our waters? No it absolutely is not. But is it worth it? In my opinion, yes. It’s important to note that our refillable jugs are glass instead of plastic. Don’t even get me started on plastic, there will be no end.
Driving a Tesla- This one for me is a sad story. We first got a Tesla in 2019. We immediately fell in love and decided we were never going to get another car ever again! We have an EV charger set up at our house and because we have solar panels, if we charge during the day it’s essentially free. Win win, right? Well, fast forward a few years and now the sustainability of the Tesla batteries is in question. And on top of that, Elon Musk (wacky as he may be in other ways) is union busting. It’s a personal belief of mine that employees should have the right to convene and fight for better working conditions for themselves. To not allow them to do so, is not okay with me. So here we are in the last year of our Tesla lease and wondering what to do next. We cannot currently afford to break our lease so we have to stick it out until the end of the year. Other car companies are not as advanced in EV’s as Tesla who’s been excelling in it for about a decade or more. This is where sticking to your guns over convenience becomes hard. We still absolutely LOVE our Tesla and wish we could keep it. In good faith, we cannot.
Sustainability is an ever evolving journey. One that does not always step forward. Sometimes you have to reevaluate your situation and when presented with new information, you need to make a different decision. To truly try to live sustainably, you have to be fluid and able to adapt and change. It’s an important thing to think about and lean towards because at the rate we’re going on a global scale, we are absolutely not doing anything to help our planet. If you have children, consider what kind of environment you want to leave them. Don’t you want to leave them a planet with safe water, land and air quality? In allowing these large corporations to rule the world, we’re allowing them to call all the shots and their shots are only called based on what kind of profit can be made in the short term. Let’s not even get started on the toxic mess that is not being handled in Ohio. Are those the people you want to leave responsible for your children’s future? Because for me, it’s a big HELL TO THE NO.
There will be no change if we, the people, do not force change. The rich will keep getting richer while the rest of us remain bottom of the barrel in terms of health and profit. Make the small changes in your personal life that will start to shift the current convenient flow of things. There will be no change if you can’t give up your convenience.
Keep evolving
-A