The Beginning
For a while now, I’ve been obsessed with sustainability. Like, it used to be something that I just thought, “Oh, I recycle,” and “Don’t use plastic bags!”, but it’s become something so much more. I actually think I need to credit The Minimalists with the birth of this all-consuming, overarching principle that is the filter for every thought, purchase, and impulse. I’ll write more about that journey, and the absolute and total – for me – interconnection between minimalism and sustainability in a future post, but for now, I just want to give you an idea of where I’m coming from.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio where, believe it or not, recycling was part of our daily lives for as long as I can remember. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was getting a weekly lesson in sustainability back in the ’90s with the recycling truck coming through every Monday to pick up our blue bin. (Side note: the fact that there are still places in our world that don’t offer, or have stopped offering, recycling as part of the garbage service blows my mind. I understand that we have compromised recycling and that the plastics industry totally put one over on us about how recyclable their products were, but still – glass! Newspaper! Cardboard! Metal! Come on, people!) My parents, ever the progressive role models, were collecting Styrofoam by the paper bagful to take to the specific recycler that would accept it whenever we were going to be making the two-and-a-half-hour trek to Cleveland to visit my grandma. We also had our own composter out back, and they had us using reusable bags WELL before it was cool.
All this to say, sustainability has been a part of my life for, well, as long as I’ve been alive. I just didn’t *know* it until more recently. It took sustainability‘s becoming a buzzword for me to realize what I’d known all along: the thing I love most about this planet is how many freaking shades of green there are, and damn it, we’re going to have to get serious if we want to keep it that way.
I have lots of thoughts about sustainability, and mostly I just needed to get them out of my head and written down so I could make room for some new thoughts up there. But I’m also hoping to use this blog to create inspiration, for myself or for others, to start taking action. Let’s think about things in a new way, have a conversation about it, and do what we can to move the needle. I think government is critical for making the big changes we need, but frankly, politics exhaust me and I feel totally helpless when I think about them too much, so instead, I’d like to try something different. What if we come up with some ideas here that we can implement on a person-scale? As we’ve recently seen with reddit and the stock market, it turns out that if enough people get involved on a person-scale, then you can take on things so much bigger than yourself. Let’s do that!