being greener
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Strict Standards: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /homepages/8/d91492417/htdocs/cattywampus/wp-includes/functions.php on line 52
Strict Standards: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /homepages/8/d91492417/htdocs/cattywampus/wp-includes/functions.php on line 54
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September 19th, 2008
You know what’s a hassle? I’ll tell you what’s a hassle. Recycling.
Recycling is a hassle. So is eating right, and saving energy, and exercising, and voting, and contributing to your local economy.
When it comes to being concerned about the earth, or concerned about our personal health, I think that most of us have this idea of the life that we should be living versus the life we’re living right now. We get stuck in these patterns of thinking “I don’t have time to change my lifestyle right now. I will. Someday.”
“Making a change” sounds like an overwhelming proposition. As if we’re being asked to make an overnight change from city-dwelling, polluting, wasteful, fast-food patronizing car drivers to commune-living, composting, grow-your-own-organic-vegetables, granola-eating, tree-hugging hippies.
It’s a lot of pressure. I know I’ve felt it. And I’ve felt the guilt of not living a more eco-friendly life. Then something small but important happened.
When checking my mail one day, I received a coupon for a local hardware store selling energy efficient lightbulbs for .99 cents–a fraction of their normal cost. Now, I’d seen these lightbulbs before–they’re the one that have a kind of spirally corkscrew structure to them. I knew that it was somehow “better” to use these than the normal lightbulbs, but I never really looked into it because, after all, I already had lightbulbs in all of my lamps. Why buy new ones?
But this coupon intrigued me. For under $10, I could now replace every bulb in my house with an energy efficient bulb. So I made my way to the hardware store one weekend morning, and by noon I had made the switch. And you know what? I felt really good about it! I mean, I knew I wasn’t making a gigantic change in the natural history of the planet, but I knew that using these bulbs was better than using the other bulbs. That was enough to give me a small smile of accomplishment.
And that’s really all it takes, folks: one small thing. Doing one small thing at a time, making one little change at a time, is what can help you change your life and feel better about yourself. Even if it’s once a year that you make a small change, eventually you’ll find yourself on the path you always knew you wanted to be on but you didn’t know how to get there.
My friend, Stef, pointed me towards a website called The Story of Stuff. Watch the 20 minute introduction animation to get a sense of how our culture’s lifestyle affects the world we live in. Some of it will sound like the same old message we’ve been getting from any number of sources for years. But what I like about this website is that it is very straightforward and makes a lot of difficult concepts easy to understand for the normal person like me.
One of the most staggering statistics, one that Stef was particularly excited about sharing, is that most of the products we purchase end up not being used within 6 months of when we bought them. In fact, only 1% of the things we buy are still in use a half a year later. Think about that the next time you look around your home at all of the things you own. I know I do now.
At the end of the animation is a section called “Another Way” with suggestions for how to reorganize your lifestyle with more eco-conscious decisions. Have a look at the list and ask yourself if you could think about trying just one of the suggestions, even if it’s in a small part of your life.
Another really good site with similar types of suggestions is 50 Ways To Help.
I encourage you to make that one little step: do one tiny thing, and see how it feels. I can almost guarantee that it won’t affect your life every much once you’ve got the momentum going–if it even takes momentum at all. I mean, I’ve got my lightbulbs installed, and now I don’t even have to think about them! Done!
But after you do that one small thing, I promise it will be that much easier to do a second small thing. And then a third and a fourth, and on and on.
And here’s the thing: I’m not a particularly green-oriented person. I’m pretty lazy. I’m not an activist, and I don’t contribute to any earth-saving campaigns. Pretty much like most of you, I’m betting. So if someone like me can start making little changes in their life, I’ll bet that you can too. 
One small step at a time.
At the risk of overloading you with links, I also want to include two more articles from a blog I’m sure I’ll talk more about in the future, Get Rich Slowly. In these two articles, the author really gets to some issues that touch home for me, and maybe they will for you, too.
Instead of me leading in with a huge introduction, I’ll let the title of these two posts speak for themselves and try to entice you into reading the rest of the articles. Enjoy!
