My roommate and I went to the grocery store the other day. We chose this particular store because it is new, has a lot of selection, and (as far as I'm concerned) has a greener approach to business. When we got to the checkout and informed the cashier we had our own bags, the otherwise friendly woman gave us a hard time for seemingly thinking that avoiding the use of five plastic bags makes a difference in the grander scheme of things.
The truth is we could have walked to the store, but decided to drive. And a lot of our groceries had a lot of packaging. Not to mention we were endorsing a large grocery chain and purchasing goods which require lots of energy to import. The irony was not lost on us.
Despite the cashier's admitted grim outlook on the fate of world, and our own realization that saving a few thin bags from the landfill means exceedingly little to the environment, I still feel compelled to defend our decision to bring our 99-cent recycled bags to the store.
I find it interesting that so many people not only disregard small actions as negligible in terms of the global effort to revert our terrible destruction of the environment, they also decide that this is reason enough to avoid making the small decisions. I suspect that former has to do with the difficulty most people have in seeing the big picture in terms of incremental change. The latter probably is a result of an assumption that any change in lifestyle will add to the duress of daily life.
And while it is true that five less shopping bags in the landfill can easily be negated by a small boat owner accidentally spilling some gasoline into the water as he fills his engine, my small action is part of a larger plan.
Consider the number of grocery bags my roommate and I will not use over the course of my life if we ignore our cynical cashier and continue with our reusable bag mission. Some quick math pegs this at 5 bags every 2 weeks, which is twice for each 12 months of the year, times our expected 50 years remaining on this Earth. That's 6000 bags. Minimum.
Add that to the many, many other things we do in our household: minimize our water usage; take measures to insulate the house; use compact fluorescent bulbs; and turn off electronics when not in use, etc. We walk or ride our bikes most places we go, and this is possible because we live in a part of the city which is densely populated and thus we are surrounded by amenities.
As well, we endorse the organics movement by purchasing organic versions of whatever we can. These products are just as delicious as their counterparts, and for the extra few cents in cost (which will eventually be eliminated), we are also supporting ethical treatment of works and the environment while resting assured that the food is safe and healthy.
These are easy choices to make and don't require much, if any, change in lifestyle. And while it may be unconvincing to say "yes, but if everybody used reusable grocery bags" (the simple retort being that "you can't make anybody do anything"), one can be certain that nothing can change if nobody does anything.
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Very true...
We humans are very short-sighted on a day-to-day basis. We don't realize that many of massive structures in our world came to being through small, incremental changes.
I had the chance to go to a talk on green engineering today, where the speaker outlined steps that need to be taken in order for us to mitigate our impacts on the environment.
However, at the end of the talk, the speaker stressed that the ONLY long-term, sustainable solution is one where we change our consumption patterns to better fit the limits of our environment, rather than trying to engineer our way out of the mess we have created.
And the accumulation of incremental changes within each of us is probably the only way that we can realistically achieve this goal.
(An avalanche starts with a single snowflake).
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