I am not big on resolutions or promises. I guess it stems from all the years that I quit smoking or started dieting at midnight on New Year’s eve in the hopes that the resolve of several cocktails would provide me all the courage and strength that i needed to follow through. Being older and wiser, I have stopped such nonsense. The real way to make a long term change is to set a goal and to work toward that goal. I have a goal to eat better. By better, I mean less meat and more local foods. To that end I am planning on seeing how much food I can grow myself this year and how I can preserve it to last through these cold winter months. While looking at ways to home can, dehydrate and freeze, I was struck by how much my life has turned into those of my mother and grandmother.
My grandmother recently passed away at the ripe old age of 101. I spent many hours reflecting on the changes that have happened in her lifetime. Born in 1908, she saw multiple wars (including both World Wars), the Great Depression, the sexual revolution, the technology revolution and the evolution of the internet. When she was a child, more people lived on farms and ate what they were able to produce. People who lived in cities, lived in dense urban neighborhoods, walked where they could, and took street cars to get to downtown. Most cut their own hair, owned few clothes and repaired them as they showed wear, bought in staples in large quantities and cooked their own foods. They used doilies and the like to protect furnature from dirt and grime, because when you bought a sofa it was pretty much yours for life.
Fast forward a hundred years, and here I am trying to live more like my grandmother did. Little did we know that progress was not all it was cracked up to be. Living a more sustainable life means living with a lighter footprint on the earth. Growing any portion of your own food, puts you more in touch with the things that you are eating and makes you appreciate the labor involved in producing what you consume. When you learn to drive less and walk more, you soon realize that buying in bulk makes sense because you want to make that trip as less often as possible. When you commit to buying less, you do more to make the things that you buy last longer and thus consume less materials in the life you live. That is why I call my haircut sustainable. I bought a good pair of clippers for $20. When it gets too long, I can trim it myself in a few minutes. In addition, I will use less hair care products. While no hair salons are going to shut their doors or turn off their lights an hour earlier because of me, I know that I am using less energy in the way I live my life.
On the other hand, the rise of the digital age has increased our need for electricity and high tech materials, but it allows us to reduce our consumption of many other resources. Email is rapidly replacing snail mail and spam is replacing junk mail. That means a lot less trees are bing cut down every year to send me my bills and offers to buy a new car. Less mail means less mail carriers driving less miles and less planes delivering less letters-that means less gas being burned. I was asked the other day for my fax number. Do people actually use such things anymore? If so, why? The fax machine is rapidly going the way of the dinosaur, the land line telephone, and the answering machine. A fax machine has to be on all the time to be effective. Not only is it drawing electricity all the time, waiting to be used, but when it is, it prints on paper. In this digital age, when everyone I know has an email address, why are we even sending things over fax machines. I haven’t entered a fax number in my contacts in years. Anything that needs a signature can easily be scanned and sent over the internet the way everything else is, so why are people even buying these big machines that use power, toner, ink, paper, and plunk it down next to their computer and internet line?
So in reflecting on the long life of Grandma Belle, I find that she lived a more sustainable life than most of us in the modern age. Who knew that real progress would mean going backward and not forward?
Tags: food, Technology
Loved your blog, Now that I have too pay for everything myself. I found I don’t need as much as I thought I did. Ii get by without much heat, buy very few groc. try not to use to much elect. so you see I too am following the lifestyle Grandma Belle instilled in us. She will live through us forever, as we pass on her wisdom. love you so very much.
It’s true. The only good thing about these troubling economic times is that we, and much of the rest of the America, are starting to see how consumption has ruled our economy, our lives, our very happiness. I worry that when things turn around, though we will go back to our old ways. We went through a lot of these same things in the 70s, but enter cheap oil in the 80s and the SUV became our new vehicle of choice!