I found out yesterday that my favorite local health food store is going out of business. They just can’t keep up with the bigger health food national chains that are in town.
They’ve been around for 42 years.
It’s so sad to me. Our grocery budget doesn’t allow me to shop there all the time, but I love to support them with several of my regular purchases.
And now they’re going out of business.
My first real look at shopping local and the effects of big chain companies started with 7. Waste week was really hard for me. For one thing, I love Ziploc bags. Oh me oh my.
But for another, I was justifying some of my wasteful, consumptive habits.
It was eye-opening to get serious about some of them.
Jen’s family adopted the following habits for a month:
Gardening
Composting
Recycling
Conserving Energy and Water
Driving only one car
Shopping thrift and second-hand
Buying only local
Our family had a history of gardening and composting (though just this year are we getting reestablished at this in our newer house), recycling and shopping second-hand. But we drive two cars quite happily all over creation, use disposable products (including more disposable diapers than I care to admit), and shop at big chain stores which can affect small businesses and encourage poor business practices.
For our Waste Week, our family adopted these:
Flush only when necessary (“if it’s brown, flush it down”)
No paper products (cloth napkins, towels instead of paper towels, cloth diapers only, remember to take cloth grocery bags into the store, etc.)
5 minute showers (and turn off the water when shaving)
Conserve electricity (no space heaters, bundle up instead of turn up the heat, no white noise machine at night, turn off lights when not using them, etc.)
Tupperware instead of ziplocs (gulp)
No fast food (paper wrappers, plastic utensils, napkins, bags, etc.)
Most direct routes when driving (notice we didn’t give up our second car!)
(Also notice we didn’t qualify shopping local…I didn’t know what I was doing in this area…still not sure actually.)
Of course, all of this could quickly turn into legalism, which is only concerned with external behaviors. But we wanted to be challenged with our habits and then examine our hearts. There is no reason we as children of the Creator shouldn’t take care to steward His beautiful creation.
And here are the kinds of things I was reading throughout this week:
“Few of us actually rely on the land we can see and touch. We don’t feel the repercussions of deforestation. We don’t swim in the ocean’s trash swirl. We get our water from nine faucets in our homes. Our pets aren’t going extinct. Crop failure doesn’t affect us. Our grocery stores are infinite. Oil consumption? Who cares? There is always gas at our pumps. Well, maybe…
Presently, human demands on the world’s natural capital measures 30 percent more than the earth can sustain. Global consumption of natural resources far exceeds the earth’s regenerative capacity. We are borrowing from our natural capital at an entirely unsustainable rate. Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles and our economic growth by drawing – and increasingly overdrawing – on the ecological capital of other parts of the world.
‘If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,’ according to World Wildlife Fund International Director-General James Leape.
America’s global footprint is made up of millions of people like me, making choices that affect the planet, getting defensive when the rest of the earth’s citizens quietly say, ‘Please. Please stop. You are deficit spending our shared resources and there is no bailout if the earth’s systems collapse.'”
The impact of environmental degradation falls most heavily on the people who are least able to mitigate these impacts – poor and vulnerable populations. It also disproportionately affects fragile plants, animals and ecosystems.
[On her wrap up of the month] My land, do we have far to go! My hypocrisies are too numerous to count, but this month birthed something unmistakable: I’m done separating ecology from theology, pretending they don’t originate from the same source.
‘The earth is the LORD’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters’ (Ps 24:1-2).”
(The 7 Experiment, pgs. 114, 115, 118, & 124)
All of this could turn into guilt-ridden anxiety. I so hope it doesn’t. I could list all our hypocrisies but I won’t. I still have a lot of the same questions I had in this post. But there lots of things we can do that are the “next right thing.”
We can join a CSA to support local farmers and get fresh produce that is not chemically treated.
We can try our hand at a garden (says Jen, ‘We were total morons and still managed to grow food, so please don’t disqualify yourself because you have a personal history of murdering plant life.’ Also, one year we did a shared garden with our neighbors – a great way to include others in your life and share some of the weeding!)
We can support local businesses
We can pay the extra $3 a month to get curbside recycling and change our trash habits.
We can share hand-me-downs with others, shop garage sales, make a habit of giving away things for others’ sakes. (I know so many people who do this with such open hands…inspiring.)
We can buy more bulk items to reduce plastic consumption
We can carpool or walk
We can put a brick in our toilet tank so each flush takes one brick’s worth less of water. Maybe two bricks?
We can line dry clothes instead of use the dryer. (My sweet friend does this on a regular basis overseas.) Or just stick them in the dryer for a few minutes when they’re dry to get the stiffness out.
We can trade in a car for a more fuel-efficient model
We can buy less Big Ag products and more local in-season produce
We can send reusable containers to school with our kids’ lunches
We can get off marketing lists that send you excess paper and unsubscribe from catalogues
(Lots of these ideas are from 7 pg. 122)
What do you think? Have you tried any of these things? Does it seem like something worth our while as Believers?