It’s been a while since I’ve written anything regarding the environment around here (sept 29, to be exact). I think that one of the reasons for this has been the circumstances by which I’m living. I drive around 750 miles per week (not great for the environment) in a vehicle that gets 18-20 mpg (Not good either). It’s getting to the point where it’s too cold or I don’t have the time to walk places when I do have things to do in town. I’ve started shopping at stores that are very wasteful in their packaging and shipping (and I don’t mean just wal-mart), mainly because they are open when I need them to be open.
While I can see a beacon of inconsistency in the amount of driving that I actually do every day and the amount of driving that I had hoped to do everyday when I was in school is vastly different (unfortunately), I don’t feel like I’ve given up sustainability completely in my life, although I have heard many friends opine to the contrary.
Sustainability is a very complicated beast (to say the least), and it includes many different segments and responsibilities if it were to be completely attained. For instance, lifestyle bloggers that own very little can be considered very sustainable because the possessions they have are very limited, they are not wasting precious resources on things they don’t need. On the other hand, many of these possessions are very heavy in technology, and therefore are laden with so called “rare earth” metals, over 90% of which are mined in China (the US is looking to ramp up production, and recycling rare earths could boom soon too). Chinese environmental standards for mining these are very, very low, and then there’s processing the metals and shipping them to the lifestyle designers.
In my life, the driving aspect may not be very sustainable, but I’ve started to 
make quite a few things for myself (laundry detergent, from this recipe) that would normally be bought at some store, and (sometimes) put in a terribly inefficient container then shipped from somewhere. If you look at the container at the right, draw a box around it, and notice the large amount of ‘air’ being transported when the item is moved from the factory to the shelf. Note: dry laundry soap users need not worry. Personally, I think that making detergent is not only more sustainable than purchasing it, but more self-reliant as well (which is also something I try to focus on, and wrote on back when this blog was still in interweb diapers).
Another one of these areas is food. I try to focus on eating more ‘primary’ foods (ones that turn the suns energy directly into food, as opposed to growing food (corn) to feed other things that will become food (chickens, pigs). To further that, I (attempt) to get my own locally raised, free range, organic, humanely treated meat every year, but occasionally fail, so I still eat & purchase meat at the store.
Sustainability, as it’s viewed by some, is simply as easy as shopping at the right stores (Whole Foods, who push organic and local foods, but make sure to import rugs from India and Christmas trees from East Tennessee). In an effort to become completely sustainable, you’re going to have to make tons of sacrifices in your life, most that people wouldn’t even want to consider. The trick to getting to a comfortable sustainable point is making peace with the compromises that you’re inevitably going to face while attempting to get there. I’ll give you an example from my own life: A guy I work with was bringing his yogurt in a small tupperware style container everyday, so that he could buy the large container at the store, save some money and cut down on the plastics being produced. Unfortunately, he needed to wash the tupperware after every use, using much more water than normal. Where we live, water is scarce, and has been for centuries. There’s even a saying around here “We drink whiskey and fight over water“, which isn’t all that far from the truth. So on the one hand, my colleague was preventing plastic yogurt containers from being produced, but on the other hand was using a (locally) rare resource.
As I thought about it, almost anything can be unsustainable, and its easy to fall into the habit of doing those things. For instance, maybe the sandwiches I make at home for lunch are using food with that traveled longer than a sandwich that I could have bought from the store – One would be helping the environment at the cost of my wallet, and one would be helping my wallet at a possible cost to the environment.
I think that the most important thing here is to strike a balance that is in line with what you hope to achieve. For me, I’d like to use less (of everything), save money, and know more about what’s in the products that I use every day (like laundry soap). I don’t want P&G to tell me what’s ok to put on my clothes and what’s not, and I’d like my laundry soap to be relatively simple and earth friendly. The fact that this saves me money and makes me more self reliant is just icing on the cake.
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