Making Choices: Frugality, the Environment, or Social Justice

I stumbled into the carfree lifestyle because I'm a cheapskate. I'm allergic to spending money, and cars drink up a lot of money. I get to feel overly proud of not owning a car because I'm being environmentally responsible. Living without a car brings two of my core values together. But those values are often in tension, particularly around things that I consume on an ongoing basis. Do I buy local, organic produce (expensive but environmentally sound), or do I buy cheap produce trucked up here from Mexico (cheap but environmentally costly)? And I'll throw one more value into the mix -- social justice. Is that cheap broccoli I buy in the winter picked by someone being paid far less than a living wage?

I've been thinking about the choices I make with my time and money and where they lie on a matrix of social justice, environmental responsibility, and frugality. Wherever I am on that matrix now, what changes do I want to make? I'm particularly interested in making changes that move me in the direction of satisfying all three core values -- these will be the efficient choices that get me the most payoff for my efforts.

Shopping

Buy Less. Buying less is usually environmentally responsible (remember, everything you purchase will be trash someday) and frugal. There are exceptions -- for instance buying weather stripping may help you reduce your fossil fuel waste and save you money. I think that buying less is generally socially neutral. If you don't buy something, then in particular you aren't buying something from a corporation that exploits cheap labor overseas. But you also aren't buying something from a local merchant who employs people in your community at a fair wage. In other words, you aren't putting your money into building and sustaining a socially responsible local economy.

Buy Used. You are not making new waste, you are probably saving money, and you are likely giving your money directly to someone else in your community. The real challenge here is that buying used often takes more time than buying new.

Dumpster Diving and Trash Picking. Like many of you, I do the occasional neighborhood curb crawl for discarded treasures. Since we have a very small space, we are limited in the amount of junk we can bring in, and as a result our use of curbside goods has diminished over time. Mostly we just don't want to bring stuff into our house, period, whether it's cheap stuff or free stuff. However, inspired by Amy Dacyczyn's review of John Hoffman's book on dumpster diving, I'm interested in increasing my trashpicking skills and expanding the types of things I'll consider picking. Rescuing usable items from the trash keeps things out of the landfill and it's free. Two social justice issues surface here. Many people trash pick as part of their livelihood, and since I would consider it more of a hobby, I wouldn't want to interfere with others' ability to get their basic needs met. Also, dumpster diving behind a store might deprive the store of sales (you give your kid the "My Little Pony" set in the crushed box with the missing whip and bridle instead of buying a new one at the store) which could have a negative impact on your community.

Conclusions so Far?

After writing all this down, it seems clear to me that I need to focus on purchasing things used whenever possible. It meets all of my big goals, so it's a very efficient action to take. If I really take that on, I'm going to need to be more organized about the purchases I make, since getting something used takes more time that running into a store or ordering online.

Next?

The big thing I haven't yet tackled here is food. The options I mentioned don't necessarily work well for food. Yes, I can buy less food and perhaps I should. Yes, I can get perfectly serviceable food out of some dumpsters, but I just don't see myself being willing to go that direction (and I don't think the rest of my family would be happy about it either). So I'm going to spend a couple of weeks trying to buy used, and then I'm going to do some blogging about the food issue and try to determine my most efficient options there. Suggestions are very welcome!

Self-reliant Living

My mother recently gave us a stack of Mother Earth News from this past year and it has been having funny effects on me. On the one hand, I am lusting after the whole back-to-the-earth lifestyle found in the pages of Mother Earth. On the other hand, my life couldn’t be farther from the life of a homesteader and I like it that way.

I just finished reading an article on simple living in a city (“Simple Ideas for Sustainable Living” from Dec 07/Jan 08). The article itself got me thinking about my own choices in urban living, but I was really most struck by the ad at the back of the article to share your stories of the “self-reliant life.” Is it possible for a life in the city to be “self-reliant?” Would I even want a self-reliant life?

Living in the city we cannot be self-reliant. My family relies on city and state services throughout each day. We have city water, city sewer, and city garbage and recycling pickup. We use public transportation. We have no yard at all (our greenspace is a strip a couple of feet wide on two sides of our house), so we can’t grow vast amounts of produce on our land or raise livestock. We live in a small 3-unit condo building, so creating our own electricity is complicated by the amount of coordination that would be needed.

On the other hand, we share resources to an extent that would not be possible in suburban or rural areas. Most obviously, almost all of our rides in vehicles are shared. The bus and subway systems allow us to share rides with the whole greater Boston area (and we share the use of a car through the Zipcar network). We live on a short private drive and share a number of things with our neighbors. In the summertime we share our neighbor’s bike trailer (which was passed onto them from another neighbor). H has received a number of hand-me-down toys and clothes through our neighbors. In the winter our neighbor with a snow blower makes a dent in all the snow. This Halloween we gathered with our neighbors at the end of our drive to share some cider and give out candy together. We share green space with our whole neighborhood in a park that is a social hub for families with young children in the summer months. We share produce with other city residents through our CSA and local farmers’ markets.

In terms of sustainable living, it is hard for me to imagine that I could be more sustainable in a rural area than I can be right here. I don’t own a car. I live in a 650 square foot condo with two other people. I don’t waste energy mowing a lawn. I don’t have many excess possessions simply because I don’t have space for them. I work less than a mile from my home and most of my transportation is done self-reliantly by foot or bicycle.

On the other hand, living in the city costs us quite a lot. We pay $1500 in our mortgage and condo fees each month, which represents over half of my own take-home pay. We pay $225 each week for our daughter to be in part-time daycare. We pay $10 per hour on the rare occasions that we actually need a car. We also pay the price in terms of our lack of connection to nature. I can’t remember the last time I saw stars. I rarely find myself in quiet woods. The animals I interact with the most are dogs and squirrels and mosquitoes.

Despite my happiness with the city lifestyle, I think you can sense my defensiveness and my desire to continue to lighten my footprint on the earth and increase my sustainability. So what more can I do, aside from moving to a hippy commune? I’ve thought of some things that I might do to increase my sustainability even here in the city, but I have to decide what I have the time and energy for.

• Growing food. We have an under-utilized and very sunny porch on the front of our house. It is an unheated space but tends to get quite warm during the day even in the winter due to the sun exposure. We’d like to clear out this space and use it for growing some food in containers in the winter. We also do have a very small strip of land around two sides of the house, but it is entirely in shade. Still, perhaps we could do some container plants there that would do well in shade. One problem I have is that when I look at books or websites devoted to urban agriculture all of the projects seem too large for our space and too difficult. So if you have ideas for me, please leave a comment. I’d like to find some baby steps I could take on the path to growing more food.
• Composting. Our neighbors are experimenting with composting right now, and we may be able to share their composting bin some day in the future (or we could start our own compost bin). We already reuse many of our vegetable scraps in creating broth.
• Eating more locally throughout the year. We have a CSA during the summer months, and if we were to can or freeze more of this food we could eat it throughout the year. We did some canning with some friends this year and it was fun – I’d like to do more.
• Spending more time in the outdoor areas in Cambridge and the surrounding areas. We don’t have many natural areas, but we do have some and I don’t visit them nearly often enough. I’ll put that on my list for next summer.