Saving Money & Wasting Less

Lesson 1: Starting out

In this lesson we will start to consider how and why saving money can also help to save the environment. We will look at some of the pressures we are all under to consume and live a lifestyle we may not even really want.

We will begin to look at voluntary simplicity and see how living in a simpler, more deliberate way can help you save money, the Earth, and perhaps your sanity as well!

By the end of this lesson you will have begun to think about the ethics of voluntarily living a simpler, less expensive, and less wasteful life, and how this can benefit you in many ways other than simply saving you money.

Discussion questions are provided to help you sort through your thoughts on saving money and saving the Earth.

'Life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.'
Henry David Thoreau, 'Walden'

Why bother?

If you don't have enough money to pay the bills, you don't need an answer to this question! But even if you have money to throw away, it is bad for the environment to be wasteful of its precious resources. So, how can saving money save the environment?

Let's look at a simple example. Take spinach. You could go to the supermarket and buy a package of frozen, chopped spinach. Or, you could go to your local farmer's market and buy a bunch of fresh spinach, which you then chop yourself.

If you buy the fresh spinach you will save money because you get more spinach than you would get in a package for the same price. You might decide to chop and cook only a quarter the spinach, and save the rest for later. You get the idea. You will use some energy in driving to and from the farmer's market, and in cooking the spinach of course, but let's look at the cost to the environment of the package of frozen, chopped spinach.

First, you need to drill for oil, which is refined and turned into plastic. The plastic has to be shipped somewhere (say Ontario), to the spinach factory. The spinach is grown somewhere else (say Idaho), and then has to be shipped to the spinach factory. It is then chopped. The chopped spinach is then sealed in plastic, and transported via refrigerated truck to a supermarket distribution warehouse. From there your chopped spinach is transported again by refrigerated truck to your local supermarket. You drive to the supermarket and drive back with your package of frozen, chopped spinach in a plastic bag (or perhaps in a paper bag). (See the discussion on the environmental impacts of plastic and paper bags in the Greenfeet newsletter.)

When you need the spinach, you open the package, use the spinach, and then throw the packaging and plastic bag away. The cost to the environment is astronomical when you add up all the pollution and fuel used during transportation, all the waste along the way, the electricity use in the factories and refrigerated trucks, and the plastics and other packaging thrown away. And all this to save you the trouble of chopping the spinach yourself!

I'm sure you can see that buying fresh spinach is not only saving you money, it is also saving the Earth - in saving resources, energy, and reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions (from all the transportation). You would save more of all these if you could go out and pick a few spinach leaves you've grown yourself. If you grow it from seeds you saved from last year's spinach, the cost to you is almost zero, and you don't even need a vegetable garden, as you'll learn in a later lesson.

(And what do you do if spinach isn't in season when you want to use it? You do what people have done for millenia: you use your intelligence to think of a seasonal substitute.)

Spinach is just one example. There is a kind of 'daisy chain' of production of all consumer goods, and the lower you buy down the line - the less processed it is - the cheaper it is for you, and the better it is for the environment.

The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment on the Environment released in March 2005 found that approximately 60 percent of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth are being degraded or used unsustainably. It also found that humans have changed ecosystems more extensively in the last 50 years than in any other period of human history. The major conclusion of the report is that it lies within the power of human societies to ease the strains we are putting on the nature services of the planet, while continuing to use them to bring better living standards to all, but to do this we (especially those of us in the richer nations) have to change our ways. The pressures on ecosystems will increase globally in coming decades unless human attitudes and actions change (Millenium ecosystem assessment:Living beyond our means). The future is in our hands, and we simply cannot continue to live in the way we have been living.

For a sobering look at some statistics about the American way of life, check out the All Consuming Passion website. (If you don't live in the US, you have little reason to feel smug as your country (if it's in the West) is going the same way.)

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