Quiet Consumption

As mentioned in my last post, I recently had a themed dinner party where we talked about global warming and where we might be as a nation and as a world in forty to sixty years. One of the conclusions was that everyone around the table was quite pleased with the changes each of us had made in an effort to help reduce our personal footprint. All of us were recycling, a few of us were composting our kitchen waste, one couple was actively engaged in the solar energy business and had converted their home into an energy producer instead of an energy consumer. I was proud of my vegetable gardens and explained how I thought that was helping. Everyone around the table was quite pleased with the efforts they were making and there was some talk about how other parts of the country needed to catch up with what we were doing in California.

Then I hear that, if California were a separate nation, we would be the twelfth largest producer of greenhouse gases. I did not hear how we stack up on a per capita or land mass basis, but the information was still staggering.

Our love for cars is certainly the first place to look when looking for a culprit. We all know we drive too big of cars to too many places, though we always seem to have great purpose and good intentions.

But, is it really the car that is driving us to damage our planet so? Beyond car-pooling, buying more efficient cars and thinking before we take long trips, what are we to do? The world is what it is. Our economy lives on cheap fuel and there is very little we can do about it.

Then, the other day, I needed to make room for a new computer desk I bought. I bought it on-line, so I have no idea where it was made, where the wood came from, or whether this piece of furniture had criss-crossed the nation or the world a few times on its way from manufacturer to wholesaler to warehouser to retailer to shipper to me. And to be honest, I didn’t care. I had found a piece of furniture I liked and had bought it.

Well, before the furniture arrived, I needed to move some stuff. I looked in the closet of my new office. It used to be my son’s bedroom before he went off to college. It was filled with boxes upon boxes of stuff we would someday have a yard sale to get rid of. The last yard sale we had was ten years ago and I have no intention of spending a precious weekend sitting out in the hot sun letting people pick through my old stuff and talking me down to fifty cents for a pile of books.

I am droning on about this stuff, because I am betting I am not the only one that is absolutely drowning in crap I have not used in years and will probably never use again. I am hording useful stuff that is not being used. And then, on one of my rare trips to Napa, I am confounded by the shear volume of crap that is stacked into just one K-Mart or Target, let alone the factory outlets, the book stores, the kitchen stores (my favorite), Toys-R-Us, Costco and on and on. How did these things get here? Who made them and at what cost? Where do they go if they are not purchased? Where do they go if they are purchased? How many closets and bookshelves and storage units can we fill with our crap?

I am lucky. I live on a street that has “affordable housing” a few blocks away. Anything I put a ‘Free’ sign on is gone by the next morning. I feel like that is the best recycling. I have given away everything from TVs to tea sets. I just set out about three bags of stuffed animals my daughter left behind a few years back and I just found a home for a large bag of ‘valuable’ beanie babies. They are going on a Rotoplast (Rotary sponsored cleft-palette repair) mission to Nicaragua.

So what is my point? I believe that the consumption and hoarding of stuff that we don’t really need is the true source of Global Warming. Recycling is fine, but what if we just don’t buy stuff we don’t need and immediately give away stuff we don’t use any more. With the money we save we could afford to buy that electric car or the solar panels that are really going to help.