The things my parents knew and tried to pass on to me are
exactly the kinds of practices that appears to have been forgotten (or maybe
never known) by so many in the world. My parents lived by things they knew worked
because they were handed down to them (like growing a garden for healthy food)
or because of first- hand experience (like living within your means and using
things until they were completely, beyond-repair used up). Such things have
been rediscovered, in part because of the Great Recession, but in truth they never
went out of style.
I have chosen to live what I considered a pretty simple
life. I don’t do lots of traveling or buy lots of “stuff.” I walk many places
(although I admit I could do more.) I try to support small local businesses,
cook the majority of my meals, garden, can, generate minimal landfill-destined trash and recycle. I keep the thermostat at 68 or lower in the winter and 75
or higher in the summer. (Please let the record show that I would prefer to
have my windows open for fresh air when possible, but that is unfortunately an
engineering impossibility where I live.)
So about four years few years ago I felt I was doing a good
thing buying mittens made from recycled sweaters. It was a better choice than
buying new gloves and so I bought some for gifts too. I was wearing someone
else's discards that a local artisan had breathed new life into. All good,
right?
Fast forward to this winter. I decided to take one of those
huge online classes through Coursera. It was from Johns Hopkins University and
titled An
Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health. (I highly recommend it,
but I digress…) As part of the first week’s assignments, I was directed to take
an assessment of my environmental footprint. Confident that I would be a better-than-average citizen of the world, I dutifully and honestly typed in the
answers requested at The Global Footprint Network “Disappointed”
barely described how I felt when I learned that despite my efforts, if everyone
in the world lived as I did, it would take the resources of 3.6 earths to
sustain us. Clearly, I was not living as sustainably as I had thought, mittens
or no mittens.
Fast forward again to two weekends ago when a friend who I
had given a pair of those mittens, chided me when I said I thought mine had
completed their useful life after springing holes in both thumbs and having
various other stitching unraveling. It seems she had repaired hers several
times (something we used to do when I was growing up) and thought that I could
get at least another year out of mine if I took the time to do the same. She
was exactly right. That was a more sustainable thing to do and it hadn’t
occurred to me.
It’s hard to accept that I’m part of the sustainability problem. My parents lived well on the resources of just one earth. And although it’s
hard to see where any changes I could make could have a real, meaningful
difference, doing nothing is not an option. I have to try. I have to mend the
mittens.
