To ask the right question is how we can reduce our negative impacts on the world. Choosing the right things to spend on doesn’t really do that, for two very good reasons. Most money you spend will have average impacts per dollar anyway, producing 3/4 lb of CO2 and contributing to an increase of 3% in what we try to control in nature, per dollar. So buying expensive “green” products does more harm than cheap products by having nearly the same average impact per dollar. You could buy cheaper products, but because you’d then buy more there’s no escape… either way.
The key is changing the question. It’s not what you buy, but what you use it for. Whatever you spend on, judge it by how well you or others can use it to change the future. It’s not what need you serve today but the lasting meaning of what you do with your choices. A switch to sustainability is one from satisfying wants to having a lasting meaning for the world around you.
We need to, as a whole community, get off the path we are on but seem captives in a spiral of seeing how far we can push our presently narrowing path before it closes out entirely. It’s like the housing bubble, but it’s a bubble of thinking we can and need to take ever increasing control of our environments. That we can control things better in the short term is the illusion that keeps us thinking we can control ever more things in a misbehaving world without losing control in the long term.
That is a complete illusion, of course, just the same way the limitless appreciation of housing values was an illusion, a bubble of misinformation created by a circle of little self-deceptions… that we all thought was fun but turned out badly. What we need to figure out is how to allow things that are naturally uncontrolled to take care of themselves, a different path to making peace with nature. from “What to do” 3/6/10