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You’ve made the switch. You sleep on 100% organic bamboo sheets, dry off with organic cotton towels, sink your toes into a rug made of recycled plastic bottles while surfing online for the newest organic clothing trends by soy candlelight. Out with the old, in with the green! Shopping has never felt so good. After all, it’s for Mother Earth.
Is it really? Have you ever considered helping the environment by not buying things? Sure your old sheets weren’t organic but they were already there and still functional. Are they any better now that they’re in a landfill somewhere while resources that didn’t need to be used were used to make the new bamboo sheets you just purchased? And don’t forget the carbon footprint they left to get to your bed. It’s very wasteful to toss out your old clothes and replace them with organics when you didn’t need new clothes at all. The only things worth replacing outright in your home are your fridge and furnace, and maybe your toilet and shower head for water conservation. But you don’t need new hemp curtains when the old ones work just fine.
When renowned environmentalist Paul Hawken is asked to comment on the new green consumer, he says, dryly, “The phrase itself is an oxymoron. Really going green,” He says, “means having less. It does mean less. Everyone is saying, ‘You don’t have to change your lifestyle.’ Well, yes, actually, you do.”
If you absolutely need it, sure, get the organic brand. But, as Chip Giller of Grist says, “We’re not going to buy our way out of this.” The greenest products are the ones you don’t buy.
