This Christmas, like any other, was the same - after the ritual opening of gifts in the morning, I could barely move for all the plastic and paper littering the living room. Even though I hadn’t bought gifts or wanted any in return, family and friends had poured presents onto my daughter. With most of those gifts came a lot of packaging - besides the Christmas wrapping paper, there was lots of plastic and cardboard that went in my parents’ trash that day.
I appreciated that people were trying to express their love, but the evidence of consumption struck me as excessive. We consume year-round, but Christmas highlights our capacity to over-consume.
Some people, including one family from Okotoks, have introduced a solution to the problem, by buying nothing new for a year, except for food and goods necessary for health and safety (i.e. new brakes for a truck or toilet paper). For Christmas, the mother stuck with the resolution and instead of buying gifts, made items such as play-dough to gift. You can read about the Gabriels and their one-year campaign on their blog at http://nothingnewnothingwasted.blogspot.com/. They’ve inspired me to try to do the same – I don’t generally buy anything new for myself, but I occasionally show weakness when it comes to buying things for my daughter or getting takeout with Styrofoam etc., tendencies I could definitely limit.
Recent talk about recycling in St. Paul has underscored for me the amount of goods we consume. We’d like to think that doing our part and recycling these goods is socially responsible, and it is definitely an important thing to do, but it doesn’t erase the costs of consumption - there’s more to it than that. Whatever we recycle has to be hauled away, re-processed and potentially shipped out to places as far as China, all of which has an environmental cost.
Take a bottle of Ty Nant. My husband loves getting this spring water from his home in Wales, bottled in plastic and flown halfway across the world to get to the stores here. This is despite the fact you can get water straight from a tap, and if he prefers spring water, he drives by the North Saskatchewan bridge and past a natural flowing spring every day. At events where plastic water bottles are handed out, I wonder why there perhaps isn’t a suggestion for people to bring their own water bottles that can be filled up at water stations. In contrast, in a visit to a Sparks, Brownies and Girl Guides potluck dinner, I was impressed that everyone brought a dish and their own plates and cutlery, instead of using and throwing away paper products.
Although I can’t get all my goods here in St. Paul, the foods that I consume which are grown locally – like carrots, honey and eggs – taste better, more fresh and wholesome to me. The locally-produced goods I buy, like a knitted hat at the Visual Arts Centre’s crafts sale, come with no packaging and are handcrafted with skill and a love of the trade, making it more meaningful to me.
Since agriculture is part of the backbone of St. Paul’s economy, I think this area and all of us in turn have a capacity to become more self-sustaining. I applaud initiatives such as the one begun by Community Futures to start up a regional brand for foods grown, processed and produced in this region. How great would it be to walk down the grocery store and see the brand and think, ‘Oh, this cut of meat is from Bob’s farm. I know Bob, I know where he lives and by buying this product, I can support him and local industry.’ Bob’s meat represents the way of the future.
To take a current favourite phrase out of the Conservative handbook, I think we can all learn to do more with less and maybe we will find using less will mean more in returns to us and our lives.
