About Suburban Green is People
How low can we go? So often it seems that the only way to make a real difference in the toll we take on the earth is to move out into the middle of nowhere, go off-grid, take up homesteading and ride a bike into town once a month for supplies.
To be honest, that doesn’t sound all that bad to me, but it just isn’t possible. Well… It isn’t possible if I want to keep my husband and I’ve grown rather fond of him so I do plan to keep him around. The ‘burbs were not my first choice of places to live. They weren’t even my second. But in this marriage where I get my way more often than not, this is the one big battle that I’ve lost (so far).
So here we are, a family of four, in the suburbs in a town sandwiched between two Big Cities, surrounded by freeways and where long commutes to work are the norm. Is it possible, here, where the neighbourhoods are designed as if cars live in them instead of people, to make *real* reductions in our consumption of resources and production of pollution? … To make tangible, measurable differences?… To do more than drag a Blue Box to the curb every week and consider that to be enough (all the while knowing that it isn’t… Not really)?
I believe it is possible. I’m just not sure how to go about it, beyond those easy things we cling to so we feel better. We have always tried to be more conscious and have developed earth friendly habits that I would consider successes, but there have been a lot of failures too and so many options that we’ve never even attempted. Part of the reason that so many of us have less success than we’d like, is that the information about which “green” habits really work for families and actually make a positive difference for the environment is scattered, misleading, polluted by advertising and, to be honest, trite.
I want to know if this dish soap is really “greener” than this other one… and why. And then I want to know if it actually works. I want to find ways to reduce the amount of garbage we produce, to reuse things in ways that are not a giant pain in the neck and to use old things to make new things that I would actually want to have in my house. I want to know how much of my food I can get locally (a challenge during Winter here in Canada. Snow is beautiful but not very nutritious.). And, as time goes by, I want to see measurable differences. I want proof.
Suburban Green Is People is where all this is happening. Because the best information is made better when we share it.
About the Author
Billi-Jean lives in a yellow house with her husband, two children, a big dog, two cats and a bird in one of those treeless subdivisions that was built on perfectly good farm land. Her educational background is in Engineering, but most days she is a conduit for peanut butter sandwiches, glasses of juice and clean laundry. Her personal blog is My Bountiful Life.
