To go with an earlier post about our efforts to live more green, today I’m thinking about how the world food crisis and rising fuel costs impact me directly.
Because we own a hybrid car and only spend about $20-25 per month on gas, the cost of fuel doesn’t impact us DIRECTLY, per se. But it does affect us indirectly, as it does everyone else, particularly due to the costs of transporting goods thousands of miles by truck, plane, and ship.
It is more important than ever to seek out local food and other products. So I’m making that my goal this summer. Of course we will be eating the most local tomatoes possible — ones grown in our yard, virtually for free. I am going to start getting some of our weekly food from the farmer’s market in town, though it’s pretty small and I might check out the market on the island which I know will be a lot bigger. I would love to have local cheese and eggs, too. When I’m at the supermarket, I am going to pick produce grown in WA instead of Chile.
Many of the items in the typical American home were made in China. There is very little getting around it at this point. Americans are addicted to cheap crap. The cheaper the better, who cares where it came from and how many weeks it spent on a freighter getting here, burning oil the whole way. So I try hard to find non-Chinese goods when I can, specifically American if possible. Yeah, you pay more for this stuff. Because unlike China, we have a minimum wage. Hopefully when we get a new bed at some point this year, it will be one from a furniture maker in Tacoma. It will last forever and only travel 30 miles to get here.
It’s very very difficult to find affordable new clothing that was not made in China or other distant lands (Sri Lanka, Thailand, etc). So you either budget to buy a few pricey, American fashions, or you do what I’m going to do, which is buy my clothing used. Which is kinda what I always did before I worked at Gap and got my (boring) clothes for 50% off for nine years.
What are you doing to deal with inflation and gas prices? Are you changing your lifestyle? Do you conserve energy, re-use things, recycle more aggressively? Anything?
I conserve energy by unplugging most appliances when not in use and having everything on power strips that I turn off at night. We recycle, use our own bags for groceries, don’t use extra bags for veggies/fruits. We joined a CSA that will start this summer. Through our gas/electric company we are paying towards renewable energy. I think the higher gas prices are good in one sense that they cause people to really think about where they are going/what they are doing.
i always have these plans about being better with my usage and things like that but the truth is we are strapped for cash and while i would love more than anything to buy things with the purpose of keeping it local/green/organic/what have you, a lot of times, we can’t and it kind of hurts my soul to be honest. we’ve dug ourselves a nice big hole between student loans, house woes, and health so the plan now is to dig out so in the future we should be able to do more of the things we can’t quite afford now.
i drive a small suv (ford escape) as moving to alaska kind of called for it. to try to get rid of it today and buy a smaller car would make some sense and wouldn’t make sense at the same time. we are constantly working on the house so we need something that can haul big stuff or we’d have to rent a vehicle anytime we needed to move things. we bought a second vehicle, 91 honda accord, to use for everything else but i do have to drive to work 10 miles one way so basically i use a gallon of gas every day when i go to work. i used to work OT almost every time i had a day off but have changed that to work more hours to make it worth that drive or i don’t go in, like today.
we unplug almost everything save for the difficult stuff like the microwave & stove. i read something where people would put a bucket under the spout in the tub when getting the water warmed up for the shower and threw the extra water in the pool. we just finished up a bucket of dog treats so that’s where the bucket is headed now. i didn’t want to buy something for it so figured i’d wait until i could reuse something instead.
wow, this is getting to be a long comment…i’ll finish for now! 🙂
i drive the ford to work, my husband drives the honda. his job is farther away so we figured that would be a better plan…i worded that weird in my post.