Entering the Green World, One Step at a Time
Editor's note: Kelli Best-Oliver is another new writer at Green Options. A St. Louis-area high school teacher, Kelli will be covering education issues for us. We're glad to have her on board!
One of my students, for a class project about sustainable food, called a local anarchist bakery to ask them about sustainable practices they use. “Nothing in this corrupt, capitalist world is sustainable,” the baker snapped into the phone—and then hung up. My student was frustrated and disillusioned, and rightfully so. She was honestly seeking answers, and he made her feel naïve and stupid for not already knowing what was, for him, the ultimate answer.
Green living can be intimidating. There’s a lot of information out there, a lot of opinions, and a lot of people who are arrogantly seeking a higher level of sustainability as though it’s a competition. Whoever eats the most organic tofu wins. While it is noble, and undoubtedly rewarding, to go completely off the grid, eat vegan, and swear off fossil fuels, it’s also not reality for the majority of Americans. There are small, accessible starting points–it's just a matter of finding them.
I teach an elective called “Exploring Environmental Sustainability” at our small, public high school just outside of St Louis. My students were proposing big changes to add renewable energy to our school. One student, when researching the possibility of using biodiesel in the busses at school, incredulously sputtered out, “Ms. Best-O, why wouldn’t we be doing this? It makes the most sense!” and, indeed, it seemed like a no-brainer: the school would save a large amount of money for very little investment and relatively little effort.
It was a transformative moment for my students. Why don’t we live more sustainably? Is it really that substantial of a difference than how we live now? More often than not, the first changes towards living green are those that seem to be no-brainers: turning off the faucet when brushing teeth, turning off the lights when you leave a room, or keeping car tires properly inflated. These are things that aren’t intimidating changes, they’re tiny reminders of the ease of our lives. Unlike so many people, we have the luxury of waste, a luxury we take for granted.
According to the EPA, Americans threw away 246 million tons of solid waste last year. That’s 4.5 pounds of waste per person per day. If we could reduce, reuse, or recycle one quarter of that, 123 billion pounds of waste could be saved every year. The same principle can be applied to greenhouse gas production, pollution levels, or utilities consumption. Small changes, done collectively, can have a startling and immediate impact on the problems that threaten our sustainable future.
