I am not sure if it is because I am now a grumpy old man or if other’s share my view but I believe the various crisis that we are now experiencing, both financial and ecological are caused by human kind’s shallow spirituality caused by the growth of desire for ever more stuff!
With that said I thought it would be a good idea to visit other peoples green blogs to find out how they were living the green lifestyle so I could read and comment, hmmmm big mistake!!
All I could find was blogs selling green living, from soap to electric vehicles, admittedly there were some good blogs that consisted of regurgitated news on the subject but they themselves are supported by the advertising revenue that often looked quite dubious. (I am not speaking of green sites, just blogs)
I wanted to read what the people who have actually gone green had to say, I am not saying they are not out there, I just couldn’t find them, maybe the Google gods of search engines don’t value them, who knows.
So what does green living mean to you? Are you happy you can go online and buy it?
Of course you will not be buying an actual green way of life, you will just be buying into the same old ego success painted green.
Green living is living a sustainable life, so what standard of life would that be?
Well roughly, if you take the average USA citizen and reduce their standard of living by three quarters this reduction would not be quite enough to be sustainable, if you live in the UK and halved your standard of living, again this would not be enough to be sustainable, based on the whole world population having the same standard of living.
So what is one to do if one wants to not only live a green life but promote the benefits of a green lifestyle?
Well governments haven’t got a chance, no government is going to be voted into power on the bases that it is going to massively reduce your lifestyle.
Which unfortunately means most if not all the rich western governments are lying to their people when they talk about economics and growth.
So who really wants to sacrifice their lifestyle to return the earth to it’s natural colour.?
Well I do, and if you care to read on maybe you will as well.
It is not possible to sustain growth to a greener world, a greener world requires sustained shrinkage, in fact it is probably no longer just an option. If we cannot embrace sustained shrinkage it is likely the economic and environmental changes we are experiencing will force it upon us.
The fear of loss is greater than the loss you fear.
I believe the key to a green life is to seriously consider striving for heart success, the success of doing the right thing and not the ego success, the success of turning a blind eye to the right thing in order to have stuff and power.
We need to do more and use less but most of all we need to get out of the race to have the trinkets that say who we are and realise that all they say now is actually how spiritually shallow we are. To me wealth is not wrong but the trappings of wealth, for me, represent exploitation, somewhere along the line someone and something was exploited.
You cannot buy a green life, you have to live a green life as a whole.
Becoming a vegetarian (says the meat eater but I am trying!) is a wonderful example of doing more and using less, it takes planning and thought to eat well and be a vegetarian.
Any example I give you will be about making more effort and using less resources, that is the easy part, the hard part is to change peoples perception that success, real success, is not how much power and money you have or that you have a marble top kitchen, or the Ferrari parked outside.
Real success is sharing one’s wealth to resource others in your community, this is heart success, it is the key to the mindset that will help create a green life and combat the alternative which is the stealing by force of other’s precious resources, the darker alternative future.
For instance let us look at house wall and roof insulation, why haven’t all the houses built in the western world in the past 30 years had super insulated walls and roofs integrated at the design stage?
It is not because of cost or design factors it is because you can’t park insulation outside, or wear it to a party or show it off to your friends, unlike the success of double glazed windows which can be shown off that don’t save anywhere near as much energy as the unseen insulation
Green living is fun and I admit this post appears to be removing all the fun away from a green lifestyle but I am just trying to be real.
Now if your idea to go green is to buy an electric bike as an addition to all your stuff then you are not really helping anything other than your own ego, but if you buy the bike as a tool, an alternative means of travel it will give you the heart success I speak of, so much so that even on a cold wet evening sat at the traffic lights as the guy in the Ferrari pulls up next to you you may actually feel sorry for him!!
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