Keeping It Green Without a Lot of Green, or Beware of Falling Prices

This is an essay I wrote five years ago while working for the Twin Cities Green Guide.  It was never published, as it's a bit academic for a magazine, and as you can see I never really wrote an ending (if I can't think of a beginning or ending, I sometimes just write "Once upon a time" and "they all lived happily ever after," respectively).


Keeping It Green Without a Lot of Green, or

Beware of Falling Prices

18 March 2007

Rough Draft

Mike Jones

“The regulatory function of the Green Movement is to… prepare a vision for how contemporary industrial capitalism can transform itself into a new system of ‘sustainable’ class exploitation once [an] ecological limit is reached” (Eytchison 38).

Redwood Coast Green Patrick Eytchinson compares the current environmentalist to the Confucian philosophers in ancient China.  Though having an ethical system in which many sincerely believed their role in society was to warn landlords when their oppression of peasantry got to the point where it fermented revolt.  They stabilized the system of feudal oppression.  Eythchinson sees the Green’s role as stabilizing modern capitalism.  Capitalism can’t destroy the nature on which it depends (its “ecological limit”).  The reason that companies pursue initiatives like waste reduction and recycled paper is to delay this ecological limit while maintaining profit intake.

Eythchinson ponders what this will look like when the oil wells begin to run dry.  Experts predict that global oil production will continually decline until it hits zero sometime mid-century.  Long before that time, supply will drop far below demand.  What happens then is too distant to make out exactly, but some predict a return to feudal peasantry, where hand and animal labor once again fuel economy.  What is a green to do?

A few weeks ago I started my very first ever 9-5 (actually, 8-5) job.  With this stability and with the savings I’ve already gathered, visions of energy-star compliant appliances, dual-glazed double-paned windows, and organic co-op groceries are dancing in my head.  It’s gonna be nice rolling in the benjamins because a little bit of money buys you a little bit of power to structure your living practices in a manner of your choosing.

I can only believe that so far keeping in mind where we are headed.  Looming on the edge of severe ecological turmoil, I get to buy the toys that give me a feeling that ‘hey, it’s not my fault.’  While promoting the purchase of green food, shelter, clothing, and whatnot is important, they are only realistic courses of action to a certain class.  To the growing working class, they are not realistic.  To the world as a whole, they only give us more time before the ecological limits of current capitalism.  Resist any temptation to throw up your hands in resignation and buy a Hummer.  What we need to do as a movement is to revise our role in class politics.  As a stabilizer to the capitalist class, our efforts are severely limited by our utility to profit.  As important as expensive middle- to upper-class environmental practices are, we need to focus energy on the poor green and the low-budget green.  If we want a legitimate green revolution, the meek must inherit the earth.

I’ve never been exactly poor, but I’ve never been rich, either.  Though my Catholic high school was attended almost exclusively by children of the upper-class, one altruism I was taught is that to be poor is not to be powerless.  While this could be used to deny the reality of the privileges of the, well, privileged, it can also be used to empower the poor.  Growing up, I was not powerless to live in a more environmentally friendly way.  There’s lots of things the person without a lot of money, or the person not willing to part with a lot of money, can do and maintain an relatively environmentally ethical living.  Truly, it pays to upgrade your life before you can afford to upgrade your house.

I am indebted to my mother for having the foresight to teach me many different skills as a youth, but one skill that she taught me that I’m not even sure was by design was how to ride a bus.  While this may seem a simple task to many, it requires certain literacies, such as how to read a schedule, how (un)reliable the times are, where you can usually find stops, and where is a good place to sit.  The simplest acts can unravel into an inticrate web of complexities if we take the time to examine them, all the more reason to learn them young.  Public transportation is now part of my lifestyle, as any living choice is made with an eye to buslines.  Also, riding the buses (or train) is a solidly blue-collar practice.  It is drastically cheaper than car ownership: add up car payments, insurance, general maintenance, special repairs, gasoline (the lifeblood of market capitalism), tickets, fees (including tabs and licenses), and MPR bumper stickers.  Think of how much tofurkey jerky that would buy!

Something that I also began at a young age was riding a bike.  Though for many Americans, it also ends at a young age, when I moved to Minneapolis, I realized that as long as I was healthy it was a viable mode of transportation.  Though I could write many reems of paper on the benefits of bicycle commuting, the most important two benefits in the context of this paper are: it is environmentally friendly, and it is cheap.  My current bicycle I bought new from The Alt now located on Lyndale and Lake.  It cost me about $100 and came with a lifetime tune-up warranty.  It has survived about five years of use now with minor repair (especially minor compared to car repair).  And though there are bicycles as expensive as you want to buy for the very rich, stand on Lake and Nicollet during rush hour, and you’ll see that this, too, is a working-class activity.

Many traditional working-class money saving techniques are also exercises in waste reduction or less voracious resource use, such as reuse of shopping bags, using newspaper to wrap gifts, using old clothes for patches or to make new items, drying your clothes in the sun or on an indoor line, and handing down clothing or exchanging/borrowing it.  My grandfather always used to keep the heat turned relatively low to reduce costs; he was also reducing energy consumption.  The almost universal edict of Midwestern mothers and grandmothers is to ‘clean your plate.’  Control your portions beforehand and make your momma proud: don’t waste food.  These are all very basic ideas to reduce your use of resources, and I suspect a long conversation with any relative who has lived during the 1930s or ‘40s will turn up a multitude of other ideas.

Then there are more modern sustainability practices that don’t cost anything or save money.  For starters, recycling; while most of the readership probably does this in some form, this is something that should be universal and needs to be common knowledge and practice amongst the poor, as does hazard waste disposal.  When printing most documents, use the lowest ink setting and draft quality (for PCs, under the taskbar click on ‘File’, then ‘Print’, then click on the ‘Properties’ button on the window that pops up.  There is probably options to change your ink use and quality).  The other side of unwanted documents can be printed on or used in some other way (be careful with personal information, of course).  While many blue collar jobs can make you dirty and stink to high heaven, showering quickly or less frequently can save fresh water and your water bill.  Hell, have fun with it and shower with your partner.

Exercise and diet, while not normally considered money-saving techniques, can save you a lot of money in the long run if you think of healthcare costs to the under- and uninsured lower-class.  While organic food and vegetarianism can be damn expensive, it is cheaper than a heart bypass or colon cancer.

This article began as an advice guide on how to live green on a budget.  A Google search later, and I was on a train towards Marxist theory (you are reading it in the opposite order).  I’ve tried to combine the two approach Eytchinson’s vision of a “shift of movement base from the professional class to a base in the lower strata of society.”  This is not meant to be exclusionary, but rather expansive (making Green practices accessible to the poor) and practical (how this can be done).  Also, within all of us, regardless of class, there are tendencies towards the hegemony of market capitalism and alternative ideologies.  Having money or power should not inspire guilt, but should move us to examine why we have those things and what we should do with them when we have them.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Source: Eytchison, Peter. “Green Confucianism: Ecology, Class and the Green Movement.” Synthesis/Regeneration 31 (2003): 38-40.  Full text at http://www.greens.org/s-r/31/31-10.html.