Bean Sprouts

Bean Sprouts

Great little blog about working on living green without the domestic budget of Sheherazade Goldsmith. For me blogs like this disprove the oft quoted 'fact' that green living is only for the rich, in fact it kind of proves the inverse, the middle class buy themselves green by ensuring they buy organic, fairtrade food and drink, expensive organic clothes et al. In fact all they are doing is swapping one form of market consumerism for another, albeit one with a smaller footprint, and some social justice outcomes.

What this cash rich approach to greenery doesn't do however is confront the fact that it is the very market that is at the root cause of the problem, climate change is a market failure to use the economist's term, shifting from one form of consumerism to another more benign form does not challenge the underlying problem.

Basically you can't buy yourself a greener lifestyle, it is a lifestyle not a fashion statement, and that means changing the way we live, reduce not replace is the order of the day, make not manufacture.

In essence if we take time to look after the little things- like the garden, make our own soap- buy second hand, re-use and if we have to throw away recycle- all these little things make a small dint in the big problem.

In a society where people are time poor and money rich it is impossible to hid the fact that at its heart we have created a soulless culture. Not that I am religious, what I mean by soul I suppose is community values, ethics if your want. When Thatcher said, 'There is no such thing as society', she may not have been describing the society at the time, just look at the incredible sense of community that operated during the miners strike, but she was certainly describing the objective of her economic policies. By alienating people from those around them, isolating individuals and couples in their hermetically sealed struggle to buy their houses, buy a better car, pore money into private pension schemes, have a private health scheme, modern economic and social policies have ripped the heart out our sense of community.

It should therefore be no surprise that when people search for alternatives they are plunging along individualistic routes, by changing their shopping habits, or for that matter 'down sizing' like we have by using our economic power to buy a place in the South of France and opt out of the rate race.

And of course it is these individual responses which grab the media headlines, why? Well because those who write the articles, and read the broadsheets, come from the same middle class culture as those opting for a consumerist approach to greenery. Or the rash step of down sizing. ( Most down sizers rapidly find that the life dreamed of on a rainy day over looking the Thames fails to materialize and rather rapidly up size again in my experience).

However running parallel to this high profile economy there is another culture all together, it isn’t a new economy launched in the 80s like modern ‘greenery’, its been there since there was a peasantry and was transported to towns with industrialization. Its hard to remember that the first large scale organized ‘ethical consumers’ where actually the Rochdale Pioneers not the Richmond dandies. Make do, re-use, hand me downs, the vegetable plot were and are a part of life for those who are unemployed or low paid. The carbon food print of the less well off in economic terms is minute compared to the middle classes, the sense of community on council estates is still much stronger than those of the leafy suburbs.

A green lifestyle doesn’t involve wearing Kyochi jeans, and eating Marks and Spencer’s organic, it involves growing your own, bartering with the neighbours, hand me downs and hown brewing. It is about parties not discos, picnics on the allotment not dinners in restaurants. Most importantly it is about the sense of empowerment that comes from community and not from a bank account.

Thus ends the rant.