How Do We Consume?

“Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.” —Wendell Berry

It is estimated that the US consumes 25% of the world’s energy; we seem to have forgotten that we are just one country among nearly 200. Our county hosts only 5% of the earth’s population. You and I drive to work, plug in our computers to check Facebook, keep our porch lights on all night, and dry our laundry. Our lifestyles and the design of our cities demand an enormous amount of consumption. It seems we have no other option, but to buy plastic packaged floss containers and then toss the box in the landfill to join the 700 million boxes that are estimated to be used a year.

Over the past century, we have become a culture of consumers that are disconnected from the very things that sustain us. Meat and vegetables arrive shrink wrapped and irradiated, and we no longer know how to tend the soil and coax forth food. Many of us have no first-hand knowledge of oil extraction or the toll it places on its laborers or our planet.

The oil spill disaster in the Gulf Coast is a collapse of a way of life. Communities who are intimate with the rhythms of the tides now rely on food stamps to feed their children; families are de-constructing as despair deepens and does not lift as fishing areas are closed indefinitely.

Our consumption of oil and its products such as plastic makes each one of us complicit in this crisis. Now we have the opportunity to respond. If we choose to acknowledge it, this will be the greatest challenge of our lives. Join me on the journey.

Ariana Longanecker

[Image: Siftnz]