By Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Living a natural and sustainable lifestyle should be simple and attainable for everyone is a continuously repeated slogan by one “green” vendor online in Tweets and elsewhere. But what are they then trying to achieve with this. Greensumption, that’s all.
They are making this statement to get people to their online store to spend money buying green goods; goods and products that often could be made at home, such as cleaning materials.
Other goods are those that people should be encouraged to make by upcycling, such as reusable glass water bottles, for instance, instead of being encouraged to buy. But the “sell, sell, sell” mentality is as much in existence in green businesses as it is in conventional ones. Profit also, more often than not, for the green business comes before any other consideration.
We have, as we have discussed previously already a couple of times, gone from one kind of consumption over to another, the latter being what I like to refer to as “geensumption”. Instead of ordinary products people are being led to buy “green” products and gadgets, many of which could be made by anyone with just the slightest inkling at home from materials that are available in the pantry or from waste materials.
Green desk accessories, such as a pencil bin (yes, we have arrived here again) from recycled steel are fine and good but why buy one? Why not simply upcycle a nice clean tin can (or other item of packaging waste) into a pencil bin for the desk? Much better for the Planet.
And the same applies to so many other things. We are being encouraged to jump right into the green economy in the same way as we involved ourselves in the ordinary economy by spending ever more and more. What we really must do is to take stock and rethink our ways.
A natural and sustainable lifestyle is simple and attainable for everyone and it can be very well done without spending much money on things bar, maybe, a few small guidebooks that will give us some serious food for thought as to how you can green your life and lifestyle without having to spend much if anything in way of money.
© 2011
