A Green Life Should Be a Good Life
A post today on AT: Green makes a very important point about green living:
Making your home green is first about doing the best thing for the earth, but it should also improve your quality of life.
As you remove toxic materials from your home, or cook organic meals, or start composting, or even just recycle more meticulously, you should feel a change in your home — a real touchy-feely, mumbo-jumbo-ey kind of shift. In my experience, it can be very subtle but also very powerful.
I’m familiar with this feeling. And if I had to name this feeling, I’d call it the satisfying sense of agency that one finds when one lives intentionally. And this extends to green parenting. It shouldn’t have to be based on fear of all the toxic dangers out there in the world that may harm our children. Or have to take an alarmist tone about the future of our planet. Or be about reinforcing one’s neuroses or control issues, which any kind of parenting can certainly do. Green parenting works best when it’s about living intentionally in a way that reflects one’s values. For me, this entails reverence for life, care for the planet, and a sense of connection to communities and the rest of the world.
Consequences and results are important, but green parenting works best when it’s focused on action for the sake of action. We don’t exactly know what the results of our actions will be, if our efforts at green living will actually curb this ecological crisis we see. That shouldn’t be the point of our actions, because then, it’s too easy to feel discouraged that we haven’t achieved this desired goal. And it’s too easy to fall down that slippery slope of trying to control things we have no control over. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t care about the ecological crisis. Of course, we should. But a true recognition of the ecological crisis should lead one to feel humble. And that humility should lead one to act because it’s right, rather than with the intention of saving the world.
But then, in the end, I think this is how the world will be saved– when people reconnect with the earth and with their own humanity and begin to live accordingly.
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