There are so many things we can do to reduce our impact. We take for granted our grocery stores full of fresh food year-round. We forget to think about how far it was shipped to get to us. We are so incredibly lucky with so much food, but we eat too much and far more than we need. Some reports suggest that 90% of commercial fish are gone.

We have an attitude of entitlement about what we have. Our voracious appetites, coupled with our growing population, are too much for our earth with her finite resources, to satiate. I worry sometimes what will be left for the next generation? Will they inherit a world of war over food and water? Instead of waiting for the worst-case scenario, doing nothing, and assuming that catastrophic predictions are inflated or exaggerated, why not err on the side of caution? If we don’t, and the predictions were right, how will we ever justify our selfishness to our descendants? Or to ourselves?

One easy way to reduce our impact is to consider the packaging of the products we buy. One day I was staring at the liquid soap bottle in my shower thinking, “This is such a waste.” I remember reading not long ago about a man who saved all his waste for a year. You can imagine that he was surrounded by piles of empty bottles, cartons, and toothpaste tubes. What a luxurious world where our waste just disappears and we never have to think about it again. How many of my empty liquid soap and shampoo bottles are sitting in a landfill? Even despite my efforts to be a conscious shopper? That day, I switched back to bar soap. Now, I buy in bulk when possible for beans, nuts, and rice. It’s just a small fraction of the packaging though. There is so much other waste I wish I could eliminate, if only there were a choice. (I could save a lot of glass bottles if I had my own wine barrel, for example.) We must demand better choices from the manufacturers and vote with our dollars.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. Reducing is the first step. We live in a consumption-oriented society, where too often our worth as a human being is estimated in a snap judgment by the stuff we own and wear. Deep down, we might think, “Who cares!” or “That’s silly!” but on some level, if we want to be part of society, we know we must participate to some degree. Perhaps more than we desire. The pressure is there. We are social beings after all, so we must either find like-minded people, go along, or reconcile being ostracized and have the willpower to eschew cultural habits that don’t reflect our real beliefs.

How are environmentalists portrayed in the media? Not as a group of intelligent, discerning people with a strong grounding in science and nature, not as people to admire and emulate, but as extremists and nutcases who value people less than the environment (as if the health of humans is independent of the environment), people who have an agenda like saving owls or salmon to the detriment of someone’s pocketbook. Hippies who don’t understand the concept of economy. What’s missing is the discussion of the eco-system. High school biology. We are interdependent. There’s always an angle that somehow neglects to mention what the use of an economy will be when when we have no fish left to eat. (Putting aside all other arguments about the intrinsic value of every living creature.) There’s the omission of the angle that one person’s profits do not supersede the needs of the collective. As a species, we are notoriously short-sighted and we continue to be so at our own peril.

There’s the trouble. There are some that believe that the government doesn’t have a right to tell us what to do. It’s our land. We own it! We can pollute it as we wish. We’re free to make whatever profits we can. This is capitalism! This thinking reflects an erroneous notion that we are individuals, independent of each other. But we are not. We are one. The drycleaner who pollutes the stream behind his property that flows into my drinking water affects me and my neighbors. Our collective need as a society for clean water is more important than one man’s desire to freely pollute his property. Our collective need as humans that salmon not go extinct is more important than the bank account of a few. No one person’s profits are so important that he has a right to choose to eliminate a species from all the earth, from all of us, for the rest of time. We share this earth. We all “own” it.

In Baltimore, I worked for a drycleaner who had five stores. Every store had a stream running behind it. The owner knowingly and deliberately disposed of his drycleaning chemicals by dumping them into the streams. It was cheaper, you see. He was eventually caught and fined by the EPA, but he admitted to his young hourly workers that the fine was insignificant and not enough to make him change his behavior. A friend of mine lived downstream from one of the cleaners. The same river he polluted ran behind her house, and is the same river she played in. Now, at 40, she has breast cancer and I wonder, is there a connection?

This is why we need effective regulation.

We have messages to consume all around us. Powerful images fly at us from the television. Paco Underhill discusses in his book, “Why We Buy, the Science of Shopping,” how much television influences our expectations and standards. Not only are we comparing ourselves to our neighbors, friends, and coworkers, but we’re evaluating “how well we’re doing” by comparing ourselves to the fictional characters we see on television. What’s more is that advertisers are smart about the psychology of how people operate. They convince us that we need a product we never knew existed, and survived quite well without, by creating a feeling of inadequacy in us. Consider how many products you buy because of how they might improve your image, or how good they’ll make you look. (I do too.)

I, too, even as an ardent environmentalist struggle with all the enticing objects there are to buy. Here’s just one story of many from my own experience. A couple of years ago, one morning as I was preparing to do my DVD workout, I became engrossed in an infomercial for a Sleep Number bed. On and on they went about how much better one can feel after having a good night’s sleep. Who doesn’t want to operate at her peak and feel amazing after a great night’s sleep? One thing led to another, and after a conversation with a colleague, I found myself owning a memory foam mattress topper. It’s a long story, but while my husband loved it and would have married it if he could have, I spent months without sleep and discovered the horrors of night-sweats that await me at menopause. It took considerable effort to convince my husband to let go of the thing while I cursed myself for buying it and evaluated the possibility of setting it on fire. I didn’t have to start a fire and managed to wrest it out from under my very disappointed husband to let the hateful thing off-gas its offensive chemical smell into the guest room for a few months. By the time I aggressively pushed it off on an unwilling friend to get rid of it once and for all, I had learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of trying to improve an already perfectly good, or as I discovered, good enough, situation.

We’d do well to reduce our exposure to advertising, these messages to buy more, and it would go a long way to reducing our consumption. All those wonderful products that are going to immeasurably improve our lives, seldom deliver as promised. Though some do. I’d hate to return to a world without my IPOD, or Kitchen Aid mixer, but somehow we need to find a way to be discriminating about the things we can’t live without. We’re so lucky and spoiled already. All it takes is one issue of National Geographic to remind us how much better we live than most of the rest of the world. If only we could be peaceful and end our quest for more, more, more. (I’m sure my husband would have a comment about this regarding my love of clothes. But I do so love them.)

I’ll let that end my diatribe for Earth Day. You had to expect one from me, right? Two things everyone knows about me, I love the earth and I love my Orioles. I can’t resist talking about either.

Happy Greening!

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