So why do I write about money, if I hate it so much? What actually motivates me? The simple answer is that in most cases, frugality is environmentalism. There's such a huge intersection between the two. However, the minute you start talking about the environment many people's eyes glaze over and their minds start wandering. No one wants to hear a self-righteous rant about how much good you're doing in the world. And frankly, I know I'm not doing a ton of good. I would never label myself an environmentalist because I suck. I and my family take a huge number of resources. We are by no means kind to the earth, in part because we have to exist within the framework of our society. A society dominated by the pursuit of money.
Even if I lived a truly environmentally friendly life, if I did everything right, there's still the fact that society at large doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. I understand that too. However, the fact that it is collective action that will make a difference gives me hope. Every person who starts making a difference impacts those around them and the difference spreads. If no one speaks out, then no one is working to make a difference. Do you want to live in the sort of society where no one is trying to make change for the better? Neither do I.
So here's a short list of the ways frugality and environmentalism intersect. I'm sure there are more, but these are just the ones I could think of during nap time.
Reducing Fossil Fuel Usage
This has got to be the number one way everyone can easily reduce their impact. I cannot speak highly enough about all the ways biking can improve your life, and mass transit, for all its downsides, is way better in almost every way than driving. Even when you and your kid are sitting next to two people who are so high that they can't sit upright, or the bus has been delayed because there's a fistfight going on (true stories), it beats the hassle of driving around dangerous assholes and, ugh, finding parking.
I know that many people will get huffy and declare that they have to drive because of their specific circumstances. I won't dispute that, since everyone knows their own situation. However, even if you have to drive there are plenty of ways to reduce the amount you drive. Batching errands, walking or biking when you can, working from home, and staying in rather than going out are all easy ways to reduce your driving. These things also save you time and reduce your personal exposure to car emissions. Here are a few ways less driving can improve your life in addition to reducing your personal emissions: less driving means less wear and tear on your vehicle, meaning less time and money spent on maintenance, and less time spent pumping gas. More time out of the car reduces the health impact of being in the car (do not underestimate that) and thus increases the amount of happy, healthy life you're likely to have. Stopping at the store when you're tired from a full day of work might seem like a hassle but it will save you more hassle later. It also reduces the amount of time you're willing to spend in the store, making it more likely that you'll stick with your list. (You do carry a list, right?)
But eliminating or reducing driving isn't the only way frugal people save on fossil fuel use. Turning down the heat in your house and turning off the air conditioner can save you some serious cash but they also reduce the amount of natural gas, coal, and oil that are used. The invention of stable, reliable heat and a way to cool things down are fantastic, but not at the expense of the stable climate we depend on. Heating or cooling yourself first is a very basic way to reduce the amount of heating and cooling you need for your home.
Since we live in a cool area, I don't know that we'll ever get air conditioning. I'd rather leave that for vulnerable places where air conditioning can mean life or death: hospitals and nursing homes. We can use other methods of cooling down, like getting outside into the shade, fans, cross-breezes, drinking cool liquids, cool showers and swimming, eating foods that don't require cooking, and retreating to the basement when it gets too hot. We can also use landscaping and curtains to make our house need less heating and cooling. In the winter we do the opposite, eating and drinking hot things, throwing on sweaters, cooking and baking, wrapping ourselves in cozy blankets and snuggling.
Of course, I'm not the only one who matters here. In my own household we have the heat debate. If it were just me, I'd have the winter heating set at 60F during the day and 55F at night. But it's not just me. My spouse thinks I'm insane and wants the house warm enough to be comfortable while wearing shorts all winter. We also have a renter, who has no control over how warm his living space is. We have a compromise that neither HusbandX or I are fully happy with, so we grumble to each other still, but it works. When it's just me and the kids at home the heat goes way down, and I turn it back up to 68F about half an hour before my husband comes home. What I've found most interesting about this is how the kids and I have adapted to the cold temps. When I turn the heat up in the evening the house starts to feel too warm. Acclimation isn't as difficult as it's made to seem, and forcing our bodies to get used to seasonal change probably isn't a bad thing, since that's what we evolved to do.
Reducing Food Expenditure and Waste
Reducing food waste not only helps your budget, it also reduces the amount of farmland needed and reduces the waste of packaging and fossil fuels spent to get the products to you. All the usual tips about eating leftovers or only cooking and buying as much as you will eat apply, but that only affects things on your end. One of the biggest sources of food waste in this country is actually at the farm level, since only certain products meet grocery store standards. Seeking out ways to source "seconds", or items that don't meet those standards, is both cheaper (because of no grocery store markup) and more environmentally friendly. I've had good luck with roadside stands, which frequently sell seconds. There's one near my mom's house that sells honeycrisp apples for $6 per 7 lb. bag. Farmer's markets are also better, because they don't have to meet the stringent grocery store standards. If you ask around, you might be able to find farmers willing to sell you the odd produce that they don't think most people would buy, and are happy to because it increases their profit margin. In my experience, kids especially love picking out the funny looking produce and eating it. It's like a little experiment for them--will this funny-looking strawberry taste like a normal strawberry? And getting them used to funky produce at young ages normalizes it.
In some areas there's a CSA called Imperfect Produce that I've heard highly of from friends. We haven't tried it ourselves because I tend to like going to the farmer's market. I like the interaction and being able to stock up on things for canning or the freezer as they're in season. I'm also lucky enough to have a farmer's market nearby that's open year-round and there's a bus that takes me basically from door to door. But if the CSA model works for you, check out Imperfect Produce (or any other local CSA, if they're not in your area).
If those options aren't for you, people in Buy Nothing groups will sometimes offer up food. Leftovers that are going to go bad because someone's leaving town unexpectedly, an opened package that was discovered not to be to the person's taste, food gifts that the receiver knows won't get eaten. It all goes back to reducing food waste, but also helps neighbors by passing it along to someone who needs it or will put it to good use. Even if you don't want someone else's castoffs, offering your own potential food waste can help keep it from landfills and help your less food-secure neighbors.
Buying less (or no) meat can also be one of the biggest ways to reduce a household's food budget. We've experimented with the amount of meat we eat and have concluded that, for health reasons, meat needs to be part of our diets. However, reducing the meat we eat and eating from better sources when we do are the ways we reduce the environmental toll. Hunting can be sustainable, if done correctly. In some areas predators have been driven away so much that animals such as deer are overrunning the ecological limits and becoming a menace. Hunting means no factory farms, so you don't have to worry about what hormones are in the meat, antibiotic use, and a host of other issues that come with our current "farming" system.
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| Blueberries hardening off before I plant them. |
Foraging is another great way to save money and eat what would otherwise go to waste. It's amazing to me how much free food there is around. Blackberries, apples, and plums all grow in many places around my area and those are just the ones I know about. Amateur mycologists might know where morels and other edible mushrooms grow. In Alaska I foraged blueberries and cranberries every year. I've even grabbed dandelion greens to supplement salads when my garden isn't producing quite enough lettuce. (Though they're very bitter--best as a supplement rather than the main attraction.) It's sad how much produce just falls and rots on the ground. Don't let it go to waste, eat it!
Not Buying Stuff, and Sourcing Used Whenever Possible
I know quite a few people who've looked in their closets and, fed up, declared a clothes-buying ban. Most people's closets are so stuffed and so overrun with clothes that we could go for years without buying clothes without really noticing. I do know people who, mostly through health problems, have weights that fluctuate between several different sizes. In that case, keeping more than one size on hand can be the right and frugal choice. For many of us, however, there are clothes we own that haven't seen the light of day in many moons and likely never will again. Do yourself a favor and pass those along, either through your Buy Nothing group or to Goodwill. Then, stop shopping. Buying ban accomplished.
This can be done with any number of things. Do you really need the things you're buying, or do you just want them? This is important because everything we buy--everything--has an environmental toll. It's much harder to justify buying crap when you think about the entire life cycle of the item and the slow death of our planet that's caused by its creation and destruction. A new phone every couple of years can seem like a pretty asinine choice when looked at that way.
Inevitably, however, you will need things. Gearing up my older girl for outdoor preschool this year, we realized we needed a bunch of warm gear. Seattle might not get that cold in absolute terms, but being out in the rain and chill for four hours every morning can be tough on a tiny human. The school provided rain suits but the rest was up to us. I asked around on Buy Nothing for the winter gear we needed, then checked Goodwill, and those two sources provided everything we needed to outfit her. If she loses something (all her gloves) or gets something filthy and torn (every day) then I'm also not upset like I would be if I'd spent some serious money on her clothes. Best of all, it was easier to check those two places than shopping a bunch of different places and looking for deals would have been. Even looking online takes a massive amount of effort and frugality of my time is just as important as that of any other resource. As all those endless motivational posters tell you, you've only got one life. Do you really want to spend it shopping?
I'm saving myself even more time and money by setting aside what I can, what's not ruined, for my younger daughter. Reducing the amount that I have to seek out for both of my girls is effort well spent, since it means spending more time with them or, ya know, on the Holy Grail of any mom's desires, time to myself. As my younger daughter outgrows things I'm setting some aside for friends and the rest I'm passing along to either my Buy Nothing group or to a charity that takes used baby items for distribution to poor families in my county.
Increasing Efficiency
In addition to reducing things, increasing efficiency is the other half of the equation. Things like living in a smaller space, or having more people living in a larger one, can greatly increase the efficiency of a living situation. Making that living space as efficient as possible in terms of resource usage--water, heating and cooling, electricity--all save tons of money as well. Those seem like no-brainers. Why wouldn't you want to upgrade your space so that it saves you money and is kinder to the environment? Even better, it saves you time since things like LEDs don't require changing as often and, if you pocket the savings, you won't have to spend as much of your life working. There's literally no downside.
Other facets of this are things like only running the dishwasher and washing machine when you have full loads, or turning off the water when you're brushing your teeth or shaving. After all, it's highly inefficient to have the water running when it's not actively being used. These are small things that everyone can do. Small, but powerful.
Reusing, Repairing, and Re-purposing
I have a potted plant hanging in my bathroom. You might not notice at first or even sixth glance, but the plant is entirely encased in plastic waste. When I got the plant as a cutting, I didn't have a pot for it. So I made one out of an old milk jug. Then I didn't have any more flat surfaces to put it on, due to the large number of plants I already had, but I did have a hook in the ceiling. I figured out how to cut up plastic grocery bags, tie them together, and then crochet them. Since I used brown plastic bags, it looks a lot like a straw basket. HusbandX made the hanger for it out of an old nail he bent into a circle. You tell me if it looks horrible, but not one person has ever seen it and wondered what the heck was wrong with my plant's container. (Yes, I do have friends who would be that brutally honest.)
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| My plastic waste plant, in need of a trim. |
This works with most items around the house, and in addition to saving money and reducing your garbage output, it stretches your creativity. How many facets of our adult lives actually do that? Instead of playing brain games, spend some time coming up with creative solutions for simple problems. I've turned torn t-shirts into nightgowns for my daughter. I've serged the edges of an old torn sheet to use as baby wipes instead of buying the disposable kind. I use the clips from balloons we've been given as 'chip clips', for flour and sugar bags. Once you start looking, there's almost always a creative solution to an issue, and a way to reuse or repurpose items that would otherwise just go to the landfill.
Similarly, I could have simply thrown out the duvet that got a hole in it. Not a giant, gaping hole. Just a small one. And the duvet is old, it has some stains on it. It would have been easy to tell myself that it was worth it to get a new one. Instead, despite being a terrible seamstress, I set out to repair the hole. And I did it, like a boss. Three years later that same duvet is still on our bed, the scar covered up by the cover so that only we know it's there. (And my spouse has probably forgotten.) I also get the satisfaction of knowing that I increased my skills a little bit. I'm a terrible seamstress, but I'm less bad than I was before.
These things don't have to take forever. When you eliminate most of the time you spend shopping from your life, it's incredible how much more "free" time you have. The fifteen minutes it took to repair the hole is a drop in the bucket compared to the time I would have spent trying to buy a new duvet. Cutting up and sewing my homemade baby wipes took a couple of hours but I've never had to run out and buy what are, essentially, disposable poop rags. Not spending my money on one-time-use disposables means that I can afford to work part-time, which gives me more time at home to do these projects and to spend time with my family. Very cyclical, but in my experience the cost, time, and environmental savings of small things intersect incredibly well.
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| The skirt I made when my favorite pair of jeans died. |
Our society, our planet, has a giant waste problem. Frankly, I think we pay far too little for garbage service. The fact that recycling is free in my area shocks me, because it's sort of covering up the fact that even recycling is pretty wasteful. With geopolitical problems right now and problems on the home end, it also might not be free for too much longer. Reusing things so that they never enter the waste stream in the first place can help the goal of zero waste. And if you have a wasteful habit that you really, really love--like a Keurig coffee maker--look for ways to make it less wasteful.
Embracing Difficulty
This is by far the most abstract but probably the most important place where frugality and environmentalism intersect. When you make a conscious choice to embrace either mindset, you must embrace doing the difficult thing. It's easy to throw money at a problem or to drive everywhere. It's not so easy to deny yourself things or walk to the grocery store with two small children. (Ask me how I know.) If a person really wants to stop living paycheck to paycheck, though, they need to embrace the difficult choices and figure out what can be cut from their budget, or what they can do to earn extra money. It's difficult and no one wants to do it, but making a better future for yourself is worth it. The same thing holds true for the environment. We can't keep thinking of ourselves all the time, we need to be looking to the future and trying to make tomorrow better than today. We owe it to ourselves and everyone who comes after us, not to mention every other species on the planet, to build a better and less wasteful society. But we can't do that without first embracing the hard choices.
My brother reminded me that, during the Great Depression, my great-great grandparents* moved out of Missouri to live with their daughter...in her chicken coop. Think of how rough life has to get before living in a chicken coop is better than what you left behind. It makes my philosophy of embracing difficulty seem like a game. But, what they had left behind was an epic environmental disaster, one that could very well happen again if we don't course-correct. Never think you and yours won't be the ones living in chicken coops if you really have to. Learn to suck it up now, in hopes of averting a chicken coop retirement.
As I said, we're no environmental paragons. We drive. We eat meat. We have kids, for goodness' sake, little resource-intensive needlings. Even trying to do things as environmentally friendly as I have time and energy for with regard to raising kids, they take a lot of resources. (Oh lordy, the amount of laundry with a new baby....) But the kids help me look to the future and clarify why I do the things I do. When I want to take the easy route, all I have to do is look in their little faces and remind myself that it's for them more than it is for me. Everyone has a reason, someone or something to give them hope that we can make the future better. For me, that's my kids.
I don't worry that humans will go extinct because of climate change but I do worry about the wars which will inevitably occur when resources become scarce. (Are occurring?) I worry about how pollution is affecting people right now, particularly the vulnerable brains of children. I worry about the people who have to live near factory farms and oil refineries. I worry about the animals who never asked to ingest plastic that humans created. It's worth embracing just about any difficulty now so that so much suffering and devastation is averted, both short- and long-term.
How many of us say we'd do anything for our kids, but we can't even turn down the heat? Our actions are making liars of us all. I'm striving to be less of a liar every day. It gets easier when you realize that humans are really adaptable. What was once super difficult becomes your new normal, and you can set the bar higher for yourself. If we all set that bar just a little bit higher, and a little bit higher, then we'll collectively be making the future better. The value of small, incremental change is highly overlooked. I can't do it all so why should I try at all? But even small changes can have a big impact over time, particularly when you implement more than one change. It's like the classic example of spending $5 on coffee daily. It's not that $5 is going to break most people's budgets, it's that the value of that money over time really will make an impact on both savings rate and how much a person needs to save before reaching financial independence/retirement. Similarly, doing small things all the time that are better for the environment, especially if you get others to do the same, compound over time to become significant. It won't take the place of political and international action on a massive scale, but it can build momentum so that such critical action seems attainable.
*Family historians, feel free to correct me on who, exactly, this was if I don't have it right.
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