Our Journey to Green

This post is a submission to December’s APLS Blog Carnival. Read about the journeys others have taken and are currently taking at The Conscious Shopper, one of my favorite green blogs, on December 18.

We’re deep into goal setting for 2010 around here so the topic for December’s APLS Carnival fit into our ongoing discussions perfectly. Below is an overview of the main vehicles that led us to begin making changes to live a greener life. I’ll be reviewing our progress towards our 2009 goals and laying out our goals for 2010 in a future post.

Our journey began more than ten years ago with finances as the impetus. As I wrote on our sister site, Family Profits, when we met both Rich and I were carrying significant student loan and credit card debt. The total when we finally added it up (it took us a couple of years to work up the nerve) was more than $180,000 worth of debt. That’s right, we were $180,000 in the hole even after making payments for several years. Not a good place to be.

We knew we wanted to pay off all our debt. Since we worked mainly in nonprofit organizations, we weren’t bringing home the Big Bucks so had to learn how to be super frugal. One of the unanticipated benefits of living frugally was that it was also a green lifestyle. We didn’t buy much of anything and the few things we did buy were often used. We were all over Reduce and Reuse because those actions saved us tons of money but we began to love the difference it made to our impact on the environment as well.

The next leg of our journey was spurred by medical issues. A week before our wedding, a driver ran a red light and T-boned my car, narrowly missing a direct hit to the driver’s side door. My car was totaled and I was injured pretty badly. My recovery took more than a year and led us to explore complementary and alternative medicine. Rich gave it a try as well and soon discovered that his back pain, for which surgery had been recommended, completely disappeared when MSG was removed from his diet.

We began to pay close attention to the food we consumed and as a result made many changes to our diet. We switched first to less processed foods, then to whole foods, then to locally grown organic options. Our spending on food remained fairly constant during these switches, in large part because we traded “convenience” for healthier options. A host of green living topics were revealed to us through these changes and we’re now huge proponents of organic farming, local food options such as CSAs, and the Slow Food movement.

The decision to become parents sparked the next shift. There is nothing like being completely responsible for the health and welfare of another living creature to get one’s attention! The more we learned about fetal and child development, the more concerned we became about items that had alwasy seemed innocuous. From baby lotion to sippy cups, there were serious matters to consider at every turn. While scientists argued about potential long-term effects and “safe” levels of exposure to various chemicals and compounds, it was clear to us that our first job as parents was to protect our children and so evoked the Precautionary Principle whenever we weren’t sure what to do.

New changes, like storing food in glass containers and making our own cleaning supplies, were implemented. And it became clear that the journey to a greener life was one that could last our whole lives.

Now that our daughters are a little older, the lives lived by other families is becoming the driver of change for us. We want all children, human and animal, to have the chance to grow up healthy and strong. We’re talking a lot this month about what we can do to help make that a reality but I can already see that more alterations will be coming to our lives soon. And I can’t wait.

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