Supporting the eco cause is a noble one, but sometimes even I’m forced to admit it’s slowly starting to feel like eco-conscious living is only for wealthy and privileged people. You really can’t fault anyone for not taking up a greener life because some things associated with it are just so expensive. It’s so easy to say pick up the green challenge and make the switch today. When you sit down and calculate the cost of that investment, the eventual pay-off is great (save mother nature, create a healthy body and environment for yourself and your loved ones) but the initial payments you’ll have to make might not even be possible. Think about it as we break this down into the three main areas that make up our lives:
- A roof over our heads
- Food on our tables
- Clothes on our backs
The solar panels
Let’s face facts, solar power will save us plenty of utility bills, although it may vary from household to household before you get to the saving you’ll have to have enough in your bank to comfortably part with a five-figure sum outlay. Again the price depends on the size of the system and the quality of your panels, but still, it’s not cheap.
Eco-food source
Local sourced organic foods are the probably the premium of green foods, but frankly, they cost quite the bomb too. If you’re living alone or just a small family of 3, you can still manage to go by buying everything organic without feeling too much the pinch but try that with a large family with ever hungry kids, and things would look very different.
Eco-dressing
Again organic clothing is the way to go, but have you compared the prices of an organic cotton t-shirt to that of a typical cotton t-shirt? Phenomenal difference! But I think of the three areas; it’s the clothes that I have most issues with because while I can understand why food and power set-up would cost that much; I can’t quite fathom why upcycled or repurposed clothing should cost double what regular clothes do. Upcycled and repurposed does mean making something out of a material that would have otherwise been given the toss. I appreciate to hand make a piece of clothing takes more effort than using a machine, but surely not to the extent the price can be inflated to such ridicules amounts.
Thus this brings me to the conclusion that some people are simply cashing in on the green cause, trying to make insane amounts of profits off it without realizing their actions are setting the cause backward. Who would want even to try to go green when green is nothing but expensive?
“Let’s face facts, solar power will save us plenty of utility bills, although it may vary from household to household before you get to the saving you’ll have to have enough in your bank to comfortably part with a five-figure sum outlay.”
The problem is not the outlay but the fact that most households will never get a positive return from the installation of solar panels. Not only do some panels have a problem with delamination and component failures long before their stated life cycle is complete but in many areas the panels are damaged or made less efficient by perfectly natural factors like bird droppings, animal damage, wind, snow, and hail damage, etc. Rich or poor, it is not green to invest in a system that consumes more energy than it produces over its lifetime.
“Local sourced organic foods are the probably the premium of green foods, but frankly, they cost quite the bomb too.”
I believe that there is a language problem here. How can foods that require more resources to produce be considered ‘green’?
Note that organic farmers can use toxic chemicals as long as they are ‘natural.’ How is the use of copper sulfate considered more ‘green’ than synthetic fungicides that do the same job? Because organic farmers use fewer chemicals, they need more land. That means that they use more resources as their lower yields mean more land and energy to grow and gather the same amount of crops. Note that in the case of fungicides like copper sulfate, you use arround two times more by weight than synthetics. The synthetics are safer and more effective because fungi are not as tolerant of their applications as they are of copper sulfate. The lower yield means that even more land will be used to produce organics so less land is available for wildlife.
“some people are simply cashing in on the green cause, trying to make insane amounts of profits off it without realizing their actions are setting the cause backward.”
Green activists want to get rich too. The richer that they are, the more they can allocate to exotic travel, bigger homes, and better cars, not to mention more cash for hookers and booze.