Today is my last blog contribution as it is also the last day of our experiment. I want to write a few comments on the rule that was hardest for me or the one which was the most difficult to comply with. This rule is our promise to abstain from things that have been produced more 120km away from lovely, sunny Freiburg. We were having some kind of dispute about how strict one should interpret this rule and I doubt that we really found a valid and sound answer to it. In the end I think we applied the rule a bit arbitrarily. Our major concern lies with consuming goods that have been produced locally and thus are more climate friendly while at the same time supporting local farmers (and organic farming). Easy as it seems, this is already problematic. Let’s say you buy a super locally produced delicious 5l pack of apple juice. It’s organic, it’s healthy and veery tasty, but it comes in one of these handy tetra packs with a little plastic tab. Another example is milk. There are hundreds of grassing cows on the picturesque meadows of the rolling hills of the Schwarzwald. You can buy their milk directly from the famer or on the market or even in the supermarket in recyclable glass bottles. But now, one does still not know if all their fodder is also regionally produced. And that is only the food side, not even talking about cloths or other non-food goods.
What I learnt so far is that sustainable consumption is heavily dependent on knowledge and information sharing. There are things you simply can’t know! But for me sustainable consumption is also about the will to reduce this black box. This means think and think again and again before you buy something. This is hard and if you end up being uncertain if the product really complies with the rules, you shouldn’t buy it. Well, that’s at least the theory. Unfortunately I discovered: I am a human being which has certain desires for unhealthy and probably unsustainable things. I am now at a point where I would probably kill for piece of chocolate. Unfortunately, even despite some unfruitful efforts, cacoa trees still don’t grow in Germany. This would mean that I would have to cross off chocolate from my diet forever, if I don’t move to South America any time soon. The same holds for coffee (though I don’t like coffee that much), tea and even spices. I was a bit inclined to think for quite some time that organic farming and bio-products would save the world and that it was upon us the consumers to switch our consumption patterns to buying more green. This illusion was very quickly destroyed when I had a closer look where the organically produced onions in my next door supermarket came from: Israel, Argentina and even New Zealand!!!! That is simply crazy! I now learnt that there are certain products that far away from being sustainable even when it says bio or organic on the label, since they have been ship almost around the whole globe. I think we have to accept that, since the system in which we are acting and in which the whole production is embedded is not perfect, certain tradeoffs are inevitable (unless we don’t want to deny ourselves every kind of good that doesn’t comply fully with the radical definition of sustainability, thus adhering to what some people call ‘new ascesis’ ). That’s a fact which we have to be aware of. I know, I must sound a bit fatalist and pessimistic and above all radical here. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that at least the basic idea has to be radical. It gets fuzzy and dodgy enough, once it collides with people’s cognitive routines and habits… So my new credo is to keep on trying despite all odds, but don’t expect it to be nice and short. I could go on for ages about this and I also feel a bit uncomfortable to not fully elaborate my position here but then we would probably enter in some neo-marxist discourse about how bad the world really is. I kind of have the vague feeling that this blog would then exceed its thematical boundaries. I will nevertheless try to elaborate on why sustainable consumption is actually a fun thing to do next week, when the experiment has already ended (I hope I will find some good points to back up this brave claim…) . Right now I am too much concerned with not buying some chocolate.
No comments:
Post a Comment