Photo: Stock Exchange/garbage floating in river after storm

Duty trumped my shopping aversion, requiring a trip to Home Depot where my heart sank at the absurdly low prices. A small bathroom vanity and sink for $88.97, bathroom faucet for $39.97, ceiling fan with 42″ blade and light for $49.97. Junk food must be the worst offender, such as McDonald’s $1 menu and 7-11′s two breakfast burritos for $2. Do you want to eat what’s in a sausage and egg sandwich that you can buy for a buck?

We expect music, software, and news on the Internet to be free or really cheap. The Internet has supplanted television and the print media, decimating their advertising revenues. I too search for free software to create pdf files, manipulate graphics and zip files. We are unwilling to pay a price that reflects the toll a product takes on the earth and we expect a heck of a lot of stuff for free. The result is more than a race to the bottom, it could be a death spiral if we can’t stomach the reality check.

Who do we think we are kidding? How do we stop the madness? We are hard wired to find the best deal, with price usually our first, and sometimes our only, concern. This leads businesses to resort to sweat shops, child labor and cheap plastic materials by the boat load ultimately destined for land fills. A big picture perspective demands an end to our disposable mentality. Surely buying well made products that can be repaired and purchasing some of our goods from garage sales and thrift shops would ease the burden we place on the earth.

Policies can create big changes. The recycling industry is a fraction of what it could be because the market is not is not robust enough to insure a continuous supply/demand loop. Incredibly, we toss items that could be composted into the garbage. Structuring taxes to reward recycling and composting over land fill dumping could change that within a year. The market has been slow to catch up to this because we have not made it a priority.

Recognizing that our indulgence in absurdly cheap goods and our unwillingness to recycle costs the earth dearly, and having the will to pay and tax accordingly, would be a big step into a future that welcomes humanity.

For more info: New Community Vision is working to spawn a movement to think about our social and housing paradigms in a new context. Community gatherings to address our universal challenges are the fertile soil in which durable solutions take root. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.