Constant State of Flux

In a rented house with a very small patch of lawn, there is no chance of us keeping livestock, growing enough vegetables to eat year round or using ‘green’ off-grid alternative energy sources. So, in a bid to start with what we have right now, I have been implementing some measures to cut the ‘consumption’ in our household.

There have been many things I have been mulling over and thinking about again and again whilst doing the housework, the dishes, the washing etc. wondering if there can be a better way. There has to be a way in which less stuff comes in and out of the house, like packaging, electricity, water and heat. People living in the 1930’s for instance, used a fraction of the resources we do today. How can we get back to that level of consumption again? I have been watching the farmer in our village saving every scrap of plastic and every piece of twine – today he was scrubbing about up in the woods finding twigs to burn on his fire – my parents called it ‘the war mentality’; making the most of absolutely everything that comes into your possession, everything.

One thing I have realised is that you do not have to be living on an eco farm in the middle of the countryside to do anything I have done here. Anyone can do it, because ultimately, it is all about attitude rather than money, resources or who you know.

So, here are the things I have already started to change, in no particular order:

ENERGY:

• We try to go to bed when it gets dark and wake up early to use up all natural light instead of artificial. This admittedly can be difficult during the winter, but that is what winter nights are for – being in bed.
• Of course, we do use the lights, but we utilize spot and small area lighting which, instead of lighting the whole room, which uses a fraction of the energy with a few spotlights throughout the house turned on when needed. We have 12 downlighters in the ceiling of the kitchen alone, something I detest, enough energy is produced to light the whole village, it seems. These lights never get turned on – instead, I use a light over the hob to work by.
• I turn off every single transformer and appliance when it is not used. The ipod, the coffee machine, the laptop, the slow cooker, I daily search for things stuck in walls and promptly pull them out.
• We ditched the TV.
• I sweep up instead of vacuuming, which is easier with wooden and tile floors.
• I let my hair dry naturally instead of blow drying it, something I have always done. Why bother to blow dry? It is such a dull occupation at the best of times.
• We always hang washing out on the line or on a clothes horse hanging on the ceiling over the stair well. We never use the tumble dryer that came with the house.
• I try to drink less hot drinks during the day and if I do, I have not quite boiling water from the wood burner.
• We wash the dishes by hand, we hardly ever use the dishwasher.
• We wash clothes absolutely only when they have to be washed, (something I have not been very good at in the past) spot cleaning small stains and hanging woollens outside to ‘air freshen’. I wear my clothes until they cannot be worn any longer and must be washed (having a good diet means less sweat).
• We have lived for five years in France without a bath and Sunday night is shower night for the girls. In the summer we swim most days, so no need for showers too often anyway then. I can get away with two showers a week and still feel fine. I grew up with Sunday bath night and my mother still only has a bath on Sunday, a time honored tradition that seems to have stood the test of time.
• We wash clothes on 30°c, I occasionally do a 90°c wash for all the dirty dishcloths and tea towels. This also is necessary for cloth diapers/nappies.
• We wear extra layers instead of turning up the heat. We use hot water bottles in bed and the wood-burning stove for heat downstairs.
• We use rechargeable batteries wherever possible, we have wind-up torches.
• We try to cut trips in the car to a minimum and I use my van two or three times a week. It helps that we homeschool and live in a beautiful place. We have said no to long haul holidays for about seven years now, preferring to enjoy what we have around us. Every day feels like a holiday of some sort to us.
• We let the farmer cut the grass with his scythe in summer rather than a lawn mower, he uses the cuttings for hay for his sheep in the winter. This year much of it will be dug over for the vegetable patch.

PRODUCTS:

• I use cloth dishcloths instead of disposables, cloth instead of kitchen paper and baby wet wipes, though we have not quite got into cloth toilet paper yet. All this gets washed together on 90°c and reused.
• I have given up buying books. I have started to borrow books from friends and lend them out instead. Same with DVDs. I do not buy new toys for the girls, we have enough from friends and relatives to last for years. I always ask the grand parents for wooden/educational toys that will last and my children will want to keep. My girls have been lucky enough to have been given all their clothes (except underwear) from friends and relatives and we always pass them onto other friends. Christmas is a very small affair.
• We have given up buying new products for friends and relatives’ birthdays. Instead we bake or make things and make our own gift wrap. Jules and I never go to great lengths to buy each other presents, it is just something we have never done.
• We are not a family who are gadget mad. We do have an ipod, vacuum cleaner, two laptops, iron, sewing machine, a battered old camera (which I use for all the photographs here) and camcorder, a de-humidifier, a couple of electric heaters, a red fridge and a sundry smattering of other gadgets, but we just have not accumulated much stuff. I see this as a good thing. We have certainly had our share of plastic in our possession on the past, but never having owned a house of our own, well, we have just not had a need to buy lots of things.

RECYCLING:

• I think that the recycling initiative is on the whole a good thing. But it sure has made people complacent about the stuff they buy and throw away. It gives us an excuse to feel better about waste but as it stands, it still takes a hell of a lot of resources to get the recycled stuff recycled and back into use again. And is it really used again? I have my doubts. Far better to foster an attitude of using less in the first place rather than giving us yet another reason not to care about packaging and waste disposal.
• I have turned into a bag lady. I now take a load of plastic bags everywhere with me, I give them to to butcher and use them in the market. My favorite line is, ‘No need for another bag, I have one already’.
• We use our own glass bottles for raw milk and in France, supermarkets are not allowed to supply plastic bags, so we use our own carriers.
• I boycott products with packaging (polystyrene and plastics) now and try to get everything from the dairy, the butcher and the market in paper bags or use my own stash of bags. Household goods are more difficult to buy without packaging, so I have cut down on using anything more than vinegar and bicarbonate of soda for cleaning and search out products with glass containers (increasingly hard to find) or no containers at all like soap instead of liquid detergent, flakes in cardboard boxes instead of plastic etc. Personal products I have really cut down on, I do not use deodorant or moisturizer for instance (as I said, a good diet) and make things like toothpaste etc.
• Our vegetable waste goes to the farmer’s sheep. We are going to buy water butts to catch rainwater from the roof this spring. We burn our cardboard in the stove. Logs are bought locally from the village. It is easy to set up a compost heap even without a garden. All the ash from the fire goes on the garden soil.
• From now on I have made a pledge to work with what I have already. I am going to try not to want to update things just because I think they look unfashionable or out of style. I recently wanted to throw out my old wooden tray, for instance and buy a set of new plastic trays I had seen in IKEA a while back. But what is the point? Even though they were really inexpensive, the old wooden tray works perfectly fine, it is just my attitude towards it that I need to adjust. Even though we think that we are saving money by buying cheap plastics, the actual cost is passed along the production line to the environment. Just because we do not see these hidden costs, does not mean to say that we shouldn’t care about them.
• We try to source what we need from the community before buying anything new – we ask around to see if anyone has the thing we need going spare – we have been given many, many things this way; a second hand car, computer, tables and chairs, book shelves (which was swapped for a fish tank). We make sure we give away anything we no longer use, just to keep the universal law of ‘what you give out comes back a hundredfold’ alive and well (it really works).
• I have made a pledge to stop buying new clothes. I am given many second hand clothes from friends, have even started to buy wool for knitting at secondhand shops and have already pulled back an old jumper to knit again in another style. I will be utilizing my sewing machine much more in the future, i like this make do and mend kind of fashion anyway!
• We now eat seasonally, buying all our meat and fruit and vegetables from as near as possible cutting down on food airmiles. I have stopped drinking coffee and we have cut down on sugar and other goods from far-flung places (even bananas). This means that we mostly eat swiss chard, beetroot and turnips in the winter, but it is from a local farm at least.

People think that all this is taking it to extremes; why go back to living in the Dark Ages again when we should be able to have all the luxuries we can have in this day and age? Because life is actually richer and more interesting without TV, without bright lights in the evening, when we attempt to knit clothes from recycled wool, spend time in the evening doing the dishes together, try to find an alternative to all these gadgets and live closer to the earth. People assume that when we have all the mod-con-convenience and luxury we can afford, life will be easy – yes, we are living in so-called easy times right now, but we have to remember all the things we have sacrificed for that ‘easiness’.

One thing is for sure, my life has become ultimately more thoughtful, creative, passionate and vital, the more ‘easiness’ I have chosen to walk away from.