My Green Journey – Part Three

Do you know my green journey?  Probably not entirely.  I’m sure that if you have been reading here for any length of time you will know bits and pieces, but you probably don’t know the whole thing.  I decided that it would be fun to share, and also to write out for my own benefit!  You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

After all of the recalls, I realized that I needed to have better food security.  That is where my green journey really began.  Food.  If I can’t feed my family safely, what other choice do I have?

Well, it became clear to me that gardening was a choice that I wanted to make.  Not that I am a master gardener by any means, but I am trying, and every year I am putting up more and more food for the winter.  It isn’t just about gardening, it is sourcing food locally.

I have found local sources for so many different foods that I never really thought of as being available from Maine.  Even though our growing season is short, we are able to do quite a bit.  And not everything can be local.  I love coffee, but coffee certainly isn’t growing in my neighborhood.  But, I do know someone who roasts small batches of coffee beans, and he sources them from a sustainable and fair trade source.  I may pay a little extra, but I do enjoy good coffee 🙂

Once I started researching food, it got me on the track of other “green” issues.  If I didn’t want pesticides in my food, why would I want the chemicals in the cleaning products I used.  So I started making my own laundry soap, which then turned into making my own all-purpose cleaner and the heavy usage of vinegar/lemon/baking soda/salt to clean just about everything in my house.

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A couple of great books I used for these changes are Salt, Lemons, Vinegar, and Baking Soda and Make Your Place: Affordable & Sustainable Nesting Skills.

I feel like it is a slippery slope of green changes.  Once you change one thing, your research leads you to something else that you want to change.  It leads you to research you may or may not want to acknowledge about the way the planet is being treated.  The way animals are being raised to feed us.  The number of chemicals that are put into the products we use every day, whether personally, on our children, or cleaning our homes.

My green journey “officially” began back in 2006, and I have made a lot of little changes up to now.  There are so many more things that I want to change still.  But, it takes time.  It can’t be an overnight type of deal, although sometimes I think it would be easier that way.

A lot of these changes started out of necessity, where can we cut corners to save a little extra money?  Cooking from scratch is healthier, and there are fewer ingredients you need to worry about.  Turning the lights out when you leave the room saves money on your electricity bill, and conserves electricity in general.

Have you started making small changes to your lifestyle to be more environmentally conscious?  Are you less concerned with the environment in general and more concerned about your personal financial situation?  Can the two connect for you?