God's Geek

Reflections and random thoughts of a geeky youth worker in North London...

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Dilemmas

You may have picked up from here that I think it is important to live ethically and leave a gentle a footprint as possible. We have recently given up our car, we use reusable nappies (for Daniel, that is) and generally are trying to cut down the amount of stuff that we buy. However, it is really hard! (Fairly obvious, I know. We are now living on one salary, which is great. I love the amount of time that we both get to spend with Daniel and wouldn't have it any other way. However, it does lead to budget constraints. We have recently been shopping mostly in Waitrose(fairly good ethical policies) and buying as much organic and fairtrade as possible, as it is better for the environment, us and everyone else. However, it is much more expensive than the evil one of which we must not speak (T......), and it is v tempting to go . I am not convinced it is all that evil, just the biggest????

Also, I don't buy many new clothes but I succumbed to the Next sale, where the clothes were not organic or fairly traded. And what do we do about Daniel's clothes? Fair trade baby clothes are well expensive and he grows out of them so quickly. To be fair, most of his are hand me downs and I wear lots of hand me downs as well.

It is just hard. We wnat to do live lightly but it is a struggle at times. Although I also know it is nothing compared to the daily struggle that many have just to survive. Any thoughts??

2 Comments:

Blogger Suse said...

I know what you mean hun. I love Dove shower cream - but it's ain't ethical. Chris Evan (cheese @ STEP rather than TV bloke) was talking on being Salt 'n' Light @ LET and he said you have to work out what's most important to you. If it's your clothes then but ethical clothes or if it's food, or a specific food e.g. coffee, tea n chocolate - then but ethical there. If we were to ethical with everything we wouldn't buy anything. We have to start somewhere....

10:41 PM  
Blogger Sarah Brush said...

I think it sounds like you're doing pretty well. I commit to buying certain things fairly traded but I certainly can't manage to buy ALL my clothes fair trade and some things are just too expensive on our budget. How about encouraging others as well if you can't do it much more. That won't cost more.

6:49 PM  

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