At the blog Vegans of Color, Johanna quotes a new anthology to be edited by Breeze Harper:
Rarely, if ever, has the status quo of these movements written about how [white] racialized consciousness and class status impact their philosophies and advocacy of animal rights, veganism, fair trade, ecosustainable living, etc., in the USA. Deeper investigations by academic scholars have found that collectively, this “privileged” demographic tends to view their ethics as “colorblind”, thereby passively discouraging reflections on white and class privilege within alternative food movements (Slocum 2006) and animal rights activism (Nagra 2003; Poldervaart 2001). Consequently, academic scholars such as Dr. Rachel Slocum feel that rather than fostering equality, “alternative food practice reproduces white privilege in American society”.
Ad she states:
The discouragement about reflections on white & class privilege has definitely been more than just “passive” from readers of this blog at times, especially lately, although obviously the passive discouragement is a big player as well. As one of my favorite LiveJournal icons says, “White privilege: you’re soaking in it.”
In the short-term, sustainability is expensive. If it were cheap, we’d be doing it already. So, obviously, the impoverished among us are going to be less able to be sustainable. I’d love to re-insulate my house to lower my power use, but I can’t afford the large up-front cost… if you don’t have access to a good kitchen or laundry facilities or you can’t afford the expense of living in an urban environment, your options are even less. Eating locally requires a large amount of storage space for preserving food for out-of-season.
That being said, there are a lot of cases where it is a simple matter of laziness, and pretending that other groups are less able to put in the work necessary is bigotry of low expectations – it sounds like we’re making environmentalism into the White Man’s Burden. Sure, if a person works two jobs, then they won’t have the time to do any of that environmentally conscious stuff… but the satellite dish on the roof tells me that a lot of people in subsidized housing have more leisure time than I do.
Reusable diapers are cheaper than disposables (if you have access to your own washing machine) but they’re more work. Lentils are cheaper than beef… but making an edible, healthy vegetarian meal is a lot more work than just slapping a burger onto the grill. These are choices that everyone can make, and I’m not going to hold a gun to your head to make them… but I also am sick of hearing people make excuses for this that and the next thing.
Make your choices and own them. With any challenge in life, you’re going to be able to find an excuse. There’s always going to be a reason not to do something, or a reason to do something wrong. You still have a choice to overcome the obstacles or to throw your hands up and give up. So stop making the excuses and either do it or don’t.
The problem isn’t personal, it’s social. It’s not laziness, it’s lack of access, poverty, time constraints imposed by multiple jobs, children, the consumer environment – and as importantly, the choices society makes in allocating its resources, both human and material. Sustainability and good nutrition are low items on the priority scale compared to war, agribusiness, ethanol, and the prerogatives of the energy companies.
I fail to see how that part a class issue. We are all bombarded with the same banal pop-culture, the same flaccid government, and the same ambivalent society.
Right now, sustainability is primarily an individual issue. There are communities of sustainable people, but for the most part a person individually chooses to be sustainable and then seeks out a community, not vice versa.
And, with the exception of finances (as I said, sustainability is expensive), I tend to think that most healthy people face the same barriers.
The part of the sustainability movement that is most susceptible to classism is “Recycling.”
While the started with paper and cans, “recycling” is now a mantra for everything:
“Give the clothes you don’t want anymore to Purple Heart. . .”
“Donate your old computer. . . ”
“The kidney society can use your old car. . . .”
The point is that a product has use from 100 down to 0, and when the well-off use it from 100 down to 20, and then give it to “the poor” for 20 down to 0 while they go off to buy new, it isn’t actually reducing anything. The end result is just that “the poor” end up making all of the “trash” (when their hand-me-downs become truly worthless), while the well-off get the emotional lift of putting fewer items into their trash can each week, and more and more into the blue and orange recycling bins, or left on the doorstep for pick-up.
Why isn’t this reducing anything? Today “the rich” donate their used clothes, and “the poor” wear them. (I buy my suits at a used clothing store.) What would poor folk like me wear if we lacked the opportunity to wear hand-me-downs? Would you expect us to go naked? Or would you expect that we’d buy new (if cheap) substitute clothing?
No, recycling may not cause the rich to reduce their consumption. But that’s not a reason to deny the benefits to society overall.
Well, I’m a little lost here.
Sure, shopping at Whole Foods is expensive. Film at 11.
But there are plenty of other ways of living more sustainably, many of them available to the poor. Buying new/efficient appliances is out, but it’s easy and cheap to turn down the heat and put on a sweater. Riding a bike, walking, or taking the bus are all much cheaper than driving. Even if somebody can’t afford to invest three bucks in a set of reusable bags, they can certainly reuse disposable plastic ones, or at least make sure they find their way to a trash can instead of the gutter.
There was an article in the LA Times yesterday about the huge number of barnyard animals living in back yards in South Central. The paper claimed that the animals were primarily kept to “make it feel like home” for recent immigrants, but it seems obvious that cheap food was part the reason for keeping them. Getting your eggs from the back yard rather than from a CAFO 200 miles away is a very sustainable choice, even if that isn’t the primary motivation for doing it.
And while the poor often don’t benefit from access to things like fair trade and organic products, they do benefit on the other end of the transaction: the farmers that grow the food get more money, are healthier, and leave their land in better shape than those who farm unsustainably for the mass market. (Though sometimes they do benefit from organic products: in Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma”, he spends a great deal of time describing a sustainable farm which sells primarily to local, working-class folks at prices comparable to unsustainably farmed products.)
So I guess I’m one of those people that the OP was complaining about — aside from the obvious, I don’t really see how sustainability discourages reflections on classism. Quite the opposite, actually. White privilege…well, you got me there too. I can’t see what being white has to do with it, other than the obvious effects that being white tends to have on one’s class an economic status.
Pollan is just as classist as everyone else, pfft. I feel like I should elaborate on this a bit more but I don’t have my copy of Omnivore’s Dilemma handy..
basically, eating locally doesn’t always mean that you should eat “ethnically” which he talks about in other articles that he’s written. I live in Oregon and the food that I like to eat, because I’m brown and get homesick, is from Mexico. Oregon isn’t hospitable to any of my favorite foods except strawberries and cilantro. Plus, now that I have a nice job, I live in an all-white neighborhood where people can get actual tortillas (on a good day), but in a recent trip to the grocery store in the outskirts of town (GASP WHERE BROWN PPL LIVE OMGZ) revealed that all of the tortillas were filled with all kinds of crazy ingredients, and only a few are even made in Oregon.
If this doesn’t provide evidence of what the OP was talking about, I don’t know what does.
Someone else once pointed out to me how this applies in Green politics in the UK: the Greens think that because of the ‘food miles’ problem we should have import sanctions on food produced outside the EU, and they also think people should be discouraged from taking holidays in faraway places – the affect of these policies would be to make white farmers and tourism providers wealthier and non-white farmers and tourism providers poorer.
Economic growth at the expense of the environment is often a bad choice for the nations in the global South – it’s them who suffer first from global warming, not to mention more immediate pollution problems. But I am troubled by Greens who see environmental preservation as more important than lifting people out of grinding poverty.
Then there’s the general whiteness of the movement. Greens might brag about conservation work they do for people in non-white nations, but in London the anti climate change movement is roughly 98% white (I counted) and strongly privileges the voices of white men above other people. Those white men have a habit of making statements that are borderline imperialist when it comes to wanting to waltz into non-white nations and rearrange everything into what they see as ‘sustainability’. (I blogged about all this at one point last year).
My sympathies for the culinary wasteland in which you live. If I ever leave Los Angeles, I know I’m going to mourn the loss of wonderful eating opportunities here.
I still don’t understand what you’re getting at, though. It sounds like you’re objecting to two things:
1) That tortillas (etc.) aren’t available where you live, and
2) That what little you can find isn’t sustainably produced.
As for #1, if you leave an area where your ethnic group lives, then you will not be able to find locally produced food that you are used to. This is pretty much a fact of life: it applies whether you’re a Mexican looking for tortillas in Oregon, or a rich white Minnesotan looking for lutefisk in Kansas. I suspect that your inability to access local Mexican food is in part because of your good job — poor Mexicans in this country tend to congregate in communities near job opportunities, creating a market for Mexican food, which is soon available. I suspect you won’t find much locally produced corn in Oregon; but again this is just a fact of life (and the weather), not classism.
As for #2, of course it’s troubling that “ethnic” foods on the US market are rarely sustainably produced. But this is just the obvious Whole Foods issue again: sustainably raising food is more expensive (in the short term) than raising it unsustainably using subsidized petroleum. When minorities in the US have the time, money, and interest to demand sustainably raised food, they’ll get it.
I’ll take your word for it that Pollan is classist; I was only crediting him for finding the farm, not holding him up as a paragon of virtue.
I don’t know if it’s white privilege so much as it is wealth privilege.
“of course it’s troubling that “ethnic” foods on the US market are rarely sustainably produced. ”
There are problems with the whole notion of “ethnic foods” – lutefisk and balut are ethnic foods, but tortillas and spaghetti? grits are considered ethnic food in Western Washington, but probably not in Georgia or Alabama.
No tortillas made in Oregon? Try finding seaweeds in New Mexico. And if you want fresh tortilas, go to Yakima.
Sustainability – a lot of these “ethnic foods” are produced in people’s home countries where God knows what standards apply, but at least they taste right. I buy various species of fish from Vietnam, and I can only hope they are not just cleaning the Mekong out for some foreign exchange. The noodles and the rice to make them are probably sustainable and will remain so until the farmers get the cash for artificial fertilizers………………………
No, that’s pretty much what they’re doing.
Want to really ruin your appetite? Check out how they farm shrimp.
@Robert
Haven’t you been keeping up? Obviously, white and wealthy are exactly the same thing. Wealthy non-white folks got that way by selling out to The Man and are otherwise aberrations.
(sorry, couldn’t resist trolling… the white = wealthy tautology is bigotry in progressive clothing)
Silenced is foo:
1) Oh, cry me a river for us poor, oppressed white people, and all the bigotry we suffer for being whites.
2) Why do you assume that this anthology considers “white and wealth exactly the same thing?” All we have to judge by is a handful of sentences taken from the introduction; I don’t think you can make that judgement from what’s been given here.
3) White privilege and class privilege aren’t the same thing, but they have considerable overlap and inter-relationships.
Silenced is foo et al who don’t cut the poor any slack —
I’m going to refer to a psychoanalytic concept here, which is actually pretty well-known in wider society: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s usually represented as a pyramid, with categories in ascending, diminishing order. This is meant to represent the fact that a typical individual can’t really focus on stuff at the top of the pyramid until stuff at the bottom — the stuff that’s crucial for day-to-day survival — has been dealt with. It goes without saying that as one ascends up this pyramid, one’s “time orientation”, or sense of what is necessary for survival over time, lengthens. That is, your time orientation is immediate (day-to-day) survival at the bottom of the pyramid. By the time you get to the top, you have the leisure to think of survival in longer terms — not just day to day, but month to month, year to year, decade to decade. i.e., the future of the planet. Personal orientation shifts as one ascends the pyramid too — from a focus on the self to a focus on others.
This is not to say that poor people are incapable of thinking long-term, or thinking about sustainability. It’s just that a person — poor or wealthy — can only devote so much of herself to issues beyond survival. But that proportion (of energy/focus/time devoted to issues beyond survival) is greater for the wealthy than the poor.
So if a poor person chooses to use the smidgeon of free time that he has available after working two jobs to watch a few shows on the Dish Network, I’m not sure that’s sufficient reason to blast them for not thinking about the planet first.
You know, I almost forgot about the hierarchy of needs until I had a bad hiking expedition with a friend who forgot to pack a lot of food. I threw two temper tantrums on the way home from being hungry and tired. It seems frivolous mentioning it until I think about all the times I spent angry from not having money for food.
Though, I don’t think that it’s necessary to be poor *and* hungry… you can have very little money and still have food or some kind of food-related capital (livestock, farmland, fish/water, etc). I think maybe this is what we’re trying to get at.
I knew this one would get a lot of comments right away.
Pingback: Understanding Intersectionality & Food: How to Get It Wrong « Vegans of Color
Okay, I’m in a pissy mood today so obviously I’m being ruder than I should be (like the “bigotry in progressive clothing” – that was out of line)… but I still stand by my points.
1) The headline says race and class, the teaser says race and class, and from what my browsing of the articles says they continue to use the phrase race-and-class, but rarely mention race specifically, almost exclusively discussing class issues.
Personally, I think they’re just tacking on race to make it sexy. Classism is the dull domain of dusty Marxist essays, while cultural racism is exciting and terrifying. This kind of glitzing-up by polymorphing into a race thing is tacky and it’s confusing the issues at hand.
2) I’ve yet to see a study that shows me that the median poor/working class person has less time on their hands than the median middle class person, and all my working class friends (the cabbie, the waitress/single-mom, the pizza guy) seem to have the same or more time on their hands as I do (and being a single-income 3-person family on my salary doesn’t really put me much out of “working class” territory).
Yes, they lack the communities that foster a culture to encourage and educate about sustainable (or even just personally healthy) living. Yes, they lack the money for a lot of sustainable choices (like living in a well-planned area if you’ve a large family). But trying to pretend that there are magical barriers blocking people from making choices for themselves is dishonest.
And they are their choices – I don’t judge anyone for choosing to prioritize other things over the environment or related personal health issues. But don’t make excuses – you can find an excuse for anything. Just say “I don’t want to” and be done with it.
While poor people don’t necessarily buy lots of organic, locally grown food, they do tend to use less energy because, you know, they don’t have the money to pay for high electric/gas bills.
My mother, who earns less than $1000/month driving a school bus, is an electricity nazi. You should hear her yell about all the cold air coming in her house should you hesitate even a second at the door. While she cannot afford costly storm windows for her trailer, she does use plastic sheeting over all the windows during the winters. She uses as few lights, dishwasher runs, and television-viewing sessions as possible to avoid using a lot of electricity.
It’s true; lentils are cheaper than Hamburger Helper. Using my mother as an example again, you’re talking about a woman who can’t cook to save her life. Nor would she be willing to eat lentils. There is both an educational and food culture issues going on along with issues of poverty and sustainability.
Why isn’t this reducing anything? Today “the rich” donate their used clothes, and “the poor” wear them. (I buy my suits at a used clothing store.) What would poor folk like me wear if we lacked the opportunity to wear hand-me-downs? Would you expect us to go naked? Or would you expect that we’d buy new (if cheap) substitute clothing?
No, recycling may not cause the rich to reduce their consumption. But that’s not a reason to deny the benefits to society overall.
Nobody expects the poor to go naked. Everyone gets to be dressed every day. That’s exactly the point. Everyone’s reducing a clothing’s use by one day every day that they wear something. When the well-off buy their new fall wardrobe and give last year’s cast-offs to “the poor,” they are doing nothing to improve “ethical consumption & sustainability,” but they think they are.
When the well-off buy their new fall wardrobe and give last year’s cast-offs to “the poor,” they are doing nothing to improve “ethical consumption & sustainability,” but they think they are.
Most people I know who drop things off at Goodwill aren’t thinking about the environmental impact, they’re hoping that someone else will be able to get use out of their items at a bargain.
In the very large population of people who used to be poor but who no longer are, me, for example, they are also thinking that they remember what a Godsend Goodwill was when they had job interviews, no clothes, and $20 in their bank account, and that a little payback would not be amiss.
That aside, it does, in fact, reduce the consumption level, because what is relevant is the decision points where different people decide to discard and replace clothes. Let’s model it.
Marty Millionaire buys a $500 outfit of clothes. A nice suit, say. This suit has 1000 “wears” in it before it will become too tattered and will be discarded. Marty, however, will only wear it 500 times before it gets below HIS quality threshold. So the first decision point is, will he give it to Goodwill, or throw it away, before he buys a new suit. He buys a new suit either way.
Peter Prole needs a suit. His budget is $50. He can afford either something decent at Goodwill, or a lowball polyester number with about 500 “wears” in it from Sears; cheap clothing is significantly less durable. The second decision point is which of these he buys. He buys a suit either way.
Marty’s decision to donate creates an opportunity for Peter to purchase his castoff. Both men will be buying suits, but Peter will either be buying a new suit, which causes a new suit to be produced by the textile industry, or buying the castoff, in which case no new production needs to take place.
Without the donation, the option to forego production does not occur. So the donation does reduce production, and thus does enhance the “sustainability” of the clothing choices being made.
Of course, things that don’t get purchased from Goodwill/Oxfam etc get bundled up and sold to rag traders, mostly in Africa, which makes it near-impossible for non-white nations to start their own fashion industries.
Just saying.
[The comment editing feature isn’t working for me atm. Is it just my connection, or some sort of bug? Anyway, I meant to say ‘those non-white nations’, because obv most of Asia is doing fine in that regard; it’s just the Africans we’re dicking over.
Globalisation means that class discussions that cross national borders almost always wind up being about race.]
Buying new/efficient appliances is out, but it’s easy and cheap to turn down the heat and put on a sweater. Riding a bike, walking, or taking the bus are all much cheaper than driving.
First, most poor people do turn down the heat–in fact, a lot of people in my area couldn’t afford heating oil and needed assistance! “Taking the bus” is great if you have bus service (or other public transportation) that will take you to where you need to go. That is not always the case. Of course, poor people who do not have cars or reliable transportation cannot get to work, and the cycle continues. As for walking or biking, that’s great in a safe area, when you’re not say, walking alone at night after working your second job. If you’re a woman AND something happens to you, then you’re asking for it by not driving or paying for a cab (which you cannot afford because, well, duh, you’re poor).
This isn’t the bigotry of low expectations; it’s simple reality.
Pollan is awful about money for food. In The Omnivore’s Dilemna, he says that the only really good way to eat is from small organic farms– this might work out well for six billion people, or at least no worse than what we’ve got now, but he doesn’t address the question. It just doesn’t seem to occur to him that not everyone can afford to spend what he does on food.
In a radio interview, he said that the choice to eat $7/dozen eggs is purely a political matter. Aside from that I don’t even know where he finds $7/dozen eggs, they really are pretty expensive compared to the $1/dozen ordinary eggs or the very nice $3.50 dozen eggs I get at the farmer’s market.
Oh, yeah–access. Farmer’ markets have very short hours. I’m fortunate that I can get to them, but they’re a lot less available than supermarkets, and a lot of people with day jobs are going to have problems getting to the market that’s only open 4 hours a week.
As much as I agree with most of their long term goals, I am often annoyed with contemporary environmentalist and its distinct white, privileged, and purist streaks. If you want a specific example of racism in the sustainability movement, Silenced is Foo, try listening to some of the arguments against global overpopulation. I myself recognize overpopulation as a potential problem, and those who bring this up are always careful to couch their arguments in terms of economic development and women’s rights, but I can’t help but detect an underlying tone that wouldn’t be out of place with a conservative warning about how brown people will overtake white people. This is of course a subjective judgment on my part.
I’m late to the thread, but feel a need to comment anyway.
The argument that the sustainability movement is about whiteness and class privilege has not been made here in a convincing manner. Lots of allegation and bile, but little substance.
I don’t see anything inherently white or privileged about sustainability. I’m African-American. My family comes from rural dirt farmers in Virginia and the days when segregation was the rule. I came of age during the civil rights movement; I think I know what white privilege looks like. It’s just that white people spearheaded this version of the sustainability movement.
So what if everyone can’t afford Whole Foods? Almost everyone can plant kitchen herbs in window post, thereby avoiding everything associated with buying fresh herbs in plastic containers that are trucked in from heaven knows where. The excess is easily dried and stored, just like farmers used to dry herbs and fruit for winter use. No great amount of space is required, either. My grandparents managed in a four room farmhouse.
In short, sustainability is not about everyone doing a lot of exotic stuff. It’s about doing what you can; giving it some thought and making a contribution.
And BTW, we were making the argument on sustainability back in the sixties, when only dirty hippies discussed this sort of thing.
I agree. Here’s something for thought – A problem in the Hispanic community (and others) is the rise of diabetes. Most cheaply-made food products contain HFCS, like bread, cerial, sodas, fruit drinks… etc. So if one were to only look at nutritional facts and not look at the food itself, you could be ingesting some interesting things indeed.
I think part of it comes when you end up having that little extra money, and you want things to be convenient. You look at your wallet and go, “Oh! $5. I can buy $5 worth of things at the Dollar Store”, except these things are often faulty or not worth much at all.
A third thought… too bad the soil in most urban places is contaminated. Some potted plants are feasible depending on type, but others should probably be grown outside. I dunno, my grandma had a garden but it got eaten by fire ants. It only grew jalapenos. (Unrelated – now grandma hates squirrels because they eat her peaches :( )
How many poor people do you know that use fresh herbs, whether they buy them or grow them?
I live in a two-room (not two-bedroom, two-room) apartment in NYC. I don’t get much light, because my apartment is cheap and therefore has a view of a brick wall — my windows face the central atrium of a 6-story building, and I’m on the third floor. I can’t grow anything inside the apartment proper because it’s too dark. I’ve tried, and even though I’m pretty good with plants, they just keep dying. (Just plucked mushrooms out of my calamondin orange tree last night… ::sigh:: Well, maybe I could try growing those instead of oranges, if they turn out to be a variety that won’t kill me.) So I’m trying to grow a trough of herbs on my fire escape. It’s illegal to put anything on the fire escape, so I’m risking a $90 citation.
It cost me $12 to buy the bag of dirt that I’m growing my herbs in, because I bought it from a local bodega and it was overpriced — but I don’t have a car, so I needed to be able to carry it home. The pot, a wooden trough (I was trying to avoid using plastic, though it was cheaper), cost $14. Getting the dirt and pot home was a PITA — I had to haul it up and down subway steps (because I live in a poor neighborhood, there are no elevators or escalators at my home station), and walk maybe a mile all total. The subway is $2. Thank goodness I’m young and able-bodied. Still fucked up my back doing it, but I recovered without needing to see a doctor. Just bought a $5 bottle of Alleve and went on about my business. There’s a farmers’ market nearby, luckily, so I was able to buy organic herbs — $4/plant, three plants, for a total of $12. I saved $4 by water-rooting some basil that I got along with some Vietnamese pho I ordered for dinner one night ($5, but I won’t count that). I can also afford to pay that citation if I get it, so I’m willing to take the risk. The herbs themselves won’t last me long — the catnip and rosemary might survive the winter, but not the basil. Probably not the sage either.
So the way I figure, growing those fresh herbs is costing me about $50 in money, labor, and time, with the potential to cost three times as much if I get cited or if I’d needed medical care for my back. Buying the same herbs from the store, in dried form from the seasonings aisle, might cost $10, maybe $12.
I’m not really poor, despite living in my shitty apartment. I can pay my bills every month without asking relatives or a boyfriend for help, and I have this shitty apartment to myself — no roommate. In NYC that’s a luxury. Most of the people in my rent-stabilized building are truly poor. No one else is growing anything on their fire escape, and I’m totally unsurprised by this. I would not even attempt to grow fresh herbs if I were truly poor. Too much cost for too little benefit. I wouldn’t buy them (fresh) from the store either — they cost too much and don’t last long enough. The only thing that makes financial sense is buying a little glass or plastic container filled with dried stuff that’s probably not organic, and was probably shipped a billion miles to get to me, and that isn’t remotely sustainable.
Nora–what you said? SECONDED.
So, I’m detecting a trend here. (And in other conversations…but I’m posting here.)
Person 1: “Here are a few things that poor people may be able to do to help the environment. [1, 2, 3]. In short, sustainability is not about everyone doing a lot of exotic stuff. It’s about doing what you can; giving it some thought and making a contribution.” (The latter being a direct quote.)
Person 2: “But I can’t do #1, because here’s how it’s not feasible for someone in my situation. And some people can’t do #2, and some other people can’t do #3!”
Look. Based on your circumstances, some methods of conservation will be available to you. Some will not. We get it. It’s obvious. You don’t need to detail how method #17 is unavailable to a person with problem #4, because we know that — we suggested it because method #17 is available to people who don’t have problem #4. Similarly, you don’t need to detail how method #8 is already being done because it saves money (or another reason); we get that too, that’s why we mentioned it. Whether you’re doing it because it’s cheap, or because it’s good for the environment, either way it’s still good for the environment. And that’s a Good Thing.
There may be a small segment of the conservation-minded who insist that one particular method is the one-size-fits-all of environmentalism, or who insist that anyone who isn’t going all-out is somehow wicked. We have terms for these people: “immature”, “ineffective”, and “lunatic fringe”. Rail against them if you want, but be aware that they’re not the mainstream.
Conservation is about doing what you can with what you have.
Nora asks: “How many poor people do you know that use fresh herbs, whether they buy them or grow them?”
I did it for years. My wife, daughter and I were on welfare and it was a lot cheaper than buying McCormick, and better tasting and cheaper than generic. Grew them and dried them for winter. And they’re sustainable.
But growing herbs and other things is just an example. It’s one thing that can be done sustainably. We have a lot of urban gardens maintained by people who don’t make much; they ain’t putting a lot of money into them. But they are sustainable, on poor folks terms. Some say that’s a motivating factor for them.
BTW, I admire the hell out of you for growing them on the fire escape. Oh, the sage should survive the winter. My grandparents had one by the kitchen door for a lot of years.
I guess I’m confused.
“Sustainable Living” mostly costs more because it fully-costs everything. Which means that until the infrastructure exists so that all this “sustainable living” stuff is competitively priced, it’s going to be a very classist proposition.
Why is this news to anyone?
People think the solar panels on my roof are really “Cool”, but get sticker shock when they find out what they cost. But if it weren’t for people like this particular rich white woman, they’d cost more. Given that, what’s the suggestion?
Let the rich, white do-gooders spend the money to build the market to create the demand to drive down the price to make sustainable living affordable.