10 Practical Steps for Sustainable Living

Changing your lifestyle to be more sustainable offers opportunities to save money, build a stronger local community, increase the quality of your home and possessions, be more insulated against the collapse of larger systems, simplify, continue learning, be organic and contribute to a healthier style of living on the Earth.

The number one thing required is personal commitment. By making sustainable choices, all the rest flows from that. It doesn't take more money, but it will take continuous effort and mindfulness. The best way to truly achieve lasting change in your lifestyle is to take small steps and change specific areas that really mean a lot to you. Then once you are adapted to that change, you can pick a new situation to address or your first changes may naturally lead to others.

Here are my ten steps for having a more sustainable lifestyle. And yes, I'm working towards this myself.

Being green frequently has nothing to do with being sustainable. Being green is more of a buzzword, a marketing concept and a way to turn a profit. Being sustainable means that whatever is being done has the least impact, the least waste and is a cycle or means that can be repeated indefinitely without cumulative damage or harm to living things.

Here are things which are considered green, but are in no way sustainable:

• Hybrid cars - they use oil-based fuels, a resource that is very finite. They have parts that are costly in resources to make, and toxic to dispose of afterward. Owning a hybrid car is green, getting around by bicycle is sustainable.
• Solar power - the sunlight part of solar power is sustainable, but the resources it takes to manufacture and dispose of solar panels and batteries is not. Switching to solar power is green, building a house that uses passive solar gain is sustainable.

This is the number one problem facing the entire world today. Oil, from which over 90% of the fuel and energy sources of modern civilization are based and powered, is an extremely finite resource. Scientists have already determined that we have passed "peak oil" meaning all resources of that type are now in decline. Almost everything plastic is based on oil. Almost all transportation is based on oil.

Learning to reduce and cease the usage of anything derived from oil is paramount to becoming sustainable. What supplies of oil the world has left are going to become critical in areas where there is no substitution for it. In the end, to truly become sustainable, one would have to eliminate all petroleum/fossil fuel usage from their life.

The whole point of advertising is to create a state of desire, to make someone want something that they actually don't require to conduct their life. First one has to learn how they have adopted this type of mindset. Then you have to stop thinking this way. Unlearning this type of behavior is part of the key to adopting a sustainable lifestyle.

This can involve not buying new products unless you truly and genuinely needed them. This can involve not owning multiples of things. This can involve not following retail trends or styles. Instead of paying for services like regular maintenance and repairs, learn to care for and repair the items you own yourself. It's interesting how you simplify when you really start to do-it-yourself.

One great rule for this is to look at every single item you own and ask yourself if you've used it or worn it in the last calendar year. If not, get rid of it. You'd be surprised by how much you really need and how much stuff you have in your life just because it got there and has been hanging around ever since.

This mindset also ties in closely with the next point listed below.

In the late 1800s, the average American family generated a grocery bag's worth of trash per year. That refers to material that absolutely could not be reused again in any way. Presently, the average American individual generates nearly five pounds of trash per day! To truly reduce waste, you have to make changes across nearly every part of your life, looking for excess and either changing what you use or how you use something, or both.

Good areas to start reducing waste:

• Packing - so much of what we buy and consume comes with excessive and wasteful packaging. Switch to buying in bulk, but also be sure to try to switch away from items that use unneeded and non-recyclable packing and wrapping. This applies to household products, food, clothing you buy and much more.
• Gift-giving - Use recycled materials to do gift-wrapping, try using cloth wrapping that can be used again, or give gifts just marked with a cute bow or tag.

This type of thinking and action ties into the action below just as it is connected to the one above.

Instead of using disposable things made for a one-time use, a sustainable thinker goes for quality, getting tools and goods which are made to last a lifetime or longer. Instead of just throwing things out when they aren't perfect, things get maintained and repaired so that they can be used again and again. Many items that used to be made from metal or wood are now crafted from plastic and won't last for decades. People are also not used to performing regular repair and maintenance on their own appliances or homes.

Ways that good used to be durable and became disposable include

• Pens - Use a fountain pen and not a disposable one.
• Lighters - Use a refillable butane lighter and not a plastic disposable one.
• Razors - Straight razors last longer than a lifetime and get resharpened instead of thrown out.
• Shoes - Good quality leather shoes get resoled when they become worn and last for many years, not just a year or two.

As part of addressing issue #2 above, it's important to cultivate a local lifestyle. The more you can conduct your life and needs local to where you live, the better. It's going to become too costly to ship items and goods over long distances. Those apples from New Zealand that you get at Trader Joe's? Totally not sustainable.

Patronizing local businesses eliminates cost of transportation and effects of pollution. It also creates diversification of small businesses which feeds into the growth of smaller, localized economies.

As much as the media is putting a lot of attention and focus on oil and petroleum, one of the biggest problems that the world will face soon is going to be water. Water is a natural resource and for thousands of years, it fell freely from the sky and flowed across the surface of the planet and anyone who needed it had access.

Industrial society changed all that. Companies claim to own the rights to water, forcing people to pay for something that used to be free. Carelessness for this precious resource has led to depletion of water in some areas, and terrible contamination in others. As the human population grows, having access to clean and plentiful supplies of water will change radically. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has estimated that by 2030, almost half of all people on Earth will live in areas of high water stress.

When you rinse your lettuce to make a salad, how can you reuse that water instead of just pouring it down the drain? When you start your shower, do you catch the water that comes out before it becomes hot and use that for anything? Every time you go to pour water down the drain, think about if it really could be used for something else instead.

If there is one thing that all humans used to be sustainable at and now are just about as far from it as you can get, it's producing food. Once upon a time, every family produced all of their own food and nowadays, you'd be surprised just how many people have no idea how food is produced or where it comes from other, and how many have never cared to wonder.

Large scale food production has increased pollution, supports food systems that are more at risk of breaking down, contributes to a devastating loss of biodiversity, encourages waste and excessive consumption of resources. Even if you have a small garden, it can provide tasty and healthy food. Talk to your neighbors: if everyone grows slightly different things, you can pass along the extra when the harvest comes or share foods in season.

If there's something where you can complete your task or get the job done without electricity, try and do it that way. Electricity is most often derived from a process that uses fossil fuels, or uses some other precious resource, and generally is non-renewable. For hundreds and hundreds of years, humans lived without electricity and now you'll find people who spend their weekends in RVs with satellite TV, microwave ovens, air-conditioning and generators saying they are roughing it. Compared to how millions of people live day-to-day in the world, they aren't.

A few ideas to get started:

• Dry clothing on the line instead of in the dryer.
• Use manual kitchen tools instead of electric ones.
• Use manual yard tools instead of electric or gas-powered ones.
• Exercise using just your own body instead of going to the gym.

There's a lot of increasing evidence that the modern, Western lifestyle (most notably the American version) isn't going to be possible for much longer. Too much fossil fuel is consumed and too much water is wasted. Environmental pollution just keeps increasing even as stricter rules are put into place. Larger systems keep evolving, but they are often endangered by small breaks in their process. Look at product and food recalls for examples of this.

Start to make sustainable changes and choices in your lifestyle on your own terms and at your own pace before the world situation demands it. This makes it more adaptable and adjustable. Think of how people who survive natural disasters are traumatized by the sudden loss of everything. Many of the ways we live and modern conveniences may be going away or being reduced in the next few decades and by shifting how you live and consume, you will make yourself more adaptable to these changes without shock or loss.