This Earth Day, Take Care of Your Crap
Earth Day started fifty years ago, and it’s never looked nicer than it does today. This is mainly the side effect of the pandemic – everyone’s staying home instead of littering, polluting the air, or working to dump byproducts into the local ecosystems. Suddenly we see maritime life flourishing, less stress to our forests, and more animals venturing out than ever before. On my walks I’m now encountering more robins, sparrows, squirrels, and (ugh) bugs than I have since moving to Boston in 2012. This is nowhere near enough to reverse the consequences of our environmental free-for-all, but it goes to show the dramatic difference responsibility can make.
Which is the perfect metaphor for today’s lesson: take care of the crap you own.
Personally I blame consumerism for the idea that you should just buy a new thing instead of repairing the old one. Predatory practices like planned obsolescence (where products are deliberately made to make sure they won’t last that long) only proves my point. Companies have chosen straight profit over the quality of their products; another apt metaphor between profits and being responsible about the environment.
But corporate guilt is not completely to blame when us consumers just let it happen. We blame it on being too stressed to tinker with things that break. We find it much easier to just rebuy something instead of fixing it or advocating for higher-quality products. For sustainable wealth-building, that needs to change.
Maybe Own Less Crap…
Some folks complain that it’s plain bad luck that prevents them from getting ahead. Their loved ones get seriously injured, requiring hefty hospital bills or expensive therapies; homes or vehicles keep constantly needing something pricey done to fix them; possessions you rely on keep breaking down, from the coffeemaker to the dishwasher to your iPhone and so on. “Duh, Darcy!” they cry. “That is why I can never invest – every time I get enough money in my emergency fund something else comes up!!”
If I try to talk about how to take care of your crap through regular maintenance, the advice falls on deaf ears. “There’s not enough time in the day to do that for EVERYTHING I own! My free time would be entirely eaten up with maintaining the car, the pipes, the circuitry, the flotsam, the jetsam, the blah blah blah….”
And yes, put that way preventative maintenance seems like a Herculean task. This same reasoning goes into why better environmental protections just aren’t feasible. You hear from folks that they can’t reduce their carbon footprint without paying their workers less to comply with better regulations. Or that they have no choice but to drive everywhere and fart their way to Earth’s death. Or that polluting oceans and native reservations are just “accidents,” not something you can prevent.
Except you can prevent both. You don’t have enough oomph to take care of your stuff or effectively fight for climate protection? Owning less stuff will help both. Reduce your possessions and suddenly you reduce the amount of stuff you’re responsible for. As an added bonus, this reduces the demand of new products and eases the crazed plundering of natural resources.
So help the Earth. Sell your unnecessary shit.
…Or At Least Get the Good Stuff
Possessions made with quality products and craftsmanship will last you an extremely long time. This is not a secret. There’s definitely a higher upfront cost than the cheapo alternative, but guess what? It actually saves you money in the long run. It’s actually nice to take care of your crap when it’s not actually, you know, crap.
Thrift shopping is the perfect example, and not just because it’s the best clothes choice for environmental sustainability. Flimsy polyester clothes will last you maybe a year’s worth of wearing it, depending on how much care you might pour into it. Cotton or natural fiber blends, on the other hand, will last you for years. I’ve still got clothes from high school that I still prance around in. I graduated high school in 2012 – they were made with quality in mind.
The higher-quality stuff is also easier to maintain, because they take much better to repairs and preventative maintenance than the bottom-tier stock. Have you tried sewing up a rip in a plastic shirt versus a cotton one? The difference is night and day. With cotton I don’t have to worry about the needle holes becoming bigger problems than the rip I’m trying to correct; I also don’t have to worry nearly as much about thread knots falling through, uneven stitching, embarrassing stretches, or any other common wardrobe malfunction that plagues fast fashion.
Back to Earth Day: there’s no better planet for humanity to live on than Earth. You’ve seen what the other planets in our solar system are like; you know there’s nowhere else that so lovingly cradles us with enough air to breathe and water to drink. Don’t cheapen it by ignoring how much worse we’re making it. We’re only going to hurt life as we know it if we continue down this path.
Get Handy With Money by Getting More Skills
The more skills you add to your wheelhouse, the better off you’ll become. Getting handy with a sewing kit makes maintaining your closet an easy endeavor. Better yet, it provides a foundation for progressing to the next level of mastery. Knowing how to hand-stitch will help you in making your own clothes, including gorgeous pieces like what Moriah at Our Table for Two does.
You can take those steps to mastery to high levels of success. In Baltimore, Adam Lindquist has worked for years on reducing waste in his community. He used that expertise in 2014 to build Mr. Trash Wheel, a googly-eyed machine that has scooped over a million pounds of trash out of the Baltimore harbor. Yes, a million pounds. In one city. Think about how much cleaner it is without all that trash in the water.
Now, think about how that came to be: someone built up their skills to make something huge like that possible.
You can do the same. Pay homage to the earth you live on by taking better care of the things you own. You won’t start out by saving the planet, but you sure will help it.
What are the best skills you can learn to take care of your crap? And what brands do you recommend for being good to the environment?
I have tingles <3 I love this so much.
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Patagonia comes to mind