Going Green and Tight

Frugal and green… the two concepts often overlap. If I install more insulation and tighter windows, or if I dress warmer and turn down the thermostat, or if I buy more energy efficient appliances all in order to lower my utility bills and save me money, then in each instance I am also being green and reducing my carbon foot print. Energy conservation is both green and frugal. Likewise, if I grow an organic garden and eat out of it to reduce my grocery bill, I am inadvertently reducing the green house gasses spewed from trucks hauling produce cross country. If I decide that I don’t really need the latest electronics or toys from the Orient, then I am reducing pollution from both manufacturing and trans-oceanic transportation while I keep more money in my pocket.

OK, being economical can often have the side effect of also being green, but what about the consumer-driven economy—if people don’t buy, then manufacturers don’t manufacture, and workers don’t have jobs or income? There is a fundamental identity between the value of product and income. In plain English, if everyone consumed half as much, then everyone would only need half as much income. There could still be full employment, but people would only need to work a 20-hr work week to make their purchases. Like that would ever happen! But if it did, there would be more leisure and less global warming.

I, for one, do not believe that the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. If we as individuals (i.e., the parts) get our acts together in terms of discriminating between needs and wants, in conservation and recycling, in limiting population growth, in home production, then perhaps the whole or global problems can be alleviated.

Think of me, not as a tightwad miser unwilling to help spend the nation out of recession, when I’m actually a patriotic green environmentalist. Considering that the word frugal is a synonym for economical, and that economy and ecology both come from the same Greek root word, oikos, (which means home or environment), should these concepts really be that much in conflict?