Reflecting on my Earth Care Practice

I'm the sort of person who cringes whenever I have to spend money. I like to hunt for bargains and find the best deals on products. When I am grocery shopping, I am the guy who bends over to find out what the price per ounce of a product that is printed on 8pt. font on the price tag of the product. In short, I'm cheap. I hate to admit it (partly because I think that I inherited this trait from my parents), but the fact is, I often need that extra little bit of motivation to spend money on a product that I could purchase at a better price somewhere else. So when I have to eat the 29% price increase to buy organic foods, I hesitate to pull the trigger.

My guess, is that this is the case for a lot of people (not just the overly frugal). Buying Organic has proven to be very difficult on the micro level, and my suspicion is that a lot of the problem exists because we still refuse to deal with the issue of sustainability on the macro level. Consider the huge amount of subsidies that are dolled out to unsustainable, big business, agricultural farms every year. Though these farms produce cheap food, they also wreck havoc on the environment. This is just one example of an entire system that makes buying organic food less practical than buying non-organic food. What I am proposing, is that we need to ask two questions. First, how can we affect systemic change on a macro level and second, how can we affect change on an individual level, micro level?

There are a lot of people out there who, like me, have a very genuine desire to buy organic products. One website that I found, said that about only 10% of the American Public bought organic groceries. However it also mentioned that nearly 70% of those who didn't buy organic foods on a regular basis cited cost as the main reason why they didn't. This is not a problem of information. Most people understand that buying organic is better for the environment and our bodies. Nor is it a crisis of ethics. People genuinely want to buy organic products. It's a question of practicality.

What I am suggesting is this: people will not begin to buy organic products in mass until prices begin to fall to something comparable to the prices of regular groceries. This is something that can only be affected on the macro level. However, I do think that individually there are things that we can do - things that affect the decisions of people of influence in the macro level. We can change who we vote for. We can change our own buying habits. We can change the awareness levels in our communities. We can change many things, but if we do nothing, then we can change nothing.