I am at À Votre Sante organic health food store, filling small plastic bags with organic turmeric and Thai basil while imagining the possibilitiesof dinners to come. I’m also kicking myself because I didn’t think to bring the plastic bags from the last time I purchased spices here. It may seem a minute detail, but I’ve committed to a zero waste apartment experiment and plastic adds up – in the back of my kitchen drawer and in the 10,000 landfill sites across Canada. I know this, and I cringe. So I decide to buy only a few spices this time, and make a mental note to create a clever system so that my daily errands and consumer habits don’t contribute to the stockpile of waste weighing on, seeping into and contaminating the earth.
zero waste at a daily pace
For the past four months, I have been shifting my daily habits to create an urban living environment that generates as little waste as possible. I had imagined what it would look like if I had to literally face my waste. What is my relationship with what I throw away? Statistics tell me that the average Canadian creates his or her body weight in garbage every month. If I had to deal with my own waste, what would my back balcony look like after a week, a year, a decade? What would it smell like? How would it change the way I bought, behaved? In North America, we have little to no relationship with the waste we produce. Our practice is to make it disappear. We send it to other countries, throw it into the earth or burn it into the air. It remains invisible to the eyes of most North American urban dwellers. I wonder if we dealt with our waste differently, would it bring together or disrupt our relationship with neighbours, urban wildlife, and the earth on which we live and which we call home?
I began my “zero waste” experiment with the misguided assumption that I was already a responsible consumer with a fairly small ecological footprint. I used my own shopping bags, took food and water with me every day to avoid foods packaged in styrofoam or plastic and rode my bicycle everywhere. I bought organic and local foods, had few appliances and used locally made eco-biodegradable cleaning products in my home. Yet, I wasn’t nearly as aware of my wasteful habits as I thought.
My zero waste practice began with noticing how I consume. I began to really look at what I bring into the apartment, and what I actually need. What do I buy and support as a consumer? How does that which comes in go back out (composting, recycling, etc.)? What happens to the food, organic waste, plastics, containers, wrappings, paper, toilet paper, clothes, water, electricity?
I began to notice my erratic buying habits, too often based on curiosity, inspiration or compulsion. I was shocked to see how my weekly purchases, coming mainly from organic and health food stores, produced a heap of plastic in my recycle bin. Over the years in Montréal, my households have bought vegetables from local farms through Community Supported Agriculture, and we’ve managed to compost without any formal municipal support system. As a vegan raw foodist, I had carefully sleuthed to find the best prices and deals in stores and markets for the considerable fresh produce I consumed. The choice to eat “living” foods was part spiritual practice and part consumer choice to not support the industrialization of foods.
Yet I was still confronted with how much of my diet depended on imports and came in clever packaging, or was mediated through juicers and blenders. Most importantly, I began to feel dislocated from the rhythms of the land I lived on. A strong desire emerged: to more closely connect what went into my body with what was around me in terms of climate, environment and growing seasons.
So the noticing practice took me inward to an inventory of how I could work with what was already present immediately around me. This included inviting my resourceful roommate into the experiment. He was way ahead of me, having already sprouted and planted tomatoes and basil to cover our back balcony. Together, we planted herbs and flowers on the front balcony and “upcycled” the large wooden surface of my desk, carving it to fit our small living room. We used the leftovers and other found wood to build shelving and a kitchen counter.
As I began to think about these seemingly small but conscious choices, the zero waste apartment took on new and surprising dimensions, challenging my ideas about what “waste” means in my life. I saw how every choice I make touches a much larger web of life and destruction between the natural and human worlds. This complexity and interconnectedness was one of the inspirations for starting this experiment in the first place.
a community of practice
Tucked away on the Pelion Peninsula in Greece facing the Aegean Sea is Axladitsa-Ataklavia, Greek for “little pears and things that grow in difficult places.” A wild and nurturing piece of land, rich with organic olive trees anda history of families and companionship, it is stewarded by two formidable women, Maria and Sarah.
In May 2007, I was one of forty people from twelve countries on this land for the annual gathering of the Berkana Exchange. In our own local work, we are each creating the world in which we want to live through new forms of organizing, leadership and community learning based on the wisdom and practices of our local places. As a group, we were experimenting with the life cycle of emergence and how large-scale change happens in the world, beginning as networks, shifting to intentional communities of practice, and evolving into powerful systems of influence. We exchanged our work “translocally” to co-create new practices for sustainability between Zimbabwe, India, South Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico, U S, Canada, Senegal and Greece.
Over the ten days, we created the physical, emotional, spiritual space to meet and explore our work in the world, and to live together and host each other on the land. We offered our hands and skills to Maria and Sarah, leaving practical and lasting impactsfor Axladitsa. We shared and adapted our own renewable and eco-building practices from home. Our days were spent building the foundation for an organic garden, a zero-waste kitchen, composting toilets and a camping area that wouldn’t affect the lush ravine or wild boar breeding grounds. We cooked, prepared and served delicious meals with Maria and Sarah’s generous neighbours and with recipes and the spices brought as gifts from home.
Every day, we worked with our hands, hearts, minds and spirits. We developed the trust to discuss where power lies in our own network and explore how we become a healthy and dynamic self-organizing system
harmony & dissonance
One of the greatest tensions came out in our attempt to practise zero waste as a translocal community. We could compost all of our organic waste except for the toilet paper. The local brand contained bleach, so we could not burn or bury it. Tense discussions about cutting down on use or using the “water method” ensued. In the end, we decided to package the remaining waste and send it into town.
A microcosm of a global reality. Sending out waste for others to deal with. It brought out an insidious dynamic. North American and European countries send a great deal of their waste to southern countries with tragic, toxic results both to humans and the environment. Every year, 20 to 50 million tonnes of electronic and electric waste from items such as computers and cell phones are generated worldwide. It is sent to India and China where women and young workers take them apart by hand. E-waste is a hazardous, booming business; cancer is skyrocketing among the workers because in extracting or reconditioning the parts, chemicals such as mercury, lead, PVC and copper are released into their hands and lungs. When they can no longer work, they are simply replaced. Disposable, like the parts we throw away.
Our experiment in Axladitsa put a magnifying glass to the interconnectedness of our human and ecological systems. It asked us to see how far we were prepared to go to make change in our own lives, with our communities, and in the world. And it came down to the most personal form of waste. In our lives and work, we hope to set an example for sustainability in how we feed ourselves, how we tell the stories of our communities, how we learn, heal, exchange, earn our livelihoods. Then to what degree is it possible to advocate personal change as part of a collective movement if we ourselves cannot succeed?
The issue and image of how we deal with our own discharge was powerful. Will we always have the luxury to send it away? I imagined all the waste that I send away to some other city piled in my backyard or on my balcony. I left Greece with one project to report on for the next gathering: how I would adapt what I learned in this rural and temporary experiment to my own urban living environment.
sacred pace
And so I wonder what success in this zero waste apartment experiment really means to me. Does the carbon-heavy flight to Greece to work in a community of practice on sustainability offset all the small choices I am making in my daily life? I waver between extreme discipline and secret desires to just buy what I want when I want. I realize that even the word“experiment” leaves me a way out. I see how the pace of my life and the way I am in relationship with myself, people and places both invites nourishment and creates refuse.
Zero waste begins to bleed into how I understand time and I imagine what a zero pace might be – a sacred pace that honours stillness and contemplation as essential to manifesting my ideals, and grounding my choices and actions.
Success is living the questions and sitting in the tensions, being in the inquiry, naming my contradictions and making the effort. To be honest with myself, to face myself in the actions and choices of my daily life. To make it a practice, one to which I show up every day. And to be joyful in the discoveries, mindful of the process, clear about my intent.
As the sharp summer sun melts into the rainbow of the harvest, I prepare for my second trip to Axladitsa, one framed by a tragic imbalance. Greece burns. Forest fires are being set intentionally by the greed of so-called “development.” I collect the herbs from my little kitchen garden to dry as an offering to Axladitsa. The sweet crumble and scent of oregano, basil and lavender remind me that the gifts we offer each other from the earth of our lives is the practice of our interconnectivity. It is from here that we become the web of possibility. It is through these relationships that we are held in our commitments to make choices and changes, because we see how we are one in the mirror of reciprocity.
Vanessa Reid practises the yoga of sustainability in her day-to-day life, with organizations, through networks and in communities around the world.
www.vannyfreedom35.blogspot.com
Illustration by Elisabeth Belliveau
Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this article? This process cannot be undone and is permanent.
I am at À Votre Sante organic health food store, filling small plastic bags with organic turmeric and Thai basil while imagining the possibilitiesof dinners to come. I’m also kicking myself because I didn’t think to bring the plastic bags from the last time I purchased spices here. It may seem a minute detail, but I’ve committed to a zero waste apartment experiment and plastic adds up – in the back of my kitchen drawer and in the 10,000 landfill sites across Canada. I know this, and I cringe. So I decide to buy only a few spices this time, and make a mental note to create a clever system so that my daily errands and consumer habits don’t contribute to the stockpile of waste weighing on, seeping into and contaminating the earth.
zero waste at a daily pace
For the past four months, I have been shifting my daily habits to create an urban living environment that generates as little waste as possible. I had imagined what it would look like if I had to literally face my waste. What is my relationship with what I throw away? Statistics tell me that the average Canadian creates his or her body weight in garbage every month. If I had to deal with my own waste, what would my back balcony look like after a week, a year, a decade? What would it smell like? How would it change the way I bought, behaved? In North America, we have little to no relationship with the waste we produce. Our practice is to make it disappear. We send it to other countries, throw it into the earth or burn it into the air. It remains invisible to the eyes of most North American urban dwellers. I wonder if we dealt with our waste differently, would it bring together or disrupt our relationship with neighbours, urban wildlife, and the earth on which we live and which we call home?
I began my “zero waste” experiment with the misguided assumption that I was already a responsible consumer with a fairly small ecological footprint. I used my own shopping bags, took food and water with me every day to avoid foods packaged in styrofoam or plastic and rode my bicycle everywhere. I bought organic and local foods, had few appliances and used locally made eco-biodegradable cleaning products in my home. Yet, I wasn’t nearly as aware of my wasteful habits as I thought.
My zero waste practice began with noticing how I consume. I began to really look at what I bring into the apartment, and what I actually need. What do I buy and support as a consumer? How does that which comes in go back out (composting, recycling, etc.)? What happens to the food, organic waste, plastics, containers, wrappings, paper, toilet paper, clothes, water, electricity?
I began to notice my erratic buying habits, too often based on curiosity, inspiration or compulsion. I was shocked to see how my weekly purchases, coming mainly from organic and health food stores, produced a heap of plastic in my recycle bin. Over the years in Montréal, my households have bought vegetables from local farms through Community Supported Agriculture, and we’ve managed to compost without any formal municipal support system. As a vegan raw foodist, I had carefully sleuthed to find the best prices and deals in stores and markets for the considerable fresh produce I consumed. The choice to eat “living” foods was part spiritual practice and part consumer choice to not support the industrialization of foods.
Yet I was still confronted with how much of my diet depended on imports and came in clever packaging, or was mediated through juicers and blenders. Most importantly, I began to feel dislocated from the rhythms of the land I lived on. A strong desire emerged: to more closely connect what went into my body with what was around me in terms of climate, environment and growing seasons.
So the noticing practice took me inward to an inventory of how I could work with what was already present immediately around me. This included inviting my resourceful roommate into the experiment. He was way ahead of me, having already sprouted and planted tomatoes and basil to cover our back balcony. Together, we planted herbs and flowers on the front balcony and “upcycled” the large wooden surface of my desk, carving it to fit our small living room. We used the leftovers and other found wood to build shelving and a kitchen counter.
As I began to think about these seemingly small but conscious choices, the zero waste apartment took on new and surprising dimensions, challenging my ideas about what “waste” means in my life. I saw how every choice I make touches a much larger web of life and destruction between the natural and human worlds. This complexity and interconnectedness was one of the inspirations for starting this experiment in the first place.
a community of practice
Tucked away on the Pelion Peninsula in Greece facing the Aegean Sea is Axladitsa-Ataklavia, Greek for “little pears and things that grow in difficult places.” A wild and nurturing piece of land, rich with organic olive trees anda history of families and companionship, it is stewarded by two formidable women, Maria and Sarah.
In May 2007, I was one of forty people from twelve countries on this land for the annual gathering of the Berkana Exchange. In our own local work, we are each creating the world in which we want to live through new forms of organizing, leadership and community learning based on the wisdom and practices of our local places. As a group, we were experimenting with the life cycle of emergence and how large-scale change happens in the world, beginning as networks, shifting to intentional communities of practice, and evolving into powerful systems of influence. We exchanged our work “translocally” to co-create new practices for sustainability between Zimbabwe, India, South Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, Mexico, U S, Canada, Senegal and Greece.
Over the ten days, we created the physical, emotional, spiritual space to meet and explore our work in the world, and to live together and host each other on the land. We offered our hands and skills to Maria and Sarah, leaving practical and lasting impactsfor Axladitsa. We shared and adapted our own renewable and eco-building practices from home. Our days were spent building the foundation for an organic garden, a zero-waste kitchen, composting toilets and a camping area that wouldn’t affect the lush ravine or wild boar breeding grounds. We cooked, prepared and served delicious meals with Maria and Sarah’s generous neighbours and with recipes and the spices brought as gifts from home.
Every day, we worked with our hands, hearts, minds and spirits. We developed the trust to discuss where power lies in our own network and explore how we become a healthy and dynamic self-organizing system
harmony & dissonance
One of the greatest tensions came out in our attempt to practise zero waste as a translocal community. We could compost all of our organic waste except for the toilet paper. The local brand contained bleach, so we could not burn or bury it. Tense discussions about cutting down on use or using the “water method” ensued. In the end, we decided to package the remaining waste and send it into town.
A microcosm of a global reality. Sending out waste for others to deal with. It brought out an insidious dynamic. North American and European countries send a great deal of their waste to southern countries with tragic, toxic results both to humans and the environment. Every year, 20 to 50 million tonnes of electronic and electric waste from items such as computers and cell phones are generated worldwide. It is sent to India and China where women and young workers take them apart by hand. E-waste is a hazardous, booming business; cancer is skyrocketing among the workers because in extracting or reconditioning the parts, chemicals such as mercury, lead, PVC and copper are released into their hands and lungs. When they can no longer work, they are simply replaced. Disposable, like the parts we throw away.
Our experiment in Axladitsa put a magnifying glass to the interconnectedness of our human and ecological systems. It asked us to see how far we were prepared to go to make change in our own lives, with our communities, and in the world. And it came down to the most personal form of waste. In our lives and work, we hope to set an example for sustainability in how we feed ourselves, how we tell the stories of our communities, how we learn, heal, exchange, earn our livelihoods. Then to what degree is it possible to advocate personal change as part of a collective movement if we ourselves cannot succeed?
The issue and image of how we deal with our own discharge was powerful. Will we always have the luxury to send it away? I imagined all the waste that I send away to some other city piled in my backyard or on my balcony. I left Greece with one project to report on for the next gathering: how I would adapt what I learned in this rural and temporary experiment to my own urban living environment.
sacred pace
And so I wonder what success in this zero waste apartment experiment really means to me. Does the carbon-heavy flight to Greece to work in a community of practice on sustainability offset all the small choices I am making in my daily life? I waver between extreme discipline and secret desires to just buy what I want when I want. I realize that even the word“experiment” leaves me a way out. I see how the pace of my life and the way I am in relationship with myself, people and places both invites nourishment and creates refuse.
Zero waste begins to bleed into how I understand time and I imagine what a zero pace might be – a sacred pace that honours stillness and contemplation as essential to manifesting my ideals, and grounding my choices and actions.
Success is living the questions and sitting in the tensions, being in the inquiry, naming my contradictions and making the effort. To be honest with myself, to face myself in the actions and choices of my daily life. To make it a practice, one to which I show up every day. And to be joyful in the discoveries, mindful of the process, clear about my intent.
As the sharp summer sun melts into the rainbow of the harvest, I prepare for my second trip to Axladitsa, one framed by a tragic imbalance. Greece burns. Forest fires are being set intentionally by the greed of so-called “development.” I collect the herbs from my little kitchen garden to dry as an offering to Axladitsa. The sweet crumble and scent of oregano, basil and lavender remind me that the gifts we offer each other from the earth of our lives is the practice of our interconnectivity. It is from here that we become the web of possibility. It is through these relationships that we are held in our commitments to make choices and changes, because we see how we are one in the mirror of reciprocity.
Vanessa Reid practises the yoga of sustainability in her day-to-day life, with organizations, through networks and in communities around the world.
www.vannyfreedom35.blogspot.com
Illustration by Elisabeth Belliveau
Are you absolutely sure you want to delete this article? This process cannot be undone and is permanent.
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