10 Pathways of Just & Sustainable Lifestyles

10 Pathways of Just & Sustainable Lifestyles

1. Nurture blessings and hope in your own life and in the life of your community. Promote solidarity and cooperation. Don't leave the anybody behind for the wolves to devour.

2. Grow some of your own food. Plant fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other perennial food crops. Preserve heirloom varieties of plants and animals. Buy as much food as possible from local farmers and local processors. Encourage schools and churches to start gardens. Avoid meats, eggs, and poultry from the giant hog, feedlot, and chicken house "Confined Animal Feeding Operation". Look for local meats produced with sustainable and humane practices. Do your part to help develop a local food system.

3. Use energy frugally. Walk, take public transportation, or ride a bicycle wherever possible. Super insulate your dwelling and avoid air conditioning as much as possible. Use less stuff, use less energy, have more money.

4. Practice personal detachment from material goods. Reduce, reuse, recycle, repair, make do, do without. Patronize the aftermarket in places like swap meets, thrift stores, and flea markets. Avoid new stuff as much as possible, don't buy new clothing made in sweatshops, limit your consumption of resources, including water.

5. The borrower is the slave of the lender. Flee the bondage of debt. If you must borrow money for education or housing, pay it off as quickly as you can, make extra principle payments on loans. Never finance frivolous consumption with borrowed money on credit cards.

6. Learn many things. Practice many skills. Teach others.

7. Accept responsibility for your own life, but understand your interdependence with others and the importance of community. Be aware of your environment and how your lifestyle impacts the community and world you live in and other people. "What I do doesn't matter" is a lie we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel better about doing wrong. Watch out for dangers and disasters that may be ahead, and act in advance to mitigate the impact of such events. The Bible says, "Remember the time of hunger in the day of plenty." The time to build the cellar is before the tornado hits. It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.

8. Avoid big box corporation stores and franchise chains. Buy from local businesses and if possible earn a living and spend your money outside of the corporation dominated globalized economy. Organize cooperatives and start small businesses to replace unsustainable globalized business structures. Keep your money in a credit union.

9. Support political and voluntary initiatives that promote sustain-ability and resilience, such as public transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy resources, small farms, decentralized economics, balanced government budgets, and local markets.

10. Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Don't attempt too much at first. Set goals and meet them. Be willing to start small, or it is likely you will never start at all. But beware of procrastination.

RMW

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