consuming | personal

My personal interest in promoting sustainable living and responsible consumption of resources stems from my avid traveling in my childhood which opened my eyes to the disparity in lifestyles of myself and my fellow Americans to those in different cultures around the world. As a child, I remember my mother dragging me out of the Four Seasons Mall crying because she would not let me buy the new brown loafers I thought I could not live without. Or the plastic ladybug earrings and matching sock set that I thought was crucial to sustain my existence. At the time, all my 10-yr-old thoughts were, "Why can't I be like the other 4th graders, with their cute bows, shiny shows, and name brand backpacks?" The answer was always, "You don't need another pair of shoes, you have one already." My mother was notoriously thrifty; I wore second hand clothing, my brother and I wore the same pair of shoes until they had holes in them, and in the fall, we never got to buy new school supplies, one of the few consolations for actually having to go back to school. It wasn't until a number of years later, I realized that my family was not poor, but simply did not place value on things and chose to spend money on other things--most importantly, my brother's and my education. My father was very concerned on making sure our world perspective was not limited to the small North Carolina town we lived in. Though he claimed we didn't have enough money to replace the dilapidated car that consistently broke down ever month, my family would visit a new place in the world each year. Paris, Cairo, Madrid, Singapore, Hong Kong were among the many selected destinations.

The trips opened our eyes, warped our perspectives, and challenged our assumptions. My father brought us to the slums of each city, among them, the dirty streets of Cairo and the ancient medina in Fez and Marrakech where people as if it were thousands of years ago without plumbing, central heating, or family entertainment centers. The beggars in the streets would swarm us for the Doritos and Cheetos Snack bags we would hand out as if we were relief workers. An image that will always be cemented in my mind is of my brother holding a coke in one hand and an ice cream cone in another while a young boy of the same age, looked longingly. I would come back from these experiences with an entirely different perspective on my own life and the people around me; the items in my life which were important before, suddenly seemed so trivial. And then I forgot it. I attended a private school and begged my mother for designer jeans. As I began to grow up, I started to understand. In my mind, I constantly juxtaposed people and situations around me with the image of the small Moroccan boy. I became fascinated with a culture that had the capability to skew our ability to determine what we needed to survive and be content.

Many years later, I began working closely with social justice advocates in a small non-profit in North Carolina. Immersed in this community, I began to discover many injustices in my own neighborhood I never knew existed. Working with many inhabitants of low-income housing projects, I saw direct effects of jobs lost to cheaper overseas labor, further widening the gap of the rich and poor in our own communities. As I began to learn more, I realized that my relationship with consumer culture to be more than a personal one, but one that effected many others, on a massive global scale. Experiencing this firsthand alerted me to the problem, which I began to see lay much deeper than a simple difference between rich and poor communities, but rather in an ingrained mindset of a culture that has been "programmed" to consume and buy blindly without regards to consequences which inevitably ensue.