The tiny trailer house I lived in as a kid was about as wide as the length of a bed. When my parents folded out the sleeper sofa in the living room for my sister and me, the head of the bed touched the west side, and the foot hit the east side.
The kitchen was so small that we couldn’t open the refrigerator after we folded out the leaf on our table for meals. Whenever the washing machine was unbalanced, the whole house shook.
Now I live in a house six times as big as that home, and still the closets are crammed, cabinets are full to bursting, and we have to pick our way through mountains of things in the basement.
I look around our cluttered house and think, “How did my parents do it?” And the answer comes: We just have lots more stuff. It’s mostly stuff that we don’t really need. Three-quarters of our storage is filled with stuff that we bought because it was cheap, stuff we might need once a decade, and stuff we have just forgotten.
It’s not just my family. The whole nation has twice as much stuff as we did in 1957. The average home size has doubled, from 1,100 square feet in the 1960s to 2,300 square feet today. According to the 2005 Census, 26 percent of Colorado homes have four or more bedrooms — the third-highest rate in the nation.
We need the space to store our stuff. I recently read about a woman who had amassed 40 coats and stuffed them into a hall closet. She admitted she found it easier to just buy new towels than to search for the ones she had stored in that closet.
Each week, Americans spend six hours shopping and only 40 minutes playing with our children.
What do we do now, faced with all this stuff? We gather it in bags — McDonald’s toys, unwanted T-shirts, old electronics — and throw it away. And in two months, we have just as much again. Each American generates 4.5 pounds of garbage per day. In Colorado, that adds up 21 million pounds of stuff, the weight of more than 3 million Hummers every day. It’s a national binge-and-purge cycle.
“Wait a minute,” you might say. “I recycle. Surely that counts for something.” Indeed, it does. According to the 2006 “State of Garbage in America,” 28.5 percent of our waste is recycled or composted. However, that still leaves 61.5 percent which is either burned or placed in a landfill.
We have consumed one-third of the Earth’s resources in the last three decades alone. By the time my daughter is my age, we will have consumed at least two-thirds of the Earth’s resources. Even now, we have destroyed 96 percent of America’s forests, and 40 percent of our water is undrinkable.
What am I supposed to tell my daughter when she has children of her own? That we turned the planet into a trash heap because it seemed more important to get a cool new flat-screen monitor? That it was easier to throw out the shower curtain and get a new one than to clean it?
It is possible to live a life less obsessed with gathering and discarding stuff. We simply need to buy less stuff. We can start by going shopping only when we need something. We can cut down enormously on our need for natural resources, energy and space by foregoing the knickknacks, tchotchkes, and “newer and better” stuff that we just don’t need.
It’s time to pay attention to the “Reduce” part of the mantra “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”
Reducing is a hard thing to do in a consumer-driven culture. Refraining from buying stuff when it is all so cheap seems un-American.
Yet, it is time for us to start showing our children how to consider the entire ecological costs of our purchases. If our country keeps consuming at our current rate, it will serve them well to know how to consume less.
For their generation, it will be a necessity, not a choice.
