Reflections from the Journey

Not long ago I was much like most Americans fueling up my vehicles with gasoline, taking my kids to the fast food drive-thru’s,  buying my food at the grocery store, spray fertilizing & weeding my lawn, etc. without much of a second thought.  I did want to conserve energy a bit (& save $$$ a lot!) so I grew a few tomatoes & cucumbers in the summer, kept the thermostat set cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer, watched the “green” shows on HGTV, went hiking and photographing in the woods, fed the birds (& squirrels!) in my yard, I joined the National Wildlife Federation.  Heck, I was even using CFL’s in many of my lamps!  I was “going green” like most folks.  I was no “tree huggin’ environmental wacko,” but I was doing my part.

Now, I’m not saying that any of those things I did to “go green” was wrong, in fact I encourage people to do them.  Please don’t think that I am standing up on some pedestal or sitting up on a “high horse” looking down on anyone.  What I am is a person on a journey that just may be a little bit further along the trail than many, but still lagging behind many others.  I’m here to offer what little guidance and insight I can to what lies ahead if you decide to undertake a similar journey.

Though I would say that God has been preparing the trail for me throughout my life , we can take a look at where I began to tread this particular section of trail:

Even though I have considered myself a nature photographer for about 10 years or so, I really wasn’t very knowledgeable about the health of our environment nor did I really care to learn.  Sure I wanted to keep nature pretty (so I could photograph it!) and didn’t like things like litter (it isn’t pretty), but my UBER-conservative political views told me that ideals like “the free market” and “personal property rights” would take care of things and that the “environment” was the political playground of those bleeding heart liberals and their silly theory of “global warming.”  I believed that this world was created for us to use however we saw fit.  I was even part of an organization that lobbied to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol.

Again, I don’t tell you this to sway you toward any political party or even to say that either of our current major political parties are “right or wrong” or “good or evil”.  In fact, though I will write more about this another time, I will tell you that I think that our current system is a mess and that both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party no longer serve “We, the People.”  I write this to give you some background and to encourage you no matter where your political views may lie to listen (well, read) carefully to what I have to say because I have no political agenda.  The only master I serve now is God (and I’m sure He even finds me quite uncooperative at times.)  So now that you know that I was once a part of  “the vast right-wing conspiracy” we can get on to the pertinent details.

A few years back my ever so beautiful and patient wife, Kristie, was diagnosed with celiac disease.  If you are thinking, “What’s that?” then you know exactly how I felt.  Celiac is basically an allergy to wheat gluten and can really mess up a person’s intestines.  That diagnosis led me , the family grocery shopper and cook, to start looking at the ingredient labels on all of our food.  If you’ve never looked closely at the ingredients in the foods you buy, I can tell you that it is an eye opening experience.  There is a lot of “stuff” put into our food that we wouldn’t choose to put in there ourselves.

Not long after I started paying more attention to the food we ate, the price of gasoline skyrocketed to nearly $4 a gallon.  This caused me to look at my driving habits and make some pretty severe changes.  Having 3 children in carseats we had bought a 4-door Jeep Wrangler accommodate the entire family, but while about as efficient as most minivans it certainly wasn’t fun to fill up.  Errands were consolidated and I took far fewer trips to the mountains (& far fewer photos).

Consolidating errands especially shopping errands got me thinking a lot about my spending habits.  Looking at my spending habits during a period of high fuel prices got me thinking about where the products I bought originated.  That in turn got me thinking about the materials of which the products made.  And so on.  I started examining everything I bought and even the consumer mindset that drove me to buy them.  This last discovery linked up with another inward journey I had been undertaking.  More on that tomorrow…..