What is Sustainable Living?

If you've stumbled across this page, chances are you are interested in sustainable living. One of my main reasons for creating the Green Kind is to create a community of like minded people and to share ideas about living in a more eco-friendly and sustainable way. But first of all it helps to know a little bit more about sustainability in general, why it's needed and what it means for us as individuals.

In this post, I will talk about some key points to do with sustainable living and why it's important.

What is Sustainability?

Sustainability means doing something that meets the needs of the current situation without compromising the available resources for the future. Essentially, to live sustainably is to make lifestyle choices that only use the necessary resources - conserving them for future generations.

Businesses and government bodies often refer to sustainable development as being a large part of their economic plans to make changes whilst being mindful of natural resources. There are three element of sustainable development, also know as the three P's. Each of these three factors must be balanced to ensure sustainability:

1. People (social) - the needs of individuals must be met

2. Planet (environment) - ensuring natural resources are not wasted and the environement is not damaged

3. Profit (economic) - resources are used efficiently and processes work in a sustainable way to produce profit without causing harm.

But, what does that actually mean for us?

Individuals can play a big part in supporting sustainable development by adopting elements of a sustainable lifestyle. We can do this by:

• Reducing waste (recycling or reusing)

• Reducing our consumption (not buying more than we need or using less water or energy).

We can also get involved in helping to make businesses more sustainable by using our purchasing power to choose businesses that have a more established environmentally friendly record.

Embrace Sustainable Living: Getting Started Guide

Why does it matter?

It's no secret that our climate is changing. The years of burning non-renewable fossil fuels for energy, production of consumable goods and the discarding of waste that goes nowhere (hello plastic!!) has led to a warming effect. Ultimately, sustainable development is essential if we want to fight the effects of climate change and ensure that future generations can have enough resources too.

I have tried to be a little neutral with the above paragraph but it is hard to do. By no means is this meant to be acusatory but we are, as a species, responsible for the wellbeing of our planet because, by extension, this means being responsible for our own wellbeing. It's hard to understand the current benefits to sustainable living when some of are just trying to get by. Ultimately though, living sustainably and contributing to a better environment should help to lower the cost of the things we buy. We will buy less overall, investments in Green Energy will bring down the cost of electricity as we will be less reliant on oil and gas.

There is a lot to do but thankfully it's not all on us to do it. It is on us to, at the very least, to be a little more conscious of how we impact the world around us. If we all can make just one small change, that's enough.