What If We Had a Year of Jubilee?
December 17, 2008
by Ariah Fine
The Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) is one of the most radical things I’ve come across in the Bible. It’s one of those passages non-Christians should know and ask all the Christians they talk to about, and expect some sort of a response regarding it. The Year of Jubilee is many things, but one thing it is in particular is a time for all debts to be forgiven, and everyone to have a fresh start. Could you imagine this happening? It’s supposed to happen about once every 50 years, so let’s just say, oh 2009 happens to be the next Jubilee Year. What would happen if this was carried out on an Individual Level? Church? City? Country? World?
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Plastic Bags vs. Cloth Bags
August 6, 2008
Seems like everywhere I turn people are lamenting the impact of the plastic bags available at the grocery store. It’s not that they don’t have good reason to. It’s estimated that we as a global society use nearly one million plastic bags a minute. Besides using 12 million barrels of oil in the US to make those bags, it’s estimated nearly 100,000 marine animals die each year when they mistake plastic bags for food. Whether it’s the statistics or the ‘green’ trend that’s caused a shift, one thing is clear, everyone is jumping on. Nearly every store has reusable bags in their aisles, companies give them away as door prizes, and everyone and their mother are picking up two or three at the checkout.
What has amazed me is that I haven’t heard anyone acknowledge the irony in this. We critique the rampant consumerism and environmental degradation of plastic grocery bags that fill landfills, waste energy, and acknowledge our disposable society, and our answer to that problem: Buy something. Buy a bag, a nice pretty canvas tote with trendy design and take it to the grocery store and show it off.
While we think we’ve done some great act for the environment, we’ve in some ways simply traded one consumable product for another. We need to think more critically about this. We need to raise some questions about our consumerism and think hard about our choices:
1. Is plastic bad? If you think it is and should be used in moderation, then we need to make a serious effort to reduce our use of plastic across the board, not just shopping bags. And may I suggest we do this buy purchasing non-plastic products when it’s necessary to buy something new, but even better, simply buy used.
2. Can you reuse your plastic bags? Since moving out of my parents home I have never spent a dime on trash bags. Instead, we’ve used those dreaded plastic grocery bags as our kitchen, bathroom and other trash can liners. We also used reused them to get our groceries time and again until we accumulated enough cloth bags for our shopping. I use the plastic bags to store dirty cloth diapers when we are on the go. And if we had a dog, I’d be using the bags for clean up there too.
My goal is not to discourage anyone from using cloth bags, but to think more critically about our purchasing and lifestyle, rather then simply following the trends, even if they are ‘green’ trends. Personally, I use cloth bags quite often for groceries. It’s been fun to see the change in attitude in the checkout line at the grocery store. We used to walk to the store with a couple backpacks and a cloth bag and when checking out we’d tell them we were going to bag it ourselves in our own bags and we’d get very strange looks. Now it’s not that big of a deal. We’ve reduced our trash output so much that I don’t need many plastic bags for that anymore either.
If your going to purchase cloth bags make sure they are environmentally friendly and fair trade. And if someone’s got a more creative way to collect trash then plastic trash bags I’d like to hear it.
Ariah Fine lives in North Minneapolis with his beautiful wife and daughter. He is a blogger, community organizer, and author of Giving Up.
