Eco audit: on the outside, looking in

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the time of my teens, a few key things happened that put eco-wheels in motion for me.

For one, I went to places where eco was made accessible, possible – and carried out as a mainstream way of living.

I went to other places where life was still familiar, but noticeably different. Simpler. Challenging in some ways, freeing in others. When I came back to the UK, it was to look at it afresh – and decide what I liked, and what actually bothered me quite a lot.

I’ll tell you the story of the mini pink doughnuts, because that summed up for me what was not working in the society I saw as home.

I came back from Poland, and although it was good to be back, it was also hard work.  At one point, I went to the big supermarket in town with mum.  Reasonable activity, but a bad move for me.

I felt overwhelmed – rows of products, massive amounts of choice. Did we need a whole aisle of breakfast cereals? Where did all these things come from, anyway?

At some point on our journey round the supermarket, I came across a fresh baking section. In it was a box of mini doughnuts. (I have a feeling ring doughnuts were less familiar in the UK at that time, so they stood out.)

Each doughnut seemed to be individually wrapped.  And then the whole lot were packaged together in something like a large see-through egg box. And the doughnuts were pink and sprinkled and whatever else it is people do to doughnuts.

I recoiled from it. That sounds over the top when I write about it now (particularly when others are ooing and ahing about the arrival of Krispy Kreme doughnuts close to home). But it was all too much – about three times over.

I queried what the society I knew had been doing when I had been away for only half a year. Who had come up with these ultra-packaged – and, to me, unnecessary – items? Why, equally, were others buying them? (And what was going to happen to all that packaging after the few moments of eating?)

Despite being back for only a few days, I took up an offer to go away again for a few. I went for walks, smelled the sea, and got some simplicity back again. And I continued to think about it all after I came back.

It’s become one of those things about gap years: that you learn about life by seeing how others live. But the other side of the coin is the equally powerful aspect of seeing your own culture afresh when you come home.

If we’re lucky, we can have this form of stopping short, and questioning, through an engagement with the alternative. I chose to be vegetarian because of reading a book that impacted me strongly – and managed to follow through on my response.

But as life goes on, our ways of living, our habits, become more and more fixed. We stop questioning what is around us, and those moments where we can see something afresh – they may not become fewer, but we tend to forget to look for them. To stop in them.  To take in what we are learning.

So sometimes it takes a bigger change to offer that impact. I may not be able to spare six months to live abroad again, to reconsider what my society is like.

But I have now had several months of living in a different way in my own home (thanks to the building project). And the longer I live with things being different, the more I wonder about what I really need, what can still work even if it’s different.

Giving yourself a new start can also allow you to change. With a ‘new’ room, there is the opportunity to live in new ways. To organise life differently – and make different choices.

I didn’t expect to see my society differently through living abroad – but it happened anyway. I didn’t expect to read a book that changed what I wanted to eat, overnight, but that happened too.

Sometimes, the significant thing seems to be staying open, in a new experience, not just to what we think we are taking in on the surface, but also the deeper messages that come through.