The Daily Voting Booth

“…the cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism. We don’t have to buy products that destroy or from companies that harm or are unresponsive. If we want business to express a full range of social and environmental values in their daily commercial activities, then we, too, will have to express a full range of values and respond to the presence or absence of principle by how we act in the marketplace.” –Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce.

Political elections often have critical implications, and we pay an awful lot of attention to them, but Hawken’s words are dead-on. Formal voting is an occasional event, but the real voting, whether we realize it or not, takes place on a daily basis. The decisions we make as individuals affect our collective well-being just as surely as those made in the Oval Office.

We apparently have a lot to complain and worry about a lot in a world seemingly controlled by big governments and big corporations, but it’s our own actions that helped create and continue to foster these unpleasant realities. The things we buy. What we eat. How we use energy. These seemingly private choices all have very real impacts on the world:

• Participating in rampant, excessive consumerism is voting for continued degradation of the earth, its resources, and oftentimes its people. Buying a lot of unnecessary crap may stimulate the economy, but it’s definitely not stimulating any positive gains for humanity.

• Eating a lot of cheap, processed foods is a vote for unsustainable agricultural practices. Despite what it seems like, that seemingly harmless McDonald’s meal didn’t appear out of thin air upon your ordering it. The harms that result from industrialized agriculture are tremendous in scale (The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an great book on this subject). Suddenly French fries don’t sound nearly as appealing…

• Using an excessive amount of fossil fuel for home and transportation is to vote for energy instability and environmental harm. What irks me about this one is that the energy-gluttonous among us seem to be the first to complain about high gas prices. Is it just me, or is that hypocrisy at its finest?

“Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.” Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.

This is something I need to consistently remind myself of. It’s an easy concept to grasp but far tougher to put in practice on a daily basis. I consider this a public reminder to myself to work on doing just that.