One of my favourite T-shirts during my undergrad years was a pink one with tiny printed stick figure dolls in different yoga poses. I often wore it to college, and once it started wearing out, promoted it to the nightwear section of my wardrobe. It made a brief stint in public once again during a particularly messy Holi, after which the stick figures faded behind the stubborn blue-green battle scars of water balloons.
My favourite pink tee was granted a new lease of life when my mother found it, tucked behind clothes which I still hope will fit me one day but probably won’t. It now proudly occupies a spot in the corner of my balcony and continues to live on as my mother’s current favourite pocha. Similarly, an old cotton dress of mine has been cut up into several parts, each now repurposed as a dusting cloth, a kitchen countertop wiper, and other things.
As the climate crisis escalates and the world plunges into one horrific natural disaster after another, it has become imperative that we find alternatives that can reverse the damage or at least, put a stop to it. Sustainability has emerged as a popular alternative to our current lifestyle that continues to fuel climate change. In the west, social media influencers have emerged as experts of sustainable living – whether it is advocating for veganism, opting for all things organic or appropriating the practices of indigenous and marginalised communities.
However, much of our understanding of sustainability today is still very much rooted in consumerism and comes from a perspective that appears to be increasingly capitalism-friendly. It remains an exercise that continues to see every individual as a potential buyer, much like the free market. As sustainable lifestyle blogger Alden Wicker wrote in an article published by Quartz, “Conscious consumerism is a lie.”
In an economy which thrives on consumption, it is a Sisyphean task to reverse the harmful effects of consumption with…more consumption. In the article, Alden cites several studies to back up their claims, one of them being a 2012 one which found that there was no meaningful difference in the carbon footprints of consumers who make “eco-friendly” choices and those who don’t. Turns out the vegan, cruelty free makeup I bought that came in cute, recyclable packaging was not going to save the planet.
Also read: Lockdown: An Opportunity to Revisit Good-Old Sustainability
Sure, thrifting your clothes is a fun way of saving the environment and has now become a multibillion dollar industry, but sooner or later the secondhand fast-fashion clothes still end up remaining in landfills for years. On the other hand, the biggest reason why sustainability – the way it is marketed by the west – remains so out of reach for most of us is because of how expensive sustainable products actually are. The movement has been deemed elitist by many, and rightfully so. Of course, it isn’t logical to pin the blame on well-meaning individuals when big corporations themselves refuse to take accountability for their actions. But having said that, I do believe that our individual actions can have an impact if we were to shift our focus from consumerism to a different approach.
This is where Eco Chic Podcast’s idea of “ugly sustainability” comes in. Eco Chic is a podcast hosted by Laura E. Diez where she talks about a lifestyle that isn’t centred on sustainable buying for the purpose of aesthetic fulfilment or being glamorous and trendy, but rather on ways of reducing waste and consumption. “It’s about using things until there’s no life left in it,” says Diez, while talking about the definition of sustainability that she grew up with in her Cuban household in America.
This compels me to think of the ways in which our mothers and grandmothers have been practicing sustainability through various tricks and hacks they employed around the household to be less wasteful. In Bengali cuisine, we have a variety of dishes that are made using parts of food items that normally get discarded during the process of cooking, like alur khoshar torkari (a dish made with potato peels), and similar dishes made with the peels of bottle gourd, plantain, cauliflower stems, etc. I’ve heard from my mother how my grandmother would often take a bit of butter and apply it on her hands during winter to moisturise them. Mustard oil used to be another favourite alternative to body lotions in Bengali households, but I believe Bath and Body Works has a much better fragrance.
Also read: What Growing up in an Indian Middle-Class Household Taught Me About Sustainability
My mother still repurposes coffee jars as spice containers and uses takeaway boxes to store leftovers. My grand aunt prides herself in her ability to make her own plant fertiliser with vegetable waste. During winter, my aunt’s balcony is studded with orange peels drying in the sun – she makes homemade face-packs by mixing them with a host of other readily available ingredients from the kitchen. I think these amazingly innovative and surprisingly sustainable jugaads also stem from the ways in which South Asian women have been socialised into the roles of wife and mother. From a very young age, they’re trained to be the masters of the hearth, with an easy homemade fix for all possible problems. I think this ability of our foremothers to be less wasteful was perhaps driven by a sense of frugality as well, considering how women don’t have the kind of financial power that their male counterparts do.
These tricks and hacks have been passed down through generations from one woman to the next, from one sewing-box-masquerading-as-a-cookie-tin to the other, creating its own oral tradition of sustainability that isn’t nearly as attractive enough to be appropriated by white women on Instagram who are self-proclaimed experts of sustainability. These aspects of our culture are in themselves acts of environmental conservation that do not catch the attention of mainstream western media.
Sanjukta Bose is currently pursuing a Masters degree in English, and, yet, is terrible at writing bios.