Chapter 4. What is the impact of your financial decisions on the environment?

Believe it or not, having too many choices can hinder or impair our decision-making ability. Think of your weekly grocery shopping, you are presented with tens and sometimes hundreds of options for a particular product. Yes, the market is giving you choices. However, your pressed time and the other things you have to do are forcing you to make a decision quickly so you can finish and leave the store. Every financial decision can impact the environment. Those unnecessarily heavily packaged vegetables you picked up last week could create a plastic choking hazard for birds flying over a shore or a dump site. Those water bottles you purchased because you did not trust your tap for drinking water could end up in a landfill if not recycled into polyester fiber for a carpet or a rug.

 

How to

You can protect the environment simply by questioning the impact of every financial decision you make in your daily life. Should you continue your familiar practice or invest your money and energy in alternate solutions? Here are a few examples of what you can do. You can add additional items to the list each time you make a new financial decision.

• Continue to buy bottled water OR install a filtering water system on your water tap?
  • Consider advocating keeping our water resources and rivers clean.
• Continue to buy heavily packaged food supplies OR find stands for farmers markets in your local town?
  • Consider participating in a community garden project or grow a vegetable garden in your backyard.
• Continue to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere using gas vehicles OR invest in an electric car?
  • Consider compensating by participating in projects to offset such pollution in the air such as investing in clean energy sources.
• Continue to live in a house that wastes energy OR invest in energy-conserving equipment and machinery? 
  • Consider installing energy reducing windows and doors or use environmentally friendly flooring, carpets, rugs, and furniture.

 

Practice

Now you know how your daily financial decisions impact the environment. Think of paying it forward and discuss your ideas with a friend or a family member.

 

Congratulations! You can move on to Chapter 5. Ways to help save money and protect the environment

To review the full module on Environmental Stewardship, click here.