Afternoon tea.

One of my neighbours has seven exterior lights on his house. I know this because I walk past it twice a day. The lights are on day and night, twenty-four seven. I'm pretty sure they are incandescent bulbs, mainly because they have burned out several times over the past twelve months. They also appear to be brighter than the standard compact florescent. Out of idle curiosity, I did the math. The lights probably use 420 watts per hour. That's a staggering 10,080 watts every twenty-four hours. Even though the winter nights are long here on the prairie, the days are still bright enough that exterior lights are virtually useless. During the summer, lights before ten or eleven at night are unnecessary.

Every time I walk past this house, I find myself considering a number of issues. Has the owner not heard about the movement toward conservation of resources? Have the people living in that house never read an article on light pollution? The use of electricity isn't creating emissions in their face, but it is ultimately polluting their backyard. Don't they care? The average cost of electricity here is sixteen cents per kilowatt hour. These lights are probably costing in the neighbourhood of fifty dollars per month. Are they that wealthy? And if so, does money alone automatically give them the right to waste our natural resources?

The same things cross my mind when I'm forced to run the gauntlet of diesel pickups left idling outside the grocery store. Some communities are passing laws prohibiting this behaviour. The primary issue for this is of course air pollution. People today are super-concerned about global warming. But what about simple waste? Do we not have a responsibility to each other to not waste our natural resources?

Our natural resources are finite, but in the last five decades, we have been using them up at a phenomenal rate. It's almost as though we expected to soon be mining other planets in the solar system. We are being urged to consume – in fact, we are labelled 'the consumer' – almost from infancy, with no regard for the consequences. As a result, most of us have accumulated so much 'stuff' that storing 'stuff' is becoming a major issue in our daily lives.

When I look at the collapse of yesterday's economy, I wonder if part of the reason was simply that it had become so massively over-productive it was no longer sustainable. We had devised methods of producing more faster, and an elite few became obscenely rich because of it. As difficult as this may be to accept, it's important to remember it could not have happened without our complete co-operation.

Our society appeared to be wealthy, but was it? We might each have had ten pairs of shoes in our closets, but most of them were so cheaply made they fell apart in a matter of weeks. We accepted quantity in place of quality, and someone else's definition of convenience, at an insidious cost. As a society we have been so systematically conditioned to believe we had to have all that 'stuff' that we surrendered our quality of life without a struggle. We all may have had the latest 'in' thing, but we didn't have any time to spend with our families and friends.

The current downturn in the economy gives us a perfect opportunity to change. As we try to find ways to reduce our expenses, we can also reduce the waste. Some of us will find an old tee shirt works just fine as a dust cloth; that a re-useable mop and water still works on the floor. Others will rediscover the comfort of a decent pair of shoes. If you can only afford to buy one, you can insist on better quality, and buy the best you can afford. If we all take this stance, if we all refuse to accept the cheap junk that was a standard in the majority of yesterday's stores, the colossal waste that once defined our society will become a thing of the past. And as we all learn that we really can get along with less, we'll get back the simple pleasure of spending time with family and friends.