Eileen's Low Impact Commitment

It's one of those assignments that some people get excited about and others question the relevance of. For me, I think it's a cool idea, yet I ultimately see it as overly time consuming due to Senior Expedition and trying to pass math. Despite my personal thoughts on this assignment I'm giving it my best and trying to make the most of it. That's why for my low impact challenge I have chosen to: Eat only local and organic foods, work to conserve both water and paper and try to break the cycle of consumerism by only buying necessities.
Eating organic and local food has been something that I have advocated for since I returned from Woolman, where we were on a strictly vegetarian and organic diet. We also focused a lot on water conservation at Woolman, having time-limited showers and allotted amounts of water for things like watering the gardens and washing the dishes. Choosing to try to conserve paper comes from the massive amounts of paper that this school wastes daily. It's sad but I'm glad Mrs. Plath has found a way to reuse some of it. Last but certainly not least, my decision to try to cut back on consumerism had a much more selfish reason behind it. (In complete honesty.) Not only is consumerism a disturbing problem around the world, but I thought that if I tried to cut back on consumerism for a school project, I could force myself to stop spending money and save more than I would otherwise to put into my car fund.

I started the challege yesterday when I left school with a trip to the Greenfield Co-op. I knew that my famioy didn't have anything local or organic in our fridge or cupboards so I knew I had to go grocery shopping if I wanted to do this. Since buying things that were local and organic was necessity for the success of my challenge, I didn't see it as unecessisary consumerism. Other than that, I went back to time-limited showers starting at 10 minutes. (This will decrease over time.) In a strange move, I pulled the sheets, blankets and pillows off my bed and replaced it with my sleeping bag. This is partly because I can wash my sleeping bag less often than I would wash and change my sheets and pillow cases. Also, My sleeping bag is not machine washable, you have to hand soak it in water. This way I cut down on water from the washing machine. (The other part of that was I missed sleeping in my sleeping bag, which I slept in every night at woolman.)
So everything is in place and ready to go! It's been fun so far, but we will see how long it takes to start waring on me. The blogging everyday part will be the hardest part of this project I think for me. I'm terrible at keeping up with things on a day to day basis, which is why I failed at keeping a diary when I was little. We will see where this leads me...hopefully it's somewhere good.