"We cannot realistically expect most people to choose sustainable options if they appear to be more difficult or expensive..." (Roseland, pg. 31).

Hands down, I'm one of the cheapest people you'll ever meet.  My dad was a Depression-era baby and grew up crazy poor, so cleaning your plate after you're very full, sitting in the dark unless you're reading (because glasses are more expensive than electricity), and turning off the water when you shave your legs was (I thought) what everybody did.  We had an amazing garden, but it wasn't because it was healthy or the flowers were pretty.  It was free food, and child labor didn't count (trust me, that tactic was tried many times).  Need furniture, kitchen appliances, clothes?  Hello Salvation Army.  Buying a school lunch instead of packing one was considered an outrageous frivolty.  I could go on, but it's really endless and I don't want to bore you (too late).  As a kid, I didn't really get on the family thrift-wagon until I started getting an allowance, at which point the world in terms of property ownership and cost for services became all too real for me.  And I became monstrously cheap.

So you can imagine when I stumbled upon the concept of sustainability it was like discovering the holy grail.  It was a whole group of people/way of life/economic system based on ideas like zero waste, systems design in production (see http://zeri.org/ZERI/Home.html and http://www.interfaceglobal.com/), and reduced/smart consumption.  And an extra special bonus was all this "thriftiness" helped out all the green things and fuzzy critters that I hold so near and dear.  For a cheapskate with a sweet spot for nature, it was love at first sight, like Dorothy coming home to Kansas.

But wait! There are some caviats.  Sustainable development ain't free.  There's investment required in things like organic agriculture (but it's so much easier to throw pesticides on it and over-irrigate), green building, alternative fuel sources, renewable energy infrastructure.  This is going to cost alot of money for alot of people, which means some big decisions must be made.

That brings me to the line that every cheapskate must come to in their life: when their thrifty ethic comes up against other ethics.  Just because I can get something for free (clean air and water) or make somebody else pay for it (environmental externalities) doesn't mean it's okay.  If you were in industry, and you could dump effluence into a river for free (and get away with it) versus disposing of it properly for a fee, would you do the right thing?  Leopold said "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (Wheeler, pg. 28).  When no one is looking, which ethic wins?  And more importantly, how much will it cost to do so?

I don't know about you, but I don't want the health of the ecosystem to depend on whether that industry guy chooses the bottom line over the bottom of the river.  I struggle enough with this issue (cheap vs good) on a much smaller level of finance, so I can imagine it would be difficult.  Not everyone was blessed with cheapskate parents that also happen to have an ethic towards other living things (I got that) and also towards people (I'm working on this).  So let's make the decision easy for him: creat incentives that make it cheap to be good to the environment.  We've got a government for a reason, create policies that encourage good behavior.  Did somebody say "Pigovian subsidy"?

You know what? I feel a little sorry for these industry guys sometimes.  I bet it's hard to make costly, "environmental" changes to the way you do business when you've been getting by on the cheap for so long.  But not that sorry.

So the next time I'm in the grocery store agonizing over whether or not to buy the more expensive, organic carrots I'll not feel so guilty when I go the cheap route.  Because once I get a "big girl" job that comes with some political/economic sway, I am going to work as hard as I can and dedicate all my time and brains to making the world as sustainably affordable as possible.  And that (thank GOD) is priceless.