Living On A Smaller Scale

My family and I just returned from a two-week trip to France and Spain. While many questioned the sanity of bringing five-year old twins on a two-week trip out of the country, it actually ended up being an enjoyable trip. As long as we kept our expectations low and our agendas short, the days were comfortably full and no one got disappointed.

We spent most of our time in large cities, and while I was there, I was constantly stuck by one theme: Urban Europeans have a much more earth-friendly and much less consumerist lifestyle than most Americans I know. Here's what I observed:

• People simply buy less stuff. Food is a great example. Rather than stocking up on tons of perishable items at a time, they buy what they need for that night, or the next few nights. Most people travel on foot, so they buy what they can comfortably carry home.
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• Packaging is just smaller over there. I bought what seemed to be very small containers of juice, and surprisingly, those containers sustained my kids for a whole week. 
• Cars are smaller, and there are fewer of them. Most people take advantage of the excellent rapid transit infrastructure in the city.
• As my friend who had already been in France for a few weeks noted to me, "People definitely frown on you if you don't bring a shopping bag to the grocery store." Plastic bag consumption over there has to be a small fraction, per capita, of what it is here.
• Portions are smaller too. Restaurants don't overwhelm diners with massive plates full of food

• I noticed that while the streets are clean, the public trash cans are small. Europeans seem to generate much smaller amounts of trash. (See less stuff and smaller packaging, above.)

I could list many more examples. Collectively, they confirmed for me that Europe is light years ahead of the U.S. in terms of mitigating its global footprint and its citizens' impact on the earth. Whenever possible, I tried to point this out to my daughters, so they could see that there are ways to live other than the Costco-fueled stockpiling of goods that we are used to over here. They rode the subway more often in Paris than we've ever done in D.C., and I hope that they noticed that we just weren't acquiring and buying the whole time.

Or maybe all they will remember is the ice cream.

Original D.C. Metro Moms post. Gayle also blogs about books at Everyday I Write The Book.