Let’s call the whole thing off…
May 26th, 2007 by Katie
Has the green wedding backlash begun already? US environmental news site, Grist, picked up on a piece in Salon magazine (and sparked off quite a lot of debate!), suggesting that green weddings are not necessarily great and that if you want to minimise your impact, maybe you should just not have a wedding in the first place.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it but I don’t know of many cases where a couple has decided to get married simply because they wanted to have a green wedding. Generally the decision to get married and have a bit of a party to celebrate the occasion comes first…and then the thoughts about how much it’s going to cost, how long it’ll take to plan…and what impact it might have on other people and the planet come after!
One of our original thoughts when we started planning our own wedding and were flicking through wedding magazines was wow, if people are going to spend this much on a wedding (£17k was apparently the average in 2004) why not try to spend it where it could make a real difference - on fair trade products, organic food, local produce and services?
And as more and more people are trying to live a more sustainable life, cutting that carbon footprint, looking behind the label, and giving a thought to how our choices might affect others around the world for better or worse (no pun intended!), it just makes sense to apply the same thinking to any event in your life…such as your wedding for example.
This way you celebrate and everyone (not just your guests) celebrates with you! After all, we still need our parties don’t we? Otherwise the world would be a very sludgy green…
What do you think? Tell us in the forum…
Keep planning!
Katie
Hi Katie,
I just wrote about this today as well, and actually commented on this both on Salon and Grist. I think it is great that people like you are urging people to make more sustainable choices for weddings, but what bothered me is that many of us are just not spending $27,000 (or anything close to that) on our weddings, and all of a sudden we see articles on “green weddings” which end up most likely consuming far more resources than our more modest weddings. But they are “green.”
I also think that encouraging this kind of wedding also encourages the whole culture around it being “your special day.” I know my wedding had a lot more to do with family, and of compromising to make it a special day for everyone involved, i.e. our parents and siblings, extended family who in my case are still very close.
For people planning to spend the big bucks, I say green weddings are great. But for other people who will spend much less, I’m not sure they are worth the fuss.
Good luck,
Liz
Hi Liz,
Thank you for your comment. I absolutely agree with you that a lot of people don’t have anything like £17k or $27k to spend on their weddings - we certainly didn’t! - and I should probably have made that a bit clearer in my post.
The idea of a green or ethical wedding is certainly not that people would ‘consume’ more than they otherwise would - my comment above about a £17k wedding was simply that if (big IF!) someone was spending that much on their wedding, imagine what good they could potentially do with that cash if spent in the right places - fair trade, organic, local etc.
However, for most people, a green or ethical wedding will actually be about consuming less, about downsizing in many cases, and simply about giving the whole thing a bit of thought rather than just rushing out and buying everything tradition or the wedding magazines say you should have.
We wouldn’t expect anyone to do everything by the ‘green’ book - that would be hypocritical as we certainly didn’t. We weren’t able to get our church ceremony and reception venue in the same place so we drove to the wedding; we went for a local caterer who agreed to serve fair trade tea & coffee and mostly locally sourced produce but we couldn’t afford the premium for exclusively organic food because, like you, it was important to us that all our friends and family were there to celebrate with us which meant we had to find cheaper options than might have been the case if we had had a much smaller wedding.
When it gets down to basics, I don’t see an ethical wedding as being about spending big bucks. It’s about taking a moment to think about what you’re doing and where you’re spending your money (as little or as much as you have). It’s about thinking whether you really want that ice sculpture and chocolate fountain or if you’re just having them because your friend did last month or you saw it in ‘Weddingz’ magazine
It’s about getting family and friends involved where you can, chipping in, helping out and saving money (my husband made our wedding cakes, for example, saving us about £300 - and they were organic and fair trade!). It’s about doing what you can and not feeling guilty about what you can’t. And it’s about having a great day, celebrating your love with your friends and family around you…that’s what it’s all about.
If anyone else has any thoughts on what a green or ethical wedding means to them, let us know!
Katie