To tie in with this Sunday’s Eco Chic Wedding & Home Show, The Guardian posted a piece on their Environment blog about 5 couples who tried to have a ‘sustainable special day’ The Boys from Brazil dvdrip .
So far so good… Some heartwarming stories about couples who did things a little differently – and hoped it might make a difference, however small.
The Spider Baby or Maddest Story Ever Told movie But the hostility and ridicule in many of the comments that followed really shook me.
The couples stood accused of preaching, being delusional (in the belief that their actions could make a difference) and fully paid up members of the smug middle classes.
The self-appointed green wedding police examined their stories for holes:
‘I note with interest that only one of the couples makes reference to their honeymoon destination. Why spoil a good story, I suppose.’
Or this one:
‘Also, making one’s own dress isn’t really ethical unless it’s made of second-hand or ethically sourced and manufactured fabric.’
And the one that really made me laugh:
“I’m not convinced that e-mailing the invites is reducing your footprint when you consider the amount of energy required to manufacture and ship computers from the Far East or wherever they’re made.”
True. But I don’t know of any couples who bought a computer for the sole purpose of emailing their invites, do you?
The thing is, those who go down the green and ethical wedding path generally have a few things in common that perhaps have been lost on some of our naysayers…
National Geographic: Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria dvd 1. They believe in marriage and they want to get married. This bit’s not up for debate – the decision has already been made. Next…
2. They want to celebrate their marriage with their nearest and dearest. It’s (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime event and as good an excuse as any for a party.
Nightmare Beach release Beautiful Joe trailer Yes, the quickie registry office plus witnesses home in time for organic tea and the latest instalment of ‘It’s not easy being green’ is greener – but it might not be quite as much fun and despite being preachy kill-joys, these guys do want to have fun.
3. They’ve seen how the costs of a wedding – economic, social and environmental – can spiral and they’d like to keep them down if they can. They know it won’t always be easy and that there will be times they say, hey, we’re doing our best, we need to stop beating ourselves up over the non-organic eggs.
4. They want their wedding to be personal – not a ready-to-assemble affair that’s just rolled off the ‘Weddingz R Us’ conveyor belt. This might mean including some special touches that seem odd to an outsider but make perfect sense to the couple and their friends and family.
5. They believe that small actions can make a difference*. The ice caps might be melting (and how did they come to be melting? The result of many small actions over a long period of time) but that doesn’t mean they have to stop trying. If another way is possible, let’s do it!
Happy planning!
Katie
*For an excellent and entertaining read on how the small things add up – and how in fact every supposed overnight sensation or disaster is the result of many unseen small things – I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s books, ‘The Tipping Point
’ and ‘Outliers’.
Fortunately some of the more nastier comments must have been removed by moderators. But it never ceases to amaze me how horrible people can behave towards others just because they think they are anonymous on the internet.
I mostly liked the last comment but there was something that struck me as strange about it:
“I made every effort in my wedding for it to have a low environmental impact, but this can be done in a way that doesn’t involve gathering branches and berries locally! Articles like this are a real obstacle to the promotion of greener lifestyles as they do little to demonstrate how green choices be relevant ones for people living average lifestyles. We didn’t shout about our green features…”
I don’t think that the couples who where a part of the article shouted about it. But someone has to be prepared to talk about their wedding and the things they did to green it in order for the rest of us to gather inspiration and learn about how it “can” be done.
I might not personally feel that all the things the couples in the article did would work for our wedding but at the end of the day I can just choose not to use that particular idea.
Frankly I can’t see how this article is an obstacle to promoting a greener lifestyle. I think they all sounded like pretty average people. I feel like a average person and I think that we have been living a pretty green life style for the last couple of years anyway. What all this green wedding planning has done for us is making us aware of all the other green things we could do in our everyday life as well as at our wedding.
The comment by “kj33″ before the last one was quite good I thought. I will agree that it is very sad to hear peoples negative, bah humbug attitudes towards people who want to do their bit. It must be jealousy or guilt driving this attitude but even so.
I just want a lovely wedding with my family and close friends. We won’t be very many people there and we are going to try and do as much as we can to green it accourding to our beliefs on the subject. And I think that both this website and articles like the one in the Guardian have been very helpful for gathering idea about how to do this.
Also I would like to thank you Katie and Kate for the lovely Eco Chic Wedding and Home Show yesterday. We enjoyed it and got new inspiration.