by Paula Mitchell-Bentley

Created on: January 23, 2009

It's important to ensure the survival of environmental goals in a recession. In fact, it should be easy to meet environmental goals during a recession. There are several reasons why environmental goals need to be met and are actually easier to meet during a recession.

A recession means cutting back on a personal level. Job uncertainty or loss leads to less household income. This means you will have to become more budget conscious. Going green and saving green have many of the same solutions in common. If you cut back on your buying, that means that you are cutting back on waste. Less products will be brought into your home which means less packaging and less "extras" being bought. Buying less will reduce your carbon footprint by using less energy to produce items that people don't really need.

A recession makes people evaluate what is a need (food) and what is a want (a new couch). You may start buying used to save money which will help save the environment as well. You may start to go out less to save money which will also cut back on your gas usage and carbon emissions. You might get rid of your second vehicle to cut out extra car payments and insurance costs. This will help the environment by having less vehicles on the road. You may even start carpooling or using public transit which are also great economic goals.

Many people say that these cutting back measures that people are turning to will only make the recession worse. This opinion is misguided though. People spending money that they don't have is what really started the current economic situation's major down turn. You cannot continue to live a lifestyle beyond your means forever. Perhaps the recession will make people re-evaluate their lives. There are many benefits to living a more simple life. Complexity leads to stress, anxiety and constant struggling for more. Environmentally speaking, people spending money that they don't have to buy things that they don't need leads to many of our current problems with pollution, global warming, and overflowing landfills.

Recessions can also lead to environmental goals being met on a wider scale as well. When governments commit themselves to going green, to finding alternate power sources and so forth, more jobs are created. The creation of jobs in the environmental sector could put tens of thousands of people to work which would help to ease recession woes.

The arrival of a recession should be taken advantage of by environmentalists on both a personal level as well as a government level. It should be easy to maintain the survival of environmental goals during a recession as more people will see the need for it.

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