In front of me sits a one-inch binder. Gray and unremarkable, meaningless doodles adorn the front cover and the inside margins. It’s a busted-looking old thing. The underlying cardboard structure shows through where the vinyl has split. I have had this binder for at least thirty years, and possibly more than thirty-five. From a number of perspectives, it has long since outlived its usefulness. Except in the most important sense, it hasn’t. It still works at holding paper, it just isn’t much to look at.

Why do I care about this binder? More importantly, why should you care about this binder? Well, you shouldn’t. I barely do. Except that, at some point in my life and for reasons unknown to me, I chose to keep this binder with me, wherever I moved. So, it came with me from my hometown in Lead to college in Bozeman, Montana. Then, it came with me to Los Angeles, to Denver, back to Los Angeles, and now, finally to Rapid City.

During all of these moves, I never had a conscious thought about this unexceptional binder. It was something that somehow I just never threw away. But at some point in the last decade or so, I started actively refusing to throw it away. It became a totem of sorts, a symbol of my growing dedication to try to live a more mindfully sustainable existence.

So much is said about decluttering your life and trying to simplify by getting rid of the things that you have that you don’t use or need. This is good advice, in a sense. But it usually comes without the acknowledgment that when we mindlessly throw things away, we are creating a vicious circle of trash, borne by conspicuous consumption. 

I would not, and am not arguing that by simply keeping things we would otherwise throw away, we can save the world from climate change. I would, however, like to suggest that we all find a similar symbol of our individual efforts, be they conscious or not, and try to let these symbols inform our choices going forward about what we do and don’t find necessary to mindlessly, and perhaps needlessly, replace.

This effort is what I call Small-Picture Sustainability. I submit that when we cultivate the humility necessary for Small-Picture Sustainability, Big-Picture Sustainability logically follows. Perhaps you create a different, more conscious, default picture of how larger monolithic entities should and shouldn’t be interacting with our world. Maybe this Small-Picture awareness can push us to take the next step in holding the larger offenders of conspicuous consumption to a higher standard and create their own talismans and practices of sustainability.

Scaling up a mindset can seem like wishful thinking, especially because of the need for large-scale urgency in combating climate change. But expecting the impetus for changes to come from within multinational corporations has proven unrealistic, nor is expecting those changes to be initiated top-down. The incentives just aren’t there. Only when we strive to see our actions as influential upon ourselves can we then expect these actions to trickle upward. Consider it a bit like supply and demand. If we, the individual consumers, demand conscious sustainability, then the companies with which we deal will have no choice but to supply it.

Look around your residence and try to find something that you have had for a long time. You may not even realize you kept it. I once had a Lead-Deadwood Soccer t-shirt for over twenty-five years. It just always fit, never fell apart, and looked weirdly flattering on me. The funny thing is that I didn’t even consciously keep it until about twenty or so years into having it. I then made it my mission to keep that shirt as long as possible, which I did, until it finally found its way out of my life. What happened to it, I am not sure. But every time I think of throwing something that seems to have outlived its usefulness in the trash, I think of that shirt. And I think of my grade school binder. And then I think how easy it is for everyone else, big companies included, to consider everything on this earth subject to a lifespan that is determined by arbitrary and unenlightened notions of usefulness, and how that mindset will never get us out of this mess we’ve created not only for ourselves but, more importantly, for those that stand to inherit it. 

But if future generations can inherit our mess, surely they can also inherit our mindset. It’s up to us to determine what that mindset will be.