Reduce your Carbon Footprint for Lent

The suggestion comes around every year that instead of giving something up for Lent, folks should use the season to declutter their homes, finding one item per day to give away.

The problem is, we're drowning in excess stuff. Decluttering, whether to spark joy or find God, doesn't address the problem of how we got all that stuff.

I'm going to suggest, instead, taking action to reduce your carbon footprint for the days of Lent.

Instead of giving things away for Lent, we could give up buying things. Give up a category, like clothing, and make the things you have in your home work for a few weeks longer.

Or give up food waste. Or plastic supermarket bags. Or single-use plastic packaging.

Or give up beef, as the meat that's highest in emissions, and for the 40 days of the holiday eat only fish and fowl. Or reduce the quantity of meat you eat rather than the kinds.

In the solar year, Lent crosses the last few weeks of winter and the first few weeks of spring, a time when many of us are waiting eagerly for light and warmth, the change of season that will bring more light and enable more outdoor time and allow us to manufacture more vitamin D as we shed winter layers and take a big breath of relief that the dark cold of winter is over

For our ancestors, it was the hungry time, when stores of late summer and fall crops like potatoes and apples were running out and the spring lettuces and early berries had yet to grow.

Giving up a category of food as a religious exercise was a way to give meaning to the season's privations.Today, though, while poverty is an entrenched and serious problem, it doesn't follow the solar seasons the way it used to.

Today, referigeration and global shipping allow us access to wide varieties of foods year-round -- so much so that if you didn't grow up in a rural community, you might not actually know what foods are seasonally available in your local area.

Lent is a short time frame during which you can try out an action that will reduce your carbon footprint, and see if it will work for you in the longer term.

What do you think?