Via a wander round the internet links generated by my latest internet social networking fad, the lovely SheWrites, I came across this neat little article from an LA green living website, which has a good list of tips, especially on less-considered aspects of the wedding like how to research what you might (or might not) want to do in the first place...
Liz O'Neill is head of communications at the Vegetarian Society. She and husband Joe, a teacher, were married in July 2002.
“Our desire to have an ethical wedding started with the fact that I was vegetarian and Joe is a strict vegan,” says Liz, “so we wanted to have good food that met with our ethical beliefs. And then it just made sense to approach other parts of the wedding so that it reflected how we felt about the world.
“Out guests covered a really wide spread of ages and interests, from some who very much agreed with us politically and socially to others who didn't really know about our beliefs. But afterwards, lots of people said it was a really good wedding in that it totally reflected who we are as people and as a couple, instead of just being like everybody else's wedding days.”
As well as sourcing almost entirely vegan food from a small vegetarian restaurant in Chorlton, Manchester, Liz applied environmental and fair trade ideas to the rest of the wedding.
“One of the hardest things was the flowers. I went into so many florists and was just met with blanks stares or even one place which laughed at me when I asked about local or fair trade flowers – I think awareness of the issues has increased loads since then, but a lot of places just didn't have a clue five or six years ago. Lots of people assumed that because I wanted things to be ethical I was looking for a hippy look, when actually we wanted something quite classic – modern and urban, but very smart too. People kept offering me grasses!
“But eventually I found a place in Buxton where the woman was interested in helping to source them, and she did a great job – she even dropped them off herself on the way to visit her mum!”
Another issue that Joe and Liz felt strongly about was waste. “I'm always upset by all of those little table decorations and favours and things you get at weddings, which mostly must end up in the bin,” says Liz.
One of Liz's solutions was to ask friends and several local restaurants to save the cobalt-blue bottles that companies like Ty Nant sell mineral water in, and Neal's Yard toiletries are packaged in. They were used to make striking vases for fresh flowers on each table at the reception. Liz made many of the table decorations herself, using ribbons and materials from craft shops.
Joe is also a very keen cyclist, so the couple had a cycle rickshaw to carry them from the church to their reception.
Liz's dress came from a small boutique and was made by a European designer, while Joe had a suit made at a local tailor in Nottingham, where he was living at the time. “Neither place was particularly super-ethical,” says Liz, “but they were the kind of independent local businesses that we felt it was important to support, and they provided us with just what we wanted.”
And following a Roman Catholic church service, Liz and Joe's reception was held at a local community centre. “We really enjoyed, and felt strongly about, celebrating our wedding somewhere that was local to us and where we were part of a community, rather than going somewhere in another part of the country where we didn't have any connections. It was a very affordable venue, too – in the end we were able to provide all the drinks as well as food, outfits, flowers, venue etc for less than £10,000.”
Liz's main recommendation is just to take each stage of the wedding planning process as it comes, and then to think about what the alternatives might be. “If you just view it as lots of single jobs and find a way of doing each one of them as you want it, it suddenly seems much more manageable,” she says.
Here is the first of my interview posts - conversations with people who've had green or ethical weddings and who have ideas and tips for those of use still in the planning phases!
Rebecca and Hugo Whately
We decided to get married about 18 months before the wedding and we really struggled about how to do it. We didn't know how we wanted to get married – we knew we didn't want to get married in a church and we were quite put off by a lot of things that we traditional about the traditional wedding and wedding industry, so it took us about 6 months of thinking about how to do it – whether we wanted a big wedding and lots of people.
And one of our concerns about having a big wedding was the environmental impact of having that many people travel and huge amounts of food. Coincidentally, Hugo found Daphne and Penrhos on the internet, and my family already knew about Penrhos, so it seemed an ideal place for us to get married. We met Daphne and really liked her and we really like the kind of thing she did at Penrhos [Penrhos is a converted mediaeval manor farm in the Welsh Borders, with a pioneering organic restaurant and interests local food. They offer a full range of wedding facilities and help with planning green weddings.]
For both of us food is really important, we're both really appreciate good food but also food that's sourced locally and organically and seasonally, which Daphne does.
So that was a brilliant start really, and once we'd decided to have it at Penrhos we pretty much just trusted Daphne, because I didn't have any clear ideas the way some people do of how I wanted it to be, so we trusted her to sort it out. I didn't have an image in my head of some huge day – my partner Hugo actually did more organisation than I did, I'm usually really put off by big events and that meant that I wasn't the middle of organising it all so I could actually be quite calm and had an amazing day.
So Daphne sorted out a lot of it, like the food, and it was really nice because everyone could stay at Penrhos – we had about a hundred people with all our families and Daphne was really flexible and sorted it out with the local farmer so that people who weren't staying in the building could camp in one of his fields next door, which was great.
She was really brilliant at really taking on as much as we wanted her to take on but being flexible on things like having lots of our friends camping in the field next door.
We also made the invitations ourselves and wrote them out.
Ethical dresses, suits and rings?
For the clothing it was really amazing, once of my friends offered to make my dress. The material wasn't sourced really environmentally, I suppose – it came from a fabric shop on the Edgeware Road in London, and my friend over the year made my dress with the added challenge that over the year it had to change shape because during the year I became pregnant so the design needed to be changed for that.
And Hugo had a pair of linen trousers from years ago and he got a waistcoat and shirt from Green Fibres.
The rings – Daphne did a printout of things like local bands and local jewellers and flowers and we used that a lot – so actually we used a local jeweller in Worcestershire, we went for a weekend with him up there and made our own rings and he was this incredible character and had this incredible studio in the countryside which looked over the countryside, and he was there to make sure there weren't any disasters and to make sure we ended up with a ring each! And he sourced the white gold for us in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham.
Weddings lists
We ummed and aaahed about the idea of a wedding list. We didn't particularly like the idea of a wedding list and the over-consumption of the whole wedding industry and the wastefulness of it in some ways and going with the usual rituals just for the sake of it, so we tried to be a bit... [Hugo in background – 'spending for spending's sake'] so in the end we had a wedding list with Green Fibres and got some bedding from there, and then there's a little traditional shop round the corner from us which is run by a couple and does kitchenware and garden things, and they were great, so it was just those two things.
Local flowers
And then flowers- a friend of Daphne's tries to do flowers in a more ethical, local way and grows a lot in her garden and grows wild flowers and herbs and we didn't get any of the flowers from abroad, it was all flowers grown locally. and a friend of mine made my bouquet from her garden.
Cost?
It cost less than £10,000 for a hundred people and that included paying for people to stay the night at Penrhos and for people to camp, and we paid for all the drinks in the evening, and that included everyone staying overnight in the building or camping and then having a big breakfast the next day together. It was really lovely – having been someone who was quite phobic of big parties and bringing all these different people together it actually turned out to be a really incredible day.
Mum and Dad made the wedding cake and Hugo's brothers did the music – basically Daphne did everything we wanted her to and then we could add things on like that.
And the food was incredible – I think people sometimes have the idea that if it's going to be organic food it's going to be a bit bleurgh, but it was really beautifully cooked and delicious.
Advice?
I think it's quite good at each step to think about how to do it and thinking about whether there's an alternative way. So we didn't really sit down and plan it but because we were engaged well before we got married we had plenty of time to think about it, so we could do the invitations and you can easily do those yourself, and thinking about everything from flowers to wedding lists. Particularly now it's not so difficult, there are lots of people who offer alternative services and also i think people who are coming to the wedding like friends and family, we didn't want to be really sanctimonious about it, not everyone agrees with us completely, so it was about having a really incredible day without trying to push a particular political or ethical stance, but at the same time it just had that feel to it.
Hugo: we wanted to get married but we didn't like weddings!
A lot of people find finding the venue difficult, so finding a venue where everything was like that was great and they could organise so much of it and then we could just do the bits we wanted – that was perfect. People who usually go to church weddings said they were surprised by how moving the ceremony could be without being in a church – we passed the rings round, we got married inside this tiny little room and then went outside and passed the rings round to everyone held them and it kind of included everyone in the ceremony.
Honeymoon
And then we went for our honeymoon on an eco-retreat in Wales, in this incredibly luxurious blissful teepee with a fire and lots of rugs, outside Machynlleth, four miles down a dirt track.
Surprised as I was to find myself Quite Fancying the idea of getting married, I was even more surprised to find myself Quite Fancying the idea of having an engagement ring. I'm not really a big jewellery person, and the idea of wearing any item of bling that costs more than about 10p makes me nervous, in case I either lose it or someone else takes into their heads to relieve me of it.
Anyway, having decided I wanted one of these, I had to find one I liked. Overgrown Antipodean had very sensibly not done the down-on-one-knee-with-a-rock thing – I'm far too pernickety for buying me jewellery on spec to be a safe option.
Did I mention also that this wedding is happening on a serious budget? Estimates for the cost of the average UK wedding range from £12,000 - £20,000. Not so long ago you could buy a house in my neighbourhood for that. Certainly spending that on a single day, even a (hopefully!) once-in-a-lifetime one, seems kinda obscene. And anyway, OA and I would rather chew our ring fingers off than start getting in hock for this...
So a traditional diamond was probably never going to be an option. In addition to cost issues, I'm still highly sceptical about most diamonds. Many people will by now have heard of the issue of blood diamonds – those gems mined in conflict zones in Africa and then sold to fund further warfare. Most mainstream jewellers in the UK now sport claims that they are conflict-diamond-free and sell gems that are approved under the Kimberley Process (www.kimberleyprocess.com), an industry and international government initiative which was supposed to eliminate the danger that new diamonds would likely be tainted with the blood of millions of people caught up in a number of very dirty wars.
Despite the claims of big diamond merchants like De Beers (and most diamonds you come across anywhere in the world), the Kimberley Process is far from a guarantee that a diamond will come from a source that has not involved human and environmental exploitation. One example is the recent eviction from their traditional lands of a number of Kalahari Bushmen by the government of Botswana so that diamond mining could take place there. People who had lived as roaming hunters and gatherers for centuries were forced into 'resettlement camps' with high levels of violence, alcoholism and HIV, and made dependent on aid rations by being prevented from hunting and gathering food in their usual way. Not a bloody civil war, but a major infringement of human rights, and not covered by the Kimberley Process. For more detailed criticisms, see Global Witness' pages at www.globalwitness.org/pages/en/the_kimberley_process.html and information on the PR campaigns run by big diamond companies at www.spinwatch.org/content/view/3359/9/
The problems don't stop with diamonds. Many other gems are mined in similar ways and with similar ethical problems, although there are a small number of ethical gems projects which are being started up, although many are still in their infancy.
And gold is another big problem. Gold mining is often accompanies by terrific human rights abuses and environmental degradation. In Guatemala and Honduras, for example, anti-mine activists from environmental groups and indigenous peoples have been threatened in some cases murdered by gold companies from North America, and local people evicted so that precious metals on their land can be exploited. Similar tales come from countries as far apart as Indonesia and Guyana.
As well as human rights abuses, most modern gold mining is a hugely polluting affair. Movies and history books might have inculcated images of ragged prospectors panning rivers for gold, but the reality of most gold production now is very different. Tons and tons of rock are mined by heavy machinery, crushed, and mixed with highly toxic cyanide solutions in order to separate gold and silver from the stone. The gold – perhaps only a few ounces per ton of rock – is filtered out. This leaves gallons of toxic cyanide sludge, called tailings, which is stored in lakes called 'tailings ponds,' as there is pretty much no cost-effective way of processing it. At a number of mines around the world – from Guyana or Romania to the Philippines and Ghana - the dams that hold these ponds in have burst, causing massive pollution which kills fish, animals, plants and often people. For more information see www.minesandcommunities.org or www.nodirtygold.org.
Despite these tales of doom and gloom there is some hope for the ethical engagement ring seeker with a bit of cash to burn. The Green Gold project in Colombia provides a small source of artisanal gold (remember those gold-panning scenes? This is where it still happens) which is used by some jewellers, while others use recycled metal from second-hand jewellery. Second-hand gems might also be considered, and at least one British jeweller is looking into diamond sources in Canada. This whole issue will be re-explored when the time comes to try and find some ethical, affordable wedding rings, but until then possible sources of ethical new engagement rings are April Doubleday in Cornwall (www.aprildoubleday.com) or Cred in Chichester and at stockists around the UK (www.credjewellery.com). Both also do mail order. In the USA, www.greenkarat.com will remake old rings to your specifications and www.ethicalmetalsmiths.org will try and connect you up with ethical jewellers who can meet your requirements.
So what did I do? Well, having decided that I'd reserve my major ring-hunting efforts (and budget) for wedding rings, I just sort of kept an eye out in the windows of second-hand jewellers. I came across one or two possibilities that didn't quite hit the mark, until in a spot of serendipity, waiting for a late friend, I came across something in a small shop in the god-awful heap of South London concrete I grew up in. Three garnets in pinkish (ie nice cheap, impure 9-carat) gold, it was made in 1906 in Chester – the year my beloved house was built and not far from Sunny Manchester where that house is. Perfect. Of course it needed resizing, so it's currently in the possession of my mum. I hope she's keeping it safe...
I was never really one of those girls who was too fussed about getting married. I certainly never dreamed about big white dresses - I'm too short and untidy for that kind of thing; I'd just end up looking like a meringue that had been dragged through a hedge backwards. And my innate cynicism meant that I spent most of my teens and twenties making sweeping statements about marriage as An Institution of The Capitalist State. I may have been right.
So when Overgrown Antipodean, my boyfriend and cohabitee, popped the question in a way that was more romantic than I ever though he was capable of being, I had to start thinking quickly. When you get engaged, EVERYONE wants to know what you're planning, and 'Ummmm.... it seems like quite a long way away...???' doesn't seem to be an acceptable answer.
And then of course there's the fact that I've spent most of my professional life researching all the evil and unpleasant things that capitalism, corporations and consumerism have wrought on the world. If I'm going to have a really special day on my Big Day, then a chain hotel suite, rings of questionable origin, foodservice company meals, industrially-grown flowers and the tidal wave of overpriced tat, manufactured in China by underpaid and overworked ununionised labour, that an entire industry really wants to sell you are not getting a look-in. Not if I can help it.
This blog will, at least on current intentions, be the record of how I try to avoid all this, and still have what I hope will be a lovely wedding day, and hopefully a way of sharing ideas and horrors with other women trying to do it differently...
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