Finished the book at last, but in the final few weeks, I discovered that I just couldn’t keep it together to do my family’s food shopping. We temporarily turned back into take out mavens, causing more plastic tub trash in a couple of weeks than in the last couple of years. This begs the question, […]
Consumerism and Materialism
The true cost of our cars
I’ve said before that if our automobiles really make us happy, then to hell with the planet. The thing is, I don’t think they do. Listen: American adults average 72 minutes a day behind the wheel of a car, according to the WorldWatch Institute. That’s more than twice as much time as the average American […]
Christmas with no presents
Here’s the beginning of an article of mine that’s in this month’s Yes! Magazine: If Christmas is about presents, then in 2007, my little family and I had no Christmas. I mean, we had the caroling and the uncle playing the piano and the cousins running around with my three-year-old, Isabella, and the grandfather coaxing her to sit […]
More on living the green life out loud
Yesterday, I posted on making a spectacle of living green as a way of bringing attention to our environmental emergency. It turns out I’m not the only one who uses the strategy. Lots of readers left behind comments on their lifestyle strategies for getting attention (see the end of the post). Among those readers is […]
In praise of making a spectacle of living green
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to decide to go against the cultural flow in the way that one lives and even more if you decide to advertise the fact. But I’m thinking that, of the many ways to assess which environmental lifestyle measures make the biggest difference, one way is to decide which […]
Open Discussion: Consumption–The elephant in the living room
Bringing this conversation back up to the top for those of you who didn’t yet have the chance to comment or read the comments of others. It’s worth wading in… None of the politicians seem to want to discuss the fact that consumption is at the root of our environmental problems. I’d love to hear […]
Making products so valuable that no one wants to throw them away
Part of why it is hard for business to really embrace deep-green environmental practice is that making profit has always been associated with high material and energy throughput. If they make products that are meant to last, they sell less, and their profits go down. Reduced material throughput, for them, means reduced income–even if it […]
Would we shop the planet’s resources away if there was more fun to be had?
This is a guest post by Ruchira Shah aka Ruchi aka Arduous. I’m a recent transplant to London, and I had plans to check out the neighborhood around Ladbroke Grove. But as I sat riding the Tube, the rain started to pour down, and suddenly an afternoon of walking outdoors didn’t seem like the best […]