There are two ways to reduce the harm to the planetary habitat we depend on for our health, happiness and security. One is to reduce the amount of resources we consume or degrade–air, forests, atmosphere, water, etc–and the other is to make the consumption of those resources less harmful. In other words: Resources Used x […]
sustainability
First to green wins, Clorox decides
I’ve written before that the big companies should make enviros the target market. To be enviro, these days, is to be cool, ethical, caring and driven by values. And as people become aware that enviro-concerns are really human concerns, that toxins in our environment mean toxins in our bodies, and that a happier planet makes […]
An end to the musical chairs
Yesterday I posted an interview with Van Jones, who reminds us that the way things are for the poor in America makes environmentalism their last concern. Then, Anne, from Not So Big Blog, left behind a comment suggesting that the way things are for the middle class in America isn’t so great either. Compared to […]
An argument for a zero impact culture
Alex Steffen, of WorldChanging, writes: “The idea of zero impact ought to be non-controversial. It is simple common sense that practices which are unsustainable cannot continue, and we know that it is true that propping up unsustainable practices with non-renewable resources has even more dramatic consequences. And we are currently growing rapidly less sustainable, and using more and more non-renewable […]
Our problem, you see, is insufficient materialism
On Saturday, I had coffee with Boston College Professor Juliet Schor, author of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream. We were talking about throwaway products and the disposable culture which fuel our economy and trash our resources (and which I […]
The bottom-line problem with sustainability?
According to Heather Rogers’ Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, 80 percent of products sold in the United States are designed to be used once and then thrown away. Now, this is a leap of logic, but for the sake of a thought experiment, let’s assume that 80 percent of the energy and raw […]
Sustainable consumption’s “double dividend”
[First off, let me say sorry about yesterday’s post of a revamped version of the national anthem. Like so many people commented, I couldn’t hear the lyrics. I thought that only the melody had been adapted. I would never have posted it if I had realized that the lyrics had been changed. But onwards…] One […]
Buying small and local vs. supporting green in large
I buy my soap from a lady named Susannah who hand-makes it from beeswax, water and lye and nothing else. For other people, she scents it with essential oils, but when I read that essential oils are being used in such concentration that they are now entering the water and affecting marine wildlife, I asked […]