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I Challenge You To BUY SUSTAINABLY!!!
Melinda, One Green Generation
There have been several Buy Nothing Challenges in the past couple of years, including the most recent one from Crunchy Chicken. Those are great, as they teach us that we really can get through a whole month without buying much (if anything) at all. However, the reality is that normally we do buy stuff in our everyday lives.
Because of the current credit crisis, now is a good time to get our finances together and spend as little as we can. So let’s take the awareness we gained from the Buy Nothing Challenge, and make it sustainable for the long term. And, let’s take it to the next level, where buying what we do need helps us become positive – and active – members of our communities.
There have been several Buy Nothing Challenges in the past couple of years, including the most recent one from Crunchy Chicken. Those are great, as they teach us that we really can get through a whole month without buying much (if anything) at all. However, the reality is that normally we do buy stuff in our everyday lives.
Because of the current credit crisis, now is a good time to get our finances together and spend as little as we can. So let’s take the awareness we gained from the Buy Nothing Challenge, and make it sustainable for the long term. And, let’s take it to the next level, where buying what we do need helps us become positive – and active – members of our communities.
Follow These Five Steps For Buying Sustainably:
- Ask Yourself if You Really Need to Buy it. Do you need it at all, or is it something you could live without? Can you reuse or repurpose something you already have? Maybe you have an old one in the garage that could be fixed up nicely (with the bonus of adding a repurposed/reused charm)? Or can you borrow it from a neighbor, friend or family, or even make it yourself? Also while we all need food, starting a garden will mitigate what you have to buy – you can grow vegetables year round. Plus when you start that garden, don’t buy seedlings – grow them from seed, and then save your own seeds for next year!
- Buy Locally. Drive as little as possible to get the item, and buy it from a locally-owned and –operated business. It’s even better if the business makes the products locally, or has a local source for them.
- Buy Fair Trade. Buy the item from a manufacturer that pays its workers an honest wage. AND Buy from a business with good business practices. If you have a choice, go for the business that gives back to the community, pays its workers well and gives them health insurance, and has good customer service. You may even find a business that has been built with sustainable building practices, and has taken steps to reduce its daily carbon impact.
- Buy Green. This means different things to different people, but essentially, minimize the impact the item has on the environment, including the materials used to produce and package it.
- Buy it to Last. Think twice about going cheap and easy. It’s no good for your pocketbook or the environment if you have to throw away an item when it breaks or looks ugly in a year or two, and then you have to buy another one. Instead, buy something that will last 5, 10 years – or better, a lifetime. For furniture, look at used furniture and antiques – what you find may cost the same as an item from IKEA, and it will last long enough to hand it down to your kids or your friends or someone in need. If you can’t afford good quality, wait a few months and save up to buy a good quality product that will last. In the long run, it will cost less in time, money, and environmental impact.
(2 October 2008)
The carbon footprint of divorce
Alan Durning, Sightline Daily
How Is That Car-less Family?
The year of living wifelessly.
People often ask me, “Is your family still car-less?”
I myself am still car-less, but the family has changed. Amy and I have separated, undone our vows, and revised our coupledom into a parenting partnership. The divorce paperwork is underway.
Don’t worry: I’m not going to regale you with the emotional tale. This isn’t that kind of blog.
Instead, I’m going to do what the Daily Score does best: wonk out. In this case, about the carbon footprint of divorce. (No kidding.)
Although the human implications of divorce are constant topics of discussion, divorce’s consequences for sustainability are rarely considered. That may not be surprising: Who could think about carbon budgets at such a time? (Not me, at first. But months have passed.) Still, the impacts of divorce on resource consumption are interesting.
Sharing a home among more people conserves natural resources, for space and water heating, cooling, lighting, refrigeration, building materials, land, and all the tonnages of consumer goods that furnish our abodes.
Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University recently published a study quantifying the global impacts of divorce on resource consumption. Among their findings were that square footage of home per resident as much as doubles after divorce, while energy and water use per person jumps by about half. Consequently:
Divorced households in the U.S. could have saved more than 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone if their resource-use efficiency had been comparable to married households.
Thirty-eight million rooms!
(25 September 2008)
The referenced paper is Environmental impacts of divorce (PNAS)
Finding Opportunity in Peak Oil (video and audio)
Peak Moment
Molly Brown sees Peak Oil as both a challenge and an invitation to create a better world. After awakening to Peak Oil, she explored her own responses — inner attitude and outer action. Personal changes include creating a vegie garden and bicycling. Noting that individual survivalist mentality is insufficient (“we are all interconnected”), she helped form a local group to awaken and prepare her community. As a therapist, Molly sees this predicament on several levels, noting how crises have the potential to bring out the better part of human beings.
(18 September 2008)
A Green Path out of the Red (audio and transcript)
Living on Earth
As Washington rescues Wall Street, a growing chorus of big thinkers from the left and right are calling for a greener approach– using investment in clean energy and efficiency as a way to stimulate the economy. Living on Earth’s Jeff Young explores the elements of a green economic bailout
… YOUNG: As the Capitol’s political elite huddled to craft an economic rescue, some other Washington residents in the city’s struggling Anacostia neighborhood rallied for a different kind of economic plan.
CROWD: I’m ready for green jobs now!
[CHEERING, MILLING OF PEOPLE]
YOUNG: It was one of some 700 rallies around the country that day promoting clean energy as a way to generate jobs and wealth. Activist Van Jones, with the Green for All campaign, says that’s where government should be making its investments.
JONES: The people who said we could have a financial strategy based on borrow and spend and bubble and bailout, they’ve had their turn. They’ve been totally discredited. It’s our turn now. Green jobs now! Green jobs now!
YOUNG: Jones says an economic recovery plan should attack many problems at once. If government spending helped idled workers in Anacostia weatherize homes, it would also save energy, cut greenhouse gas pollution and lower utility bills. He calls it greening the bailout.
JONES: We’ve gotta make this bailout bail out the people and the planet, not just the people who want their platinum parachutes. The bottom line is that we got ourselves into trouble because we started building our economy based on consumption, based on debt, and based on environmental destruction. The way forward is to recreate the U.S. economy so it’s based on production, savings, and environmental restoration. That’s the way forward. And any help that anybody gets now should have green strings on it to pull us into the only part of the economy that’s going to grow, which is the green part.
YOUNG: It’s not a new idea—Jones has been helping people find work in solar and energy efficiency efforts in the Oakland, California area. And many communities in the windswept states are already at work building turbines for that fast growing energy sector. But as the economy teetered in the past weeks, a green growth agenda really
seemed to gain steam.
(3 October 2008)
Roberto Perez’s Visit to Totnes
Rob Hopkins and Nicky Scott, Transition Culture
We had the pleasure recently of having Roberto Perez, he of ‘The Power of Community’ fame, in Totnes recently to give a talk, imaginatively entitled, erm, ‘The Power of Community’. He was quite brilliant, painting a powerful picture of how Cuba responded to its own peak oil experience. Thanks to Carl Munson at Traydio.com, you can now hear both his talk and also a rather rousing bit he came out with at the end of the Q&A after the talk. Our deepest thanks to Roberto for his time here. I had a very pleasant early morning stroll around the Agroforestry Research Trust’s forest garden with him before he headed off to his next talk, in Birmingham. Here is Nicky Scott from Chagford’s write-up of Roberto’s talk;
“People all over the world are starting to wake up!”
these words were ringing in my ears as I walked away from Roberto Perez’s talk in Totnes about how Cuba had managed to feed it’s entire population using mostly organic and permaculture methods. I had Steve Bell like visions in my head of people coming out of their zombie state and their eyes opening to the reality of a world where until very recently a £100 worth of capital could get you £8,000 worth of credit (I don’t know maybe you still can?) where we need 3 planets each to keep up with our consumer lifestyles.
Cuba had to find out the hard way. When the Soviet Union collapsed, virtually all imports, into Cuba ceased. Any ships landing in Cuba were barred from USA ports for 6 months (first offence and a year 2nd offence.) Cuba had the most industrialised agriculture in Central America based on the old plantation crops of tobacco, coffee and sugar – all good nourishing crops! The land which had been cleared of forest was first given to the rich elite and later mostly appropriated by the state. This land is now being massively reforested and much of it returned to grow food crops. All the previous cash crops were heavily reliant on fuel, pesticides and chemical fertilisers – this was reduced at least tenfold virtually overnight.
… Roberto said that the signs were promising – people all over the world are waking up and finding themselves in cloud cuckoo land and with the financial world being finally exposed for the house of cards that it is now is the time for us to start a compost heap, to pick up a hoe and start to cultivate some land; and this is the perfect time to start. I always think that September – October is the time to start you growing year. Get your garlic planted, plan for those broad beans to over winter, and look at sowing all kinds of oriental salad crops, autumn onions. Get you ground covered and growing for the winter and then the spring start will just be a natural continuation. Are we the ones in cloud cuckoo land? I don’t think so!
(6 October 2008)
The Geeks Were Right: Using The Internet And Social Innovation As Currency
Randy White, Lawns to Gardens
… So as the economy contracts and we start to experience fuel and electricity shortages, all sorts of funny human behaviors will start emerging. Who knows what our failed government has in store to control enraged the citizens of the US – only the biggest, most shadowy figures have the playbook.
What we do know, however, is that even as markets fail, Internet startups will continue to create and innovate. There are coffee shops loaded to the hilt with programmers and entrepreneurs teaming up in collaborations to unite local communities through social innovations.
The focus of the startups that matter are around real-world needs, including food, communications, community-building, hyper-localization and revenue sharing. Revenue doesn’t necessarily mean paper money, either. Collaborations are forming based on shared value(s), meaning whatever the participants decide is worth something is becoming its own currency. That means barter and trade – just like the old days.
As America collapses Enron style, we will probably begin to experience hyper-inflation. That means “consumers” will continue to experience a serious wake-up call into what we truly need versus what we think we need to be happy. But hey – Ramen Noodles have got a lot of people through tough times before.
In case you are a government employee reading this and need to do something to help your local municipality or emergency responders deal with this crash, here are some of the nifty things that Bright Neighbor offers communities:
– Fast and easy searching for all things local
– Discover and meet people around you based on location and interests
– Safe & Secure – only your real community members allowed
– Food Growing / Garden system automation
– Swap & Share allows the community to lend, barter, trade and sell
– Add and discover community events, hyper-local news, views, and reviews
– Transportation & Ride Sharing tools
(6 October 2008)
From the exuberant Randy White of Portland. -BA
