This month, perhaps after watching the video above, I’ve gone and done something essentially un-American: I’ve declared March to be a no shopping, no buying month for me. Food and other essentials like toothpaste that allow me to function as a normal member of society are excepted. I’m not a shopaholic to begin with, and [...]
Posts Tagged ‘consciousness’
25 May
The dark side of food waste
I’ve found my newest addiction: the A&E show Hoarders. You may already know that my dad is a hoarder, and that growing up around his piles of outdated magazines and electronic gadgets has given me a profoundly ambivalent relationship with stuff. Even though I’m neither extremely neat nor extremely messy, I’m terrified of becoming a [...]
27 Apr
The art of the green compromise
As a hobby, pottery sounds pretty old school and traditional. Like organic agriculture, hand-weaving, and compost heaps, it’s been around for centuries. What could be more low impact and earthy than a craft centered around mud? A whole lot. Here’s the wheel I use: it’s a Brent electric wheel, and it has horsepower. Horsepower. Like the other [...]
23 Apr
The Grumpy Green Approach to Holidays
I no longer celebrate Valentine’s Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, or St. Patrick’s Day. Christmas is on the wane, and Easter (except for the bag of Cadbury mini eggs given to me that I ate guiltily, thinking about child labor) is on the chopping block this year. I haven’t deliberately cut out all these [...]
20 Apr
The Impact of Freebies: An Earth Day Post
The word ‘free’ has its own special magic for many of us. I’m the daughter of Asian immigrants who came to the US with nothing, worked hard, saved up, and made it into middle class tax hell. My childhood was full of extra napkins and ketchup packets saved from McDonald’s, red and white wet wipe [...]
18 Feb
Quick thoughts on taking responsibility
Yesterday, as I was getting into my car, I saw a crumpled paper napkin on the ground. I didn’t remember dropping it, but I knew that I had taken one a few weeks ago when my soup exploded on me at the office. It could have fallen out of my lunch bag to the floor [...]
17 Aug
Guilty Green Consciences
I spend a lot of time thinking about all the ways in which I’m not doing enough to minimize my impact on the planet. I feel a lot of responsibility for what I and other humans have done to screw over our fellow earthlings. In moderate quantities, this guilt has been highly effective in pushing me to make better decisions. At the [...]
12 Aug
100 Personal Items: Minimalism & Environmentalism
I’ve read a lot of minimalist articles lately. One of the most recent to come to my attention was a 100 personal items challenge. Pretty simple: get yourself down to under 100 personal belongings. (Easier said than done, of course.) Then I read a far more upsetting article: how to get rid of your books. [...]
1 Aug
Why shorter showers matter
I recently read a provocative article on Orion by Derrick Jensen called “Forget Shorter Showers: why personal change does not equal political change.” In a nutshell, he argues that the system is broken, and individual action to minimize impact isn’t going to make a significant dent in saving the planet. Instead of taking shorter showers, we should be lobbying, restoring habitats, [...]
7 Jul
Redefining Progress
I’ve been trying to write this post for weeks, but it’s so big and hard to wrap my head around that I just don’t know where to begin. It has something to do with the shortsightedness of economic progress. And then it has something to do with my admittedly idealistic idea of progress, and its two [...]
