The green movement is often seen as a white movement. A white, Whole-Foods-loving, Prius-driving, upper middleclass, leftwing movement. Which strikes me as sad because your ethnicity, car, and politics have nothing to do with being a concerned earthling who doesn’t want to see humans screw up a perfectly good planet. Here’s something you might not [...]
Posts Tagged ‘personal experience’
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 You may already know that my dad is a hoarder, and that growing up around his piles of outdated magazines and electronic gadgets has given me a profoundly ambivalent relationship with stuff.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 [...]
11 Feb
Reusing: the gateway to hoarding?
Like most of my hang-ups, this one begins with my dad. He grew up as the sixth of seven children, in a family so poor that an egg was considered a extravagance. Fast forward twenty years, and he’s in America, making a decent salary that allows him the luxury of stuff. Lots of it. Magazines, [...]
4 Dec
Opting out of the holidays
My mother is an events organizer and often takes the same [dictatorial, no-ifs-ands-or-buts] approach to her family. As a result, we ended up squeezing an abbreviated form of Christmas into Thanksgiving break. No decorations, no stockings, no cookies, just a bare bones gift exchange in which no one really got anything she would have bought on her own. (See [...]
7 Nov
13 Reasons You Can’t Afford to Shop
Shopping is an expenditure of time, energy, and money. It’s easy to forget that all of these are limited resources, and choosing to shop is choosing not to do something else, often something more enjoyable and fulfilling. Although shopping may not be the worst thing we can do to the planet, it’s probably the eco-sin we commit most often, with the least amount of consciousness. (Greenwashers, you’re [...]
27 Oct
Why I care.
Kevin and I drove to the coast yesterday on a whim and spent the afternoon watching the interplay of tide, sand, bird, and wind. Wet sand reflected azure skies, then began to dry into undulating patterns of darkness and light. Feeling small against the expansive blue of the sea, we sat there and talked about the planet, its fragile beauty, and the problems we’ve helped to [...]
23 Jul
Friday Night Purge
Just to give you an idea of how geeky Kevin and I actually are, here’s an example. On Friday nights, other people watch movies, hang out with friends, go out on dates. We get rid of stuff. It’s a game only treehugger geeks could enjoy. There is only one rule: for every item one person gets rid of, [...]
11 May
Environmental Epiphanies
Were you swayed by a slow trickle of devastating facts and figures? Or can you trace your environmentalism to one major turning point? Although I grew up hearing about the three Rs and my parents were thrifty enough to make us tear paper napkins in half at dinner, I wasn’t particularly concerned until one incident [...]
