By Rachel Shulman •
October 19, 2009
With all of the attention being paid to the platforms of foodies like Jamie Oliver and Michael Pollan, you would think that Americans would cook more and rely less on fast- and processed-food.
The misperception that cooking is too time consuming turns out to be a major roadblock on our path to a sustainable national food system.
Cooking is not time consuming. Shopping for groceries, however, is.
One strategy for making cooking a part of your daily life is to maximize your cooking to shopping ratio.
Here are some tips on how to cook more and shop less:
By Zachary Shahan •
September 2, 2009
If you are thinking about going vegetarian, here is a list of things that should help you to actually do it,… and to stick to it once you’ve started.
By Kelly Rand •
December 22, 2008
As the holidays are solidly upon us, I am finally feeling a little bit relieved that it is almost over. I took the handmade pledge, made the majority of my gifts, or bought handmade for the rest. I, again, underestimated the amount of time it would take me to get everything accomplished and ended up spending an arm and a leg on shipping, but my stress level has subsided.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the holidays. Figuring out gifts and baking an insane amount is actually fun, but takes a lot of coordination. So I wanted to give you another option for your gift giving. The gift of time.
It is the ultimate in green giving. No purchase necessary. It doesn’t consume resources. It even thwarts the consumerism that is so prevalent during this season. All’s it requires is for you to craft some room in that super busy over-scheduled life of yours.
I didn’t say it would be easy.
By John Ivanko •
August 6, 2008
“Simple living” continues to garner much pop culture hype, sparking books, magazines and a slew of self-help opportunities to assist you to declutter, scale back and slow down. Environmentally conscious and sustainable living fall under the simple living radar, but where does ecopreneuring or running a green business fit in?
My wife and I incorporated numerous “simple living” strategies into our business over the years. While our lifestyle may exude quintessential simple living elements — from canning applesauce to crafting holiday gifts — there remains an inherently complex element to our ecopreneuring workstyle. Our calendar looks like a treasure hunt map of lines of travel, Bed & Breakfast guests arriving and departing, writing deadlines, family gatherings, and our son’s home-school group projects. We always juggle multiple unrelated projects.
A better word than “simple” to describe our ecopreneuring approach is “focus.” By consciously choosing to do certain things, we inherently simplify by prioritizing. We open more time to focus on what we really want to do by eliminating (or at least seriously reducing) time drains, including the following:
(1) Daily commute.
With the average daily commute in the US now nearly a half-hour, by working from home, we save over seven days per year driving to someplace, not to mention the fossil fuel emissions of daily driving.
Take it easy. Go slow. Take your time.
Lately, I’ve been writing about lessons learned during my three-month sustainable living experiment. Most of them are not concrete facts, but rather emotional insights which came to the forefront when the stresses of my new lifestyle began taking their toll.
Welcome to my most significant understanding: that developing an environmentally sustainable lifestyle MUST be personal, too. It must reflect the individual. It is not a one-size-fits-all game plan for green living. There’s an unfortunate popular “Wonder Diet” mindset pervading American media, which says:
- There IS one solution.
- It’s painless and requires no real effort or commitment.
- It’s quick and tidy–no mess!
I realize I made a mistake in planning for my Sust Enable project by embodying some of these cultural concepts of media in MY media. For the sake of being easily recognizable and gimmicky, I assigned a strict deadline to my sustainable living project, thus making it sound more like a game show than the life-changing experience it has been.
Three months exactly. From Day One to Day 92. A riveting progression from novice to expert, from struggle to smooth sailing.
Don’t do what I did.
If you are to be successful in your sustainable living venture, your actions need to come organically out of your motivations. Your goals will shift over time. You will realize what is feasible for you and what is not; what you need help with and what you can push yourself to do.
Am I expected to stop living as close to 100% environmentally sustainable as possible once August 1st clocks over? And when did I really begin?
