the eco advocate

This video is fantastic. So, I’m sharing it for you!

It’s been a pretty busy past few weeks, and it’s only going to get crazier as Christmas approaches. All the same, I look forward to spending time with my friends and family, eating good food, sharing good laughs and all that seasonal celebration-type stuff. What’s really hard about this time of year though is the amount time people spend driving around in order to dish out outrageous amounts of money out on gifts that are horrible for our earth, and our wallets!!

I know we’re all under pressure to get ‘just the right thing’ for that special someone (or maybe your mom or dad or son or daughter), with advertisements bombarding us constantly about all the best deals in town. I find it’s good to avoid the overwhelming shopaholic, consumerist babble, just to help you keep your wits. But how can you make Christmas sustainable?

There are tonnes of resources out there for sure. ‘Green’ is in, so ‘green’ gifts can be found! However, is that enough? Is there another way of giving that doesn’t involve buying something??

This year, the City of Montreal has launched a campaign that encourages Montrealers to think differently: “Pour Noël, faites un cadeau à l’environnement: consommez autrement!” or “For Christmas, give a gift to the environment: consume differently!” is the slogan. The second tagline translates to something like “Reduce at the source, it’s good for our planet and for our wallets.”

With a list of good suggestions for how to do this, you can’t go wrong. If you give it a try, you almost can sing it along to the tune of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’…

For Christmas, give a gift to the environment:

1. Consume differently
2. Give a night on the town
3. An ‘Aaaaaaah’ spa night
4. A quality gift made locally
5. Rechargeable gifts
6. The gift of time off for busy parents
7. Offer home-baked goods
8. A donation to a non-profit
9. Take public transit while shopping
10. Use reusable wrapping
11. Send an eCard
12. Trees grown locally … then recycled

Besides being fun and creative, the campaign, I think, is a very good idea. Check it out: http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/consommezautrement

I just heard of this fantastic project: Sourcemap

“Sourcemap is an open source project about where things come from. [It] is a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing the supply chains behind a number of everyday products… You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using our Life-Cycle Assessment calculator. This web-based tool uses linked data from geological and geographic resources. Each ‘Sourcemap’ can be used to help market socially- and environmentally- conscious products and to buy carbon offsets.”

See the explanatory video:

Getting Started with Open Supply Chains from Matthew Hockenberry on Vimeo.

Find out more, visit: www.sourcemap.org

I was just recently asked about living ‘green’ on a budget. Or, “more specifically, how to live modestly with rising costs for food, clothing, etc.” I guess it’s a good question, since it really got me thinking!

What’s interesting about this question to begin with is that it indicates the bizarre mentality around ‘green’ living. That is, that it’s expensive.

People tend be weary of the current environmental direction because it’s perceived as being costly. However, when you compare the short and long term costs of ‘business as usual’ versus ‘action to curb climate change’, the long term costs of the former are way more. To me, the longer-term savings of living ‘green’ in the financial, personal and environmental senses are undeniable.

While it does seem hard to live green on a budget if you’re thinking that you need to retrofit your house or buy a hybrid car. However, if you don’t have the money to begin with, those are out of the question. If you are looking for immediate savings with environmental benefit, it’s totally possible, and simple.

Living green to me means so many things. Invest in your local economy; encourage green, sustainable, ethical businesses; minimize unnecessary consumption of goods that have a limited life span (look up planned obsolescence); consume less goods generally; purchase used goods when possible; avoid creating excess waste; cut down on energy use and switch over to renewable energies; eat less meat and eat locally grown food; walk, bus or bike more; etc. etc.

To put it bluntly, the key factor here seems to be about buying and producing less crap.

All of these things also involve saving money and spending money wisely. There are so many things that facilitate this, like thrift stores, health food and bulk stores, eco-quartiers, websites like craigslist.org, public transit, etc.

These resources exist, you just have to know they are there.  In places that aren’t as eco-minded as parts of Montreal are, maybe these resources are harder to find. In such cases, people must be innovative and create them together, or demand them from the local government. (I see a future blog post here… hmm.)

There are also tonnes of little ways to be eco-friendly around your home, work and school that involve simply being creative and resourceful. This includes things like reusing your plastic bags, having shorter showers, not leaving your fridge empty, printing less documents, turning unused lights and appliances off completely, etc. I could go on and on (I guess that’ll be another blog post too)!

But really, if you are smart enough to recognize that things need to change, you are certainly smart enough to figure out what you can do. And don’t just think about it. Do it. Your wallet, your health, your community and your earth will thank you.

So apparently, according to the Globe and Mail, us Canadians are uncommitted to making real changes in our lives towards sustainable living… We’re just hard to convince, and hard pressed to change our comfortable ways. I don’t exactly blame us, considering our bountiful resources, skilled labour within non-eco industries, and suburbia-mania.

But what is it really? Are we just lazy? Apathetic? Uncaring?

Or is it that the government isn’t doing enough to properly measure our environmental footprints, certify green products and services and reprimand people for their poor behaviour? I sure as hell think so.

If Montrealers had water meters, for example, we’d use a lot less of it! If more funding was put into the development of green technologies, marketing them, improving them, people would be all over that!

It’s just that a few keeners are doing it already, with no one watching them to monitor or celebrate their work. And other conniving scam artists are copying them poorly and tarnishing the green reputation!

Enough with crappy ‘green’ dish detergent! I say make the green movement law! Start with big industry and work downwards, helping people change, not just suggesting they do it.

Goddamn it makes me angry…