Making the Hard Choices About Where to Spend Money
These days, wallets are tight for just about everybody but a select few. The American recession is starting to make its impact known more and more, and making decisions about where to spend what resources we do have is becoming more and more challenging. This entry is designed to explore some of the thinking behind those choices and is inspired by a conversation that a member of the Postconsumers team recently had [...]
Managing Food Waste at Thanksgiving
Here are some statistics that will astound (and possibly horrify) you. According to America’s Second Harvest, over forty-one billion pounds of food were wasted in the United States in 2009. According to another study by the University of Arizona in Tuscon, the average American household wastes fourteen percent of their food purchases. As we all attempt to live more sustainably and find the satisfaction of enough instead of the waste of too [...]
Consume this Style
By Michael Beck In the ‘60s a tsunami of social change swept the U.S; within ten years it had burst out of its radical origins and transformed mainstream America. A rather stifling and materialistic early-postwar mindset morphed into a broad, creative megatrend, from civil rights and women’s empowerment to a renaissance in the arts and a space program that put a man on the moon. Through the arts, especially popular culture and music, [...]
Shorter isn’t always simpler, but it helps
I don't own, nor have even ever used a Kindle (Amazon.com's ebook reader), but this seems like a great idea. Jacqui Cheng, writing in ars technica: Paying for (short) content: Amazon to publish "Kindle Singles" Amazon is rolling out a separate section of its Kindle store meant for shorter content—meatier than long-form journalism, but shorter than a typical book. Called "Kindle Singles," the content will be distributed like other Kindle books but will [...]
Postconsumers Free Guide to Spending Less, Stressing Less and Celebrating More this Holiday Season
We’d like to be saying above that we’re starting the Postconsumers holiday season in the first week of November, because clearly we have some issues with the way the media and consumer corporations have extended the holiday purchasing season! However, we understand that, for many people, holiday shopping starts now. We’d like to be able to help as many people as we can not only be less of a slave to consumerism [...]
What, Me Worry? Hell No, Shoot the Messenger!
“GOP plans attacks on the EPA and climate scientists” Thus ran a major article in the L.A. Times last Saturday. AccuWeather.com’s Climate Change blog picked it up yesterday, and my fingers, no doubt itchy from excess global warming, could not resist posting a comment there. Here it is: "The LA Times article mentioned climate scientist Michael Mann as a probable target of investigation and quoted him: "I don't think we can cower under [...]
The Satisfaction of Travel in a Sustainable World
One of the ways that many people find satisfaction in life is through travel. That’s a great thing. Learning how others think and act in the world is critical to bringing the world together, and we wish that it was an activity that was more available to others. In addition, quite frankly, the world is full of beautiful and amazing sites to see. However, it’s no secret that travel, particularly global travel, [...]
Thinking Sustainably About Your Electronics
We’ve read on the Postconsumers Blog an article about how much time the average American spends online, and it is scary! We’ve also read the article about how many hours a month the average American spends on their cell phones, and it is also scary. However, electronics are a part of (most of) our lives. Despite our best efforts, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to completely distance ourselves from cell [...]
Would a Second Planet Help?
Not that long ago, sci-fi legend Stephen Hawking suggested in a media interview that, quite frankly, it was time to find another planet to move to. Hawking’s concept was that we had not only ravaged our planet so deeply but also that the ever-growing population wasn’t going to level off (because more people will just make … more people) or reduce to a level where the planet could support the population. Not [...]
Climate-Change Frolics, Tra-La-La!
By Michael Beck Deniers Fiddle While the World Burns Deniers often resort to sleight-of-hand in order to “disappear” global warming. In one recent frolic, Virginia’s reactionary Attorney General Cuccinelli tried to subpoena all the research from the University of Virginia performed by eminent climate scientist Michael Mann. The reason? – a presumption of fraud. The judge tossed out the request, dryly noting that just because some scientific findings are politically ‘controversial’ does not [...]
