Green, frugal, sustainable, simple, healthy, happy... No matter what we each call it, we come together here to support and learn from each other.
We are preserving our planet with our lifestyles. We are creating sustainable communities for our children. We are living the lives we want to live. Please join us!
You made goals or resolutions for 2010. You have life-long goals, ambitions, hopes, dreams… So no more excuses - I challenge you to follow through and DO IT!!
10,000 Steps Challenge
That's the general number of steps needed to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system and help keep your weight in check. With environmental and emotional benefits to boot, let's start walking!
The Green Your Insides Challenge
For your family and our planet, start greening your own home!
The following post is written by one of my lovely and talented writers at Re-Vision Labs, Martina Welke. Look for more of these posts in the coming months, as we aggressively build our Environment Lab to help environmental organizations to do their work better, faster, and more effectively.
Waste Not, Want Not
This week, Director Mai Iskander’s film Garbage Dreams will premier on PBS as part of the station’s Independent Lensseries. The documentary features three adolescent young men “raised in the trash trade” in Cairo. Adham, Osama, and Nabil are part of the Zaballen community, which is one of the oldest urban recycling cultures in the world.
The Zaballeen people saw economic opportunity in trash collection over a century ago, and have built their livelihood around the business. Since there is not much money in garbage pickup, the Zaballeen make the majority of their revenue from recycling. About 80% of the trash they collect is recycled by hand and then sold as raw materials.
The film chronicles the Zaballeen struggle to maintain their recycling program after the city of Cairo hires foreign corporations to take over garbage disposal in the city. Although the corporate program recycles only a small fraction compared the to Zaballeen, the city government prefers the foreign companies because they are perceived as modern.
In an effort to combat the foreign competition, the Zaballeen community launches a grassroots campaign to organize the enterprise, modernize their services, and educate the surrounding community. The community sponsors a Recycling School that teaches reading , writing and computer skills as well as safe recycling practices. Iskander includes a few community meetings and some footage of door-to-door canvassing efforts, but I found myself wanting to see more scenes focused on Zaballeen community organizing than the one-hour time frame would allow.
One of the most interesting segments of Garbage Dreams is when two of the young boys, Adham and Nabil, are selected to travel to the United Kingdom in order to study modern waste management. The boys are appalled at how much garbage is wasted at the high-tech plant they visit. Adham tellingly remarks, “Here there’s technology but no precision.”
In a very brief segment near the film’s conclusion, Iskander included updates two years after the launch of the Zaballeen campaign. Unfortunately, the foreign corporations seem to be winning the battle. Yet there are still signs of hope, as one community member notes that people around the globe are finally starting to care about trash and understand its environmental, political and economic importance.
Garbage Dreams is the kind of documentary that left me wanting to see more, learn more, and do more. Luckily, there is a fantastic interactive website that allows viewers to do just that. The site is packed with additional information, discussion guides, and lesson plans to help people learn from the film. There’s even a game that simulates the Zaballeen business process and challenges players to match the 80% recycling rate they have achieved (no easy feat, even for a die hard recycler like myself—I only reached a 32% on my first attempt.)
Garbage Dreams premieres tomorrow, April 27th on PBS. Check local listings here.
Recently I asked you all what was the most difficult part of your path toward sustainability (there were great responses on Facebook as well as on the blog). There were a surprising number of answers that focused around people giving us a hard time for living the lifestyles we live.
All right, y’all: I’m back online, here’s my rallying call!
Right here, right now, I want to encourage you all to turn the conversation around. Show everyone around you how normal your lifestyle is relative to theirs! You are the normal one. You are living more like humans have lived for thousands of years, and how most humans in the rest of the world still live. Most people don’t use the heap of beauty products and packaged goods that we Americans consume. We are abnormal as a society.
I mean really, is it normal to…
Be ok with who you are, put only a few pure ingredients in and on your body, nurture your health and strive for a gratifying life of longevity?
OR is it normal to…
Be embarrassed about who we are and cover it up with harsh chemicals and fragrances that we buy at a store for generally a lot of money, which are not good for us and often send us to the doctor for medical care (or force us to buy more products to cover up the issues the original products caused), both of which force us to work long hours and make lots of money to pay for it, which makes us not have time to focus on what we put in our bodies, which perpetuates a vicious unhealthy and unhappy cycle?
The other day a coworker told me she’d never thought she needed eye cream to stave off wrinkles, until she saw an ad in the store that convinced her.
There are lots of ads out there, convincing us that we need things:
We need to cover our wrinkles (which are often created by the makeup we use to cover them), we want that take-out hamburger because we’re hungry now and it’s convenient (but it was the sign on the side of the road that made us want the hamburger – what if you’d seen a sign that pictured a luscious homemade meal?), we need a big diamond ring to show others that we are in love (rather than the smile on my face and a little heirloom ring that show it so much more)…
Here’s another: is it normal to…
Drive to work, sit all day working hard (so you can pay for your car and other things to give you comfort after a stressful day at work), drive home, watch television, take your pills to treat coronary issues or diabetes, and sleep?
OR is it normal to….
Get enough exercise and be healthy and fit and live long because you walk and garden?
What should be normal here? Most people in the world don’t live the way we do in America.
So I encourage you all, the next time someone gives you crap, to very politely acknowledge to yourself that you are the normal one. You are the one who has not bought into the last 50 years of advertising in America, which tells us we need to buy things to make us happy. You are the one who is living more like most people in the world, and most people over many generations.
Whether or not you say this to your friends is your choice. Just as you don’t take kindly to being told you aren’t normal, your friends won’t either. But you know your friends best – try to open their eyes in a way that doesn’t push them away. It might be a very slow process. However, keep in mind during that whole process that you are the normal one.
A long while back many of us shared the most difficult things to change in our lives – on our paths toward sustainability. We have so many new people joining us, and life has changed quite a lot since then. So let’s do it again!
Once we share them here, we can help one another to make those changes over time. Shall we?
For me, the hardest things have been:
Making the time to cook. Particularly at lunch, I eat (organic) frozen food. Ack – it’s true!
Making the time to help other people make lifestyle changes. Particularly lately, I haven’t made time to help others by way of the blog (sorry guys!), speaking, and other ways.
Being a real part of my new community. I don’t spend enough time at local events, I don’t volunteer locally (there are lots of local organizations that could use my help), and I don’t feel like I participate in my new neighborhood.
What Change Is The Hardest For You?
Think a bit, and then please share! What do you wish you were doing, but you just can’t make yourself do? What do you feel guilty about doing?
I will tell you it feels good to write them down. Now that they’re there, on paper, I see what I need to work on.
In one hour, you won’t change the world. But you might change your perception of the world. And that’s something.
I believe the world needs to redefine what normal is, and the way to do that is to start very small for some – one hour, one moment to think about the earth. That one moment can have profound implications, or it can be one more step to redefining the way businesses, homes, and lives to think about the earth.
It’s only one hour. Try it! Don’t be disappointed if your neighbors don’t do it – they probably don’t know about it. But know that across the world, millions of others are doing it. Next year, maybe your neighbors will do it too.
I have been blogging for over three years now - three years!! (We’re on our third year of Growing Challenges!) And I will tell you that this blog has changed my life in so many large and small ways. And know this: it has most definitely set my life down a different road than I would have taken without it. A very, very good road.
I began writing as a way to catalog Matt and my journey toward self-sufficiency back in Geyeserville, California, town of 1,600. I wanted to help others learn from our failures and few successes. But I had never written a blog post before in my life!
It has been a long road to learning and growing as a writer as well as someone who lives sustainably. I’ve had the help and support of several people along the way. This series is about the bloggers who have been there for me – they’ve helped push me in sustainable living, in my writing, and in becoming who I am today.
Sustainability Bloggers That Changed My Life
1. Rhonda Hetzel, Down To Earth. Who knows how we find the blogs we do – we follow one, and their blogroll leads to another, which leads to a third, where we click on yet another link until we find something that really sticks. Is that about right? Well however it was, one day I ended up upon Rhonda’s blog and was amazed at the way she was able to engage her readers.
So, I wrote her! I wrote Rhonda and I asked her how she built up her blog, what tricks she might pass on, and just how she started. She was ever so generous and kind with her time. I think quite honestly what helped me the most was her telling me to look at some “How to Blog” blogs. I spent many many days reading and reading!
But more than anything, Rhonda has been so supportive of me, my writing, and my life. She and I trade emails occasionally, and we blog together at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op – which Rhonda founded! Thank you, Rhonda, for all you have done and continue to do. You are truly an inspiration.
2. Michelle/Green Bean, The Green Phone Booth. Michelle and I actually met via the Riot for Austerity listserv. She was looking for ways to help her son through his newly diagnosed asthma, and I had already gone through all of that for myself, so I had loads of tips! We kept in touch after that, sharing local food resources (we lived probably 50 miles from one another), learning both of our husbands have the same name, and generally supporting one another as we built our online communities and learned about sustainable living.
A couple years later, Michelle found her sustainable life was taking her outside of her home to work with her child’s school and do many things in her community. So she gave up the beloved Green Bean Dreams blog and started up a cooperative blog – The Green Phone Booth – with several other green moms.
While having never met her in person (someday!), I am proud to call Michelle a friend of mine – we have learned a lot from one another, and without her support it’s likely I would not be where I am today.
To Be Continued…
What Are Your Favorite Blogs?
Please share! Are there blogs that have really changed your life?
I’m still working away on some amazing projects that are keeping me beyond busy. I’ll be back soon!!
In the meantime, I’ve been interviewed by BizyMoms as one of their Top Home and Garden Bloggers of 2010. So cool! I’m honored to be in the midst of Ronda Hetzel and Susan Harris, both wonderful bloggers I admire. Here’s what they’ve said about us:
Meet some of the world’s most exclusive bloggers on Home and Garden issues
Bizymoms has chosen some of the world’s top-notch bloggers who are maintaining hugely popular blogs to discuss everything related to home and garden. Bizymoms recognizes these wonderful men and women for their great endeavor to reach out to humanity using the extraordinary power of blogging in such a positive way. This is an exceptional series of interviews with these bloggers to get an insight into their bright minds, and to understand what they stand for when it comes to home and garden. This series comes exclusively from Bizymoms for its reader community. Check it out and learn something new and unique from each of these world-class bloggers.
It’s awesome to me that they’ve included a representative that writes about sustainability in their Home and Garden top blogs. I do believe that is a bit of redefining normal, don’t you think??!
Anyway, please go check out my interview! I’d love to hear what you think (comments there don’t seem to be working – sorry, they’re working on it, some tech problem – so until they fix that feel free to comment here).
Recently I received an email from Nicole with a very interesting question:
How do you come to terms with the fact that so many people in the world don’t seem to want to become educated about how their actions affect their world? For example, I am learning a lot about our food system lately and I really want my friends to become educated about it, too. I feel like if they just KNEW where their food was really coming from, they would make healthier and more environmentally-sound decisions. But I don’t want to see preachy or holier-than-thou. Another example: I have two friends who just don’t recycle. I can’t wrap my head around it. They CAN recycle in their neighborhoods, they just don’t. Again, I want to call them out on it, but I just don’t know how to do it without seeming judgmental – even though I AM!
This is something I think about a lot actually. I think about it when writing this blog, I think about it when I’m doing work for my clients, I think about it when I walk through the streets on my daily walk, … yes, I think about it a lot!
I wrote a bit about it a while back: How Do You Get People To Change Their Lifestyles? In that post, I took a more academic approach of thinking about the stages of change and how you generate behavioral change. I also touched on it when writing Sustainability Begins At Home, because sometimes change really comes from within and spreads outward in due time. Plus I’ve written about the importance of us all doing this with our friends in We Can’t Do This Alone.
But on a very practical level, how do we get our friends to care and to join us?
Nine Ways To Get Your Friends To Care
Here are a few ways that have worked for me.
1. Think About Your Friend and What They Want. What is a good entry point for them? Would the entry point be finding a healthy home for their kids? Or maybe food, knitting, reading (book group?), shopping (antiquing or thrift store shopping or a clothing swap?), gardening? Find an entry point that will draw them in.
2. Meet Them Where They Are. You are likely at point c or even z, while your friend might be at point a. So help them simply get to b first. Make it easy, cheaper, tastier, more fun.
3. Never Use the Word “Should” or “Can’t”- your friend needs to WANT to change their lifestyle, otherwise it won’t work and won’t stick. In the same way that you wouldn’t change if you felt you were being judged, neither will your friends. Despite how much our friends can be frustrating, being judgmental or condescending just doesn’t work to changes anyone’s mind.
4. Remember Your Own Mindset When You Began Thinking About Change. What did you experience? Like me, you probably weren’t told something, but rather you experienced a moment when something happened, something clicked. Somehow it hit HOME for you, and applied to you on a personal level in a way that it never had before. So what were the steps that led you there? How can you recreate that whole experience for your friend?
5. Just Be Friends and Appeal to Your Friendship - ask your friend to accompany you to the farmers market or help you pick out a dress at the thrift store or make an organic cake for your little one. Something similar to what you would normally do, with just a little tweak to let them slowly into your new world. You might even ask them to help you, because this is something you’re really interested in.
6. Be Patient. It takes time and we are all different with different learning curves and needs and wants. We all take two steps forward and one step back as well, so know that just as you are not perfect, you friend is not perfect either. The best thing you can do, though, is stumble through this ebb and flow together. So let them in when they are ready.
7. Make It Fun. Particularly while the world is in Recession and Recovery, nobody wants to hear that the world is dying, or they are going to die, or anything of the sort. Right now, whether we like it or not, the world needs some fun. So make going green fun! Try new things together, with your kids, and in a positive and forward-looking way. Look to the future and see how your lives will change, how your changes will make an impact. Strive toward that point, and continuously redefine normal in a positive way.
8. Show Them How Excited You Are. Good friends will be excited about things that make you happy, healthy, and excited about life. Sometimes all you can do is make your own changes, and let others look on until they find something they find useful or interesting or exciting, and begin to pick it up. This is a tactic that has worked very well within my own family, for instance, where my mother and sister began learning from what I was doing, and started trying it themselves. It happened very organically, and now they make changes on their own and at their own pace.
9. Keep On Truckin. Some people are in such a different place in their life, their work, and their very being that there is nothing you can say or do that will change their minds. That’s ok. They may come around sometime, or they may never come around. One of the things that is so important to me is to focus on helping those who are already beginning to convert their lifestyles. There is a lot of merit in that, and a lot of merit in just doing what you do and doing it well. We all need to learn to be ok with being the first, being the loudest, and being the furthest. And you’ll be surprised at who just might catch up with you when you least expect it!
You know your friend better than most people do, so pick a tactic that makes the most sense given your unique relationship. Don’t give up on your friends. Friendships lift us up when we are down, friendships move us, shake us, and support us, and we need them. If you are not finding support for your lifestyle within your current friends, you might consider finding like-minded people who can support you. Check out Finding Or Forming A Local Group for ways to do that.
What Has Worked For You?
Please share your success stories!
(A version of this article is cross-posted at the Co-op)
We are living in difficult economic times. Join us in saving our family budgets and helping our local communities thrive.
Translator
Donations
This site is totally ad free, and I fund it on my own. So if you feel this website is helping you in some way, please donate $5, $10, $20 to help fund the site.
Just $25 in donations will pay for the site's hosting for one month.
Loading ...
Please Rate this Post!
Recent Comments