Rethinking Lifestyle

My friends and family from Alberta periodically post some version of the line “if you’re against pipelines, go turn off your natural gas and see if you miss it.” or “if you’re against oil, better tune up your bike.”

It is appropriate that Donald Trump should be an ardent supporter of the fossil fuel industry. After all, who better than North America’s premier fantasist to promote an industry that has consistently indulged in such fantastic claims regarding its economic benefits?

In 1962 Rachel Carson published the book Silent Spring describing DDT’s toxic impact on the environment. In spite of fierce opposition from chemical companies, her book led to a wide spread ban on the use of DDT.

Af-flu-en-za: 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling resulting from trying to buy all the latest stuff and keep up with the Joneses.

In previous columns Gary Snyder and Pat Marten have written about why they cycle through the winter. Both of them need to get to their job every day and this needs to happen reasonably efficiently.

The term “sustainability” is in many ways replacing the old term “environmentalism”, in large part because we’re beginning to recognize just how much we rely upon our environment: human life simply isn’t sustainable without it, and when the environment is damaged, inevitably so is our quality of life.

Oil is an incredibly powerful resource that has allowed us to change the world dramatically over the past century.

The house is black and silent, other than the occasional crack from the walls hinting at how cold the air is outside.

From my point of view, consumerism lies at the heart of the problem of sustainability we now face in the 21st century.

When you look around where you are now, how many items do you see that are were not mass-produced? Take a few seconds to look around right now. Did you find one?