Courtesy AdbustersFor twenty years, the people behind Buy Nothing Day have been pleading with consumers to avoid the frenzy inherent in "Black Friday," the no-holds-barred shop-o-rama that comes the day after Thanksgiving. This year, they're ramping things up and calling for an all-out Wildcat Strike against the "capitalist consumption machine." Socialists, you say? No, just worried people who want to take a stand in the face of "crises of ecology, psychology, and faith."

Dearest readers, I'll let them say it themselves -- give this a look, and visit the Buy Nothing Day site to learn more:

This year we’re calling for a wildcat general strike. On November 27/28 we’re asking tens of millions of people around the world to bring the capitalist consumption machine to a grinding – if only momentary – halt. We want you to shut off your lights, your televisions and other nonessential appliances. We want you to park your car, turn off your phones and log off your computer for the day. We’re calling for a Ramadan-like fast. From sunrise to sunset, we abstain en masse. Not only from shopping but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.

Instead we’ll feed our spirits and minds with a feast of subversive activities: pranks, shenanigans, credit card cut-ups, bicycle swarms, mall invasions and all manner of culture jams and creative détournements … and some of us will take things even further with sit-ins, demonstrations, passive resistance and acts of nonviolent defiance, anarchy and civil disobedience. If we can create a big enough ruckus on November 27/28, then we may be able to catalyze what the Situationists tried to set in motion half a century ago: a chain reaction of refusal against consumer capitalism … a sudden, unexpected moment of truth … the first ever global revolution.

So think about it -- and at the very least, I encourage you to rein in your shopping this holiday season. Here's an interesting look at the role of products and packaging in our current climate crisis; when all is said and done, they can be tied to 44 percent of our greenhouse-gas emissions. In the words of Santa's seamstress, "Yikes."

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Photo courtesy Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr I guess I’ve known all along that introducing a baby into the family meant introducing a whole slew of stuff into our lives -- much of it bulky, expensive, and -- often -- plastic.

But I'm fighting all the media and social cues to go on a shopping spree at Babies R Us. Instead, my husband and I decided to buy only one or two essential items new, like a state-of-the-art super-safe car seat. But, for the most part, we’ve managed to “go green” as we’ve outfitted ourselves for pregnancy and parenthood -- from used maternity clothes to garage sale furniture and non-material shower gifts. Our goal has been to reduce, reuse, and recycle -- and to save money while we’re at it.

Here are three tricks that have worked for us:

Identify the real essentials. As a pregnant woman I’m constantly bombarded with advertisements about all the stuff I absolutely “must have” to welcome baby. (On a side note, how does every baby product retailer even know I’m pregnant? I guess it’s because I signed up for email updates about my pregnancy from popular websites, and because I write about being pregnant on Facebook and Gmail … Our “digital shadows” are bigger than our real selves sometimes.) It’s easy to get carried away buying all kinds of baby things you don’t really need. And frankly, babies don’t need much -- especially at first. We have relied on Consumer Reports’ list of absolute newborn essentials to cut through all the clutter and determine a real list of essentials.

We’ve even scaled back from this list a bit by asking people we know with newborn babies exactly what they use and don’t use. But this is a great starting place -- reassuring new parents that you don’t actually need 50 sleepers and 30 onesies, etc. Figure out what you really need and resist the urge to buy anything more (because you'll get more than you need at your shower anyway!).

Garage sales, eBay, Craigslist, thrift shops, and consignment. Babies don’t usually wear stuff out or even soil it irreparably -- especially before they’re crawling or feeding themselves beets. (And pregnant women grow so fast they don't have time to wear stuff out either, for that matter.) That’s why there’s a glut of perfectly good, gently used baby stuff (and maternity wear) on the second-hand market. Along with hand-me-down stuff from friends, we scored most of the clothes we needed from thrift shops and consignment shops. Designer maternity jeans that would have cost nearly $100 were a steal for $15. An organic baby sling that had been recommended to us by close friends was easy to find -- in perfect condition and for half the price -- on Craigslist. And I felt like a good Samaritan buying it from a single mom who likely needed the money.

Some people love garage sales (I’m one of them); others loath sorting through piles of junk in hopes of finding one real treasure. To streamline your search, look for garage sale listings that help you pinpoint exactly what you’re seeking (sellers often list their major items or let you know they will be featuring lots of baby stuff, for example). That’s how we scored a nearly new, perfectly safe, high-end crib for a fraction of the cost of a new one. In fact, we paid $100 for a crib that retails at nearly $700. I got to the sale early (yes, I was one of those people) and fended off the other pregnant women who were circling me and the crib like sharks until I could snap it up.

Many people sell entire lots of clothes on eBay -- this may mean a little less choice, but buying in bulk cuts your shipping costs and gets you through a whole season of baby fashion needs without driving around town to multiple stores.

Finally, when you’re finished using this stuff, sell it. Consignment shops give you cash or credit. Craigslist works well for the big-ticket items. You rid yourself of excess stuff at the same time you recoup a little cash for the child’s next list of necessities -- or for their college fund.

Alternative gift registry. The obligatory baby shower is a celebration of motherhood that, like Mother’s Day, has become more about buying stuff than anything else. Everybody will insist that you register for the gifts you want, but the standard registries lock you in to a consumerist trap. A great resource for expecting parents who want to direct their shower down a more sustainable path is New American Dream’s Alternative Gift Registry. This site makes it easy to ask for used gifts, hand-me-downs, gifts from local retailers, and non-material gifts like babysitting, a diaper service, and help when baby comes -- like home cooking or grocery shopping for the new family.

After my shower, a dear family friend told me that shopping at the thrift store for baby clothes was the most fun she’s ever had looking for a shower present. She couldn’t believe the adorable items she found for dirt cheap. She ended up buying at least ten sweet little outfits for the same price she would have paid for one or two new ones. She was thrilled; I was thrilled.

All this takes a bit more time and effort, perhaps, than a few trips to a big box store. And of course buying used items means that you have to be even more vigilant about safety concerns and checking for toxins or synthetic materials you want to avoid. But it beats paying full price and starting your baby’s life off by adding to the consumer waste in the world he or she will inherit. 

If you have ideas for green baby shopping (or avoiding shopping in the first place), send them our way.

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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Elizabeth Kolbert's latest essay for The New Yorker is another triumph, a perfectly pitched marriage of style and substance.

It's about Colin Beavan's blog-turned-book-turned-movie No Impact Man, Vanessa Farquharson's Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days, and other recent experiments in (well-to-do, white, urban) asceticism. Kolbert's dry wit is underappreciated. You gotta love this paragraph:

Farquharson's "green-ovations" range from the significant ("sell my car") to the useful ("turn down my thermostat," "fix things rather than replace them") to the downright ditzy ("go to eco-friendly spas," "shop at green malls," "use a natural lubricant instead of K-Y"). The day after she resolves to "use no more toothpicks," Farquharson is shown a house that's for sale not far from her apartment in Toronto. It's newly renovated, with three stories, and, in terms of Farquharson's ecological footprint, represents an awful lot of toothpicks. She immediately buys it. ("I must have this house," she writes.) Meanwhile, even though flying is pretty much the most carbon-intensive activity possible, Farquharson is constantly taking to the air. At one point, she flies to Banff for a writers' workshop. At another, she flies to Portland, Oregon, to undertake, of all things, a sustainability-oriented bike trip. (During the trip, she sleeps with one of the trip's leaders, and so a few weeks later he flies to Toronto to stay with her.) She flies to Tel Aviv to visit another guy she will eventually sleep with. Finally, she flies to New York, where she seeks out Beavan, because, as she puts it, there's "no way" she is going to go all the way to Manhattan "without confronting my competi— . . . I mean, meeting my fellow green blogger." They rendezvous, at Beavan's suggestion, at the Grey Dog's Coffee, on University Place, which, Farquharson sniffs, doesn't seem "especially green in any way." Naturally, the talk turns to shit.

There's plenty of fun to be had at the expense of these wannabe Thoreaus, but Kolbert does have a point to make. The problem here is that "lifestyle changes" are conceived of as strictly bounded by the individual's private sphere. Says Kolbert:

The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.

What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

To put a slightly more fine point on this, I've long lamented that America seems to have devolved into two spheres, the private, which now contains almost everything of meaning to individuals, and the public, which is "government doing its thing somewhere far away."

What's missing is the middle sphere, the civic sphere, in which people do things collectively outside the state (via churches, neighborhood groups, voluntary associations, etc.). Pushing his quest into that sphere would have been much more brave of Beavan; he has less control over it, and progress is much slower and more frustrating, but it would much better illustrate what we'll all need to do if we want reduce our collective impact.

Anyway, I once wrote a post about this: "10 things we can do: rebuilding civil society." Give it a read, it's nice companion piece to Kolbert's.

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

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You never get a second chance to make No Impact—oh wait, yes you do

Photo: Editor BThe stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms--social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. Throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth's geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the throwaway economy beyond another generation or two. Assuming an annual 2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on economically recoverable reserves show the world has 17 years of reserves remaining for lead, 19 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 54 years for iron ore, and 68 years for bauxite.

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York's garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia--with some of the sites being 300 miles away.

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long--impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York's garbage--if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia's Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City's trash. "I understand the problem New York faces," he noted, "but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York's dumping ground."

Garbage travails are not limited to New York City. Toronto, Canada's largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now ships all its 750-thousand-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

In Athens, the capital of ancient and modern Greece, the one landfill available reached saturation at the end of 2006. With local governments in Greece unwilling to accept Athens's garbage, the city's daily output of 6,000 tons began accumulating on the streets, creating a garbage crisis. The country is finally beginning to pay attention to what European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas, himself a Greek, calls the waste hierarchy, where priority is given first to the prevention of waste and then to its reuse, recycling, and recovery.

One of the more recent garbage crises is unfolding in China, where, like everything else in the country, the amount of garbage generated is growing fast. Xinhua, a Chinese wire service, reports that a survey using an airborne remote sensor detected 7,000 garbage dumps, each larger than 50 square meters in the suburbs of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. A large share of China's garbage is recycled, burned, or composted, but an even larger share is dumped in landfills (where they are available) or simply heaped up in unoccupied areas.

These examples of China's waste problems are disturbing by themselves. But a broader analysis of potential consumption patterns in China in the near future shows why the existing western economic model as a whole will fail.

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's people, consumes a third or more of the earth's resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a third more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is nearly double that of the United States. It uses three times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume that China‚s economy slows from the 10 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then before 2030 income per person in China will reach the level it is in the United States today.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China's 1.46 billion people will consume more paper than the world produces today. There go the world's forests.

If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice.

By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world's oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model--the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy--is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream." And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy--one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a breakdown of social systems?

Adapted from Chapter 1, "Entering a New World," and Chapter 6, "Early Signs of Decline," in Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available for free download and purchase from the Earth Policy Institute.

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American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, "You get what you pay for"? More than we'd like to admit.

So why is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, so shocking?

Shell deftly weaves a compelling, cautionary tale out of disparate strands: the psychology of manipulating shoppers, the environmental costs of our lust for inexpensive things, the deskilling of the retail industry, and the loss of appreciation for "quality." Tracing the history of discount culture from the yesteryear excitement over brown paper packages to today's ambivalence about crammed plastic bags, Shell shows us why we feel we've been ripped off if we pay "full price."

She pushes readers to ponder the strange circumstances that make an item shipped from thousands of miles away less expensive than something homegrown. And how a major furniture retailer can convince a customer to get attached to a piece just enough to buy it, but not enough to keep it long. And, most disturbingly, just how expensive our bargain hunting is turning out to be.

_____

Ellen Ruppel Shell

Q. What audience did you have in mind when you wrote Cheap?

A. This grew out of my own curiosity about my own behavior. Since I have a science background, and I try to be a very rational person, I was startled by my own shopping behavior. So if that was happening to me, I figured it was happening to an awful lot of people. As someone who is socially conscious, I was making purchasing decisions that didn't reflect that social consciousness sometimes. I wondered what was behind that.

I'm trying to reach a thoughtful audience, and I'm particularly interested in reaching younger people because I think they have the spirit and the opportunity to change. Interestingly, it seems to resonate with young people quite a bit.

Q. Why do you think your message is resonating with young people, especially considering how inclined they are to move around and not get attached to their property?

A. I don't want to speak for all young people, but there are all sorts of ways to get value without playing into this con game of cheap.

You go to a place we have in my town [Boston], called the Garment District, which is second-hand, third-hand kind of clothes, and you can get really good stuff there for very little money. You can be creative with it -- dress it up or dress it down, do what you want with it. It's not a cookie-cutter piece out of H&M that everybody's wearing that week. You're the boss of that thing, it's not the boss of you. It's style rather than fashion.

The idea that you can go to IKEA and get good deals -- it's really not a good deal. You can't ever get rid of it, it's not something you can resell. You don't really own it; you're kind of renting it. So that's something that young people who are thinking about moving can think about. What you want to do is to be able to put it on craigslist, or maybe get your friends to help you move your stuff. You want your stuff to [have] resale value if you really want to save money. You're not being cheap, you're being smart. They're two different things.

Q. How does the psychology of marketing inhibit the ability of consumers to see an item in terms of its entire lifespan?

A. IKEA names all its products to make stuff seem cute, but then they're telling you, "You're not really attached to this, are you crazy?" They're getting you to laugh at and make a mockery out of the idea of durability. They make durability seem like an old-fashioned, passé idea. And it works. I think it's really juvenilizing: "Oh, come on, you want a new toy. You always want a new toy."

Particularly in the marketing of cell phones. You have a cell phone that works really well for you, and then you have a friend who has a cooler one, and you want it. That's kind of 4-year-old behavior. When you have 3- or 4-year-olds, they want the new shiny thing. But as you get older and a little more mature--and I don't mean 50, I mean 16 or 17--you learn that that's not what it's about. It's about what works for me. Marketers obviously don't want you to think that. In the case of the cell phone, they assume you're going to use it for a year or less, and it's not durable. Even if it is, they assume you're going to junk it. I say, "Screw them!" If it works for you, hang on to it. Don't buy into that, because basically, it's all about them making a profit. It's not about you and what you really want.

Come hither -- cheap goods for sale!Q. Do you see similarities between the psychology of marketing cheap goods and of greenwashing?

A. Yes, I do. There's a mnemonic device that's used by marketers in terms of discounting. The mental shortcut is, "Lower price, good deal." And those two things don't necessarily follow. Something that's low price triggers the impulsive side of our brains and causes us to make decisions without much thought. The same thing is true for some of this green marketing. We're told that something is green, or it has the aura of green, and that makes it OK to buy it.

That's actually why I [focused on] IKEA instead of Wal-Mart. Most of us think, "IKEA's the good guy." IKEA has taken some tiny, baby steps towards environmentalism. For example, they started charging for their plastic bags. When you charge for plastic bags, it's reasonable to question if it's really a green step or just a way to make profit. They use low-wattage bulbs in their stores. But those are cost-cutting measures. There's nothing wrong with cost-cutting measures, but they don't take environmental steps that cause them to reduce their profits. People think, "Oh, it's a green store." But the whole story that they tell of clean living and the outdoors is a mnemonic to get you to buy. When you look under the hood, and you look at something that is essentially being sold as a non-durable product, something that won't last and isn't necessarily marketed to last, that's not an environmentally sound product.

Q. What do you say to those who believe the way discounters do business is essential to the American spirit of capitalism?

A. If you reconsider Adam Smith's arguments, in light of today's realities, he would not say what a lot of people think he was saying. He was concerned about greed and morality. He was a moral philosopher. When we talk about a free market, Adam Smith could have never anticipated the free market that we have today, which is a global market of supply chain that depends on instant messaging across the globe and transportation costs being so low that they're essentially negligible.

That's why the invention of [shipping containers], which has severely lowered transportation costs, is so important in the story. In [Smith's] days, if you shipped something from Japan or China, it was costly. Now, it really isn't. It completely changes the argument about what works and what doesn't. And when you're talking about a global economy and you have workers who are completely out of our sight, who we use as a labor source--and the resources in those countries as well--and costs are so low because transportation costs are so low, it's a completely different equation.

Q. Do you foresee a change in our perception of cheap if transportation costs are driven up through climate legislation?

A. There's no question [about] that, if we actually taxed for carbon use around the globe so that we can't just outsource our pollution--which is what we're doing now to the developing world. In terms of pollution, it was pretty shocking to see the levels of particle pollution of areas in China. We're talking huge amounts of carbon being burned, toxins in the air and the water, which is all to keep prices low, because when you put in environmental protection it costs money. If the price of oil went up substantially and environmental restrictions were made globally so that we couldn't outsource our environmental costs, I definitely think this could have a big impact on cheap.

Q. So there are two ways to frame the rejection of cheap: from a personal, psychological standpoint and also an environmental standpoint.

A. And also sociopolitical impact, because as we pursue cheap goods, we also pursue lower wages, less benefits, and worse working conditions because that's what makes things cheaper and cheaper. If wages go up in Mexico, plants close up and go to China, and if wages go up in China, the plants move on to Vietnam. We're basically pursuing the least regulated cultures, where the rule of law is the weakest when it comes to enforcing the kinds of things we in the United States really value.

Q. Do you think the general public is shocked when they make the connection that their cheap habits are supported by deregulation?

A. Some of the critics have said the book is shocking in the sense that it kind of opened their eyes. And it was shocking to me; I didn't know this stuff before I did the book. I think with knowledge comes power and you get to enact change in people.

Q. Is a rejection of cheap goods and food sustainable on a global scale?

A. In the book I quote World Bank economist Michael Morris because I don't want people to think that this is going to be easy or that we're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It is a world of many billions of people. In talking about agriculture and small farms, there's this notion of happy peasants--which is a myth. It's true that small farmers can flourish, but it's also true that in many places in the world, the small farmers are the poorest of the poor. We do need to feed this world, which has so many more people than when we had these small farms. We do need to have large agricultural systems.

What I call for in the book is a middle way. I don't think we necessarily need factory meat farms, for example. I think that's actually a very costly system in many different regards. If that's something that the local-food movement and the slow-food movement pushes against, it's probably a good thing. Do we need large fields of gain? I think we do. [Fields of corn] to be fed to livestock is an unfortunate thing, but, as my background is in science, I do see the positives there, and I don't want to sell them short. For people who are starving around the world, they need a source of readily available food.

To feed the world, we're going to have to keep some of that in place, but we're also going to need a lot of local farmers, and we need more diversity in what we subsidize. We subsidize the grain growers, and the corn growers, and the soybean growers--anything that has to do with the meat industry. But we don't subsidize very much fruit and vegetable growers, which, if you're going to have a healthy diet, that's what you need. We need to really rethink our agricultural system, but the way to do it, I believe, isn't just to tell everyone to shop at their local farmers market--it's too expensive for most people, and it's unavailable to most people. I take more of a middle ground than a lot of other folks, people who I very much respect, but who I think are looking through a very narrow lens. I think we have to be careful not to oversell or oversimplify.

Q. In Cheap, you talk about the role that corporations and politics have played in how we've gotten to where we are, but you also place a significant part of that burden on individual consumers. How do we get to a sustainable middle ground in the retail landscape?

A. Consumers need more information. When you go to New York City and you go to a coffee shop, they tell you the calories of what's in the food. You can make better decisions; you change your choices.

I didn't write this in the book and I wish I had, but some kind of labeling so that consumers know the origins of what they're buying, and how it's made, and what it's made of [is important]. And eventually you should be able to go on the web and find out what company made this, where's the supplier, and [if] are they acting responsibly. Suppliers in the developing world are notorious for labor abuses. The way you make these changes is to make the labeling at the point of purchase where the buyer can see, right then and there, what he's buying. And that changes behavior.

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Our planet's supply of safe drinking water is rapidly diminishing. We have reached peak oil (according to some experts). The polar ice caps are melting, causing sea levels to rise and threatening coastal areas and island nations everywhere.

The Great Squeeze, a documentary by director Christophe Fauchere (of 2007's film Energy Crossroads), is full of such apocalyptic observations, none of which should surprise anyone even vaguely environmentally minded.

The film is polished and put-together, chock-full of interviews with various professors and experts, and features powerful footage of displaced typhoon victims and third-world children picking through trash heaps. The problem with The Great Squeeze is that its subject matter is too broad, and its format and delivery are not unique enough to reach the legions of uninformed citizens who most need to hear what it has to say. Those of us inclined to pick up a documentary with the vague subtitle "Surviving the Human Project" are probably already on board with efforts to create a sustainable future. We don't need more swelling, ominous music, staggering world population statistics, or haunting shots of belching oil refineries to convince us.

The Great Squeeze made some brief but interesting observations that I wish had been explored more deeply. It discussed the modern concept of progress, which has only barely begun to shift away from being defined by levels of consumption and convenience -- barometers that developing countries have been monitoring for decades in an effort to emulate the American lifestyle. The film also touched on the fact that Americans have lost "the tragic sense of life" -- that is, that our expectation of instant gratification has wiped away the truth that life contains loss as well as consumption, hard times as well as happy times, and that often pain and sacrifice are required of us before we can move to a better place.

For those balking at the idea of transforming our economy into a clean, green one, this is the message they need to hear. But I fear that The Great Squeeze, like so much environmental advocacy journalism before it, drowns this point with too many familiar images of bleached coral reefs and paddling polar bears. It's no surprise to learn, then, that the production company, Tiroir a Films, is working hard to market the film to the academic community, where Energy Crossroads enjoyed some success, according independent producer Joyce Johnson.

Film Notes: The Great Squeeze was released in March. It won Best Long-Form Documentary at the Festival de Cine Ecologico y de la Naturaleza de Canarias (Spain) 2009. The producers are hoping to sign a broadcast deal with an independent channel and are focusing on distributing a version of the film tailored for academic settings. You can order a copy online.

Watch the film's trailer:

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You never get a second chance to make No Impact—oh wait, yes you do

I was at a small meeting on peak oil Friday - Executive Summary:  We're peaking now!

James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, was there.  He is in the Mad Max/Lovelock/Wall-E school of dystopia, and so I have a number of disagreements with him (see "Why I don't agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the "end of suburbia").

He did, however, say one thing that really strike a chord.  He said we should stop calling Americans "consumers."  It pigeonholes all Americans and also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That seems to me a reasonable point, and I will endeavor to make a change.  Indeed, I had previously blogged that the U.S. savings rate was on the rise, it looks like U.S. carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2007, President Obama was making a big ush toward making America a nation of creators as opposed to consumers, and I asked "Is the U.S. consumption binge over?"

The figure above is from the NYT business blog, Economix, which has a longer-term, glass-is-half-empty perspective in a post titled, "Savings Rates Rising Toward Mediocrity":

The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that personal savings rates rose again in May. Americans saved 6.9 percent of their after-tax income last month, the highest rate in 15 years.

Is that impressive? Not particularly, at least in historical terms. In fact, it's about equal to the average savings rate of the last 50 years:

Doh!

Well, I'm a glass-is-half-full type of person - or, rather, like my old friend Amory Lovins, I'm a glass-is-twice-as-big-as-it-needs-to-be person.  So rather than focusing on the past, I'll stick with Obama's optimism about the future from his big speech on science and R&D last month - "Our future on this planet depends on our willingness to address the challenge posed by carbon pollution," vows "we will exceed [R&D] level achieved at the height of the space race":

I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it's science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent - to be makers of things, not just consumers of things.

I would also note that in Dale Carnegie's uber-bestseller How to Win Friends and Influnce People, in Section Four "How to be a leader:  How to change people without giving offense or arousing resentment," he has a chapter titled, "Give a Dog a Good Name."  Bottom line:  People live up - or down - to expectations, and the naming of things matters.  [Yes, I know, calling ourselves "homo sapiens sapiens" didn't take.]

So, while it may just be a small thing, instead of using the term "American consumers," I'll just try to stick with "Americans."

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Is the global oil tank half-full, is it half-empty … or are we running on fumes?

LooWatt LooWatt, oh baby, me gotta go
Meet the LooWatt: a waterless eco-commode made from poop that turns your #1 and #2 into CH4. It's the diaper genie of the sustainability set.

Tofu man, chew
We can't be sure whether this specialty tofu has anything to do with George Clooney, but you can't go wrong when your Hot Dude promises to be sweet and tender and he's got his own theme song.

Get a blue clue
Fatboy Slim and other Brit celebs you don't recognize suggest you get blue in the face right here, right now. They also suggest you get your mind out of the gutter.

No shirt, no shoes, no problem?
Imagine wearing one dress for one year no matter where you go -- all in the name of sustainability. Or you could just go nude, which sorta looks green if you squint real hard -- which is probably a good plan anyway, considering the view.

Mr. potato fan
Be a spud stud in this raincoat poncho made from tater-based bioplastic. It's 100 percent biodegradable, compostable, and unattractive. But it's embedded with seeds that'll sprout once you're done with the slicker … or get caught in a rainstorm -- whichever comes first.

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A new survey came out indicating that (surprise, surprise) only 20% of Americans trust food companies to "to develop and sell food products that are safe and healthy." While the depth to which food companies' reputations have sunk is impressive, the phrase from the survey question is both interesting and unfortunate. IBM(!), who performed the survey, put "safe and healthy" together. As a result, we can't really know which aspect, safety or health, is driving that low number. If I had to bet, I'd say safety since survey results often track media coverage of an issue and there's certainly been no shortage of food safety news. Still, the idea that people get the fact that big food companies' products are unsafe AND unhealthy is pretty satisfying

But there was, however, some far more interesting data buried in this survey. First, this:

...[N]early three-quarters (72%) said they trust the store where they buy groceries to properly handle food product contamination recalls.

That number is far above the percentage who trust the manufacturer to handle the recall. Well, that confirms what many of us knew -- the sources closest to the consumer are the most trusted. In the case of the survey, it's the store where people bought the food. But it would likely also apply in direct farm-to-consumer sales or any scenario where the consumer personally knows the producer. In other words, people may naturally understand that the shorter the "food chain," the safer.

Next and more importantly, we have this:

...63% say they have become more knowledgeable about the contents of food they buy, 77% say they want more information about the content of the food products they purchase, and 76% say they would like more information about its origin.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) say they are willing to dig deeper and seek more data about how food products are grown, processed and manufactured.

I guess our message is getting through. This survey should thus encourage those of us trying to communicate the realities of our food system and draw back the curtain on Big Food's industrial excesses. Not only are consumers willing to learn about it -- they're demanding it. Let those in business and government who wish to hide the origins and contents of their products beware. The people are with us.

(h/t Bill Marler via Twitter)

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Every year around this time, the father in me starts thinking deep thoughts about why I’ve dedicated my career to environmental awareness and, in particular, helping people who don’t consider themselves activists understand why environmental issues should matter to them. In more recent years, it’s morphed into an almost singular focus for me on why the climate crisis should matter to all of us.

For me, it’s simple. It’s the kids.

As a parent, I want to do everything I can to make sure my kids are exposed to fewer hazards than I was. I always laugh when my own mom says, “Well, we fed you [some processed food I could never imagine giving my kids] and you turned out OK,” or “We didn’t even have carseats when you were growing up and you’re just fine.” Yeah, yeah, yeah – I for one feel completely free of nostalgia for the “good old days” of the toxic dangers of the 1970s. We’ve gotten smarter and that’s a good thing.

That’s why I was so disappointed to find out how stuck companies that are making the products we parents are buying to protect our kids are on climate because climate is simply toxic to our children’s future. When Climate Counts (which I direct) announced scores on the climate action of the toys and children’s equipment sector a couple of months back, results were dismal.

At the request of the many consumers who were interested in this sector, we scored 13 of the biggest companies – companies who make familiar family brands like Graco, Safety 1st, Instep, Evenflo, Chicco, One Step Ahead, Britax, Peg Perego, and more – and TEN scored less than five points out of a possible 100 on climate. No understanding of the overall impact of their companies’ energy use, waste, distribution, and sales on climate. No evidence of any efforts to reduce energy use or greenhouse gas emissions. No support for good climate policy. And, no conversation at all with the legions of parents who buy from these companies because they want to ensure the safety of their kids. No conversation about climate change, something that could have a greater impact on the current generation of children that maybe anything else.

The companies that make children’s safety equipment are incessantly frightening parents like me into an upgrade: “Hey concerned parent, remember that carseat you used for your newborn in 2006? Well, nothing could be more dangerous for your newborn with a 2009 birthday. You’ve got to buy this year’s model in order to keep you kid safe!” Most of us hear the call and do just as we’re told, stretching our own wallets way too often to support a business model fueled by planned obsolescence.

Look, I’m a big believer in steady safety improvements and appreciate that these companies are constantly looking for ways to make their products safer. But here’s the problem I do have – why hasn’t that thirst for safety carried over yet to climate?

Children’s equipment companies know parents want to keep kids safe. And that’s not just today or this week or this year. I think about the safety of my kids long after they’ll have left my house, long after I’m gone. I want their entire lives to be safe and secure. I want to take every precaution possible in the way I treat the world I leave them. I’m not trying to anticipate what could result from global climate change. I don’t want to know – and not because I’m trying to avoid thinking about it. I don’t want to know because I don’t want it to happen.

So that affects the way I think about the products I buy ostensibly to keep my kids safe. I think those choices have to extend far beyond the catastrophic car accident I hope will never happen, far beyond the tiny fingers that might get slammed in the bedroom door (which has happened, despite my precautions), far beyond the potential toxic chemicals that may be in the food we feed them. They have to extend to climate change.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Entrepreneur Jeffrey Hollender launched a mail-order catalog business 20 years ago and nursed it for more than a decade before it became profitable. That company is now Seventh Generation, and there's no more catalog, but there certainly is a ton of recycled toilet paper -- and all-natural cleaning supplies and non-toxic personal-care products.

It's a product category that has seen massive growth in the last few years as environmental issues have risen to front-page news status. In fact, Seventh Generation saw its biggest numbers recently -- posting about 50 percent growth last year. Which is exactly why Hollender has decided it's time to step down from his role as CEO.

Sound like odd timing? Not for Hollender. "I realized that I lacked most of the experience that would be required to manage that growth to its fruition," he says. Hollender was also growing increasingly torn between other projects like writing -- his next book, In Our Every Deliberation, comes out next month -- and speaking gigs, and a TV program called Big Green Lies. "As I wandered around the offices, I began to wonder what all the people in different rooms were doing."

So as of last week, there was at least one more new face in the Seventh Generation offices: Chuck Maniscalco. He comes to the company from PepsiCo, where he was CEO of the $10 billion Quaker, Tropicana, and Gatorade division, which he calls "very purpose-driven businesses." Maniscalco, who actually came out of retirement to take on this job, says he's determined to manage Seventh Generation's growth in a way that remains true to the company's commitment to sustainability.

As for Hollender, he'll be continuing in the role of "Chief Inspired Protagonist," focusing more on corporate responsibility and sustainability advocacy work rather than being involved the company's day-to-day operations.

I spoke to the two of them in a three-way conference call just days after Maniscalco took over his new office. Here's what they had to say:

Q. One of the reasons you're leaving, Jeffrey, is because of the massive growth Seventh Generation has seen recently. What do you attribute that success to?

A. Hollender: I think that we live in a world where there is a tremendous sort of search for purpose and meaning. In some respects, who Seventh Generation is and what we aspire to helps people be the people they want to be and live the lives they want to live and that is a stark contrast to what they often experience from [other] companies and businesses ... [It] builds a strong and deep connection to people that I think is more important than it has perhaps ever been. Now, that's not enough; you have to also get your products on the shelves of stores at the right price and the products have to work the way people expect them to work.

Q. Speaking of getting your products on the shelves at the right price, are you still refusing to sell them in Wal-Mart?

A. Hollender: Historically, that was true; up until a year ago while we were in a very close dialogue with Wal-Mart and working to help them become a more sustainable and responsible business, we were not comfortable selling to them. But the progress that Wal-Mart has made in the past three to four years is astounding and absolutely an incredible inspiration for what's possible of a large company. Does that mean they're perfect today? No, but they have made more progress than just about any company that I can think of and that progress has led us to experiment with them in a small group of stores. ... So it's really a question for Chuck in terms of when is the right time and what is the right way, but there is no philosophic issue that restrains us from doing business with them.

Q. Do you feel like it's possible for a big company like Wal-Mart or PepsiCo to commit to the same standards of sustainability that Seventh Generation has?

Chuck Maniscalco (left) and Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation.Photo: Chrystie HeimertA. Maniscalco: I think it would be difficult for any company to ever reach up to the standards that Seventh Generation has set. I've never seen it before, and I probably will never see it again and that's why I'm here. Having said that, Wal-Mart, for example, was a very big customer for PepsiCo and Quaker Oats, and Wal-Mart over the course of the last several years has been the single biggest force in getting companies in the consumer packaged-goods world to take waste out of their products, out of their packages, and out of the supply-chain stream. So I think they can be a force for good.

Hollender: And they can move quicker than government or any regulatory agency. Now, they don't all use that power in ways that are beneficial, in fact we wouldn't be in the situation we are if they did. But I don't believe that we can solve the urgent problems that face us -- whether it's global warming, or whether it's a crisis of fresh water or species disappearance -- without aggressive leadership from the business community. Part of the role that Seventh Generation wants to play is showing business that being responsible is good business and being sustainable is good business, and that we can't afford to have business stand in the way of the progress we need to make to become more sustainable.

Q. In the same vein, is it possible for a company like Seventh Generation to scale up? You've said your goal was to take the company from $150 million annually to $1 billion. How do you plan to do this while maintaining a commitment to sustainability?

A. Maniscalco: It's a question of how to get big and be authentic at the same time ... Even with all of the growth this business has had over many, many years, we have still tapped into a minority of the consumers out there who care about what we offer in our products and who care about what the company stands for ... so there's still distribution opportunities. And from a consumer standpoint, this group of people is already big and it's growing by the day, because all of the issues that we all know the world is facing are becoming much more apparent to more people. So I absolutely think it's doable, but you have to do it with real care and real discipline. And that's our charge.

Hollender: It helps to be a private company so that we don't have to answer to shareholders who've purchased stock in the company who might not share our vision or our values. We choose our investors as carefully if not more carefully than our employees, because the alignment of those investors is absolutely critical. I also think that what I've experienced is that a company with the mission we have is a magnet for the best talent in the marketplace ... that's one of the ways in which we will scale, because we can get the best and brightest people to come and join what we're doing.

Q. When you started Seventh Generation, you were a big fish in a little pond. That pond is more crowded now; is there enough room in the pool for everyone? How do you feel about the competitors like Method who are on the shelves with you at Target or other stores?

A. Maniscalco: People always say they love competition and they rarely mean it. I would say, in this case, we love competition and we do mean it. In my view, the more people who come into this space -- and do so legitimately -- the greater good we're serving. And as Jeffrey pointed out before, we don't succeed against our mission if we do it all by ourselves. Secondly, the more people that come into this space and do it right, the more awareness and understanding consumers will have about how to behave responsibly. The challenge for us, I think, is to ensure that we keep driving standards higher and higher and higher, so that as other people come along, we still have a significant edge over them.

Hollender: One of the biggest gaps that exists today is a green product does not make a green company. And what we need to do -- and what we need our customers, consumers, and partners to do -- is to push businesses beyond greening a teeny part of their business, to embrace sustainability across everything they do. When you look at the competitive landscape today, it's mostly large companies taking a small part of their portfolio and making it greener than it was before. I think that consumers will increasingly look for sustainable companies, not just sustainable products.

Q. You're touching on a major problem for consumers: greenwashing -- companies putting out products that have green labels on them, but aren't really following that up within the actual product or their company as a whole. What can consumers do to make sure they're buying a legitimate product?

A. Hollender: Well, I'll just mention two things. One is we have a great application that you can download to your phone or your computer or your PDA. As you're walking down the aisles of a grocery store, you can use this application to help make better choices. Secondly, we are big advocates of what the Good Guide is doing, and we think that the service that a third party like the Good Guide provides in making independent evaluations of the products on the shelf is a very valuable service to consumers.

Q. What is the biggest challenge for a business wanting to be truly sustainable?

A. Hollender: I think we face a couple of challenges. Clearly, education is a huge challenge, so it is critical that we help consumers make conscious and responsible choices. We need greater transparency so that they can make informed decisions. Secondly, we live in a regulatory environment that often encourages us to do the wrong thing because companies are allowed to externalize so much of their costs that dangerous, environmentally irresponsible products often cost less than sustainable, responsible products. If consumers are shown the full cost of the products and services that they're buying, there's no question that they will increasingly choose responsible, sustainable products.

Q. How can we show them that cost?

A. Hollender: There are hundreds and hundreds of examples, and some of them directly affect our business. We're in the business of selling recycled tissue paper, and the government -- for the last year in which a calculation was made -- spent a billion dollars subsidizing the virgin timber industry by building roads and allowing that timber to be cut at below-market prices. What that does is it artificially makes recycled fiber more expensive. All of these things send the wrong message to the consumer, and we need to actively make sure that the government and the regulatory agencies are reflecting decisions that are in the best interest of future generations, not the shareholders of some of America's largest companies.

Q. So, it's got to be a political-activism sort of thing?

A. Hollender: It does, and Chuck's going to allow me more time to do that, which I'm looking forward to.

Maniscalco: The great news is we've now got Jeffrey playing a much bigger role in that big external environment, and I can get really focused on driving [the company] from the inside, and I think that's a really good one-two punch.

Hollender: Absolutely. We're subtly sending a message to all these large companies that they better, to a certain extent, watch out because this is a game-changing event for our business and for our industry. The addition of Chuck to Seventh Generation will dramatically accelerate the need for everyone to rise to a higher standard and move more quickly in a sustainable direction.

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National Geographic GreendexWith NatGeo releasing the results of its annual Greendex survey today, I'd like to point out that polls like this are really an opportunity for America to shine.

Take, for example, the question about public transit: Not only did we score the lowest percentage on public transit use every day, but we also scored the highest percentage of folks taking public transit never. Talk about kicking the competition's ass at both ends of the spectrum.

We've also got the lowest score on the green housing index (despite our best efforts to show up the neighbors with big green additions to our McMansions!). And we might want to rethink that whole Lay's as local thing, seeing as how we're ranked lowest in the list of countries eating locally grown food and lord knows we eat a lot of chips.

There's more to the report than these few categories -- you can read all 296 pages of it here [PDF] -- but if you want the short version, here it is: developing nations like India and Brazil have the highest (read: greenest) Greendex numbers, while Canadians and Americans round out the bottom ... overall and in pretty much every category (way to be consistent!).

OK, enough sarcasm; turns out it's my job to wrangle out a nugget of hope here, however tiny, so the good news is that we are improving. Sure, everyone else is too -- so in the long-standing American tradition that is Always Wanting to Be Number One, we are, perhaps, not doing so well -- but at least we are trying. We are trying, aren't we?

Perhaps with a little hard work (Americans are known for that, too, aren't we?), we can aim to move up a spot next year on the Greendex. Surely, we can beat those Canucks, eh?

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Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist ManifestoCourtesy of Indiana University PressI’ve had some great teachers over the years, but none quite like Scott Russell Sanders, the gentle guru of Bloomington, Indiana, and a leading light of Midwestern environmentalism. To call him articulate doesn’t begin to do justice. He exudes a sort of intellectual clarity, in both his works of non-fiction and fiction and in his teaching at Indiana University. (As a former student, I'm a thoroughly biased source.)

Sanders' book Staying Put offers a countercultural vision of what it means to live rooted in a place -- not far from Wendell Berry country, geographically or philosophically. A Private History of Awe charts his development-of-conscience growing up on a military base during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. It’s one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.

His new book, A Conservationist Manifesto (released this week), presents a host of arguments for why we’re better off thinking of ourselves as citizens and stewards than consumers in the face of ecological disaster. Here’s our recent phone conversation about the book.

Q. What led you to write A Conservationist Manifesto?

A. For the first time in human history, we are causing damage to the entire living system of the planet, and we know that we are doing so. We don’t have models for how to respond, because none of our ancestors ever had to contend with damage on this scale. I’m trying to identify some of the sources we possess within our spiritual and intellectual traditions, and within science and art, for responding in creative ways to our present environmental predicament.

Q. You do a lot of describing a civic "good life" -- through describing what you love best about Bloomington, through describing the work of unsung conservationists, and in your essay that responds to [James Howard] Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere with a "Geography of Somewhere." Why do you take this on?

A. We live in a society that places so much emphasis on private wealth that we forget how important the common wealth—the realm of shared natural and cultural goods--is for our happiness, our wholeness, and our well-being. Advertising addresses the isolated individual, but we don't exist in isolation. We exist as members of relationships, within families, communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces. I write about that communal dimension of our existence because the private dimension is more than adequately dealt with by the popular media.

Q. Sure. It seems like an artistic challenge as well to make successful towns and societies as compelling as dysfunctional ones.

A. None of us wants to live in the midst of trouble, but we do want to read about it and watch it on screen. It's easier to make trouble and failure artistically captivating. So there is this paradox. I faced a similar challenge in my book A Private History of Awe, where I wrote about an enduring and loving marriage. It’s a lot harder to engage people in reading about something that works well over a long period of time than to engage them with something that breaks down in catastrophic and sensational ways.

Most environmental news describes breakdown of one sort or another. Of course, it's crucial for us to be aware of such news. At the same time, we need to know about the creative and promising responses that people are making, the various "arks" people are building to carry what we love and what we need through this time of troubles.

Q. You write about settling in southern Indiana in 1971 and trying to be a conscientious citizen since then. How have you seen the environmental movement, or attitudes toward conservation, change in the Midwest over that time?

A. During my nearly 40 years here in southern Indiana I have seen a rising concern about the preservation of forests, the restoration of wetlands, the cleansing of rivers, and the healing of communities.  As I travel around the Midwest, I meet people everywhere who are involved with farmers' markets, with land trusts, with community-supported agriculture, with schoolyard gardens, and with other efforts to protect and restore portions of the natural world. Every community I visit has organizations devoted to looking after the land and waters, fostering organic gardening, reducing carbon emissions, or other environmental causes. I find that very encouraging.

The central section of A Conservationist Manifesto focuses on Indiana, because this is the place I know most deeply. For the benefit of readers who live elsewhere and who may think of the Midwest as short on wild beauty and environmental consciousness, I wish to call attention to the natural history of my home region and to the conservation efforts underway here.

Q. Your vision about how we ought to live in relation to the natural world stands very much in the tradition of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and such. And you make it pretty clear in your writing that you’re working from within that tradition. I'm curious about how you make your message your own.

A. Well, certainly I have drawn on the great tradition of American nature writing, and I honor those predecessors. But I also feel that I'm doing something different. That tradition was created primarily by men who explored nature in solitude. They made excursions into the natural world, lived beside ponds or climbed trees in the midst of storms or canoed wild rivers, and then returned to write about the experience. I treasure their work.  But I am not solitary.  I write about living in the midst of family, community, and human structures.  I see the natural world not as a wild place out there, but as the matrix from which we arise and in which we dwell.  We breathe it, drink it, eat it, and wear it; we are sustained by nature with every heartbeat.
Among our contemporaries, Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, in particular, have written powerfully about human relationships embedded within nature.  They exemplify the sort of writer I’ve tried to be, more fully than such earlier figures as Thoreau or Muir.

Q. I want to ask about reverence and irreverence. You make a case for sort of rediscovering reverence--in dealing with the natural world, in dealing with other humans -- Grist tries to make a case for irreverence in approaching deadly serious topics. What gives?

A. Reverence is a profoundly important attitude. Not toward ourselves or our work, but toward the power that we see manifest in the natural world and that we feel moving within us.  Reverence toward that shaping power seems to me the deepest and truest emotion the universe calls for. That awareness runs through A Private History of Awe, as well as A Conservationist Manifesto.  We need to recover a sense of the ultimate value and beauty of wildness, including the wildness that courses through us as human beings.

While we honor the universe, we need to maintain a healthy irreverence toward ourselves.  We need to challenge, to question, in some cases to mock, to look harder at our works, postures, and sayings. Grist has attracted readers who might be put off by the sense of frenzy and righteousness that can creep into environmental writing (including my own). So that’s where irreverence comes in.

Q. What do you make of the so-called "moderate" Congressional Democrats, ones like Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, your representative, Baron Hill, and others who have suggested they may force Obama to slow down or water down renewable energy measures and capping carbon emissions? What do you think of the whole "moderate" or "centrist" terminology?

A. They're not moderate, nor centrist, nor conservative. Insofar as they are endorsing the status quo, which is ruining the planet, they are extremists.  They refuse to recognize how radically our society needs to change. They seem to feel that we can cope with global-scale damage by making little changes around the edges of our lives. They're not moderate; they're timid. We need more courage and vision from all of our leaders, at the local, state, and national levels, and we need those qualities from Republicans as well as Democrats.

The word "conservative" ought to have some connection to the word "conserve."  If you're going to call yourself conservative, you ought to be clear about what it is you want to conserve.  Many conservatives, if they're honest, will say, "I want to conserve as much money as possible in private hands, and I want to protect every opportunity to increase that private wealth, regardless of the cost to society or planet." If we keep treating the accumulation of money by individuals and corporations as the highest good, we will continue to degrade Earth's living systems, and we will leave a sadly diminished world for future generations. That's as immoral a path as I can imagine.

Q. Thanks. What have I missed?

A. Some people come across A Conservationist Manifesto and say, "That title seems confrontational." Maybe it is, I reply, but so is every billboard, every TV advertisement, every speech calling for endless growth, every Hummer on the highway, every assault on the Endangered Species Act, every call for drilling in wildlife refuges. If we plead, "Don't forget that we share the planet with millions of other species, that we are degrading the living conditions for all beings including ourselves, that we are betraying future generations"—if we say all of that mildly and meekly, we have no chance of being heard in our cultural cacophony. We need to be forceful in challenging the ruinous path we're on and the media and ideology that keep pushing us along that path. I hope that A Conservationist Manifesto is written in a measured, thoughtful, lucid way. But I also hope the book conveys a sense of ethical and practical urgency. Right now, anything less than urgency is inadequate to our situation.

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Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing SquidToday is Earth Day. (Whoopee?) And there's no better way to celebrate than with a nice, cold pint of beer. No, really!

To make it truly Earth-Day-worthy, however, make sure you're chugging buying it at Seattle's Pike Pub & Brewery today. Why there and why today?

Seattle Greendrinks has partnered with Carrotmob to create a consumer-powered event in which 25 percent of all sales at Pike Pub today will go toward efficiency retrofits, waste reduction, and other sustainability efforts.

It's a way to vote with your dollars, to make change by spending a little of your own on something you would have purchased anyway. But because it's an organized, focused effort -- with many, many other consumers standing in line right behind you -- it actually sends a message.

So forget about the planet's ails and settle in for some refreshing, locally brewed ale of your own.

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Tip #1: Make every day Earth Day by killing the vampires. Our advice queen Umbra Fisk tells you how to cut your spending on electricity in this recent video. Less energy use = less coal and natural gas burned to produce electricity.

...

Why does Grist hate Earth Day, you may be wondering? Are you guys jealous or something?

No ... yes ... not really ... then again, sorta.  You see, every year as the calendar approaches April 22, the Grist staff gets cranky.

“Here it comes,” we say to ourselves, “the day we’re supposed to do something GREEN and appreciate all the attention that this made-up holiday brings to Grist and every other environmental organization and cause under the sun.”

And then there’s all those people who get to take credit for being green for one day and we’re all supposed to be happy about it. Hypocrites!

Earth Day, then, is sort of like Christmas, Hannukah and Kwanzaa all in one: We Gristers love to talk about hating it, we say we’re only doing it for the kids, but in the end we grudgingly have to admit that we had fun, at least until crazy Uncle Ray started talking about the ozone layer being a myth…

Screw Earth Day was born from mixed emotions about a day that we purists think doesn’t do enough to get the message across about what individuals can and should be doing to protect the environment. While even the most jaded Grist staffer gets a little excited on Earth Day, as lots and lots of people gather together in communities around the world to do something good for our dearly loved Mother Nature, in the back of our heads we’re thinking, “It’s not about a single day, dude, it’s about living green every day.”

Every day is April 22 in Gristland! Really. And we want you and your friends and family (even crazy Uncle Ray) to sign up for the cause as well. We’re not hyperventilating when we say that the fate of the planet is in the balance here, really.

Here is Umbra’s video advice on vampire-slaying. Check back Monday for a new Screw Earth Day tip ... straight from the Grist vault. Even more tips with our free book giveaway.

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File this one under "now they tell us" or maybe "the former drug kingpin says crack is not healthy for you." The Financial Times reports the shocking not-quite-deathbed conversion:

Uhh, "your products," Jack? Still, an amazing statement and 2 out of 3 aren't bad.

I realize this is not the same as Jack denouncing the whole system as a Ponzi scheme (see "Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme, Part 1."). It's not like he said "your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and the next generation."

But escaping the Ponzi scheme requires a massive national and global investment in the trifecta of energy efficiency, cogeneration, and renewable energy (see "An introduction to the core climate solutions"). And that requires companies to make investments maximizing long-term profits and minimizing lifecycle costs -- not maximizing short term profits and minimizing first costs.

Having spent a decade working with leading businesses on greenhouse-gas mitigation strategy, helping (many of) them to adopt energy efficiency, renewable energy, and cogeneration technologies, I can attest that the single biggest reason senior company executives and corporate energy managers turned down even highly profitable investments was the companies' obsession with short-term profits. A four- to five-year payback is, for instance, typical for a major energy efficiency upgrade and/or an onsite combined heat and power system, which can cut energy bills 25 percent to 50 percent (see the hundred case studies in my 1999 book, Cool Companies: How the Best Businesses Boost Profits and Productivity by Cutting. Greenhouse Gas Emissions).

Now that is a simple return of some 20 percent to 25 percent per year -- comparable to or even higher than most of the other kinds of investments companies make. And that high return comes with a far lower risk than any of those other investments. And that high return also often come with productivity gains, as I and others have documented at length.

But it requires making a capital expenditure now (or increasing debt to borrow the money for the retrofit), to reduce operating expenses for the next 10 to 20 years. That hurts short-term profits and shareholder value -- at least in the Welch-created world of now, now, now.

So perhaps Welch's statement might be the first crack in the short-term-profit façade. Here are more excerpts from this amazing story:

Sadly, most businesses today still haven't done what the best businesses did on energy efficiency and cogen in the 1990s. And yes I realize that most companies don't feel they have the money to make such investments right now.

But the Obama administration and Congress are working hard to help underwrite part of those investments with tax credits and loans -- and incentivizing the utility industry to do the same by pushing smarter regulations (see "Waxman puts utility decoupling in the stimulus").

So I expect a real resurgence in corporate energy investments over the next few years.

Note to self: Perhaps it is time to reprint some of the case studies I published a decade ago.

h/t HuffPost

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Dear Umbra,

Sustainably grown bamboo is a very good choice for fabrics. But how does the consumer know it is harvested sustainably? After all, some bamboo is clear cut from old-growth stands. Even in cultivated bamboo there are some very unsustainable practices (for instance, harvesting too young). How can you know if the bamboo fabric you are buying is harvested sustainably?

Gar L.
Olympia, Wash.

Dearest Gar,

Telepathy is the only way. Close your eyes, put your hand on the fabric, and let a vision of a Giant Panda come in to your mind. If the panda is frolicking, all is well.

Dude, that's a lot of grass.

Bamboo is hot hot hot, for flooring, fabric, and myriad other stripy items. It is an inexpensive material, and the plants grow quickly and can do so without many fertilizers or pesticides. The mysteries of the exploding bamboo industry include the questions you mentioned above, and others such as how are the workers treated, are commercial pressures leading to the removal of other vegetation and the planting of bamboo in its place, are farmers adding chemical fertilizer to increase production, and what toxic chemicals are added in order to make products such as flooring and fabrics?

We'll get to that last question in a moment. The answer to the rest is: no one really knows for sure. I spoke with Jackie Heinricher, a bamboo expert and entrepreneur here in Washington, who says bamboo is both blessed and cursed: It's a truly green plant, but there's no accountability in the current industry.

There is no sustainable-harvest certification to look for, in part because, says Jackie, bamboo grows so quickly that no one imagined it would ever have overharvest issues. I did find that the Forest Stewardship Council has a certified bamboo flooring producer. I also tracked down one organic bamboo fabric producer, certified by OCIA International and the USDA, whose products are sold by Bamboosa and perhaps others. (The organic certification process for bamboo fabric would be similar to that for other fibers such as cotton, and is governed by crop and livestock production standards.) Another certification often touted for fabrics is Oeko-tek 100, however this only guarantees minimal residue on the fibers and tells us nothing about raw material production methods.

Outside of these eco-certifications, I think there is no surety for sustainably produced bamboo fabric. Given the general positives about bamboo -- its speedy regrowth, its low fertilizer needs, its high carbon-sequestration abilities -- we could hold out some reasonable hope that a bamboo plant's life was fairly low-impact. But here's the catch: It's the bamboo fiber production that leaves quite a bit to be desired.

It's just difficult to make a hard grass into a shirt, and so we use chemicals to soften the fibers. Here's what I've read: there are two ways to mash a bamboo plant in to fibers appropriate for fabric. One is mechanically, via crushing and enzymes. Mechanical processing results in a linen type of fabric, and is expensive and unusual. Most bamboo is processed in a bath of lye and carbon disulfide, along with something referred to as "multi-phase bleaching." It is akin to the method for making rayon out of cellulose, and it can be quite toxic to workers and nearby nature.

So is bamboo worse than other fabrics? Probably not. It may in fact be a little better. There aren't good "chain of custody" certifications, but that doesn't mean that the wool is pulled over our eyes and bamboo is never ecologically preferred. A possibly promising development comes from Jackie and others, who are finding ways to cultivate bamboo domestically and responsibly. Meantime, we're just stuck with our same old clothing rules: buy few, buy organic, buy used, dry on the line.

Pandaly,
Umbra

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