San Francisco city officials say they are moving to block purchases of Apple desktops and laptops, by all municipal agencies, after the company removed a green electronics certification from its products….
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Over the past several years, Walmart — the largest retailer in the United States by a factor of, well, a lot — has paraded out a series of sustainability initiatives, from energy efficient lighting in its stores to, more recently, a much-touted effort to bring fresh food to urban areas….
posted by Originally Posted at EarthTrack, which works to make government subsidies that harm the environment easier to see, value, and eliminate.
Like implant dentists or utility accountants, subsidy wonks go to trade meetings (yes, meetings on natural resource subsidies do exist) to find people who talk our language. In that “safe” space, we can be met with a knowing nod as we wax poetic on the difference between revenue loss and outlay equivalents, or what is missing from a price gap estimate….
posted by ORIGINALLY POSTED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR HUMANE EDUCATION
From the time we arise in the morning until after we fall asleep, we participate in a continuous cycle of using stuff that affects ourselves, other people, animals and the planet. We do what we can to buy products and use stuff that do more good and less harm, but it can be a real challenge to uncover the details of how these gadgets and goodies that we buy to meet our wants and needs are produced, transported, and disposed of and whether the secret lives of our stuff reflect our deepest values. Industry and government don’t make it easy to find out. Fortunately, people passionate about creating a better world are creating more resources to help us. Here are 7 resources for finding out more about the impact of your stuff on people, animals and the earth:…
posted by Inspired by The Story of Electronics, hundreds of people sent letters to Lenovo President and CEO Rory Read yesterday, telling the company to green its products and “Make ‘em Safe, Make ‘em Last, and Take ‘em Back.” Within hours,Read got back in touch to say he “could not agree with [us] more.”
We’re excited that Lenovo wants to do better, but with their weak track record on responsible recycling and failure to follow through on a commitment to get PVC and brominated flame retardants out of their products, we’re not ready to take them at their word just yet….
posted by If you’re like me, an increasing amount of your worries these days focus on the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and the resulting potential for devastating climate chaos.
Years ago, when I first heard about climate change, I figured someone else would work all that out while I kept plodding away with my work on consumption, pollution and waste. Well, guess what? They didn’t work it out; in fact, the climate situation is far worse today than even recent scientific predictions. And guess what else? It turns out that climate and consumption are actually the same issue….
posted by Those of us in the U.S. are wrapping up our work weeks today to spend tomorrow with friends and family, gathered around big home cooked meals and giving thanks.
Yes, I know that the history of this particular holiday is not nearly as charming as our children’s schoolbooks portray, but for many, the gathering isn’t about participating in a fabricated historical tale, but is about pausing in our hectic lives and honestly sincerely giving thanks for those things which make our lives sweeter throughout the year: our friends, our family, our community and our work to make world a better place.
Unfortunately, many people across the country leave their home Thanksgiving night to sleep in cold parking lots and line up at stores to participate in the consumer frenzy known as Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Retailers know that the Friday after Thanksgiving is the only weekday that many people will have off from work until Christmas, so they widely advertise rock bottom prices to lure people away from their friends and families to go shopping. Adbusters has declared November 27th in the U.S. and 28 November internationally Buy Nothing Day and calls upon us all to restrain from holiday shopping, or from any shopping as well as to unplug our TVs, leave the cars in the garage, and “from sunrise through sunset, we’ll abstain en masse, not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.”
Last year’s Black Friday hit a new low.
Jdimytai Damour, a 34 year old man from Haiti, was working as a temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in New York State. At 5:00 am, when the store was scheduled to open, the crowd of shoppers who had been waiting in line in the cold for up to 8 hours, stormed the door and trampled Jdimytai to death.
I think of Jdimytai with every advertisement that I’ve seen urging me to go shopping early on Friday morning. And I’ll be thinking of him as I instead linger around our dinner table, crowded with friends, and when I spend a welcome Friday off of work playing board games and making art projects with the kids and doing any number of things that will be infinitely more fun than sleeping in a cold parking lot to be first in line at the mall.
I hope you’ll do the same.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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