Books & Music...

Adopting a greener lifestyle sometimes puts me at odds with the very lifestyle I desire. I want a more simplistic lifestyle, one that's not driven by our consumeristic society. But at the same time, I'm told I need to buy certain products to make that happen. When those colliding ideas are exploding in my head, it makes me want to run for the woods and live like the Wilders.

In Diane McEachern's new book Big Green Pursue: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World, these two ideas that seem at odd with each other are neatly reconciled. McEachern does a great job of addressing this tension while giving the reader a clear path to move forward and understand how their new approach to spending can make a difference.

Here's a green nugget from her book:

Okay, let's get the "sacrifice" message out there in the open first. If we really want to protect the planet, we have to stop consuming so many resources and producing so much waste. There's a reason "reduce" is the first R in the environmental mantra "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." Between 1972 and 1987, the U.S. population grew by only 16 percent – but the amount of garbage we generated increased by 35 percent. Right now, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each one of us throws away three-quarters of a ton of garbage every year. All together, that's enough trash to fill the Louisiana Superdome twice a day, everyday. If we each cut waste by only 5 percent, we could collective "lose" more than 20 billion pounds of trash every year. Talk about a diet worth sticking to?