World Changing

I am sitting here creating my first ever official blog, taking advantage of a rare bit of time after the kids have gone to bed and I have nothing pressing to do. I said kid(s) because I am child- sitting, I am not at home where my own little one is also asleep.
As I sit here getting myself online and caught up with this changing world, I am driven to talk briefly about a book and website that I just discovered both called World Changing.
This is an extraordinary book designed to help guide us into the 'green' future that I hope we can create. A future of peace and harmony with nature and people through things like green design, fair trade, and community organizing. I only just read the intro to the book and skimmed its chapters and I found a website by the same name. The book covers the subjects of stuff, shelter, cities, community, business, politics, and the planet.
The website subtitle says "tools, models, and ideas for building a bright green future" and the the subtitle of the book is "A User's Guide For the 21st Century"

I want to share with you part of what I read in the intro of the book for this excerpt touches on things I have been thinking a lot about lately and are especially relevant with the ultra consumer season of Christmas at our door step and tons of temptingly affordable Chinese imports to buy.
Having educated myself recently on the true costs of cheep products and having looked into the real life effects of our purchases of these products like child labor, environmental degradation, etc, I have strong feelings about the consumption that we all take part in. Much of this is a new problem, how long has plastic even been around ? I was visiting my grandfather this weekend for Thanksgiving and every time we talked about something he said "yeah, I made myself one of those". An example he showed us were the beautiful bows and arrows he made himself from scratch.
My son has wanted a set and we have even seen them in the toy catalogue for unbelievably low prices. Using my motivation to buy less, we went ahead with the plan we had to cut some cedar and make our own (nothing like my grandfather made but plenty good enough for a four year old).
Anyway, I could go an a 'buy less, buy local, buy fair trade, buy organic, shop responsibly, and make your own bows and arrows' rant but at this point I will simply give you the excerpt from the book which says it all pretty well. As this is the intro it is important to realize that the rest of the book is FULL of solutions to the problems it introduces.


Stuff
"Our things define us.
What we buy, what we use, what we keep and throw away, what we waste, and what we save: the stuff that surrounds us and flows through our lives is a key indicator of the kinds of lives we're living. To be an affluent twenty-first-century person is to float on a sea of material objects -- each with its own history and future.
They may be hidden form our eyes, but in practical global terms, those histories and futures tend to be the most important aspects of the stuff we own. The moment we tear the wrapping from a new toy, that toy is already at the end of a sweeping story involving the mining of metals, the pumping of oil, the operation of huge factories, the shipping of cargo containers, the printing of packaging materials, the purchase of advertising, the careful arranging of store shelves, and the final drive home. Simply buying, say a new laptop connects us with a web of activity that spans the planet.
Another story begins when we throw away our old laptop. It may find itself on a quick trip to the local dump, where it will lie, buried beneath a mountain of garbage, corroding and slowly leaking toxic chemicals for hundreds of years. It might, on the other hand, be shipped off to china, where its circuit boards will be stripped out and where poorly paid workers will extract by hand the valuable metals they contain. Parts of the laptop's titanium body may be sold as scrap and melted down for other purposes. Much of the rest will wind up in an open dump, where children will pick through the dissected electronic remains.
What's true for our new laptop is true for every product we buy: what we actually purchase form the store, as sustainable-design expert William McDonough points out in his iconic book Cradle to Cradle, is just the tip of a vast material iceberg, a gigantic pyramid of extracted resources and burnt fuel, toxic waste and sweatshop labor. Similarly, our use of a product only marks the start of a new cycle - the product will spend most of its time decaying in a dump somewhere. A Styrofoam carton may only spend fifteen minutes holding the Chinese food we have for lunch, but it could easily spend a hundred years decomposing in some trash heap.
The first problem with the secret of our stuff is it hides from us the consequences of our actions.
The second problem is, most of the time, those consequences are not pretty.....
However changes are happening; the things we live with every day are evolving, becoming lighter on the planet, fairer to the people everywhere, safer for our health....
The changes rippling through the fields of art, design, engineering, material science, and biology are nothing short of revolutionary......
Because of these forces, a more radical evolution in design is under way, and a new generation of stuff is emerging. Imagine things that use minimal energy, that are made with non-toxic chemicals, that are completely recyclable, that hurt no one - not even nature - but that perform better and last longer than what we have today....
These products still live mostly on the computer screens of cutting-edge designers, but that's changing quickly. And we have the power to make it change more quickly still. We may not all be designers, but we are all design consumers. By voting with our dollars and showing that we demand smarter stuff - that we insist on quality without the guilt - and that we're willing to walk the talk at the checkout counter, we can help spur this transformation.
We have the power to choose the world we live in, and through our purchasing decisions, we reveal that world every day."

Happy Holidays everyone, if you want, get out there and shop, but shop smart and with the whole story of your purchases in mind.

Peace,
Danny