consumption

The job market is one place where many people are finding stability to be difficult. Most employees are waiting to see if their names will appear on a short or long list of lay offs, downsizes, reorganizations or company changes. No matter the different type of term used. People are very nervous about their futures and their jobs.  Read More »

In my Sustainability class we were discussing different theories of development and we were assigned a reading called addressing "The Subsistence Perspective." I read it and basically what it was advocating was that we abandon our Western definition of affluence as consuming as much as possible and replace it with the traditional definition of being self-sufficient.  Read More »

This morning in my local newspaper, The Bangor Daily News, I read the opinion piece "Ulysses and the Hedge Trimmer" by Martin Bunzl, philosophy professor and director of the Initiative on Climate Change, Social Policy and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Poli  Read More »

A friend recently told me about The Story of Stuff, a short film that examines the production, consumption, and waste processes and suggests what we can do about them. Did you know that only one percent of what we in North America buy is still in use six months later?  Read More »

There is a region of our society, coinciding ubiquitously
with discontent, nurturing, as culture would have it, something new, original,
brave, free, exotically dangerous. Yet, when they grasp this which they’ve
constructed for themselves, their contentment is only a temporary phenomenon,
lasting mere minutes, or generally no longer than heavyset hours, running into  Read More »

A friend and I have just started a project called Caveat Emptor. It's a wiki with the purpose of informing the public about more conscientious consumption--reducing it as a whole, but also focusing on socially aware and green living.  Read More »