Shades of Sustainability Series Part I

The Washington Post published a fascinating article today, "Greed in the Name of Green," that dealt with the problem of people trying to save the environment by consuming more (eco-friendly) stuff. At the same time, I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about the problem of eco-paralysis, where people acknowledge the enormity of our environmental crisis, but continue to go about their lives without changing anything. I'm convinced that these two phenomena are intimately tied together by a common cause. People have no idea what a "sustainable life" would look like. It's completely unreasonable to suggest that everyone has to go live in huts and become subsistence farmers (although I've heard this argument made), and simply buying organic versions of the same crap we buy now isn't going to cut it, but no one seems to have come up with a really compelling vision of what our everyday lives will need to be like to really achieve sustainability. In an attempt to contribute, even a tiny bit, to that process, I'm starting a series on different, cool ideas on living sustainably. I'll be posting occasionally on how we are to go about it. I'm going to start with Hobbits. A family in Wales has built a "Low Impact Woodland Home" that looks remarkably like the houses in the celluloid version of Hobbiton. That is, it looks beautifully cozy enough to make me want to break into their home and put the water on for tea. I definitely think that tea ought to be part of living sustainably...because without tea, you aren't really living.