Cheers to Living Green

Hello everyone!

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the choices that I make in my life, mainly as a consumer. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I pretty much despise money. It makes me sick to see how much our society is influenced by pieces of paper that have been assigned a value. But despite the fact that I dislike money and how it drives our society and brings out the worst in people, I’m enough of a realist to understand that my power lies in my dollars, as does all of yours.

The world is presently in desperate need of educated consumers who are capable of looking past the glitz and glam of intelligently crafted marketing strategies. Fortunately, there is a growing population doing just that. Cries for transparency around social and environmental responsibility are forcing companies to really look at the way they do business and assess what must change. I, for one, am extremely excited about this. There are plenty of critics who claim that the environmental movement is hindering progress – I say that’s absolute bullshit, and I would challenge those critics to define progress. Have we really gotten to the point where the only metrics we care about are financially based? If so, what a sad statement about humanity. I truly believe that we are better than that and this is a phenomenal time for us to step up and prove that we are as smart as we think we are.

Humans are creative – benefit of having large, high-functioning brains. We are also incredibly adaptive. These two characteristics are enough to save us from the situation that we have gotten ourselves into (more to come on climate change in future posts. By the way, if you still think climate change isn’t “real,” I suggest you take a trip to the Maldives. If you can find them, that is). While change can be uncomfortable and irritating because it requires actual effort and thought, in this case it’s worth it, not to mention our only option.

I have 3 main goals with this blog:

1. Convince you that sustainability and environmentalism are, in fact, important and that they’re not such foreign concepts as some would have you believe
2. Prove that incorporating sustainable practices into businesses does NOT hinder progress – I will actually argue that it does the opposite because it drives innovation and creates new opportunities
3. Share awesome ideas on how to adapt a more sustainable lifestyle that are easy to implement. In other words, I won’t tell you to purchase an electric car and install solar panels on your roof and go vegan. If you can do all of those things, great! But for the majority of us, baby steps are necessary (and perhaps all that our limited budgets allow). A behavioral shift like this doesn’t happen overnight. However, I really do think that if you’re willing to learn along with me we can make some pretty sweet discoveries and end up happier and healthier.

I’ve never blogged before, so bear with me. I encourage you to share your thoughts by way of comments – this should be a conversation, not a lecture series. If you come across relevant articles or videos, by all means share them! Sustainability is still a relatively new concept (well, actually it’s a very old one that is now resurfacing, but again more later) and we’ll learn a lot quicker if we collaborate. Gotta love the age of social media 🙂

Alright, I think that’s it for my intro. Stay tuned for what will hopefully be a very entertaining and enlightening series of posts. Cheers to living green!

~SustainableDoi