I lived in the Presidio in San Francisco for six years, a former military base turned national recreation area right next to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean. It was a beautiful place to live, full of meandering trails, dense eucalyptus groves, and more often than not, small pieces of litter that had either been dropped or escaped people’s trash cans, blown by Read More »
Hello, my name is Kara and I’m a recovering shopping addict. Growing up in an affluent California suburb during the ’90s, it is no great surprise that I spent a lot of time in shopping malls. Read More »
As I mentioned in my blog Opt-Out of Fast Fashion, the clothing industry has moved from creating quality clothing that last years to creating low quality, disposable clothing that quickly falls apart. I’m opting out of the system, because fast fashion is both bad for the planet and for me personally. By spending a bit more on quantity clothes up front and making them last, I end up saving both time (since I have to shop less often and can spend my weekends on more fulfilling hobbies) and money. While I may spend $50 on a single wool shirt, I make it last for years and thus the cost per use is lower than with a cheap $10 cotton-poly blend shirt that starts to pill and fall apart within a few wears. Read More »
I was listening to an interview with author and motivational speaker Jon Gordon on the Rich Roll Podcast recently and Jon talked the idea of picking a single world each year to remind you of the reason why you’re doing things to help keep you focused and motivated. According to Jon, “We don’t get burned out by what we do… We get burned out because we forget why we’re doing it.” Read More »
Ladies, it is time to reconsider how you manage your period for the good of your wallets and our planet. According to this article, women in the United States spend from $150 to $300 per year on menstrual products. Over her lifetime, the average woman will use 11,000 tampons and the manufacturing process is resource-intensive, full of chemicals and all tampons end up wrapped in one or more kinds of plastic, depending on if you use an applicator or not. That’s a lot of hard earned cash being spent each year on your period and a lot of waste being generated per person. What if we could easily solve those problems with one small change?Read More »
The holidays have become a time for taking on debt in order to honor the “time-honored” tradition of giving gifts at the holidays. CNBC reported in November that many American still have credit card debt from last Christmas. However, according to this article in The Atlantic, the tradition of gift giving at the holidays started after our country was founded and it was originally focused in giving gifts to children only. Obviously, that changed over time and we now give gifts to not only our children, but our families, friends and often co-workers. This change has been driven largely by retail who want to encourage us to spend more money to grow their profits and this is a great year for them as sales are up from last year.
While it is good for retail, I’m not convinced that the growth of this annual spending frenzy is helpful to the rest of society. The problem that I see with the proliferation of gift giving is twofold. Read More »
Are you struggling to come up with ideas of what to buy friends or co-workers for that upcoming Secret Santa gift exchange or White Elephant party? Here are some ideas for eco-friendly Christmas gifts that are under $30 that people will fight over receiving at this year’s holiday party.Read More »
I have a love-hate relationship with Christmas. Growing up, I loved the decorations, baking Christmas cookies, picking out a Christmas tree with my family, listening to Christmas carols and of course, the gifts. My sister was the master gift wrapper in our house and made a game out of gift wrapping. She became known for creating a Russian dolls of boxes; wrapping a gift in a small box, then putting that in a bigger box and that box in an even bigger one, each covered in a layer of wrapping paper and then often, a layer of clear packing tape to make it impossible to open. As I grew older and became more aware of the waste that we as a family were generating, I started to save the comics from my newspaper and wrap Christmas gifts in that. This met immediate disapproval from my little sister, who cherished a beautifully wrapped Christmas gift above all else. She was right; my gifts looked cheap and were not the least bit festive.Read More »
Last night, my husband and I sat down to watch a documentary called The True Cost, which looks at the true cost of the fast fashion industry that has developed over the past few decades. By the end, tears were streaming down my face and I was overwhelmed with anger at the clothing companies who are getting rich at a very high cost to us. I was familiar with the concepts in the documentary from reading a book called Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, but seeing video footage of the problem always makes it hit home harder than words in a book. Clear your evening and watch the documentary (it’s on Netflix); it’ll take 90 minutes of your life and is guaranteed to move you, but to paraphrase a bit of what it covers:
Welcome to My Eco Legacy, a place for people to get inspiration about simple steps that they can take to live a more eco-friendly and sustainable life!
The word legacy is used often to describe a gift or something transmitted from the past that continues onto the present day. Sometimes a legacy is used to describe a bequest, or donation of money made, to a cause or organization. These legacies are intentional and tend to be positive. Whether or not you realize it, you will leave behind a legacy. All seven billion of us living on the earth leave behind the legacy of the things that we have consumed during our time on the planet. With more people on our planet than ever consuming more than ever because we can, it becomes essential for individuals in wealthy nations who consume the most and who have the luxury of choice to take a hard look about what we want our ecological legacy to be and to put intention around it. It is time to take a pause and consider what is it that we want to leave behind after we are gone, because unlike past generations who lived before the creation of plastic, much of what we leave behind does not compost and is not going anywhere after we ourselves disappear.Read More »
