My adorable niece turned eight last week, and one of the gifts we sent her was BRAND NEW CLOTHES! Definitely not Compact-approved, so I’m coming clean here. Do I regret it? No way. She’s wearing one of the tops in this photo, she liked it and wanted to wear it on her birthday while she […]
Annie Leonard: hero or communist sympathizer?
Annie Leonard’s video “The Story of Stuff,” was the single strongest influence on me during my first year on The Compact (I’m almost halfway through my second already). So I was happy to see her on The Colbert Report and learn that she’d written a book of the same name. The idea that we should […]
March Birthdays
I’ve successfully navigated another Birthday Season on The Compact. March is Birthday Heavy in my world. A lot of friends and acquaintances were born in March, and my husband, my brother, and my father all have birthdays within a week of one another. And those are birthdays that require acknowledgement. It was no problem to […]
My 90% Rule
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this concept of what I’ll call “The 90% Rule,” by which I mean that a lot of people doing things at a 90% level makes a much bigger difference than a few people operating at 100%. By “things” I mean recycling, living sustainably, buying secondhand, eating organic, line-drying […]
I’m a Citizen, Not a Consumer!
Well, in reality even non-consumers are consumers. My husband and I consume food- both groceries and restaurant food, entertainment- in the form of movies, plays, concerts, and so forth, used goods from ebay, craigslist, Goodwill, yard sales, freecycle, etc. But we’re not big consumers of brand-new, cheaply made, throwaway STUFF. As a member of The […]
Is it more expensive to be green?
There are a lot of misperceptions about being green and living sustainably, and one of the biggest is that it’s expensive. Supposedly only the wealthy can afford to think about the environment. But like a lot of conventional wisdom, it’s just not true. In fact, a lot of “green” choices are frugal as well. Here […]