Apartment Ecology is living a life in the city that's healthy, and low to non-polluting, with living wages, liberty, truth, justice, and sustainability for all.
Seriously: How do our personal choices and actions become amplified into political change? The current flood of "consumer green" sites, as well as many green design blogs and tech sites, focus largely on what to buy -- this eco-friendly cleanser, that sustainable wood furniture, his or her shirt from PLA, ingeo or Teijin EcoCircle, and those organic, bird-friendly, fair trade coffee beans.
These are welcome choices in a world where simply buying something made less thoughtfully can contribute to the loss of a rainforest or depletion of a fishery, or perpetuating low pay and miserable working conditions for the world's working poor.
They're fun choices, often -- I've been known to fall for the charms of a Teijin EcoCircle jacket myself. And, they're viridian: things that are designed so fabulously that ultimately it's irrelevant that they're also incredibly ecologically correct.
But how will my buying recycled polyester instead of something from a petroleum-derived polyester -- or buying clean power from ConEd, or Method cleanser instead of Ajax -- somehow move this country closer to making the big, systemic changes -- which will ultimately entail passing laws and overhauling rules and regulations -- that will really transform our society, industry, energy generation, agriculture, and consumerism for the sustainable better, and fast? Does my riding a bike around Brooklyn instead of driving a car help get greenhouse gas caps through Congress? And what's the deal with $4.89 a half gallon for organic milk?
Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," recently wrote an essay titled Why Bother? where he argued that
Here at Apartment Ecology is where I hope to make and explore these links -- between personal choices and serious transformation, between consumerism and culture and politics and change.
Email me at egertz -AT- oneatlantic -DOT- net, or egertz -AT- apartmentecology -DOT- com.
Seriously: How do our personal choices and actions become amplified into political change? The current flood of "consumer green" sites, as well as many green design blogs and tech sites, focus largely on what to buy -- this eco-friendly cleanser, that sustainable wood furniture, his or her shirt from PLA, ingeo or Teijin EcoCircle, and those organic, bird-friendly, fair trade coffee beans.
These are welcome choices in a world where simply buying something made less thoughtfully can contribute to the loss of a rainforest or depletion of a fishery, or perpetuating low pay and miserable working conditions for the world's working poor.
They're fun choices, often -- I've been known to fall for the charms of a Teijin EcoCircle jacket myself. And, they're viridian: things that are designed so fabulously that ultimately it's irrelevant that they're also incredibly ecologically correct.
But how will my buying recycled polyester instead of something from a petroleum-derived polyester -- or buying clean power from ConEd, or Method cleanser instead of Ajax -- somehow move this country closer to making the big, systemic changes -- which will ultimately entail passing laws and overhauling rules and regulations -- that will really transform our society, industry, energy generation, agriculture, and consumerism for the sustainable better, and fast? Does my riding a bike around Brooklyn instead of driving a car help get greenhouse gas caps through Congress? And what's the deal with $4.89 a half gallon for organic milk?
Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," recently wrote an essay titled Why Bother? where he argued that
Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It's hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: "Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money." So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.With most of the world's people now living in cities, we urbanites are already playing a big role in creating the world's future -- whether it's a great bright green future, or a dingy khaki future. How can we move city living to greater greeness, and use that momentum to drive transformation to sustainable systems?
For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we're living our lives suggests we're not really serious about changing -- something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking -- passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists -- that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It's hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.
Here at Apartment Ecology is where I hope to make and explore these links -- between personal choices and serious transformation, between consumerism and culture and politics and change.
Email me at egertz -AT- oneatlantic -DOT- net, or egertz -AT- apartmentecology -DOT- com.
