‘THINK GLOBAL - BUY LOCAL’
Lowering our consumption is a necessarily step for sustainability plus we need
to become much more conscious of how we invest and vote with our money.
The best mantra to remember is:
‘Refuse Reduce Reuse Repair Recycle & Localize’.
It does make a real difference if we buy e.g. organic, seasonal and local food,
in the end many small choices raise a big voice. www.ethicalconsumer.org
On a globalized marked actions and consequences are often very separated. I
think there would be a different behaviour if the whole phase of a product was
met on personal level.
E.g. just imagine if buying a t-shirt produced “cheaply” in Asia included visiting
a baby mum working in the factory 15 hours a day, bathing in the local river
poisoned by chemicals and thinking more about who pays the real price for
bargains. I saw many horrible textile manufacturing areas in Bangladesh and it
changed my clothing habits. Or just imagine that each time using gasoline for
transport we had to first go visit a family that has been forced away from
ancestral land by invading petroleum industry to instead live in big city slum
and are classified as uneducated even though they know the rainforest botany
without looking in a book.
www.storyofstuff.org
Another aspect where modern people have got lost is our relation
with food.
Modern agriculture has with the unnatural use of chemicals, big scale monoculture
crops, GMO, animals factories etc. become the biggest threat to the wellbeing of our
ecosystem (and moral). As this is getting obvious more people start looking into
growing, finding and buying food in more harmonic ways like:
Organic farming, Permaculture, Biodynamic
agriculture,
Natural
farming,
Holistic
management, Keyline design, Wild Food
Foraging, Seed banks, Beekeeping, Urban
farming, Aguaponics, Farmers Marked, Local
Food Co-ops, Dumpster diving/freeganism,
breatharians etc.
Some links:
www.permacultureglobal.com *
www.biodynamics.com * www.eupc.eu
www.onestrawrevolution.net *
www.landawakening.com
www.ridgedalepermaculture.com * www.naturalbeekeepingtrust.org