Want to Live More Sustainably? ‘Just Don’t Buy Stuff’
Dr. Susan Senecah, an environmental studies professor whose research focuses on public participation and public policy.
Environmentally minded people who want to take steps toward sustainable living can start by simply reducing their consumption, according to the second annual Earth Day survey at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF).
Just in time for the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day observance (April 22), the faculty and staff at the college, where environmental issues are the sole academic focus, were asked to suggest one thing people could do to live more sustainably.
Reducing consumption came out on top, followed by a suggestion that people change their eating habits to include less meat, especially red meat, and more locally produced foods.
“The crises the earth faces are not environmental problems,” said Dr. Susan Senecah, an environmental studies professor whose research focuses on public participation and public policy. “They are human problems—human appetites, human decisions for behavior, human-created policies, human decisions for research, etc.”
More than 25 percent of the respondents said curbing consumption is the first step toward a more sustainable lifestyle. (more…)
An Environmentalist in Favor of More Consumption
In the pleasing quietness of his house—a place where Pakistani prayer rugs lie in maroon rectangles on top of clean, white, wall-to-wall Berber carpet—Saleem Ali tends his treasure. There is the soft laughter of his two sons upstairs, “needful treasures in my life,” he calls them in the dedication to his new book, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and A Sustainable Future.
But more traditional treasures lie in wooden display cases against two walls of the dining room: cinnabar and amber; green malachite (“very common stuff,” he says) and uncut opal (“good opal can be more expensive than diamonds,” he says). There’s ruby from Cambodia and an orange slippery shard of salt from his native Pakistan. These and other items he has collected from around the globe are mostly minerals and stones, composed of elements, dug from the earth.
Why do you collect this stuff, I ask him. “The world is such a wondrous place,” he says, turning a glittering nugget to and fro under the display-case light, “And the materials of the world, the natural materials, are so beautiful.”
His collection is not large, nor exceedingly valuable. “I’m not a very organized collector,” he says. But it evokes the many places he has visited—and crystallizes, almost literally, what he believes is a fundamental human desire to collect the earth’s mineral resources. He calls this the treasure impulse. (more…)
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