Looking to save
money and remain eco-friendly?
Meet Billee Sharp and her fabulous book Lemons and Lavender! Packed with tips, recipes, and advice,
this handy how-to will help you save the planet and your pocketbook.
Interested? Here’s a peek of what’s inside:
Most of us are searching for the good life. What
constitutes a “good life” is obviously subjective, but our quest to find
happiness directs each of our lives in unexpected ways. When I think of
personal happiness, security and fulfillment immediately come to mind. We all
want the means to realize our hearts’ desires, but it is perhaps these desires
that need to be reexamined. As a society, we’ve recently learned the hard way
that we often want more than we can afford: our overextended credit system and
failed subprime mortgage market have led our economy to a near collapse.
Twenty-first-century life affords us a unique
perspective on the world we live in. We are hyperconnected to the rest of the
globe, and we are all too aware of the ecological and economic crises that
beset contemporary life. We can see that our daily actions have very real
repercussions, and what we do as individuals shapes our world both literally
and figuratively. We now have an opportunity to take our vision for humanity
more seriously.
Slowly, we are acknowledging that the earth does
not have the capacity to meet our unrepressed appetites, and that to end the
destruction of our environment and the suffering of millions, we have to want
less individually.
Our emotional well-being is connected to how
much money we have; while it is wretched and distracting not to have enough
money to pay the bills, there are also pressures and worries that come with
having plenty.
As Duane Elgin notes in his book Promise
Ahead,
For many, the American Dream has become the
soul’s nightmare.
Often, the price of affluence is inner
alienation and emptiness. Not
surprisingly, polls show that a growing number
of Americans are
seeking lives of greater simplicity as a way to
rediscover the life of
the soul.
How do we adapt our life expectations accordingly?
For me, the desirability of a $7,000 designer handbag evaporates when compared
to the number of people that sum could feed. The carbon offsetting system—where
individuals calculate their carbon expenditure and try to lower their carbon
footprint—is an initiative that shows how seriously we take our situation. Likewise, the growing support for
fair-traded goods in commercial markets is evidence that mainstream society is
beginning to show more compassion for the people who make and grow our food.
Quite literally, how we see the world has
changed. In 1966, with the question “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the
whole earth yet?” Stewart Brand initiated a public campaign for NASA to release
the satellite image of our planet from outer space. His argument was that the
image would be a powerful symbol for humanity, and he was right. Our
visualization of the world was changed with our access to this image, and this
parallels the dramatic reconfigurations that have transformed Western society.
We now have legislation that prohibits discrimination based on color, gender,
and religion. Popular opinion and our evolving global consciousness give us
hope that humankind can peacefully coexist with one another and with the earth.
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