Congratulations! You made it here and I welcome you wholeheartedly. It means you’re open to hearing more about this green movement that everyone is talking about. My purpose here is simple – to share my viewpoint and to raise your awareness about your current living style. If you don’t know something is having a negative affect on your life or your home, you keep doing it. Or, you may suspect that there are better alternatives to your present lifestyle, but you don’t know what they are or where to find them. My Level One gives you a starting point.

 

To me, the concept of sustainability and green living is a process, just like our journey through life - a perpetual expansion of awareness of who we are. The more we know, the more we are accountable to what we know. Ignorance is bliss, and in this case, harmful to ourselves and the planet. I seek only to raise your awareness and ask for your commitment to change your habits to conform to choices that are better for you and for the environment: to understand what you're ingesting, what your body is coming into contact with, and what you're putting back out into the environment.

 

Since the Industrial Age, we’ve been creating man-made chemicals and materials and integrating them into our bodies (free radicals), the environment (toxic waste), our food (pesticides), our clothing (harmful dyes), our children’s toys (plastics), and our furniture (lead/retardant sprays). While we are individuals, we are also part of a larger whole and we have a finite amount of natural resources. If we exhaust them, we alter our own existence. It’s that simple.

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This program identifies major elements in the areas of energy and water use, product consumption, and auto use/emissions where you can make small cost/time investment changes to improve your personal health and to reduce your impact on the Earth and its precious resources, while also saving you money in the long run. These are simple behavioral changes, and only require an acknowledgement and a desire to be accountable for your own consumption and production of waste. Once you have Level One down, move on to Levels Two and Three!
“Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.”
(Oystein Dahle, former VP Exxon for Norway and the North Sea, quoted in Time for Plan B – Cutting Carbon Emissions 80 Percent by 2020; Earth Policy Institute; Brown, Larsen, Dorn and Moore; 2008.)