It’s great to buy green gadgets that are earth friendly or promote sustainability on some level but while buying green stuff may help you feel better about your purchase ultimately it likely won’t really do much to help the environment or change our culture of over consumption and unsustainable consumerism. The real need is for more people to reduce their amount of stuff, reuse or buy used. Ask yourself do you really need this item? Our homes and society is becoming overwhelmed with crap, we all need to find new ways to change our orientation so we can feel good about making do with less.

It may seem odd to read this on a blog that promotes green shopping but perhaps you can think of it as an “anti-advertisement”! A few words from our “sponsor” – Mother Earth! Seriously though, An excellent resource for anyone who wants to follow the tenet of reduce, recycle and reuse is the Vedant.net site on Overcoming Consumerism. Check it out.

Forget the toxic plastic artificial trees and the pesticide laden live trees. Here is nn excellent way to remove some of the consumerism out of Christmas and make your holiday’s a tad greener is to make your own Christmas tree. This video (and the book they promote) shows how you can make a Christmas tree shaped plywood constructed and drilled holes to be a holder for live pine branches that you can gather from discards at nurseries, your own back yard or local woods. (just don’t take enough branches that might actually harm the tree) If you make it sturdy enough you can use this for many years.

Can’t afford a Prius or Solar system for you home? There is another, basically free, way you can do even more to do your part to help reduce greenhouse emissions and lower your carbon footprint in a big way – Stop eating beef.

The constant belching and flatulence from cattle produces enormous quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. This makes for more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks and ships combined. This UN news article discusses the many ways the rearing of cattle is playing a major role in contributing to global warming.

There are many people currently working on a variety of innovative approaches on ways to curtail bovine methane such as cow “beano” type medications or food additives like cashew oil, special grasses to be added to their feed, flatulence vaccine, and more. However cows wearing gas masks and fart-capture backpacks won’t be likely to go over too well with the cows or people.

One thing that is easy for us non-farmers and cattle-people to do right now is to dramatically reduce or stop eating beef. Going veggie will not only do as much for the planet as driving a Prius but will give you the added benefit of being healthier from eating less saturated fats, hormones, antibiotics and other chemicals. Factory farmed cattle are bad the planet in many ways, here is a excellent huffingtonpost article that discusses this at length.

Freewebs Sunny Cooker has an interesting article on how to go about making a sun powered oven-cooker for basically free, essentially just using cardboard, aluminum foil and a patient knack for following detailed instructions. This would be perfect for adventurous epicurean green cooks, homeless people, frugal types and maybe freegans cooking up a yummy pot of fresh dumpster diving treasures.

If you house is like ours, we get a ton of junk mail everyday that goes straight to the recycle bin. (actually, its not quite a ton, the average person gets 41 pounds of junk mail a year) Most household waste consists of unsolicited mail and to no one’s surprise most junk mail is discarded unread and unopened. Over 100 million trees are ground up each year to make the paper for junk mail and a lot of junk mail, especially glossy catalogs, are difficult to recycle, as the inks have high concentrations of heavy metals.

Here is some information on free (or even get paid a dollar) ways for you personally to get rid of your junk mail. Some new websites like ProQuo.com and GreenDimes.com will do most of the grunt work for you so it is pretty easy. I signed up with the new site, ProQuo, that makes it easy to get rid of many of the prime culprits, like coupon ads, Credit Cards offers, insurance ads and the like. They also allow you to opt out of catalogs but you have to individually pick which ones you don’t want (and they have an offer to choose to get the catalog if you don’t already get it – which makes me wonder if this is where they hope to get their money from)

They also make it easy to get on the do not call registry (you go to another site) all and all the process was fairly quick and easy (they did require you to give them info like your address and social security number) this made me nervous at first but after investigating them a little, it seemed a legitimate request – you can do it without the social security number but they claim it isn’t as effective. It will take about 3 months to know for sure if this site delivers on its promise. They have some clever videos to promote their site (they must have gotten some serious startup cash to make all these professional promotional videos – but some of them are quite funny. (I liked the medieval junk mail the best)

Another site that looks very promising in stopping junk mail is Green Dimes, I haven’t tried it so I can’t comment too much, but they do offer to pay you a dollar and guarantee results.

If you don’t completely trust these sites with any of your personal information or think they are just out to make a buck off of you some how? I don’t blame you for thinking that way – So here are a couple of sites that give you some useful information on how you can do it all yourself. A wiki on getting rid of junk mail

And a very comprehensive series of articles on the problems of junk mail and how to get rid of it at
ecofuture.com

Need lumber for a pet project? Aren’t into the nasty selections at Home Depot – chemically treated woods from unsustainable clear cuts? A thought provoking article can be found here on Verdant.net about all the in’s and outs of obtaining free building materials. Make your projects green by recycling old growth lumber thrown away by clueless contractors. Here is a link at the California Construction and Demolition Debris Recycling site to more great info on recycling lumber, while it specifically relates to California, much of it is relevant to most anywhere.

I don’t get carbon offsetting. It’s like pouring oil down the sewer grate after an oil-change and then donating 20 bucks to Greenpeace so you don’t feel guilty about your toxic oil heading for the harbor. I don’t see how that’s much different than the idea of paying someone to plant a treefarm so you won’t feel bad about that cross-country airline ticket.

My suspicious nature wonders about how verifiable some of these carbon credit outfits are. Like the plant-a-tree-today.org or Dell Computer’s plant a tree for me campaign. I worry it’s a half-measure at best, giving people an excuse to postpone the difficult politics needed for significant changes to halt global warming. It will do more to create a lucrative market of pollution trading then it will to help us change from a fossil fuel based economy to renewable sustainable one. It also helps to paint a happy face on the corporations that are often some of the biggest polluters.

That said, planting a tree can still be a good thing. Trees can help remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. But a healthy forest with a thriving total ecosystem is better for people and other living things not just a monoculture of thousands of perfect rows of pine trees in a sterile tree farm. I’m sure many of the carbon trading organizations earnestly attempt to solve our global warming problems but, for me, I would rather directly give money to people fighting for healthy forests. Or even get a shovel and go out in my backyard plant my own tree. If you feel particually daring there is a group of guerrilla gardeners who plant who use direct planting to help make the world a better place. Guerrilla Gardeners is a group worth checking out.

As individuals there is only so much we can do. Planting a tree won’t absolve you of your need to get involved in the bigger political arena or better find earth friendly solutions in your life but it’s nice to do something constructive however small. If you don’t have the space or the green thumb to plant your own then consider donating to Save America’s Forests nationwide campaign to end clearcutting and protect and restore our nation’s wild and natural forests. They also work to help protect the rain-forest in Ecuador. Of course there are other groups doing similar work and equally deserving of your attention.

Enhance your USB WiFi with cheap Chinese cookware

Tired of excessive consumerism? Some people are sick of buying expensive computer hardware when more simple solutions can suffice? Here is a link from a New Zealand site that shows some ingenious ways people have found to make and dramatically enhance a Poor Man’s WiFi. Here is a link that clearly explains what you need to do to make one of these (shown above) I have a pretty fast connection already and I don’t work from a coffee shop so I haven’t tried this myself but I like the funky angle of this and I am happy people are finding ways to make computing more affordable and accessible. Just make sure you aren’t using any trans fats!

A complaint occasionally heard about wind turbines is that they produce low-frequency sounds that are disturbing to some people. According to an ariticle in The British Wind Energy Association this is just a myth, but what if you like the sounds that wind can make? An amazing range of artistry and invention exists in the world of wind music making. There is often an eerie quality to the sound, reminiscent of science fiction movies. I like to imagine these wind sounds are the music from the earth gaia herself.

The Plastorgan shown in the above photo fascinates me the most because it’s free, keeps some plastic bottles out of the landfill, encourages people to unleash hidden talent, and makes for more interesting neighborhoods. All you need to do is make one slit of a certain size in the side of a plastic bottle, paint it with a cool design, put the cap on the bottle and glue or somehow fasten the cap to a bamboo pole and stick the pole in your garden or yard – the more the better, with all different sizes of bottles and slits to create a wide range of tones and timbres. Check out the sound of the above grouping here. You can see more samples and info on how to build your own plastic bottle wind organ as well as other kinds of wind organs and harps here. Here is another link in which a few people share their experiences with these plastic wind organs.

If you want something a bit more sophisticated than plastic bottles then your options are wide open. There are many resources available from extremely expensive wind sound sculpture to affordable garden wind harps.

One site, mohicanwindharps.com offers a number of reasonably priced contemporary wind harps as well as the traditional Aeolian Harp, one of the oldest known musical instruments made by the ancient Greeks. You can listen to the sound one of these harps makes here.
more links on wind harps here.
appalachian heritage alliance.org
soundscapes international.com