Going Green Without Going Crazy
The sustainability movement has truly come a long way in the last ten years. The stereotype of the environmentally conscious as a tree hugging hippie has long since passed with the rise of organic and pesticide free products in our everyday supermarkets. That being said, we still have an incredibly long way to go when working to make our earth a cleaner, better place and there are things we can all do to improve. One of the best guides we’ve found to living a sustainable life is Sara Gilbert’s The Imperfect Environmentalist: A Practical Guide to Clearing Your Body, Detoxing Your Home, and Saving the Earth (Without Losing Your Mind).
The author, who many know as Darlene Conner from the ABC sitcom Roseanne and more recently Leslie Winkle on the Big Bang Theory, is a lifelong environmental activist that has put together a fantastic reference manual on living green. The book is broken up into 10 parts such as clean eating, clean household products, and clean transportation and is great to have lying around when you need to find the most sustainable way of cleaning your couch or getting to work. Broken down by the level of financial ability from Donald Trump to sleeping on someone’s couch and living off ramen noodles making it easy for anyone to see what they can do right now to reduce their ecological footprint.
Living a sustainable lifestyle is all about choices and frankly, it can be just as easy if not easier in some cases to do what’s right by the environment. Some of the great tips Sara provides are to substitute chemical household cleaners with a cheap half white vinegar half warm water mixture in a spray bottle and to check the label for Low or Zero-VOC on gallons of paint before remodeling your living room. It’s these little decisions that when added up can help us do right by the earth. So tomorrow when you’re doing laundry or make the decision to run that last load on cold or reminding yourself to turn all the lights off before you go to work. There are so many ways that we can be green without going crazy.
NOTES
The author of the book is Sara Gilbert, also known as Darlene Conner from the ABC sitcom Roseanne and more recently the role of Leslie Winkle on the Big Bang Theory.
Environmental sustainability is important to us and you don’t need to be an activist to do it.
The book is broken up into 10 parts such as clean eating, clean household products, and clean transportation.
The book is all about “doing what we can, when we can.” And is meant to be used as a reference manual for when we need to know what to do.
She breaks it down by the level of financial ability from Donald Trump to Sleeping on someone’s couch and living off ramen noodles.
Because of the paint we use, the EPA ranks indoor air quality among the top five health risks. Scan your paint label for “Low-” or better yet, “Zero-VOC”— that’s volatile organic compound to you … but it’s not the good kind of organic. VOCs include cancer-causing toxic contaminants.
You can substitute store-bought cleaners with a spray bottle of half white vinegar and half warm water to save money and ozone toxins.
It’s all about showing us that it is just as easy to be green as it is to not be and that we can make a difference by doing the little things.
The majority of the energy used when doing laundry comes from heating up the water, use cold water when you can over hot water.
The greenest thing you can possibly do is to use what you have instead of buying something new.
Look for clothing that is made with organic cotton as up to 25% of the world's herbicides are used in cotton production.