Thanks so much for all of your kind words about my article for Rhythm of the Home!  It’s a joy to be part of such a supportive community.

This is another big month for us – planting beans for Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA, training a great new crew at Wheatberry, making new aprons and other exciting sewing for Wheatberry, hosting family . . . Ella turned three years old yesterday – I didn’t finish her present, but lucky for me, she’s three, so she didn’t notice!  She was, however, thrilled to have family here to play with, and excited to see her birthday banner up on the wall again.

While all of these projects are happening, though, my heart is very heavy with thoughts of the oil spill in the Gulf.  I have a lot of family in Louisiana, and I swam in the Gulf as a child – this both matters, and it doesn’t – the Gulf belongs to us all.  I’ve been thinking a lot about Jim Merkel, author of Radical Simplicity – he was an environmentalist who worked as a military arms trader, flying around the globe.  Sitting in a bar, watching the footage of the Exxon Valdez spill, he realized, I did this.  And he went home and changed his life.

How bad does it have to be, how much do our hearts have to break, before we open them?

And then, how do you change a life?  How do you take responsibility?  Merkel’s insight is as true now as ever – we did this. We drive cars, eat food flown around the globe, buy products we don’t need made through extractive, polluting practices – we did this.  And now what?

I donated to Center for Biological Diversity, I’m writing my congresspeople and the President, I’m going to join Craft Hope’s gulf project, but to me, the most important path is to reaffirm our personal vows (whatever those may be) to live in line with our own values.

It is so easy, as the days pass, and new situations arise, and temptations strike, to drift.  To live in a way we don’t believe in.

For myself, I’m renewing my dedication to the ten steps we’ve talked about here.  As I go through my day, I’m going to be asking myself, once again, Am I doing this because it’s easy, or because it’s right?  We may all be angry at BP, angry at lack of regulations or enforcement, but none of that matters when placed alongside our own actions – they have been trying to pump oil as cheap as they can, because that’s what we have asked them to do.  And they will continue to do it until we truly ask them to do something else.

The current issue of Yes! is, in perfect timing, all about water, and it has a fantastic article by Francis Moore Lappe about power.  I’ll leave you with her words, because this is definitely a time where we all feel powerless – and yet we are not.

“It helps to remember ecology’s core teaching: We all exist in densely woven networks.  From the cellular to the societal level, our context shapes each of us from moment to moment . . . From this view, our power is evident.  The only choice we don‘t have is whether to change the world:  Every choice we make sends out ripples . . .

In the early 1990s, neuroscientists were studying the brain activity of monkeys . . .They saw specific neurons firing for specific activities . . .the same neurons fired when a monkey was simply watching another monkey perform that action.  . . For me, our ‘imprintability’ is itself a source of hope.  Our actions, and perhaps our mental states, register in others, so that change anyone observing us.  That’s power.”

Personally, I’m working on our Ten Steps.  I’m holding close to my heart the old St. Francis of Assisi prayer: Make me an instrument of thy Peace.

And you?  Tell us what convictions you’re working to live truly.  Change us.

Step Six is the Big Box Boycott.  A big box store is any chain – from the mega-chains like Wal-Mart and McDonalds, to products made by giant corporations like Kraft, even to “smaller” or “eco-friendly” chains such as Whole Foods or a ‘locally owned’ franchise.  (Note: I shopped at Whole Foods for many years, and for some folks they are the only option for buying organic food.  Whole Foods does use many good practices, but they are still a huge corporation which comes with a lot of inherent issues, and if you have other places to buy organic, I strongly encourage you to give your money to your neighbors.)

Why boycott big box stores and large corporations?  The very simple answer is that money is power.  When we give our money to huge corporations, we are freely giving them power, and oh boy do they use it!  Particularly in a political system where we allow lobbying, our government and the decisions made by it, is basically for sale.  Individuals and small businesses do not have the monetary power to affect legislation, but big corporations do.  We can vote, we can petition and demonstrate, but our most effective tool is to not give them our money.

A prime example of the sort of ridiculous behavior we get from chains is one happening here in our Valley.  In Hadley, some of the world’s best soil is being paved over for a Home Depot and Lowe’s, right next door to each other.  And right across the street from the wonderful Hadley Garden Center.

It’s extremely hard for me to believe that our community is large enough to support even one of these mega-stores, much less two of them!  I imagine they will fold in a few years time, leaving us with huge empty eyesores, and a whole lot of concrete covering up that beautiful soil.

Chains siphon money from our communities in the form of tax cuts, falsely low wages, and reduced local jobs, not to mention robbing your town of its soul (who wants to live there or visit when it looks just like everywhere else?).  Chains keep prices falsely low by strong-arming farmers and suppliers – if you want to sell to them, you have to sell at the price they name (we have personally experienced this).  They are also part of the system of planned obsolensence – selling items that are so poorly made they will quickly break, are made so that they can’t be repaired, and you have to buy another one.  And another.

I highly recommend watching The High Cost of Low Prices or Fast Food Nation, for an understanding of how corporations like Wal-Mart and fast food companies truly cannabalize our friends, neighbors, and culture in order to make more money.

Think your local store is more expensive?  That’s because they’re not getting tax incentives from the town, government incentives for hiring, etc etc .  . . They are paying fair wages, creating interest and life and teaching skills to your neighbors and friends.  They will work their hardest to meet your needs, because to them you’re a customer and a friend, not a number.  If times get tough, Wal-Mart will not help you keep your family fed or clothed, but your local grocer, baker, or clothes store might.  (But not if they no longer exist!)

(Some late fall swinging fun at our local coop.)  Amanda Blake Soule of Soulemama shared some great thoughts recently on shopping at big box stores in this interview.  Have any favorite tips to share, on how to avoid corporations and big box stores?  Feel free to share!

I really wish that this step read something like this:

I am thrilled to announce that eating seafood is super sustainable, and we can all go stuff our bellies with shrimp and oysters while toasting the beautiful bountiful ocean!

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Sadly, that’s not the truth.  This is really hard for me – I grew up on the Atlantic coast my whole life.  I breathed salt air, ate seafood like it would never end, and loved it.  When I came home from being away at school, the dish I asked my mom to make was shrimp.

But.

To say it briefly, I’ll paraphrase from the November 2006 issue of Science – If current trends continue, the oceans will be essentially barren, with no chance of recovery, by 2048.  (That’s only 38 years folks!)

I’ve known, in a vague way, that things were not going well in the ocean for years.  As a teenage, I volunteered with my dad to spend a week on a tiny island off the coast off Georgia, walking the beach all night long to monitor and protect the endangered sea turtles who came there to lay their eggs.  I knew about mercury in tuna, and as much as I love tuna sushi, I cut back, and haven’t touched it since I got pregnant over three years ago.  Since moving to the inland Pioneer Valley, seafood has not been a big part of my diet, but it was still an occasional treat.  Sushi, smoked salmon, oysters on the half shell.

Then, I started learning more about what it really meant to eat seafood today.  I learned that a lot of “fishing” in the deep ocean is done with underwater bulldozers, that crush coral reefs, grab a bunch of sealife in their maws, and use only a fraction of what they catch.  Last February (while visiting family in Louisiana and chowing down on seafood, ironically), I read the article “All You Can Eat” by Jim Carrier in Orion (one of my favorite reads).  A few disturbing tidbits from that article:

“In the gold-rush days . . . shrimpers killed ten pounds of sea life for every pound of harvested shrimp—waste that reached one billion pounds a year in the Gulf. Once called “trash,” now called “by-catch,” this sea life included sea turtles driven to the brink of extinction, and juvenile red snapper, a good eating fish. Under environmental regulations requiring escape hatches in nets, the by-catch-to-shrimp ratio has been reduced to four-to-one . . .”

Most of the seafood, particularly shrimp, now sold in the US is imported, and comes from seafood “farms.”

“A shrimp farm is a saltwater feedlot. There can be as many as 170,000 shrimp larvae in a 1-acre pond that is 1 to 2 meters deep. So-called intensive ponds can yield 6,000 to 18,000 pounds of shrimp in that acre in 3 to 6 months. . .Because of this density, the waste they swim in, and their susceptibility to disease, most farmed shrimp are treated with antibiotics, only some of them legal in the U.S. A wide array of poisons is used to kill unwanted sea life and cleanse ponds for reuse, creating what Public Citizen calls a “chemical cocktail.” In random sampling of imported shrimp, health officials in the U.S., Japan, and the European Union have found chloramphenicol, a dangerous antibiotic banned in food.”

Out of all that imported seafood, “The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for imported food safety, samples less than 1 percent of the 1 billion pounds.”

What I’m saying here is that not only is our seafood addiction destroying the oceans (which are critical for healthy life of the entire planet), but the seafood we’re eating so much of is toxic. It’s a little hard to really wrap our minds around this, when we’re constantly being told about all those good omega-3s in salmon, and how lean and great fish is for us.  Fish 50 years ago that wasn’t drenched in heavy metals and raised in chemical soup, maybe.  Fish now?  No thank you.  Hence, Step 7: Eat Less Seafood.

Edited on Feb 22 to add: A reader sent in a link to this documentary, coming out in June: http://endoftheline.com/

(my current favorite tote)

Cloth Bag It, that is.  I imagine many of you, dear readers, already bring your trusty cloth bags to the grocery store.  Mad props to you (er, congrats).  That is super good news, because not only are plastic bags and even paper bags for groceries ugly and wasteful, they could pretty much single-handedly destroy the earth if we keep using them like there’s an endless supply.  As in: the trash circle in the Pacific that’s bigger than Texas. As in:  every year, according to the Worldwatch Institute, we throw away some 4 to 5 trillion plastic bags.  They leach chemicals into our groundwater, fill our landfills, kill wildlife and sealife, and use precious resources (trees and oil).  As Colin Beaven points out, why is something meant to be used for only minutes made out of material that will never biodegrade?

As a shopowner, I can testify that very, very few of us (yup, I’m including myself here), have taken the leap from reusing a big cloth bag for groceries to reusing other bags (mugs, napkins, etc) for other items.  We sell Ecobags and SnackTaxis at the bakery, with the original hope that customers would use them for their breads and pastries.  That has happened twice in the past 2 1/2 years.  I serve maybe one cup of coffee a day to someone who has brought a reusable mug.  Why don’t we take these simple steps?  Is it really so hard? Why does it seem easy to bring trash into our lives, when we have to live with it, throw it “away,” and then live with the consequences?

I started using Ecobags a few years back at the grocery store, for produce or bulk bin items (flour, grains, nuts, etc) – anything to stop the ridiculous bag waste.  They’re awesome, and you can also make your own in about 10 minutes, using our grain bag tutorial.  I keep some silverware and cloth napkins in the car to use when we’re out, and I try to remember my own mug.  I try to do all of these – and I’m certainly not perfect.  But if you tried to do them too, and you, and you .  . . how sweet it could be.

Oh, and how could I forget?  Buy bulk baby!  Save yourself time, temper tantrums (yours and theirs), gas, money . . . the list goes on.  Consolidate your trips (think once a month) – buy dry goods (flour, beans, grains, nuts, seeds, nut butter) in bulk, buy meat, butter, and cheese (preferably in big pieces also) and freeze it.  It might seem silly, but think for a moment about all those tiny containers of peanut butter, all those tiny, plastic wrapped juiceboxes, bundled together and wrapped in – you got it – more plastic.  Now imagine if you and all your friends didn’t buy (and therefore didn’t say to the system, “Make more of those”) all those tiny, wrapped packages.  Happy day.

You can do it, friends!  What tips do you have for reducing packaging in your life?

(a peek inside – knitting, bank deposit)

” I recently saw a video recorded secretly by a Humane Society investigator . . .that sparked the country’s largest-ever beef recall . . . as part of the USDA inspection process, cows must be able to walk under their own steam to slaughter as a precaution against their having, for example, mad cow disease and thus introducing tainted meat into the food stream.

The Humane Society video showed slaughterhouse workers doing anything they could to get downed cows to walk.  They sprayed hoses of water into their nostrils to try to get them to stand.  They tied chains to their legs and dragged them through the mud with trucks.  They used bulldozers to try to force the cows to their feet.  And throughout the video, you can hear the sounds of the cows – they are screaming.”

-from No Impact Man by Colin Beaven, pgs. 134-135

Sorry to surprise you with this.  Most of the time, Ben and I try to walk on the sunny side of the street – or at least to recruit from there.  We work hard to tell people how delicious, fun, joyful the sustainable life is.  But sometimes, it is important to be reminded just how bad our current system really is.  I read this passage on Saturday, hours after visiting the cows at the farm where we drive to pick up raw milk, and it has been haunting me ever since.  They tied chains to their legs and dragged them through the mud.  The cows are screaming.

(all photos are from our meat farmers, Chestnut Farms)

Our life’s work is sustainable food, community food, and I while I have done a ton of research into this, I still find myself, as I did last Saturday, holding a book and crying.  For the cows, for the workers, for all the families out there who think they are getting such a great deal when they eat a 99 cent hamburger.  We are all responsible for this (unless you’ve been a vegetarian/vegan your whole life).  Our family, as I said, is not vegetarian.  We do take a lot of care to know our farmers and how they raise and slaughter their animals, and we have greatly reduced our meat consumption.

There is a reason that some of the world’s oldest religions (Judaism and Islam come to mind) have strict rules about slaughtering and eating meat.  If you do not respect, give gratitude, and make sure that you are killing a healthy animal, you are simply playing Russian roulette.  And Americans pay with their lives all the time, not to mention their on-going health.

I know that the next time I find myself in a restaurant, tempted by an industrial steak which is so easy to order, and might taste so yummy, this is what I’ll remember.  The cows, screaming.  We can do so much better than this.

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“I knew it”, you’re thinking,” She’s finally cracked.  Now this crazy hippie want us to go out to the front lawn like rabbits and eat grass.”

Never fear, friends, I mean eat grass (and sunlight!) through the meat and dairy products you consume.  Meaning, make sure those animals ate grass, not corn and other industrial by-products.  If you’re eating meat from the grocery store, there’s a high chance that the meat you eat comes from animals who spent their life crammed together in knee-high manure, eating corn and other by-products (such as ground-up animal parts – this is where Mad Cow comes from folks, eating the brains of the same animal), not to mention all the hormones and antibiotics, which are contributing to a) early-onset puberty in children and b) more anitbiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.  Many of you know this, some of you may not.  See the books list at the bottom of the post if you want to learn more!

Basically, cows (and sheep and goats and horses) are all ruminants, and their digestive systems are meant to digest grass.  So why do industrial factory farms feed them corn?  The short answer is – because it’s cheap.  Corn grows in abundance in the Midwest, subsidized by cheap chemical fertilizers and fuel.  (Great explanation of how this came to be in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma).  Corn is cheap, and land (which you need a lot of in order to graze cattle on grass) is generally not cheap.  So even though feeding cows corn makes them so sick that it’s necessary to give them all these antibiotics, it still comes out cheaper to pack them into tiny lots and give them corn.  It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine how healthy it can be for us to eat the flesh of an animal raised in such an unnatural way.

Cole enjoying his dinner off of Molly’s back (our animals are 100% grass fed, if you’re wondering)

photo by Jeanine Dargis

On the other end of the spectrum, farmers such as the increasingly famous Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia do graze their animals in a  traditional rotation.  Salatin actually considers himself to primarily be a grass farmer.  (By the way, Salatin will be giving the Keynote Address at the NOFA winter conference, where Ben will be giving a grain workshop – check it out!)  In our fair Valley, wonderful farms such as Wheelview Farm, Austin Brothers Farm, Mapleline Farm, Misty Brook Farm, Chase Hill Farm, and our beloved Chestnut Farms are all part of this return to grass fed meat and dairy farming.  And can I tell you a secret?

It tastes awesome.

If you’ve ever had wild venison or other wild game, then you have an idea of what meat is supposed to taste like.  Meat has flavor.  One amazing thing about eating meat with flavor, is that you don’t have such a need to consume massive quantities of it.  Americans eat a staggering amount of meat – some of us eat it three meals a day, most days of the week.  That adds up quick, when you understand how much feed goes into those animals (especially if the animals are grain-fed), and how much methane they produce (which is even more destructive to the atmosphere than carbon).   As I said in the original ten steps post, E! Magazine said recently that “livestock is a major player in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions . . . more than the entire transportation system.”  In other words, how much meat we eat could have even more impact than how much we drive our cars.  Eating meat one less day a week reduces 1,000 miles of driving worth of CO2.

I’m a believer in robust, diverse farm systems that include animal husbandry.  But I think we currently have an excessive emphasis on meat production.  Of course we like how meat tastes – it’s potent, condensed energy, and for most of our history, we didn’t get a lot of it (just like sweets), so we crave it.  There’s a lot of indication that an excess of meat in our diets is not only unhealthy for the planet, it’s also unhealthy for us.  (For instance, read the meat chapter in Diet for a Dead Planet – very interesting data from countries where they had war-time rations and many modern health problems pretty much disappeared.)

In our household, here’s how this goes down.  I could be a pretty happy vegetarian, eating cheese and some rare treats of bacon and fish.  But Ben loves meat.  Loves it.  Our compromise is the Chestnut Farms Meat CSA.  We get 10 lbs of meat a month, and that’s what we eat.  We occasionally supplement with bacon from another local farm.  Meat usually isn’t the main feature of our meals, it’s a component.  So we’ll eat meat in a stew for example, or small lamb chops with hearty vegetable sides.  Several meals a week are vegetarian.  One thing I love about the csa is that there’s a clear limit to what we’ll consume.  When purchasing from a grocery store, it’s so easy to get more.  And then more next time.  And then some more.  It’s much easier to only have to use your willpower to make the decision once, than it is to make the decision every time (more on this in future posts). We have definitely found that, just like with eating more whole grains, eating less meat has a noticeably positive effect on our digestive systems.  When we eat meat several days in a row, we feel sick.

Also, I personally don’t eat meat when we eat out, unless it’s from a local, grass-fed source (this is nearly impossible to find, except at Wheatberry of course).  This can be hard to do, but I really don’t want to give my money to supporting a system that I think is gross and dangerous on so many levels. So, good luck to you, and come find out how delicious real meat can be!

Book Resources:

Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis by Christopher Cook – Ok, scary title, but this is the BEST explanation of our current system in my i.  More in-depth and broad than Pollan.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan – Very good, a little too philosophical for my taste, but many folks loved this.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Diet for a Small Planet, by Francis Moore Lappe

Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck

Movies:

The Future of Food – Very good look at GMOs

Food Inc – Great, features Joel Salatin among others!

King Corn

So, on to step one.  When I say, “buy less,” you may be thinking “Those poor deprived people.”  Hardly!  I’ve bought myself way fancier clothes at the thrift store (can you say cashmere?) than I ever could buy new.   And why limit our purchasing of stuff, particularly new stuff?  Isn’t that stimulating the economy? This is a complex issue, to be sure.  To me, what it comes down to is that every time we spend money, we affirm something.  We either affirm the factory, industrial system that creates huge amounts of waste and pollution, a system that strip mines and rapes the earth and its peoples, or we don’t.  We can choose to make our own, use what’s already been created, or support the craft of a friend or neighbor (www.etsy.com is a great resource for handcrafted goods).

Mostly, here’s some glimpses of what this looks like in our life.  We’ve bought everything from draft horse harnessing to clothes to our car used.  There are some purchases we still make new – food, some farming equipment that can’t be found used (but we look first!), and this winter we upgraded from our old, cantankerous woodstove, and bought a new one, because we felt the newer efficient designs made it worth it.   My new favorite phrase, from Living Simply With Children (originally from the Great Depression) – Fix it Up, Wear it Out, Make Do, Do Without.

So, here we go:

Our beautiful shoes.  I’ve seen quite a few (beautiful) photos on blogs lately of people’s spiffy new shoes.  While beauty does count, how many shoes do we need?  How long do they last?  My shoes, on the left, have been worn almost every day for nearly three years.  (They’re El Naturalistas – not cheap, but they’ve far-outlasted any other shoe I’ve owned.)  Ben’s boots, on the right, were actually bought at Wal-Mart (ugh) long ago before we stopped shopping there.  That said, he’s worn them and worn them and worn them . .  . and he’s wearing them today.  All of Ella’s shoes have been hand-me-downs or thrift store buys, except for one pair made by a neighbor.

You may notice that many of the following photos have to do with used things we’ve gotten – but I do want to emphasize the do without part.  Here’s a quick list of things we do without:  a second car (more on this in a later post), a microwave, “labor-saving” gadgets at the bakery that take the skill and art and taste out of baking, a playpen, a baby monitor (we had one that broke about a year ago, and I never replaced it), a giant TV (we have a tiny screen that we use a few times a year, lately, we’ve used it to watch plowing videos, haha!), frequent expensive vacations, new furniture (our couch is the one Ben grew up with, for instance), daycare (we choose to take turns staying home with Ella, and sometimes bring her to the bakery – and we’ll continue to do this as she grows older; we do sometimes do a childcare swap with a friend).

Gorgeous antique crock for lacto-fermenting vegetables (remember those pickles we made?), bought at Kay Baker Antiques for less than it would cost for a new made-in-China version.  Yeah baby.

Cloth napkins, our basket of cleaning rags (more to come on this in the clean it green step), homemade soap from a friend.  Ever notice all the plastic packaging (not to mention the trees!) that comes with buying paper napkins, buying paper towels, buying personal care products like shampoo, shower gel, conditioner?  In our bathroom, you will find one bar of soap, made by our friend Bethany (who’s teaching me how this Monday – woo hoo!), and a jar of homemade toothpowder (baking soda, myrrh powder, and a drop of essential oil for flavor, we used peppermint).  That’s all, and we are as clean and lovely as ever.

A real handkerchief (way more beautiful and gentle way to blow your nose – these are easy and cheap to find, since most people no longer use them).  And above it, some homemade elderberry syrup.  One thing that may not occur to us to make for ourselves is medicine.  Did I just say medicine?  Yup, I did.  After becoming pregnant with our daughter, I started to think much more carefully about what we put in our bodies to “treat” illnesses.  I own a business that works against the industrial system, yet I was participating in the industrial pharmaceutical system without much question other than trying to generally avoid it.  The amount of drugs we consume in this country is staggering.  While we have a conventional doctor for ourselves and Ella, I think of them as the emergency backup.  (The same is true for our animals – we have a vet, but mostly treat the animals ourselves.)  For colds, flus, stomachaches, fevers, etc, we use medicinal foods, herbs, acupuncture (hooray for our local low-cost clinic, The People’s Acupuncture Clinic in Amherst), yoga, and massage.  Many of these are preventative treatments, designed to strengthen our basic health, and then to address specific needs as they arise.  We also believe that illness is a natural part of life, not something to be smothered or eradicated (this isn’t even possible).  One of the really amazing things about medicinal herbs and foods is – you can grow them yourself, and many of them are delicious!

Ella’s secondhand play kitchen, with sweet thrifted pitchers, and one of the many handmade sweaters I’ve found at the thrift store (yes, handmade).  Jen asked about plastic toys, which may be gifted or handed down to us – we do give them away to the thrift store.  I feel it’s very important to keep plastic out of our home and lives as much as humanly possible (this is very, very hard).  Especially with small children, I feel this is important because we are teaching them so much about the natural world and also about what our lives should be – do we want them to grow up accepting plastics as the way we live?  Do we want them wearing clothes and snuggling with toys that are plastic, or objects that carry life – wool, wood, ceramic. An added bonus of asking friends and family (and ourselves) not to buy plastic, is that real objects cost more.  Which means less stuff, which teaches us to treasure what we have, instead of having to wade through a pile of toys/clothes/junk to even find what we are looking for.  Also about toys – for the most part, we bring “toys” into our child’s  life that are actual tools, not toys.  A small broom, a small guitar that plays, balls, wool, art supplies, and some dolls/stuffed animals.  We try hard to limit the quantity, and what we do have, we rotate so there are only a few things out at a time, and we also do a toy swap with friends.

Missy the cat, made by my grandmother for me as a child, recently patched up for Ella to use.

I do want to say that one danger of thrifting is that things are so cheap it can be tempting to buy too much.  I try to remember Jefferson’s saying, Don’t buy what you don’t need just because it’s cheap.  So true.

Phew!  This turned out to be quite long, and I’m sure there’s still so much I haven’t covered.  Hopefully this gives you some ideas.  On my list of things to learn/improve upon: learn to darn socks, patch more clothes and wear them proudly, stop using sponges altogether and just use rags.

Some great book resources for the things I’ve talked about here:

Naturally Healthy Babies and Children, by Aviva Jill Romm

Living Simply with Children, by Marie Sherlock (not just for families with kids, a lot of these ideas apply to everyone)

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, and Monique Tilford

Radical Simplicity by Jim Merkel

The Compact in SF – a group who committed to buying nothing new

Handmade Home by Amanda Blake Soule

The Good Life, by Scott and Helen Nearing

Sewing Green by Betz White

The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable by Juliette de Bairacli Levy

Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas by Bill McKibben

Colin Beavan’s Ten Steps, via Yes! MAgazine

And just in case you thought I was exaggerating about our crazy colored house – here you go.

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