Environmental Shopping

            There must be some better way to discover what would be an ecologically sound decision to make.  We’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to find healthy, environmentally friendly personal care products and still haven’t gotten something that both works well, doesn’t have to be shipped from a long distance, and doesn’t cost a fortune.    Today I wanted to get a case to protect the iPad we were given as a Christmas gift and I wanted it to be as environmentally friendly as possible.  For me, that includes not being made of leather, which eliminates a lot of choices.  Because Kathy already had a black case for her iPad I also wanted a different color.  I found lots of options but none of them seemed great. 

            There were eco-friendly leather cases (which it turns out means they were still made from animal’s skins but didn’t use harmful chemicals in the processing). 

            There were lots of cases with environmental slogans. (My favorite was ‘lose the lawn’.) Unfortunately none of them said anything about being made in an environmental way and most of them were made out of leather.

            There were bamboo cases.  I almost bought one of these. It looked very nice. Bamboo can be grown every three to five years from the same plants, it releases tons of oxygen into the air while it’s growing, and it’s a pretty strong wood.  I couldn’t tell though, whether it was grown using pesticides or whether the workers were fairly paid, it had to be flown from another part of the world, and it didn’t have a cover on it to protect the touch screen while it’s not in use.

            I found some very nice sleeves made out of recycled clothing, but no cases.  Sleeves are great for travel but don’t protect the iPad during daily use, when it’s also apt to be dropped, scratched, or otherwise injured.  The sleeve that I liked the best, though, was made from a pair of recycled old jeans. While it wouldn’t help on a daily basis, as a travel option it’d be great.  I think the next time one of my pairs of jeans wears out I’ll make myself one from them.

            After a long time searching, I ended up in frustration by buying a blue silicon case for the iPad.  It’s got a cover, it’s not made of animal products or plastic, it’s made in the US, and it’s not black. I think it’ll protect the iPad, but I’m not at all convinced that it was a sound environmental choice.  There has to be a better way to make these decisions.

Books Read in 2010

1. Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

2. Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence.

3. James Swallow's Synthesis

4. Michael Pollan's Food Rules

5. Guillermo Del Toro's The Strain

6. Mark Bittman's Food Matters

7. Lonnie Edwards' Spiritual Laws that Govern Humanity and the Universe

8. Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia

9. Wendell Berry's Leavings:Poems

10. Gail Godwin's Unfinished Desires

11. Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire

12. Mary Gordon's Reading Jesus

13. Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft
14. C.S. Friedman's This Alien Shore

15. Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden

16. Swami Satchidananda's The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

17. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

18. Kage Baker's Sky Coyote

19. Alexandra Horowitz' Inside of a Dog

20. Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden

21. Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

22. Patricia Lanza's Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces

23. William Gibson's Spook Country

24. Alan Roxburgh's Missional Map-making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition

25. Graham Bell's The Permaculture Way

26. Ross Mars' The Basics of Permaculture Design

27. Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves

28. Elizabeth Moon's Sheepfarmer's Daughter

29. David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways

30. Colin Beavan's No Impact Man

31. Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual

32. Marian McCain's GreenSpirit

33. Henri Nouwen's In the Name of Jesus

34. Stephen Webb's Good Eating

35. Robert Sawyer's WWW: Wake

36. Terry Pratchett's Nation

37. Bill McKibben's Deep Economy

38. Laurel Kearns' Ecospirit

39. John Updike's Of the Farm

40. Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat

41. Gordon Hempton's One Square Inch of Silence

42. Anna Quindlan's Every Last One

43. Gernot Candolini's Labyrinths: Walking Toward the Center

44. Chris Cleave's Little Bee

45. Anna Edey's Solviva

46. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God

47.Gail Schumann's Plant Diseases: Their Biology and Social Impact

48. Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest

49. Nick White's Save Energy & Cut Your Bills

50. Ki Longfellow's The Secret Magdalene

51. Eugene Peterson's Working the Angles

52. Shane Hipps' Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith

53. Janny Wurts' The Curse of the Mistwraith

54. Deepak Chopra's Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment

55. Kage Baker's Mendoza in Hollywood

56. Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World

57. Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town

58. Thomas Truxes' Defying Empire

59. Ben Lowe's Green Revolution

60. Gary Gunderson's Leading Causes of Life

61. China Mieville's The City and the City

62. Vandana Shiva's Earth Democracy

63. Matt Biers-Ariel's The Triumph of Eve

64. Vandana Shiva's Soil Not Oil

65. Maeve Dawn's In the Beginning, God

66. Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind

67. Donna Schaper's Labyrinths From the Outside In

68. Abigail Gehring's Back to Basics

69. William McDonough's Cradle to Cradle

70. Colleen Shehan's James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government

71. C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner

72. C.J. Cherryh's Invader

73. Len Wilson's Digital Storytellers

74. Lisa Miya-Jervis' Cook Food

75. Brian Swimme's The Universe Story

76. Terra Brockman's The Seasons on Henry's Farm

77. Elie Wiesel's Rashi

78. Bryan Beyer's Encountering the Book of Isaiah

79. Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody

80. Andrea Cohen-Kiener's Claiming Earth as Common Ground

81. Don Lattin's The Harvard Psychedelic Club

82. John Sawyer's The Fifth Gospel

83. Candace Chellew-Hodge, Bulletproof Faith

84. Charlene Li's Groundswell

85. Carol Howard Merritt's Reframing Hope

86. C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms

87. Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book

88. Peter Rollins' The Fidelity of Betrayal

89. Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity

90. Anne LeClaire's Listening Below the Noise

91. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible

92. Thomas Merton's Praying the Psalms

93. Walter Bruggemann's Praying the Psalms

94. Eugene Peterson's Answering God

95. T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

96. Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock

97. Janny Wurts' Ships of Merior

98. Bill McKibbon's Eaarth

99. Lillian Daniel's This odd and Wondrous Calling

100. C.J. Cherryh's Inheritor

101. Andy Crouch's Culture Making

102. Peter Rollins' How (Not) To Speak of God

103. Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Watch

104. Dwight Friesen's Thy Kingdom Connected

105. Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

106. Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage

107. Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From

108. Stu Campbell's Let It Rot

109. Manny Howard's My Empire of Dirt

110. Janny Wurts' Warhost of Vastmark

111. Joshua Ramo's Age of the Unthinkable

112. Thomas Berry's The Great Work

113. Eugene Peterson's Run with the Horses

114. Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution

115. Larry Rasmussen's Earth Community, Earth Ethics

116. John Daido Loori's Teachings of the Earth

117. Juliet Schor's Plentitude

118. Michael Pollan's Second Nature

119. Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question

120. Robert Laha's Jeremiah

121. Walter Bruggemann's A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming

122. Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn

123. Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism

124. Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac

125. Wendell Berry's Imagination in Place

126. Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra

127. Wendell Berry's Bringing it to the Table

128. Worldwatch Institute's State of the World 2010

129. Richard Rohr's The Naked Now