ECO ACTION: Sustainable Happiness

The pursuit of happiness has been transformed into the pursuit of consumer goods and energy hungry lifestyles that damage our planet.

Visit HERE to browse a large selection of articles about pursuing lasting happiness while consuming fewer resources and reducing your environmental impact.

It's a lot more fun than it sounds!

I hear the politicians talk a lot about "getting our economy moving again." Does a "healthy economy" automatically mean, by definition, that they expect us to resume our old habits of consumption? If so, we need to rewrite the definitions. We need a new vision.

We've grown used to a world bulked up on the steroids of excess consumption. Like a weight lifter who's steroid built muscles are damaging his liver and heart, we can't expect to keep this up over the long term.

Someone needs to rewrite the economics textbooks and redefine the tools by which we measure the health of our economy to take into account the long view of things.

I wonder: Can we find a way to shifting our world economy and our individual lives toward a more sustainable and equitable model?

What would that look like?

QUOTES: Done with Great Things

"I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride."

~ William James

Random Discoveries

RANDOM LUNCH EXPERIMENT, a grilled cheese sandwich tastes really good with dried basil and cayenne pepper sprinkle on the cheese before putting the lid (top piece of bread) on and grilling it.

RANDOM WEBSURFING brought me to Instructables.com "The World's Biggest Show & Tell," with photos and step-by-step instructions for all kinds of interesting, strange and creative projects. Looking is free. Also free to sign-up for extended features, like printing, and to post your own instructions.

RANDOM READING in the February issue of "Gourmet" magazine while sitting under the dryer at the hair salon today, I came across the following quote from conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll,* "The interesting thing about being an artist, though, is that you can only learn if you are willing to fail." Architect Charles Ranfro, who is working with Carroll on a project in Houston, said, "Mary Ellen's investigations are fueled by a kind of childish curiosity, but combined with a very sophisticated adult's resourcefulness. That makes her slightly dangerous."

*Tried to look at MEC's own website, but it was a blank white page. Is this the conceptual artists way of making a statement? Instead, I've given a link to a google search on her name.