by E. Originally published on The Conscious Consumers’ Network 0n[ 07/24/05
Home ownership. The American dream. Home ownership is one of the last bastions of complete freedom of will, choice & independence. A man/woman’s home is their castle, right? But did you know that with ongoing developments inrenewable energy technologies, green construction materials & green design architecture (biotechture), your home doesn’t have to pollute & cost you $ every time you flip on a light switch? In fact your home can be producing it’s own electricity, supplying much of it’s own water, heat & cooling (or be designed so well that their is little need for powered air conditioning or lighting). Currently, on the west coast of the U.S., their are homes that produce a surplus of clean energy & sell it back to their electric company or are off the grid altogether.
If you think these types of homes have only one 15 watt light bulb & no HDTV, you’d be wrong. Modern homes with all the techno-cultural creature comforts American’s have decided they can’t live without are still available in a properly designed energy self-sufficient home. While it currently costs more to design, construct & outfit a renewable resource home, those costs are rapidly falling as the market grows. How does the market grow? These markets will grow by consumers becoming aware & demanding these goods & services. That’s where you, my dear consumer, come in. So read on & learn how to make your world better while simultaneously making everyone’s world better. Win-win results are becoming within our grasp, & this site is about keeping you up to date on them.
Here’s what I will build here in Tampa to make others aware of green hi-tech living, & to promote the business of whatever construction company has the expertise to do it. I’ve designed this house to survive our increasingly severe hurricane seasons.
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Posted in Biotechture & Eco Construction | No Comments »
Friday, October 10th, 2008
by E. Originally published on The Conscious Consumers’ Network 0n 09/26/04
[ Tampa 09/26/04 ] Home is the one place where you can have control of your immediate environment. However, what you buy to put into & service your immediate environment has an effect on our collective environment. In this last place where you have full control, you can choose to learn to make your home more alluring, cleaner, healthier, & technologically advanced. Opt to make your house a state-of-the-art place for you & your family with a new level of creature comforts, while making the outside world we all share a better, cleaner, healthier place.
Imagine if this idea caught on.. Imagine if everyone started to learn to make these choices. Not only would our personal lives improve, but manufacturers would be forced to supply what the public demanded & switch focus to meet this demand. This would cause prices on “green” products to fall, as they would no longer be specialty items. So live by example. Inspire your friends & neighbors.
Bring about this change for your home-castle. In a time where most of us may feel disenfranchised & unable to make much of a difference beyond our immediate surroundings, we must learn that every time we spend money we are supporting something somewhere. We are in effect voting for some company to keep doing what they are doing to provide us with some product. If many of us have convinced ourselves that our vote at the polls does not matter, that corporations are responsible for putting our leaders in office through huge political contributions, & then further controlling policy through lobby, then we should realize that it is the collective “us” that gives them this power through our dollars. We go to the polls every day we spend money. It’s time we all looked deeper at what we are voting for with every dollar we spend. Consumer power is the highest power in a capitalist society. (more…)
Posted in Green Smart Home & Garden | No Comments »
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
by E. Originally published on The Conscious Consumers’ Network 0n 11/01/04
[ Tampa 11/01/04 ] ”Green” is an oft used buzz word in the fashion industry, however, just because a company is not employing a 3rd-world sweat shop labor force or burning rain forests to produce cheap clothing does not mean they are “green”.
 Indeed, many clothiers are labeling themselves “green” & selling their products at higher mark-ups for having such distinctions. But who is really green & who’sGreenwashing? Here’s a hint: If the manufacturer sells cotton that is not organic, then they are not “Green”. Non-organic cotton is one of the most pesticide-intensive crops grown.
A larger problem that may prevent bhigher sales of earth friendly clothing is the lack of contemporary style choices. More high fashion designers need to start hanging organic cotton clothing and “green” couture on top models strutting the cat walks of Paris & New York. I say Enough with the baggy hemp shirts, shorts, sandals & hippy clothing.. If environmentally conscious clothing is going to catch on, it’s going to have to get some fashion consciousness.
While it’s great that many clothing & textile manufacturers are joining modern civility by no longer exploiting a poverty stricken 3rd-world work force, C2 seeks to find designers & clothiers who are making a fashion statement by designing attractive clothing made from innovative, organic fibers, low impact dyes, manufactured in advanced, eco-conscious factories, by a labor force that is treated under socially responsible guidelines. This fulfills a more full sense of what it means to be “green”.
At C2, I want to go one step further into “Viridian Greenism” & seek the best designers. Hippie-centric styles only preach environmentalism to the converted. It is the broad consumer base that needs to be reached to make meaningful impacts. Therefore, we demand clothing that makes people feel good because they know their clothing is not being manufactured at grievous expense to the biosphere . However, we Viridians, also desire higher-than-fashion, pragmatic, futuristic, techno-cultural, ‘urban attack-wear‘.. ;-> Seductive, apparell that can be donned anywhere; from nightclub to office to skatepark. We need gear that can keep up with all the phases of modern life, including a place to hold our wireless devices & I-pods.. (such is the “EveryWear” & “Wear For Art Thou” clothing I have designed). (more…)
Posted in Eco-Chic Fashion | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
By E. Originally published on The Conscious Consumers’ Network on 07/19/04
In our mass-media influenced society, where we are bombarded by images of physically fit, beautiful people, there is an enormous interest in what the proper diet is so that we may claim that hyper real body for our own. Diet books were 9% of all book sales in 2003. The health spa and gym industries also take in millions annually. However, even with all this interest over what should be put into our bodies, the American population suffers from specific diet related diseases at a disproportionate rate in comparison to most other populations.
What can account for such a negative statistic in the so called “most advanced nation on the planet”? Could it be those ultra processed, preservative riddled, artificially flavored & colored “dead” foods we eat from boxes and cans? Or could it be the meat-centric, saturated fat laden fast food we catch on our 30-minute, eat-it-as-fast-as-you-can and get-back-to-work lunch breaks? It couldn’t be. Thoey’re FDA a& USDA pproved so they must be O.K., right? ‘Its’ the same food those people with the beautiful bodies oin the TV commercials are eating .and they wouldn’t lie, would they? Well, they are lying. It is processed dead foods and the meatcentric diet which is giving us and the planet a host of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, deforestation, soil erosion, certain cancers and many others.
What diet fad do you follow? Which book by which health guru or pseudo doctor is right? Let’s scrap all that and get down to the basics. (more…)
Tags: Environmentally Conscious Diet, G.L.A.D. Organic Diet, raw food diet, vegan diet, vegetarianism
Posted in G.L.A.D. Organic Diet | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
A renewable energy “Infotorial” By E.
Originally published on The Conscious Consumers’ Network 05/10/04
Energy. We all use and sometimes misuse it. Fossil fuel energy production and use is the major factor associated with environmental decline and the once theorized and now realized Greenhouse Effect. The production of carbon dioxide has exceeded the rate at which plant life (which is also being harvested beyond its rate of replacement) can recycle it back into oxygen (…you know, that stuff we breath?) There is no other option for making the conversion from carbon dioxide to oxygen on planetary scale. So what are we going to do about it? Well, we’ve already been suckered into paying for drinking water, so I guess we’ll just pay for “breathing air” next. That’s O. K. with you, isn’t it? It’s seems just right that we should pay the same corporations who befoul the air for the privilege of manufacturing some sort of bottled equivalent for clean air. Good business plan. Let’s pollute the air and make billions selling air! Alright, gotta run to the store and buy some water. Be back soon. ;->
Luckily, there is human consciousness capital & some very bright people using it to help us out of this fix. Learn how you can help them help us all by leaving your thoughts & comments on this issue.
Tags: Sustainable / Renewable Energy, sustainable energy
Posted in Sustainable / Renewable Energy | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
Drill Baby Drill
You’re Going To Need Those Holes For Your Corpses
[Tampa, FL 10/06/08] As seemingly mindless throngs echo the “drill baby drill” chant like so many corporate robots, I pour over reports of all the oil hurricane Ike poured into the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Ike caused at least a half million gallons of crude to pour into the Gulf (the worst Gulf spill since Katrina).
Living in Tampa, FL, I would be directly affected by the lifting of moratoriums to drill for oil off our coasts. I’m not crying “not in my backyard”, I’m crying that we move into the technologies of tomorrow rather than this incessant backwards thinking desire to continue to power the dirty old internal combustion engine.
The moment I heard the “drill baby drill” chant I fired up my laptop and wrote it as a line of dialogue delivered by my villian in part two of my “Apocalypse Near” book trilogy. Here’s the dialogue as it appears in the book between the inter-dimensional villian and the protagonist. My protagonist is on a mission to enlighten the humans to their oncoming doom and how they might avoid it: (more…)
Tags: Big Oil, Drill Baby Drill, Energy Policy, fossil fuel economy, Hurricane Ike
Posted in Environmental Politics | No Comments »
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
An InfoTorial by E. Reporting for The United States Media Corps
Originally published on The Conscious Consumers’ Network on 07/24/04
The current enemies of the industrialized nations mostly recruit their soldiers from among the disenfranchised populations of largely non-industrialized nations. Some of their propaganda charges that Western, industrialized nations use disproportionate amounts of natural resources and the cheaper labor of the needy to produce their wealth which is in turn used to produce weapons to proliferate their policies, goods, services and politics. In the process, the biosphere (which all humans must share) is unfairly being exploited. These criteria (among others) are spun to hang the title of “The Great Satan” on the western industrialized nations. Perhaps the larger crime is that the industrialized nations are basically loading bullets into the weapons of their sworn enemies by buying their oil which also has the effect of destroying the environment. It’s a lose-lose situation for the U.S. If Big Oil & our government were really smart they’d be investing all the money we spend on Arabian oil into sustainable / renewable energy technology and selling that technology to the world. (A win-win situation). (more…)
Tags: defeating terrorism with ecology, environmental ethics, environmental politics, global warming, national security, natural capitalism, peak oil
Posted in Environmental Politics | 1 Comment »
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