How to Live a Green Lifestyle 


Many people are talking about living a green life style, reducing their carbon footprint, and living in a more eco-friendly way.  All of that is a well and good, but having them explain what any of those terms mean can lead to some jargon filled conversations  The knowledge barrier for entry can seem pretty imposing, and even people who are well immersed in the sub-culture frequently get confused on some of the details.

It's not as complicated as they make it out to be.  At least, it doesn't need to be.  With a little bit of personal awareness and research, you can be well on your way to a more environmentally conscientious lifestyle.

Step One - Start Analyzing Your Purchasing Habits: A majority of the things you can do to help the environment start with being more thoughtful when you make purchases.  When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.  After all, most environmental problems come down to little more than human beings not being more aware of the choices that they are making.  So what you need to do is think about the purchases you make and where you make them.  Purchasing locally made goods from locally run business will almost always reduce the amount of transportation involved.  Less transportation mean less used fuel.  When you do need to shop at bigger stores, a little bit of light research into that company's practices will be very revealing and show case who deserves your cash and who definiately does not!

Step Two - Cut Back on Meat, Especially Beef: You don't have to be a vegetarian in order to be more environmentally conscious, but cutting back on your red meet consumption certainly helps.  A cow requires a lot of food and water to be raised to the point where it is good for butchering, and those are resources that could be used to produce larger quantities of other foods.  You can still eat red meat, just be sensible in how you do it.  Cut back on the amount of it, and make it is more of an occasional treat rather than a staple of your diet.  Also make sure you buy more raw beef, as oppose to foods that involve a heavy amount of processing.  Heavily processed food is, essentially, shipped twice; once to get the raw materials to the company, and once to get the finished product to the store.  That's a lot of fuel spent shipping a food which probably only has a small amount of reel beef in it.  By making your burgers and cheese steaks from real beef, you're reducing your resource consumption and probably raising the quality of your meal!

Step Three - A Little Research Goes a Long Way: Many companies count on little or no research performed by their consumers.  They make claims of being more environmentally conscious or to using recycled packaging,.  These statements are often only true in the eyes of the law, and looking at the claims with common sense reveals a much different answer.  Look into the practices of the companies that get your money.  The end result is that you'll be making more environmentally sound choices, and feeling a little better about them in the process.

