Welcome!

Welcome and Thank you for being here!

Welcome to Choosesustainable.org, a blog where we explore ways of living sustainably. This blog is sort of a travel journal. The journey starts with many questions and is fueled by the desire to share our collective experiences to answer them. The destination, however, is never fully reached, is a continuous improvement made of failure and success.

The questions, I am sure, are on the mind of many: is it possible to live more sustainably within our means, time, physical resources? Are my individual choices going to make a difference?  I believe the answers are yes and yes.

We as consumers have an enormous impact on the success or failure of products, and I am sure that most people are not happy with the current rate of destruction of our planet. However, globalization and marketing cleverly detach the products from their environmental impact, either disguising the ingredients under chemical formulas or moving their production to countries that are less regulated and removed from where the majority of consumers resides. A quick visit to websites of organizations such as the WWF that are in the front line, combating deforestation, should convince us that we are the ones fueling destruction through unsustainable shopping choices often dictated by convenience more than necessity.

There are however additional factors that impact our ability to embark on a journey of environmental consciousness and action. These factors have a lot to do with our innate resistance to modify habits acquired since infancy and our ability to create never ending justifications for them. Probably the most remarkable success of the modern consumer society has been its ability to train us since childhood to have everything ready and available and to make us believe that we can achieve all that with zero impact on the environment. We are trained to think that alternative solutions would require enormous time and resources and would bring us back to the stone age. And so, tasks that were considered normal until 50 years ago, such as spending 30 minutes cooking a meal from scratch, are presented as a waste of time compared to buying a frozen packaged meal that can be ready in 3 minutes. Similarly, remembering to bring a few bags with us to the grocery store becomes an impossibly difficult endevor. Carefully ostracized to a remote corner of our mind is the concern for the waste and pollution generated by our easy choices, the plastic in the prepackaged food, the ingredients obtained through deforestation, the plastic bags that end up in the ocean, even though in many cases more sustainable alternatives are not much harder and often cheaper.

This last consideration brings us to the destination of our Journey: Retraining ourselves by consciously reducing our dependence on unsustainable products that are destroying our planet.

I plan to document my attempts step by step, to provide an account of successes and failures and reasons for them. However, my experience is representative of a limited portion of the population, therefore comments, suggestions, collaborations, and writings from others are welcome. Most of all, I would really like this to be a positive, informative, and inspiring place to encourage each other to make real changes to our habits and behavior. Hopefully this blog will reach not only those of us who are already well in the journey to live more sustainably, but also those who have been thinking about making changes, but have been too busy, felt overwhelmed, or perhaps not motivated enough to start.

Can an App help?

About a year ago, when listening to news about more and more sections of the rain forest being set on fire, I started thinking about what more can be done to raise awareness of the link between the destruction of the environment and the products we use every day. Reflecting on my personal experience, one consideration was that when out shopping, whether it was at the grocery store, eating at a restaurant, or looking for furniture, it was hard to have ready available information on products. For this reason I thought of developing an app that could provide interested users with quick information, suggestions, product ratings, and links on this topic. Perhaps having this information quickly at our hands can motivate us to find alternatives. Today an initial test version of the YouChoose app is ready for evaluation and is available in the Play Store for free download to people interested in checking it out. The next blog will be devoted to the description of the YouChoose app. Here it’s enough to mention that after researching the issues, the full extent of my obliviousness to the environmental impact of many products I routinely used to buy became painfully clear and this experience prompted me to change several of my habits.

What this blog is not:

In this first post I would like to say a few words about what this blog is not:

• This blog is not about promoting or advertising products. If comments on specific products are unavoidable it should be clear that there is no monetary gain, or any other personal benefit, involved.
• I have no financial interest in this blog, and I am not trying to generate revenue for myself. The blog, most of the pictures, and the above mentioned YouChoose app are entirely developed in my free time. The app is borne of a genuine desire to find ways to reduce the destruction of our planet by informing consumers and is free for download.
• Although I recognize that many of the issues discussed here have deep political implications, this blog is not about politics, but is about individual actions, therefore comments strictly of political nature should be avoided. Advocacy is welcome.
• This blog is not about pointing fingers to others. We are all in the same boats and we all come from the same starting point.
• This blog will not provide easy or definite answers that fit everybody, it is a journey and as such, solutions will have to be tailored to individual needs and always require improvement.

Are we ready to start?

I look forward to having contributions from others both as comments and as contributed articles. Suggestions and collaborations to improve the app are always welcome. I will conclude this first blog by saying that, surely, we all have a place where to start to live more sustainably and we can all have a positive impact on our Planet. If you are one who is looking for ways to live more sustainably but is hesitant to start, I would like to say this: Look at the picture below and think about what you see.

Mother Earth Needs you!