Ah yes, the holidays. Time to celebrate, revel in the season…and put your relaxation exercises to the test in the form of annoying relatives who might share your grandma but not your dogma.
What to do? Well, besides drinking too much and resorting to name-calling, you could actually take it upon yourself to educate the skeptics among you. No, really.

I have family members (identifying names and characteristics will be conveniently left out in order to avoid spending holidays alone with the punch bowl and reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life) who insist that climate change is simply the “natural cycle” and that living green is, therefore, unnecessary and…well…inconvenient.

And though I’ve inundated said family members with enough peer-reviewed climate research to earn me an honorary PhD (or at least a hand-written ‘thank-you’ from Al Gore and David Suzuki), they remain firm in their conviction that I’m – ahem – woefully misinformed at best and brainwashed at worst.

Sierra Club recognizes my pain. And has kindly come up with the Holiday Survival Guide. Within you will find appropriate answers and easy talking points to not only educate but entertain. What’s more, your blood pressure will remain in check because you won’t allow yourself to become emotionally engaged in verbal sparring with anyone who’s IQ seems inversely proportional to the rising temperatures. Oops! See how hard it is not to fall into ad hominem attacks?

Better luck to you, dear readers, in your attempts to not only inform your relatives of the crisis of climate change, but actually enjoy a family get-together. No easy task…

Keeping up with the “Greens” is infinitely more exhausting than keeping up with the Jones. Every time I embrace a new eco-principle – buy local! buy fresh! don’t buy at all! – some study comes along to reveal the flaws.
Not too long ago, it was the bamboo bamboozle, in which eco-friendly bamboo was revealed to not be bamboo at all…really it was rayon. My own bamboo clothes weren’t among those cited for violations, but nonetheless they seemed a little less green.

Now it’s local food.

The local food movement seemed beyond reproach. It focussed on the eco-benefits of buying food that was grown closer to home. Surely that‘s green.

Not so fast, says The Globe & Mail. However, despite the provocative headline, the article fails to convince me that eating locally isn’t a better (read “greener”) thing to do.

It focuses almost exclusively on fish, a muddy issue in any case. We have debate around farmed versus wild, high on the food chain versus low, mercury contamination, overfishing, methods of fishing… In short, fish can be problematic whether you’re catching Lake Huron trout or ordering halibut at your favorite restaurant.

In other words, the benefits of eating locally don’t necessarily carry over into seafood, which, forgive the pun, is a whole other kettle of fish.

So keep eating locally. Eating anything is going to impact the planet…but eating food grown close to home certainly reduces that impact. And creates a positive economic impact in your community.

Bon appetit.

As someone who has devoted much of the past half-decade delivering my message of green living (it’s fun! it’s easy! it’s cheap!), I frequently get resistence in various versions of “I don’t have time” or “I like my conveniences.” Which makes me wonder at what point living lighter on the earth became inconvenient. You wanna talk inconvenience, let’s talk about a lack of fresh water… However, I digress.
There is a price we pay for “convenience” and it doesn’t always show up at the cash register.
Consider the disposable dusting cloths and Swiffer-esque cleaning products that conveniently clean our homes…more than 83,000 of them annually, enough to fill 9,000 18-wheelers, according to the David Suzuki Foundation.

Consider the additional greenhouse gas emissions from using a gas-powered leaf blower rather than an old-fashioned rake. One hour’s of use produces as much emissions as a car travelling close to 150 – 500 km (depending on who you ask. Either way, they’re worse than driving a car…). You get the idea, I’m sure.

I’m not pushing for a return to the days of washboards and churning our own butter. What I am encouraging is an understanding of exactly what convenience costs. If we add it up, we just might find that inconveniencing ourselves in the short run will pay off for future generations.

What holds people back from making smarter (read “better for themselves and for the planet”) purchasing choices? It’s a question that plagues me. I’ve always assumed people adopt a “when I know better, I do better” mantra. However, a recent e-mail blast from marketing mastermind Seth Godin has shone some light on the issue:
The challenge for people trying to…highlight long-term side effects of various consumer choices is that it’s much easier to spread a story about exploding cars or hair falling out than it is to spread a story of ‘nothing bad happens’ or ‘no one got the swine flu and died’ or ‘three years from now, this section of ocean will be dead.’ We prefer the vivid anecdote to the dry and statistically useful fact, which in a complex world, is to our detriment.
I’ve been fascinated by media’s and the public’s fascination with the swine flu vaccination. And, in the midst of the maelstrom, I confess Godin’s theory struck me as likely. People are afraid of what could happen RIGHT NOW. What might or even likely will happen in the future just isn’t enough to motivate us to change.
Godin’s right. It is to our (and our children’s!) detriment.

My home has become a battlefield. My three child have drawn their lines in the proverbial sand, sharpened their tongues and unleashed their campaigns to destroy each other…and my sanity.

Lucky for me, I just learned – courtesy of a University of Rochester study – that all I need to do is immerse them in nature. Nature, it turns out, makes us nicer.

We’ve known the benefits of nature for some time now. We’ve heard of the studies in which patients healed faster when they had a window in their hospital room that allowed them a view of nature. We know that getting kids outdoors reduces evidence of learning disabilities. And we know that just a walk a day in a natural place (ie. not a mall) has been proven to improve the health and moods of seniors.

However, to date, there’s been no evidence – certainly not in my house –  that indicates that nature makes us nicer. At least until now.

It couldn’t be easier. The next kid to mouth off, take a swing at a sibling or let loose with the “s” word (“stupid,” of course), gets dropped off in the nearest forest. By the time I pick him or her back up, I expect someone a whole lot…nicer.

It’s Thursday morning – “yard” day around my neighborhood. The day when trucks arrive, pulling trailers loaded up with lawn mowers, leaf blowers and weed wackers. For most of the day, there’s a constant buzz of machines as the workers busily tidy
my neighbors’ lawns.
We, too, have a lawn mower that gets pulled out when the grass is high enough that our pet rabbit gets lost in it. We, too, have a leaf blower that languishes in our shed. My husband knows he uses it under threat of divorce or dismemberment, depending on my mood. We have no weed wacker, except for me.
The message seems to be MIA. Ya know, the one about how the planet is heating up, rendering polar bears homeless, islanders looking for scuba equipment and the rest of us shooing away malaria-carrying mosquitoes. While we’re all gripped by flu fears, economic woes and So You Think You Can Dance, environmentalists (by which I mean those determined to save us from ourselves) carry on their thankless work of convincing us – and those we’ve voted for – that we really do need to do something. Like now. And it’s not as hard as we might think.

Like, for example, give up the gas-powered lawn mowers. Put aside the leaf blowers. Let the grass grow a little longer. Mulch the leaves and let them nourish your lawn.

While you’re at it: hang-dry your clothes. Cold-wash your clothes. Air dry your dishes. Walk. For more simple ideas, click here.

And let me know what else we can do…