do you dare?

Do you dare to check the potential health risks of your personal care products? I've already purged a lot from my bathroom shelves but I sense another round coming on...

principles and permaculture

I found principles that line up strongly with my own on a social work oriented site that draws heavily from permaculture. The little bit of time I've spent looking up permaculture for this entry has been exciting. There is another world open to exploration. It's word that corresponds to many of the values I hold and when you google it, a wealth of different pages come up than I've seen before. Computers facilitate the habits of learning junkies in a blissful way.

It's delightful to find that someone else has gone to the effort of writing up something that I would have liked to put together some day. Saves a lot of time. Some of it is a bit wordy to duplicate so I've edited or paraphrased in brackets.

-Evoke whole system sensitivity: (pay attention to whole cycles, not reduce everything to parts)

-Model ecologically-appropriate lifestyles for others to learn and mimic

-Cultivate wise diets: food systems greatly influence the health and welfare of people, place, and planet--as we are what we eat, be sure to carefully consider the origins and impacts of food choices;

-Use knowledge with humility: the more you learn, the less you will know -Practice inclusivity: embrace, affirm, and advance calls of justice for all human and more-than-human species--at once;

-Integrate competence, confidence, and consciousness: begin with what you know, learn as you go--devote time to reflect on how your actions rightly do more good than harm (all things considered);

-Most importantly--have fun: life is too short for boredom, burn-out,tedium, and the like--be sure to enjoy all of what you learn and do--a healthy mind, body, and spirit (and relationships) can then be enjoyed as well. Help to design and grow healthy organizations, communities, and institutions accordingly.

What? Have fun as a guiding principle? Sweet. Here's a beauty from the permaculture perspective

-Maximum effect for minimum effort: go slow and hone observation skills (enlist all senses) for keen theories and interpretations of system states--Mollison & Holmgren: "apply thoughtful and protracted observation, not thoughtless and protracted labour"

little consumers

I'm reading Born to Buy (Juliet B. Schor) about the mass marketing of products to children. It's not that it's so incredibly shocking but it's opening my eyes a little wider to smaller details and trends. It's highly relevant to me because my 16-month old is already recognizing various cartoon characters and Ivy (3) is very concerned about things being "girlish" enough for her (that makes my skin crawl). The kids do obviously watch some tv, but not hours and hours and not every day. In the CBC kids programming there is about a 5 second spot that says "brought to you by xxx" and Ivy picked up on that yesterday. I can imagine the chaos if there were toy commercials on. It's all pretty disturbing and makes we aware how steeped I am in this culture, nevermind the little ones just growing into it.