Photo by Purrfect Fence

House cats should be kept exclusively indoors because of the damage feisty felines can do to the small indigenous wildlife¹, some of which may be already endangered. Another fun fact: Two out of three vets, according to the Humane Society of America, recommend keeping cats indoors because of the dangers of cars, predators, disease, and “other hazards”—a euphemism, I’d imagine, for the neighborhood psycho. The estimated average life span of a free-roaming cat is less than three years; an indoors-only cat gets to live an average of 15 to 18 years.

If kitty has to give in to her primal urges and heed the CALL OF THE WILD, the Purrfect Fence seems like a good compromise if you have the cash to spare. At $795 for one complete Houdini-Proof Outdoor Cat Enclosure System, however, it’s definitely not for the cheap seats in the back. (If you’re only concerned about native critters, there’s always the much cheaper $9 CatBib, of course, but OH THE INDIGNITY.)

More info on various cat enclosures (and the hairless bipeds who love them) here.

¹The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that domestic cats kill more than 39 million birds annually—and that’s just in Wisconsin.

Related article:
1. Much Ado About Poo
2. Kitty Goes Organic

The major earth-rattling revelation in Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin is that money is something we choose to trade our very finite life energy for, i.e.:

Money = Life Energy

I know it sounds like a lot of hippy-dippy, new-agey pablum, but the authors back up their thesis in the pages that follow. They also ask you to calculate your real hourly wage vs. what’s written on paper:

Most people look at this life-energy/earnings ration in an unrealistic and inadequate way: “I earn $440 a week, I work 40 hours a week, so I trade one hour of life energy for $11.”

It’s not likely to be that simple.

Think of all the ways you use your life energy that are directly related to your money-earning employment. Think of all the monetary expenses that are directly associated with the job. In other words, if you didn’t need the money-earning job, what time expenditures and monetary expenses would disappear from your life?

Subtracting the costs of commuting, “costuming” (i.e. your work clothes), meals, recreational activities for you to decompress from work, vacations and expensive playthings, job-related illness, and other job-related expenses from your usual pay, your real hourly wage is likely to be a lot lower than what you think you are getting. So you might be selling an hour of your life energy for $4, rather than the apparent $11.

The corollary figure is also interesting. In this example, every dollar you spend represents 15 minutes of your life. Think of that figure next time you’re shelling out your money for yet another gazingus pin¹. Ask: Is this item worth 120 minutes of my life energy?

And, if you’re one of the millions of people who are merely “making a dying,” as Dominguez and Robin put it, and the amount of money you’re spending is inversely proportional to how fulfilled you feel, then it’s time to reevaluate the time and expenses incurred to maintaining a lifestyle that consumer culture says matches your job. Another question to ask: Are you willing to accept a job that pays $4 per hour (or whatever you’ve calculated in that last step)? Could pursuing your real desires and goals actually SAVE you money, while improving your health, sense of well-being, and relationships with others?

Then, to evaluate your spending, the authors suggest asking three questions:

1. Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction, and value in proportion to life energy spent?
2. Is this expenditure of life energy in alignment with my values and life purpose?
3. How might this expenditure change if I didn’t have to work for a living?

These steps, and the others listed in the book (which, if you haven’t already guessed, I heartily recommend reading), may lead you to conclude that spending money in ways that might bring superficial happiness, but don’t contribute to lasting fulfillment or support your values, is actually frittering your finite life energy. Questioning whether your actions are in line with your values will also help you clarify your life’s purpose and lead to a greater sense of satisfaction, wholeness, and integrity. Cavorting with goats and other assorted livestock on a kibbutz in Utah fit in better with your overarching purpose in life? Trade in your briefcase for a feed sack and more power to you.

Okay, so the book can get a little kumbaya-ya on you, but you’ll find very little in it that isn’t the God’s honest truth about the way we live, work, and most importantly, spend.

Goats, regretfully, are not included.

¹A “gazingus pin,” according to the authors, is anything that you can’t pass by without buying. They’re usually the little tchotchkes placed closest to the cash registers, from “pocket calculators and tiny screwdrivers to pens and chocolate kisses.”

Photo by Tamara Muth-King/Natural Home Magazine

Natural Home Magazine has a fantastic feature on how to create a nontoxic nursery in its Nov. 2006 issue. A hardwood floor finished with nontoxic sealant (such as such AFM Safecoat’s Polyureseal BP), for ince, is safer than conventional carpet, which outgases harmful chemicals. Use natural-fiber area rugs, instead. (Check out LifeKind’s organic cotton throw rug or pick up a recycled rag rug.)

Also available online: Five nursery-decorating tips that help your kidling snooze and how to choose the best nursery colors.

Further resources:
1. Earth Mama Angel Baby
2. EcoChoices
3. Harvest Moon Boutique
4. Kushtush Organics
5. LifeKind
6. Mama’s Baby
7. Our Green House
8. Sage Baby NYC
9. Sage Creek Naturals
10. Tiny Birds Organics

Related posts:
1. EllaRoo Baby Carriers
2. Mail Call: Used Baby Bottles
3. An Eco-Friendly Nursery is a Healthy Nursery
4. Chemical Pollution Harms Kids’ Brains
5. Maybe Baby: Chemicals & Kids
6. Color Me Bad and Color Me Better: Eco-Friendly Paint

Photo from Charity Global

I’m feeling ambivalent about Charity: Water. On the one hand, it’s helping draw attention to the fact that 1 billion people lack access to a safe supply of drinking water. On the other, it’s a $20 disposable bottle of water that, price aside, is going to contribute to just another embattled facet of the environmental-justice equation: landfill problems. (The non-profit is likely hedging its bets on our first-world lust for exclusivity with that price tag. WWOD?¹)

Unlike Ethos Water, however, where only 5 cents out of the $1.80 you pay per bottle actually goes to “helping children get clean water”—and leaving Starbucks coffers more than 20 times its much-hyped financial bestowment—Charity Global says 100 percent of your donation goes to fund clean-water-well projects in Africa. Each $20 donation provides one person with clean and safe drinking water for 15 years, it says.

To the non-profit’s credit, it won’t ship single bottles via its Web site. (You’ll have to purchase crates of 24 bottles for a cool $480.) You can also buy a “virtual bottle,” meaning you pay the 20 smackers but you don’t get to tote around the minimalist-chic bottle and flash your largesse to poor, ignorant plebs. Or you can make a direction donation and not appear tragically and insufferably bourgeois.

As cause-related marketing goes, Charity Global at least appears somewhat sincere. But, as I’ve said so before, if you want to give, simply give. Don’t merely buy something you don’t need under the guise of “doing charity.” It’s disingenuous, at best. And, nine times out of 10, it doesn’t do a dollop of good.

¹What Would Orlando Drink?

Related articles:
1. The Truth About Bottled Water
2. World Water Day
3. Must be Something in the Water

Comic by Rustle the Leaf

Photo by Jonathan Kirn/Getty Images

Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, authors of Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence on frugality vs. hedonism:

While both have to do with enjoying what you have, frugality and hedonism are opposite responses to the material world. Hedonism revels in the pleasures of the senses and implies excessive consumption of the material world and a continual search for more. Frugal people, however, get value from everything—a dandelion or a bouquet of roses, a single strawberry or a gourmet meal. A hedonist might consume the juice of five oranges as a prelude to a pancake breakfast. A frugal person, on the other hand, might relish eating a single orange, enjoying the color and texture of the whole fruit, the smell and the light spray that comes as you peel it, the translucence of each section, the flood of flavor that pours out as a section bursts over the tongue … and the thrift of saving the peels for baking.

To be frugal means to have a high joy-to-stuff ratio. If you get one unit of joy from each material possession, that’s frugal. But if you need ten possessions to even begin registering on the joy meter, you’re missing the point of being alive.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Writer and commentator Stuart Chase (1888-1985) summarized the gist of Thorstein Veblen’s¹ The Theory of the Leisure Class in its foreword:

People above the line of base subsistence, in this age and all earlier ages, do not use the surplus, which society has given them, primarily for useful purposes. They do not seek to expand their own lives, to live more wisely, intelligently, understandingly, but to impress other people with the fact that they have a surplus … spending money, time, and effort quite uselessly in the pleasurable business of inflating the ego.

¹He who also coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”

Related articles:
1. What is “Voluntary Simplicity”?
2. The Golden Rule
3. Simplicity and Consumption
4. Voluntary Simplicity/Frugality Online Resources
5. 174-Year-Old Wisdom

Photo by Tony Cenicola/New York Times

The “fabled deliciousness” of New York’s water, which the city isn’t required to filter, is under siege, according to the New York Times.

Increasingly stormy weather that comes with climate change, for one, is muddying the city water beyond what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency deems safe for direct consumption. Between September 2004 and last June, for instance, four major storms have dumped highly turbid (or cloudy) water into upstate reservoirs. The tiny particles suspended in the water can interfere with chlorine disinfection, while serving as food for disease-causing organisms.

Another culprit being fingered is industrial pollution. Much of Westchester has been paved over in the last five decades, diverting fertilizer, sewage, and road salt into reservoirs so that from 1989 to 1999, the city has had to increase the amount of chlorine it added by 35 percent.

If the federal agency does conclude that city water is too sullied to be consumed directly, New York will have to spend huge sums on filtering, close the book on 165 years of filter-free taps—and absorb a major blow to its hometown pride.

Photo by EllaRoo

Snigger maniacally as you and your bambino breeze past the Sunday morning stroller gridlock. EllaRoo makes a range of baby carriers, including the Mei Hip pictured above, using organic cotton canvas, hemp/tencil twill, and organic cotton batting. While conventional cotton is still used for some of the decorative accent fabrics, the company wants to transition as many of its products as it can to sustainable fibers, despite some complications that owner Vesta Garcia details frankly in a recent blog entry. (I don’t impress easily but her principles? Impressive.)

Some benefits of “babywearing,” (you kooky parents, you) according to SimpleSlings.com—which, incidentally, also has its own baby carriers made with organic-cotton fabric from Harmony Art:

• Parent has hands free to accomplish unlimited tasks.
• Sibling jealously of a newborn is greatly reduced because parents are still able to play with and tend to older children while simultaneously caring for the newborn.
• Breastfeeding can be easy and discreet while wearing a baby in a sling.
• There is no need to be tied to home for nap-time when your baby is used to being in a sling. Babies sleep comfortably in slings.
• Slings distribute the baby’s weight evenly across your shoulders, back, and/or hip and are worn comfortably for many hours at a time.
• Toddlers who were carried in slings are not as clingy as those who were not regularly worn. They are securely attached to their caregivers, and experience less separation anxiety.

The Wrap is handwoven by a co-op of weavers in Guatemala; all other carriers are made in the U.S. (From $59, Peppermint)

I’ve just updated my post on low- or zero-VOC paints to include Green Planet Paints and YOLO Colorhouse’s new baby line. Because the times, I like to keep up with.

Illustration from Native Energy

I knew we should have eloped! Here are some quick facts from eco-wedding rag Portovert:

• The average U.S. wedding has 165 guests; 54 will require lodging and/or air travel. (American Wedding Survey 2005)
• In the U.S., approximately 15,000 pounds of carbon equivalent are emitted per person every year. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
• The U.S. is the world’s largest single emitter of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 23 percent of energy-related carbon emissions worldwide.

Portovert has partnered with Native Energy to launch the first U.S. wedding carbon calculator, so eco-savvy brides and grooms can calculate the emissions generated by the major matrimonial-related carbon sources: guest travel, lodging, and venue power and heat.

Starting at $12 per ton of carbon offsets, the happy couple can invest in renewable energy by choosing one of three options: helping build new wind power projects, new family-farm methane-energy projects, or a combo of both. And if it’s not financially feasible to offset your entire nuptials—because, hey, who wants to start a marriage mired in debt?—making a manageable percentage of the wedding carbon neutral is still an excellent way to toast your new beginning in an environmentally and socially responsible manner.

It almost makes me wish I had my wedding to plan all over again so I could do right by the planet this time around.

Well, almost.

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