Nice AD, I hope Crosscut got paid.

The video is very bias and should not be required to be viewed in schools. It was shown as a part of a PSE presentation in our district, once, and then after student complaints it was dropped. Apparently all of ths kids parents and the companies they work for are earth destroying corporate zombies.

After last year in the Puget Sound area are Leonard and Lightfoot seriously going to stand by their statement “Real men and women deal with the discards of our everyday life, in work more dangerous than what firefighters or police do." I don't see four garbage truck drivers being ambushed at a coffee shop because of what they do. Will the "safety" of the garbage haulers job really be improved with a pay raise?

Progressives like to talk about reducing, reusing and recycling. In fact they are raising their kids to expect ever more stuff and electronic gadgetry.

Lightfoot's logic is flawed and disconnected. The systems designed to mitgate waste streams are as unstainable as the waste itself. The cost structures simply can't be maintained. Thus, the demands of Waste Management Employees simply CAN'T be met! Sadly, the ideology of social "justice" blinds her to the obvious. I particularly find the call for localism misplaced, though. While I've not encounter specific numbers, I speculate that the percentage of public employee's that reside within the community they work is pathetically small. I would go even further and suggest that the percentage who paricipate in the community (pay taxes, frequent establishments, engage in social activities, etc.) they work is similarly low. Thus the notion that Waste Management or their employees are concerned with my community is dubious from the outset, and supporting the union's position is in no way supportive of the localism. Please explain how a recycling system that ferries containers packed with recycleables to China, and then back again is local? Or a system that trucks yard waste to the fringes of suburbia, and back again? A substantive localism would include a properly scaled waste system; one that would be accompanied with a significantly lower cost structure. My best guess: a decentralized system of privateers and independents directly contracting with communities as service becomes unreliable and increasingly expensive, in conjunction with significantly reduced waste streams.

Or save some trees and if you really need help reasoning out ecological footprints, as opposed to conveniently incomplete rationalizations of carbon offsets, e.g., Seattle Times 3/30/10, Nicole Brodeur, then put your name on the hold list at your branch library and when it comes in walk over and get it.

The bigger question that needs answering is how are are all going to make a living when economics includes the "externalities" and full accounting is standard procedure. The ecological footprint, BTW, was invented up the road in Vancouver--see Wikipedia. Seattle, for all the huffing and puffing at http://www.seattle.gov/climate/ is still into "not invented here," as are most governments around the world.

Okay, someone's got to say it: the key to "stuff" is to make less money!

But in a world that worships growth, such a suggestion is simply heresy, and easily dismissed by the True Believers.

What ever happened to the notion of "enough?" You need clean air, clean water, healthy food, a safe place to call home, and meaningful, useful work.

You can help us live such a life style: http://www.EcoReality.org/wiki/Land_purchase_fund_drive

Hmmm... can you put links in here?

Apparently not. Bummer.

Several sayings come to mind. Almost all of them pertain to the fact that every evil seems to have a financial juatification. "We have to have slavery, other wise who would pick the cotton."

Theses great documentaries, Michael Moore etc are always atacked not for their facts but for their politics. Every attorney knows that when the facts are not on your side you atack the person

Vaya con Dios

The morro of the story:
The ends "juatification" the means. "Theses" are words to live by. Please do not "atack" the messenger, or you will be "atacked".

So apparently, we should make less money by giving it to bytesmith!

Cameron, have I told you how small you are, lately?

Well as long as you are down there.

She may be scrubbed and shiny and mischeviously smiling, but she's flogging her book and telling people what they already know. What she doesn't seem to know is that there are very few independent booksellers left in Seattle (at which we'd pay $8 more for said flogged book) and that's as much a sign of the times as the proliferation of stuff; in fact they're not unrelated.

Perhaps I should have mentioned that Leonard specifically referred to U Bookstore, which was selling books at the event, but her message at that moment seemed to me to be a broader principle that did not exclude other independently owned local (general) bookstores such as Elliott Bay and Third Place. I wonder how many of us try on principle to patronize locally owned businesses, even when their prices are higher.

Actually, I merely glanced down, and there you were.

Thanks,
I do what I can for the environment by eliminating waste. I call it my Anne Leonard, ecologically sensitive "Stuff".
How very Seattle of me!

Probably many people do buy at locally-owned places on principle. Many more can't afford to do so. As long as that's the equation, the independents will go out of business. That's the reality of economics, not morality. It's kind of like telling low-income people to spend their money on two apples instead of two hamburgers: it just doesn't work, and it only ends up with those who buy the hamburgers feeling shamed by people with more resources telling them to buy the apples.

Sarah, you're always right.

No, I'm not, nor is anyone. But telling people to pay more for something isn't right either.