A top ten list of things that aren’t as cheap as you think.
#10 Bottled Water – Bottled water sounds like it should be cheaper – it’s 200 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. But in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive. Make a start: stop your local government from wasting your money on bottled water, as we did in San Francisco.
The North American book tour is winding down, and I’ve had many more invitations to speak than I’ve been able to accept. But that’s okay. In the course of a couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to hone my presentation a little and one of my favourite events was at the Town Hall in Seattle on January 18th, 2010, Martin Luther King Day. Thanks to Ed Mays (who has a version of this talk as a Windows file), you can watch it below, all 70 minutes of it. It’s a more environmentally sustainable way of doing things than my flying around. And, yes, it’s free.
In a house in a leafy Durban suburb, lightly festooned with Christmas decorations, a TV is playing the Adam Sandler movie ‘Bedtime Stories’. Across scenes of gumballs falling from the sky and Roman gladiator races, our hero tries to get ahead through wish fulfilment. Predictably, his dreams don’t come true in quite the way he hoped.
I should have been posting a little more than I have over the past week or so, but I’ve been murderously busy with the UK publicity tour for The Value of Nothing which ended gloriously this morning with a five minute crossing of swords on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. I’m heading to Malawi today, which means being offline for a week or two, but when I come back, expect thoughts on Copenhagen, economic recovery, and how much you can eat for $1 a day.
The Friday after Thanksgiving is traditionally the day when US consumers rush to the shops, and spend until their eyes bleed. But tomorrow doesn’t inevitably have to involve running around with a credit card and bags of crap we don’t need.
One man who takes shopping’s stigmata very seriously is the Reverend Billy, preacher at the Church of Stop Shopping. Keep Reading »
