Ecofficiency pushes for a free and fair market-based consumer system that maximizes positive impacts to our planet.
The fundamental question: Are the impacts associated with producing, shipping, packaging, storing, and disposing of the products, resources, and services we consume worth the benefits they provide us as individuals or to society at large?
"The greatest threat to our planet is thinking someone else will save it"
- Robert Swan
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead
Going Green
When thinking of consumer responsibility, many of us tend to think about "going green." Going green has become a popular mantra lately, coming from Presidential candidates, corporations large and small, various communities, and numerous advocate groups. While we are heartened by this recent movement in bringing needed change to the American lifestyle and consumer systems, we believe the movement needs more structure, and that we need to revisit what lies behind "going green."
Going green has become heavily focused on reducing (carbon) emissions. Obviously, emission reduction is critically important for our future, and is a central component to consumer responsibility. Nevertheless, we cannot forget about the human elements in need of attention today - such as the effects of localized pollution, civil conflict, and labor abuses - all of which frequently stem from a globalized economic system that feeds consumer demand in industrialized countries. To address these issues, in addition to climate change, we require a more holistic approach to understanding and acting on consumer responsibility.
We as individual consumers need to take control of the power that comes with consumer demand. Governments won't do much more than what they need to for our votes, and businesses lack incentive to do any more than what we support with our wallets. The time has come for us as individual consumers to incorporate an ethic of consumer responsibility into our lifestyles; by doing so, we place the same demand on business and it's practices, as well as from government and the policies that are put forth on our behalf.
Our goal is simple; we want to inspire you to live a life that more positively impacts our world. None of us are perfect, and we know that consumer responsibility can seem like a pointless struggle at times - many of us don't even know what it means - but it is not. There are a number of simple things we can do to begin making huge impacts immediately. All of us, however, must first make an ethical commitment to do so.
Our contribution is to help make sense of how all the pieces fit together, and why it is important for us as individuals to proactively initiate an adaptive process of change.
Nobody can tell anyone else exactly what to do, everyone is different, and we all have different capacities for change. Therefore, you must decide for yourself what you can do, and make that be the first step toward your next step...and so on and so on.