What Does It Mean to Be Green?

Is it living off the grid? Living in a green house? Working at a green job? What exactly does it mean to be green?

At its essence, a sustainable lifestyle, or living green, refers to a lifestyle and set of choices that minimizes a person's environmental impact. While living green embraces sustainability concepts of efficiency, organics, waste management, and so forth, the mindset is more important than the eco actions. Why? Because life is dynamic.    As expressed in our eco friendly training, applying sustainability concepts one way today may not be the sustainable solution of tomorrow. Your life circumstances change so it's in your approach to life that matters.

Being green is a continuous improvement process that challenges us to expand our own personal eco awareness and experiment with new ideas and sustainability concepts in our lives as they unfold.   The essence of a sustainability mindset reflects one of wholeness and appreciation for natural resources, communities, and the gifts our planet gives to us.   A personal sustainability plan is a journey: you never get it done.

Green homes, eco gadgets, living off the grid, and all of the many "demonstrations" of a sustainable lifestyle are the results of a mindset framed with eco awareness.   From the perspective of a green living consultant, what is considered to be green is continuing to evolve. Our personal consulting practice encourages all to keep up with evolution by embracing a sustainability mindset.

Comments for What Does It Mean to Be Green?

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by Peter Fagerström:: Sustainability as a mindset, ok, I can agree with that, however it is only after that mindset becomes action that it really starts to matter, or? Knowledge evolves and with it our understanding of all the systems in this complex puzzle that we somehow have to solve. We need to make the right educated decisions today and bear in mind that the knowledge we possess tomorrow might over-rule our decisions today. We should for example not do something we can not reverse tomorrow, do slipped in by now as decisions without the appropriate actions remain only a mental exersice and will not lead to a sustainable society. Actions, does a person buying an energy producing house support a sustainable society even though he doesn't understand the widespread implications such an action might have? The sustainability mindset is important but not in all cases relevant, a lot of the decisions we think we make are in fact already made for us several times over before it's even our turn to choose. Buying something in the supermarket, producer, buyer, shopowner etc. a sustainability mindset is a simplification of many different mindsets we need to put ourselves into to be able to correctly (atleast to our best abilities) assess the situation or action we are about to take. Systems thinking, ethics and critical reflection, knowledge of the natural sorlet etc., however how many of us (not including the professionals) do that when buying a steak in a restaurant? If the restaurant serves only vegetarian food that choice becomes a more sustainable action without the person having any specific set of mind. (written on a mobile who likes to think itself so sorry about any possibly odd words in the mix) Peter