• The organic cotton chambrey shirts from Knowledge Apparel with button-down collars are incredibly handsome and fitted. A+ all the way.
• What is ecological truth? What is the true cost – not just abstract numbers, but the actual ecological impact – of running your fridge, buying a toy from overseas, or eating animal products from CAFOs ? Furthermore, what would happen to our economic systems if we implemented what Kalle Lasn calls “true cost” in his article “A New Kind of Global Marketplace“?
“Processed, mega-farmed and imported foods become more expensive as the cost of organic and locally produced food goes down. Bit by bit, purchase by purchase, the global food system heaves toward sustainability.”
• When the first clocks were erected in the town squares of France, the workers revolted and destroyed them for fear of having their lives controlled, minute by minute. Nowadays it’s nearly impossible to escape the tick, tick, tick of clock. Short of escaping our dependency on man-made-time (as opposed to following the patters of the sun and moon), the Italian eco-lux company, WeWood, offers reclaimed and sustainably harvested wood watches. The website claims that every watch is “completely absent of artificial and toxic materials,” and furthermore, each purchase of a watch results in a tree being planted! (via Ecouterre)
stereotyped as unsexy in our culture is because the more we know, the less pleasure we can derive from traditional consumer-capitalist activities with an unethical base that benefits those in power. AKA: shopping and consuming starts to mean something completely different when a holistic comprehension of objects and activities is pursued. It turns
traditional economics on its head, and it is not ‘good for the economy’ because we might decide not to purchase something based on the story of how it came to be. This conflicts with the story-telling and economic interests of those is power, so it is best that they continually reinforce a pseudo-rebellion against an ostensible culture of do-gooders.
Things start to become less ‘cool’ when we realize that ‘cool’ is a grand plan, cleverly designed by a few monolithic entities who reap the benefits of having us run in circles to achieve some false dream of personal revolution through solipsistic hedonism. The truth is that falling in line by responding to traditional fear-based and cool-chasing advertising can rarely be a revolutionary act. It’s the furthest thing from it, because it simply reinforces the status-quo and in turn, the Great Myth. My main question for advertisers who use revolutionary terminology to sell images that sell products is this: What are you telling us to revolt against?
joy the piece of meat and cheese that came from somewhere out there, it became an avoidance and denial of the knowledge that the ground up flesh and cultured cow-udder secretions required the torturous confinement, exploitation and eventual messy death of a cow, the clear-cutting of rain forests for cattle grazing, human labor abuses, the displacement of indigenous peoples and the general ecological devastation. Does it still taste good? Maybe. But the net-gain of sensual pleasure is outweighed by the discomfort, or loss of pleasure associated with the transcendence of infantile self-gratification.
