Sustainable Missoula: Six ways to go green this holiday season

By Jeremy Drake, community engagement manager at Home ReSource.
Originally published in Missoula Current, December 6, 2019.

We are capable of increasing human well-being while reducing resource consumption or, in other words, “doing better with less.” That’s the big takeaway from the UN Environment’s International Resources Panel 2019 Global Resources Outlook. That’s great news. And we must temper the tremendous momentum of decades of unfettered production and consumption to get there.

According to the same report, the resource extraction and processing needed to satisfy our appetite for stuff to date has already caused 90 percent of biodiversity loss and has contributed to about half of global greenhouse gas emissions. The report estimates that material resource extraction will more than double globally by 2060 if our appetite continues unabated.

Those of us who live in the developed world consume the lion’s share of the world’s resources per capita. That puts a lot of responsibility on us to take a look at our consumption habits and see how each of us can indeed do better with less, despite what we are told by marketers of the latest and greatest gizmos and gadgets….Read the entire article at missoulacurrent.com.