I found the following especially to be of interest
Strategic Consumption: How to Change the World with What You Buy
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
...should we give up on trying to spend our money in ways that could do some good? Absolutely not, but we need to start getting better at buying in ways that make an impact. We need to begin to practice strategic consumption.
What makes consumption strategic? Multiplied leverage.
The ideal is to buy products that not only do their job more sustainably, but send market signals back through the economy that are likely to result in more meaningful systemic changes.
If we want to see these changes, we should pursue five strategies, listed in order of increasing importance...
1) Defaulting to green: When relatively equal alternatives exist, routinely choose the greener one, even if its impact is only minimally better (for instance, choose recycled toilet paper whenever possible). This may not produce massive change, but it helps solidify the gains of greener products. We ought to be working to put obviously dumb products -- like bleached, pulped-forest toilet paper or toxic chemical household cleaning solutions -- out of business. That'd be a pretty clear market signal.
2) Lengthening our time horizons: A great number of costlier green products are smart investments when viewed from the perspective of long-term cost. This is true of everything from more efficient home appliances (which can pay for themselves through energy savings) to low-flow shower heads. These are big-ticket items, requiring substantial industrial investment to manufacture. Buying them represents a wise investment and speeds up the process of higher standards being more widely adopted, but it also requires spending more up front -- sometimes a lot more. (It'd be easier if we all adopted the Japanese approach of requiring today's best performance levels to be the minimum allowable a few years hence.) This kind of sustainable consumption makes good sense.
3) Greening our geeks: One of the best ways to pursue sustainable innovation is to have millions of people working to make their special areas of expertise and passion as green and socially responsible as possible. Gardeners, for instance, can plant native species, harvest rainwater, build rain gardens and create backyard habitat, transforming what once was lawn into an oasis of living creatures and good sense. The same thing's true for home improvement buffs, amateur chefs, travel hounds and all sorts of other enthusiasts: We can take the thing we love and make it better, something that's not only satisfying to do, but satisfying in its consequences. As Bruce says:
I don't believe in "average people" doing anything. People ought to support mitigation and adaptation within their own line of work, no matter how un-average that is. I mean: if you're butcher, baker, ballerina, banker, or a plumber, envision yourself as the post-fossil-fuel version of yourself, and get right after it.
This is true even, perhaps especially, for pursuits which are now incredibly destructive. I'd love to see a bunch of NASCAR enthusiasts and amateur mechanics put their brains together and prove that motor sports have a carbon-neutral future by assembling some really smoking fast cars that get, say, 330 miles per gallon. I'd love to see an X-Prize motivate teams of engineers around the world to find a greener alternative to current jet engine design. Heck, I'd love to see some golfers green golf.
4) Being truly strategic in our consumption: A whole different level of committed consumption comes into play when consumers send major market signals by choosing to make big purchases that may not, strictly speaking, be rational, because we are confident that it will help shift an industry's practices. Hybrids, organics, green power, ecotourism are all prominent examples, but let's push even further. Electronics are a gigantic social and environmental problem: E-waste creates horrific social and environmental problems all around the world. Better standards are starting to emerge, including the EPEAT standard here in the U.S. (which aims to become the LEED of electronics), but progress has been slow -- for instance, no product has yet met EPEAT's Gold standard.
But sooner (hopefully) than later, a laptop will become the first to earn that gold star, and when that happens, a good strategic consumption move would be to make sure that laptop (assuming it works well) is a commercial success, by buying it ourselves, talking it up online, at work and in our community, and generally doing everything we can to see that laptop manufacturers everywhere see it as a profitable trendsetter, not a failed experiment. It may not make great economic sense for us to take that risk on a new product, but it makes terrific sense if we want to be strategic consumers and we can afford it.
5) Tilting the playing field: If we really want to make big change happen, we've got to engage with movements designed to shift institutional behavior. We've got to lobby for better regulatory policies, investment in responsible companies, boycott bad players, destroy or reinforce companies' brands and influence the media. We can't achieve these results single-handedly, but we can work together with others who share our values to exert enormous leverage on the marketplace. And, paradoxically, that may end up being the most surprising result of strategic consumption: Shopping, that traditionally most narcissistic of consumer actions, may actually lead us to civically reengage.
Sustaining Change from the Middle Ground
James Biggar and Michael M'Gonigle, Alternatives
Organic Gardens vs. Chem-Fed Lawns
Enrique Gili, Inter Press Service
Less carbon, more community building
Bill McKibben, Christian Science Monitor
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