How to be a frugal zero waster

[hunter]

8. I hate shopping and boycott everything.

At my worst, I lived in my car, showered at the gym, and ate out of dumpsters. Later I lived in a garden shed.

Alas, my wife does not support this lifestyle.

There isn't anything we eat that the leftovers can't be fed to the dogs or composted for our garden. My wife is mostly vegetarian, tending to vegan. I sometimes eat animals.

Our dogs are from the animal shelter. I don't expect them to be vegetarian. They are larger dogs and increase our family's environmental footprint significantly.

Spay and neuter cats dogs, and teach children about birth control.

Accumulating books is our major consumer vice. We have literally thousands of them. Both my wife and I have mostly converted to e-books, which has reduced the problem somewhat.

The worst thing most affluent people do is participate in the car culture. When my wife and I met we were car commuters, each suffering more than an hour of stop-and-go freeway traffic every work day. By some planning and greater good fortune we've been able to avoid that lifestyle since the later 'eighties. But we still have to own cars to be considered fully functional adults in this community.

I'm a fairly good mechanic and drive a well-used car I bought for less than $1000. It's likely I'll never buy a new car. I did that once, more than thirty years ago.

There's no such thing as a "green" automobile.

Affluent people like myself can't really be green, we are posers. It's a function of how our world economy works.

This thing we call economic "productivity" is actually a measure of the damage we are doing to whatever is left of this earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.