An Environmentally Correct Present Is a Gift for the Future : Suggestions include a variety of books and a magazine that will help those who receive them to remain ecologically aware.
‘Tis the season to be giving, and here are some Earthwatch-style ideas: First, give something that benefits both the recipient and the planet. Second, give something that keeps on doing that again and again. Third, cut yourself in on the deal.
A combination of all three might be a gift subscription to an environmentally oriented shopping guide like Consumer Reports. Yes, the magazine has gone green. It’s not just about stuff for the Ozzie and Harriet crowd any more. The editors have been sly about going environmental, but this month confessed in print, “We admit that there’s a message here: Ame ricans are consuming more resources than are needed to maintain their high standard of living.”
The current issue is pretty typical of the new slant. After casting its knowing gaze on the retail industry and deciding to praise the value-for-money offered at Price/Costco, Target and Wal-Mart, the magazine admonishes readers to shop this season for energy-miser lights, less-toxic cleaning products, energy-efficient appliances and fuel-efficient cars. Plus, a la Earthwatch, it calls on readers to shop for more vegetables because of what the magazine calls the “environmental price” of meat. If you give yourself a $22 year’s subscription to this monthly you can also have it sent to your environmentally aware friends for $16 each. Call (800) 234-1654.
That vegetarian angle, by the way, is one reason for my choice of this year’s under-$5 stocking stuffer. The others reasons are terrific taste and doing something for your fellow citizens.
A wide array of prepackaged bean mixes is available by mail order from The Women’s Bean Project. This provides an easy way to acquaint yourself and your friends with a health-building and soil-building legume. The soups, chili and bean salad mixes--at $5 each or in gorgeous little boxed sets of various mixes for $10 and $15--are packaged by a Colorado organization that provides employment for homeless and poor women. Call (303) 292-1919, or fax (303) 292-9072. If you’re in business and need to give multiple, memorable little gifts, this is just the item.
Here’s something else for business people: a giant-sized holiday gift-giving suggestion which works two ways. If you manufacture or sell consumer products--be it toothbrushes or T-shirts, eyeglasses or eye shadow, there’s a national organization called Gifts In Kind that wants to hear from you. By arranging through them to provide a certain volume of inventory to nonprofit organizations that serve the needy, homeless, ill or elderly, you can obtain tax savings of up to twice the cost of the goods. They currently distribute $110 million worth of such goods to the 50 top national charities the year around. When amounts are large, they’re distributed nationwide, but charities in the donor’s hometown, such as United Way or Boys & Girls Clubs receive special attention. Call (703) 549-1481.
Carrying on with this giving-as-well-as-receiving theme, there are two books I want to recommend as presents, at $15 each at major booksellers: “Shopping For A Better World” and “Sustaining the Earth: Choosing Consumer Products That Are Safe For You, Your Family and the Earth.” Each is about green living as well as a guide to green giving.
The first, compiled by the Council on Economic Priorities and published by Sierra Club Books, factors in questions of people-friendly management practices along with an environmental slant in calculating which companies and which products you should support with your consumer dollar. I think this council is one of the most level-headed groups of its kind.
The second book, written by Debra Dadd-Redalia and published by William Morrow, is about sustaining our families and our planet. The quality and thoroughness of this author’s advice on environmental consumerism is tops.
My final holiday gift recommendation may seem odd. It’s also a book, “Material World,” but it’s not unequivocally pro-environment or anti-materialist. This $30 Sierra Club Book by Peter Menzel with astonishing photographs by 16 of the world’s top photographers, shows what ordinary people in 30 different countries have. Yes, what they have. You see everything they own arrayed in their front yard, if there is one, or the street. One home was a yurt, one yard was a pond, with the stuff on a raft. Everything has been brought out for display--pots, TVs, rugs, pets, cars, carts--plus ma, pa, kids and oldsters, winsomely arranged for the camera.
