Here is the website of the community of people devoted to this way of life and helping others in need. A great resource http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/
One of the most inspirational stories I have read period. This book really forces you to examine your life and realize how wasteful we are as a society. This is not a book about creating an action plan and doing what the author has done, but rather you draw your inspiration from his story. A couple facts really stood out to me.
- Water used to wash clothes in a machine: 25 gallons
- Water used to wash clothes by hand: 3 gallons
- Water used to flush toilet each day per person: 18 gallons
- Water used in composting toilet: 0 gallons
- During the twelve days of Christmas in 2008, 207,360 died of starvation while we stress about buying all these toys that most of our kids could care less about anyways.
- 50 million diapers are thrown away every single day in the US alone
Some quotes from the book that I really stood out to me.
- Living the slow life is definitely more time-consuming, but I ‘d rather have it consumed this way than in watching a reality TV show in the room we call ‘living’.
- None of us are teachers; we are all students, learning from each other’s experience.
Reading this book things started to appear all over the place
- A label on my tea that I have been drinking stated that by them not using a string and tag on their teabag they are saving 3.5 million pounds of waste entering landfills every year. This is crazy! This is more than mind blowing.
- I just went through my refrigerator the other day and tossed out so much food that was a day or two past the expiration date. I was quite wasteful and this book made me feel bad about my decisions.
Great sites mentioned
- www.bookcrossing.com
- www.ilovefreegle.org
- www.skype.com
My Goals
- Give my books away for free to people who don’t want them. Maybe even set up an event where many people could get together and just swap them out and take what they want.
- Try to not be as wasteful in my day to day activities. This book has opened my eyes to realize how wasteful of a society we are. I went through my typical eating routine and was so surprised at how much we throw away in waste products and in food.
- To do more for people. I need to work on being a better citizen and person and help out more when I can. I have had chances recently that I simply overlooked or forgot about that could have made a change in a life of a person.
In closing, I really liked this book. It opened my eyes to taking a step back to appreciate what we have and all the great things available for free. It also was a great reminder about how great the human spirit can be. I liked the story in that it caused me to do some reflecting and thinking about my way of life. Great credit goes to him for living this way for a year and continuing to do so. I could not do it. It is not possible in my mind. However, I can definitely change my ways to help reduce the problems that I cause to the earth.
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