I have attempted to start an upcycling/sustainability blog for quite some time now. Each one has been set up, carefully named and then brutally abandoned-- all in a month or two.
Now, I am starting yet another blog, but this time I should (hopefully) have more of an incentive to keep at it. I am required to blog weekly for my Journalism II class, and this is where I will be doing that. Besides the occasional post on an assigned topic, I will mostly be writing about upcycling.
Eventually, I would also like to explore the relationships between upcycling, living sustainably and environmental activism.
As a disclaimer, I would like to point out that while doing things like upcycling and composting are definitely valuable for the environment, they are only starting points. Just upcycling and composting does not make one an environmental hero.
Annie Leonard explains this well in her book The Story of Stuff:
"There are things we can do to lessen environmental health impacts... So, yes, we should engage in these actions, as long as we don't let them either lull us into a false sense of accomplishment or let the effort of maintaining this constant, uptight, rigorous green screen on our lifestyle exhaust us. In other words, as long as taking these actions doesn't stand in the way of your engaging in the broader political arena for real change, knock yourself out."
I am guilty of having allowed upcycling and recycling and picking up garbage to give me the false sense of accomplishment that Leonard is referring to.
Ultimately, my goal for blogging is to learn more about real environmental change while also exploring new ideas for my beloved hobby of upcycling.
