Sustainable Badass: A Zero-Waste Lifestyle Guide (Sustainable at home, Eco friendly living, Sustainable home goods, Sustainable gift) - Softcover

Johansen, Gittemarie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1642508691 ISBN 13: 9781642508697

Publisher: TMA Press, 2022

Synopsis

A Guide to Being Sustainable at Home and in Life

“Gittemarie is creator that not only provides helpful tips on living a zero-waste and vegan lifestyle, but also articulates it in way that is approachable.” —Jhánneu Roberts (@Jhanneu)

#1 New Release in Upcycling & Repurposing

Reshape your conventional habits, purchases, and recipes with these simple yet effective zero-waste alternatives!

Eco-friendly living made simple. As a lifestyle guide and an introduction to sustainable living, Sustainable Badass shows you why and how to minimize your consumption while effortlessly making your habits greener. Each page has practical tips, tools and important facts about plastic pollution, overconsumption, and the climate crisis. From small changes such as pre-cycling and purchasing items with minimum to no packaging, to eliminating plastic entirely; this book empowers you to be a sustainable badass by making effortless planet-positive choices in your everyday life.

Know the cause, be the change. Gittemarie Johansen, sustainability blogger and speaker, teaches you the way to a greener, more simple and happier life by implementing self sustainable living principles, all while putting the power into your hands as the consumer to speak up and demand change for our planet.

Be sustainable at home.Sustainable Badass encourages you with some effortless principles on the best sustainable home goods. Enjoy this holistic and accessible approach to creating a self sustainable home and lifestyle, that is easy to implement, and fundamental to saving our planet.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A guide to being intentionally sustainable at home 
• Effortless and intentional steps to withdraw from consumerism
• All the knowledge you need to live a sustainable life at home and with others

If you liked Simply Living Well, Live Green, or Attainable Sustainable, you’ll love Sustainable Badass.

About this title

About the Authors

In 2015, Gittemarie Johansen replaced fashion week, impulse buying, big steaks, and package holidays with a sustainable and plastic-free lifestyle. Since then, she has made a living by passing on sustainable tips and principles to people of all ages in both her home country and overseas. Gittemarie’s passion for sustainability is built on her own experiences, not as an expert of commutation, but as an average consumer herself. This is her very first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

“The past few years have seen some of the worst environmental disasters in history, signalling a new era of accelerating environmental destabilisation. Food security and the strength of our global systems to meet basic human needs are under threat, and have already caused irreparable damage in the Global South. As our levels of consumption increase, so does the demand for fossil fuels and cheap labour. This is wholly unsustainable, and without systemic change we cannot turn the tide on environmental destruction.

 

“All that said, there has been a fundamental shift in the perception of how the climate and waste crises are being handled. And with the advanced scrutiny coming from creators like Gittemarie, young activists living on the frontlines of climate change, and organisations, there is hope for our future. Individual action plants a seed of hope in every single person who makes one swap, one lifestyle change, or reads one book outside of their comfort zone. It is this action that helps to shift our mindset from overconsumption to mindful consumption. This may lead to collective action, to protest, to petition, to actual systemic change.

 

“Gittemarie is particularly well qualified, personally and professionally, to contribute to this conversation, and many of us who have followed her for years have learnt a tremendous amount. I have no doubt that you will gain the tools needed to live more sustainably at the end of this book, and hopefully motivate you to join forces and be a part of a collective for a more sustainable future."

—Immy Lucas, excerpt from the foreword

***

“When you change your habits (and write a book about it), you also automatically threaten other people’s old habits. You signal to them, often without even saying anything (or, like me, saying it kind of loudly), that what they are doing is no longer good enough. That does not feel good—trust me, I know—and it makes people want to clap back. When we feel threatened, we protect ourselves; we become defensive, and it is the most human thing in the world to do. For you and me and everybody who wants to live more sustainably, we have to develop a filter, some thick skin, and an above-average amount of indifference towards jokes and snarky remarks. Of course, it can also be a good idea to engage in a discussion where we can teach others something as well as learn something ourselves. But we also need the strength to know when a discussion is a waste of time.

 

“With climate guilt, it often happens that the guilty feeling comes from within. It is often your own voice telling you that what you are doing is not enough. Ignore that voice as well, but just a little bit. Once in a while, let it know that what you are doing now is all you are capable of. The reason I think we should not completely shut it out is because that voice can also be what drives us forward. However, the external voices of shame, which often come from people who are doing next to nothing themselves? Yeah, do not listen to those at all. We literally do not have time for stuff like that. Shame, guilt, and anxiety sneak up on even the best of us, and they are things that we also must learn to navigate, control, and process. Personally, I live a lot in my emotions, and I still get affected by negativity in certain situations (like when I am dragged into a debate that I do not want to be a part of, or when I am used as the butt of a joke). I fight off the guilt and the anxiety in the best way I can, and I tell myself, “Guilt does not plant trees.”

 

“Disregarding the fact that sustainability is about more than planting trees, it has become my mantra and it always pulls me out of an unhealthy mind space. Something I have learned, and which I think it is beyond important to mention in a book about sustainable living, is that it is okay to tell people “No.” It is okay to announce that you do not want to talk about these issues today. You do not have to engage in every single debate with friends, family, or strangers about climate change. You may care (and as a result, often end up learning about reports and statistics more than any other person around you), but it is still okay to leave conversations you do not want to have. It took me a while to figure that out. I have lost count of how many times I have continued a conversation that just left me tired and empty.

 

“To this, I want to add another thing I have learned. Maybe I was the only person who needed to learn this, and perhaps everyone else has it figured out already. If that is the case, that is awesome for you; but if that isn’t the case, here I share my own hard won lesson: It is okay to have other interests and hobbies that are not related to sustainability. It is okay to be more than a vegan, more than a zero-waster, more than a thrift shopper, and more than an activist. It has been freeing for me to find hobbies without any relation to my interest in zero-waste living, and honestly, I believe that the fact that I have other hobbies keeps me from burning out in my fight for sustainability. In 2019, I started training martial arts. Did I know anything about the sport prior to starting taekwondo? Heck no. I just needed to be more than my work with zero waste. I was afraid of burning out, as many activists often do, and becoming indifferent to the issues.

 

“This is, in and of itself, another aspect of guilt, I am sure. Burning out and losing the passion that drives you is the risk you run when you dedicate all of your time to just one thing. If you experience burn out, then you will not be able to help save the world—you will not even be able to save your own backyard in such a state. We do not all need to fit perfectly into the same box. In sustainability, there is room to be different and to expand your perspectives in a direction that you are passionate about. People are different, and focusing on different things and gradually evolving into different people is okay. It took me a long time to refuse the idea of the “stereotypical environmental activist.” Zero waste is not a hat that you need to wear all the time, every second of every day; it does not have to be the first thing people notice about you, and it does not have to fully define you. No, zero-waste living is more like a vest. Vests are fitted for each individual person to wear, with room to breathe, so it is more like a zero vest… (Sorry, the bad puns will be over soon, I swear.) But honestly, remember that, while we are being good to the planet, we also have to be good to ourselves. And technically, we also have to be good to other people (no matter how wrong they are about climate change). No one ever learned anything from being punched in the face with the book. Granted, no one should get medals just for showing up either, so take a deep breath, give yourself a hug, pull up your sleeves, and let’s get to work.”

—Gittemarie Johansen, excerpt from Sustainable Badass

Edition details

• Publisher: TMA Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1642508691
• ISBN 13: 9781642508697
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256