How the Other Half Lives: An American impression of the Anthropocene

"The biggest problems the world is facing today are not all beyond our control. Rather, they are all of our own making, and entirely in our power to deal with."

This young woman at a public speaking conference in Dubai has given the best summary of the Anthropocene that I've been able to find in my several years of self-study on the topic.

The term 'Age of Man' is a loaded one indeed. According to several publications including the Guardian, human impact on Earth is vast enough that it has lead to the proposition of an epoch.

Are human beings largely are at fault for the premature destruction of Earth? The general consensus is yes, but that is neither here nor there.

The most important perspectives are the ones we most often overlook.

This is SO, SO important. Even if I can't understand the content of this video due to a language barrier, the fact that a young woman in a Muslim nation is speaking out about the problem of overconsumption so passionately is something the world needs to notice. I did a little research and found her paper (in English) on Prezi, and her ideas are brilliant and on-point with leading researchers in the field of population growth and the factors that drive it. Wake up, citizens of our fragile, beautiful, desperate world. People, especially those who do not live in affluent Western nations, are calling for positive and necessary change. They are asking for us to consider the long-term impact of our fleeting actions before we throw away perfectly good food or a working computer instead of donating it, before five friends take 4 separate cars to the same destination when they live within 2 miles of one another, before we decide that not turning off the lights isn't going to hurt anyone. To the young lady who gave this speech--Thank you SO much. You are a light in the darkness, a hope for steering the world away from the bleak course it is headed on if habits do not change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAFehIzgK9k

Food (in?)Security: My experience as an intelligent, hard-working, independent, low-income American

I am a 27-year-old woman living in Asheville, NC. I work full-time for a large fast-casual cafe chain. My net monthly income is about $1450. After I allocate money for my rent, utilities, car payments, phone bill, insurance (health and auto), gas, YMCA membership, and minimal incidentals, I have an average of $175 per month for groceries. Previously, I qualified for SNAP benefits in the amount of $120 per month, however, after a $.50 per hour raise, I no longer qualify. As someone who values nutrition and quality of life, feeding myself in consistency with my standards on $175 per month requires copious amounts of effort--planning bulk purchases, couponing, checking every sale, and figuring out what combinations of items to buy in a given shopping trip so as to maximize the quality of foods I can purchase.

The dietary standards I hold myself to are as follows:

The less distance my produce has to travel, and the closer to ripening I can purchase it, the better.

Local takes priority over organic in my book. I'd much sooner purchase conventional South Carolina peaches or tomatoes grown in Western North Carolina or South Carolina peaches than I would organic peppers from Holland or Argentinian garlic.

The more I know about and trust the source and growers/farmers of a food item, the more likely I am to purchase it. 

My go-to yogurts are Redwood Hill Farm Goat's Milk Yogurt (plain) for home use with muesli for breakfast or as a snack with honey and Dreaming Cow Cream Top flavored yogurts with my work lunches. Redwood Hill Farm is a family-owned operation that focuses on using minimal processing and providing high quality of life and proper nutrition to their dairy animals. Dreaming Cow yogurt is produced from cows residing in Jumping Gully Dairy, a family-owned, grass-based, rotational dairy farm only a couple hundred miles from me in Georgia.

I try as much as possible to buy only seafood whose source I find acceptable (wild-caught or sustainably farmed), and again, the more local, the better. I love salmon, tuna, trout, and scallops, and few things get me more excited than a filet of fresh NC sunburst trout.

I should add that I regularly buy both of those yogurts and the trout at my local Ingles, which for those who are unfamiliar is the dominant grocery chain in a large part of the Southeastern United States.

I would rather spend extra on high-quality dairy products than on going out or high fashion clothing.
Clothing is worn out, a night out is ethereal; health is invaluable. I think this is one of the few legitimate reasons to declare the following:

You only live once.