Continuing this week’s focus on the successful Blog Action Day is an editorial from LifeHack. Dustin Wax waxes ecstatic about how the best solution for the environment is for us to buy less, just stop consuming. I agree with his conclusion, but how he gets there is not something I will blindly support. It’s a good read though and I encourage to go read it (and also to buy less).

For most of us, simply dropping out, growing our own food and living off our own labor, is not an option and is hardly desirable even if it were an option. The answer to the dreadful over-consumption that fills our landfills with completely unnecessary crap, pollutes our water sources, kills off species after species (something like 40 a day!), and leaves us in a world of ever-diminishing beauty and diversity can’t be to drop out of consumption entirely, because it’s simply not an option.

But we can change the way we consume, and more importantly lessen the demands we place on consumption to complete us as individuals. This means developing a higher sense of self-reflexivity about what we do buy, and replacing our identities as consumers with identities as part of our families and communities — and maybe even as producers, once again.