Today is Earth Day where you are bombarded with messages and products that are "sustainable." Instead of phoning it in one day a year, try to make even a little difference every day. If everyone tried even a little bit harder to "Live More with Less" we'd all reap the benefits.
Image via earthday.org
Treehugger.com covers a recent New York Times article about the rising interest in the idea of "Less Becoming More" in the American home and lifestyle. Read it here.
Image via Treehugger.com
The Dwell Blog has a nice post about built-ins as a great solution for small homes. See a slideshow and details after the jump.
Image from Dwell.com
It seems only appropriate that the last PrairieMod Monday post on the subject of “Less Becomes More” would occur as we gear-up for the Christmas season. With the mountains of food consumed, the crowds of shoppers and the never-ending gift purchasing list… if ever there were a time to try and impart the lessons that “less” can teach us, it’s during this season. There’s one aspect of this holiday that I would like to particularly concentrate on, and that’s the subject of Christmas decorations.
Trying to apply the concept of “simplicity” to our daily lives can be, ironically, a very complex matter. There are just way too many choices to allow for a simple decision to be made. There are too many advertisements trying to influence us and grab our attention. There is never enough time to do all the things we demand of ourselves and that our society demands from us. “Simplicity” often seems like a quaint notion from a bygone era—one before iPods, TiVo, SUVs and Super Target. Our lives seem so complex that to many of us “Simplicity” is something that would be nice to have, but not likely achieved. Yet, the biggest obstacle to living a simpler life is not the demands of a modern world, but our own inexperience with what “simplicity” actually means and how it can be integrated into the fabric of our lives. It’s why “simplicity” is at the heart of the principle, “Less Becomes More.” To understand this concept’s proper place in our modern homes to cultivate our modern lives, we must look back at what a modern master has tried to teach us.
Working on an older house can teach you many things. How much patience you have, for one thing. I'm currently in the midst of renovating the living room area of my 1950s ranch home, and I feel it's finally coming together. I had to learn a very important lesson, one that I constantly struggle with. The lesson I had to learn, relearn and ultimately apply was the principle of "Less Becomes More."
Contrary to what many teachers and parents think, television can teach us a lot. Now, I’m not talking about PBS or the Discovery Channel… I’m talking about television in general…all 500 + channels of it. The 20 different Home Shopping Network channels; the multiple cartoon channels; jillions of news channels; reams of regular sports channels, extreme sports channels, super-extreme sports channels…it never ends. Just when you think they couldn’t possibly find another thing to build a channel around—they hit you with the 24-hour extreme bass fishing channel. So what could we possibly learn from the box of endless channels?
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