Look around and remember. How many of the purchases we have made in the past five years were made in consideration of style, brand and desire. Measure the approximate dollar value of those purchases against how much money we applied to purchases of necessities. Remember, we may need a vehicle, or even two vehicles, but measure the difference between the vehicle we own and the vehicle we need. Don't forget, the financial and environmental cost of both the purchase and operation of our vehicles needs to be a part of the equation and comparison.

The point is the difference will be vast. Our society tends to buy goods and services with little consideration of the sustainability rating. Rather, we make purchase decisions based on our self-identity rating. Then we work extraordinarily hard to earn enough money to appear as wealthy as we would like to be perceived. In the process of working as hard as we do we often make repeated compromises affecting the sustainability rating of our activities and daily decisions. We overlook 'little' things and pretend we believe how insignificant the effect of our small decisions and actions will have on overall sustainability.

It is over my friends. You know it as well as I. None of us can side-step our obligation to make every decision count towards a sustainable future. Forget the news...forget the advertising...forget the peer pressure. Stand up and be counted. Make your family proud and find the comfort that comes from making habitually intelligent decisions. Consume less. I remember the old axiom, "The richest person is not the one who has the most, it is the one who needs the least."

I am not advocating poverty and hopeless idealism in the pursuit of sustainability. It should be evident a small change by each member of a society will bring about a remarkable and significant change in the way industry, the media and government addresses such a society. The exaggerated harvest of natural resource only takes place because we consume natural resources indiscriminately. The unrelenting exhaustion of carbon into the atmosphere from the consumption of fossil fuels continues only because people demand and consume the product requiring the energy. It appears the process used to create pure bottled drinking water actually emits an enormous amount of carbon into the atmosphere. Look it up.