• Plan meals and buy groceries only for the same day;
• Limit your shopping to whole foods which will:  improve your health, cut down on packaging of pre-made foods and eliminate food waste;
• Begin a food policy within your household of no food waste:  try not to overcook  and in the case of excess food, these leftovers should be eaten the very next meal;
• If you don’t know how to cook, learn how to cook today.  By using whole foods you eliminate food and packaging waste and you give your body the best source of nutrients.  By tossing out bottles of pre-made drinks and diet sodas with herbal tea drinks (ie. hibiscus, verbena, chamomile) and freshly squeezed juices you greatly improve your body’s health and eliminate hundreds of kilos of metal and plastic waste;
• Stop over-eating, lose weight and exercise: most of us in the West are guilty of one of these three behaviours, if not all three. The health crisis in North America due to these three problems alone is a drain on worldwide food resources. We have a social responsibility to stop over-consuming so as to make way for food to stay  and to keep our bodies in shape;
• For those animal eaters, reduce your consumption of meat, eggs and dairy to two or three times a week.  According to Harvard nutritionist, Jean Mayer, by reducing meat production and consumption in the United States by just 10% would free enough grain and legumes to feed 60 million people.
• For those who eat eggs and dairy products, reduce your consumption of these products to two or three times a week and buy only ethically procured products;
• Stop buying crap and try to create systems of exchange or donation for items we do decide to buy (ie. books, videos, toys, clothes);
• Buy fewer clothes and buy clothes from ethical clothing retailers and designers.  If a package of socks costs $5 for six pairs, there is a reason why the socks are so cheap: unethical labour practices.  If we expect to be properly paid for our jobs, we need to return the favour and properly pay for materials we use regardless of where they were made;
• Don’t turn up your noses at fashion designers and fashion houses—often these are the places of more ethical and grassroots clothes design and fabrication.  As you read labels on the food you buy, learn about who makes your clothes from the designer to the tailor.  There are history and artistry in clothing and you would be surprised to learn that buying more quality and fewer quantity effects social change, supports artistry over mass production and/or maintains ethical standards of employment locally and internationally;
• Recycle your own clothes and shoes—find a nearby tailor and shoe cobbler and keep your clothing in repair rather than throwing it out;
• Educate yourself about where your taxes go.  Where is tax money being used and how might it be better used to alleviate the social and political conditions of poverty;
• Buy ethical food products (ie. café equitable, etc) and try to buy locally and in-season;
• Stop the fast-food habit and limit eating out in restaurants to once a week.  Likewise, eat out in healthy restaurants that serve reasonable portions of freshly-prepared food and do not support “all you can eat” or buffet venues which encourage food waste;
• Try to limit your automobile usage to once a week and when running errands, invite a friend or neighbour who hasn’t a car;
• Reduce your household waste to recycling and compost;
• Fast several times a year, or observe Ramadan: it is amazing how refreshing such practices are of the body and these practices serve as a reminder of the implications of repetition and somatic functions;
• Stop buying bottled water and instead carry a thermos with you that you can refill;
• Try to reduce your intake of alcohol, drugs and prescription drugs.

Aside from being in complete agreement with the character of Sheldon (from television’s Big Bang Theory) about the inutility of gifts, still there is enormous pressure to do Christmas gifts, especially when children are involved.

In fact, I just had my first holiday season with my children where one of them was for the first time aware of the commodity fetishism found throughout the structures of the Christmas period. Even with my “presence, not presents” attitude towards the holidays, my four-year-old wanted material items.  I have discussed this for many years, thought long and hard about how to indulge my children with happiness and love at this time of year, wondering if letting us begin that tradition of gift-giving was beneficial much less necessary. Of course, to a four-year-old, everything seems necessary. So I set out to discuss with my daughter various items that might be rethought.

First on her list: a Christmas tree.  I asked why we should get one and she wanted to decorate it. So, I posed options: a small Christmas tree, a recyclable Christmas tree, or no Christmas tree in the house and instead we adopt a tree in the park nearby.  As I researched and thought about everything, I learned that the first two options were hardly ecological: the smaller trees do not survive to adulthood and the shipping to and fro of so-called ecological trees only swapped in green points, as fuel would be used to pick up and return these trees. The park contains many a tree, but none with branches adapted to decoration much less, did we want to risk that decorations are blown away only to pollute, even if they might be ecological?

So the option we turned to, was a wooden stick tree which we can decorate and use every year. It turned out to be a most minimalist and beautiful option, which upon assembly and then with our crafting, we created dozens of paper and cookie decorations with a few items from our home that we added to the tree.

Then came the issue of the “presents”.  In speaking with a friend, she and her partner had decided to give their children one gift each.  I had already been setting up my daughter with the knowledge that we were not going to do gifts and yet felt guilty enough to decide that if need be I would use her birthday gift which I was to give her later this month, for her Christmas present. Still, even with that as a possible solution to remedy her expectations, I was left in the same predicament in which I began: that my two-year-old was really impossible to buy for. He has everything a child at that age wants (he does not want for items) and I would then be forced to match a gift for him which would mean that I would buy something just to buy it.  So, as the day approached, I realised that the guilty was mine alone to negotiate and we had the best giftless present.

How this translates today as my daughter is back at school and might be disappointed to learn that she is the only child without Christmas presents is another story.  I am hoping that we might be creating a holiday tradition for our family whereby participating in cooking, creating crafts, watching movies, playing games, singing, and dancing forms the bonds of this holiday and not the suspense of what we get. For what we got, we already had: each other.

Many permaculture designs involve animals other than humans. Chickens can be used as a method of weed control and also as a producer of eggs, meat and fertilizer. Some types of agroforestry systems combine trees with grazing animals.Some projects are critical of the use of animals (see vegan organic gardening). However not all permaculture sites farm the animals. The animals are pets and can be treated as co-habitators and co-workers of the site, eating foods normally unpalatable to people such as slugs and termites, being an integral part of the pest management by eating some pests, supplying fertilizer through their droppings and controlling some weed species.Annual monoculture such as a wheatfield can be considered a pattern to be avoided in terms of space (height is uniform) and time (crops grow at the same rate until harvesting). During growth and especially after harvesting the system is prone to soil erosion from rain. The field requires a hefty input of fertilizers for growth and machinery for harvesting. The work is more likely to be repetitive, mechanized and rely on fossil fuels.No pattern should be hard and fast and depending on the design considerations they can be broken. An example of this is broadscale permaculture practiced at Ragmans Lane Farm, which has a component of annual farming. Here the amount of human involvement is a key factor influencing the design.Natural Energy use: e.g. a cave for preservationApplying these values means using fewer non-renewable sources of energy, particularly petroleum based forms of energy. Burning fossil fuels contributes to greenhouse gases and global warming; however, using less energy is more than just combating global warming.Using current agricultural systems the food production system is not fully renewable. Industrial agriculture uses large amounts of petroleum and natural gas, both to run the equipment, and to supply pesticides and fertilizers. Permaculture is in part an attempt to create a renewable system of food production that relies upon minimal amounts of energy.For example permaculture focuses on maximizing the use of trees (agroforestry) and perennial food crops because they make a more efficient and long term use of energy than traditional seasonal crops. A farmer does not have to exert energy every year replanting them, and this frees up that energy to be used somewhere else.Traditional pre-industrial agriculture was labor intensive, industrial agriculture is fossil fuel intensive, and permaculture is design and information intensive and petrofree. Partially permaculture is an attempt to work smarter, not harder; and when possible the energy used should come from renewable sources such as passive solar designs.A good example of this kind of efficient design is the chicken greenhouse. By attaching a chicken coop to a greenhouse you can reduce the need to heat the greenhouse by fossil fuels, as the chickens’ bodies heat the area.The chickens scratching and pecking can be put to good use to clear new land for crops. Their manure can be used in composting to fertilize the soil. Feathers could be used in compost or as a mulch. In a conventional factory situation all these chicken outputs are seen as a waste problem.In large factory farms (cooled by large air conditioning systems), chicken heat is a waste byproduct, along with their manure. All energy is focused on egg production. Thus it is a further principle of permaculture that “pollution is energy in the wrong place”.These restatements of the principles of permaculture appear in Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability:

Observe and interact – By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.

Catch and store energy – By developing systems that collect resources at peak abundance, we can use them in times of need.

Obtain a yield – Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.

Apply self-regulation and accept feedback – We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.

Use and value renewable resources and services – Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumptive behaviour and dependence on non-renewable resources.

Produce no waste – By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.

Design from patterns to details – By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society.

These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.

Integrate rather than segregate – By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.

Use small and slow solutions – Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.

Use and value diversity – Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.

Use edges and value the marginal – The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.

Creatively use and respond to change – We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.

A basic principle is thus to “add value” to existing crops. A permaculture design therefore seeks to provide a wide range of solutions by including its main ethics (see above) as an integral part of the final value-added design.Crucially, it seeks to address problems that include the economic question of how to either make money from growing crops or exchange crops for labor such as in the LETS scheme. Each final design therefore should include economic considerations as well as give equal weight to maintaining ecological balance, making sure that the needs of people working on the project are met and that no one is exploited.Community economics requires a balance between the three aspects that comprise a community: justice, environment and economics, also called the triple bottom line, or “ecological-economics-ethics” (EEE) or “triple E”. A cooperative farmer’s market could be an example of this structure. The farmers are the workers and owners.Additionally, all economics are limited by their ecology. No economic system stands apart independently from its eco-system; therefore, all external costs must be considered when discussing economics.One way of doing this is through designing a system that has “multiple outputs”. For example, a wheat field interspersed with nut trees will reduce soil erosion, act as a windbreak and provide a nut crop as well as a wheat crop. Here the system comes into conflict with conventional agriculture and economics. Interplanting trees in a wheat field reduces the wheat yield and makes the field harder to harvest using machinery, as the operator has to drive around the trees.Most farms specialize in a few crops at a time and seek to maximize surplus in order to increase profit. This surplus can only be maintained with a massive injection of fossil fuels.

Main article: list of permaculture projectsIn the years since its conception, permaculture has become a successful approach to designing sustainable systems. Its adaptability and emphasis on meeting human needs means that it can be utilized in every climatic and cultural zone.Permaculture is about creating small successful interconnected domestic food forests. Permaculture has also been used successfully in Eco-Village design, many of its strategies have been applied to large scale broadscale commercial farming, and it has been successful as a development tool to help meet the needs of indigenous communities facing degraded standards of living from development of land and the introduction of industrialized food in Australia and in Africa.

John Robin has been one the strongest critics of permaculture, criticizing it for its potential to spread environmental weeds, reflecting a divide between native plant advocates and permaculture. Bill Mollison himself has also been critical of itinerant teachers of permaculture who would go on to teach after only a short course. At one point Mollison unsuccessfully attempted to trademark the term permaculture to prevent this practice.Another criticism of permaculture is to be found in a book review of Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden, published in the Whole Earth Review. In it, Williams critiques the view that woods are more highly productive than farmland on the basis of the theory of ecological succession which states that net productivity declines as ecosystems mature. He also criticized the lack of scientifically tested data and questions whether permaculture is applicable to more than a small number of dedicated people.Hemenway’s response in the same magazine disputes Williams’s claim on productivity as focusing on climax rather than on maturing forests, citing data from ecologist Robert Whittaker’s book Communities and Ecosystems. Hemenway is also critical of Williams’s characterisation of permaculture as simply forest gardening.

How we conserve water depends on our abilities to observe and self-critique.  We can have the good intention and ecological rhetoric in the world but unless we are ready to make changes in our own daily lives, no amount of complaining about the prices of fuel or about our governments inability to respect the Kyoto Protocol really has any weight.  If we want to conserve water, we need think as individuals how we use water presently and what changes we might effect to reduce our overuse of water.

Singer’s most comprehensive work, Practical Ethics (1979), analyzes in detail why and how living beings’ interests should be weighed. His principle of equal consideration of interests does not dictate equal treatment of all those with interests, since different interests warrant different treatment.  Ethical conduct is justifiable by reasons that go beyond prudence to “something bigger than the individual,” addressing a larger audience. Singer thinks this going-beyond identifies moral reasons as “somehow universal”, specifically in the injunction to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’, interpreted by him as demanding that one give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. This universalising step, which Singer traces from Kant to Hare, is crucial and sets him apart from those moral theorists from Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence. Universalisation leads directly to utilitarianism, Singer argues, on the strength of the thought that one’s own interests cannot count for more than the interests of others. Taking these into account, one must weigh them up and adopt the course of action that is most likely to maximise the interests of those affected; utilitarianism has been arrived at. Singer’s universalising step applies to interests without reference to who has them, whereas a Kantian’s applies to the judgments of rational agents (in Kant’s kingdom of ends, or Rawls’s Original Position, etc.). Singer regards Kantian universalization as unjust to animals.  As for the Hobbesians, Singer attempts a response in the final chapter of Practical Ethics, arguing that self-interested reasons support adoption of the moral point of view, such as ‘the paradox of hedonism’, which counsels that happiness is best found by not looking for it, and the need most people feel to relate to something larger than their own concerns.

Biogas typically refers to a gas produced by the biological breakdown of organic matter in the absence of oxygen. Biogas originates from biogenic material and is a type of biofuel. Biogas is produced by the anaerobic digestion or fermentation of biodegradable materials such as biomass, manure, sewage, municipal waste, green waste, plant material and -moreproblematic- energy crops.[1] Biogas comprises primarily methane and carbon dioxide and may have small amounts of hydrogen sulphide, moisture and siloxanes.The gases methane, hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be combusted or oxidized with oxygen. This energy release allows biogas to be used as a fuel. Biogas can be used as a low-cost fuel in any country for any heating purpose, such as cooking. It can also be used in anaerobic digesters where it is typically used in a gas engine to convert the energy in the gas into electricity and heat.[2] Biogas can be compressed, much like natural gas, and used to power motor vehicles. In the UK, for example, It is estimated to have the potential to replace around 17% of vehicle fuel.[3] Biogas is a renewable fuel, so it qualifies for renewable energy subsidies in some parts of the world. Biogas can also be cleaned and upgraded to natural gas standards when it becomes biomethane.