bookmooch

One aspect of popular culture not talked about too often anymore is fiction. Yes, in a world of TV, computers and the Internet, books are still considered a form of popular culture. Well, I am addicted to a sustainable way to get my hands on the books I want. I go to the library of course, but sometimes you just want to be able to keep a book forever, or at least hold onto it for a while. So I use BookMooch.

BookMooch is a book sharing website, where members receive “points” for giving books away and use those points to “mooch” books from other members. When you give a book away, you pay to ship it to the recipient, and when you mooch a book, you receive it for free. It’s inexpensive (about $2.50 to ship book-rate), so say, for the price of one new book (generally around $15 for a paperback) you can get 5+ used books.

Not only this but I find this site to be a real community of avid readers, eager to share book reviews, connect to readers who have similar interests, etc. You can even send someone a “sMooch.”


Though the publishing industry is definitely trying to be more sustainable, BookMooch offers a sustainable solution for avid readers. It saves paper, connects people, and the only thing that is not-so-green is the shipping (but the US Mail will run anyway no doubt).

community

In his essay, The challenge to environmentalism, Bill McKibben writes,

“The average shopper at a farmer’s market has ten times as many conversations as the average shopper at a supermarket—that order of magnitude is a sign of the world we might be able to build, of the pleasures we might be able to substitute for stuff. I predict that environmentalism will find itself increasingly interested in promoting this kind of reconnection: that ‘wilderness,’ since Muir the animating force of environmentalism, will become relatively less important than ‘community.’”

I agree with this statement 100 percent. For me, sustainability has much more to do with a sense of interconnectivity between people and the world we live in. This is why I think that the green movement in popular culture is a good thing – it allows people to make that first connection between their everyday life and sustainability in easy and fun ways that then hopefully will serve as a starting point for bigger changes.

(p.s. - sorry I haven't been posting a lot! My internet access is very limited.)