Top Quotes: “Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change” — Tanya Hester

Introduction

“The US is the least socially and economically mobile country in the developed world.”

“More capital exists around the world today than at any time in human history. According to Oxfam, just one year’s income of the world’s 100 richest people added together is enough to end global poverty permanently four times over. The world’s billionaires could give a tiny portion of their fortunes to build clean energy infrastructure and solve the bulk of the climate crisis virtually overnight. This is the scale of inequality we’re talking about.”

“Nearly 70 percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings (and people in most other wealthy nations don’t fare much better”).”

“High in the Andes Mountains of central Ecuador, food sometimes falls from the sky. Each autumn, hundreds or thousands of brown and white plover birds migrating from the US drop into the icy waters of the Lagunas de Ozogoche to meet their death, their last sight the jagged, cloud-shrouded pinnacles that surround the lakes. Biologists have yet to explain the phenomenon, but the local Quichua-speaking Indigenous people have witnessed this ritual for countless generations. They hold a festival to celebrate the gift from above, wearing brightly dyed traditional ponchos, and feast briefly on the birds before returning to their everyday lives of subsistence farming and grazing sheep at 13,000 feet.”

“Most advice written by climate activists urges us to stop traveling, or at least to travel much less by air, primarily because of the enormous volume of carbon released by burning jet fuel. And the carbon emissions of a flight to South America from anywhere else in the world are not negligible. However, if tourists stop showing up, the Chimborazo Quichua will likely need to continue increasing their burning to farm. In this case, the best thing for our climate and for our fellow humans is to support their efforts to grow ecotourism in the region.

For poor people in innumerable places in the world, ecotourism provides a near-term chance at making a living without harming the natural landscapes they love.”

“Quinoa has been a staple of the diet in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador for as long as anyone knows, showing up in art at archeological sites dating back centuries before Columbus. As the global demand for quinoa has increased, pushing the price higher, some researchers believe that the price became so high that many in Bolivia — including the very people who grow it — could no longer afford to buy it. It’s certainly true that consumption of quinoa in Bolivia has decreased significantly. Other researchers disagree about the cause, but one thing is clear: the global quinoa boom has brought harm to Bolivia. While campesinos used to grow thousands of varieties of quinoa they’d refined over generations to best suit their local climates and elevation zones, the push to commercialize the crop has resulted in their producing just a few of the highest-yielding cultivars. The land where quinoa grows best in Bolivia is scarce, and the crop’s popularity has driven numerous land grabs and even armed conflict over available farmland. And as global demand for quinoa has increased, more countries have started growing it in large volume, including China. and the United States, pushing the price back down. Bolivian farmers are now left with far less biodiversity of their quinoa, a precarious position to be in as global warming worsens. Farmers around the world are needing to turn to rare cultivars to keep crops producing when they find that their typical cultivars, those that produced best in the past, are ill-suited to the new, warmer climate. Bolivia’s quinoa farmers have lost many of these rare strains. They’re also left with fewer forests after clearing them to make more space for growing. And they see lower yields from their land after putting all of their fields into production rather than allowing some to lie fallow each season to avoid depleting the soil, as was formerly the practice before the quinoa boom.”

“John Muir saw Yosemite Valley — the centerpiece of what would become Yosemite National Park, in large part because of his advocacy — as an empty shell, a place surrounded by awe-inspiring granite cliffs in all directions, but not one inhabited for generations by Indigenous people who were forcibly driven out of the valley by army battalions in post-gold rush California.”

“The place names of Yosemite today serve as a silent reminder of the brutality and genocide: Tenaya Lake, named to celebrate the conquest of Ahwahnechee Miwok chief Tenaya by imperial forces; the Three Brothers, rock formations named for Chief Tenaya’s sons who were captured, and one of them murdered, by imperial soldiers; and even Yosemite itself, named after a misunderstanding, when early white battalions mistook the local Miwok word yosemeatea for a place name. It really meant “killers,” or those armed forces themselves who’d come to displace and slaughter them.”

“”You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” — Angela Davis

“The World Bank estimates that 850 million people in China have moved out of extreme poverty in the last forty years, from 88 percent of its population in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015. The poverty reduction in China is so dramatic that it represents a full 75 percent of all poverty reduction in the world in the 1990s and 2000s.”

“Black vegans and people of color advocating for plant-based diets have pointed out that these diets have deep roots in Africa, India, and West Asia and that Black Americans are about twice as likely to be vegan as white Americans.”

Recycling

“One study found that nearly half (46 percent) of all the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is from fishing nets.”

“Here’s a fact that none of us want to be true: a large portion of what we attempt to recycle never gets recycled at all, because the entire notion of recycling is based on a lie. In truth, very few things can be recycled. Most products that go from being one product to being another can only be downcycled: turned into a much lower quality product than the one they started out as. That’s why it’s hard to find 100 percent recycled paper: the fibers that make paper hold together get degraded each time they are processed, and thus most new paper requires virgin wood pulp. High-quality paper has virtually no recycled content in it, and newsprint, our lowest-quality paper, is typically at most 50 percent recycled content. Plastic is even worse, requiring a huge amount of energy to turn one plastic product into a far inferior one, and only with the addition of new petroleum. The only plastic product you encounter regularly made from a high percent of recycled content is the flimsy plastic grocery bag (not the thicker, so-called reusable bags that some stores charge a few cents for, and which are still likely single-use bags for many shoppers). These bags are designed to be used for a single trip home and are the bane of recycling plant workers everywhere, as they are constantly having to pull the bags out of jammed belts and sorters, forcing the process to stop and start over and over again. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we’re currently generating about 35 million tons of plastic a year but can recycle only 3 million tons — less than 10 percent of the total. Some of that is because products made from recycled plastic are not in high demand, but it’s also because a lot of items that could be recycled, especially plastic water bottles, never make it into a recycling bin in the first place.

Glass and metals degrade far less in the recycling process, and are thus closer to being what we would call truly recyclable. But we’re still generating far more new product than we’re recycling, and a huge volume of potentially recyclable material goes to the landfill, though with high variation between countries: countries in Europe currently recycle 90 percent of disposed glass, while the rate is under one-third of disposed glass in the US. Glass is the one product for which adding more recycled content actually improves the manufacturing process and creates a higher-quality end product: previously used and remelted glass doesn’t release carbon dioxide, and thus it creates fewer bubbles that can get trapped in the glass and weaken it.”

“Putting an unrinsed yogurt container into your recycling bin means that container isn’t recyclable. It also means that some yogurt will likely get on a bunch of other things in the bin, making those items impossible to recycle. Then those items go on to touch other items when your recyclables get collected, and the contamination spreads, so even your properly handled glass is now nonrecyclable. Because of that, only 40 percent of what should be endlessly recyclable glass from single-stream recycling systems — where you put all recyclable materials into a single bin rather than sorting them into different bins, known as multistream recycling-ends up getting recycled.11

A final reason why we’re not living up to the recycling promise is another one of those hidden costs. Recycling costs money, and someone has to pay for that. Recycling rates are higher in Europe partly because countries are much smaller, and the distance from a recycling sorting plant to a remanufacturing plant is likely to be short. In large countries like the US and Canada, those distances are likely to be much greater, thus the cost of including recycled content in a new product is that much higher because everything must travel farther. With consumers insisting on the lowest possible prices and treating products as interchangeable commodities, and no incentives offered to manufacturers to include recycled content, manufacturers have to choose between paying more to do the right thing or paying less to use all new material, knowing their customers are unlikely to notice either way. We would undoubtedly achieve higher recycling rates if every local system converted from single-stream recycling to multistream, but that would require local governments to raise taxes to cover higher collection costs (something no one has the political will to do), and it would also require residents to make space for several recycling bins instead of one (not something everyone physically can do).”

Homes

“Most economists agree that the mortgage interest deduction’s ultimate effect is to raise home prices, because everyone who buys a home is effectively getting a retroactive discount on that home at tax time. Studies have concluded that getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction would bring home prices down by 13 percent on average nationwide and by more than 25 percent in the larger cities. And those higher prices also translate to higher rental costs for those who can’t buy or choose not to buy, and they make it much harder for first-time buyers to purchase a home at all. (This effect is further magnified by exclusionary zoning.) The mortgage interest deduction is meant to incentivize homeownership, but economists agree that its actual impact is to reduce homeownership rates because it drives up prices and makes home purchase less attainable. The prices that lower-income people pay are often artificially inflated, while those paid by the wealthiest among us are artificially discounted by tax breaks.”

Climate Change

“The inventors of the carbon footprint were the public relations team for British Petroleum (BP), one of the largest extractors and distributors of fossil fuels in the world. In 2004, they launched their first “carbon footprint calculator,” along with a massive campaign to popularize the term, and in almost no time at all, we were all talking about reducing our carbon footprints without having a clue that we’d been skillfully manipulated.

While the goal of getting each of us to understand the impact of our choices is a noble one, there was nothing noble about the campaign to get carbon footprint into the vernacular. It was a diversion technique to get us to blame ourselves for climate change rather than the massive corporate actors who bear far more responsibility.”

“BP is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world, one of one hundred companies responsible for nearly three-quarters of all global greenhouse gas emissions. (Together, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell are responsible for more than 10 percent of all the global carbon emissions produced since 1965.)”

Environment

“It’s virtually impossible to amass mass wealth without directly engaging in worker exploitation or looking the other way and pretending not to notice it. As AOC’s policy advisor says, “Every billionaire is a policy failure.””

“You’re probably already familiar with the term greenwashing, meaning attempts by marketers and PR staff to make a company or product seem more environmentally friendly than it is. Making claims that rely on offsets is one example (these claims often use terms like net zero and carbon-neutral), and there are countless others: claiming that something is “sustainably sourced,” “Earth-friendly,” or ‘ “chemical-free” without defining what that means. (“Chemical-free” is impossible, as even pure water, H2O, is a chemical, just not a harmful one in reasonable doses.) Claiming something is 100 percent recyclable when most municipal recycling systems can’t process it. Touting something as “plant-based” when it’s full of polluting chemicals that just happen to be derived from plants. Throwing out unregulated buzzwords like natural, herbal, pure, or green. Even making a product’s package literally green to exploit our associations with the color. These companies know consumers will spend more on products that appear to be environmentally responsible, and they want to cash in.

Besides being manipulative and deceptive, these greenwashing efforts are harmful because they waste consumers good intentions. Consumers believe they are doing something good by choosing a greenwashed product over another when, in fact, they are funding the same old destructive and exploitative practices. And yet, if we find out that something is greenwashed, we tend to blame ourselves for falling for it, which is exactly what the company wants us to feel. This pattern of getting us as individual consumers to blame ourselves and feel responsible has been repeated time and time again.”

“The push to recycle plastic was funded not by environmentalists, but by the plastics and petroleum industry, even though records show that they knew most plastic could not and would not be recycled. A National Public Radio (NPR) and Frontline investigation found that, as early as the 1970s, plastic and petroleum executives acknowledged in speeches and in writing that recycling would not keep plastics out of landfills, and recycling was unlikely ever to be economically viable for manufacturers of plastic products. Yet they poured millions of dollars into campaigns to urge consumers to recycle, because convincing people that their plastic was being recycled made them feel good about buying more of it. As reporter Laura Sullivan wrote, “Selling recycling sold plastic.””

“[Look for] a company that uses recycled materials when possible and commits to a circular life cycle for products, meaning there’s a plan for what happens when a product is no longer useful, so it can be refurbished into something of value instead of going into a landfill.”

“Even the company’s pledge to go carbon-neutral by 2040 without the use of offsets only counts the emissions of its stores and offices, not its manufacturing and transport, accounting for only about 5 percent of Walmart’s total climate impact.”

Laws and Certifications

“As one notable example, in the early 2000s — the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military and the Defense of Marriage Act that outlawed same-sex marriage — automaker Subaru made the deliberate choice to market directly to lesbians. At the time, almost no major brands were even willing to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ customers, so Subaru’s choice was considered radical by many. But lesbians loved it, not only buying enough Subarus to help set the brand on a path of growth in the US but also signaling to other brands that acknowledging and marketing to audiences other than heterosexual, cisgendered white men or white housewives could pay off.”

“In 2018, the city council of Seattle, where Amazon is based, passed a small payroll tax of $275 per employee per year to fund services for those experiencing homelessness — a problem that exploded in lockstep with Amazon’s growing presence in the city. Amazon in turn threatened to stop all construction in Seattle, putting enormous pressure on city leaders, and led an effort to repeal the law, forcing the council to reverse course and repeal the bill itself only weeks later. That apparently was not enough, however, and Amazon spent $1.5 million in the next election to try to defeat six out of the seven council members up for reelection. Given that Amazon is notorious for paying almost no corporate income tax, its willingness to spend millions of dollars on political action and lobbying but next to nothing for the public good reveals much about its priorities.”

“In 2010, California passed the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, which requires all large companies and manufacturers doing business in the state to disclose whether they actively work to identify and eliminate human trafficking and slave labor in their supply chains around the globe. Because California represents one of the largest economies in the world, the law requires a large percentage of multinational corporations to make this information available. Though the law does not require that companies actually address problems in their supply chains, only disclose them, you can easily search for any company’s statement and decide for yourself whether the actions it is taking are sufficient to address your concerns. Various other laws force companies to disclose other aspects of their supply chains, like the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires companies to disclose conflict minerals (those minerals like gold and tin mined in areas with armed conflict and whose illegal sales finance the fighting) in their supply chains, and a law in France that requires companies to report on their carbon emissions. Searching a company’s name along with the phrase supply chain disclosure will give you a range of information to assess.”

“If you see a certification you’re not familiar with, searching for that certification name and the word bogus or credible will return research others have done on whether its claims are to be trusted. The Ecolabel Index maintains a list of the more than four hundred enfronmen certifications offered around the world, and though the tool is not especially user friendly, it can help you deter mine whether a certification is legitimate. Searching for a company or product name and the term greenwashing will give you a sense of whether the company is in the habit of misleading consumers to sell more product. And searching for a company name along with political comtributions or causes supported will help you better understand what you’re funding outside of that company’s business practices. Of course, as with all of the internet, be wary of “sources” that consist of unqualified opinions on disreputable sites. Look for information coming from government bodies, credible nongovernmental organizations, nonpartisan think tanks, and mainstream media sources.

Many of the third-party certifying organizations maintain a registry on their sites of all of the products and companies they’ve certified, making it easy to find products that meet their standards.”

“Searching a company’s name along FTC or Federal Trade Commission will bring you results for when the company has misrepresented its products in some way, often in regard to environmental claims.”

“To find out what a company supports, search for it on OpenSecrets to see political contributions and lobbying spending. Look it up on Progressive Shopper to see its proportion of spending to each party — though this includes giving by employees, which often skews the figure — as well as its list of issues that go against progressive principles.”

“The site Goods Unite Us provides much the same information as OpenSecrets but without separating corporate from individual giving, which skews its figures, but it offers the feature of suggesting alternative brands that rate better on its scale for each category. And InfluenceMap’s company profiles let you specifically see how a company scores in working toward climate goals aligned to the Paris Agreement.”

At Home

“Boxing Day, December 26, a holiday that originated as a time to box up your excess and share it with those less fortunate, is now purely about consumerism.”

“Choose the electric range and stove. (Need more convincing? After decades of overlooking the health hazards of cooking and heating homes with natural gas, experts now say the risks are too great to overlook. Cooking with gas introduces particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde, resulting in levels of indoor air pollution that are illegal outdoors. Gas use is linked to significantly higher rates of asthma and worse outcomes for respiratory disease. The New England Journal of Medicine recently recommended that gas appliances be removed from the market entirely because of their health effects.)”

“Perhaps most importantly, speak up to your electric utility as a customer, a person who pays its bills. Tell it you want a more renewable energy supply. If your utility doesn’t offer you the option first, investigate if it has a program that lets you opt in to renewables, perhaps for a surcharge that goes to fund more investment in new infrastructure. If you can afford to spend a few extra dollars on your monthly utility bills, do it. The more people who opt in, the more reasonable the cost becomes. Ask if your utility provider has a program to install solar panels where you live, using your home as a power plant, and give it permission to do so if that’s a decision you can make. (Putting solar panels on your roof is great if that’s something you can afford, but reduce your total electricity usage first. Solar panels are energy-intensive to produce, they don’t last forever, and having “free energy” on the roof can make it feel like it’s not important to conserve. We aren’t going to meet our climate goals with rooftop residential solar, but if you’re committed to pairing solar with conservation, and you can feed a significant amount of electricity back into the grid, then go for it.)”

“The one exception is polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which can still be found in shower curtains, kids’ toys, pet toys, plastic wrap, raincoats, and a whole range of flexible materials, as well as the white pipes you might use in home improvement or gardening projects. PVC plastic contains phthalates, which are added to make the plastic flexible, and the by-product dioxin results from its manufacture. Phthalates are linked to a wide range of health concerns, from asthma, to breast cancer, to impacts on the reproductive system. Dioxin is a potent carcinogen, one that persists in the environment and in our bodies for years. PVC is not recyclable, and it doesn’t biodegrade in the landfill, instead leaching dioxin and other hazardous substances into the ground and water. You should dispose of PVC products via your local area’s hazardous-waste collection process.”

“When you have a choice, the best material options you can choose, ranked with the best choices at the top of the list, are:

• Anything you already own or can acquire second hand

• Natural fibers like hemp, bamboo, and cotton, especially if they are organic.

• Wood that has been forested sustainably (or, in the case of paper, if it contains as much recycled content as possible).

• Glass, especially if it’s recycled.

• Metal, especially if it’s recycled, only for things you’ll keep for the long term.

• Compostable products when disposables are necessary.

• Recycled plastic, when there’s no way around plastic.”

“With wood, the source is extremely important, as old-growth forests are still being clear-cut around the world, and many stylish woods like teak are virtually impossible to find in sustainable versions. Environmentalists have also programmed us for decades to believe that it’s bad to cut down a tree, no matter what. And how many people have disliked the idea of a tree being cut down to serve for a few weeks as a Christmas tree so much that they’ve instead purchased a fake tree made of plastic and metal that’s almost impossible to recycle because of how the materials are interwoven? It’s hard to imagine making this same choice, and believing it’s the more environmentally responsible one, for any other product. If the tradition was to celebrate around a broccoli stalk, no one would think twice about it or consider buying a fake version, because we know that broccoli grows back, and it will biodegrade into valuable compost when we’re done with it. The fact is that Christmas trees are farmed like any other crop.”

“Make a point of seeking out the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) seal on both wood products and paper products, so that you know the trees weren’t old-growth or the result of clear-cutting, and make sure you check out what happened to the tree after it was cut down, like whether the papermaking process it went into was an old-school toxic process or a more responsibly conducted process (you may be able to find this information on the manufacturer’s website). Ideally, a product that isn’t pure wood should contain both FSC-certified lumber and post-consumer recycled content. If you take those steps, you can absolve yourself of any guilt about cutting down a tree. And, if you’ve been wondering about what type of countertop you should buy if you simply can’t use the one you have, knowing all the downsides of engineered stone, the answer is FSC-certified wood.”

“Unfortunately, the process of making stainless steel is not remotely humane or eco-friendly. Making steel requires mine workers to subject themselves to hazardous conditions and substances, it requires burning coal at several stages to refine the iron ore, and the production requires both inputs of hazardous metals and chemicals and creates hazardous by-products. Moreover, stainless steel is rarely recycled because it doesn’t fit the mold of the standard metal objects we recycle, like aluminum soda cans and steel (“tin”) food cans. That said, if you can find something made from recycled stainless steel, that can be a good choice, because it diverted good-quality material from going to the landfill, and it takes much less energy and extraction to recycle steel than to create new material. The exception is if the stainless steel is meant to be disposable, containing something that you’ll use up in a short time. A troubling trend has been for retailers to greenwash products that once would have been packaged in plastic by packaging them in stainless steel or other similar metals, like the lip balm tin example, even though it will only be used for a short time before being discarded. A good general rule is: if you must buy metal, buy recycled. But never buy it for disposable products, and if you can avoid it altogether, do.

Compostable products: Compostable products sound good, but they are better in theory than in practice. Made of bioplastics, derived from plants instead of fossil fuels, compostable products are designed to break down in a matter of months or years, rather than staying intact for centuries like other plastics, but studies have found that not all actually break down as claimed, and worse, most are compostable only in industrial settings, not at home.”

“For things with a lot of contents or ingredients, get to know those that are harmful for you, which also likely means they were harmful for the workers who made them. Avoid Teflon-treated pans, which off-gas harmful chemicals as you cook. Choose cleaning products with ingredients you recognize over those with a bunch of chemicals with numbers in their names. As much as you can, avoid these chemicals, all of which are banned in the European Union but widely available elsewhere:

• formaldehyde (and any substance that includes formaldehyde in the name like paraformaldehyde)
• methylene glycol
• quaternium-15
• mercury
• any phthalates
• any parabens
• polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)
• p-phenylenediamines

Keep in mind that many chemicals do not have to be disclosed, hiding within the blanket term fragrance, for example, so you can use a resource like the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, their Healthy Living app, or the Think Dirty app that lets you scan products in the store to check on their ingredients.”

“The production of white clothes and textiles requires toxic bleach to produce, and then requires more bleach to maintain that bright white color and treat the inevitable stains. However, wearing a darker color wardrobe has none of these problems, and a black shirt is unlikely to become unwearable because it’s stained.”

“Stop buying paper towels and tissues and instead buy a stack of cotton dish towels that you use to clean up messes and then wash. Cotton clothes sold as washable baby wipes are nicer on noses anyway. Old tshirts are even better. If you buy new, avoid microfiber, which is plastic.”

“Instead of buying a new box of hair color each time that contains within it several single-use plastic bottles, consider switching to coloring products designed for professional stylists that you can buy from a beauty supply store in larger quantities, so you end up with only two plastic bottles for every ten times you color, rather than two to four bottles every single time.”

“For things that don’t come already boxed, choose whenever you can to have things shipped together, even if it means they get to you more slowly, and express your desire not to receive things packed in plastic. For example, you can do an online chat with Amazon customer service and register that request, and they’ll put a note in your customer profile that warehouse workers will see when they ship your orders.”

“For retailers with whom you shop regularly who ship things only in plastic, message them to tell them you won’t shop with them anymore until they convert to less harmful packaging.”

“Making a point not to shop around peak periods is a good practice generally. The vast majority of roses and other cut flowers offered for sale in the US and Canada come from South America, primarily Colombia and Ecuador, which are now the world’s largest flower producer’s after the Netherlands. In an effort to get farmers in the region to stop growing the coca leaves that become cocaine, the US instituted the Andean Trade Preference Act and later the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, for the region’s other agricultural products, removing tariffs on crops deemed more desirable and giving farmers in the Andes region a financial incentive to grow things for export to America. This created the South American flower boom that continues to this day, injecting capital into the region and boosting local economies. Most of the year, flowers are flown north on commercial airline flights, filling otherwise empty space, and contributing relatively few carbon emissions on their own. (Growing roses and other cut flowers in South America is also less carbon-intensive than growing them in greenhouses in North America, for example, because of the ideal climate near the equator.) However, around peak periods like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, flowers are in such high demand that they travel north on specially hired cargo jets. As a result, not only are flowers more expensive during these peak periods but they also generate dramatically higher carbon emissions to get to your door.”

“Only about 20 percent of clothing donated to secondhand stores is ever sold, with the vast majority either ending up as trash or getting shipped to developing countries like Guatemala, India, Tanzania, and Angola, which are now inundated with our castoff garments. A third of all clothes donated globally end up in sub-Saharan Africa, and the result is that local textile industries have been harmed by the influx of cheap clothing, with Ghana’s shrinking by 80 percent between 1975 and 2000 and Nigeria’s being almost entirely wiped out. For the large share of that clothing that doesn’t sell in the countries to which it’s exported, those countries are now stuck figuring out what to do with it, and plenty still ends up in the trash, but only after having traveled thousands of miles and consuming loads of fossil fuels along the way.”

“As much as possible, shift your view of donating to an option of last resort. Then, do what you can to ensure your castoffs find a use somewhere:

• Host a garage sale or a swap with friends where everyone brings the things they don’t wear any-more.
• List items on Craigslist, eBay, Poshmark, or your local Buy Nothing group on Facebook.
• Announce on social media the things you want to get rid of and see if anyone wants them.
• If you can get your things into someone’s hands directly, there’s a far greater chance they’ll actually be used.
• For items that no one wants, or that aren’t in great condition, consider ways you can repurpose them. Free T-shirts are so ubiquitous that most of us have more of them lying around than we’ll ever wear. And sure, some could become sleep shirts, but none of us need ten sleep shirts. However, if you’re looking to reduce your usage of disposable paper products, cotton and cotton blend T-shirts are great to cut into squares to use instead of paper towels, and the more synthetic-based T-shirts that tend to be extra soft are great replacements for tissues. Every home should have a rag box where worn-out clothes go so that anytime you need a cleaning cloth, you’ve got a ready supply.

For things you wish to get rid of that seem like they should be recyclable but aren’t allowed in your curbside bins, contact your local recycler to find out if you could drop them off. Or research other recycling options like TerraCycle, a company that sends out mailers so you can ship back harder-to-recycle items that they’ll take care of for you. Paying for this yourself can be costly, so ask the brands you shop with if theyll commit to a circular life cycle for their products, including paying to ensure their packaging gets recycled. For example, skincare brand Josie Maran lets customers print a free return shipping label with TerraCycle to return empty containers.”

“Whether it’s splitting a lawnmower between several neighbors, because you don’t need to mow your lawn every day, or opening up a local tool library so that people can do home improvement projects without having to buy a bunch of tools they’ll use only rarely, any effort to get more usefulness out of things and to reduce demand for those resource-intensive products is good.”

“For things you may use only once or twice, the best form of sharing might be simply to rent rather than buy. Numerous options exist now for renting all types of clothing, and tool and equipment rental is available in most local communities. As power tools especially have decreased in price, equipment rental has become less popular — but before buying a tool, assess how often you’ll truly use it. The cost of buying something might be only three or four times the cost of renting it for your project, but if you aren’t certain you’ll use it often, renting can still make the most sense.”

“A wonderful resource to use when giving or receiving gifts is the SoKind registry. SoKind allows anyone to register for things like gifts of experience, gifts of time and skill, secondhand gifts, gifts of philanthropy, day-of-event help, and a range of other options.”

Food

“It’s doubtful that we think of what garlic truly is: the most commonly consumed vegetable in the US, as well as in many countries around the world. It’s a central component of our diets, yet it rarely warrants discussion of any sort. But here’s another fact about it: 90 percent of the garlic sold in the US (and 80 percent of global supply?) is grown in China. Despite being an incredibly easy crop to grow, requiring less work than almost any food we eat, and one with varieties adapted to virtually every climate zone on Earth, it also has a shockingly high carbon impact relative to its nutrition because it’s needlessly grown oceans away from billions of the people who eat it.”

“Given its adaptability and its virtually no-maintenance growing habit, every one of us with a pot of dirt and a sunny windowsill could realistically and inexpensively grow all the garlic we need, and we could cut off a needlessly wasteful supply chain.”

“Because the problems of our food system are so closely linked to food subsidies, stemming from the outdated 1973 Farm Bill, only policymakers can spur the widespread change that’s needed, which means pushing your federal elected officials to reform that legislation. But reducing demand for subsidized foods can help make the case.”

“Farmwork has the most lax rules around child labor, letting kids as young as twelve work long hours in the fields, and allowing sixteen-year-olds to perform tasks deemed hazardous. In California, one of the most progressive states where the bulk of unsubsidized foods are grown, farmworkers are granted additional protections above federal minimums, but they still aren’t granted overtime until they work seven days a week, or more than ten hours a day, sixty hours a week, and twelve-year-old kids are allowed to work eight hours a day and forty hours a week on nonschool days. If you have the opportunity to talk to farmers, especially at the local farmers market, ask them about their labor practices. What you learn might shock you.”

“Across the globe, it’s estimated that meat production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all industrial processes and transportation combined. What am I funding?”

“As a consumer, your only guarantee to avoid contributing to antibiotic resistance via the food supply is to buy only organic meat, dairy, and eggs.”

“The bulk of the GMOs in our food today are engineered not to grow differently from their unaltered cousins, but to survive the onslaught of one particular and especially toxic herbicide: glyphosate, which goes by the brand name Roundup. “Roundup-ready seeds grow into grain crops — mostly GMO corn, soybeans, and canola — that thrive even when doused with massive amounts of this potent weed killer.”

“Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, has had to pay more than $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of cancer claims. Other studies have shown that it regularly causes health problems such as respiratory irritation and acute myeloid leukemia in those who work around it, and it has been linked to a wide range of effects, from hormone disruption and reproductive toxicity to liver and kidney damage, DNA damage, and neurotoxicity among those who consume it or even just live near fields where it’s used. Glyphosate also harms wildlife, soil biology, and whole ecosystems, and it has a range of unexpected harmful impacts. One study found that the presence of glyphosate increases the risk of humans in the area contracting Lyme disease, because the glyphosate dramatically reduced the population of local lizards that eat the ticks that carry the disease, allowing the pests to multiply rapidly.

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, the US Public Interest Research Group, and hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and grassroots groups have asked world governments to ban glyphosate outright. Glyphosate is banned in the European Union, but it remains perfectly legal in most of the world, and it’s the most used weed killer in the US. It’s virtually impossible to avoid being exposed to glyphosate, because it’s now so prevalent in our environment. US Geological Survey research found glyphosate in 40 percent of the stream samples.”

“Because glyphosate is used on both GMO and non-GMO crops for different purposes, only policy action can ban it altogether, requiring us to speak up and demand change from our elected leaders. We can also refuse to buy oat-based products from companies like General Mills and Quaker, who use oats from farmers who spray glyphosate on their crops.”

“The only surefire way to avoid these specific GMOs known to cause harm is to buy organic when it comes to those plant foods known to be associated with glyphosate use (oats, corn, soybeans, lentils, flax, rye, buckwheat, millet, potatoes, and sugar beets that become sugar), and processed foods that contain grain-based byproducts (cereals, pasta, breads, and crackers), as well as meat, dairy, and eggs.”

“If you look at where the almond orchards are, you’ll see that they’re predominantly in the southern portion of California’s Central Valley, and these orchards were planted mostly on land where cotton used to be farmed. Cotton is one of the most water-intensive crops there is, and almond trees require less water than farmers used to put on that very same land. In addition, planting almond orchards is reforesting the land, making it in part actually beneficial to the climate. And every nondairy milk alternative has issues of its own: rice also requires a lot of water, and the growing process is fossil fuel-intensive; soy is a subsidized commodity crop grown in vast monoculture plots devoid of biodiversity, and it’s heavily sprayed with glyphosate if it’s not organic; oats, too, are sprayed with glyphosate, and because they’re frequently cross-contaminated with wheat, most oat products are not suitable for consumption by those with gluten allergy or sensitivity. We can find something to gripe about with any option, but the important fact is that choosing any nondairy milk alternative is a better environmental choice than cow’s milk. You might decide that the best choice for you is produced closest to where you live, so you’re not creating demand for a product that travels a long distance. And all of that still leaves packaging out of the equation. If you’re at the store, choosing between nondairy milks, and one choice is in a plastic bottle while the other is in a paper carton? Go for whatever is in the carton: even though it’s coated with plastic, it’s still much less plastic than the bottle, and cartons can be shipped more efficiently.

There are four primary factors to keep in mind when making choices about what foods to eat regularly, and which to consider the exceptions:

1. the greenhouse gases involved in producing it
2. the land use involved
3. the distance it has traveled to reach you
4. how it’s packaged”

“A bunch of spinach bound together with a twist tie has a dramatically lower impact than does the same amount of spinach packaged in a plastic bin. Not only is plastic production an energy-intensive process, but because the bin is rigid, much less spinach can be transported on the same truck or train car than if we’re transporting bunches of spinach that can be packed together. What am I funding? Buying a plastic bin of spinach means funding the shipment of air, from all the empty space in the container, along with the spinach.”

“Read the little stickers stuck to things, see where they were grown, and make an effort to eat things only grown within your own country.”

“According to Conservation International, if we all ate the Mediterranean diet and brought down the portion sizes of the meat and dairy we ate so they’re no longer supervised it would eliminate 15% of all global greenhouse gases by 2050, the equivalent of taking a billion cars off the road.”

“Be wary of unqualified usage of terms like natural, no additives, made with organic ingredients, hormone-free, cruelty-free, ethically raised, free-range, pasture-raised, vegetarian-fed, and grass-fed. None of them are regulated or have a set definition, and a cow could be labeled hormone-free even if it was injected with testosterone. The labels that are meaningful are these:

• USDA organic (or the national government seal for the country you’re in)
• Fair Food Program
• Certified Humane Raised & Handled
• Food Alliance Certified
• Global Animal Partnership (look for ratings four and higher)

The Fair Food Program certification tells you that workers were treated fairly. The latter three signal that animals were treated humanely.”

“If we took all the food wasted around the world every year and tallied up the energy it took to produce, transport, and store it — all for naught — and then compared that sum against the total emissions of entire countries, food waste would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. In the US, 40 percent of the food we produce never gets eaten.”

“The average American household throws away 32 percent of its food a year, a year, worth $1,866.”

Neighborhoods

“In 2014, the nonprofit organization Building Bridges Across the River announced an ambitious plan to link Anacostia to the rest of the District via a river-spanning park built on the bones of an old bridge — DC’s answer to Manhattan’s High Line — calling it the 11th Street Bridge Park. Rather than simply announcing the revitalization plans to residents, the organizers of the park worked closely with community stakeholders over the course of many years to ensure that the park, as well as the accompanying investments in the surrounding communities on both sides of the river, would provide benefit to those who’ve long called the neighborhood home, not just the new, higher-income people who will likely be attracted to the area after the project’s completion. The concept is called inclusive recovery or inclusive development, and its aim is to ensure that the growth (both what’s planned and what will inevitably happen if the investments are successful) ultimately results in more opportunity for the existing residents and business owners, not just a newly spiffed-up neighborhood that white folks can move into as people of color get forced to move elsewhere. The project calls its central document not an economic development plan, but an equitable development plan.”

“The park organizers partnered with the community and other organizations to develop community garden plots, put on arts and culture festivals, train residents in the neighborhood in construction and OSHA-certification and help many of them find full-time jobs, provide small-business assistance and pro bono accounting services to local business owners, help low-and moderate-income residents of the neighborhood purchase homes, and educate local renters about their rights as tenants. The goal at every turn is to help those who already live there stay there, while investing more and improving quality of life in the neighborhood and its surrounding areas.”

“The population of the US increases by 1.7 million a year, split evenly between births and immigration, and those folks need somewhere to live. However, given the average US household size, we should need only about 650,000 new housing units each year to keep up. We’re building double that just in new single-family homes (more than 1.3 million of them a year), not counting new apartments and condos — and even if we presume that many of these homes are replacing older homes that were demolished, the rate is hard to justify. At the same time, we have more than 1.5 million homes sitting vacant across the country and an additional 7.4 million that are second (or third) homes that sit empty most of the time. All this while housing shortages and affordability crises grip cities, and more than half a million people a year experience homelessness.”

“Though most owned residential property is passed down to descendants when its owners die, anyone can choose instead to leave their property to the land’s rightful owners and encourage neighbors to do the same. The NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led organization focused on building Indigenous power, launched the LANDBACK Campaign, an effort to get lands returned to tribes and groups that were stolen in violation of treaties signed with the US and Canadian governments. Bequeathing land to the local tribe or group is a way to support reparations for past wrongs using individual financial power.”

“In both Texas and Florida, the primary source of revenue for the state is property tax, not income tax, and this creates incentives for local governments to approve as many developments as possible to boost tax revenues, including in areas where building clearly should not happen. Recent hurricanes have been so much more destructive not just because they are stronger due to global warming but also because we have a lot more houses built in floodplains than we used to. Buyers have likely assumed — wrongly — that no one would build a house where it’s so likely to flood.”

“We can’t bank on government buyouts. Beach communities in Southern California that are already seeing regular low-level flooding have begun to contemplate a concept called managed retreat, in which you move the town inland and to higher ground so that it’s better situated to handle sea-level rise. The only problem is that managed retreat requires an enormous amount of money, either to buy coastal property owners out of their homes, or to create a scheme of transferring everyone’s ownership to an equivalent parcel inland and then assisting them in rebuilding. Given how concentrated our population is near the coasts, the cost of widely implementing managed retreat would be astronomical, and we can’t assume there’s anyone to foot the bill. We already have a federal program to buy people out of their homes in hurricane-prone areas, but few have benefited from it, and they’ve mostly been white residents with more resources.”

“Consult fire-risk maps for your area, and then add an additional margin of safety knowing that things will worsen. In general, fire tends to travel uphill, and it can pass faster through more densely built neighborhoods, where residents don’t have enough space to create a fire buffer between each property.”

“College admissions officials know which schools have more Advanced Placement classes and other unequal resources, and they assess students accordingly, rather than penalize students with fewer prestige points on their applications.”

“The white kids who attended public school, however, could clearly articulate systemic racism, discrimination, and the racial wealth gap, and they spoke with passion about the necessity of addressing these injustices. They witnessed teachers and school police officers treating their friends of color differently, and they learned how to relate to diverse peers, too. In other words, the parents who chose the privileged perception of what it is to be a good parent over being a good citizen were much more likely to raise kids who are not especially good citizens.”

Transportation

“The system for becoming a taxi driver involves buying what’s called a medallion, in essence a license to operate a taxi, and they are costly — often hundreds of thousands of dollars in big cities. Cabbies pay off these medallions over many years, and they made the decision to buy a medallion at a time when they could reasonably expect that people would continue to need cab rides for the foreseeable future. With Uber and Lyft now taking so much business away from taxi drivers, many drivers still owe tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on their medallion loans, they can’t sell the medallion to anyone else because driving a taxi is no longer a good way to make a living, and they have no way to make their payments. (The medallion system itself is also rife with exploitation.) Even in cities that don’t charge huge premiums for medallions, drivers still have the cost of buying and maintaining a taxi that’s not usable as a personal vehicle. And, because taxis are regulated by local governments, customers have official recourse if an incident should occur in one. Every taxicab commission has a complaint and hearing process, and you can see the drivers’ identification from within the vehicle, so you know who to complain about.”

“All of this brings their “W-2 equivalent wages,” or what their earnings would equate to in a typical job, to $9.21 an hour. Uber and Lyft take a huge cut of what customers pay, essentially just for running an app, while the drivers who do the actual work and make it possible for the companies to exist earn the annual equivalent of $19,157 before taxes, in line with fast-food workers who are likely to require government assistance to get by.”

Accommodations

“To open a bed-and-breakfast, for example, most local governments charge a hefty registration fee, as well as taking a share of profits as tax and in some cases performing inspections to ensure things are up to code. They may also have an approval process to ensure that tourist capacity doesn’t exceed what their local infrastructure can handle. Though it’s starting to change bit by bit in a few places, almost none of that happens with short-term rentals, meaning not only that visitors have fewer protections but also that cities lose all say in lodging capacity and can’t collect the fees and taxes that help them maintain the services that tourists use. The ease with which anyone can now rent out space has been a big motivator for a lot of investors to buy properties solely to rent them out on Airbnb, which also has negative consequences. Buying a property to use as a short-term rental that could otherwise serve as someone’s home reduces the available housing stock. That, in turn, raises rents based on supply and demand, but it does nothing to raise local wages so people can afford the higher rent. In many big cities and tourist destinations, including rural places like ski towns, short-term rentals have contributed enormously to the housing affordability crisis. The proliferation of short-term rentals has benefited travelers and Airbnb “hosts” but has hurt almost everyone else.”

Travel

“While most airlines have unionized pilots and flight attendants, cruise lines rely heavily on exploited labor, hiring poor people from developing countries and paying them sub-poverty wages.”

“While tipping is not the norm everywhere, especially in countries where service workers are paid fairly, it’s rare that tipping will be seen as odd or offensive, with Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea as notable exceptions. Research your destination before you go.”

At Work

“In 2020, Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishers in the world, was set to publish the memoir of Woody Allen, the filmmaker who has long been accused of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. Books by controversial figures get published all the time and are often best sellers, so the notion of such a book deal was nothing new. Though management across the organization seemed to be in favor of publishing Allen’s memoir, many lower-level employees were angry about the decision and decided they weren’t going to stand for it. A month before the book was set to publish, dozens of employees staged a walkout, joining a protest outside Hachette’s offices in midtown Manhattan and forcing management’s hand. As a result, Hachette announced that it was dropping Allen and would not be releasing his book as planned.”

“If companies can’t attract top talent because too many find the work unsavory or unethical, that affects their bottom lines.”

“Almost anyone can ask management or HR to provide a presentation on something that troubles you, giving you and your coworkers the opportunity to ask questions, provide feedback, and ask for an anonymous employee survey to be conducted.”

“Ocasio-Cortez announced before being sworn in that she would hire fewer staffers but pay each of them more: all interns in her office would get $15 an hour, and all of her staff at least $52,000 a year plus benefits — an unheard-of starting salary on the Hill. Regardless of your views on her politics, she has indisputably seen that approach pay off, as she regularly goes into committee hearings the most prepared of anyone, including her colleagues with many more staff members at their disposal.”

“Economists found in one analysis that more equal-seeming parental leave policies in a higher education setting, in which the tenure clock stops while both men and women take parental leave, actually has the effect of disadvantaging women. Women are much more likely to use their maternity leave to care for their child and perform “mom duties,” while dads use their paternal leave to provide some care but also to continue their academic work from home. The result is that men get ahead during their leave, while women tread water at best.”

“A 2016 study found that execs who were women or POC and who pushed for diversity and inclusion got worse reviews than those who kept their heads down and kept the status quo, so it’s especially on white men who don’t pay a price for their advocacy to step up and do this work.”

“Anil Dash, the CEO of tech company Glitch, has a large Twitter following that he assumed was more or less evenly split between men and women. However, when he looked at the data, he found that 77 percent of them were men, which surprised him. Unsure at first how to correct that, and to better serve the women who he felt should be included in his audience, he resolved only to retweet women for a year. Not only did the gender balance of his followers shift, but he also got into more conversations with women, which broadened his perspective and helped him identify more of his unconscious biases.”

“When ordering food for meetings or large events, don’t order so much that there’s food waste, and make sure you have a plan beforehand for distributing uneaten food to those who need it, identifying a local organization who can pick up would-be food waste and redistribute it to hungry families, or simply letting staff know in advance to bring containers they can use to take home leftovers.”

Finance

“For many reasons, not the least of which is the expense for someone of limited income and resources to use a bank, the Federal Reserve estimates that 22 percent of households in America are unbanked or under-banked. This means they rely on even more predatory systems like payday loans, which regularly take $15 or more out of every $100 borrowed, working out to an annualized interest rate of 400 to 700 percent.”

“Seek out a community development credit union, which follows a mandate to support low- to middle-income communities in particular. You can find one at inclusiv.org.”

“If you’re especially interested in racial justice, you might seek out a Black-owned bank. Black banks have for more than a century been the only consistent investor in Black communities, while other banks have denied both mortgage and small-business loans through discriminatory practices. By depositing your money with a Black bank, you ensure that it will be lent out to support and uplift Black communities and help forge pathways to creating wealth for Black households, shrinking the disparity between the $171,000 median wealth for white families and $17,600 for Black families. OneUnited Bank is the largest Black-owned bank in the United States, as well as the first to offer comprehensive online service, allowing customers to bank with them from anywhere. A variety of sites like BLACKOUT Coalition and BankBlackUSA.org have maps to locate a Black bank near you.

A final alternative is to do business with a bank that uses a different business model. Beneficial State Bank, for example, is not a credit union but a nonprofit organization owned by a foundation that offers free online checking accounts for individuals and businesses, as well as all the normal bank services at reasonable rates, and uses deposits to fund social justice and environmental sustainability projects. Amalgamated Bank is the only union-owned bank in America and one of the only banks with a unionized workforce. It also has an environmental and social justice mission, offering a 100 percent fossil fuel-free portfolio, as well as being a Certified B Corp and deriving 100 percent of its power from renewable energy. You can find other banks who do not put profits above everything else and who pledge to use deposits to fund projects that benefit the collective good at the Global Alliance for Banking on Values site.”

“BankTrack.org is a good resource for identifying banks around the world to avoid, as is StopTheMoneyPipeline.com.”

“When choosing a lender for a car purchase, a small-business loan, or a home mortgage, you may approach the institution you already bank with, or you may select another. In addition to using the same resources you use to select a regular bank, you may opt to dig into their lending-specific practices to ensure that you won’t be mistreated, and, more importantly, to ensure that you won’t be participating in a process that will help you get ahead at someone else’s expense.

Check on service ratings for your would-be lender and find out if it services loans itself or sells them to a third-party service who you can’t choose or research in advance — most of whom have poor service ratings. You also want to look into whether a particular lender has faced regulatory action for violations of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) or the Fair Housing Act (FHA). You can search the lender’s name along with ECOA violation, FHA violation, lending discrimination, or prosecution to get a sense of whether it’s a repeat offender, and that’s a clear red flag. Some states’ attorneys general also maintain a list of the institutions against whom they’ve taken action for discriminatory or predatory lending practices.

Then, look more specifically at practices in your state or metro area. Search for the best geographical descriptor and the phrase lending discrimination, as well as the same search but with prospective lender names included. Some lenders may not be large-scale discriminators, but they may have a history of discriminating in your area, and if that’s the case, run away as fast as you can. Choosing a lender with a bad history rewards that business for its bad behavior.”

“Investing is a lot less complicated than most financial advisers would have you believe, because they want you to pay them to manage it all for you. (If you do decide to pay someone, search for a fee-only certified financial planner, or CFP, who adheres to the fiduciary standard. Search for those exact words.)”

“The money you pay for a stock goes to the company only if you buy it during an initial public offering (IPO), the very first time its stock is offered to the public on one of the exchanges. Otherwise, when you buy shares, the money you pay for them goes to the investor who is selling their shares to you. However, though you’re likely not funding the company with your stock purchase price, you are profiting off whatever business it conducts when you receive dividends — the excess profits a company gives to shareholders — a few times a year. And then when you sell your shares, ideally many years later, the increase in share price will be driven by market perceptions of the work the company is doing.

While owning a share of stock is to own a small slice of a company, owning a bond is to be a lender. In essence, the bond is a promissory note for a loan issued by a company or government entity to fund some project, often things like building roads and bridges or updating school facilities. By buying the bond, you’re lending the company or government entity money, and it promises to pay you back in full, plus the amount of interest specified at the time of purchase, on the bond’s maturity date. In general, stock investing is considered more aggressive, meaning there’s a much higher potential for growth but also to lose more money, while bond investing is seen as more conservative. This refers not to any political ideology, but simply to the fact that bonds have no potential to grow beyond the interest rate you bought it at, though you’re unlikely to lose what you invested.

While it’s important to understand what stocks and bonds are, and how they work, you never need to buy a single share of stock or a single bond certificate to invest successfully. That’s where the mutual fund — and one specific type, the index fund — comes in. A mutual fund — and the closely related ETF — is a bucket of stocks and/or bonds selected by a mutual fund manager. When you buy a share of that fund, you are a buying a tiny slice of all the stocks and/or bonds in that bucket.”

“There are fundamentally only two types of mutual funds: actively managed and passively managed. Actively managed mutual funds are often organized around a goal, such as generating dividend income for shareholders or investing in companies that don’t generate dividends so that you pay taxes only when it’s time to sell shares. I’m not an investment adviser, and it’s always best to consult with a pro who can advise you on your situation, but I can tell you that I do not invest in actively managed mutual funds. Mutual fund managers are always seeking to beat the markets, but research shows that, year over year, none do so consistently. But they do charge more for all the time they put into picking companies to swap in and out of the fund, and actively managed funds therefore come with much higher fees that dramatically erode your gains over time.

Passively managed mutual funds, on the other hand, are treated more as a “set it and forget it” fund in which the mutual fund manager chooses stocks and/or bonds that match some existing index. The S&P 500 is the most commonly known index, composed of the five hundred largest publicly traded companies in America. The manager of an S&P index fund would simply put stocks in the bucket in proportion to their weight on the S&P 500 index, and then investors can buy shares of the bucket. Because that doesn’t require ongoing research and management, passively managed index funds have much lower fees, which is better for you as an investor and can be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time you retire. With index investing, you’re not trying to beat the markets but only match them, which is still good enough to grow wealth over time.”

“The simplest way to invest responsibly, without seeing your gains eroded to fees, is to seek out ESG index funds. ESG stands for environment, social, and governance, and it has become the universal parlance for investments that aren’t environmentally destructive, socially exploitative, or run through exploitative governance.”

“A fund that says ESG but not index is likely actively managed and comes with higher fees, so seek out a fund that is both. In most cases, these funds will simply mirror an index like the S&P 500, or the US total stock market, but with the worst companies removed. The big caution on ESG investing is that ESG is not a regulated term — therefore, what feels responsible to the fund manager and to you may not be the same. It’s also a term that’s being exploited to lure in investors under the same logic of companies greenwashing their physical products. So it’s important to do your homework to dig into what is inside each ESG index fund being offered. A company can be given a high ESG rating for its transparency, labor practices, and environmental commitments, not its actual impact. For example, the Spanish oil company Repsol, whose main business remains oil extraction, gets consistently high governance and transparency marks, and thus is included in several European ESG funds. You can research what’s in any mutual fund by searching its ticker symbol, often composed of five letters, or you can search the name of the fund along with the term social responsibility to find out if others have spoken up to point out that it’s not as responsible as it claims to be.”

“A newer option for responsible investing is what is called direct indexing. It’s not designed strictly for investors focused on social responsibility and sustainability, but it can work well for the purpose. With direct indexing, you start with a standard index fund like the S&P 500, and then you can decide which companies in the index you wish to exclude, because you don’t want to endorse or profit off of their harmful work. So you could create something very similar to the S&P, but with Amazon, Facebook, fossil fuels, guns, tobacco, junk food, and mining subtracted, for example. As with any investments, aim to keep the fees on all of your investments under .25 percent (a quarter of 1 percent), and read all the fine print.”

“Two of the largest gunmakers in America are included on the S&P 500, an index in which my husband, Mark, and I had invested most of our retirement savings. Not long after that, BlackRock announced it was offering gun-free funds, but Vanguard, where we had our investments, would not commit to doing the same. So I started an online petition, and with the support of Change.org, it got nearly 100,000 signatures. I sent the petition to Vanguard, reminding the company of our combined total investments with it, and demanded action. Though it wouldn’t commit to anything to me directly — and it’s entirely possible if not likely that Vanguard was already working on new funds before the Parkland shooting and my petition — a few months later the company announced a new set of ESG funds that excluded guns and other bad guy companies. The offerings were a big leap forward for responsible investing, as Vanguard is known for having some of the lowest fees around, which means you get to keep more of your gains and let them compound over time. They were also evidence that shareholder activism can work.”

“In 2021, a small group of ExxonMobil shareholders succeeded in getting three new directors with renewable energy backgrounds installed on ExxonMobil’s board in defiance of its CEO, with the goal of forcing the company to transition away from fossil fuels. On the same day, Chevron’s shareholders overruled the company’s leadership and voted to be more aggressive in reducing its emissions. Like with boycotts, shareholder activism works best if you, can also get media coverage, so you make the company fear for its reputation, and if you can band to gether other shareholders to fight with you.”

Giving

“In the case of endowing a foundation, an ultrawealthy person can not only grant some large amount of money to form the foundation, getting a tax write-off on every dollar donated, they can also retain control over that money and how it is spent for as long as they wish. The only rule is that the foundation must give away roughly 5 percent of its endowment each year. Even with that rule, most of the largest foundations continue to grow their endowments, becoming more influential in the nonprofit sphere and able to chart the course for the thousands of nongovernmental nonprofits in nearly every country who could not exist without those foundation dollars.”

“Individual donations are fragmented and irregular, making them hard for nonprofits to plan around. Foundation dollars are most predictable: they come for a promised period of time, normally several years, and usually go to fund specific programs. Because foundations give their money in big chunks, unlike most individual donors, they can offer it with a lot of strings attached. They can nudge or even push an organization to change its approach to one the foundation prefers. They can fund an organization for a number of years and demand that they hire more staff, only to abandon the organization completely later on, leaving everyone out of a job. They can move whole fields of activists to stop paying attention to something important and instead focus on this trendy thing the foundation decides it wants to be known for, simply because that’s where the funding is.”

“If we as individuals instead made the decision to step up and give more to organizations doing important work, they would be less reliant on foundation dollars and better able to steer their own course.”

“For a long time, donations have been called charitable, and organizations doing work in the social sector have been called charities. This naming promotes “savior” narratives and takes agency away from those whom the donations are meant to serve, privileging the interests of the giver over those of the receiver. Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, proposes that we instead call it solidarity. Instead of charitable giving, it’s solidarity giving. Instead of charitable organizations, we’re supporting solidarity organizations. It puts giver and receiver on equal levels instead of perpetuating a power imbalance, while helping better contextualize the role we should play in giving: meeting the needs someone says they have instead of telling them what they need.”

Conclusion

“In 2012, President Barack Obama raised more from small donors than his opponent Mitt Romney raised from all donors combined.”

“They knew it was rigged. Based on a coin flip, one student was made “rich, given $2,000 at the start of the game, an additional $200 each time they passed Go, and two dice to roll each turn, so they could move around the board faster. The other student was made “poor,” beginning with $1,000, getting only $100 when passing Go, and having a single die to roll. The students played as researchers watched video of them down the hall, analyzing their behavior. Quickly, a pattern emerged: the students arbitrarily made rich acknowledged the unfairness of the situation at first, but soon began talking louder, making their moves faster, occasionally saying something obnoxious, and even eating more of the cookies researchers left out for them on the table.

When asked about the game afterward, the arbitrarily “rich” students said they believed they were better at playing Monopoly than their opponents, and that, even though everyone knew that the game had been rigged in their favor, they probably deserved to win anyway. Piff concluded, “When we watch patterns of human interactions, people who feel entitled and deserving of their own success are more willing to privilege their own interests above the interests of other people and often engage in ways that undermine other people’s welfare so that they can get ahead.””

“As of a few years ago, in 2012, nearly half of the animals taken in by shelters in Los Angeles were ultimately euthanized. By 2018, only six years later, that number was down to 9 percent. Over that same period, Phoenix went from 46 percent to 4 percent, Philadelphia dropped from 36 percent to 13 percent, and Fort Worth went from 41 percent to 9 percent. We see this trend repeated in cities all over the US, with dramatic drops in nearly every city surveyed. Experts believe that higher awareness of the need to spay and neuter pets did a lot to reduce animal euthanasia compared to its peak in the 1960s, when shelters routinely put down scores of animals every day, but what explains the dramatic drop in euthanasia rates in that short recent period? Consumer preferences. It became cool to adopt a shelter pet.”