Frugal Green Living: Bruce Sterling's Four Categories of Stuff

We often talk about how the key to frugal green living is to simply use less of everything, that we consume too much stuff, too much space and too much money paying for it all. Science fiction writer and theorist Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design Project was an attempt to create a green design movement that influenced many of us at TreeHugger and was key to the founding of Worldchanging. In the last Viridian note, Sterling tried to summarize his thoughts. It included some very good points about buying cheap instead of good:

Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

He then looked at the issue of the stuff that we have, and developed a strategy for dealing with them:

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

1. Beautiful things. 2. Emotionally important things. 3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function. 4. Everything else.

The "Everything else" category is easy; if you have not used it or looked at it in a year, get rid of it. The beautiful and emotionally important things? Look at them closely and carefully, and make sure that they really are. Many will move to category 4.

It is tough, but sensible. I am finding that it completely fails with books, (I just cannot seem to part with them) but does with just about everything elhing else.

Read the entire series on Frugal Green Living for the full list of tips on going green on the cheap.