What is the world coming to?!

We answer that question every day with our activities, our purchases and what we teach our children.

The lifestyle enjoyed in the world's industrialized countries comes at an unsustainable cost to the environment. In the wake of development and prosperity we see acid rain, greenhouse gases, global warming, toxic waste, water and air pollution, and a global dependence on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. As today's patterns of growth and consumption continue to deplete the environment, our future welfare is at risk.

Families and individuals play a large part, through lifestyle and consumer choices, in determining the state of our environment. We must break away from the widespread belief that bigger, faster, newer and more is always better. We need to reconsider what constitutes "wealth". We need to balance our personal well-being with the health of the environment.

Eartheasy is about sustainable living. It offers information, activities and ideas which help us live more simply, efficiently and with less impact on the environment.

Hello. My name is Greg Seaman, and I write the pages for Eartheasy. I live in a small town on Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. Here's a little information about my background and how the pages of Eartheasy have come into being.

A native of Long Island, New York, I was raised in a typical middle class home with two working parents and four children. After graduating from university, my first job was supervisor of the Centennial Exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This was a two-year temporary exhibit called "Can Man Survive?", and was a multimedia presentation of the impact of our modern lifestyles on the health of the environment. It illustrated how the earth's carrying capacity was threatened by excessive energy consumption, pollution, overpopulation and unsustainable development. It was a real eye-opener, and this was 1970! Little did I know at the time that this experience was the seed which led ultimately to this website.

The career path took me to jobs in New York, Boston and San Francisco. At age 30, my wife, infant son and I were presented with a unique opportunity to live on a small rural island in BC, Canada. After months of deliberation, we decided to give it a try.

Life on the island was a little like Swiss Family Robinson. With no electricity, services or even a road to our home, we learned to embrace the dictums of rural lifefstyle: look to yourself for solutions, and be happy with what you have. We grew our own produce in our beautiful organic garden and orchard, and fished, gathered clams and oysters, raised chickens and traded with neighbors for extras. Our home was built by hand, using old-fashioned hand tools and recycled materials from stately old homes being demolished in Victoria to make way for condominiums. Natural materials from the forest, such as fir poles and hand-split cedar shakes, helped give our home a unique character, and the process of learning to use these materials fostered respect for nature's bounty.

Over the years our two children grew and thrived in a close family environment. Having no TV, our entertainment became our own creation - music, art, homemade games and family horse-play filled our evenings. Our children, and most of the island children it seemed, developed a strong sense of self from being grounded in nature and having the benefit of a close community where income, style of clothing, possessions and social status were not important.

Today, with our older child in University and the younger in High School, we find ourselves on Vancouver Island while the younger attends school. With access to electricity and the Internet, Eartheasy was born. The goal was simple - to encourage, inspire and inform people of the inherent wealth of a simpler, less material lifestyle, and the importance of protecting our natural environment as the very source of our well-being. I wanted to see a website where a wide range of information about sustainable living could be found in one location, and enough content for each topic so you didn't need to click from link to link trying to piece together information.

Most of the pages of Eartheasy come from first-hand experience. The gardening pages, home-efficiency pages, recipes, non-toxic home care, family activities and gift alternatives come from 25 years of past living experience. Others come from many hours in the library, on the web, interviewing 'experts' in various fields, testing of my own and from many site visitors who've contributed a wealth of information. The drawings and illustrations are my own, and many of the pictures on the site come from our family album. Updates to the site are made on a daily basis in an effort to keep the content as current as possible.

It's not my intention to suggest we all live a rural lifestyle. The values of a simpler, less-acquisitive lifestyle, with respect for nature, can benefit anyone in any setting - urban, suburban or rural. If the Eartheasy site gets you thinking about what constitutes true wealth in your life, and the implications our lifestyle and consumer choices have on the environment, then this web project will prove worthwhile.

Postscript: Since the above was written, quite a few articles now included in the site have been submitted by contributing writers. This has broadened the scope of the site and added the benefits of professional expertise and diverse perspectives. These writers are acknowledged in the contributed articles. Also, over the years many site visitors have submitted additions, corrections and updates to the information found on the pages of this site. As time goes by, more and more of the credit for this website is owed to these individuals. And finally, many people email Eartheasy with suggestions, comments and encouragement, and deserve acknowledgement and thanks for their unique contributions to this website.

And now, in 2007, my son Ben Seaman has joined Eartheasy to handle sales and product development. He graduated with a BSc from the University of Victoria, while concurrently building a successful contracting firm to pay for his university expenses. Over three years, Ben built the firm to almost half a million dollars in sales and 30 seasonal employees. Looking to align his work with his values, he switched into sales at an environmentally-friendly business specializing in water-saving technologies, where he worked for two years. He came to realize that making a living and having a high quality of life do not have to come at the expense of the environment. His desire to do more for the environment by encouraging others to think differently led him to work with his father on Eartheasy. Ben’s guiding values include proper stewardship of the earth, frugal use of resources, and honest dealings regarding the environment.

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Fine Print Stuff:

This website comes to you from British Columbia, Canada. A mailing address is on the Contact page.

Eartheasy.com should work fine on resolutions 800 x 600 and higher. It is designed for best viewing on monitor resolution 1024 x 768, which seems to be what more monitors are set to these days.

Images for this site come from a variety of sources, including personal collections, photos and drawings created "in-house" specifically for this site, and friends and relatives' collections. Some images were purchased from The Learning Company's "Click Art" collection, (c) 1998 TLC Multimedia, Inc. and its subsidiaries, 88 Rowland Way, Novato CA 94945 USA. All Rights Reserved.

References for many of the different topics on this site are saved on file. If you would like references for any specific topic, please contact via email.

All text and images on this site are protected by copyright, and it is illegal to copy, reproduce or disseminate any material without specific and written permission.

That being said, we're easy. We are happy to let you use much of the site information.......just ask us first. Thanks.

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