Green Lens Media

Tag: global

  • Culture, Cheeseburgers, and Sustainable Fashion: Combating Our Disposable Mentality

    Osmium FashionWe live in a time of constant upgrades. That brand new smartphone? Replaced by the latest model in a matter of months. That top-of-the-line gaming rig? Obsolete by the end of the year. That hip new fashion trend? Only hip until the newest “latest and greatest” trend takes over. We buy things, use them until they break or go out of style, then we replace them, and the whole cycle begins again. To Mark Paigen of Osmium Apparel, this disposable mentality is not the answer.

    On one of the first truly beautiful days of the year, we sat down with Paigen to discuss his life, his company, and just why buying the same disposable products everyone else is buying is hurting us not only as consumers, but as a culture.

    “Increasingly,” Paigen said, “fashion and our preferences have become global. The same H&M store you see in Boston, you’ll see in Hong Kong and Berlin and Paris, and they’ll be selling the same styles across the continents.”

    To him, this homogony of fashion accomplishes little more than taking away what makes cultures unique. “When I go to Italy, I don’t want to eat a hamburger. I want to eat great Italian food. And I think the same should be true of style, and the things we buy. They should reflect our local culture, our communities. That’s what Osmium is about. Buy things that will last a long time; that will become your favorites and won’t be obsolete in six months.”

    Of course, even the highest quality items will eventually break, and Paigen acknowledges that. “I love fixing things,” he said, “I have a ski-jacket that I’ve had for a dozen years, the draw string blew out on it and I got it fixed. I really like that mentality of buying really good stuff, taking really good care of it, repairing it when it breaks.”

    Not just content with fixing things, Paigen also has a drive towards creating, which undoubtedly stems from his love of nature. We talked about his time as an organic farmer, the “Long Distance Running and Bread Baking” class he took in college, and other experiences which left us with the distinct impression that this is a man who loves being outside, loves working with his hands, and loves to take a unique approach to his work. He couldn’t help a sly smile as he told us about the history of Osmium’s distinct Mobius belt.

    “I had the idea [for the belt], the concept, and I sketched it out, went to a product development firm, and they gave me a price of $18,000 to prototype the buckle. So, I went to Home Depot, I bought a piece of aluminum, and some threaded parts, got my drill out and I prototyped one-half of this buckle. I tried the concept, and the concept worked.”

    Though perhaps what intrigued us most about Paigen was not his creative approach to problem solving nor his love for nature. Rather, it was his sincerity. When it came to his own shortcomings, Paigen was perfectly candid.

    “I consider myself an environmentalist, but I don’t do everything I could possibly do. I could ride my bike to work every day. I don’t. I could have bought a car with better mileage, but I needed more room. I’m painfully aware of all the choices I have made that are not perfect.”

    Just as with repairing items instead of replacing them, Paigen is a man who practices what he preaches. “When I look at someone else and they seem perhaps less perfect [in their care for the environment] than I am, it’s easy to judge. But who am I to judge? All of us could do better, and there has to be a way to reach out to people in a non-judgmental way.” One such way Osmium is giving back is through its membership in 1% For The Planet, a pledge which gives 1% of sales to deserving environmental organizations.

    The point is, like the clothing he designs, Mark Paigen is a distinct man with a distinct view. His and Osmium’s mission is to bring the local focus back to fashion. Green Lens feels in sync with Mark on his perspectives and his intentions; plus, we genuinely liked his style, too. And even if his products aren’t right for you, his philosophy is certainly something we can all strive to implement a little more.

    You can learn more about Mark and Osmium’s Made in the USA clothing line at his website, www.osmium.com.

  • One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind: Boston Walk for Hunger

    If you look at an early map of the world, you’ll see a sphere. In that sphere is land – two large chunks of it – and water. If you look at a map of the world today, you’ll still see land and water. But they don’t exist within a sphere, nor do they exist in big large chunks. They’re divided. The creators of these divisions divided the large chunks of land into all kinds of odd shapes, colour coded them by money, population, economic power. Even the vast expanse of blue within which they all float is divided – this ocean, that plate, this channel.

    With these divisions so deeply ingrained within our cognitive understanding of the world, it is sometimes difficult to remember that these lines that divide up the world aren’t much more than what they appear to be: ink on paper. The interesting part about this ink on paper is that the ink was probably made in a completely different place than the paper; and the cartographer using the ink and paper sits on a wooden chair made in another chunk of land altogether. What the ink, paper and wood ultimately represent, then, is the people of the world whose needs brought them into existence: people, who, despite the divisions that separate them, partook in the shared experience of living on this planet and subsisting on its resources.

    Because the world gradually became bigger and more divided than it once was, it became easy for people to lose sight of the bigger picture. While words like “pollution,” “climate change” and “fossil fuels” began to pop up in the world’s vocabulary, they were written off as far-fetched, too conceptual to truly materialize. When they did begin to materialize, the first instinct was to worry. After all, the world is so much bigger than the people who consume its resources.

    The good thing about all this worrying, though, is that it has given rise to awareness. There is a desire to change things, and the citizens of the world are beginning to take things into their own hands. In the coffee shop down the road, a teenager is doing her part by getting her morning coffee in a reusable mug. On the other side of the world, someone is picking up an abandoned newspaper from a London Underground train and putting it in a recycling bin. Somewhere else in the world, a mother is picking up a candy wrapper from the sidewalk and admonishing her little boy for failing to throw it in a trash can. And this past Sunday, thousands of volunteers walked for Project Bread’s Walk for Hunger, raising thousands of dollars towards hunger in Massachusetts.

    According to Project Bread’s website, this annual walk has made ending hunger in Massachusetts a goal within reach. The simple gesture of walking has, year after year, had far-reaching consequences for schools and communities in Massachusetts. And if walking can spread the message and make a difference, so can the reusable mug, the recycle bin, the moralizing mom. Big change is ultimately a culmination of little steps towards it. Little steps that dare to shake the conviction that the world can’t be saved, or is too divided to be saved. The reason little gestures translate to big change is because the magnitude of the gesture transcends the action itself. All it takes is the simple recognition of the power that we have to bring about change, the ability to recall that first simple image of the world – as one big mass of land, with resources to be shared and maintained by all its citizens.