The 3 R's are said to be Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

But I think it's more lip service than anything. Cos to really think about ecology, one would need to consider all the factors involved in the reduction, the reusing, and the recycling. No one formula can fit it all.

I believe that the true answer to ecology lies in another set of 3 R's:

Reduce, Reduce, and Reduce.

Reduce Consumption
Once food is bought and cooked, it doesn't matter if you actually finish eating it or you throw it away. Once you have bought it, you are already responsible for having created the demand for that item. And it is demands that drive industries, and industries that really suck up resources. Yes, granted it will drive down the GDP. But GDP is by no means a measure of what makes living worth the while. If we want to really think about ecology, we need to re-access what we think will make our lives worth the living.

Reduce Advertisement
There will always be those with opinions and those who just follow. Advertisements are what make the latter follow, creating market demands where there is none, fulfilling desires that do not really exist. It creates profit by making people pay for what they do not really need, justifying resource usage through an artificially created demand. it's called "market trends", but if it were not advertisement, trends would have been very different. Digital electronics, luxury goods, branded goods, foreign goods - if the demand for these can slow down, "market trends" could possibly better reflect what people actually need to have, than what industries need to sell.

Reduce Population
I think the key factor to our collective environment footprint is simply our population. If we could cut population by 50%, we would cut emissions by 50%. Yes, it would cause a lot of social distress in the short term - but that is the same pain, we are currently inflicting on the environment! A larger population makes it necessary for structure in society, and therefore makes it more possible for people to exploit both the work force and the environment more systematically. If we simply had less people, the environment would probably be more forgiving. A smaller population does mean that we can specialize less, and our sciences would not be able to advance as quickly - but i think we've reached a level of specialization that has removed us too far from what is real - that isn't a problem in itself, but the fact that real-world limitations exist, is. If we had a smaller population and our current society can continue into such a world, we can put more of our energies into agricultural and medical sciences instead of military technology and consumer electronics, into solving social and existential problems than twittering and stock exchange.

And yes, it would mean that I should reduce my blogging too.
But for me, writing is part of the bare minimum that i need to stay alive.