Long before organic grocery stores and hybrid cars, our grandparents led the kind of sustainable lifestyle that everyone from environmentalists to celebrities are now endorsing. As the world struggles with its ecological crisis, it’s time to look back at how the previous generations lived if we want to save the planet for the next.

During the lazy lacuna of the 2005 Christmas break, the Australian “silly season” was suddenly interrupted by the serious when the country’s richest man, media magnate Kerry Packer, died of kidney failure. One of the most influential, colorful and controversial figures in Australia, Packer’s death marked the end of a momentous era.

In a crowded bar in downtown Vancouver, a group of reporters from the city’s main daily newspaper, The Vancouver Sun, gather after work to do what most people revel in after a long week at the office: bitch about the boss. While images of the Iraq War, Wal-Mart and Kid Rock quickly flash and disappear on the television screens above them, editors are mocked, columnists are ridiculed and the paper their bylines appear in is panned up and down.

Remember Stripes, Bill Murray’s take on American self-esteem after Vietnam? “We’re American soldiers!” Murray famously joked. “We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10-1!” Well, make it 10-2. Which begs the question: exactly how much is this postwar period going to suck?

It was the bloodiest clash between Chinese police and civilians since Tiananmen Square. On a December evening in 2005, hundreds of paramilitary police descended on Dongzhou, a fishing village in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. At seven o’clock, security forces fired tear gas canisters erupting into a crowd that had gathered to protest a power plant being built in the hills. The demonstrators didn’t disperse, so at eight o’clock, police began shooting into the dirt with their AK-47s. “Finally,” one witness said, “at about 10 pm, they started killing people.”

Seymour Hersh stands out as a preeminent chronicler of US power. In 2006, he revealed that the administration was considering a nuclear strike on Iran, and reported that the US had encouraged Israel to plan and execute the war against Lebanon, in which more than a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed. If the aim of journalism is to hold the powerful to account, Hersh is a towering example on how to do just that.

In the law of the market, businesses charge whatever they think the market will bear – except in medicine, where costs come weighed with moral dilemmas. Now, some countries are telling drug companies they won’t pay.

Rupert Murdoch has come to secure a firm and powerful grip around the throat of the United Kingdom’s media. The self-described “billionaire tyrant” now controls nearly 40 percent of the national press, owns one of the world’s biggest book publishers, and has monopoly control over the country’s satellite television service.

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis and Brazil’s most important city, São Paulo, became the first city outside of the communist world to put into effect a radical, near-complete ban on outdoor advertising.

Honeybees are hardly the developed world’s first species to suffer a quick, curious demise in their number. “We’re the ultimate cause in that we’ve changed the planet to suit our needs. We’re running it to suit our needs and not to the benefit of all the organisms around us,” explained Jeffery Pettic…

As global warming deepens, and a somber, new reality sinks in, people are starting to ask some uncomfortable questions: Why, in this ecological age of ours, do we need a $500-billion industry telling us thousands of times each day to consume more? In the affluent West (where 80 percent of the global ad dollars are spent), don’t we already consume enough?