Acronym of the Day: LOHAS

A friend of Greenjeans recently introduced me to the phrase LOHAS, which stands for Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability. I'd never heard of the phrase before, but it seems right up our alley here at Greenjeans, where craftsmanship, sustainability, and conscientious living are our founding and guiding principles.

Our friend wrote that LOHAS is a movement that started in the U.S. but is more popular in her native Japan. She said that in the U.S. the equivalent would be things associated with organics, green, fair trade, sustainability, and so on. But LOHAS sounds like a more coherent movement idea to me. I wanted to know more.

So, as we 21st century folk do when confronted with a question, I googled. Indeed all but one of the top sites that came up was in Japanese. But the first hit was in English: www.lohas.com. From their website I found a definition and lots of information about conferences, business networks, and other resources to help those of us interested in this movement to connect.

From their website:

"Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) describes a $228.9 billion U.S. marketplace for goods and services focused on health, the environment, social justice, personal development and sustainable living. The consumers attracted to this market have been collectively referred to as Cultural Creatives and represent a sizable group in this country. Approximately 30 percent of the adults in the U.S., or 63 million people, are currently considered LOHAS Consumers."

I started a blog a few months ago called Conscientious Living (www.conscientiousliving.blogspot.com) where I planned to start exploring the possible connections between sustainability and commerce. But I am beginning to see that this Greenjeans Adventure blog is really where to engage such questions, since it is exactly these sorts of ideas that inspired Greenjeans and that form the basis of our work here.

So, here's to living mindfully of health and sustainability. Here's to LOHAS. Here's to Conscientious Living. And thank you, Yoshiko, for introducing me to such a helpful acronym!

And check out Yoshiko’s wonderful blog about cooking and living in Brooklyn with beautiful photos of meals she has prepared or eaten in restaurants: blog.livedoor.jp/abc249/. And a tip: if you use the “translate this page” function in Google you will get to understand something of what she’s writing (unless you can already read Japanese) that double as really wonderful, funny found-poems. But that’s for a blog entry on another day...