apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Ironically, this is the reasoning that leads to petroleum and plastic, once partly substitutes for whale oil and whale bone, both of which put whales at risk for over-hunting.

So you've grasped a thorny and difficult issue here... one generation's "greener" alternative is another generation's non-green challenge...

The best choice, I think (in addition to simply buying less decorative tchotchke crap), is to move away from interiors punctuated by endangered artifacts. The reason it became fashionable to show coral off in the home was because it's a status symbol -- it screams "I have traveled to tropical places and amassed oddities".

One of the biggest reasons we're facing so many problems with resources and scarcity is due to the recent lowered costs and expanded demand for things that were once rare and expensive. When like 5 people drove Hummers, that was kinda-sorta OK in a global sense (if not really OK on an individual level). When wine and fois gras and aged cheeses were produced artisanally for a small elite, they could be produced sustainably. In the era of 2 Buck Chuck and pate from Wal-Mart, that's impossible. When steak was a rare treat for the few rather than what comes on top of your caesar salad at Olive Garden, cow farts didn't create more greenhouse gases than cars.

Creating chintzy imitations of posh things only creates more demand and ups the visibility and popularity of unsustainably produced items.

Also, the salad set is both ugly and poorly designed, and doesn't really look like coral at all. Not to mention why would you have salad servers made of coral, anyway?

Opoponax,
Your comment was very well argued and well written. You said what I was thinking.
Thanks,
Vanessa