Peaceable Thingdom

Water, Water, Everywhere: $50 per gallon and up

2009-03-18T11:14:00.003-05:00

Hey all.

Family stuff is happening these days, so I'm not able to keep up here as I once was, but I have been following the rapid approach of World Water Day, which occurs this Sunday, March 22. To that end, I thought I might link you all to some articles around the web that might give you a broader understanding of the problems involved in water rights and water availability throughout the world.

CHILE: Why "Free-Market" Water Rights Just Don't Work
An article about the water struggles in Quillaqua, Chile by The New York Times illustrates how badly wrong a water rights policy can go.
CANADA: No Princes in the Water Rights Game Either
Now, you'd think that a country with a fairly solid human rights record (in the main--I know no one's perfect) would be a little quicker to agree that clean water is a basic human right. Not so much. Luckily, you can tell the government just what you think of that.
AFRICA: Coca Cola Equals Fresh Water?
The Coca Cola Company has pledged $30 million dollars to fresh water projects in Africa. Now if they could just stop wasting the world's water by bottling it and shipping it across the globe.
USA: We Solve Our Problems on Film
The Environmental Protection Agency is running a contest for films that will inspire the nation's people to protect our lakes and wetlands.

For more information about water rights, check out:

New American Dream, which is holding a webinar on water rights this coming Monday.
This list from Business and Human Rights Resources which provides more links to more water info.
FLOW: For the Love of Water is a documentary film on the global water crisis. It's available on Netflix, if you're like me and are too lazy to seek it out in a theater or rental store.

So that's it for today. Go drink a little tap water out of a real glass, would you?

Next Charging Station: 3000 Miles, or 300 Feet?

2009-03-12T13:10:00.005-05:00

So, I've been reading a bit lately about alternative fuels and how exactly we can get them to where we need them. It's a huge issue, and one which can and should be tackled in the current push to rescue our economy.

See, here's the deal: It's always sunny in California. Rivers run hard in the Rockies. The windy plains are exactly that. Which is great--we can have solar power and hydroelectric power and wind power--heck, there are even fantastic places to harness geothermal power here in the United States. It's a big country after all.

Which of course, is the problem. The US doesn't have one power grid, we have several. So solar energy just can't get from the sunny valleys of the West to the dreary North very easily. Or at all, in some cases. What is needed in this country is a unified smart grid.

Now you've heard me talk about smart grids before. They are designed so that it is easy and efficient for energy to travel the length and breadth of the grid, making sure that all the places in between can get the energy they need--or give the energy they have, if that's the situation.

This can be done. It's going to take a lot of manhours (which, you know, means more jobs) and a lot of science and engineering and materials production (again, more jobs) to accomplish it, but it's possible. Just ask the Repower America group.

So, say we have this wonderful smart grid with its fancy smart meters. Say that photovoltaic power gets more inexpensive and we can all afford a couple of PV sheets on our roofs. We make more power than we use, we get a kickback, we don't make more power than we need, the grid provides it the same way it's always done--except of course that the power might be coming from across the country instead of across the state.

Wonderful for homes. Equally wonderful for cars running on electric power, especially if the newest version of fast-charge batteries become a reality. But really, all of this is only wonderful if we have a station every single place it's needed. Which could be in your home.

Take people who are being given the chance to own the first run of the BMW MINI E electric car. As lucky bum Stefano Paris tells us over at Revenge of the Electric Car, the requirements for getting one are pretty rigorous. One very important part of the puzzle, of course, is where you're going to park and charge the little electric monster. BMW is going to great strides to make sure that the first run of its electric cars don't meet the same fate as earlier versions. (See the movie Who Killed the Electric Car if you want to be outraged at how this technological innovation was squandered in the twentieth century.)

Or what about hydrogen fuel cell cars like the Chevy Equinox FC? Hydrogen-powered cars only work if there's hydrogen to be had. To which end, California has been planning an alternative fuel highway for a few years now. Their plan was to have it completed by some time next year, but it looks like it might take another five at least.

Which matters not at all if we can't get the cars on the road.

Why blather about all of this? Because we need to come up with solutions for these problems. Maybe.... Maybe neighborhoods go in on hydrogen fueling stations--buy it as a community and the community reaps the benefits and profits, instead of the oil companies. Maybe the same happens with solar-powered recharging stations. Imagine a whole neighborhood with one central parking lot, filled with recharging stations powered in part by the sun.

Really, it's all a question of rethinking the way we get resources. Do the oil companies have to turn into hydrogen fueling companies? Isn't there some other way--some more local and more personal way--to get what we need?

What do you think? Any ideas?

It's Tuesday--DO SOMETHING!

2009-03-10T11:28:00.002-05:00

Yes, all, it's Tuesday, that day when I look for things for us all to do. Things that will help the planet and our society and our fellow people.

And today, I'm going to ignore all of that and focus on what we can do for ourselves.

My life right now is very stressful, as I'm sure all our lives are. It's hard to work enough hours because there's not enough work to go around. It's hard to watch friends struggle with their own financial woes. It's hard to go through each day when what you hear all the time is how bad everything is. So today, let's focus on what we can do for ourselves to reduce the stress.

Go for a walk. Even if it's raining. Just go outside and walk around the block or the property or the neighborhood. Physical exercise, even low-impact, low-aerobic exercise like leisure walking, increases our sense of well-being. It also leads to lovely things like running into a neighbor you haven't seen in a while or coming upon a breathtaking scene you wouldn't have found, but for your little walk.
Turn off the TV. Give yourself one hour in the evening without media. No TV, no radio, no newspaper. Just hang out with your partner or your pet or yourself and listen to the traffic outside. Read a book. Knit. Anything that doesn't involve the roller coaster of stress that is our current world.
Cook a good meal. Stop by the grocery store on your way home and pick up some favorites. Focusing on the fun and peace of it, cook yourself a nice dinner.
Invite a friend. Invite a friend to take that walk or indulge in that media-free hour or eat that lovely home-cooked dinner. Friends and family are stress-relievers. And if yours aren't? Don't invite those ones.
Pray, meditate, or just spend some time in the dark. Whatever your religion (or lack thereof) or your life view, ten minutes of alone time can do wonders. Sit in a comfortable spot, close your eyes, and engage in whatever meditative practice works for you. Pray the rosary, use a focus and breathe rhythmically, practice transcendental meditation--anything to give yourself ten minutes of peace and contemplation.

There you go! Some things to do this week that help the planet by helping you keep your sanity. And they're zero carbon and easy on the purse, too!

Stealing from His College Fund to Pay for His Future

2009-03-07T10:55:00.001-06:00

No, this isn't the story of how I robbed my child's 529 so I could buy him a hockey kit in the hopes that he'd one day become a famous NHL player (although I'd totally do that). This is the story of a walk to the train station that I took this week.

On my way to work, I always have a buck in my pocket for my paper guy. He hangs out outside my coffee house and sells the local homeless newspaper. Now, I don't like newspapers. I don't like the extra paper waste or the fact that I only ever want to read a few pages anyway, and then I grump at the wad of stuff I have to carry around until I find a recycling bin.

But this guy is great. He's cleaned up his life (he went sober on his birthday one year, making the anniversary an easy one to remember) and he works for a living. But that living isn't much--I've never asked him if he's still homeless, but that's not really my business anyway. He's doing his job and he's lucky to have one (as am I).

So one day, after weeks of him greeting me happily and shooting the occasional breeze, I said to him "I don't want a paper, but I'll buy one off you anyway." I gave him a dollar and I let him resell the paper I just bought.

Yes, I do realize that what I did was just give him a dollar (which didn't make it back to the paper, and frankly, wasn't supposed to), but it was the thought of the thing. I didn't want the paper, but I wanted him to get paid--for being a genuinely cheery person, if nothing else.

I "buy a paper" from him fairly often. I also give money to other people who ask for it when I have an extra buck. It's not hugely often because I always give dollars, never coins--loose change, I keep for my son's college fund.

When I was younger, I asked my family for money for Christmas one year. It was to buy my own new shiny computer. Imagine my surprise when my eldest brother gave me a gigantic pink piggy bank. Now, this could have been the sort of gift that says "stop begging money off the rest of us and save it yourself, Peace," but it was stuffed with a $50 bill, so I didn't complain.

I did, however, keep the pig. Have for 25 years. And I use it--I usually collect a couple hundred dollars of spare change in a year, which is a nice wad to use for a birthday dinner and whatever I'm into at the time. But once we started trying to build a family, that pig became ourchildren's college fund pig. All spare change goes into the pig and, once a year the pig donates its innards to a savings account that is never touched.

So any spare change is our son's, and we joke that, when we spend change, we're stealing from his college fund. Except that, a few days ago, it was amazingly windy and cold and just miserable. And there was a guy outside of one of the convenience stores I pass by on my way to work. And I didn't have a dollar, but I did have about 75 cents in change. I dropped my son's college fund into a street guy's paper cup.

Am I a bad parent? Well, probably, but not because I gave away that money. One problem I find with the world--especially in big cities, for some reason--is that everyone thinks everyone else is out for something. Everyone's got an angle, right? That homeless guy? Probably not homeless at all. And if he is, he's probably only using the money to get high or something.

I don't think that's always true (I'm not naive enough to think it's never true). I think sometimes, people are just down on their luck. And if you have 75 cents, is it that bad a thing to give it to them?

What does this have to do with my son's future? I think respect for everyone is one of the most useful lessons we can impart to our children. I think that meeting someone's eyes when they ask you for money--even if you quietly say "I'm sorry, I have nothing to give"--is an act of respect that teaches a child a lesson. Homeless people are invisible and rudely ignored and so are small children in trouble and women being beaten and countries full of people being murdered by their own governments. It's a brutal fact of life and it just shouldn't have to be.

So maybe, just maybe, tossing 75 cents to an invisible man and thanking him for his "God bless you" as I walk away isn't stealing from my son's college fund at all--it's just making a down payment on a more compassionate, respectful, visible world for him and his children.

Cats and the Environment I: The Litter Question

2009-03-06T10:39:00.001-06:00

I was talking to my boss last week about her cats. It was originally a discussion about the composter I want to buy (which she has and likes [though she says it does smell a bit when you open it]), but grew into a discussion of recycling here in the office and at home and that led to the thing I do that annoys me most, ecologically speaking: throwing out the cat litter.

We have two cats, both indoor-exclusive, and we live in a condo high-rise with some very strict rules. One of them is that you must not toss bags of kitty litter down the trash chute. (That's pretty common sense, actually--bags do not stay intact while hurtling 30 floors through a small tube to their death in the garbage room, no matter what anyone tells you. Litter Bomb? No thanks.) The building's answer is to do a daily trash run: kitty litter bags are left in the trash room on our floor and maintenance comes by in the freight elevator and adds it to the pile of kitty litter bags they already have. It cuts down on the possibility of a litter bomb, so this rule, too, is all to the good.

Not to the good? I cannot reuse plastic grocery sacks to bag the litter. And it must be double bagged. So I end up spending extra money to buy small trash bags and then double wrap the kitty litter to ensure that it never ever sees a molecule of oxygen with which to decompose.

Annoying. And again, I mention that we have two cats. Who create a lot of smelly litter. In a high-rise building with decent but not brilliant cross-ventilation, I have to scoop the litter boxes (plural) every single day and still there is the problem of a teensy bit of stink in my oh-so-sensitive nose. Baking soda mixed into the litter helps, but the odor isn't the only problem.

I have allergies. Big, bad, killer allergies. And every single day, scooping that clay clumping litter is killing my lungs a little bit more. Yes, I know that there has never been a clinical study that shows that clumping litter is dangerous for anyone's health (but I kind of think that's just because they haven't bothered to study it), but the fact remains that I kick up an awful lot of dust scooping those things out and that does my allergies no good at all--can't imagine burying in the dust is great for the cats, come to think of it.

And the creation of the litter does no good to the earth, either. Conventional cat litters use clay, which is usually found some 30-40 feet underground on clay-containing mountainsides. Easiest way to get to it? Skim off the 30-40 feet of topsoil and growth above it and collect the clay. The result is a lopped-off mountainside (we had one where I was a kid--they're finally rehabilitating it now, decades later) that increases flood damage for the land below it and is generally an ecological disaster. It is so time for a change.

At first blush, biodegradable cat litters look like a fine idea. They are often made from things like leftover pine branches after a tree has been felled by the lumber companies or from corn husks and cobs left over from grain extraction (not 100% green, but at least it uses up the stuff no one wants). They rarely have anything chemical added to them and are, by all accounts, very good at controlling odors. And they biodegrade! They break down when you're done with them! Sounds perfect.

In actual fact, they are brilliant for people who have outside composters or large compost heaps that generate enough heat to kill all the bacteria that teem through feline waste. For someone like me--who will be double-bagging the dang stuff in air-blocking plastic, so it can be thrown in a landfill, which is, itself, an almost completely anaerobic environment--biodegradable litter only provides me with a product that was slightly less earth-killing to produce.

Flushable litters offer a good solution for me. There are a number of organic and/or natural brands out there, with varying textures, so moving your cat from one cat litter to another might be a little easier if the two feel basically the same. They don't really cost any more than the clays and might actually be more cost effective because you use less of them (supposedly--we'll see what happens in Chez Peaceable).

The basic truth is that I don't have a properly ventilated space for a certified animal-waste-processing composter (they suggest these only be placed outside because they smell regardless), and I'm sick to death of A) having to take my litter out to the trash room at a specific time to make sure it doesn't smell up the hall while it's waiting to be picked up, and B) throwing away hundreds of pounds of earth-damaging clay litter. I'm just starting my first foray into trying to get my older cat to use it. This should be fun.

NOTE FOR OWNERS OF OUTDOOR CATS: If you have an indoor-outdoor or outdoor-exclusive cat, your animal may be exposed to toxoplasmosis, a parasite which is not fun--it is the reason why pregnant women are told not to clean cat boxes, because the risk to the fetus if the mother contracts toxo is very, very high.
For this reason, you should probably find a different way to dispose of your kitty litter than flushing it down the toilet. Regional water treatment plants don't screen for toxo and it could end up in the water supply or, more likely, in the lakes, rivers, and oceans. Composting is the best bet there, as the heat of composting should kill off the parasite. Also, taking your cat to the vet and having them tested for toxo periodically is a healthy thing to do anyway. If you or your partner is pregnant or plans to become pregnant, for the love of the unborn babies, please test your cat for toxo. Birth defects are bad.

It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

2009-03-03T10:35:00.005-06:00

Hey all!

Tuesday again, and I'm actually around to do my Do Something segment. I've been seeing a lot of ads for fundraising walks lately, so I thought they were the thing to focus on today. After all, a fundraising walk increases the sense of community within a culture, increases the walkers' health and well-being, and raises funds for important health-related causes. Here's a few near and dear to my heart:

March of Dimes March for Babies
The loss of an infant or unborn child is devastating for the entire family, and the discovery that a living child has a birth defect that will challenge her for the rest of her life is equally tragic. All too often, however, miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths are swept under the rug, and families raising children with birth defects are left to fend for themselves. Help the parents of all of these children by donating to a run in your area or by running yourself and raising money for the cause. March of Dimes started as a push to cure polio, but today, its reach is far wider. Infant and prenatal care affects us all, whether we have children or not.
The Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk
For years, the Susan G. Komen Foundation for a Cure has been doing fundraising walks to provide treatment for underserved communities and to fund research into new treatments and possible cures for breast cancer. Again, whether you know someone with breast cancer or not, it is a disease that the society as a whole is impacted by every day, monetarily, spiritually, and socially. And the chance to walk 60 miles in 3 days with a bunch of crazy cancer survivors? Priceless!
American Lung Association Stair Climbs
Got a free Sunday morning? Why not hike to the top of the Hancock Center in Chicago? Or the AON Center in LA? All to benefit a good cause, of course--lung disease research. No, the ALA isn't all about lung cancer. It's about asthma (which is heavily impacted by indoor air conditions and outdoor pollution) and allergies (which are impacted by chemical exposure and environmental damage) and various other lung diseases which are afflicting a greater and greater number of people every year. As a former smoker, I'm kind of attached to the ALA--they may have to save me from my past sins one day, so I'd better give them money now.
AIDS Marathon
The AIDS Marathon foundation will train you to run a marathon (or a half-marathon) and give you a chance to raise money for AIDS research and treatment at the same time. I admit I've never thought of running a marathon, and likely never will, but the idea, if you're game, is to train for it and run it for the AIDS research community.
The Walk to Defeat ALS
The ALS Association raises money for research into a cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease). This disease is a particular cause for a friend of mine, so I sock away a little money in my budget to donate to the walk every year.

So, that's my list for the day. I have to set up my March for Babies site soon and start hitting all my friends up for a little money. It's amazing how much you can raise just by asking for five or ten dollars from a bunch of coworkers and friends.

Give it a try--you might earn a free t-shirt and sunny day of walking with a whole bunch of newly-met friends.

40 Days of Mindfullness

2009-02-26T14:10:00.002-06:00

My life is a little crazy busy at the moment, but I watched our president on Tuesday night, and one of the things he said struck me as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I agree that we need to concentrate far more on our children's educations and on healthcare for all of us. I agree that we need to help people climb out of the problems that they have--financially, socially, physically, educationally--and improve the life of each and every citizen of not just the country but the planet. I think he's got some great ideas that warm the cockles of my heart.

But then he said this: "...the flow of credit is the lifeblood of our economy."

Why? Why does it have to be that way?

I understand that 99% of us cannot afford to buy a house with the money we have on hand, and I agree that probably 50% of us can't buy a car outright either (at least not without jeopardizing other bills and life requirements). That's investment, as far as I'm concerned. Credit, to my mind, is something that you get because you can't afford what you want, not what you need. If I really want an iPod but don't have the money to buy it outright, putting it on a credit card is no investment of any kind, as it provides no usable equity (though it does make it easier to listen to the presidential address podcasts).

So credit is one thing and investment another. You should have what you can afford and save for what you can't.

It's unfair, however, to expect that to actually be the case. Our capitalist economy has been built on spending money whether you have it or not, and the industries we have are simply designed to work on money that is loaned: You loan the bank money by opening a savings account; the bank loans Bob money, and Bob pays Jimmy (who employs Ken and John) and buys materials (which employs some other people) and eventually gets paid off by Max (who borrowed his own money) and pays off the bank which then pays you off in the form of interest.

So, I guess credit is the lifeblood of our economy, but coming to that realization requires me to rethink my definition of "credit" to include investments like those described above. Is it possible to live without credit (using my original meaning) and still get what you need? Yes. It just requires that we all rethink what the definition of "need" is, as well.

A human being needs, minimally, food, water, shelter, and clothing. Which sounds pretty minimal indeed. But if I go to Spago and eat foie grae and oysters, wash it down with imported bottled water from Italy, go home to sleep at my penthouse apartment in Central Park West, and wear Armani while doing it, I've got the basics, haven't I?

There are people in the world who need those particular basics. If you're not one of them, you must just not be watching the right TV shows, because all the admen are telling us daily that that or something like it is what we need to have.

I'm not saying you have to give up your iPod (you'll pry mine from very angry hands), but I do think we should all spend a little time finding out what the definition of need is.

For Christians, the season of Lent has just started--40 days of reflection and penance. Instead of just celebrating this Lent as a Christian holy season, where the most many of us will do is eat fish on Fridays, I'm going to invite anyone and everyone of every faith and none to join me and give up thoughtless spending for the next 40 days (or thereabouts).

Here's how I, personally, am going to work it:

I am going to try not to eat out for the entire 40 days. If I do eat out, I will consider the source of the food, the plates I eat with, and the social and emotional benefit I get.
I will try to spend the least amount of money on my food and minimize the packaging with which I'm willing to deal (luckily, lots and lots of things come in bulk now).
I will not buy anything on impulse--each magazine, candy bar, and online music purchase will be considered and acquired in a mindful way.
I will keep track of each and every cent I spend, without guilt or remorse for the entire 40 days. Easter week, I can take a look and see if I can find places to cut more out of the needless acquiring.

So? Who's with me?

Cleanliness is next to--hackhack coughcoughcough

2009-02-20T14:45:00.001-06:00

I like clean. Really I do. I like my house clean and my kitchen clean and my kid, my cat, my car... I just can't stand cleaners.

So I scrub the bathtub with baking soda and rinse it with hot, hot water and I use vinegar on stains and I basically try to get by without ever resorting to bleach or scrubbing bubbles (there's actually no bleach in my house and hasn't been for years).

"My God!" a good American parent would reply. "Don't you bleach your son's toys after he's had friends over? What if one of them had the sniffles? He could get a cold!?"

Um, yes. He could. And while I'm not advocating letting my child develop whooping cough or meningitis, a cold might be good for him.

There is a hypothesis called, aptly enough, "The Hygiene Hypothesis (HH)." (A good, though very medicalese, discussion of the theory is found in the first main section of this article) Basically, it posits that our immune systems create themselves bit by bit as we are exposed to and form antibodies to various bacteria, viruses--you know, "germs". Now, if your house is spit and polish, your baby's emerging immune system doesn't know quite what to make of it all. It knows it's supposed to create antibodies, but it's not sure to what it should create them because there's nothing like, say, rhinovirus around. You've done such a good job of protecting the child from "contagions" that his immune system says, in effect, "Well, I can't find any germs to make antibodies against. I know! How about this plant over here!?"

And thus, say the HH people, are created millions of children with asthma and allergies. Their immune systems are reacting to anything and everything because they have nothing concrete and dangerous to which to react.

Now, while I'm not entirely sure I quite buy all they have to say (a lot of the research done to prove the hypothesis is a little dicey and self-fulfilling for my taste), I do agree that children need to be exposed to a lot of things at a young age.

I believe in socializing a child and dealing with the blessed inevitability that he'll get rhinovirus or rotovirus or some other virus in his first couple of years. It will suck mightily to stay up with him while he labors through it, but it is a necessary thing.

I believe that children need dirt. No, I'm not saying you now have an excuse never to clean your house again, but I am saying that it's cool if, after a rainstorm, your son gets into a mud toss with his friends and ends up mucky from head to toe. Skin is there to keep the sodden gunk out of his peritoneal cavity. We're built to last, us humans.

Most of all, I believe that there is a much greater risk posed by many of our cleansers than by many of the germs for which we created them. Bleach is a poison. If you drink the cup of bleach you washed down the drain to "clean" it, you will die in all likelihood. If, however, you drink the pan of water you used to clean out the drain instead of the bleach, you're likely to be better hydrated and not much else (unless you didn't wait until the water cooled down before you drank it--shame on you).

I think it's not a bad idea to try to clean with only what you'd eat. Granted, I'm not interested in having a glass of vinegar with dinner, but I will use it on my salad, and therefore, I can use it on my floor.

A newborn really does need protection from pretty much everything, chemical or biological, but I'd rather not lock my three-year-old out of his room once a week because the rug cleaner I used in there was toxic. And really, unless he's dropping glasses of juice on that floor every five minutes, couldn't I shampoo the rug a little less often and vacuum it most of the time instead?

The old saying "God made dirt. Dirt don't hurt?" I'll buy that.

How Green Is Your President?

2009-02-19T14:00:00.001-06:00

Barack Obama has been in office about a month now, so I thought it was time to see exactly how much damage he's done to the environment.

Let's leave the stimulus plan, which at 900 pages created a minimum of half a million pages of paper waste and attendant ink and electricity usage. That's not just his fault, it's the fault of the Congress, too. (Would they save money, do you think, if they worked electronically more often instead of printing out absolutely everything?) No, let's just look at the president's movements since he took office and do the math from there, yes?

Inauguration Day: Seriously, no way I can assess the environmental damage of the entire day. All I'm going to do here is calculate the miles he actually traveled. The answer there is: miles from White House to church to Capitol to White House and an average of miles to all of the parties. Times five, because that's the number of cars in his typical entourage on that day. This all works out to about 75 miles (remember, it's times five).

Week One: As I recall, he spent the first week pretty much in DC, so maybe we say another 35 for that, to cover going to and fro trying to get the stimulus and such off the ground.

Week Two: One trip to Williamsburg, VA via Air Force One. 500 airplane miles (AMs) round trip air, plus 100 car miles for the week.

Week Three: DC to Camp David to DC (200 miles via helicopter, roundtrip); DC to Elkhart, IN to DC (1000 AMs roundtrip); DC to Fort Myers, FL (900 AMs), to Springfield, IL (1050 AMs), to Peoria, IL (90 AMs), to Chicago, IL (135 AMs). Add at least 150 car miles for the whole week.

Week Four: Chicago, IL, to DC (590 AMs); DC to Denver, CO, to DC (3000 AMs roundtrip); DC to Ottawa, Canada, (projected back to DC) (1000 AMs roundtrip). Say 200 car miles for the week.

Miscellaneous: Because the president uses the White House Helicopter to go to and from the local airport and other places, I'm adding 100 helicopter miles to his entire time in office so far. Also, I'm assuming the gas mileage of an SUV for the car miles [~15 mpg]--which, granted, might be overstating the efficiency of his vehicles.

Let's do the math now (I love math!): (560 car miles [.5 tons CO2]) + (300 helicopter miles [.7 tons CO2]) + (8625 airplane miles [4.0 tons CO2]) = 5.2 tons of CO2 used.

By one person. In one month.

If we assume that this is an average month, by the time the president finishes his first (and hopefully not last) term, he will have burned 250 tons of CO2 on travel alone--I'd love to know the energy profile of the White House and its grounds, but I'm thinking that might be a state secret.

So? Ways he could reduce this impact? Some are simple yet complex (stop driving around DC with two cars ahead of you and two trailing behind--which would probably be perceived as too much of a security risk) and some are much more difficult (not meeting face to face with other world leaders is a problem as it paints you as elitist or worse). I do wish more worldwide discussions would be held via conference call. I wish there was some sort of international security flight service so that dignitaries from countries nearby each other could all be picked up in the same secure plane and flown to whatever conference they're heading for.

Heck, I'd like to wish our president flew a more fuel-efficient plane!

While none of that is ever likely to come to fruition, I do think it's interesting to think about the impact that the global village is having on... well, the globe. We want to see friends and family from across the world, we need to connect with our clients hundreds of miles away... It's all complicated.

So the next time you think about driving the five blocks to the sandwich store, remember that every mile you don't drive is one that a world leader can use to hobnob with other world leaders.

...

Doesn't sound like much of a trade-off, huh?

It Was Tuesday Yesterday--DO SOMETHING!

2009-02-18T10:23:00.004-06:00

Sorry I didn't get a chance to post this yesterday--stuff going on here. In fact, I may be relatively erratic for the next few weeks, as changes at home are taking up an increasing amount of time.

Anyway, in following along with my Tuesday segment from last week and my rant on packaging from Monday, I give you three things you can do to reduce packaging.

Write a letter to your favorite online or mail order company. Most of them have a support, complaint, or question address. Be very courteous, but let them know how you think they're doing on their use of packaging. I had a company send me something yesterday that was simply the piece of clothing I ordered--without a plastic bag or more than one small tag--stuffed in a mailing envelope. They're going to get the flipside of the "Why, Amazon!? Why!?" comment that will be sent out today as well.
Let your broccoli roam free. Reusable grocery bags are all the rage, I know, and I'm sure many of you use them (if not, pick a few up, they're stronger than the paper or plastic disposable ones), but there's another use of plastic bags that a lot of people don't think about: most people bag their bulk vegetables in clear plastic bags in the produce section. If you're not comfortable with placing the vegetables and fruit in your cart without a bag because grocery carts are, you know, kind of gross, try putting them all in one of your handy-dandy reusable bags until you get to the checkout. You can wash them very, very well at home and still save an awful lot of plastic by not bagging them before you buy.
Cook at home. Ah, the ultimate in package reduction. If you have time to cook one meal, you can probably cook two more at the same time by sharing heating time and veggie prep cutting time. Then you can dump them all in reusable containers, stick them in freezer and fridge, and eat away for a few days without making any more packaging waste. I once did an experiment and found that one meal at Subway for my family actually produced more non-recyclable waste than one home-cooked chicken and potatoes meal. Ouch.

So there you go, your DO SOMETHING for the week.

See you later!

Packaging and Logic: Irreconcilable Differences?

2009-02-16T08:59:00.003-06:00

We're redesigning one of the spaces in our house to make some more room, and to save money, I'll admit we've been using other people's money (in the form of gift certificates) quite liberally. Which for us means web orders. Which means packaging and mailing and product miles galore.

And that gives me a very horrible feeling sometimes. I am convinced that there has to be a way to do this all with less packaging.

Case in point: We bought a net to protect some of our things from the predations of our precious (but nosy and destructive) cats. The box the net is sold in is about 3' x 1' x 2". The box Amazon shipped it in was 5' x 2' x 2'. Now luckily, it wasn't filled with packing peanuts, but still... it's an incredible waste of space, if nothing else.

What happened to the days when vendors simply wrapped things in brown paper and sent them off? Or better, why couldn't Amazon have sent us the net and the fourteen other things we bought that day all in the same box--there was definitely room in there!

Then there are the companies who individually wrap everything when they mail it. Yes, I realize that clothing companies and bedding companies and all are doing volume business and need to automate as much as possible, and that they need to protect their products from the elements and all. I get it. But here's an idea: Why not just line each shipping box with a plastic bag, dump the clothes or whatever into it, and seal that one plastic bag, seal the box, and send it all on its way.

I know the clothing isn't made in plastic bags. When boxes and boxes of it come into the clothing stores, the shirts and pants aren't individually wrapped (yes, I realize they are in certain stores, but not the ones of which I am speaking). So why waste such an incredible amount of plastic by individually wrapping every single freaking shirt in a twenty shirt order? It's madness!

I have a lot of beefs about the way things are packaged all over, in fact. Well, except at some stalls at the farmer's market. Some stalls do wrap things or give you plastic bags or whatever, but some offer you food and only food or crafts and only crafts. Bring your own bag and have at it.

Which, I suppose, is just another reason to buy and eat locally. The only problem with that is that we just can't afford the furniture that is handmade in my area. And there aren't enough local clothiers making what my family currently needs to help us out.

I think I'm going to go buy some shares in wind energy. Or something. Sometimes daily life and the fight to live it responsibly exhausts and saddens me.

Sorry all, hard weekend. I'll be cheerier tomorrow.

Because Really, What's Better than a Fuzzy Animal?

2009-02-13T14:00:00.002-06:00

So, tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and no doubt there will be a million stuffed animals given out in an attempt to make girlfriends and wives and even boyfriends and husbands feel loved and special. The cute factor can't be beat.

And, you know, yay for that. I'm all for cute! But there are real animals out there, too. So, in honor of our fuzzy friends (and enemies--and those who aren't fuzzy at all, in fact), I give you 5 things you can do to help an animal...

1. Adopt an animal from your local zoo.
No, I don't mean take one home, I mean donate money to help defray the costs of feeding and caring for the animal (mine this year is a meerkat!). This usually doesn't cost a huge amount, and you sometimes get a stuffed animal or something to remind you of your gift. Two things, though, from someone who, admittedly, has really mixed feelings about zoos:

make sure the price of the adoption is considerably more than the probable price of the swag they send you, because there's nothing more annoying than realizing that, of the $100 you just donated, $50 of it went to the adorable stuffed animal and tote and framed portrait and everything else they sent you.
check out the zoo and its history of animal care, animal death, and animal management. Animal management includes partnerships with other zoos for the purpose of preservation, building and enclosure design that helps improve the social and mental well-being of the animals, and psychological work that is done to make sure the animals don't develop zoocosis (think the penguin in Happy Feet).

2. Deliver some food to your local shelter.
One of my cats was extremely ill a couple of years ago, and was put on prescription food. When her health started to improve, she stopped eating the wet prescription food altogether, leaving me with half a case of the stuff. So I dropped by our local no-kill shelter and gave it to them. They couldn't have been more appreciative! Now, with my vet's blessing, I buy a case of that when I bring one of the cats in for medical work and drop the food by the shelter on my way home.

Animal shelters often work on shoestring budgets--and the burden on them is getting worse in this economy, since many people are losing their homes and are being forced to abandon their animals to find places that will rent to them. And animals come in with all kinds of medical conditions that the shelters treat the best way they know how. So maybe think about making it easier for them, if you can, by donating something concrete. Yes, they need money--God knows!--but sometimes what they need, right that moment, is a case of kidney food.

3. Give money to an animal rights group you believe in.
Okay. I admit it--this is a wildly controversial subject for a whole lot of people. Greenpeace, PETA, Sea Shepherd... there are a lot of groups out there who have their supporters and their detractors and I can't tell you who to donate to. I can tell you that places like World Wildlife Fund and the others mentioned are out there for the business of saving habitats and animals. And that's a very good thing. Just remember, the money isn't worth it if you don't agree with the group's philosophy.

4. Give time to your local animal groups.
This is a very inexpensive way of giving back. Often it's what I used to call muck work (yes, I occasionally mucked stalls at a stables). If you're not into cleaning out litter boxes and shoveling dog runs, find out if there's something else you can volunteer to do. Many places are happy to have people who have experience with smaller infants or have had kittens or puppies before--it takes very little to train these people up to take care of the newborn animals they sometimes acquire.

5. Go walk a dog!
If you happen to have a neighbor who's maybe not around as much as he could be or who has trouble getting around at all, offer to walk his dog once in a while. If you have a neighbor with mobility or agility problems who happens to have a cat, ask if he'd like some help with the more bendy-stretchy things involved in pet care. If you've got a car and your neighbor doesn't, think about offering to drive him and his pet to the vet for physicals. Having an animal has been shown to be very beneficial to the human spirit (and blood pressure), but it's sometimes hard on the knees. Granted, for us introverts, this might be asking too much, but if you're outgoing enough and willing, you might find a very good friend--and the owner might learn to like you, too!

So, that's all! Have a great weekend--a great three-day-weekend if you're one of those lucky buggers who has Monday off!

Not so crazy after all

2009-02-12T16:14:00.000-06:00

When I was a young adult and CD burners were first becoming a fad (yes, I'm old), I was out with my father for dinner one night and I told him I'd had this great idea: What if there were "jukeboxes" in music stores. Each could have a computer screen where you could pick a bunch of songs--any song, any artist--and have the computer cut the disc for you right there? You'd buy a token at the checkout and would walk out with your very own mixdisc!

That will never happen, said my father. First off, how popular would that really be? Yes, kids like making mixtapes, but it'd take a whole lot of them to make that a going proposition. Then there's the problem of royalties. The music companies would demand enough royalties to pay their expenses, and that on top of the CD Jukebox company's expenses would make the final product too expensive for anyone to want to buy.

So I gave up the dream, but a few years later, the iTunes store made history doing just what I had planned.

Why tell you of my missed shot at billions? Because Kali pointed me to this post of hers about an idea for greener and more accessible healthcare--a post whose last paragraph started with "This idea may be implausible but that is not my point."

It's actually not implausible at all. Go read the post--the idea is completely solid and has a lot of the same talking points that Al Gore makes: don't put people out of business by making the world greener, put people to business at the job of making the world greener.

In the Philippines, mass transit consists, in part, of "Jeepneys"--hop-on-hop-off diesel-fueled, brightly colored buses. Jeepneys create an unbelievable amount of heavy-particle pollution. So someone thought that it would be cool if there was a jeepney that was electric--no smog! Better yet, the thought continued, what if the electricity used to power this E-Jeepney was generated by creating biofuel from organic waste?

That'll never happen, I'm sure some people said, and yet... the E-Jeepneys were made. But no one will ever use them, others probably said, and yet it took very little time for them to be approved and used.

The US Veteran's Affairs Administration has come to the startlingly logical conclusion that it's often difficult for rural veterans to travel the hundreds of miles it might take to get to the doctor. So why not bring the doctor to them. The National Health Care for the Homeless Council advocates mobile clinics to reach urbanites who wouldn't normally see doctors. Would an electric mobile medical van (let's call it an EMMV for now) in every county be something these groups might think of getting behind?

And wouldn't making these EMMVs be killing an awful lot of very troublesome birds with one very efficient stone? There are jobs to be had--retrofitting the factories that once made RVs or whatnot, hiring back the people who used to work there to build these new vehicles, providing training for community clinic workers in healthcare, and hiring those clinic workers to provide care. There are environmental benefits--even if the vehicles aren't alternatively powered, they will still cut down on the number of miles traveled. Assume ten people needing healthcare in a ten-mile radius. If they each have to drive a hundred miles to get it, then by driving one van a hundred miles into their area, you've shaved 900 miles off the trip. And of course, people who can get regular healthcare are diagnosed and treated faster, which costs less, which brings it all back to the economic side of things.

The simple ideas people have can span every facet of life and reach into every corner of the world. The Solar Electric Light Fund in California thought it would be great if African farms out in far rural areas had solar electricity to pump water to irrigate their crops. Now, they just thought it would make pumping the water easier, because diesel gennies are expensive and dirty and so is the fuel they use. But that one small idea is making the air healthier (no more diesel generators running the water pumps), the economy healthier (no more paying for that diesel), and the people healthier (no more smog and more food). One little idea is currently packing one heck of a punch and benefiting every aspect of life in that little corner of rural Africa.

So never say "it'll never happen," "it's not plausible," "it's not feasible..." Instead, research the possibilities and if you can, give a little monetary push to those who do things you think can make a difference (even if you don't believe they'll really sell). If you have a great idea, tell the president. Write a letter to a hospital in your area, suggesting that mobile, affordable, green, socially-conscious healthcare is a good, politically expedient idea. Go to your local homeless clinic and figure out what you can do to help. Figure out if your idea indeed is plausible. People everyday are designing and building their own ideas of the future--how do you think I got the Mac I'm typing on right now?

The more people with real, green, responsible, plausible ideas that are actually implemented, the more this world of ours changes for the better. So don't keep a "crazy idea" to yourself. You may not lose out on millions, like I did with my CD Jukebox, but you might not get your one chance to save the world, either.

Solar Power, Part I: "I'll call you from the sun"

2009-02-11T10:10:00.002-06:00

Ah, solar power! Now, here in the northern climes of the midwest, we don't have a lot of sunny days this time of year. But we've had a few recently, and it has me thinking about the amount of power that is being wasted every time I plug into a wall instead of into the sun. But it doesn't have to continue that way.

While it's an initially pricey investment, buying a personal solar charger is a great way to lighten the load on your local electrical grid. You can charge your smart phone via the sun and save a bundle over the life of the charger. If you have a smart phone, this particular grid-evasion is fantastic, since you can check your email and the web without ever plugging in your computer. I find it a little cumbersome to do email on my phone, but after having to do it for much of last week, I'm actually used to it and have started leaving my computer off in the mornings and just checking my email this way. Another tip on smart phones? Set your preferences to check mail manually instead of every ten minutes or half an hour. This stops you from using too much of the battery checking for email too often.

Then there's your iPod. Oh, I loves my iPod! I use it to make the commute just a little less boring, and using a solar charger to juice it up, instead of plugging it in overnight or charging it through your computer, is a great way to feel green and sustainable while jamming to your tunes!

Now, I have to admit that, owing to a number of issues, I haven't actually purchased a solar charger yet. Yes, I know, BAD GREENIE! Seriously, though, there are a number of factors to think about before you buy one:

Where do you live?
If you live in, say, Wisconsin, where there are a lot of days in the winter that don't get sun, you may want to rethink this idea--or be prepared for the fact that you will probably not get to go solar for more than a few days from October to March. If, on the other hand, you live in areas of the southwest, where they get 300-320 days of sun a year, you may be able to go grid-free on your handheld devices year-round.
How patient are you?
Many of the lovely small, stick it in your backpack charging units suffer from the lack of available charging surface and can take up to a day of full on sun to charge. Say, for instance, you're hiking in wooded mountains. Don't expect to hook the deployed solar charger to your pack, climb through the forest, and emerge at the top of the mountain with a full battery. If, however, you're setting up a base camp in a nice sunny area and have the time to leave it out and turn it toward the sun occasionally, you could be charged for the week in an afternoon.
How much do you use your electronics?
I personally have to recharge my cellphone once every three or four days and my iPod once a week. With that load, a small charger should be sufficient if you get the good sun. If, however, you spend most of your time texting and bopping to Shiny Toy Guns, you're likely to run out of sun juice before you want to.
How much are you willing to pay?
Big, serious question. There are tiny little recharging units out there like the simple Solio charger that retail for about $100 dollars, all the way up to the Brunton Solaris 52, which offers 12 watt power capable of running laptops off the sun in realtime, but weighs in at an impressive $1250! In the solar climate here, I'll be going for a lower-cost alternative.

There are a lot of companies out there selling portable solar panels, and I urge you really read up on them if you're going to buy one. I personally think they're a seriously smart idea, given that, as power loads increase and power generation remains the same in the municipal grids, summer is generally a time of brown outs--at least in parts of the United States--so starting your research now will save you time in the long run. And then there's the whole issue of knowing you've got the power to play your tunes when you're out hiking or biking or just playing on the beach with your children!

It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

2009-02-10T09:59:00.004-06:00

Yes, I'm actually starting a feature! A "segment," if you will. Every Tuesday (hopefully), I'll be posting a few ideas of things you can do to help the world. Some will be letter-writing campaigns or donation opportunities and some will be little things that you can do at home to try to step a bit more lightly.

Here's the list for this week:

Call on the International Community to Help Protect the People of the Democratic Republic of Congo
The situation in Congo is dire--send a message to the international community that the time to act is now. You need to sign up as a member of Amnesty International to send the letter, but AI is a wonderful source of information globally and well worth joining. The call to action has recipients named from the previous administration here in the US, but it will actually get to the proper people. (And don't worry, AI won't send you a million emails--or indeed, any at all if that's your wish.)
Do Something Useful with Those Empty Bottles
If you do have empty water bottles around (try not to, but if you do), there's a great way to reuse them that doesn't involve washing them and drinking out of them again (which may or may not cause more chemicals to leak out of them). Fill them with cold water and stick them in the back of your fridge. Air in a fridge rushes out when you open the door, and the warm air that replaces it has to be chilled all over again, using energy. Cold things, on the other hand, stay cold when you open the door (if you don't leave the door open all day). The more stuff in your fridge, the less air in your fridge, the less your fridge has to work.
Help Improve Education through Small-Scale Donation
Because of the lack of public school funding in the US, teachers often end up spending a distressing percentage of their incomes buying simple yet needed supplies for their classrooms. Donors Choose is a website designed to provide targeted funds to targeted classrooms. Teachers write up grant proposals and donors choose which program to give their money to. It's a fantastic way to give a gift to a friend, by the way. My best friend got a donation made in her name to a school in her area, which made it both very personal and very conscious. No gift wrapping, no fuss, no overhead. Just a teacher who now has the books she needed to help further her students' educations.

That's all for today! Have a good one--and do something!

Cleaning house--or office

2009-02-09T12:51:00.003-06:00

So, we're moving offices at work. The entire top floor of the building is being redone, so my entire department is moving down a floor. A floor already occupied. Which means lots and lots of throwing things away and making space for things.

We already called a company to haul away our old, broken computers. I wish I could donate them to someone who could rehabilitate them, but alas, they are far too far gone. Now I am redesigning the basement to fit the other department here on the top floor, and that involves cleaning up the basement and reorganizing and generally tearing it apart to put it back together in a better way.

We're doing the same at home, where we're making more room for more furniture which is desperately needed for one more person. This, too, involves dumping things and donating things and cleaning and organizing.

I've so far filled six boxes with paper for recycling, and that's just in my office at work. I have no idea how much more I'll unearth as I clean out the rest of the department. At home, where we downsized radically before moving to our current home, there was less to get rid of, but there always is something.

I'd love to have a life where, once a day, I got rid of something. Not throwing garbage away, no, but one thing--a toy, a book, a small appliance I don't really use... I wonder how long it would take to get to the point where I had only what I needed.

I'm thinking, sadly, that that would be a very long time. But I guess that's what it takes to tear something apart to put it back together in a better way, huh?

The Culture of Planned Obsolescence

2009-02-08T11:10:00.001-06:00

I really want a new computer.

I have it all picked out--a Mac laptop, which I will kit out with all the bells and whistles. It will be fantastic and I will probably name it Han Solo or something. There's only one problem.

I already have a computer.

It's a nice computer. It's about three or four years old--a PC, but we can't always have what we want--and blue. And it still works quite nicely. And every time I think, "I could give it away, though! Someone will want it--it works just fine!" I also think, "If it works just fine, why get rid of it at all?"

Which is, of course, the question. Yes, for the most part, computers are not designed to last very long. There's actually a logic that is applied to this by the computer makers: computer technology is growing at such a blinding rate that it doesn't make sense to build things that last ten years, because in ten years, that computer will be so outdated that the owner will have no use for it anyway.

Except that back in the day, I had an Apple IIe, and it lasted and lasted. Even after we got the enormity of GUI that was the Macintosh, I still used it and added on to it and used it some more. It was still functional the last time I tried it (which, granted, was about ten years ago).

Yes, my three to four year old computer is not as fast as the ones out now. Yes, there are definitely programs it won't run because it lacks the processor speed. But couldn't I just see if I could update the processor? Shouldn't I at least do that?

Or do I even need to? The great fallacy of marketing electronics these days is the assumption that we actually need all that they're selling us.

Take a 65" HDTV, for example. If you are putting such a television in a room where the couch will be less than seven feet away (an approximate optimum viewing distance), you're wasting money and likely buying a television that will hurt your eyes with every redraw.

Or a computer like mine. I do a small bit of video work--nothing earth-shattering or complex. I design, using Photoshop and InDesign; and obviously, I surf the internet and blog. I can do all of that with the machine I currently have. Will I be able to play Sims 3 on it? Possibly not. But that's not really a reason to dispose of the one I have for one I'll just--maybe--use more.

This planned obsolescence also extends to clothing. I remember wearing my brother's sweaters sometimes when I was a kid. He was four-and-a-half years older than me and my sister had worn these sweaters in between. They lasted an awfully long time. I also remember being able to wear a pair of socks that lasted at least a year before a child's natural energy and foot use wore them out.

Now it's rare for me to have a set of trouser socks that lasts more than a month before my toes are sticking out. I still wear the holey ones sometimes--but that's only because I'm really, really cheap when it comes to buying clothing. Seriously, I have t-shirts and sweaters that are more than a decade old and are still worn pretty frequently.

Why I don't just darn the damn socks and get the annoyance factor over with, I don't know. It's like a rip in a hem on your slacks--just sew the stupid thing back on, because it only takes a few minutes and then you haven't wasted $50 on a ruined pair of slacks.

But while slacks are expensive, socks are cheap. Really cheap. You can get a pair of trouser socks for $5. So why bother darning them when it's cheap and easy to get a new pair? Not to mention that you look and sound like a total freak for even suggesting that people get out their sewing kits (and how many of you really even have one?) and darn their socks. What, are you stuck in the depression?

So, rather than bother to spend the time darning, I buy a new pair of socks. And another. And another. And what happens to the old ones? Well you can't give them away to Goodwill, can you? I mean, they're torn!

And thus, planned obsolescence grinds on.

Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe I keep my computer until it doesn't work at all, and I darn those socks no matter how silly it makes me sound or look. And then I've saved all the money I would have spent on both computer and socks and that's suddenly looking like not such a bad idea in this economy.

And maybe next time I buy socks, I think about finding a better brand of sock in the first place, because darning these things every month is kind of a pain in the butt.

"I live on that high horse"

2009-02-07T10:36:00.005-06:00

So, after I wrote my article on e-waste, I was helping one of my co-workers with a problem on her machine. Our computers here are pretty old, and I spend a great deal of my time trying to keep them all going. She and I were lamenting that computers today are just not designed to last. It's a functional attempt (conscious or not) to create a spend-and-toss culture. (More on that later.)

"Not to get on my high horse," she began, to which I immediately returned, "I live on that high horse."

And really, is that the problem? What I mean to say is that there are an awful lot of us "green types" out here saying things that, really, the people reading us have already heard. And already agree with--or they've already stopped reading our writing because they don't agree with us. So, am I just sitting up here on my high horse and not getting down on the ground and working through the mud? Is that useful?--to have a person standing up there and saying "this is what everyone should do"?

Colin Beavan decided to see what one man could do if he got off his high horse and put his money where his mouth was. He became No Impact Man. Two women started thinking about what it would take to meet Monbiot's requirement of 94% resource use reduction and tried to see if they could do it. They started a movement called Riot for Austerity.

I've mentioned them before. I've also mentioned that I'm very much not them.

Am I, however, a person who has the strength of my conviction to get off my high horse and do something? Increasingly, yes. And also really, really no. I don't throw away things I could recycle, mostly, and yet I am known by name and drink at the local Starbuck's. I use reusable containers to take food to work, even going so far as to bring cutlery, but I go out to eat more often than I should and while I cringe at the plastic wrap and plastic bag and styrofoam, I still eat the food. I send off e-letters to my government officials about various things, but you'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to go to a school board meeting and open my mouth.

I wish my high horse was a little shorter. I wish I had the courage of conviction to walk all the way to work (it's only three miles, which, really, not as far as all us modern people seem to think it is) or to eat only local food or to never buy something new if I can find it used.

I know, however, that I am not that super. I'm not No Impact Man. I am, however, a lot more like the rest of the world than I am different.

Colin had a post recently about prioritizing resource use to improve lives and it's not so much the article itself that interests me, as the comments. If you read through them all (and there are quite a few), you notice a conversation that goes on about the fact that we (the greenies) are not going to convince "other people--normal people" to give up their TVs and DVDs and iPods and Starbuck's and whatnot. In fact, we're just preaching to the choir and using only the choir to obtain data on what people really need to be happy.

It's a fair point. I have friends who live for their special television shows--hell, there are shows I absolutely will not miss myself; shows I must immediately jump on the internet to discuss the second the credits roll. I am not the only person I know who needs--needs--Starbuck's in the morning. Starbuck's. No substitutions.

The point of trying to change the world is that you need to change it in such a way that most of the people more or less don't hate it. For instance, television. It's never going away--at least not until we find an even cooler way of telling those stories. So instead of saying "oh my God, TV is wrong--it's a horrible resource-wasting beast!" (unless of course, you think that), maybe saying "okay, so, we have TV. Maybe we could find a better way of powering it? One that didn't send miles and miles coal trains to the power plant to make tons and tons of CO2."

I was going to follow that example with "Or fast food giants..." but I actually think fast food giants are slowly killing a great swath of the population and a good bit of the planet right along with them, so I don't really have much of an argument. Also, given that I'm one of the people being slowly killed (though much more slowly than I used to be), perhaps I'm not the best one to address that problem.

So instead I'm going to ask a similar question to Colin's: If there is something resource-using that you can't live without, how could it be made just a little bit less resource-using?

I'll go first. I really, really, really love watching television. However, perhaps I could put the television on its own separate plug so that I could keep the DVD and VCR and such unplugged and non-resource-using the vast majority of the time. And of course, I could unplug the TV before I go to bed at night and before I leave for work in the morning.

And maybe I could write that four hundredth letter to my local electric company to see if they can finally offer me a little bit of clean energy?

EXTRA EXTRA: Healthcare in the United States

2009-02-06T15:00:00.001-06:00

I don't usually blog twice in one day, but Kali, over at Mother Earth Health, had an article that had math. You know me--I like math. Numbers are good.

Unless, of course, they're not. For instance, Kali came up with a figure from the Institute of Medicine saying that 60 people every day die in the US from lack of healthcare. That's a pretty horrifying number, in fact.

President Obama wants to give Americans universal healthcare by the end of his first (and hopefully not last) term. Which is a great idea, but how exactly would that happen? Well, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a writer on healthcare issues, took a look at some other countries and how they got universal healthcare. According to his thought processes, two good ideas would be mandating private insurance for all, with heavy subsidies for the poor, or expanding the VA medical system to include non-veterans.

While they both sound like viable plans, there are problems with privatized healthcare and the VA Health Administration has had a heck of a lot of horror stories told about it, though it looks like things are looking up at the VA.

What can we do?

Learn as much as you can. I've given this link before, but I'll give it again: www.DividedWeFail.org. It's the AARP website for action on healthcare issues, and it's got a lot of great information. Also, Universal Health Care Action Network is a great resource and a fine place to start if you want to get involved.

And I really hope we all want to get involved.

Recycling made very difficult

2009-02-06T10:00:00.002-06:00

Note: I started this blog entry yesterday at lunch time. Why was I blogging at work? Because I currently have no phone or internet at home. While this is very disconcerting to a person who spends most of the time online, it's actually been rather liberating. I haven't even turned on the powerstrip that powers my computer since Wednesday afternoon. Kinda nice, really. But I missed yesterday and I'm sorry about that. If I have time, I may blog up a couple of articles for over the weekend before I leave here today. If not, you'll know why the silence.

So, six or seven years ago, I started hearing about "E-waste." It was this great catch phrase that encompassed everything from the computer that became obsolete ten minutes after you bought it to the Atari that finally gave up the ghost after almost 20 years.

The thing is, those electronics are dangerous. We've been throwing out cathode ray televisions and satellite phones for half a century--who knew?

Well, apparently, we all should have. And in honor of the fact that my internet and phone are both out at home and I'm seriously questioning why exactly I need those things at all, I figured today was the day to talk e-waste, and how very annoying it can be to properly dispose of.

Say you're burning a back up of your personal information off onto DVD. You've been doing this every six months, just like the pundits say, but the problem is, once you've got this backup, the backup from six months ago isn't relevant any more.

Then there's that amazing Flock of Seagulls CD that you've had since there were CDs. Unfortunately, your three-year-old doesn't have the best taste in music and your dog--to whom he fed the CD--does. Plastic shards don't really play that well in today's new-fangled boomboxes.

There's the remote control that doesn't really control anything anymore; the personal digital assistant that doesn't assist; the television that almost but doesn't quite show you a readable picture. Now, most of us know somewhere where we can recycle cans and bottles, but do we know where to dump all the rest of this stuff?

The answer is not in the garbage, but in a complex dance to send it all away to be disposed of responsibly. Unfortunately, this can be a pain.

If you don't live in a big city (or a progressive town), chances are your local municipality isn't going to help you out here. Sure, L.A. county has its weekly recycling drop-offs, Chicago has household chemical and electronic recycling locations, and New York City has NYC WasteLe$$, but if you live in the middle of Iowa or South Dakota, you're likely to have a problem.

Luckily, for a fee, of course, you can have somebody take care of it. When we were planning to move inland from the East Coast, we found we had an enormous amount of e-waste. We'd never gotten rid of it because we were just too lazy to figure out how to do it, but I was damned if we were going to pay somebody to haul my nonfunctional ten year old Zaurus and the three dead laptops and every other dead plastic thing we had halfway across the country to our new home, where it would still sit in uselessness.

Thus did I find GreenDisk. GreenDisk is a company out of St. Louis that has made an art of making sure you don't throw your electronics away. If you have CRT monitors and tower computers and such, you will need to contact them to find out how much it will cost to get them to take your stuff, but if all you have are remote controls and videotapes and CDs and PDAs and even laptops, you can get them to send you one of their TechnoTrash cans. The small one holds 35 pounds of stuff and the large one holds 70, and you basically pack everything in there and send it back to them via FedEx. The price of the shipping is included in the price of the trash can.

And yes, it is a little expensive, but I've found that I actually find it very freeing to fill a can full of junk and know that that junk isn't ending up in a landfill. If I have to pay for the privilege, so be it.

Another thing I did was to get my boss to sign on to buy TechnoTrash cans for the office here. It's great! The can is in the office kitchen, next to the other recycling bins, and people can just dump their old CDs and such in there. Once it's full, it's my job to pack it up and send it back to GreenDisk.

Unfortunately, GreenDisk doesn't take batteries--I mean, they will if it's the battery that came with the computer or whatnot, but not, like a whole box full of AAA standards. Batteries are really quite dangerous if left in landfills to degrade. They poison groundwater and scavenging animals and... yeah. They're bad.

Luckily, while researching for this article, I found a place like GreenDisk, but one that will take those batteries off your hands! Battery Solutions offers a residential solution called iRecycle (someday I'm going to write a blog entry about the disturbing trend of putting "i" in front of everything). iRecycle is a box that Battery Solutions sends you. Fill it up with AAAs, AAs, cellphone batteries, cellphones themselves... There's a nice list on their site. Then just slap the label they gave you on the box, call FedEx or drop the box off at a FedEx location, and you're golden. Or green.

Now, some people may be thinking about the environmental sustainability of having this stuff shipped all across the country. I actually asked the guys at GreenDisk about that once, and the company has done research into how many miles their e-waste travels. Yes, sometimes it's a considerable number, but the thing I found out was that they use FedEx and not the US Mail because FedEx actually sets up their deliveries to use the smallest number of travel miles per package. So, maybe not as green as not buying and disposing of electronic stuff at all, but greener than the mail. And definitely greener than throwing it all in the garbage.

I'd urge everyone to Google around their local area and find out where you can dispose of things. Many groceries, like Whole Foods and even some Safeways and Krogers, will take a lot of recycling, and a few might have battery boxes or at least battery drop-off days. Some science museums and nature museums have now started programs for recycling toxics, simply as another service and educational opportunity.

Look around you. Local is always better if you know it's getting disposed of properly. If your local municipality doesn't recycle, ask them why not? If they have curbside recycling projects for home disposal, make sure they're actually doing what they say they are. Chicago's BlueBag program served as a major embarrassment to the city before being shut down.

It's a pain, yes. I know--I have a drawer full of batteries and a box full of old videotapes that are somehow, someday, actually going to make it into a recycling stream when I find the time--but it's not as much of a pain as garbage taking over the planet. I'm exaggerating, of course, but seriously, a lot of this stuff can be recycled, and by using these recycling companies, you're putting money into the green side of the economy. The more money we have in the green economy, the more people will want to invest there, and the stronger and cheaper and more prevalent it will become.

See what I'm saying?

Now I have to go pack up the latest box for GreenDisk. And maybe get off my butt and go to the local battery recycling drop off this weekend. A greenie's work is never done...

Recycling made easier?

2009-02-04T12:58:00.003-06:00

This story on recycling #5 plastic crossed my digital desk today, and it got me thinking about the fact that I hate eating yogurt out of plastic.

Really. I get tubs of organic yogurt and I eat them and then I have this stupid plastic "can" to throw away or hoard until I can get up the gumption to go to the recycling center. It's annoying.

This weekend, we have another farmer's market, and there's a wonderful dairy in Wisconsin that attends. I bought some yogurt from them at the last farmer's market, and it was wonderful. It was also in a glass bottle. For which I paid a deposit which I will get back when I go there this weekend.

OR... I could instead buy a jug of skim milk (they make their yogurt with full fat milk which is very rich for me) and make my own yogurt. I have a lovely stainless steel thermos just begging for a chance to culture some milk.

And then, instead of having a plastic jug of milk and a plastic can of yogurt, I can have one glass bottle and a stainless steel thermos. And the bottle can just go back to the dairy to be traded for another--this one full of milk!

Yes. That sounds like a plan to me! I'll let you know how the yogurt-making goes. I haven't done it in a very long time, so I'll probably flub it the first time!

Why is this Mr. Capitalist's job?

2009-02-03T06:55:00.000-06:00

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the federal reserve said he was shocked his ideas led to the current economic crisis and said "I still do not understand exactly how it happened."
     Well, let me see if I can give it a shot: Banks bundled mortgages that had been given to people that wouldn't even qualify for jury duty and then sold those, along with credit default swaps which are basically insurance the seller provides to the buyer in case the entity loses value. However, unlike regular insurance, these swaps weren't regulated so they failed to meet any standards of responsible business. Then, when everything collapsed, it spread like an infection, because when people are making money, they don't ask how, they just say "yay!"
     But again, you're the expert.
     --Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live, Weekend Update, 10/25/2008

The global economy is in the tank. Many countries are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and economic depression. Banks are failing left and right. And it's up to us to save it all. That's right, not Americans, my friends, but every single capitalist on this planet.

At least that's what the politicians and many of the pundits seem to be telling us. And because we're trying not to spend, us frugal people are hurting the economy. On the other hand, experts in personal economic security are telling us to save, save, save!

What can you do? Are you hurting the environment by spending tons and tons on things that use up resources--things you don't need and really probably can't afford anyway? Are you hurting the economy by minimizing resource use and not spending what little money your hard work makes you? Why do you have to fix this, and is spending all your money really the way to do it?

Mr. Capitalist has a hard time not spending money. Back in the 80s, when he was young, he got into all kinds of problems with credit card debt and ended up having to go to a credit counselor to get back in the black. Granted, he had to work two jobs all through the 90s to pay off those credit cards, but then he had a nice clean balance sheet to buy a house with his new wife.

When they went to buy that house, of course, the bank preapproved them for a mortgage that was very, very expensive--almost all they could afford at the time. Then, they had a baby and Mrs. Capitalist's father wasn't doing so well and needed a lot of financial help and it all added up. Luckily, the house had an equity line of credit, so Mr. Capitalist didn't worry too much.

Because, you see, he'd been told that we're all supposed to get mortgages we can barely afford and spend more than we have because we're supposed to buy things--that's capitalism. We need to make sure the family has TONS of Christmas presents (whether we celebrate Christmas or not), and then there's always Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and Father's Day and Grandparents' Day--the buying never stops because it's good for the economy!

Except...

Except that now Mr. Capitalist has a car loan and a mortgage and a home equity line of credit and a dozen credit cards and the minimum payments all add up to $5000 a month, but he only makes $4000 a month after taxes, and he never had much of a nestegg to begin with because he was spending like he should be. So suddenly the car is being repossessed and the house is being foreclosed on and the credit cards are in default and three or more banks are carrying "bad debt" because Mr. Capitalist was doing what he was told to do. He was stimulating the economy.

Not to mention the fact that, with his credit ruined he can barely get approved for a rental. His job gets downsized because he works for a company that does business with one of the banks that's carrying Mr. Capitalist's bad debt--you see, the company can't get a loan to cover its expenses while waiting to be paid by clients who can't get loans to cover their expenses because the bank is trying to hold on to what it has while it drowns under bad debt. So Mr. Capitalist goes to the unemployment line and gets his unemployment check--a check that is essentially paying back the loan he and his employer made to the government by paying taxes.

But of course, that money the government got on that loan has already been spent a hundred thousand times over, so they take out another loan to pay Mr. Capitalist, who can't get enough to pay his bills and provide for himself and his family.

This is an exaggerated thumbnail, of course, and doesn't take into account the fact that, at least in the US, the economy has also been severely damaged by the lack of affordable health insurance, which bankrupts hundreds of thousands of people because they either can't get it or have inadequate amounts of it.

It also doesn't take into account the greedy and immoral practices of banks and mortgage companies and futures traders, a great number of whom made up numbers as they went along to try to make the bottom line look good. And then there's the fact that society keeps touting the image of the affluent American, and the government has, until recently, kept trying to convince us that everything will be just fine if we can spend our way out of this.

So, fine. It's not really Mr. Capitalist's fault that the economy is crashing. It's not just because he spent more than he had--and if the economy continues to languish, it's not because he's now saving most of what he makes. But what do we do now? What can each of us do to help get things back on track? I'm not an economist by any means, but for me personally, the following is a good start:

Spending: still a good idea--but wisely. Don't go into debt to stimulate the economy. Go check out Suze Orman for good tips on staying on budget.
Saving: still a good idea, too--and remember, as that Fox article I quoted earlier says, paying down debt is saving. (I'm so not advocating listening to Fox News as a general rule, but in this, they're right. Ask Suze Orman; she'll tell you the same thing.) CNN's Money (particularly Money 101) has some good info on smart debt reduction.
Giving: absolutely crucial. It's crucial for the survival of the idea of society, if not exactly the bottom line. If this world economy comes out the other side of this a stronger one, but leaves five billion people in the dust and ruins? That's not strength. And it's certainly not right. I've listed sites for donations before, but think of calling your local shelter and seeing what they need. There are a frightening number of people in need right now and any little bit helps.
Learning: takes some time, but is so worth it. Read the newspapers, subscribe to political and economic blogs, check out your government websites (US Executive Branch, US House, US Senate, US Supreme Court) and read up on the bills being debated and the rulings coming down from your courts.
Doing: hard, but necessary. Write a letter to your congressperson asking him or her to support real solutions for healthcare, call your senator about the current state of scientific funding.
Thinking: is an often daunting prospect for some reason. There's a big list of things here, and it's hard to figure out what to do when and how. Think about three things every time you make a decision about your money: Am I helping the planet? Am I helping other people? Am I helping my soul?

We can hope all we want, but we have to work to make things happen.

Too Tired Not To Waste

2009-02-02T13:28:00.003-06:00

I'm home sick today. Some sort of stomach bug jumped up and bit me this weekend, and I'm feeling not so great. I've been sleeping most of the day, in between answering emails from work and flipping channels and eating canned meals.

I find that funny, really. Maybe not funny ha-ha, but at least funny strange. See, back in The Day (you remember The Day, don't you? That'd be that time before my grandparents, when people had no running water and walked to school in three feet of snow, uphill both ways, with boxes on their feet so they wouldn't ruin their only shoes?) people had family or neighbors to take care of them when they were sick. Or they didn't, and they had to take care of themselves or just hope they made it through to the better side of whatever virus they had.

I do have family living right here in my own house, but said family has to work, because there are bills to pay. Back in The Day, there were bills to pay, too--or rather, work that needed to be done if the family could ever hope to eat that day. So probably, I'm no better or worse off for having to be alone in the house by myself today.

I am, however, a heck of a lot more wasteful than they probably were. I laid down on the couch, turned on the TV, took a couple of Tylenol and a Benedryl and promptly fell asleep, meaning that the electricity being used by the TV was just being wasted on my cat, who doesn't like cooking shows anyway.

And of course, now I am awake, I've eaten leftover pizza (commercial-bought) and a can of lemonade ("lemon" ade), creating just a little more waste. Because, you see, I'm too tired not to waste resources.

But really, would I sleep less deeply if the TV were off? Would it have killed me to defrost one of the mini-shepherd's pies I have in ceramic dishes in the freezer? Couldn't I fall asleep reading a book and get the same restfullness that the Benedryl and Tylenol and Food Network got me?

I'm not advocating that we all lie about in agony when we're sick (I kind of hate agony, really), but it's times like this (and that may be the fever talking) when I wonder if maybe we should, as a world, be less apt to take the easy way out and say we're too tired to do something.

I think the whole problem is the word "convenience." I mean, how convenient is it really, if it just hastens the destruction of the current ecosystem? Makes that microwave dinner seem a whole lot more menacing, doesn't it?

Again, might be the fever--but I'm still going to think about it the next time I get sick. Right now, I'm going to turn off the TV and computer and read Slow Food until I fall asleep again.

Full Disclosure! Unless I think that's a bad idea.

2009-02-01T11:15:00.004-06:00

Here's a little political/legal/human rights news to go with your fair trade Sunday morning coffee.

So, Prop 8, as you know, was a proposition brought before the Californian public in 2008 to add an amendment to the state constitution to read "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." No more gay marriage.

The public went to the polls, they voted as is both their right and their responsibility, and a slim majority of them chose to vote yes and restrict legal marriage in the state to that between a man and a woman. This sucks, is unfair to a minority in our country, and is, unfortunately, now law. California is not the first state to do this, and I am tragically sure it will not be the last.

However, California's significant and very vocal gay population and its supporters have chosen to exercise their constitutional right to take part in boycotts, pickets, and protests against companies and societies who donated to the Yes on Prop 8 campaigns. The information about who gave money to those campaigns (and to the No on 8 campaigns for that matter) are a matter of public record under the California state campaign-finance disclosure act.

Which, you can imagine, has made gay marriage opponents a little bit nervous.

So the Prop 8 guys called in their lawyers to protest the disclosure law, stating that if donors were to be publicly named, they would be subject to "harassment" from gay rights groups.

(In case you're wondering? Yes, you are legally allowed to picket, boycott, and peacefully assemble against any person or entity in the United States of America. And in California, too.)

This past week, I was pleased to hear that the district judge hearing the case in Sacramento dismissed it, commenting that donors' requests for anonymity should not trump California's authority to require "full and fair disclosure of everyone who's involved in these political campaigns." [HRC article and San Francisco Chronicle article]

I'm amused by this ruling because, as the HRC article states, it is kind of funny that the Prop 8 proponents (P8Ps?) are crying foul because they're being "harassed" by the very people whose rights they've just helped to take away.

And this, my friends, is why I both love and hate democracy. I love that we all have a chance to have our say (let's pretend that there really is fair access to voting in this country for a moment), but I hate that that sometimes means there will be more people who disagree with my vote than agree.

I now return you to your Super Bowl Sunday.

Daydreaming Again

2009-01-31T14:49:00.002-06:00

In my mind there is a city. The density is about 15,000 families per square mile (That's about 3 million people for a city the square mileage of Manhattan Island, so dense, but not too dense), living in mid-rises and row houses.

When I was young, there was a community garden for every mile of land (meaning there still had to be a lot of food trucked in), but as I've gotten older--and technology has gotten cooler--that's now a 40-story vertical farm, employing a tenth of the people living in the one-mile "food circle" and providing no fewer than 1000 different crops. The growing highrise is adjacent to a processing facility that turns the farm's peanuts into peanut butter and its chilies into hot sauce. Employees of the vertical farm get paid and also get a free share of the crops.

There's still a park for every mile, too, in place of my original community garden plots, because people need to sit on the grass and that grass cools down the city wonderfully.

The population is diverse and well-integrated, without sacrificing the feeling of cultural community that, say, an Irish girl might want to have with other Irish people who live nearby and understand the necessity of having a butcher around who knows how to make a proper black pudding.

And you can have that black pudding, if you want. Outside of town, there's a ring of farms that are designed to raise cattle and sheep and chickens in such a way that their waste can be turned into biofuel (haven't ever figured out how to harness the methane in their wind, but it may come to me). They are pastured, of course, and the pastures are covered in local grasses, organically grown.

Back in the city, commercial and residential areas are mixed, so that there don't need to be any "big box" stores that take an hour to drive to, because you can find pretty much everything you need within a couple of miles' walk of your home: groceries, a shoemaker, a yarn boutique, a hair salon, an electronics store--all the important things. Industry nestles up against home where possible--polluting smokestacks are replaced with carbon filter caps and green energy buildings.

People know each other and the schools are safe and thorough in their educating and the kids come home to family members or neighbors who make sure they get a good afternoon snack, a bit of exercise, and a quiet place to do their homework. There are enough baseball, football, and soccer fields, along with hockey rinks, swimming pools, and basketball courts, to make sure there's something for almost everyone.

Every building has solar PV built right in, so there's no need for more than a couple of wind farms on the outskirts of town to supplement the grid and provide the power for battery-operated car docking stations. When there's no wind and little sun, car owners can make a little money dumping energy back into the grid.

For people who want to grow their own food, or just don't want to pay for the produce at the store on the ground floor of the vertical farm, there are garden plots on all the building roofs, making sure that people have a contact to nature and a cooler roof in summer and less run off all year long. Kids learn how the food chain works by growing things, picking them when they are ripe, and going downstairs to the apartment to cook them minutes later.

People have also rediscovered the use of water cisterns, which adorn all the buildings, providing as much of the water for each building as the climate will allow. There's central plumbing and water reclamation facilities and fresh tap water--don't worry. Nobody has to live on only what the rain provides, but at least the cisterns take a little bit of the burden off the water grid.

People don't worry so much about paper or plastic. Because it's never more than a few blocks to the local grocer (who is also the local farmer), people are content to bring their baskets--just like those quaint ones we all see in the "rural middle ages" movies.

Except that these baskets are filled with not just the foods that could be grown outside in the agricultural zone, but foods that are grown in the vertical farms. In the northern midwest, people can get melons and berries until November and again in April because the vertical farm acts like a season extender. It's all about resources, of course, so the place doesn't keep the temperatures tropical year-round. The heat and lighting are dictated by the region, to an extent, but the seasons of bounty are a little longer, produce from warmer climes can be grown during the warmer months, and the cold season still provides enough to live on.

This kind of city has always been a dream of mine--a place where people can get everything they need without going too far and wasting too much. And you want to know the funny thing? This isn't a new idea, or one that is unattainable.

The Amish do it--sure, they have more contact and trade with the "English" world now, but they still pretty much get what they need right near home. There are communities in many parts of the world that don't bother with the rest of us too terribly often. They do just fine.

The big problem is that most of us no longer know what "getting what we need" means. I'll admit it: getting what I need sometimes means buying the latest scifi film. It sometimes means Starbucks or a 3 Musketeers bar or that ever-needed lemon. I'm not shy about the fact that I like having things!

But maybe we should rethink how we get those things. Al Gore proposed a plan last year to replace US energy generation as we know it with 100% carbon-free sources in the next ten years. (Wow--and he thought running for president was hard!)

It's a fantastic idea that most of the establishment immediately marked as fundamentally unattainable. Let's stop and think a minute, though. What would his daydream world look like?

People who have spent their lives working in the steel, automobile, and coal industries have been losing their jobs by the thousands. In Al Gore's daydream, they'd be put back to work--first retrofitting the plants where they used to work and then building concentrating mirrors for solar arrays, or electric cars, or windmills. People could be put to work designing and building the new electrical infrastructure we need to make sure that the wind in Iowa can help power the buildings of Philly.

People who bought those new electric cars would be faced with expensive personal conveyances that could, in part, pay for themselves in a very real way. One of the problems we have to deal with while growing a new energy economy is the fact that, really, our batteries kind of suck. Once the sun goes down and the wind stops howling, we need to store that energy. By plugging in your electric car and charging it up, you'd be providing that battery. So why could we not, say, have all those garages in all those highrises in all those big cities install smart meters--meters that allow electricity to go both ways. During the day, the car could be charged by the grid. At night, if the car owner so desired, the battery in that car could help to light the highrise and lighten the driver's electricity bill.

(This is a particularly attractive choice for families like mine, who rarely use their car. In this future, our car could hold down the parking spot and the utility bill!)

His world would no doubt rethink agriculture as we know it. Less thinking about immediate yield and more about sustainable futures. It would have sustainably harvested forests. He probably even dreams of carbon-neutral air travel--though personally, I think we need to rethink the need for "live and in person" speaking engagements and make it fashionable to "satellite in" via audio-visual uplink.

The point here is, there are millions of us who have dreams about these things. And yes, I'm unlikely to ever be able to make my dream a full reality. But I can join the local garden club that plants and tends the greenery in those little havens of oxygen called city parks. I can plant some herbs in my kitchen (if I can find a way to keep the cat from eating them) and reduce at least some of my food miles. I can write my local electric company (again) and complain (again) about the fact that they (still) don't offer green energy (even though there are some hydroelectric and wind power plants in the midwest).

So dream, but work, too. Sure, there are the standard "use CFLs, plant a tree, turn off the TV, ride a bike" things that all of us know we should be doing, but what other things can you come up with that you yourself can do to make at least a little bit of your dream come true?

Think about it and get back to me, okay?

________

Want to find people living the dream? Global Ecovillage Network is just that--a network of ecovillages around the globe. Kinda cool.

Can not eating the last cookie change the world?

2009-01-30T13:33:00.005-06:00

Sure.

Seriously, I truly believe that. Observe:

I was walking from my house to the train station on Tuesday. Now, a mile is not a long walk, but it feels long when the wind is whipping around and the temperature is less than 10F. I live in a city, so there's almost never a time in the day when I don't have to negotiate space with other people. Sometimes, this can make you damned cranky.

Cranky the way I was Tuesday morning. My thinking went this way--

What is wrong with this stupid city? These people couldn't plow their sidewalks? No, of course not, because pedestrians don't mean anything, do we? Nope. All about the damn cars. And look at that idiot, walking right in front of that guy who only wants to get out of the garage so he can get to work! Stupid pedestrian! You can't wait one stinking second?
And what, seriously, is with these sidewalks! Oh yes, by all means, make me walk on the mounds of ice and snow on the side. Why do I always have to be the one to get out of the way? You know what? I'm totally not getting out of the way next time.
Oh, come on! You couldn't get out of the way of that woman with the cane? I mean, come on--walk up on the ice and snow on the side, for God's sake!
I hate people! Hate them.

And yes, as I kept up the running commentary in my head, I was well aware of the contradictions I was spewing. I'm also well aware of the fact that, when there's a situation where one person needs to get out of another person's way, I am never the other person.

It's not that I like walking in the pollution-blackened ice and snow that mounds around the walking spaces left by people navigating unshoveled sidewalks, it's just that, much as I gripe in the privacy of my own head, I can get out of the way, so I might as well.

My mother would call that being a nice person.

My friends might call that being a pushover.

But I think my mom is on to something. If the standard policy is to be the one to get out of the way, the one to give up your day off for another employee, the one to not eat the last cookie, then it follows that living like this in all things is a good way to help the environment, the economy, and the society.

For instance: I arrive at work and the sidewalk isn't shoveled and I know my boss isn't going to be in for a while. I also know I have about half an hour before I really have to address anything pressing. So I choose to take the shovel and clear the sidewalk. Since I've got half an hour and I relish a little exercise, I come back out with the broom and sweep it all clean. No salt needed.

So, by being the nice person, I've saved my boss some work, I've saved the environment the fumes of a gas-powered snow blower and the pollution of some road salt, and I've potentially saved the neighbors from a nasty spill. All with half an hour of my time.

Did I mention I also got half an hour of cardio in?

Yes, yes--I'm well aware that this example has nothing to do with cookies (though I could probably justify eating an extra one since I expended so much energy), but it gets to the same point.

Not eating the last cookie means not using up ALL the resources. It means not choosing to whip out the credit card (whose balance you can't pay off) to buy the Wii Fit (that will only use more electricity anyway) when you could go for a free, lung-cleansing walk. It means not buying all the prepackaged foods and the junk food in styrofoam and the lemons from Brazil because you're using so many more resources than you and the planet have to spare.

We have one planet of resources. Not taking the last cookie means not using more than you (and the planet) can afford. If we could all do that, there might be enough cookies that no one could ever take the last one. Imagine--Earth, the never-ending cookie jar!

Wouldn't that be a great bumper sticker?

A Change of Perspective

2009-01-29T10:08:00.011-06:00

It's got to be the cold, wintry weather around here making me yearn for growing season. Or maybe it's the fact that I'm actually doing okay with the spending situation just now so I'm less obsessed, but I'm much more focused on agriculture than financial responsibility at the moment.

I have made it a habit lately to look around the internet for non-US-related news. I admit that I am a pretty typical American (read: ethnocentric--specifically Amero-centric), but I'm trying to break myself of that because I think that part of the global problem these days is that we're all out for ourselves and aren't really paying attention to the other guy. Sure, we all get a little teary when we see those Sarah McLachlan commercials for the ASPCA, but how many of us actually donate?

Anyway, in my perusals of international news sites, I've been focusing on agriculture the past few days. Earlier this week, the UN held a Meeting on Food Security. While I applaud the idea of a globally donated fund to help the hungriest and neediest, I still am concerned that A) there is too much talk and not enough action in big UN-driven things like this, and B) there is too much emphasis on fertilizers and "modern" technology like GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

I don't know that I'm against the concept of GMOs per se--I mean, the idea is basically cross-breeding of plants on a grander scale. It's just that we're taking the tradition idea of grafting the grape vine that has the sweetest fruit onto the grape vine with the heartiest, most fungus-resistant stalks and turning it into the "21st century technology" idea of splicing a bacteria into a grape vine instead. It's... a little scary, given that we're not sure what effect those grape vines are going to have once they enter the wider world and possibly change the ecosystems around them.

There are other ways to increase crop yield and prevent devastation from pests and infections. Ze de Antonio is a farmer in Brazil who grows more than 25 crops on his 2 acres of land. The diversity of the plantings creates a local ecology which lessens the likelihood that an opportunistic parasite or infection vector could blow out a whole crop. It also builds balance and water-retention in the ground, making the soil itself more fertile.

Note that Diaconia, the NGO that taught de Antonio what he needed to know to thrive in his semi-arid home, spent only about $3000-4000 over eight years on his training. Universities now use him and others like him to train the next generation of farmers. It's not necessarily more expensive to learn to farm as he does. In fact, when you factor in just exactly how much fertilizers and "high-yield seed" cost, it might just be cheaper.

And it can be done community by community. The Mudgee Microscope Club in Australia is a group of farmers who are trying to see whether their attempts to farm sustainably are having any good effects on the soil around them. The fact that they get together as a local group, studying their own soil, makes a kind of sense that globally-donated emergency food funds--necessary though they may be--just don't.

I don't think we can change the face of agriculture completely with small-scale changes. There is no way to feed the projected 9 billion people who will inhabit this earth come 2050 by setting up small farms like Ze de Antonio's. Subsistence farming is farming to provide for you and yours and not much else. By definition, the only way that would work is if every single family in the world had 2 acres of arable land and actually spent their time growing on it.

I do think, however, that there are answers beyond the unsustainable monocultures and pesticide/fertilizer dependence of industrial agriculture. There have to be, because monoculture ensures that if a pest infests a field, there's a very real possibility that acre after acre could be wiped out for a season, leading to more hunger, not less. Monoculture farming and especially fertilizers and pesticides also deplete the soil of balance and nutrients, ensuring that each year's crops are a little weaker, a little less abundant.

Polyculture farms are the way to feed us all, I think. Yes, I still think we need vertical farming and an overall decrease in the use of raw materials for low-return foodstuffs (like fast food, for instance, which uses more resources for less nutritional result), but it seems to me that if we could make it affordable and attractive for farmers to grow ten different crops instead of one, we might be on to something.

Maybe instead of continuing to make it attractive to farm acres and acres of corn through subsidies for ethanol and corn syrup production, we should think about subsidizing the cost of a rotating farm. Not because the lobbies in Washington will get anything out of it, but because a farmer could rotate eleven different fields with ten different crops (leaving a different field fallow every year to renew) and rehabilitate his land while increasing both his yield and his ability to market himself--ten crops from one farmer!

Now, I know I said this whole blog thing was going to be mostly about what we can do ourselves to change the world, but this? It's something we need to think about. Because if we as a society, as individual people working together, start looking at the world differently, it all changes. Subtly, maybe. Slowly at first. But it changes.

After all, we started thinking "hey, why isn't there a car that could have a battery that would be charged by occasional use of the gasoline-powered motor, so that we could use less gas but still go as far as we wanted to go?" The hybrid cars of today may not be the electric cars of the future (or the past, but I won't rant about who killed the electric car right now), but they're better than the cars that get 20 miles to the gallon.

So what if we all started thinking "hey, maybe we should try some gasoline and oil replacement other than corn ethanol. That way we could maybe use the land for growing food instead of fuel. And what if we ate a little less processed food? That way, again, more of the land could go to growing actual foodstuffs instead of growing stuff that's turned into corn syrup and adds to our obesity problem."

It's a mindset change. It's a way to get us all to notice the world around us and see what we can think of that could make it all work a little better.

And I'm telling you, the first vertical farm that gets built in my area? I'm totally quitting my job and working there full time!

Be (at least some) of the change you wish to see

2009-01-28T08:33:00.006-06:00

I'm not an ecozealot. Regardless of what some in my house say, I'm not.

If I really were an ecozealot, We'd never have moved into a building that states in its bylaws that you cannot have worm bin composters. I'd've made sure we bought a place with a balcony, where the worms could live their wormy lives and munch up all my discarded organic matter.

But I'm not an ecozealot, so as soon as I can, I'll buy an electric composter, which uses electricity, and I'll hide it away in the utility closet where children and cats won't play with it and the smells (hopefully) won't bother anyone. There aren't supposed to be smells, by the way. The brochure says so.

I'm a fast showerer more because I find it a waste of time, not just of resources. Our water is part of our assessments, so I have no idea how much we really use, but we run the washing machine and dishwasher and they may be low-water models, but I bet we use our share.

We don't drive much. The car we own gets an average of 45 mpg during the summer, 30-40 during the winter (we've been subzero a bit more than usual this winter, so I've been getting crappier gas mileage than usual), but it's kind of a moot point because we've had it almost four years, and we haven't hit the 15,000 mile mark yet. It's a beautiful car, though--and very good at holding down our parking space.

We use a good amount of electricity--okay, I use a good amount of electricity. I have gadgets, we have two computers, a DVR, a number of televisions, and we're in the north, so it gets dark early and stays dark late into the getting-to-work hours of the morning. During the summer, because we don't use AC, we are well below the national average, but in the winter when we use our electric heat, we're above average for the country--and that's with switching to mostly compact fluorescent bulbs.

When we're being virtuous, we cook at home and bring our lunches. It's a heck of a lot cheaper, and using reusable lunch boxes like my nifty Mr. Bento means that we don't create a lot of Ziploc waste. I like to cook with fresh ingredients, and I prefer organics, so our footprint is smaller than it could be--when we're being virtuous.

When we're not being virtuous, you'd be amazed at the number of food miles, the pounds of trash, and the amount of waste a small family can create. I've seen us fill a kitchen trashbag to the brim with styrofoam and nonrecyclable plastic waste in just one meal when we've got a couple of friends over.

Why the big confessional? Because it's amazing what knowing your footprint and knowing your limits can do for you when you say you want to change the world.

Riot 4 Austerity is a group dedicated to the idea proposed by George Monbiot that if everyone in the first world decreased their resource usage by 94%, we might be able to save the environment as we know it. R4A aims for only 90% (that should be easy, right? Ha! Try it!), but it's a great place to learn a few techniques. They also have a great calculator on the site (this is relatively new, and is much easier than the slaving over a pen and paper I did when I first hit the R4A site a few years ago) that will help you see where you are in terms of the American national average. The group is full of people from all over the world, though, and also people in various stages of light living.

The group has an email forum which is well worth subscribing to if this sort of thing interests you, but it also leads me to drop my jaw more than a few times a month. There are people who are off the electrical grid, off the water grid, off the food grid. There are people who live on farms and get their electricity from cow dung and eat only what they grow in their fields. There are some seriously zealoty people over there. And while I love the group, I am not one of the zealots.

No Impact Man, who I've mentioned before, is also a true ecozealot. He set out on a one-year crusade to be carbon and impact neutral. No electricity (he did use a solar pack to power his computer and charge his phone), no packaged food, no trash, no eating out, nothing. And he gave back to the environment as well, to make up for the fact that he still had to flush the toilet occasionally. That his wife was less than thrilled with the idea is putting it mildly.

I know the feeling--from both sides. While I'm used to taking flak for being weird about my green, I love a good steak. I enjoy going to the movies and having a gigantic vat of popcorn. I'm a consumer. So I consume--a lot. As a whole, we're pretty good at being good, but when we're bad, we're your typical western world family.

I know we're never going to move to the country and buy a farm and use an outhouse and raise our own chickens. I'm allergic to chicken feathers--it would never work. We're not even in a position to buy a single-family home and kit it out with the latest solar gadgetry like the Smart House at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. It's unbelievably cool, and I'd love to live in a place just like it, but it's not actually feasible.

So what do you do? Well, you do what you can--what you will to a certain extent. My partner was horrified by the idea of a composter inside our condo. But we don't have a deck, and we throw away 4 pounds of vegetal waste alone every week (more in the summer), so eventually, the conversation turned from "you are NOT putting that in MY house!" to "okay, but you have to clean out the utility room and call the electrician and take care of the thing." Because it's a little something we can do.

Organic food, and especially local food, was much easier. There's something wonderful about wandering through the farmer's market together, looking at all the lovely food and figuring out exactly how you're going to make use of it. That it doesn't really cost much more than the grocery store, and certainly costs a whole lot less than eating out, is just an added bonus.

I'm the electrical offender in the house, and I'm working on it. And I'm working on cutting down the times on certain other people's showers, too, but again, you make the changes you can. And you keep on trying, because one day my "but I have to have the computer on overnight and I can't go to sleep without the television on" may turn to "I can run that scan once a month, not every day, and a nightlight is fine, really."

No Impact Man talked recently about ostentatious individual action as activism. He makes the point that one person's actions can cause a cascade effect... sometimes.

So, try taking your lunch to work for a week and seeing if people notice. Don't say anything, don't be loud about it. Just bring leftover soup or a ham sandwich or something everyday instead of going out, and see if people notice. If they ask, tell them you love the fact that you're saving some money.

Or try walking into you favorite coffee joint for your morning jolt and using a reusable mug to get it. Almost all of them will fill your mug for the price of an equivalent cup of theirs, and some will even give you a discount. If you're lucky, you'll get a quiet "thanks for using a reusable" from your coffee guy.

Try turning off the lights when you leave a room (make sure no one's still in the room when you do). Try doing it when your kids are around, and when they ask you why you're always doing that, tell them simply "to save energy." If our children can grow up thinking that saving energy is the norm and not the exception, they'll hopefully do it themselves.

What each of us does has an effect on other people. Live a little more consciously, and maybe others will see the difference and want to be it, too.

Now if I could just dump the soda habit! That would make a BIG difference!

Mourning the Passing of the Berries

2009-01-27T09:34:00.000-06:00

I've gone and done it.

Sunday night, I was packing my lunch for Monday, and I let out a long, sad groan--eliciting a "what?!" from the next room.

"I'm packing the last of the raspberries for my lunch tomorrow," I replied, sadly scooping the frozen fruit into their rightful place in my bento box. There were still black raspberries and golden raspberries, as well as the red raspberries you can find in any supermarket at any time of the year.

"I'm so sorry, honey," came the response--and it was actually quite heartfelt. I am the only berry junkie (the more fools them!) in the house, but I'm pretty loud about it, so the end of the summer berries is sort of a big deal.

The thing is, I didn't have to run out of berries this week. I mean, I could have bought more berries this summer. I complained about the price and the trouble of sorting, soaking, rinsing, drying, freezing, and storing them. I complained about the space they took up in my freezer (two huge plastic tubs of perfect, wonderful berries by the end of the summer growing season). I complained about the trouble of carrying tupperwares to work at least once a week to go to the market and get the berries.

And now, I'm going to complain about having to go to Trader Joe's (and only Trader Joe's--no one else carries them!) to pay about the same amount of money for frozen black raspberries that were grown somewhere in California or somewhere. They come in a non-reusable plastic bag and they're not as good as the ones grown in southern Michigan.

Don't get me wrong--they are very fine black raspberries, but they're just not as good. I don't think that's because black raspberries in California taste any worse or any different than those in Michigan, but there's something about the taste of raspberries that you had so much to do with before they ever got frozen. My farmer picks her berries in the morning, usually before dawn, and drives into the city with the berries in huge flats. She parcels out a pint or so for me and I dump it in my tupperware (she always reuses the paper pint she weighs them in). When I get home that day, I do all those things I complained about: sort, soak, rinse, dry, freeze, store...

And when I pull out a cup of them in the dark of winter, they're my berries.

There are people in the slow food movement who believe that, in part, the obesity epidemic comes from our lack of connection to our food. I'm not sure I believe that so much (I mean, I'd eat a couple of pounds of raspberries a day if I could, and that's hardly healthy for you!), but I do think that the food I cook that comes from food I know does indeed taste better. The lamb farmer who's 75 miles away and has a few acres of land where he rotates his lambs in and out of different organically-grown grass fields; the organic farmer whose heirloom tomatoes are so perfectly sweet that the salads I make with them need nothing more than a drizzle of vinegar; the apple farmer whose apples are so good that the first year I moved here and bought them, I gorged myself sick on them--twice...

The food they give me--the food I make with their help? It tastes better.

So this year, I guess I'm going to have stop whining about the cost of buying twice the berries I need, and instead buy three times the berries I need. I'll still complain about all the work I have to do, but at least the boxes of berries will last me until after the winter thaw--just in time for the cycle to start all over again.

_______

The Slow Food Movement is a fun thing to get into if you're a foodie. You may find yourself as obsessed with fresh cooking as I am (I just wish I were a better cook!), but it's got some very commonsense ideas about how to live simply and eat well.

Slow Food USA is a good starting place. In you live in the States, there's a bulletin board with all kinds of Slow Food events around the country.
Slow Food International is a global perspective and one of the resources that started it all.
This TIME magazine article highlights the difference between what slow food is all about--good food--and what the movement has been accused of being--elist food snobs.

How Much Is Clean Worth?

2009-01-26T13:21:00.000-06:00

So, I did say I was working on being financially responsible and such, right? Well, one good way to save money is to find out how to do more with less. Now, I am allergic to... well... most things. Okay, not really, but I'm extremely sensitive to any number of chemicals, so green cleaning is a big must for me, since I'm the one who does most of the cleaning in the house.

I originally had this great idea that I'd make all my cleaners from scratch--laundry detergent, dishwasher detergent, everything! I'd be this mighty, green machine of perfectly homemade perfection!

And then I had a family and a house and two very messy cats and a full time job and... it never really happened.

That said, I do buy nontoxic cleaners for any machine washing that happens around here (Seventh Generation makes some very nice, very effective laundry and dishwashing detergents), a nontoxic liquid soap for hand washing dishes, and I do use simple kitchen supplies to clean the rest of the house. No Windex, no scrubbing bubbles. Just vinegar and baking soda and my very tired arms (on the other hand, my arms are a good deal more toned than they used to be, so I see that muscle fatigue as a plus, not a minus).

So I was wondering this morning what exactly I was saving by using only a few basic ingredients to make my house clean and happy. Let's run the numbers, shall we. I love numbers!

Store-Bought Cleaners
Bathroom
- Toilet cleaner: $2.80 (lasts a couple of months)
- Soap scum remover: $3.50 (lasts a month, tops)
- Window/mirror cleaner: $3.80 (lasts a couple of weeks)
Kitchen
- Countertop cleanser (Comet, Bon Ami, etc.): $2.00 (lasts a month or two)
- Oven cleaner: $5.50 (lasts a month)
- Glass cleaner: see bathroom supplies
All over
- Furniture polish: $5.00 (lasts a month or two)
- Floor polish (wood): $5.00 (a month)
- Carpet/upolstery cleaner: $5.50 (around here? A couple of weeks)
TOTAL: approximately $35.00 a month
Homemade (all last a month)
Baking Soda: $3.30 (64 oz. box)
- uses: toilet, shower, countertops, oven, tiles, sink, fridge/freezer
Distilled White Vinegar: $3.30 (1 gallon)
- uses: absolutely everything. Seriously.
Borax: $1.00 (72 oz.--a box costs about $4.50, but it can last six months)
- uses: stubborn stains in laundry and on tile, ceramic tubs, etc.
Vegetable or olive oil (the cheap stuff): $6.00
- uses: wood polishing
Lemon juice (again, the cheap stuff): $3.00
- uses: wood polish and stubborn clothing or furniture stains
TOTAL: approximately $16.00 a month

So... yeah. That's quite a savings, I think.

Of course, it does require me to at least pretend to enjoy cleaning. It takes twice as long, but it's actually pretty nice, because I don't have to worry about making sure the room is ventilated and such. I don't have to worry about keeping animals and kids out of the bedroom after I shampoo the rug or the bathroom after I clean the shower and toilet.

There are a ton of other things you can use as household cleaners. Some mixes require more work than others--I'm lazy, and vinegar cleans as well as bleach and baking soda provides as much abrasive power as Comet, so I keep with those. There are other people, however, who love to come up with recipes:

Clean and Green is a pretty in depth site and has answers to most household cleaning problems.
Organized Home is a great site for oh, so many reasons, but they also have a nice selection of cleaning recipes.
In hunting around for some nice recipes, I found this great site called Tree Hugging Family--it's got lots of info!

There you have it--save a little money, save your lungs and those of the people and animals around you, and save the planet!

______

Over to other things, now. The US is a little... self-centered just now. We have this new president, and this new congress, and... we're really preoccupied. So I thought I'd post some links to news items that aren't about the US:

Industrial pollution chokes people, crops alike--A story from the Daily Star (Bangladesh) about the ramifications of a polluting urea plant on the local population.
A Breakthrough against World Hunger--a piece in the Guardian (UK) advocating a centralized international aid foundation for helping boost agriculture in low-income countries. Note, interestingly enough, that the example he uses for helping these countries is fertilizer. Interesting.
Study pinpoints main source of Asia's brown cloud--In a case of "what's good for you could be bad for you," the International Herald reports on a study out of Sweden that shows that much of the particulate pollution in Southeast Asia is caused by a "greener" solution to oil: biomass.

I'm off to go drive to a bunch of places. I very rarely take the car out at all, but today there are a ton of things that won't fit in my backpack. *sigh*

Food and Movies! Two of my favorite things!

2009-01-25T15:27:00.000-06:00

Just a quick post today, since I'm always running late on Sundays. I figured I'd leave you with something interesting to read, so I'm linking you to other people. :)

I happen to love documentaries, so when I got the latest issue of Treehugger's newsletter in my email box, I thought "Hey! More documentaries for me to watch!" And they're about FOOD, so really, how can you go wrong?

Speaking of documentaries about stuff I care about:

No Impact Man, the documentary based on the New York dad who calls himself No Impact Man, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to great applause this month! I hope we'll all see it coming to a theater near us some time soon.
An Inconvenient Truth is always a good addition to any environmental film festival.
Who Killed the Electric Car actually made me furious. I own a Prius, but I'd rather own an electric car! Also, check out the blog Revenge of the Electric Car to keep up to date on electric technologies.

That's it, I'm out of here--have to go enjoy the wonderful freezing weather! Have a great day!

Local Food: "Yeah, I don't really have time to go to the farmer's market."

2009-01-24T12:43:00.000-06:00

I've always found that when you feed people good food, the conversation becomes very productive.
--Alice Waters, head chef of Chez Panisse, Berkeley, CA
Find out more about her "Art. Food. Hope." dinner on inauguration eve.

I was down south visiting my sister last year. It was mid-spring and our farmer's markets here in the midwest hadn't quite gotten off the ground yet, owing to the amount of frost still on said ground.

We were driving to lunch one day (we drove to lunch every day--and to dinner) and I looked over the side of the interstate to see a lovely, sprawling, farmer's market occupying the majority of a mall parking lot. Now, this mall wasn't more than a mile or so from my sister's house, and craving some fresh food, given the long hard winter just behind us, I asked casually, "So, how is that farmer's market over there?"

"Yeah," she replied shortly. "I don't really have time to go to the farmer's market." Which pretty much ended the conversation.

Now, I will admit that, growing up, we didn't know anything about farmer's markets. We did have friends who grew some food, and we did know some of those "hippie types" who got their food from somewhere, but for the vast majority of our meals, food was procured from the nearest Safeway.

My sister has a lot of children, so on the one hand, I can see that she finds it easier to keep an eye on them when they're all trapped inside a store. On the other hand, I think the idea of spending an hour or so letting the kids get a look at what grows near you--which, let's face it, doesn't include junk food like potato chips and Twinkies--is a good lesson in how the world works.

But that, I think, requires a mind that thinks the world should work that way, and a fair number of people are very happy with their world in which they can microwave a pizza instead of slaving over a stove for an hour after a hard day at work.

I know exactly what they mean. As I got older, I found that the city we lived in did indeed have a farmer's market. But I never went there. It was in the middle of town, and we lived on the outskirts, and then I'd have to cook, and I was already working a lot of hours, and wasn't farmer's food more expensive anyway, and it was just a pain to get to and... yeah, I didn't really have time for the farmer's market.

Nowadays, living in the middle of fertile land as I do, I love my farmer's markets. I love that I can start getting the freshest, juiciest strawberries and raspberries and blackberries early in the season and enjoy them all year long. I buy twice as much as I need for a week and then freeze half, and it's done a pretty good job of getting this berry junkie through the winter. Though I have to say that I ran out of blackberries in December and broke down and bought some at the store last week. Somewhere between Mexico and me, the taste fell out of the box.

Another great thing about the farmer's market is that, if it's close to your house and you plan everything right, it can be one of the least time-consuming parts of a shopping experience. Once the season starts, we plan all our meals for the week on Saturday and go to the grocery store for things we know we can't get at the farmer's market. Then, on Tuesday, we go to the market that's on the way to the train station (on my way to work), and pick up what we need for the week. Even if we wander the whole thing, it doesn't take more than half an hour. I keep our finds in the fridge at work for the day and schlep it home and voila!

For two people, we rarely need more than one bag, and it rarely costs any more than it would to buy the same stuff at the grocery store. I do find, however, that the connection to the food itself is greater because I picked it up from the farmer him- or herself, so I make sure to use up all the food I buy there, where food from the grocery store already doesn't taste fresh and often goes bad before I can cook it.

Also, the farmers we know don't give me a funny look for bringing a tupperware to protect my berries in transit. :)

That's another plus to a farmer's market: the farmers. I love that one of the women who grows some of the best berries will see me coming and start picking out a pint just for me. Our "apple people" let us pick through and find the ones we want instead of selling us one of the baskets they already have made up for the nonregulars. Our "organic lady," who sells unbelievable garlic and tomatoes and greens, always lets me know which of the tomato strains is the tastiest this week. And of course, she actually knows that, because she and her crew are the ones who picked them and boxed them last night and drove the 70 miles from the farm to sell them to me in a museum parking lot this morning.

There's something comforting in knowing that my food wasn't picked three weeks ago and 1500 miles away. During the tomato contamination scare last year, I didn't have to worry if my tomatoes were from the farms in California that might be in trouble. I knew they were from Wisconsin and hadn't been processed at all--just washed and put in a box.

If you really, really don't have time to go to the farmer's market, there's still a way to get local food--you generally have to pick it up, but it comes in a neat box and you don't have to wander the parking lot. CSAs--community sponsored agriculture groups--are pretty much what the name implies. Community members buy into the farm at the beginning of the season, and receive "shares" of all the produce throughout the season. Since you pay up front before planting is even started, it's a way for the farmer to know that she's going to be able to pay the bills, or if she isn't, exactly how big the shortfall will be.

A whole share will usually feed a family of four every week, and a half share is good for two or three--if you're a single, you can win friends at work by giving away fresh produce or go in on a share with another person. The CSA will likely have a number of places where you can pick up your shares every week--often at your local farmer's market, which is like killing two birds with one stone.

One of the drawbacks of this way of locavoring is that you get whatever they grow. If you don't like zucchini, and the CSA tells you they're growing it, then don't be mad when you've got the little squashes coming out your ears because they had a bumper crop. Likewise, if the season turns overly wet or dry or pestilential, you're likely to get very little return on your investment.

So it's a risk, but because CSAs tend to make their living on the fact that you can have all the vegetables and fruit a family could want, just by buying into one, they'll usually plan a pretty wide variety of plantings to make sure that they keep the land biologically stable and provide enough diversity to keep shareholders coming back. Often, they'll have co-op agreements with local meat, cheese, and egg providers, as well, so occasionally through the year, you'll get bonuses in your boxes.

Interested in loving your local food? If you live in the United States, go check out Local Harvest, which has a very comprehensive listing of farmer's markets and CSAs and grocer/co-ops and such. If you live in Canada, you could start with Chef2Chef, but there doesn't seem to be a listing like Local Harvest in your country. If you know of any other resources for other countries and areas, let me know and I'll post them here in a later post.

______

Food for Thought--and Others

Try buying a CSA share for your local food bank or soup kitchen. Obviously, you'll have to go to the farmer's market and pick it up and take it to the food bank, unless they have other patrons who donate this way, in which case they may go pick it up themselves. It's a great way to make sure that people who need it are getting fresh, healthy food, while saving the environment a little, too!

Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

2009-01-23T09:23:00.001-06:00

Living more frugally when in debt or overshoot is a sane and moral choice. The more of us who make this choice, the faster the collective transformation will go. We are at a crossroads. Disaster is not inevitable, but we need to change.
--Vicki Robin
Learn more about Your Money or Your Life and the Financial Integrity movement

I hate change.

Seriously. Change is exhausting and scary and difficult and I don't like it one bit.

The fact that change brought me the love of my life, a new place to call home, and maybe even some sense of peace (sometimes) is really quite beside the point. Change sucks.

But change is the only way to live--each of us is conceived, is born, lives, and dies eventually of something. It's all change.

Now, you can try to make change less painful in an awful lot of ways. You can work as hard as you can, sacrificing everything in the pursuit of something to make the change "worth it"--accrue tons of money so that you can always "have enough" and never have to worry. You can concentrate on saving the world--spend all your time sacrificing for the greater good; stop eating meat, fruit, whatever is the environmental baddie of the day; stop using plastic, aluminum, steel, wood, air; stop using the internet, the television, the car, the bike, your shoes--making sure that future generations can enjoy the earth (because you didn't).

In other words, you can try to take control of a fundamentally uncontrollable situation, hoping to make yourself feel safer.

But the truth is, you'll never feel safe, and I'd posit that life isn't about feeling safe anyway--at least not in that way. Life is about living, which is one of those hopelessly hokey things people put on bumper stickers, but it's true.

The problem with life being about living is that everyone has a different idea of what "living" entails. Is living having a fancy car and a fancy house and eating at five star restaurants every night? Is it acquiring as much "stuff" as you can get, so that you can say "I have enough to live on if everything collapses"? Is either of these ways of life fundamentally wrong--or right--for anyone and everyone?

The world itself will eventually make this determination for all of us. Currently, we as a species are living like we've got four or five spare planets tucked away, just waiting for us to pull them out of mothballs once we've used up the resources on this one. I found it interesting that the hundreds of thousands who jammed the Washington Mall to watch Barack Obama advocate change and a turning away from childish things managed to leave 120 tons of trash in their wake. This is not change I can believe in.

Eventually, the world will stop us itself. Crops fail every year, for a variety of reasons, and we look to technology to stop these disasters. We engineer crops that withstand a certain plant virus--then grow hectare after hectare of them, making them vulnerable to some other plague. We create new pesticides to stop this plague, killing off beneficial bacteria whose job it is to keep plague #3 in check. We "reintroduce" said bacteria to the soil, further disturbing the balance... It goes on and on and eventually, the earth is going to win and we're not going to be able to grow anything on that land, because it just plain needs time to heal.

We do much the same with every resource we have, but here's a thought: What if we, for starters, used less resources? This is not to say that we don't actually need to feed the billions of people on this planet, but what if we decided that we didn't need lemons from Florida in the dead of winter in the northern midwest (and yes, I'm talking about myself here)? That would mean less gas used to get the lemons from there to here, less monoculture in the agriculture landscape there, and more support of the farmers here in the midwest, who grow a mean winter cabbage and a variety of other winter greens that will satisfy my vitamin C requirements admirably.

What if, instead of using acres and acres of farmland for endless crops of corn to be used for ethanol, we instead stopped driving quite so much? Less driving, less ethanol, more room for food crop. And what if we as consumers were a bit more diverse and discriminating in our choice of foodstuffs? The farmer who once grew only one type of corn on his 150-acre farm could now grow five or ten different crops, rotating his crops in and out of each field and increasing the growing power and stability of the ecology of his own local soil. At the same time, he'd increase the nutritional content of the local diet and make sure that people could satisfy themselves with local food, using fewer food miles and coming back full circle to driving less, using less ethanol/gasoline/electricity, and improving the local agriculture.

No Impact Man posted a blog entry recently in which he commented that "we [environmentalists] should joke around more." I love both the cartoon and the sentiment. Because the flip side of the ethical and environmental snarl I've just written about is the joy of living well.

Now, living well can definitely mean spending $300 on one meal for two (say, your Valentine's Day blowout). I'm not into spending that much for a meal, myself--but don't ask me how much I spend on the mortgage to my beautiful condo on the beach. I spend my money on housing, because I "need" to see the water. Which is also living.

Living well can also mean spending a rainy day inside on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. Heck, you don't even need to have bought that book--that's what libraries are for! Now, you can think about where that tea came from, where the cup came from, where the library got the book and how much, ecologically-speaking, it cost to make it, or you can just let go of your eco-guilt for a minute and enjoy the fact that you have a roof over your head and a good book in your lap.

And the next day, maybe you can remember how nice that day was--a day when the most consuming thing you did was, maybe, turned on the stove to heat some water and the light to see the print when it got dark, and think "maybe that's a good way to live more often than not."

Maybe buying your child fewer toys and offering him more attention is a good way to live. Maybe making a homemade meal with local foods you never even knew your area had is a good way to live. Maybe walking to the store that's only a mile away and not buying more than you can carry home is a good way to live. More often than not.

And if that change in thought--and change is hard--saves some money, or some resources, or some stress... Then maybe change doesn't need to suck quite so much all the time.

______

Today, you get an ecological link, just because it's Friday!

A Skyscraper Grows in New York City: The Vertical Farm Project is researching the sustainability and feasibility of building high rise gardens in metropolitan areas. The result could be a decrease in average food miles, a greater connection between the city dwellers and their food, and even the possibility of farms that not only supply their own power and water, but give some back to the community, as well! This project is, in my mind, the next building I want shooting up in my backyard!

What exactly is the cost of living?

2009-01-22T09:27:00.000-06:00

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.
--Anita Koddick
(Donate a mosquito net at Nothing But Nets and help prevent deaths by malaria)

People talk about the cost of living. They talk a lot about how people the world over are farther in debt than they've ever been, how people are living far beyond their means, how if we all just bought only what we could afford, we would all be stronger and more financially secure.

So let's look at that. For example, here's a typical day's food for me when I eat at home (we aren't factoring in the days I visit Starbuck's in the morning and a local Italian joint for dinner):

breakfast
1 cup Special K cereal (approximately 50 cents per serving)
1/2 cup skim milk (~ 50 cents)
Snack
1 apple (organic, so $1)
Lunch
Usually a stew of some sort, with meat ($4.50-$8.00, depending on the meat and the vegetables chosen)
1 cup berries and plain yogurt ($1.50--not a pre-made fruit yogurt, but fresh fruit and nonfat yogurt)
Snack
1 oz. chips (50 cents if you buy a bulk bag of chips)
Dinner
4 oz. meat ($1, less if it's on sale)
1 cup green beans ($1 [organic again--pricey])
1 cup roasted potatoes ($1.50 at least)
Bed time snack
1/2 cp. ice cream (50 cents)

Added up, that day's food cost me about $14. Now, I do spend the extra money to buy organic food and I do buy brand names and as you'll notice, I do eat meat (working on that). I suppose if you didn't you could probably buy all of that for about $9. Maybe. If you had the time and place to cook. That also (because I do count calories and buy lowfat foods) all came to 1450 calories, which is a little less than a normal-sized woman my age and height should eat to get her entire day's worth of vitamin and mineral requirements.

I make considerably more than $14 a day. I can very comfortably afford to eat all of that and keep trim and keep money in my pocket. I can easily live within my means and still keep myself nutritionally stable.

The US Census defines a single individual (termed "unrelated individual") living below the poverty line as one who makes just over $10,500 a year. A family of four living below the poverty line makes only twice that, not four times that.

$10,500 a year works out to $28.76 a day over 365 days. So, my meals for an average day would take half of that person's salary if he or she lived here. If you financially slimmed down that menu to $9, it would still take about a third. So, little money left for housing, clothing, anything...

Yes, you can eat more cheaply in a metropolitan city such as this one. You can. The menu can be varied to some extent, but the basic truth is, living within your means when you have little in the way of means is extremely difficult. Let's not talk about the fact that, even if you are in dire financial straights, a single person who actually has a place to rent, will get no more than a maximum of $150 a month in food stamps--half what it would cost to buy all that food. And to get that maximum, you have to beg--because you don't feel like life is hard enough for you already!

Now, I get this information from the US Census and my state's department of human services. I cannot discuss living within your means in the vast areas of the world where people live on less than a dollar a day because I do not know how much things cost there. I couldn't even tell you what it costs to live in New York or LA or Denver. I only know here. And they say you should write what you know, so...

What I can say is that things like soup kitchens and food pantries and aid organizations do a lot more than just give a handout. If you work a minimum wage job (current federal minimum wage in the US is $6.55) for 40 hours a week, you make, after taxes, approximately $10,900.00. Imagine raising two kids and supporting a spouse (who has to be stay at home whether he or she wants to or not because you can't afford the $400.00 a month minimum daycare that one child costs, much less two) on a wage that means one day of 1450 calorie meals for one person eats up a third of your daily income. And remember that that doesn't include days you have to take off because you're sick (because you probably don't have paid days off) or days the company is closed (because you don't have paid holidays) or the days you're not slated to work because the company just can't employ you full time. And if you and your spouse can figure out a way for one of you to work nights and the other days so that the children are taken care of, does that really make things better? Yes, you'll get more food on the table and the chance to keep the table, but is that a marriage anymore if you never see each other?

Aid from social community-based nonprofits help preserve a little dignity and a lot of family--if the aid is available.

So here comes that part I was talking about in my last post where I say there are things you can do.

Educate yourself:

Read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. It's an interesting experiment of a woman, who normally makes quite a lot, taking off a year to work for minimum wage. (At least she can go back to her paying job and the royalties she makes off her books.)
Check out the US Census Household and Individual data by subject index--or your own country's census bureau website. It's full of very interesting and eye-opening information.

Use yourself:

Call your local church or look in the phone book for a community food pantry. Ask if they have soup kitchen days you can volunteer at. Ask if they have enough people to help keep the pantry stocked and organized. Ask if you can donate just a couple of hours a week--even less in some places is a help. My local church does a sandwich Sunday the third Sunday of every month, when people can come in between services and make bag lunches and give them out to the homeless and needy people who live around the area. It's a great way to do something to help change things, and it requires about an hour a week of your time.

Use your means:If you have money you can donate, there are tons of people who will help you get it to the right people.

Share Our Strength is a group devoted to helping feed underfed children in the United States. They even have some fun things like The Great American DineOut, which allows you to raise money for the charity simply by going out to a fine restaurant.
Friends of Man is a charity that is completely volunteer. 100% of the money you donate goes to people who need it to pay their rent or their medicine or their food. Grants are small and specific, so if you are one of those who believe that giving money to charities is bad because the money never makes it to the people who need it, this may be a good place for you to look.
There are tons of other groups who will take your money, of course, but I think a good way to spend that money is in your local community. Even the richest areas have homeless and poor people and people who are struggling to get by. Call your local social support groups, and I'm sure they'll help you figure out how you can help in your local area.

_____

Meanwhile, here's your human rights link for the day, brought to you by Amnesty International:

Struggling for Women's Rights in Somalia: A Q&A with Zam Zam Adbullahi, a human rights activist in Somalia, the capacity building officer for Coalition for Grassroots Women Organizations (COGWO), and the Chairperson of the Somali branch of the African network for prevention and Protection of child abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN).

There is no plan to change the world

2009-01-21T08:32:00.000-06:00

Sad, isn't it?

Because really, there should be.

There should be some sort of plan that involves creating more peace and less war; more jobs and less poverty; more opportunity and less despair; more health and less pain; more flowers and less smog. You know? A plan to change the world.

Well, since there's not, we'll all just have to wing it, huh? I figure I can try to do my part by cutting down on the things I do that hurt the economy, the environment, and the people around me. I can do my part by cutting down on the things I do that hurt me, too.

I can also talk about things that other people are doing--either to help or hurt. I can let my readers (if there ever are any *g*) know what they might be able to do to help.

Yes, yes, yesterday was the beginning of a new era. Barack Obama called us all to action and blah, blah, blah. Wonderful. Words have been said. And more will be said--including by me.

But maybe, just maybe, if we all do a few things, we can actually be that change we wish to see in the world, as Gandhi said. Maybe, even without a plan, we can change the world anyway--stumble into a better future by concentrating on what we can do to help ourselves and each other now.

My first goal this year has been fiscal responsibility. How much money do you really need to live comfortably? And what does living comfortably mean, anyway? This is what I will be talking about for a while. Until something shiny comes along, or I get tired of being virtuous, or I decide that I really can't live within my means. Don't laugh at that last comment. Lots of people in this world can't live within their means. They don't have the means.

More on that and a lot of other things later. For now, go read Barack Obama's Inaugural Address. It's full of rhetoric and powerful thoughts and hard truths. We're not the people we could be (and that goes for all people, not just Americans).

But we could be.

Peaceable Thingdom

Water, Water, Everywhere: $50 per gallon and up

Next Charging Station: 3000 Miles, or 300 Feet?

It's Tuesday--DO SOMETHING!

Stealing from His College Fund to Pay for His Future

Cats and the Environment I: The Litter Question

It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

40 Days of Mindfullness

Cleanliness is next to--*hackhack* *coughcoughcough*

How Green Is Your President?

It Was Tuesday Yesterday--DO SOMETHING!

Packaging and Logic: Irreconcilable Differences?

Because Really, What's Better than a Fuzzy Animal?

Not so crazy after all

Solar Power, Part I: "I'll call you from the sun"

It's Tuesday! DO SOMETHING!

Cleaning house--or office

The Culture of Planned Obsolescence

"I live on that high horse"

EXTRA EXTRA: Healthcare in the United States

Recycling made very difficult

Recycling made easier?

Why is this Mr. Capitalist's job?

Too Tired Not To Waste

Full Disclosure! Unless I think that's a bad idea.

Daydreaming Again

Can not eating the last cookie change the world?

A Change of Perspective

Be (at least some) of the change you wish to see

Mourning the Passing of the Berries

How Much Is Clean Worth?

Food and Movies! Two of my favorite things!

Local Food: "Yeah, I don't really have time to go to the farmer's market."

Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

What exactly is the cost of living?

There is no plan to change the world

Cleanliness is next to--hackhack coughcoughcough