40 Days of Mindfullness

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?

The Culture of Planned Obsolescence

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"

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?

Why is this Mr. Capitalist's job?

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.

Can not eating the last cookie change the world?

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?

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

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!

How Much Is Clean Worth?

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*

Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

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!

There is no plan to change the world

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.