Climate change Blog Action Day
Today is October 15th - international climate change blog action day. So far, more than 10,000 bloggers from around the world have signed up and agreed to put up a post about climate change. "Blog Action Day' is the top Google search for the day!
I also joined the No Impact Experiment, which starts Sunday. So this post is about what I have learned from my own No Impact attempts that is relevant to climate change.
The No Impact Experiment is a one-week undertaking that allows participants to focus on the areas covered by Colin Beavan and his family. They include buying (consumerism), trash, transportation, food, energy, and giving back to the community. The latter recognizes the need to combine efforts on personal habits with efforts at the community, or government level.
Just to spell out the connections to climate change, here's the list of areas covered by the No Impact Experiment:
1. Buying/not buying - obviously it takes energy to mine, manufacture and transport "stuff"
2. Trash - generates greenhouse gases sitting in landfills
3. Transportation - you know
4. Food - takes energy to grow, transport, process, display, drive home, store and prepare.
5. Energy - all the electric doo-dads we have grown accustomed to. Who remembers cameras, can openers, egg beaters, telephones, kids' toys, staplers, pencil sharpeners, etc... that ran on little or no electricity? Can we make music without electricity? Can we resist turning books into something we need electricity to read?
6. Water - remember that municipal water uses a ton of electricity just to get pumped to your house. This typically comes from coal.
7. Get involved volunteering in the community - individual action is not sufficient.
Here are my thoughts on what I learned about my family:
BUYING/NOT BUYING
When I tried to avoid buying anything I do not absolutely need, I confirmed that I use shopping as "therapy", in my case as external incentive for putting up with the stuff I put up with. Two (and more) problems here: one of course, is trashing the planet, as I clearly don't NEED some of the stuff I buy. The other, though, is that at the end of the day, I am pacified enough that I don't have the motivation to change what was bothering me in the first place. You know, "dealing with stress" as opposed to making the changes necessary to decrease the stress.
I also I saved 40% of my usual credit card charges. Amazing...
The other thing I noticed is that my kids, though deprived of television, GameBoys, Nintendo, Playstation etc... have nevertheless adopted the habit of trying to make themselves feel better by buying things. This is both a source of motivation for me (I can't stand it) and a roadblock - it's hard to say no to them all the time. It does help with my resolve to never get a TV, though - they are so perfectly capable of being brainwashed even without one!
CUTTING BACK ON TRASH
This turns out to be horrendously difficult for me. I would have to do a lot less stuff, just to get organized to waste a lot less packaging. It involves fabric bags, having snacks with me so we have no excuse to buy food and drinks, making tea from local herbs (lemon balm, mint, chamomille - there's a ton of stuff you can use, if you know where to grow it and how to dry it for winter). It also involves changing habits: can't eat meat if you don't buy packaged foods. You essentially can't eat anything that's not in the bulk bins, or loose at the farmers' market (or grocery store). But you also can't eat honey, oil, most cheese, etc... You would have to grind your own flour, make your own crackers... Daunting!
DRIVING
Evidently, 30% of morning traffic involves parents driving their kids to school. I am one of these parents. It would clearly take a lot longer to take two buses. Biking is possible, but winter is coming, spring was wet, etc, etc... Changing schools is something that stresses kids and would deprive me of whatever community I've built at my present school (we're finally putting in a vegetable garden!). The best I can do right now is recommend others do not pick a remote school location, however appealing. I can also park the car at school and bike home, or do the second trip on public transportation, and I am dragging my feet with this. This is mainly because I have organized all my errands and appointments around drop-off and pick-up time, and because I can't wait to be home to blog about preventing climate change (oops, conflict here...)
LOCAL FOOD
Now, this is relatively easy for me because I have been doing it for two years already. It is not exclusive, but I know where to get just about everything I need, and I have systems in place for preserving the harvest. Clearly the majority of our food is local, and almost everything I personally eat, except for coffee, oil, butter and chocolate. In addition to this, other family members eat bread, pasta, baked goods, breaded chicken, and peanut butter.
The fact that this feels easy after just two years makes me hopeful that habits can be changed in time. All we need to do is continue the momentum that has grown the local food movement. One interesting resource I found on the No Impact Experiment handbook is the local economy project of the Center for a New American Dream. Read the methodology they used. This is another movement gaining steam. Here in Boulder we have Boulder Independent Business Alliance. Nationwide, there is the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. The trick is to be clear on our goals (clean air, social justice, peace, climate stability) and then vote with our wallets.
ENERGY
I guess I like numbers! I got a big boost from XCel Energy's website, calculating my energy use, and finding I was using less than half as much energy as similar neighborhood households. I got the same result at http://www.riot4austerity.org.
In particular, concerning my electricity use, I found that I was making serious headway reducing use. Here's what worked really well:
1. Living without A/C (love those cool foothills nights)
2. Turning off the whole house humidifier - the occupants (and bamboo floors) never noticed the difference
3. Getting an energy audit - lots of good tips
4. Turning down the thermostat 2 degrees every year (It was at 65, it's now 58-60)
5. Turning off the fan on the furnace. It was supposed to help re-distribute the air in the house, so some floors are not colder than others. The effect is not noticeable. The savings are significant.
We now use 1/3 the electricity we were using 5 years ago. It turns out that your gas-powered furnace needs electricity to turn itself on and off. You save double when turn down the thermostat - both on natural gas, and on electricity. I'm home most of the day, so I truly spend all winter at 60 degrees (less at night).
By the way, it is a good idea to pay for renewable energy - wind, unless you are about to install solar panels - but remember that we don't have anywhere near enough wind capacity to cover all our needs. What we need is massive conservation, PLUS switching the rest to renewables.
WATER
As up to half typically goes to outdoor uses, I have focused my attention here. For many of us, it's a simple matter to redirect gutters to planting areas, or even bury a hose leading from the gutter into the garden. I know, "collecting water" is essentially illegal in Colorado (even with the recent change in the law), but burying the hose leading from the gutter does not constitute "collecting". Only a rain barrel would. And even then, it's not likely you would be reported to the authorities. Add compost, mulch and maybe even drought-tolerant plants, and you can water once or twice a week at most (drip), and still grow whatever you like. If you have a water-wise landscape, you can cut that back to once a month in the summer. Beware of rock-only landscapes: they may require herbicides to look tidy. Our HOA is looking into mandating water-wise landscapes, if only to save on sprinkler maintenance.
Indoor water use: for family with little kids: they don't need a daily bath. They won't get sick, or get parasites. They don't smell funny like we adults do. Mine now use the bath to relax or play a few times per month (whether they need it or not).
VOLUNTEER
In my situation, there is very little time for the typical evenings and weekends-based activism. The web has turned out to be great for me because I like to write. I also consider all my local food efforts as community service. I don't hesitate to send grateful emails to anyone who works hard against climate change, pollution, etc... and who works for local food and Transition. There is a lot everyone can do to get this movement off the ground and soaring into the mainstream.
For today, look up the local non-food items section for my latest love - yarn from Cure Organic Farm.
Myrto Ashe
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
Lots to think about here.
For my family, I have managed to reduce trash and recycling by cooking local food all the time. With the addition of local raw milk, and some simple cheese-making skills, I've weaned my family off commercial milk, cheese and yogurt. All of these usually come in either recyclable or non-recyclable containers and now we wash jars in the dishwasher (which I pack as tightly as possible to conserve on water). That said, I must commit to making cheese weekly and generally wind up doing it on Tuesday as our milk comes in on Sunday. I pressure-cook beans usually weekly and have either dried or frozen tomatoes for sauce for the next year. Of course I also wind up making the sauce. If I had the energy I would make sourdough bread every other day. Generally it's once every week or two. I've made hopefully enough jams and jellies to last the year. I cut down on plastic bags in the bulk section of the market, by taking my own quart sized mason jars and the jar funnels to match. Whole Foods allows this, but not Safeway.
One thing I noticed when I made the above changes, was considerably less recycling to put out at the curb. My family has also gotten much less picky, and really appreciates the food, although I can't get my mom to eat goat cheese (maybe if I salt it to death...)
Regarding water use also, I have been on a campaign to add organic matter to the soil in our garden. This should reduce our use outside. For our family of five (four adults and one teen) we are well under the water allowance from the city, but of course we keep reaching..) We can't reduce the number of showers a week for our teenager because his acne takes off and he gets smelly if he doesn't shower daily. I actually had to increase his shower rate, but reduced my frequency to compensate. We also re-wear our clothes as much as is socially acceptable. Who says we should wear our clothes once and then wash them? Some things (such as my garden clothes) can just get dirty and stay that way for a while. Of course underwear is an exception, and anything nice as well.
I wish that we could send our youngest child to his neighborhood school on his bicycle. In the case of children with "special education" needs, even if the family moves to close proximity to a suitable school, they can find themselves needing a different type of educational placement and travel becomes part of the schedule. We do well though actually, because my husband rides his bike to work and my oldest son takes the bus to the university. When the weather is good I can ride my bike to many places, and if I go to the market I can hitch my bike trailer up so I can haul home what I buy. My energy levels get in the way of this (for instance, it's a long way from my house to the Farmer's Market downtown).
We had an energy audit and have a list of things to do. As soon as I'm done getting the garden ready for winter, I start working on that. A couple years ago I went around and sealed up our floor registers. It was amazing how many we have, how poorly installed many of them were and how much cold air leakage we had through those registers. This winter I want to make "Warm Window shades" for windows that give us the most bang for our buck so to speak. For example, my mom has a lovely bedroom in our finished basement, but she is very sedentary and gets cold, so sealing up her windows with insulated shades would hopefully allow us to reduce the amount we run our furnace.
Making consideration for the health and age of occupants of homes is important- the healthier you are (and younger I guess), the less heat you need in your living space in the winter. Actually one place to look at getting energy audits and retrofits done would have to be nursing homes and skilled nursing facilities. Those spaces are kept very warm in the winter to protect the health of the fragile elderly. Certainly doing energy upgrades to such facilities, particularly those accepting Medicare patients, would also reduce the cost of care borne ultimately by taxpayers.
Cure Farm fleece and yarn is great because it makes use of a resource generally overlooked. Cure Farm's sheep have been kept as meat animals and not strictly speaking, as a "spinner's flock". As the Cure Family gains experience and knowledge regarding the nutrition and care of sheep for the benefit of the fiber they provide, the quality of the fiber will improve. Meanwhile the sheep give fleece that is just as soft and we can find uses for it and enjoy it!