delighted by Pandora.com

I'm not supposed to listen to streaming audio at work, but sometimes at the end of the day after everyone's gone, I just can't help but pull up Pandora.com... and today, Ben Folds' "All U Can Eat" came up on the playlist.

I thought you guys might like to check it out :)
You can get it through iTunes or order it online at attackedbyplastic.com.

The album, supersunnyspeedgraphic, the lp, was recorded in Nashville :)

pop-culture saturation

Do you ever have the experience of never having heard of a topic/person/object before, and then suddenly you hear about it several times in the span of a few days?

Well, I feel like mainstream America is having that experience right now.
The media - both news and pop TV - is saturated with green topics right now!

It's sort of making my head spin; every channel I flip to and every news site I bring up has something about it. This is kind of cool - integrating these kinds of thoughts into the mainstream consciousness will definitely make it easier for the green culture to integrate into the mainstream, which is what has to happen if we are going to affect change.

Some of it irritates me - America's Next Top Model recently did an episode where the girls do an ad for recycling and the girls are living in a "green mansion," but how could it be green when there's tracklighting that's always on and it's housing a bunch of people who only exist to sell us stuff we don't need? - but I digress... some of what's out there is surprising!

The CW website does have a section about being green - they're talking a big game, at least.

The storyline of Fox's Bones last week was about an organic grocer who was murdered and the body hidden in a big compost heap - not the most appetizing of topics, true, but there was a lot of discussion by the characters about organic farming, etc. even though the episode was classic, gooey-gross Bones.

I'm also interested to check out Extreme Makeover Home Edition's episode tomorrow - it's going to Arizona to build a green house on an Indian reservation. Usually, the show is too sappy for me, but I'll have it on in the background so i can hear what sort of green stuff they've done.

And just in case you thought the topic of this blog was original, I just found an entry on TreeHugger about ANTM's "green" tint, and there's a great discussion in the comments.

Anyhow, it's just been on my mind lately about how omnipresent the topic is. Hopefully this will help us to develop good habits... like i was saying in the last post, if we can make being green a subconscious habit rather than something we have to constantly remember to do, maybe we can be successful at it!

Taking the bad with the good, part 1: CFL bulbs

A happy Friday to you all! I hope that, wherever you are, you/those you love/your things are not on fire. I've been watching the news and feeling very doomy and gloomy, but I heard this morning that a very sweet quilt shop out there is doing just fine.

Anyhow, today's post will try not to be as big-picture and pseudo-philosophical as the last few.

My consumer habits are, to say the least, less than perfect. Now, I haven't gone into Wal-Mart for over a month now, which I'm very proud of. I don't want to give them any more of my money. But still, I buy pre-packaged foods (oh, frozen Kashi meals, why do you have to be so good?) and I buy non-local foods and i get my cleaning supplies & vitamins shipped USPS ground from Melaleuca.

But, there are some green-alternative choices that I've been preoccupied with lately.

I bought some CFL bulbs to replace burnt-out filament bulbs in my condo. There are a few lights that I leave on pretty much all the time - the laundry room, where the dogs' stuff is (the vet confirmed that leaving lights on for them will help, given that they both have really bad cataracts), and my closet, which has an automatic doorframe switch that drives me crazy because the door doesn't latch well and therefore constantly pops open, leaving the light on. I also put one in the shower part of the bathroom. I don't want the dogs constantly running head-first into the washer/dryer (they do enough running into things as it is), and I'm not really doing a lot of small-print-reading in the shower or closet, so I thought that some low-watt CFLs would be a good swap for those places.

A while back, my dad put CFLs in all of their out-door lights and in their closets, and I HATED them. The light emitted really messed with my eyes. German Chancellor Angela Merkel complained about them, too (in case my opinion isn't quite enough - see paragraph 4). But those places don't really require much focus for me, so I gave it a go.

Thus far, it's working out well enough. The light means that I don't run into things. And the ones that I bought aren't the same as the ones that dad used, so they're growing on me.

However, and it's a big however, right after I bought the bulbs, I read on Slate.com about Wal-Mart pushing to sell fluorescent light bulbs.

CFLs appear destined to become a consumer staple, either because hordes of people realize they're cheaper or because the alternative will be prohibited... Thus far, green goods have been pitched to the top: expensive Priuses for guilty yuppies, solar installations for rich techies. But to have real impact, energy-efficiency products need to make economic sense to those who congregate on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

That's awesome, I thought. It's good to hear that the green thing is making its way down to us normal people. I mean, just because I want to have a solar panel doesn't mean I can afford to get it. I pretty much put all my eggs in the basket that is my Prius. Maybe Adam Werbach is slowly-but-surely making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

But here's the kicker - those CFL bulbs shouldn't be thrown away in your normal garbage (thanks, NoImpactMan, for noting this!). The EPA isn't very helpful in explaining this to Joe Schmo on the street, but you can find info from them here. The EnergyStar website doesn't mention this until the very end of their page about the bulbs. CFLs are considered Household Hazardous Waste. Davidson County has a recycling facility off of Trinity Lane...

It seems like an awful lot of effort to exert when I thought initially that I was doing something good for the environment. I am willing to make that effort, but I wonder how many other people will also be willing? It's the same sort of thing as the beverage companies not wanting to be responsible for all of the empty plastic bottles that end up out there (see my post on Keep America Beautiful). NoImpactMan's solution is a pretty good one (see the end of his post about it), I think, but I'm skeptical and cynical enough to think that it won't happen without a fight.

All of this new technology is good, but if its side-effects are going to be polluting just as much if not more than the old technology that it replaced, we're just succeeding in fooling ourselves that we're going something good.

This all goes back to my main goal - think about what I choose to buy and do. I'd love to hear from y'all how you discipline yourself so that you do remember to be thoughtful. It's kind of and endless loop for me, so I've had to try and make it a habit, so that I don't have to consciously remember.

In my next post, I'll be talking about my Prius and it's battery - definitely another one of those, mixed-blessing, lesser-of-two-evils choices in my life.

Sincere apologies for the 3-week hiatus!

A lot has gone on in my greening little world in the past three weeks, chickadees!

First, Vanderbilt Homecoming on Oct. 13, wherein we suffered a devastating loss to UGA (yes, Vandy did lose, but there are many of us in Commodore Nation who are loathe to say that UGA won...). The loss, I am sad to say, depressed me for longer than just the weekend.

BUT - I was lifted from my depths of despair by GreenerNashville.org.
I'm entering into a partnership with them! This blog will be moving to their site eventually (I'm not sure about the timeframe, but I will certainly keep y'all updated).

This is so incredibly exciting, I can barely contain myself.
See, way-back-when (ha. ha. 7 weeks ago... can you see the computer screen shimmy like a bad Saved-By-The-Bell flashback?), when I said

When I started looking for resources to help me, I didn't find much. Either I'm not looking in the right places or there's just nothing there... but I hope that this blog will ultimately provide a resource for anyone wishing to get a little greener here in Music City.

I hadn't found GreenerNashville.org! So when they contacted me, you can imagine how thrilled I was. People who were already set up to do what I had hoped to do with livegreennashville.com! And - despite my tendency to go very lizard-brainy on someone who beats me to a punch - I wasn't at all jealous. Here's the thing - GreenerNashville and I were made for each other. I hadn't found them in my googling because they don't have much text content, so their SIO was low and I never dug deep enough to find them. Now, hopefully, my rambling little writings can help them - and being over there, more readers will find me. What a grand way to feed my own ego while being a part of something utterly cool!

I feel hip! I feel groovy! And I am exceptionally excited to embark upon a real writing gig once again.

So, my charge to you, my few-and-faithful readers - tell people about GreenerNashville.org. In a very perfect world, I will be popular enough to garner some advertising dollars so that I can.... shhhhhhh... afford to be a writer.

Anyway, that's the long and short of why I was gone for so long. I was talking with Moses and Anthony over at GreenerNashville, and I was plotting the next year of this blog. I suddenly have so much to share with y'all, I don't know what thread of thought to pick up first. I'm going to try to lay a groundwork of ideas to start from so that I'm not throwing too much at y'all at once - check out my first post about the Tragedy of the Commons, and my previous post about Economies of Scope vs. Economies of Scale. They are, admittedly, some heavy, very "macro" ideas, but I wanted to throw them out there so that I can build off of them from here. I feel like, right now, my three very philosophical cuds to chew are the latter two, as well as what I'll be writing about in my next post - Stockholders vs. Stakeholders and why I'm excited about the idea of a B-Corporation.

So, I'll be back this Friday, October 26. I can't wait!

Stakeholder vs. Stockholder - why I'm enamoured with the idea of a B-corporation

Here, at last, is the third corner on the Triumvirate of Why I Keep Leaning Toward Being Green... okay, I'm not fooling anyone, that slogan's never going to catch on, but it did have some nice alliteration and I really like the word triumvirate... anyway, the point is that I keep thinking about the tension between Stockholders and Stakeholders.

I started thinking about this idea because back in May of this year, I heard a story on APM's Marketplace about B Corporations. This guy, Jay Cohen Gilbert, and his non-profit B-Lab, started a movement called B (standing for "Benefit") Corporations. The idea behind setting up a company as a B Corporation is that the corporate governing documents set it up from the outset so that the business is "purpose-driven and create benefit for all stakeholders, not just shareholders." Back in May, their site was only their logo, but now they've got a full site up and running - check it out for the nitty-gritty details.

When I heard this story, I got to thinking about stakeholders. I'm a stakeholder in a whole slew of things in which I'm not directly financially invested. For instance, I have a big interest in the way The Big Giant Evil Corporation for which I work runs things on a macro and micro scale, but i don't own a big chunk of stock in it so my opinions don't count for much if at all. BGEC is accountable to the people who hold the purse-strings, stockholders who are expecting it to grow their investment. But even though I don't have a big money-covered dog in the fight, I do have my scrappy little this-is-8-hours-of-my-day-and-my-mortgage payment dog in the fight. The thing is, public corporations traditionally don't let that scrappy little one in the ring.

But B Corporations do. The governing documents set the corporation up to survive the marketplace and still do good things for stakeholders - employees big and small, employees' families, the environment, the community, etc., etc.

Sure, you can start out with good intentions and a small little company, running it exactly how you'd like - like how it started here - but then when you're "successful," and BGEC buys you (because everyone has their price), things can change rapidly. Suddenly, instead of being a company that actually cares about an employees's well-being, that thinks about how to make the best partnership possible between employee and employer, it is a BGEC - it's a Wal-Mart or a ConAgra. It's best for the bottom line if the employee is faceless. It looks the best on paper when costs are displaced. Outsource to China, where you only pay $3 a day; cut your ingredients with melamine; use rBGH to make your cows keep making milk. You make your stockholders a whole ton of money, but you make the Chinese factory workers lie to keep their jobs, you make a bunch of well-loved pets ill or dead, you make a bunch of cows do something their bodies aren't supposed to do... and you make consumers complicit in these choices.

So all of these stakeholders - factory workers halfway around the world, pets, cows, the groundwater, consumers, anyone who breathes, kids who are still developing their brains, family farms, government entitlement programs, your body's hormone balance - they are all affected. But that doesn't show up in the BGEC's bottom-line dollar-amount. We're back to the problem of the tragedy of the commons - there's no one owner of the oceans, of the air... so it's not in anyone's dollar-amount interest to steward it.

Phew.

That was pretty intense. Like re-living "SuperSize Me," "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," and "Fat Land" all at once!

What I mean by bringing up all of that - and there are plenty of instances of "big bag business" picking on the "little innocent guy" - is not to bad-mouth big business. I really think that people who have great ideas and a super-natural workethic (Sam Walton, for instance) should be rewarded with financial success. Financial success allows a person to have more choices - and, I think that that's the carrot I'm chasing - the ability to choose how I spend my days. The more financially success I achieve, the more I have the luxury of choosing from a wider variety of ways to spend my time on earth.

But I don't want my choices to take away choice from someone else!

We're back again to my central goal in trying to "be green" - to try to not be so greedy. I would like to think that society has evolved beyond an animalistic scramble for amassing resources. Yes, resources are limited. But they are abundant, too! If we make respectful, thoughtful choices, lots of people can share in them and be sustained by them!

Yeah, these are all grandiose ideas. I feel silly, sometimes, thinking about them. But my ultimate goal is to be a happy soul on this planet, and I think that thinking about my choices can increase my chances of being happy. So here we are, faithful readers. I've got a lot of different choices to think about, so you'll be hearing a lot more from me. I hope I'll be hearing from you!

Economy of Scale vs. Economy of Scope

Now, I am not an economics-savvy person - I never even took Econ 101 as an undergrad (a fact I am sorely regretting, to the point of contemplating buying a textbook or auditing a class).

However, one of the points that was brought up in that Oil and Water Use class way-back-when was the idea of Economies of Scale vs. Economies of Scope. (links are to Wikipedia, which I only found mildly helpful, but a decent intro nonetheless. This article might be useful, too.)

The Scale vs. Scope thing has really been in my head lately in general; it's a big reason why I want to buy local and one of the business-related ideas that preoccupies a lot of my brain cells.

Anyway, the best way I can explain Scale vs. Scope as it matters to me is this:
An economy of scale principle means that the bigger the number of widgets your produce, the lower the cost of producing one individual widget. Because you would already have a widget factory built, you could buy more supplies at once (perhaps allowing you to negotiate the price of those supplies lower), and you could run the factory for longer each day, using a resource you already have to produce more widgets. It's kind of the idea behind buying in bulk as Sam's Club.

However, there are inherent problems when operating on the idea of more-is-cheaper. There's the obvious problem of the gallon of mayo going bad before you can use it all - the price-per-ounce actually goes up but that cost is masked by your initial thought process in the purchase. I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode "The Rye," where Kramer goes to Costco and feeds the horse Beef-a-Reeno.

Like from the rear of that horse, there's a more insidious problem that emerges. When we try to drive down prices using the Scale concept, we often don't take into account the actual cost. The dollar amount of producing one widget may go down, but there are other tangential costs that don't appear in that lovely little price-per-widget spreadsheet. For instance, what is the impact on the environment of more widgets being produced? Are we also creating more carbon emissions along with those widgets? What is the impact as opposed to the dollar amount?

Now, an Economy of Scale isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do see the benefits of it on paper not really reflected in real life. In trying to drive that dollar number down by making things bigger, we can end up really displacing that cost into other areas, like worker quality of life or environmental impact.

This is where my take on Economy of Scope comes in. Wikipedia's explanation of it is interesting, but I'm thinking in bigger terms, here. I'm thinking cost as opposed to price. Operating under the Scope idea, we would take into account ways to reduce the cost of things by trying to have an overall positive impact. We wouldn't displace the cost so that our dollar amount looks good on paper but someone else, somewhere else is actually paying the cost.

This is a big reason why I'm making an effort to "go green" or "reduce my carbon footprint" ... however you want to phrase it, I don't want to be pushing the cost of my life off on someone else, just so that the price of my life is low.

Walking in Green Hills

Anyone who's ever met me knows I'm not a big walker... when I was a kid, I hated walking to the bus stop before school - I hated walking to class in college - and I hated it last month when I went to a friend's place in East Nashville and we walked from his house to the bars.

My dislike does not stem from a dislike of exercise - I actually love walking for exercise, love taking the dogs for walks, love taking an aimless walk around the neighborhood. When I visit AblePonder down in Mississippi, one of my favorite activities is walking with her and the dogs! Rather, it stems from the fact that I hate to get sweaty when I'm not supposed to be sweaty, and I inevitably sweat when I walk, ruining makeup, clothes and comfort for longer than the duration of the walk.

I said all of that to say: a walkable living area has not been on my list of priorities... until now.

I had the luck to work from home two days this past week (it was mixed luck, to be sure, but luck nonetheless), and I took advantage of that by taking a couple of breaks to go for walks. I'm not sure how good the walks were for my lungs (this city air is dirty!), but they were good for my mood overall, not to mention my pocket, what with the gas I didn't use driving in to the office!

It was not the first time I've walked in my neighborhood, but it was the first time it really hit home how completely UN-walkable it is. Not only are there spotty sidewalks (on the wrong side of the street for me on Hillsboro, and very few along the small side streets), but the shoulders are really skinny and non-existent in some places.

This is not to say there aren't people jogging, biking and taking dogs for walks - but I'll bet it's stopping many more from doing so. I also have adopted a new dog, Madeline, who has much more energy than my geriatric pup Georgia (she's 14!), and I'd like to take her for walks. Luckily, I'm right across from the park, so we can go there. But really, I'd like to feel I'm getting somewhere - and sometimes, I'd like to actually get somewhere - like a coffee shop, the grocery, the pharmacy, the post office, kinko's...

When i lived in Hillsboro Village, the walkability of the neighborhood was really wonderful - restaurants, bars, a grocery, coffee were all within a quick walk and really invited an outdoor community.

Now, in Green Hills, the residential/commercial mix ought to be walkable, but the lack of sidewalks discourages this. Still, on Thursday morning, I balance-beam-walked my way along the side of Graybar Lane and Hillsboro Pike down to Starbucks to have them fill my mug with coffee. Then, I walked over to the park in the afternoon with Madeline. And it felt so good!

So I've been thinking about an ideal, walkable Green Hills. Obviously, it's something that is seen as profitable - case-in-point is the expansion of The Mall at Green Hills. Down by the new California Pizza Kitchen is the Hill Center - and it is an outdoor, walkable shopping center. I'm looking forward to going down there to check it out. So - if it is profitable, couldn't local businesses be persuaded to help defray the costs of sidewalks (I'm thinking of Pier 1 imports there at the intersection of Glen Echo and Hillsboro)?

Those two days working from home have encouraged me to venture out of my house de pie more often... I'll try to venture away from my favorite street, Boensch, and perhaps I'll put on some sturdy shoes to better navigate those skinny, steep road shoulders. Still, though, until utopia descends and lays sidewalks or wide shoulders and makes me a less sweaty person, my walks are going to be challenges - which isn't a bad thing to add into the mix, after all.