New Year's Resolution - stop whining and start acting

I'm pretty sure that, with my hamburger-part-2 post, I hit rock bottom.

I was pretty depressed about price versus cost.
Probably, this depression came from the fact i was eating crap (read: free crap).
I feel SO MUCH BETTER when i eat fruit for breakfast and spinach salads for dinner!

Anyway, just about the time I hit "publish" on that post, I started reading Going Green: "A Step-A-Day Program for Lazy Suburbanites". It's a blog by a mom who is making one change a day toward going green.

WOW. She is so positive, ambitious, creative, and driven! One change a day! Reading through all of her past posts, I have decided to get busy doin' instead of being busy whining.

Thanks to an awesome Christmas present from my brother, a "Living Green" page-a-day calendar, I think I'll have an easier time of keeping perspective on all of this.

After all, I already do some pretty green stuff without really thinking about it... so perk up, D!

- I don't use paper towels anymore (still using toilet paper, though... there are some people who are much braver than I am!)
- I don't run the water hardly at all when i brush my teeth
- The heat hasn't been on all winter, and I've used the fireplace like 3 times.
- I'm not showering and/or washing my hair as much. I find that, when I'm doing *nothing* but sitting all day (i.e. not going out for dinner with friends or going to a meeting during lunch), I don't need to shower every day. My day job really is conducive to not showering as often, so if all I'm doing in a day is going to work and back, i can shower every other day. Washing my hair every other day has become so much of a habit that I forgot to wash my hair the other morning on an "on" day! It didn't make too much of a difference, really, so i might need to re-evaluate the every-other-day thing.

Stuff I still consciously think about:

- Recycling. Some days, I just want to throw stuff "away". Since I'm in the middle of a giant house purge (moving soon, maybe?), I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff, and it's very tempting to just throw it in the trash. The sheer volume is overwhelming. I have been able to set some stuff aside for eBay, and recycle some parts of things (cereal boxes, for example) - other stuff (damn those envelopes with plastic windows!) seems like it takes too much mental energy to figure out if it can be recycled.
- Turning off lights. I have to consciously make myself turn off lights, because I'm so lazy I'd really rather not - so it's still not a habit. But I'm getting there!
- The dogs' mess. The topic of Georgia being on reusable puppy pads deserves a post of its own - but suffice to say that, though I've got it set up so that cleaning up after the dogs is relatively green, there are still parts of it that are hard. When we travel, Georgia uses reusable pads and I use paper towels to clean up messes. When I give them baths, I use too much water. The Green Pets Initiative is still a work in progress! More on that later.
- Treating my car gently. It really requires presence of mind to maximize my use of the Prius. Easing up on acceleration, turning it off when i run inside somewhere, driving at 60 on the highway instead of 75, using the windows instead of the a/c - all of this really takes concentration for me.
- Buying stuff. Christmas had me thinking about how much stuff I and my family buy. It's really quite staggering. Even with my recent reductions, we're still going through SO MUCH STUFF - which creates trash, of course. I did some reading over the past week about "green" Christmas presents - buying handmade, giving sustainable gifts (events or services rather than things), and one of the items I stumbled on (I can't find it now) was about how one woman asked for things like having a family member take one less shower a week - this was a gift to her because it not only helped her in her pursuit of being greener, but it also meant that if she wanted to take a longer shower every once in a while, she could rest easy knowing that someone else was using less water so she could enjoy that luxury.

So, moving forward into 2008, I'm very optimistic. I don't expect to ever fully change my stripes (my packrat tendencies are primal, somehow), but developing new habits is good practice for life as well as "living green". The page-a-day calendar will help me stay focused on my desire to develop good habits, which is what I hope 2008 will be about.

Last minute Christmas shopping & buying local

So, I'm not really doing the whole christmas-gifts-for-everyone-and-their-brothers thing this year, but I have had a little bit of holiday shopping to do, and I've found several awesome local products.

First of all, Nashville Toffee Company offers up a seriously yummy option. They were offering samples at Whole Foods the other day, and I was back the next day to buy a box for a gift exchange with my sorority "family." It's perfect for anything, really - a white elephant swap, family far away, coworkers, anyone (unless, like my friend Julie, you're allergic to caffeine - the chocolate bark on the kind I bought kept her from partaking).

And I MUST plug Hillsboro Chocolate Company, a shop opened by one of my DG sisters, Mandy Strickland, and her family. Get thee down there and check out their offerings! I am going to head down there during lunch today (hopefully) to see what they have and take home some goodies to the fam.

For my corporate gifts this year (which won't go out until after Christmas, I'm afraid... things are just too crazy), I'm getting bottles of Arrington Vineyards' Raspberry wine (goes perfectly with the BIPI logo!). Every wine I've tried from down there is a winner - the Gewurztraminer is my favorite, but I also like the Desert Rose. And even if you don't drink, you should head down to the winery to see the place - it's so gorgeous down there!

For Christmas, mom wants to make cookies, so I went to Whole Foods to grab some flour, and found two things that I'm excited about trying out. First, there's a spice company in Chattanooga called Alchemy Spice, and they had a sweet spice cinnamon blend that i want to try out on some snickerdoodles. Also, there is some jelly from Honeyberry Farm in Knoxville... I got the orange date nut honey jelly (for thumbprint cookies).

Okay, I realize that I just listed all food stuff!

If you're interested in something you can't eat but is still yummy, head out to East Nashville to Art & Invention Gallery. There are pieces for every budget and person on your list, from jewelery to pottery to oil paintings. My favorite piece, though, was a lazy susan that was painted to look like a big slice of lime. It's definitely worth a trip out there.

Well, this is all you'll hear from me until next week - I'm not working tomorrow morning, so no posts for you ;)

Have a green (and hopefully a little bit white) Christmas!

This year's christmas cards

For the past two years, I've made Christmas cards instead of buying them... generally I like doing it until it comes to the assembly-line stuff (cutting out 400 little squares and putting glitter on them; stamping 180 martini glasses and coloring them in...), but at that point I'm always caught by the sunk cost dilemma... although in the end I am happy that I did the project, so I guess that finishing them is always better than abandoning them...

It's a bizarre characteristic of mine that I enjoy the end result more than the project itself (mom always enjoys the process more), but this year I think I might have found a card project that I do enjoy in addition to the resultant card.

Previously, I've stolen paper from mom's ridiculous stash, but this year, after staring at the racks of paper at Michael's for a long while and not finding anything that flipped my skirt up, I decided I'm going to use all the magazines that are in my recycling bin and old paper grocery bags.

I'm doing a tea-bag folded starburst out of the magazine pages, and then using the grocery bags for the cards & envelopes themselves. The tea-bag folding should be an easy, portable and very soothing project that i can carry around with me and pull out at any time, so maybe this year's card will come with the added bonus of no assembly-line stress.

I feel like I'm going to look a little ridiculous with my hippie, I'm-recycling-for-Christmas cards, but i think that they'll turn out sort of cool anyway, and lately I'm embracing my ridiculousness, so we'll see how this year's batch turns out. I'll definitely post a pic of the finished piece, but for now, you can see my prototype. I used a corporate gifts magazine that was selling petit fours - you can see the little cake layers and the chocolate decorations.

Another Prius post

Part of the reason I saddled myself with debt to have my Prius was because of the impact I hoped my purchase could have on the development of technologies to further our independence from petroleum fuels.

What I didn't consider, really, was what a large part the 'image' of having a Prius would play in this. Now, I am confident in the fact that my 'image' played no part in the initial purchase - I don't care much either way about how it looks, how I look in it, or what people think of me being an owner... not only that, but the mere fact of getting a new car causes me a bit of embarrassment (because I really cannot afford it, therefore calling my decision-making abilities into question?). There was a Slate article a while back that talked about yuppies buying Prii because they wanted to look socially responsible...

According to a marketing survey [in a New York Times article]... more buyers bought the Prius this year because it "makes a statement about me" (57 percent) than because of its better gas mileage (36 percent) or lower carbon dioxide emissions (25 percent) or new technology (7 percent).

Well, that wasn't me. I don't care what people think about me, I just care that they think.

One of the coolest parts of having it (aside from the mpgs) has been talking about it! When people find out I have a Prius, or see me with it, they ask questions, and I get to explain why I have it (and then plug my blog, heehee).

UC Davis did a study on the effects of image on ownership of HEVs - how cool is that? (thanks, NoImpactMan!) It's about the benefits of owning an HEV that aren't actually benefits of the vehicle, but of what it means to own one. (note a nifty new acronym - HEVs, 'hybrid electric vehicles')

Check this out:

HEVs served as communication mechanisms in all households, either by projecting their images or by stimulating owner evangelism. In addition, for a handful of participants, the symbolic benefits of their HEVs were significant enough to justify substantial functional compromises.

Even when I feel shy about talking about how I think we should all recycle, even a little bit, or we should stop buying so much crap (and I do get shy), I'm totally cool with talking to people about why I think they should buy an HEV. What a funny way to become comfortable with acting 'evangelical'!

Warren Wilson's new environmental curriculum

You all know that I'm a Vandy grad (yes, yes, boo-hiss, where's my trust fund...), but before I fell into the VandyBubble, I was considering going to a small private school in North Carolina - Warren Wilson.

My parents went there and loved it. Sometimes, like when I'm in bumper-to-bumper traffic headed home from work, or when the sky is matte purple and not deep blue with stars because of all the sodium lights in the city, or when I think about what a lazy-butt I am, I wish I'd gone there too.

Warren Wilson is, period, end of story, AWESOME. Their little tagline says it all: "We're not for everyone... but then, maybe you're not everyone." Not only do you go to class, but you spend 15 hours a week on a work crew, and you do 100 hours of service over your 4 years there. It's in the middle of the Appalachian mountains in NC and it is so beautiful it will make you cry.

Obviously, it's a pretty hippy, granola, green place to be anyway, but they're worth mention here and now because, in October, they were awarded a $193,265 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations develop an environmental curriculum, Advancing Environmental Literacy.

Using the concept of "full cost accounting," the Advancing Environmental Literacy project will provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary study of the broad implications of critical environmental concerns. The goal is to better understand issues within a framework of sustainability - a "full cost accounting" that considers the environmental, economic and social/cultural impacts of realities and remedies.
- from the press release

I am so excited to hear more about this, because this topic has not yet been fully explored. We know now that scope is important, but we don't yet have an established framework through which businesses and governments can operate. It's not very effective to go to your local government and say, "Hey, this proposed housing development has broad-reaching implications on our quality of life! We should study this further!" but not have a way to actually, effectively study it and weigh the actual cost.

It's a bit out of our purview here in Nashvegas at the moment, but NC is close enough that this curriculum could spread here with a little push. After all, it was largely that Oil and Water class that got me thinking seriously about all of this stuff.

grocery bags and the apocalypse

Okay... a little extreme, I know, except...

I have this eerie vision in my head that morphs that 'I Am Legend ' shot of the deer running through the streets of post-apocalypse NYC into a shot of Nashville's Broadway with millions of plastic bags scudding along the empty lanes down into the river. I really must stop watching TV so much.

Anyway, on Monday I went to Whole Foods, and I had once again forgotten my reusable Ikea bag. Problem is, it's so huge that it really doesn't work for my little one-person, two-or-three-meals trips to the grocery. I joked with the checkout girl that in addition to wanting paper bags, I'd take a healthy dose of guilt to go along with them. Sadly, Whole Foods does not stock guilt, but luckily I had my own to pull out. So, upon my return home, I took a few minutes out of my mad dash to do two weeks worth of laundry to sit down and sew together the bottoms of some of my old tank tops (during which I saw the preview for I Am Legend and thus we've come full circle).

I'm going to use these as reusable grocery sacks. I only made two since I want to try them out before sewing up the bottoms of what could conceivably be wearable shirts... and since I rarely use more than two bags at the grocery anyway, this should be a good start. I know I'll need to sew up more, though, given my propensity to completely forget to take my own bags. I'll start with these two and then stock up the Prius with 10 or so.

Good thing I did that, because my lovely Aunt Louise sent a site called One Bag At A Time. Check out their breakdown of the life of a grocery sack! Holy moly!

That's the sort of stuff we need! Hard numbers to calculate impact! That's why I'm so excited about the new curriculum at Warren Wilson (I swear I'll post this next) - maybe we can figure out how to communicate these metrics (look at me with my shiny corporate lingo!) to broad audiences!

scary but cool experience - call your congressman!

Okay, so thanks to the wonders of Facebook (O, Facebook, what would I do without you?), I found out that H.R. 3221 is going to be brought up for a vote this week.

Here's part of the note from the creator of the group 'Advocates for Energy and Environmental Policy' Gabriel Koch...

At some point this week (the specific day has not been set), the House of Representatives will vote on whether to increase fuel efficiency to 35 miles per gallon and whether to use 15% of our electricity from renewable energy sources.

PLEASE CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES, both where you attend school and where your home is, and ask them to vote for this bill, H.R. 3221. You can find out who your Representative is and what their number is at www.house.gov

If you have a second, pick up the phone and call your Rep.

Davidson County is District 5 (with some of the south in District 7 - check out a map here.), and our Rep is Jim Cooper. I called his D.C. office today at 6:30PM EST and someone answered!

It was a spur of the moment thing, so I'm not sure that I sounded as well spoken as I might have liked, but the guy who answered was really nice, and took my name and address.

I am not sure if I've done anything useful, given Toyota and Detroit railing against it, but it was really easy (if sort of scary - I got a little stage fright!), and felt very green indeed.

So! Go forth and call! And if you can do it with free long distance, even better!

Irritating news from the auto-industry

I just got wind of an article in Newsweek about Toyota and how their actions speak louder than their words when it comes to being green. (Thanks, NoImpactMan, for the link!)

Basically, Toyota is talking a big game (have you seen their Why Not? ads? - if you go here and click on the Advertising navigation link, you can see the commercial), but they aren't fully committed to lowering mpgs.

Toyota—in contrast to Honda and Nissan—sided with Detroit to try to block legislation currently before Congress to boost fuel economy for all new vehicles to 35mpg by 2020, up from 25mpg today. Toyota, in a familiar Motown refrain, says achieving such a hard target is not technologically feasible

I think that "technologically feasible" here actually means "financially feasible." They can't reach the target number for their quarterly earnings if they have to go so high on mpgs. Yet another reason I wish more companies could go "B" (here's info on B-Corporations from a previous post) - because that bottom line is most likely the reason Toyota is waffling so badly. The Prius isn't enough of a money maker (because of the gas-electric propulsion system), so Toyota is also producing vehicles like the 14 mpg Tundra pickup, which has a profit margin of $10K. The thing is, I probably would have paid $5K more for my Prius! Yes, a big reason I bought it was the mpg factor, but another BIG factor was that I wanted to support green technology! So if more money is required, LET'S DO IT! Argh!

I'm sad that my Prius purchase went to a company that is not full-on behind the green movement. I still love my prius mightily (she's getting about 55 mpg right now), but I'm disappointed that the company I thought I was supporting in their efforts is trying to undermine my efforts (which are so small compared to what they can do).

Man, maybe it's the weather, but my posts are depressing lately. I promise posts that are more optimistic soon!

Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the "All-American" Hamburger, part 2

So, I told you all about how the chicken made me queasy the other night. Yeah, it might have been that fast-food fried chicken isn't exactly at the top of the healthy-eating list. Also, like LisaT suggested, had I taken the time to actually sit down and thoughtfully eat, perhaps I would have either a) gotten queasy earlier or b) STOPPED EATING THE DAMNED THING. But I think that really, in that moment, it was because i couldn't stop imagining the live chicken. Not that I have some emotional connection to chickens. Mostly, I hate them, thanks to an evil rooster my cousins had when we were kids that would fly maniacally at you whenever you went to collect the eggs from the coop. But still, something about that live chicken image in my head...

Now, like Mr. Franklin explained, since I am a rational creature, I can surely come up with a way to convince myself that eating meat is ethically okay in regards to my relation to the animal (animals eat other animals; people have been doing it forever; our bodies need the protein; the animal was killed humanely; this is my chance to take revenge on the poultry population; etc etc etc).

But what about the staggering economic & health impact of eating animal products?

Here's where, for me, it gets pretty clear.
- It takes 990 gallons of water to get you one gallon of milk (Thanks, AnimalBlawg! Click here for a citation... fact is on page 167)
- Livestock is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Thanks, NoImpactMan)
- Hog Farms don't have to treat the hog waste; plus, they're helping to grow antibiotic-resistant bacteria (check out this article from Rolling Stone)

There are lots of ways to rationalize these problems - sure, water is a renewable resource; sure, humans are causing a lot of greenhouse gas emissions just by breathing...

But the more that I read, the more I want to just opt out. Thinking about the vastness of these problems and how they affect just me, just this one body, really freaks me out.

So maybe going vegetarian and/or vegan is something that I should do out of respect for myself; putting aside my respect for the environment, or animals, or my fellow man, shouldn't I try to take care of my own body first? If I am going to start eating thoughtfully (O, were there more than 24 hours in a day - an additional 4 hours for yoga and thoughtful eating would be a true blessing), why don't I use that brain-power to hunt down green foods? Eating those free sandwiches from the BEC was definitely not a thoughtful act - it was "easy" and "free". We come back to the idea of scope versus scale here - sure it was, on the "scale" scale, easy and free, but on the "scope" scale, I actually paid for that food with my own body. I sold out. I spent myself instead of money... and we are spending our planet, instead of our time and money, on all of that meat.

I am feeling quite trapped by this problem, because I have always had a hard enough time respecting my own body without bringing green into it. The last time I did hot yoga was two weeks ago (Hey, I rationalize, sleep is more important and I don't have the money to go). Last night I ate three packaged, mass-produced, white bread dinner rolls (they were free). This morning I ate a Little Debbie snack (no excuse there other than i could find 75 cents in the floorboard of my car).

This is all, for me, like a drug addiction! But unlike heroin, the price of this addiction is "cheaper" than the alternative. Additionally, there seems to be little societal support for someone who wants to break the oil/sugar/processed-food/animal-products/waste/mass-production addiction. My job, the media, my financial life, and people around me all make it difficult to do what, if I weren't so implicated in this bizzare system, I would choose to do.

So, economics play a HUGE part in this for me. All of the immediate things, like the balance in my bank account and the time i have in a day, completely occlude the big picture cost of what I'm doing to myself by persisting in these very un-green habits.

Well, I certainly didn't intend this post to be quite such a whine-fest as it turned out to be, but I do want to ask for help in this sense - do you all have any ideas how to quantify your choices? It is easy for me to quantify the price of a lunch (free sandwich from BEC = $5 at least still in the bank). It has not been so easy for me to quantify the cost of that sandwich (that roast beef and the styrofoam packaging - how much is that costing my body and my world?).

That's why I'm super excited about a new curriculum at my parents' Alma Mater, Warren Wilson College, which I'll talk about in my next post. Maybe it will help us quantify scope in a way that our over-stressed brains can actually understand.