EPA air standards & Williamson county

Driving into work this morning on my insanely long commute really pinched this morning because of a story i heard on NPR - Apparently Williamson county is one of 345 counties in the US that is now above the new smog limit that's just been set by the EPA.

Besides the obvious (dirty air = yuck!), what bothers me about it all is this:

"The EPA's new smog limit is 75 parts per billion of ozone... The EPA's independent science advisory panel unanimously had said the standard should be no higher than 70 parts per billion...

Industry groups, which had said before the announcement that the limit shouldn't be lowered at all, said they were disappointed with the decision.

The new standard "could have a devastating effect on manufacturing employment," said John Engler, chief of the National Association of Manufacturers. "

ARGH!!!!!!! If you are doing something that is hurting/killing people, then you either need to stop or find another, non-lethal way! Good god! They're "disappointed"?!?!?!?!?!

Well, I'm disappointed that little kids in big cities have asthma at an alarmingly disproportionate rate! I'm disappointed that when i use a sponge to clean off my window sills or outdoor furniture, there's black nastiness that reminds me of what's in my LUNGS (read some more about air quality and health here). I know that Nashville isn't the Bronx, but if I remember correctly from my Geology class back in the day, Nashville is ituated in a 'geographic bowl', where, due to the topography, pollutants get trapped and sort of settle over the city. So there are air quality concerns here that are on my mind. But Industry is disappointed, so let's not get ahead of ourselves...

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.

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.

Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the "All-American" Hamburger, part 1

What drove the composition of this post (an expansion of a comment on a post over at AnimalBlawg, a blog written by some acquaintances from undergrad) was something that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. However, in the writing of it, I really found it's too big to tackle in one post, so look out for part 2 next.

About a year ago, I found a soup that I really like - Mexican–Style Chicken Tortilla soup. But I really hate the chicken in it. It is tasteless and rubbery and totally ruins the rest of the soup! So I’ve almost stopped buying it in preference for vegetable soup. It really depresses me that i don’t get to enjoy the ricey-corny-black beany goodness that that tortilla soup could be because of the nasty chicken. I figured it was just because it was cheap soup (hence, cheap chicken in it)

A few Thursdays back, I went to Hillwood High School out in Belle Meade to give a "Getting In" strategy session to a bunch of juniors and seniors (over 60 people were there! it was awesome!), and the PTA served Mrs. Winners chicken for dinner. Being that I am cheap, when they offered me a couple of pieces after the session, I promptly said thank you and then thanked the universe for the free meal. I started eating on the drive home, and at first it was very tasty. But as I ate, I got increasingly queasy. I figured it was because I was driving, but the whole thing really hit me as I pulled into the parking lot at home and finished off the last piece. I was really disgusted by the *thought* of what I was eating.

Now, I can't imagine that I'm anywhere near going vegan. Is this really me? I'm thinking... am i really turning into a leftist whacko that starts asking restaurants if they're cooking with animal oils?

Well, it is possible that I am. I mean, when they started serving Crispanis at Panera, I asked them to show me the ingredients label on the tomato sauce to see if it contained sugar of HFCS.

But I still am resistant to the idea of putting that label on myself. My vegetarian leanings mostly manifest in my day-to-day small choices as opposed to an overall lifestyle choice - I still do heartily attack a bison burger at Ted’s Montana Grill on occasion - but on a daily basis, I daydream of eating black beans and rice or a spinach and mushroom salad. I often wonder if it’s actually the burger I’m enjoying, as opposed to the idea of a burger (so ingrained in my middle-class, white-bread mindset!).

AnimalBlawg explained that the source of this may be umami

"Umami is the fifth taste, often called “savory.” We have “umami” taste receptors on our tongues that detect glutamates, found in protein-rich foods. And in uncreative diets, meat is the staple protein-rich food."

I will definitely be exploring non-meat ways to fulfill this 5th taste... although I see it playing out more as a way to avoid eating chicken as opposed to a way to avoid animal products entirely. Mostly, this is because I am lazy. And when someone puts free food, or easy food, in front of me, somehow I forget my desire to eat organic and vegetarian.

This Thanksgiving, we did cook a turkey, and it was my job to take care of the leftovers - pull all the meat off the bones. Now, I did enjoy the turkey/cranberry/whitebread sandwiches that were the reason we cooked the turkey - but after pulling all that meat off the bird, I wasn't interested in eating it anymore.

A more recent post at Animal Blawg introduced me to the fact that Ben Franklin dabbled in veganism - go read it! It really describes perfectly the situations I find myself in. Yes, i find that not eating animal products is cheaper. However, sometimes I am so drawn in by the smell and memory of the taste of food that I dig in without thinking. Ahhh, rationalism.

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do."

Yes, Ben. This is exactly the problem.
Up next - sure, I feel like chicken is gross, but how about the economic impact of being an omnivore?

How very un-green my relatively green job is

Happy post-Turkey day to you all! I must say that I am very thankful for many things, including being in control of my own bowel movements, the luxury of being able to travel to see family, and the game of football. Anyhow, here's my belated offering from last week that, in a haze of sugar and pigskin, I didn't post :)


Most of you know my many and varied feelings about my Day Job, and this isn't exactly the forum to discuss it, but a week or so ago, an email came through the pipeline that seemed relevant to this discussion.

-----Original Message-----
...
Sent: Fri 11/16/2007 1:27 PM
Subject: It's easy being green...

I know that with all of our busy schedules, thinking about what we can do for the environment isn't exactly top of mind. But did you know that by reducing power consumption and monitoring paper usage we can help save money - and the planet?

* 10,000 sheets of paper are used by a single office worker every year and 95% of it is thrown away without being recycled. Businesses that actively manage their printing infrastructures can reduce their overall cost of printing by up to 30%.
* Companies can save 40% to 80% of their energy costs simply by adopting conservation practices like making sure lights are turned off when not in use. Something as simple as making sure you turn off your monitor at night and shutting down your computer completely will really add up if everyone participates.

Please look for ways to save electricity and paper over the next year - it really can make a difference.

Thanks,

Now, I should be happy about this, right? Well, yes, in a sense I am. I appreciate that someone other than me is saying something about this. Since I started work there last November, I have desperately tried to reduce the amount of paper I use. It was just getting ridiculous, printing out every step of the processing for sending out an e-mail. Still, though, we are required to print 3-5 sheets of paper for every eBlast we process, and that's just for the client I work on. I've noticed that, for other clients, there's even more paper. And this is just for e-mail. This is to say nothing of the junk mail they print and mail from the back warehouse.

I don't know much about the environmental impact associated with the energy & resources used for electronic file storage, but at first glance it seems that storing all of these files electronically, on an external jump drive or something, would HAVE to be less impactful than printing out the documentation! Yes, like with my Prius, there is an environmental cost to the production of the microchips, and to the energy supply needed to run the electronics.
However, we can't assume that business will simply stop. So can't we use the reusable microchips to store our documentation? I am sure that the answer lies in the fact that it is "more expensive" to store the data electronically. Which touches back on the idea of economies of scope - the cost of the paper appears less than the cost of the microchips, even though ultimately we are paying a huge price that isn't readily quantifiable.

I asked if we couldn't do all of the documentation electronically, but was told that there still had to be paper documentation of some sort. ::sigh::

So that's my two cents on the first "*". On the second "*", I began to recognize that this person was appealing to people's sense of "cost". But in reality, people don't understand that energy cost as being borne by THEM! They see the Giant Corporation as bearing the "cost," and this has no real impact on their paychecks or their consciouses.

I think that this person's email would have been much more effective had s/he appealed to the employee's sense of morality.