book thoughts: No Impact Man February 8, 2010

I recently finished reading a book that was recommended to me, No Impact Man. The book stemmed out of Colin Beavan’s blog which is a journey of his quest to have zero impact on the planet for a year while living in New York City. I admire the set up– often people find excuses for why they can’t go fully green, or certain green aspects they don’t think they can partake in. I myself am a master of excuses, so someone trying to do this in NYC with a baby, a dog, and no yard seems to be setting the bar high– if he can do it, a baby-less individual such as myself in the greenest city in the US with a garden in the backyard and a great public transit system should surely be able to handle this.

Beavan divided up the project into phases in order to ease himself in. In phase one he focused on making no garbage (see 42 things the family did to avoid trash). Phase two was transportation, three was food, and four was going off the grid. (I think those are in order.) I thought this approach was a good idea– often I feel there is so much I should do that I end up half committing to lots of little things at once instead of focusing on one larger issue at a time. Some of his phases did not seem entirely well thought out (it seemed a little overboard that he was trying to live without lights– why couldn’t he have kept his electricity but purchased some RECs? Bonus– he could have bought some away from the utilities) but that part is sort of a personal idea/exploration…

I was skeptical when I first started the book– I’m weary of people who write books about going green because I often see these froufy coffee table books in stores that are titled “101 Way to Go Green” and “How To Save The Planet,” etc. that always ends up being a disapointing array of nice photos alongside text that offers suggestions such as “use both sides of the paper.” Ugh.  Trying to ease the symptoms and not tackle the larger issue doesn’t really do it for me. So I figured Beavan was another dude who was just trying to make a quick buck by writing about going green. But his writing is entertaining, and he admitted to the things he didn’t do or had trouble with, and a lot of his personal thoughts behind the thoughts going on inside his head (hmm, sort of like this blog…except he’s a real writer…). And there were some really interesting nuggets. Here are a couple passages I liked:

“Back in the 1940s and ’50s, thanks to further mechanization and other new production practices…people’s needs were getting met, yet the economy had all this potential for further production. But once they bought a car, a fridge, a house, and a washing machine what more did they require? Industrialists began to worry that needs were getting saturated, and that all their factoires might soon come to a grinding halt.
Their answer? Designed obsolescence. Manufacturers began looking for ways to deliberately cause their own products to become obsolete so people would have to buy them again and again-repetitive consumption…back then, the planet’s resources seemed limitless…” pg 150

Man, I think about that stuff a lot and the way our culture has placed so much emphasis of life cycles that don’t go in circles but instead make a beeline for the dump. Manufacturers are starting to deal with take-back laws, in which instead of selling their appliances, pocketing the cash, and not needing to put too much thought to how their product gets disposed…well, now they are the ones responsible for proper recycling of the machine. And if they have to pay to recycle all these appliances it would be in their interest to create a product where parts can be recycled instead of paying to get rid of the metal and such.

“I simply don’t believe changing senators is anywhere near enough. Yes, we need the politicians to get the message, but what is required here is for the United States to reduce its carbon emissions by something like 95 percent. That’s huge. Laws alone are not going to do it. Changing our senators- while that is part of the equation- is not going to do it. We have to change the culture…” pg 176

This is something else I’ve gone back and forth with in my mind. When it comes down to it, do we really need politics on sustainability’s side, or drive from consumers? Both.

I also found the Happy Planet Index an interesting concept. The equation goes something like HPI = the life satisfaction x life expectancy of a country / ecological footprint of said country. I’m not good with math, but the higher the denominator, the lower the product becomes (er, right?). Maybe you buy into this and maybe you don’t, but the United States came in as #150, meaning there are a 149 countries demonstrating you can have the same quality of life and happiness while creating less impact on the Earth.

There were also lots more small nuggets and good thoughts. Overall, it’s a fast and easy read. I don’t think I would feel the need to purchase it, but check it out from your library if you have a chance.

post-Copenhagen February 5, 2010

On lunch yesterday I got invited to a webinar that was entitled something like “Copenhagen Follow-Up: So Now What?” I felt guilty for not following CoP-15 (“Conference of the Parties”– never would have guessed) apparently no one else had heard it called this before, either) so I was interested in attending…and then I heard Dr. Hansen was one of the speakers, which sealed the deal (he’s a prominent figure in the movement). So I went, and Hansen flew threw some slides and talked fast and basically his spiel was cap and trade= bad, “fee & dividend approach” = good. Funny, because I was just thinking about carbon tax the other day, after I heard this NPR piece.

I don’t know enough about cap and trade and the things Hansen (and Alan AtKission, the other speaker) went over, and it’s on my “to research” list. I left the webinar not really feeling any better off about my initial thoughts on the conference (what really got accomplished that will help solve the issues?) But in the meantime I wanted to say something about my webinar lunch experience, so I might as well give you a visualization of the thoughts in my head:

new month, new eating style? February 2, 2010

I wasn’t sure how serious I was about the last post, but at least bringing the idea to the forefront of my mind has caused me to so far have consumed no meat in February. I’m not sure if it will last, and I’m not sure I’m “officially” vegetarian for the month yet, but I have a friend (who rarely eats meat to begin with) offer to go veggie with me, so we’ll see how things go.

In the meantime you can follow me  and my vegetarian adventures on Twitter.

do i have beef with beef? January 31, 2010

For a fleeting moment, I had this thought on my lunch break the other day that maybe I would try to become a vegetarian.

Let me pause so you can absorb the impact.

First, I should mention that I hate seafood, so I never eat that. And chicken just doesn’t do it for me, so that rarely ends up on my plate. My relationship with pork doesn’t really extend beyond bacon. So that leaves beef, the least sustainable of all, and the one I (used to?) love most.

Flashback to the 80s. Regan’s in office, slouch socks and tee shirt rings are in, and I’m a baby eating burgers. Really, my mother has it marked on my baby calendar when I had my first burger (I have seen it, so I can confirm this, but I cannot recall my age…although I do admit it was probably too young to give a child a burger). The reason she has it marked on my baby calendar is because I really liked it, apparently.

Years later, age 12, and the McDonalds Double Cheeseburger Meal seems to enter my system 1-3 times a week. Once I even ate three cheeseburgers in one sitting. Maybe this doesn’t sound that freaky, but that’s a lotta food for a beanpole 12 year old girl. I am probably making my McDonalds addiction sound worse than it was, but I feel like this was the age when my friends and I started going to the mall for no reason other than to walk around and be somewhere else other than our houses. And with the mall always came McDonalds. (More evidence I am psyched to be out of suburbia.)

Fast forward to my arrival in Portland. My Midwestern roomates and I are tickled that the nearest Wal Mart, McDonalds, and other big box chain places are tucked far outside the inner city boundary, opening up my immediate world to a cornucopia of friendly, local, funky stores and eateries. For the first time in my life, I try foodcarts, shop weekly at farmer’s markets, and have more than one Thai takeout place within a short bike ride of my house. This combined with meeting Portland friends who were already into eating healthy and local, and of course my first trip to Hopworks when I gave the black bean burger a try and fell in love, have led to an extreme decrease in my burger consumption.

While my burger intake was dwindling, my exposure to the farming and meat industry was rising.  Movies and books like Our Daily Bread, Food Inc., and Fast Food Nation gave me an inside view of what could potentially be in my random ground chuck package at the supermarket, so my freezer which usually had a few back up pounds of ground beef for tacos and chili disappeared cold turkey a while ago.

All of that being said, the past couple burgers I had have tasted pretty good, but have led to stomach pains and an overall feeling of crapyness. It may or may not be the burgers, but walking down the street on lunch break I realized maybe I don’t need them at all. I kind of like them, but I doubt they are doing tons of good for my body, and it’s not sustainable. And do you remember that whole Humane Society slaughter videos thing that surfaced back in 2008?

After getting this far in my “can I give up meat?” thoughts, the only other items in my way were burritos and sandwiches. I eat burritos a fair amount, so giving them up would be difficult. However…I do like veggie ones too, and those are usually cheaper and come with guacamole. So that left sandwiches, which I decided a little bit of turkey really isn’t that bad of a thing, is it? And I usually feel great after eating sandwiches.

So that’s where I am today. And maybe I won’t go full out vegetarian, but I am definitely exploring the option of giving up beef for an extended amount of time.

weatherization, parts II & III January 26, 2010

A friend of mine had found himself in a cold spot: his bed resides in a nook with three windows on three walls. Two of these walls, across from each other, have windows that open by swinging out, and when they are latched shut you can feel the breeze commin’ right on in. Of course this is problematic, not only because the breeze/coldness leaking in creates discomfort, but also it’s probably not good to have all that condensation on the inside of the windows and definitely not good to crank your heat up to compensate for all the heat that’s being lost.  So my friend remembered my post about how I am a weatherization pro and called on my expertise. So here are the steps we took to transform his windows from cold to covered:

1) We rope caulked all the big spaces in the windows that are characteristic of old Portland homes. It was pretty bad– you could definitely feel tons of air coming in. We went caulk-crazy and used a whole roll because some of the cracks were so large they needed two strings of caulk (use your imagination to think of all the dirty jokes this evoked– no, we will not be growing up anytime soon). This stuff is super cheap, easy to put on, and comes off easy. It’s sort of a Play-Dough consistency that comes as a roll of strings.

2) After the rope caulk was in place, we promptly forgot to clean the windows and the window frames. Perhaps it was this laziness that lead to the failure of  the clear, double-sided invisible tape that came with the weatherization kit (see picture three). We attempted to frame the window with said tape, per the instructions, but this maneuver was aborted after two tries.

3) In the end we used masking tape and didn’t measure the windows so there was some guesstimating and haphazard cutting (we are both semi-impatient). But he’s a dude and kept insisting aesthetics be damned, he just wanted to be warm.

After the plastic was up we, there was a noticeable difference in room temperature. If we would have taken more time to line up the plastic, you wouldn’t be able to tell there was plastic covering the window at all, and if we wouldn’t have resorted to masking tape…well, you wouldn’t be able to see the tape part either.

I still would recommend the Community Energy Project’s weatherization kits– their main pros are that they look pretty nice and they use clear vinyl instead of this Saran wrap flimsy stuff we put up, meaning more insulation and less wrinkles. And they have free classes showing you how to use the kits ensuring your windows turn out pretty. With the CEP kit you have to commit to sticking tracking into the side of your windows, which stays up all year (good if you don’t mind and are planning on weatherizing every year).

And I almost forgot “part III”– as a reward for my efforts I got to take some of the scraps of plastic home which I used to cover the small windows in my closets that are sealed but thin therefore letting cold air through. My landlord would also approve because she warned me that due to all the condensation the window collects, the closets have to be watched closely for mold.  So triple win– my room is warmer, my closet won’t spawn a mold farm, and my jeans that are stored on a shelf right next to the window won’t be freezing cold in the mornings!