reduce my impact on the environment and practice sustainable living

For the latter half of 2007, I embarked on a “Greening” experiment— a very watered-down version of what Colin Beavan (No Impact Man) and Vanessa Farquharson (Green As a Thistle) attempted in 2006/7. Each week, I added one new Green task or habit to my repertoire. Below are my notes from December 31, 2007, concluding the experiment.

I always spend the last day of the year reflecting on the previous 365 days, noting what I’ve done well, what I could have improved, what I didn’t think enough about, and looking forward to the castles I’ve built in the air of the coming year. Today, most of that reflection is focused on the Greening experiment—officially tracked since August, but begun with consideration and practice in early February.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about negative environmental impacts—but beyond the simplest actions (recycle, pick up trash from where it doesn’t belong, don’t leave the water running or the lights on when you’re not using them), I never really did much to bring about positive impact, instead. As I said to Miles on Saturday night, I always thought it was far more important to help people than to help animals or the environment. It wasn’t until last fall that I realised we can’t possibly save the health and well-being of people without protecting the planet, and last winter when I started to figure out how I could help.

In October of 2006, I attended a conference about genetic research advances. I’m a fundraiser, not a medical professional, but it’s still true that the more I know about cancer-related research, the more effective I am in my job. A great many of the details discussed by the frighteningly qualified people in the room went right over my head, but I learned quite a bit about the new field of genomic medicine—the study of genetic markers within individual people and how those markers are influenced by environmental factors. (This is the type of research which will eventually pinpoint precisely why Winston Churchill, who smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish, suffered and died from complications related to strokes at 90 and Dana Reeve, who never touched a cigarette, succumbed to lung cancer at 44.) At the conference, there were a great many opportunities to engage in conversation with the subject matter experts. Unafraid to admit my ignorance, I asked several scientists the question I am most often asked by those who know about the work I do; “Why don’t we know more about the environmental causes of cancer, and why isn’t more environmental-medical research being done?”

Fifteen months ago, the answers were short, and they were all the same: we can’t yet isolate enough environmental factors to make the studies meaningful, and we don’t know enough about genetic factors to understand majority impact of environmental causes. What I took from those conversations was, “There are so many unchecked hazards in our air, in our water, in our soil, that we can’t even begin to look at what makes people sick and what doesn’t until we know which people to look at.” Human beings have been so irresponsible with products and materials, dumping things in water, burying things in the ground, burning and releasing things into the air, and there is so much that we have allowed to alter the make-up of the planet which must sustain us, that the most brilliant medical minds couldn’t pinpoint which of those things are causing our bodies to mutate and suffer and die. The days when I realized this were the days when I first started looking at environmental health as something that I needed to fix.

I poked around the internet for awhile, wondering which group to join, where to start, how to bring about mass societal change, what my role would be. I read a lot of blogs, googled all sorts of things, read wikipedia avidly, but couldn’t figure out how to go from “reading” to “doing.” And then my friend Katie sent me a link to the blog of a crazy guy in Manhattan who was trying to live a no-impact life. Not exactly what I wanted to do, but kind of cool to read about. I checked in daily, and things began to coalesce on a subconscious level.

• I learned about Freecycle. And when I got tired of packing and moving all of my stuff (4 apartments in three years), I used it to give my perfectly good stuff to people who could use it.
• I learned about food miles, and realised that the apples and potatoes and peppers I bought so regularly at the supermarket down the street were not supplied by the farms surrounding my city, as I had always assumed, but flown in from Washington and Idaho and Mexico.
• When I changed jobs and began traveling every month, I realized that frequent flier miles were based on the number of miles traversed by a jet and extrapolated the burning of jet fuel for those miles compared to the burning of gasoline for my car; I panicked and searched out alternate transportation (which is non-existent where I live).

And some time in April I sat back and considered what I had done, what I was doing, and what I wanted to accomplish—and finally figured out that I didn’t need to start by changing the rest of the world. I needed to start by changing me.

So I did.

• I planted a garden. I didn’t buy herbs or zucchini all summer long, though I did need to supplement my tomato crop. And I learned that it’s just as wasteful to plant things you don’t like/won’t eat as it is to buy and throw them away.
• I tried composting (in a container, which smelled and attracted fruit flies and drove me crazy—then chucked that idea and built a surreptitious, against-the-rules heap in a little strip of brush woods near my apartment). Now my parents have agreed to build a heap in their backyard (I have the plans all drawn up), and we can share.
• I recycled all I could (plastic bottles, steel cans, glass jars, cardboard, office paper, paperboard, hangers, plastic bags and bag-like wrappings) and saved everything else I could for re-use, things like twist-ties, ribbon, twine, envelopes delivered in bill packets, scrap paper, buttons, paper clips, ZipLoc baggies, etc. And I now seek out glass and plain paper packaging, eschewing plastic as often as possible.
• I stopped buying things I didn’t need, and stopped watching television and reading magazines, knowing that the advertisements would only convince me that I did need something utterly useless and unnecessary.
• I switched to 100% recycled paper products that contain post-consumer content (paper towels, tissue, and toilet paper), and cut up an old t-shirt for kitchen and cleaning rags—to waste less.
• Between the compost, recycling, reuse, and lack of purchasing, my entire trash output is the size of a single grocery sack once a week. Since I use cloth bags everywhere (groceries and all other shopping), I’m eventually going to run out of my stockpile of sacks—no idea what I’ll use to measure trash then.
• For the things that I do buy, I started thinking about how to make them more sustainable. I shop for groceries at farmers markets, where food is local and fresh, and bring my own (reused) bags and containers to tote things home in. I carry a mug and water bottle with me everywhere. I stopped using tea bags, and wash a strainer instead. I changed the food for my cats to natural, healthy dry food packaged in paper and their litter is a bio-degradable, flushable, corn-based product that won’t cause them any harm. I’m still testing eco-friendly soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, etc to find ones that I can live with, and have switched over to natural, do-it-myself cleaning products (i.e. baking soda, vinegar, lemon, and water that I mix myself as necessary) and sustainably produced, gray-water approved dish and laundry soap.
• I’ve been supporting the most sustainable, earth-and-people-friendly businesses I can; joining an organic CSA for produce, buying pasture-raised, grass-fed meats and cruelty-free eggs/dairy, shopping independently-owned local grocers for dry goods, shopping second-hand for books, clothing, and household goods when possible and researching organic, sweatshop-free, fair-trade options for when I won’t be able to. There are times when “corporate” is an overall better option than local (Starbucks offers fair-trade coffee and solid wages/benefits, unlike the three local coffee shops in my town on both counts), but I limit my visits/use to “treats” rather than regular support. I’m not at 100% with this—but I would say that 90% of my purchases follow these guidelines.
• I changed the way I use what I have, too. I rearranged my home to be more energy efficient; seating areas are near windows to take advantage of natural light, and electronic equipment is arranged so that it’s unplugged when not in use (DVD player, computer and stereo, but also lamps, microwave, and toaster oven). I save “waste water” in the shower and when washing dishes (by hand) and use it to water the garden, houseplants, and compost. I use appliances rarely; the dishwasher is run only when I have enough dirty pieces to fill it to capacity (i.e. dinner parties for four or more); two loads of laundry are done per week, with one of them hung on a rack to dry; external lights and internal thermostats are arranged on timers and kept off when not in use.

There is so much else I’ve changed, too, but so many other things I still need to work on—I travel so much, and while I always choose the greenest option possible (train over car, traveling light, accepting only what’s necessary, vegetarian diet on the road, eco-friendly hotels, etc), that’s not always a great consolation when I’m on and off of airplanes every other day. I moved out of a mid-size city that made me feel crazy and claustrophobic and into a small town with air to breathe and land to plant, but am now a twenty-mile drive from the office with no carpool available. I’m still learning about available opportunities and trying to educate others when possible, but I don’t want to preach or be offensive, and I’m more worried about that than I am about inadequately conveying a message. If I’m going to become part of a larger community of earth-conscious, health-focused people, I need to get over that last, more than all others combined, because improving health and well-being for everyone is still at the root of why I’m doing this.

I can become a homesteader, as is my intention, looking forward two years to when I will purchase a home, plant a full garden, and keep chickens, ensuring that I enrich the soil, purify the water, and keep from polluting the air on my own. But one person is not a community, and I’m not in this just for myself.

So, I’m through with the one-conscious-change-per-week experiment (the final two weeks were of the gift-giving process—handmade items sustainably wrapped, and experiential gifts of theater/music tickets and local meals). And I will continue to live with the changes I’ve made and adopt others as they occur to me and are possible. But my focus now turns slightly outward, delving into the work and awareness of my immediate local community.

Problem is that I’ve abandoned a lot of these habits over the last six months (late 2008, early 2009), as I’ve had little to no control over my personal living environment. I need to redevelop my good habits, and continue moving in a positive direction.

I’ve been using reusable grocery bags for the last 6 months or so, maybe longer. A nice plus to using these is that 2-3 reusable bags will hold a weeks worth of groceries for my husband and me.

Today, I bought two of those reuable stainless steel water bottles. I’d been using a reusble plastic bottle, but had heard conflicting studies over whether plastic bottles were safe. I figure I’ll keep one of the steel bottles at home and one at work.

I’ve marked off as “done” a lot of ongoing goals – practice yoga, take a walk every night and this one – because although they are never really done, I have incorporated them into my routine and do them as often as I can. So I am considering these goal achieved.

The other day I readed an article on a local newspaper. There’s a lot of panamenians living on less than two dollars a day.

Guess I’ll start to be more open to help homeless people when they ask for help.

1.46!! Wonder if I can last long enough living on that daily budget, I spent ten times that daily between transport, snacks and food.

Knowing how weak and the headaches I feel if I skip meals one day, no wonder the only energy left to them is to pursuit food by beggin or get drunk for the narcotic and caloric effect, besides is actually cheaper than bread right now, nobody can think of work in such a weakened state, I remember when I was studying at the university and had to use my short money to buy stuff had to decide between eating or buying supplies, those were hard times…

I’ll try to live for a week under that budget, whatever I save, I’ll use to buy supplies for a local charity.

Still feeling guilty about all that wasted water when I forgot to close the laundry’s faucet and flooded my flat.

Still can’t find LED based bulbs in my city.

Working with 4 monitors.

My water and electricity consumption doubled in april and I cannot find a reason, from USD 9 for water and USD 18 for Power to USD 25 and USD 50.

1. I recycle what I am able to.

2. Most of the lights in our house have been replaced with compact flourescent light bulbs.

3. I use a refillable water bottle instead of buying small bottles of water all the time.

4. I drive a car that gets good gas mileage.

5. I bring my lunch to work as often as I can.

6. I’m pretty good about not buying things that I don’t need.

7. I donate used things instead of throwing them away.

8. We eat meatless meals about half the time for dinner.

9. We only use central heating and air when we really need to.

10. I try to shop withing a few miles of where I live in order to cut back on driving.

I feel good about my choices this week. I am becoming more conscious of my choices and no longer as susceptible to the knee-jerk impulse to buy stuff without really thinking about it. I have been trying to buy only what I truly need and putting other items on a 30-day waiting list so I can give myself time to think about the purchase. This week I also wrote to 4 companies where I do business, asking them to make more sustainable choices in the products they provide. I don’t know how much good it will do, but one company did write back and provided a copy of their environmental policy.

The only problematic day was when we went to the mall. I don’t think we bought anything other than what we truly needed, a few clothes for vacation, but I found myself annoyed and impatient after being there just a little while. All that conspicuous consumerism just depressed me.

I am currently bringing my lunch to work both to save money and eat healthier. I am trying to use as many reusable containers for this as possible to cut down on the amount of plastic baggies and aluminum foil that I throw away.

I was at the store today, and about to buy 2 six packs of bottled water to bring to the gym. I realized how wasteful this was and bought a reusable water bottle instead.