Just hanging out

I haven't minded hanging my laundry inside all winter. In fact, it added much-needed moisture to the dry indoor air. But I was still happy to start hanging my laundry outside again yesterday. It's so nice to be outside, and our laundry again has that sunny fragrance no fabric softener can duplicate.

I expect I won't be drying clothes inside again until October now. Not every day will be nice enough (since we've had snow even in May!) but generally I can wait a few days before we get desperate.

25 Ways to Green the World #10-11

#10: Stop Dirty Energy

Besides signing online petitions, calling Congress etc. about coal, we haven't yet done very much. One idea in the Green American "25 Ways" article I'm using for this list is to shift our energy use to the evening hours to reduce peak demand. From now on, we'll do our laundry and run the dishwasher in the evening or early in the morning. (In the summer, I have to do the laundry in the morning in order to hang the clothes outdoors.)

#11: Rethink Your Transportation

We've always used our cars less than average since we're basically home bodies. We've always grouped errands, since it saves times as well as gas. Beyond that, though, we've made a conscious effort to reduce our car use. For the last few years before retirement, John bicycled to work even in the winter unless it was below 25 degrees or actively snowing; in those cases, he took the bus. In the winter, when it was too dark to ride a bike home, he used the handy bike carrier on the front of the bus.

Lately, instead of doing our exercise walking around the neighborhood, we've discovered we can walk to Wegmans, each with a backpack, in the same amount of time. So instead of frequent trips in a car (since the grocery store was one trip I never could seem to cut back on) we get small amounts of groceries about 4-5 times a week. We've done the same with the library in the other direction (complete with some challenging hills to climb).

And when we do drive, we use our Prius.

25 Ways to Green the World #8-9

#8: Put Efficiency First

We're doing pretty well with this one. Except for a few mistakes, we've chosen energy-efficient appliances (refrigerator, front-loading washer, CFLs, etc.), and when we have a choice, we use them as little as possible. For example, we're pretty good at turning off lights when we're not in the room. One mistake is that we chose a small (5 cu. ft.) freezer that wasn't Energy Star-qualified. Since the store where we bought it had no small Energy Star freezers, we thought that perhaps there weren't any in this size category.

We've also tested our appliances with the Kill-A-Watt meter to see how much energy they use.

One of the most important ways we've saved energy is by not using our electric clothes dryer. We hang clothes up outdoors in the summer, and indoors in the winter. This has the bonus of humidifying our chronically dry air in the winter. We're lucky to have found a very convenient clothes rack that folds up easily, then expands to hold a whole load of laundry. It has metal rods, so I can use my regular clothes pins. Once you get used to it, hanging laundry really doesn't take much longer to do since you're essentially straightening out the clothes when you're hanging them up as opposed to straightening them out when you take them out of the dryer.

An interesting website: Project Laundry List.

#9: Advance Green Energy

We've purchased 100% wind energy for almost seven years now. We were one of the first customers when this option became available.

We looked into solar panels - and even paid for the $300 evaluation for its suitability - but it just doesn't work for our location. Partly, it's a problem with the orientation of the roof, though that's not insurmountable. The main issue is trees. We would have had to cut down the tree on the south side of the house that shades our house in the summer. And even that wasn't insurmountable. I would have done it, though I would have been sad. The real problem is that we would have to ask neighbors never to plant a large tree (which would have made our solar installation worthless). This would be a lot to ask of people, and for that matter, we would have had to ask neighbors to sign a solar easement, adding to the cost and complication of the project. All in all, we decided that there would have to be other ways for us to advance green energy. Maybe some day, there will be improvements in PV panels that would make this feasible.

We also checked out solar hot water heating, but given the pipes in our house this would have been prohibitively expensive.

25 Ways to Green the World #6-7

Here's how we're doing so far with these next two ways:

#6: Buy Fair Trade

We've bought Fair Trade coffee for years (making sure it was also shade-grown, which is very important for birds). We've sometimes bought Fair Trade tea. Why only sometimes? I'm not sure. I guess I never got in the habit. Also, I started by purchasing shade-grown coffee and then changed to the more-common Fair Trade that was also shade-grown, so I guess I focused on coffee. Also, it seems easier to find FT coffee and there are more choices. Not so with tea. But it is available, and I'll try to choose that kind in future.

I have bought FT chocolate bars and FT cocoa, but I don't buy much of these anyway. Other FT food items, such as vanilla, seem to be even less common than tea. For example, bananas are theoretically available, but not anywhere convenient. I certainly would buy FT/organic bananas if they were at Wegmans. (I buy the organic ones currently.) I also should look for FT clothing, although I don't buy much clothing....

#7 Green Your Food Choices

* Eat lower on the food chain
We're vegetarians, so we're already eating pretty low on the food chain. Yes, we use eggs, milk, and cheese, but not in large quantities - mainly just in cooking. At this point going vegan seems too much of a burden, and I'd miss too many things. I'm content with where we are on this action at the moment.

* Choose organic
We do this for some things - coffee, cocoa, spices, vanilla, flour, bananas, and (until we started making our own) jam. We've started buying organic peanut butter and greens, such as collards. Produce (except for bananas) is a little more difficult. It's quite a bit more expensive and often the quality doesn't seem to be as good. I know this is NOT because it's organic since our home-grown organic produce is excellent, but probably because there's not a fast a turnover in the grocery store. We're working on this one.

* Eat local
We made great strides this year. We bought bushels of locally-grown produce (mainly apples, red peppers, and squash) and preserved it for winter. We bought smaller quantities of concord grapes, blackberries, apricots, and other miscellaneous produce. However, most of these were not organic. First, we didn't get started until midsummer on this task, and second, some of the organic growers had crop failures (hail etc.) and so didn't have any to buy. We'll definitely be pursuing this next summer. Also, it's interesting to note that some produce, such as squash, even though not labeled organic, has really not (according to the farmer) been sprayed except for one small treatment in the spring. Mushrooms might also be in this category? I'm not sure...

* Grow your own
We've always had a vegetable garden, but last year we redoubled our efforts. These efforts include not only being more diligent in producing the food, but also being much more diligent in harvesting, eating, and preserving the food. This is not a trivial thing! In the past, we were much better at growing than using the food. Using it is much more work than growing it and requires intentional efforts. Partly, though, it's just getting in the habit of harvesting each day, and becoming more familiar with preserving methods so they become just part of daily life. And why not? It's so much tastier than store-bought. Surprisingly, we found that one of the biggest benefits was the comfort in knowing our food wasn't contaminated with pesticides or other problems increasingly being reported!

And we're helping more people grow their own food by bringing them together to learn more - for info, visit Edible Gardening CNY.)

* Avoid GM food
I'm not convinced that GM food is unhealthy, but I'm pretty sure this isn't something we want to promote because it most likely has dire consequences for ecosystems. But how do you know what foods are GM without labeling?

* Eat Fair Trade
(See #6 above)

25 ways to green the world #1-5

CoopAmerica (now renamed Green America) had a list of 25 Ways to Green the World in its Fall 2008 issue. To start thinking more formally about our lifestyle changes, I'll be assessing our progress with respect to this list and other lists as I come across them.

#1. Live Simply and Use Less
We're working on this, though we really haven't ever lived an extravagant lifestyle by our culture's standards. Still, we've certainly bought things we could have done without over the years. I find that every week, it pops into my head that "I need X" or "Maybe I should get Y." The first step is becoming conscious of these thoughts! Sometimes I really do "need" the item (or at least it serves some purpose), but sometimes it's just getting things out of habit. I've started to become more aware of what I chose NOT to get.

#2. Get What You Want Without Money and #3 Connect with Neighbors
This one is harder. I don't like to borrow items, and when it comes to house repairs etc., I would rather have a professional job. As for the suggested clothes swaps - unless you had dozens of people participating, I can't imagine that there would be enough of any one size or style to make it worthwhile. I am planning to visit a consignment shop, though - when I actually "need" some clothes. So far, I don't.

#4. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
We recycle everything that's allowed (and we try to be careful to put only allowed things in our bin.) Still, we notice that our recycle bin (along with our garbage cans) are much less full than other people's. How can people produce so much stuff? One thing that really helps us with recycling paper is to pair our wastebaskets in each room. I have a green wastebasket and another one side by side in each room so it's simple to recycle. Of REDUCE and REUSE are even more important. We're trying to work on both of these. First of all, we don't buy things that are meant to be single use items. For example, how did we get to the stage where we buy mechanical pencils that are thrown away when the lead is gone?

(I'll try to enumerate the Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle items in a later post...)

#5. Buy Green and Local
We've really made progress on this, though we're far from where we could be. We've especially focused in on food items. We bought a lot of locally-grown produce at the Regional Market, and we preserved it for the winter months. We bought mostly fruit for jams, fruit to dehydrate, and squash for storage. There's a learning curve to some of these things, as well as purchasing some equipment. This was the first year in decades that we made jam, so we had to find our old equipment and relearn the process.

We had bought an Excalibur dehydrator at the end of the previous year, so we had a little experience with it, and we experimented a bit more. So far, we love it! It's a great way to preserve local produce for the winter. This is an example of it being cheaper to buy the more expensive item. We bought the best Excalibur since we expect to use it a lot. Smaller, cheaper brands and models wouldn't have served us as well as this one.

Finally, we bought a small 5 cu. ft. freezer for the rest. We were able to preserve our excess garden produce, and we'll be able to do this more next year. I expect we'll be able to unplug it by April or so, and not need it again until maybe July. Next year, we'll focus on finding food that is not only local, but also organic. We'll also be expanding our vegetable garden (see www.egcny.org if you're growing your own food in CNY, too!) We don't know yet whether this smallish freezer will be the example that proves the point about the dehydrator. We're not sure whether it's going to be big enough to meet our needs, i.e. to store enough locally-grown produce to get us through the winter. This may be a case of having to buy again - although at this point, we'd buy another small one, and so it would be running only a few months a year until it's empty.

Thinking regionally, not just in CNY, I've been looking for other items such as cheese, flour and so on. For example, I choose the flour produced in the northeast, not the flour produced in the
northwest. It's not easy to find local or even regional varieties of much of our food.

Technology is not the answer

From Building the Green Economy (p. 49) - a conversation with Gopal Dayaneni:

"There's not a technical solution to our environmental problems. There may be technical things that we can use to help us transition, but the solution is deeply political, and deeply structural and societal. It's about really changing the way we organize our relationship to resources."

This is an important point. The idea that we can successfully navigate the environmental crises we face simply by finding the right technology (as Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Sachs, or even Al Gore seem to imply) has never rung true to me. We need to change our "relationship to resources." Dayaneni is referring to the broadest political and social context, but for me personally it means my relationship to the natural world, to my food, and to my "stuff."We've been working on these relationships, and it's interesting to see that even though we're very motivated to make these changes, they take time to incorporate into our lifestyle.

All the more reason to get started now! That's the purpose of our Living Green Living Good in Central New York group - to work together to create models of sustainable, yet satisfying, lifestyles so it might not take so long for the next wave of people to adopt them. And that's "lifestyles" in the plural. The details of each person's choices will be different - the common element is that they "...meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."