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.