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."

Building our CNY community

We've been working on greening our lifestyle for many years now, but I'll jump in with where we are with respect to a book I'm reading right now - The Small-Mart Revolution by Michael Shuman. Shuman's thoughts on the local vs. global economy are enlightening. The book was written in 2006, so it's especially interesting to read this now - in the midst of a financial crisis largely created by the kinds of forces he's discussing. And to see one of these forces, he suggests we look in the mirror...

Here's his list of ten things (in order from most important down) consumers can do to take part in the Small-Mart Revolution and where we (my husband and I) stand with respect to each one:

1. Localize Your Home - As he recommends, we own our home (or if you rent, rent from a local landlord). We now really do own our home and have for about a decade, but when we did have a mortgage, it was from a local institution that didn't bundle their mortgages and send it off.
   
2. Halve Auto Use - Until, as he suggests, we can use local fuel and perhaps even buy regionally-built cars, we're doing the best we can to reduce the impact of our transportation. (And the Big 3's current troubles make his regional car company suggestion look like a smart solution that could lead to a more stable economy.) Here's what we're doing: we have a Prius (and use our 10-year-old Sienna only when necessary), my husband bicycled or took the bus to work before he retired, we lump our errand trips together, we don't travel far to shop, and we generally limit our travel. This spring, I might get a bicycle for traveling to the near-by grocery store, though there's one short stretch of road right near the store that's difficult for bicycle travel.
3. Eat Out Locally - We don't eat out often for several reasons. First, it's quite expensive relative to the (for us) small enjoyment it gives. Also, we're vegetarians and most restaurants simply remove meat from their "real" dishes and call that vegetarian. When we do eat out though, we've patronized local restaurants - for example, Mai Lan Vietnamese restaurant on N. Salina St., the new vegan restaurant Strong Hearts Cafe, and we're planning to go to Elderberry Pond for our anniversary since it features locally grown food. When we're traveling we try to seek out local restaurants, but it's hard to know where to find them in an unfamiliar place. Sometimes, we just go to a grocery store and eat simple things out of our cooler.
4. Find Local Entertainment - Shuman includes health clubs in this category. Before retirement, John went to the local Y, and now he's sometimes going to our high school, which allows the community to use the facilities at night. As for what most people think of as entertainment, we don't watch TV, but we do read - mostly library books. We watch movies on DVDs from our local library (but this of course isn't locally produced entertainment). Since retirement this past summer, we also play our daily games of Boggle, gin, and The Train Game, partly just trying to keep our minds sharp...) But most of all, I am entertained by my habitat garden, watching all the creatures and enjoying all the plants. (See my website at www.stewardshipgarden.org .) More exactly, though, this isn't entertainment as much as recreation - as in "re-creation." It's endlessly fascinating - and as local as you can get.
5. Use Local Health Care - It's hard to have an impact on health care since it's such a crazy system an individual can hardly control, but we do get prescriptions from our regional chain store (Wegmans) rather than a national chain like Wal-Mart or CVS. But Shuman also includes prevention in the local health care category. We do lots of that by eating healthfully (especially by cooking from scratch using healthy ingredients), exercising, and by participating in the community.
   
6. Buy Fresh Food - We're trying to eat locally to reduce global warming and to support the local economy. We also want to avoid pesticides. This combination is difficult, but we're working toward this goal. This year, we grew more of our own food - very local and organic - and bought a lot of food at the Regional Market - very local, but not much was organic. We've been buying local eggs, too, and are considering acquiring two Khaki campbell ducks for our yard. We also experimented with different methods of preserving this locally-grown food for the winter. The previous summer (2007) we bought an Excalibur dehydrator, which works really well. This year, we branched out into canning jams, and we bought a small freezer. Of course, there's energy being used by the dehydrator, by boiling the water for the jam (this can't be too bad, though), and of course, the freezer. The freezer is small, though, and we don't open it much, and when we use up the food, we'll turn it off until late next summer. It's hard to estimate the energy cost relative to transporting food from afar, but buying local food also supports the local economy and foodshed.
7. Localize Household Energy Use - Advocacy efforts to create decentralized, clean, renewable energy are important, but this is a long-term effort. One big thing we can do, though, is conserve energy and use it efficiently. We've insulated our house and have CFLs all through the house. We have a gas heating stove in the family/kitchen/office area, so by keeping the doors to the rest of the house closed, we can keep the rest of the house at 56 degrees, while keeping our daytime living area comfortable at 67. We also wear layers - thermal underwear (very effective!), turtleneck top, sweatshirt, and house jacket (I like to be warm). When I bake, I group items so that once the oven is heated, it's used for many things. We wait for full loads of laundry and dishes, and we use a front loader. I hang my laundry in the summer and in the winter, too (I'm fortunate to have an excellent indoor clothes rack - unfortunately not for sale anymore.)
8. Give to Local Charities - We do support our local independent nature education center, Baltimore Woods, and our local land trust, Save the County, but most of our charitable giving is to many large non-profits, such as Sierra Club, or to smaller ones, such as Bat Conservation International or American Bird Conservancy. We're also a member of Cornell's Lab of Ornithology, which is regional for us, though national in scope. For wildlife, all of the earth (or at least continents) are "local."
9. Localize Car Services - When possible, we use the local Auto Tech auto repair shop on Burnet Ave. (though for some things it seems only the Toyota place will do...) We've also used local body repair shops. Other than that, we don't do much car stuff.
   
10. Drink Local and Stop Smoking - We don't smoke, and we don't drink a lot, but when we do, I've looked for regionally-produced items. I've found a Finger Lakes organic wine at the local liquor store, other apple, blackberry etc wines at the Regional Market, and regional beers at the grocery store.

That's where we are at the moment - at least with respect to Shuman's list on building the local economy.