Our Journey in Living Our Green "Good Life"

Taming the snail mail monster

2011-11-07T16:16:00.001-05:00

This is just about one week's junk mail

We've noticed a steady decline in "real" mail and a steep increase in junk mail over the past few years. Our real mail has declined because we do most of our communication online, and our junk increases because our name is being sold to many organizations and businesses.

I had already put our names on the lists to eliminate catalogs long ago, so we didn't get many of those -- just solicitations or catalogs that don't access that list I guess.

So until this summer, I resigned myself to opening them all to retrieve the fairly large amount of paper that we could use for scrap paper, then putting the rest into the recycling bin. Thank goodness that our county recycles this junk! (Note: I've read on Living Lighter that each year more than 100 million trees are turned into the 5.8 million tons of mail that end up as 450,000 garbage trucks worth of waste!)

Over the past few months, though, I've taken action. This was partly because there was so much in the news about the Post Office's problems and partly because I had become pretty resentful of the time it takes to deal with this junk. Even if I didn't feel compelled to rescue what paper I could out of all of that mess, it takes time to sort out the real mail from the junk.

I've collected all the junk mail we get, then once or twice a week I've been either emailing or making phone calls asking to be taken off the lists. Initially I had thought that email would be easier, but in some cases, it was just too hard to find the appropriate email on the website.


I've kept a list of dates I contacted each organization

I keep a little notebook listing the organizations I've contacted and the date I contacted them. Since some organizations contact me frequently, and since it takes a few months for the mailings to stop, it was hard to remember if I had already contacted them--hence the list. Each line in the list (in the photo) is one organization, and I have six pages so far! And each day I still get new junk...

It was interesting to find that some of these organizations have being taken off their list as a separate item on their phone tree! I guess I'm not the only one doing this.

I should note that there were organizations that I think may be charities that are excuses for a big CEO salary, but there were some organizations I respect and will continue my membership in. For these, it's all the more reason I don't want them to waste money sending stuff I have never responded to.

Another thing we did was to discontinue magazines that come with membership. For example, even though Audubon magazine is beautiful, I just don't have time to read it and I'd rather have them spend their money on bird conservation, not sending me a magazine that will just get recycled.

All in all, it's been somewhat time-consuming, but I'm really looking forward to the time in a few months (it takes a few months for the mailings to cease they tell me) when we'll just have mostly real mail in our mailbox--and for the amount of real mail we receive, once a week delivery would probably be adequate...

Rescuing stones

2011-06-19T10:59:00.000-04:00

We get our groceries by backpack (except for extremely bulky or heavy items that warrant an occasional car trip), and today on our way back we happened upon these stones put out to the curb.

They were evidently part of some craft project since some had been painted, but they were nice flat stones, perfect for stepping stones (and they were painted on only one side).

The bigger issue, though, is that these were items that could be reused--one often-ignored part of the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, and recycle). Onondaga County fortunately has one of the country's best recycling program, but do we adequately reduce or reuse? Recycling requires community effort and investment in recycling facilities, which Onondaga County has done. Reducing and reusing is more of an individual commitment.

Stones are not truly a renewable resource in human time scale--they're "mined" from somewhere after all--so we're glad to have rescued these stones for reuse. You can never have too many stepping stones in the garden beds!

And besides, carting this little pile home in my arms provided an extra amount of "free exercise" that we're always looking for. We consider things such as parking far from our destination, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking to Wegmans as the kinds of activities we build into our daily lives that take minimal time but cumulatively contribute to good health. This unexpected opportunity built some arm muscles and burned some calories!

No more peanut butter jars

2011-06-12T14:09:00.000-04:00

After saving our peanut butter jars for a few years, we've finally reached the point where we have to stop. We have a few hundred--more than enough to store our dried fruit for the fall harvest season. (We LOVE peanut butter. It's one of our favorite foods.)

I know we have enough jars--especially since we're nearing the end of the dried fruit we were storing in them, but it's hard to stop.

Sure, we can recycle them (and our county has one of the best recycling operations in the country), but recycling still involves the cost of carting the materials to the facility and the costs of reconstituting the material into new glass. (Of course, the costs are not ours, but for society.) And I doubt that this material can be infinitely recycled. Certainly many things are actually downcycled, not recycled.

These peanut butter jars have worked so well. They're of uniform size and store just the right amount of dried fruit. Each one would last for years, as has the quart-size jar that was sold for lemon juice a few decades ago. We're still using it today as a handy way to refill our water jug.

Why do we build in so much waste into our daily lives? It's clear there's a limit to the amount one person can do in this situation. I guess we could find a place that sells peanut butter in bulk so we wouldn't accumulate any more jars and we'd be able to use the ones we had, but that would entail a car trip basically just for this thing. And I have to admit that the Wegmans organic peanut butter is our absolute favorite peanut butter. It's just organic peanuts and salt. (The late William F. Buckley was famous for his preference for Wegmans peanut butter.) I'd hate to have to switch brands, and I don't think we can get this peanut butter in bulk.

I think the issue is bigger than just our peanut butter. Our modern society has come to think it's reasonable to have single-use containers for everything. It's convenient, but at what a cost.

Hanging out time arrives!

2011-04-03T11:58:00.000-04:00

This is the first day I've been able to hang out our laundry. I've been looking forward to this for weeks, both because it's a little easier to hang them on the line than indoors (though our indoor drying racks are pretty easy), but especially because I miss the sunny, fresh air fragrance we enjoy so much.

Now that we've started for the season, I know we'll be able to hang our clothes out until probably November. There have been very few weeks over the past ten years or so when there hasn't been at least one day when it's been good enough weather to dry our laundry outside.

Just hanging out

2009-03-15T19:23:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-11T07:15:00.002-04:00

#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

2009-03-10T18:35:00.003-04:00

#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

2009-01-26T14:01:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-11T11:05:00.007-05:00

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

2009-01-08T09:06:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-24T07:34:00.016-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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.
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.