the buy nothing challenge and i

This month I'm participating in Crunchy Chicken's Buy Nothing Challenge. It's gone pretty well so far. Of course, it's easy not to buy stuff when you really can't afford to, although it seems like folks manage to do that, too. My problem was, I actually had some stuff I had planned to buy this month. But a couple of loopholes in the challenge rules made it possible: it's okay to buy supplies for growing your own food (ha-ha) and it's okay to buy stuff used.

Here is what I've allowed myself to spend money on since the beginning of the month:

• gas (ugh)
  
• groceries
• car maintenance
• a haircut (nothing more)
• gardening tools (a start-up investment and hopefully a one-time purchase)
  
• a couple of serendipitous trips to the thrift store (where I actually did find a pair of roller skates that fits Khymi, miraculously; ten 24-ounce mason jars, and an old one of these for 69 cents)
• a literary magazine and a ticket to a play at the Baltimore '68 conference
• reasonably-priced dinner with a friend

I think that's all. And I think most of it (arguably) falls under stuff that's allowed, since most of it isn't actually stuff, and almost none of what is stuff is newly-manufactured.

What's been nice about the challenge so far is that I've also felt inspired to get rid of some stuff--since I'm a little bit of a thrift store addict (shopping there isn't what I would consider a sacrifice), I made a rule for myself that I have to take something to donate any time I want to buy something. As a result, I've also had to think more about buying stuff that will last for a long time--stuff I won't just want to get rid of in a couple of years. I've also had to think about what I can just make myself instead of buying (most of this falls under the food category anyway, though...more on that later).

Maybe, come May, I'll be up for the Extreme Eco Throwdown.

Read more...

treat yourself to some greenergy

A few months ago, my nearby aunt and uncle told us that our local energy provider, Pepco, offers 100% wind power. A little investigation revealed that Pepco does indeed have a private subsidiary, Pepco Energy Services, that offers residential power generation/transmission from either (1) 100% wind sources or (2) a mix of wind, solar, hydro, and biomass.

Great, think the skeptics, but only chi-chi yuppies can afford the whole "green" racket, right?

Sorry, dear skeptics, but the price tag for either source turns out to be only TWO CENTS more per kWh than your nasty (NOT the least bit "clean") coal or nuclear power. Last month, this amounted to a difference of SEVEN DOLLARS.

(We opted for wind because we were uneasy about some of the ecological dangers of hydroelectric dams and biomass. And because windmills are just doggone cool, notwithstanding the NIMBY naysayers.)


Honestly, coal and nuclear just aren't as pretty.

To recap:
For seven dollars a month, you can
(a) save part of the world's oldest mountains, North America's largest contiguous forest, and lots of poor folks' lives, homes, schools, drinking water, roads, and health, all of which are destroyed by destructive mountaintop removal mining,
(b) save tons of carbon emissions at the other end of the coal power process, thereby helping stop global warming,
(c) save tons of other pollutant emissions from coal-fired power plants, and
(c) reduce the dangers for humans and other life from nuclear waste, nuclear energy production, and nuclear catastrophe (not that nuclear production offers much for efficient carbon reduction, either).

How about that, folks?

Now, of course, that cost difference (i.e., our $7) varies with power consumption. But cutting down on power use is easily within a household's grasp: the key is just to unplug or shut off ("standby" doesn't count!) things you're not using anyway, such as phone chargers, coffee makers, stereos, TVs, microwaves, computers, and so forth. They're not doing anything but costing you money!

Aha, pipe up the skeptics, this is all well and good for you Marylanders with your Pepco, but who's to say we could get a similar deal in Minnesota, Wyoming, Maine, etc.?

Oho, quoth we in the Small Red House, who's to say you can't?

Read more...

want vs. need

A few hours after my last post, I came across this paragraph in an essay by Wendell Berry:

It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have—a pencil, say—why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging? If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?

Berry is discussing technology in general--part of his response as to why he refuses to buy a computer (*cough*), but the same might be applied to our technologically-affected food. For some, the line may be drawn at not eating animals at all, affirming that one doesn't need meat to thrive anyway, so why go through something that is morally troubling? I suppose what I meant as a result is that the introduction of another complicated set of products might not really solve anything, either.

What jumped out at me the most was the sentence, "And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need." No, many do not find it so easy not to buy things. It actually seems to be really difficult for most people. This article in the Post last week was the first high-profile (albeit unnecessarily snarky) statement that finally brought some attention to the real bottom line: "green consumption" is a contradiction. Maybe we could call it "greener consumption," in the way that some folks prefer to make a distinction between "safe sex" and "safer sex".

My mom has been working for the last few months on the concept of "green fashion," and everyone who's interviewed her is interested, first and foremost, on what to buy. No one wants to hear that we've got a ton of surplus clothes in this country and the "greenest" place to get clothes is the thrift store, a yard sale, or your friend's closet. The "greenest" wedding is the one in which you don't replace all your mismatched (but perfectly functional) dishes, sheets and towels with new, coordinating ones from your registry just because you can. No one wants to hear that it might be a good idea to look for timeless "investment" clothing that will last you for the next twenty years--want it to last longer? Learn to mend clothes instead of throwing them away when they're worn. In many ways, "green fashion" is also an oxymoron, because fashion is, sometimes by its very definition, ever-changing, temporary and disposable.

It will take quite a cultural paradigm shift for people to really only buy what they need. Look around and you'll see we're not even close.

Read more...

food: where to draw the line?

I got a little turned around in circles when I read this post (and subsequent comment thread) over at The Good Human, one of the enviro-blogs I like to read (I have a feeling we'll have to start categorizing our blogroll soon, but later for that).

I was a vegetarian (no meat, including fish) for five years, which is kind of a long time considering that's about a fifth of my total time on this planet. The reasons I would give for my decision changed over time: at first, it was because I felt uneasy about eating animals in general, and later, it more because I felt guilty eating an animal I knew I could not bring myself to personally kill if given the chance. During this time, I ate my fair share of meat substitutes, from Boca Burgers to seitan to veggie sausage and bacon to Quorn. I felt much better knowing that no animals died in the process of making this food.

In retrospect, though, I realized that what made me feel strange about being a meat-eater was not necessarily the meat itself, but my significant removal from its production. The mystery of the meat industry was enough to make me think that I was better off just not eating it at all. But after I had thought about it, the contents of those veggie alternatives were just as mysterious. Sure, no dead animals. But what is all that stuff?

Let's take one of my favorites, Morningstar Farms Veggie Sausage Patties. I loved these things. They contain no fewer than 36 ingredients:

TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN (WHEAT GLUTEN, SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, WATER FOR HYDRATION), EGG WHITES, CORN OIL, SODIUM CASEINATE, MODIFIED TAPIOCA STARCH, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF LACTOSE, SOYBEAN OIL, HYDROLYZED VEGETABLE PROTEIN (WHEAT GLUTEN, CORN GLUTEN, SOY PROTEIN), AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, SPICES, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, SODIUM PHOSPHATES (TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE, TETRAPYROPHOSPHATE, HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE, MONOPHOSPHATE), SALT, DISODIUM INOSINATE, CARAMEL COLOR, CELLULOSE GUM, WHEY POWDER, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, MALTODEXTRIN, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, DEXTROSE, ONION POWDER, DISODIUM GUANYLATE, VITAMINS AND MINERALS (NIACINAMIDE, IRON [FERROUS SULFATE], THIAMIN MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE [VITAMIN B6], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], VITAMIN B12), SUCCINIC ACID, ASCORBIC ACID, LACTIC ACID, BREWERS YEAST, TORULA YEAST, SOY LECITHIN.

Does anyone know what most of these things are? I don't. But I'll bet you most of it is made from a) corn or b) soy. Two crops that have taken over America's midwestern landscape on an unbelievable scale. We rode from Charleston, WV to Portland, OR on the train this past summer and those two crops are pretty much all we saw from our window anytime we'd go through a farming area. And when you come right down to it, the oil-based monoculture that keeps the corn industry booming isn't so eco- (or animal-) friendly, either.

Another problem with my time as a vegetarian was that I spent more of my money and my diet on these fake meats than was really necessary. One can technically be a vegetarian and still get by eating very few actual vegetables. Even apart from the processed soy products (which tend to be on the pricey side), as a college student, I could eat pasta or ramen noodles, and even though I wasn't eating meat, I wasn't exactly being healthy. I was consuming artificially cheap, government-subsidized "food" one way or the other. And I sure as hell wasn't supporting small business (guess who owns wacky ol' "alternative" veggie brand Morningstar Farms? Oh, just a little billion-dollar operation by the name of Kellogg).

I guess my point here is that meat is a red herring (as it were). Sure, the meat industry is pretty scary, and not eating meat ensures that you won't be taking part. But avoiding meat doesn't mean you're avoiding the disadvantages of industrialized food. As we all saw in 2006, you can just as easily get E. coli from organic spinach as from ground beef.

Jacob's parents have a subsistence farm in rural West Virginia. Besides a large vegetable garden, berry bushes and fruit trees, they raise chickens for meat and eggs, and my father- and brother-in-law hunt deer in the fall. The chickens live happy lives, eating a combination of feed grain and ground vegetation, and the deer...well, the deer are wild, and that's about as free-range as you can get. With virtually no natural predators, they are prone to overpopulation. As an indirect result, about 15,000 deer are hit by cars every year in West Virginia. Given that, which is better--a rotting deer carcass on the side of the road (that may have also just totaled someone's car), or a source of lean and nutritious meat, wild-roaming from the day it was born, free of antibiotics, pesticides and contaminants?

This doesn't mean I'm enthusiastic about hanging around at their place when butchering is going on. I'm still pretty squeamish about these things. But it does mean I have an appreciation for what goes into that chicken and deer meat, and I have the same appreciation for the small-scale farmers who sell the meat at the farmers' market. It is more expensive, but I am willing to pay them fairly for their work when I can. We consider it a treat in our house. Most days we are just as happy to eat a real vegetarian diet--whole beans, eggs, some tofu, lots of vegetables and whole grains. We're not purists, but we'd like to be at the point where heavily processed food of any kind (meat or veggie) is the exception, not the rule.

Read more...