Welcome!

This blog was made to document my progression from an ordinary, albeit kinda hipster, millennial, into a full-fledged modern bohème with, hopefully, a neutral or at least vastly carbon-reduced footprint.

As our streets surge with young voices campaigning at the behest of one Greta Thunberg, voices clamoring that the house is on fire, it has become increasingly impossible for the average American to deny what those of us professional treehuggers and backyard hunter-gatherers have known for years: that climate change is a serious fucking problem. And for too long it has remained unaddressed.

But as the winds of the Green New Deal pick up with ever increasing urgency towards the 2020 general presidential election, many of us, though shot with the jolly adrenaline of taking to the streets to protest, tremble at the approach of the end of the world. It’s 1.5 degrees or die. Those stakes are not good.

Each of us has his, her, their own share to contribute to the cessation of climate change. Whether that’s choosing to bike instead of drive, picketing your local politicians, refusing to support a consumerist lifestyle, or composting at home, the time is too late for excuses.

All across the world whole municipalities are gathering at the sails, determined to push the ship back into life, rather than off the edge of the ever-heating world, into a void of flames.

Yet for those eco-punks, climate scientists, itinerant fruit-gatherers, and ex-hippie teachers who have been at large since the 1990s and even the 1960s, legislative and cultural change can feel so slow. We may find ourselves individually going vegetarian, tamping down on single-use plastics, and showing up outside the governor’s house. But, as we watch the rest of the population drive, one to a car, slurping down the Kool-Aid of a single-use gas station super-size coke, we can’t help but wonder, does it matter? Is it enough? Isn’t it time to go out and slash up rubber instead?

I’d like to believe that violence is not the answer, that we don’t all need to don ski masks and start, like Luddites, destroying the hallmarks of the post-industrial wasteland we find ourselves living in. Because if I believed in violence against those who refuse or are too ignorant to take action, I’d be a massive hypocrite.

You see, just a year or two ago, I was one of those people. Did I compost? No. Did I drive? Yes. Did I eat beef – and worse, beef that wasn’t grass-fed, free-range, organic, whatever? Yes. And did I even use plastic plates and cups not for a legitimate reason, like being a working mother of three, but just because I was too lazy, busy, and mindless to wash my dishes? Yes.

Responding to price incentives and resistance to change are natural human characteristics. These traits, which have been studied by a combination of psychologists and sociologists for years, are born not of malice, but of something known as the bystander effect: the idea that when a problem could be solved by 7,000,000,000 other people, you, as 1 person, feel, naturally, a lack of responsibility or obligation or importance in solving it. In short, the problem of climate change seems much too abstract for normal people to feel like they can do anything about it, even if they care.

“What does it matter,” a previous version of me asked, “if I drove? I’m just one person.”

That’s a normal thing to ask.

Previous me also said: “It’s too hard to compost. The bin is too expensive.”

That, too, is a normal concern, or rather, excuse.

But listen. Imagine the horror if all 6,999,999 other people thought like previous me, or you as you sit there in your chair. We would certainly die.

That’s the position we’re in now.

If you love nature, if you know climate change is happening, if you agree that the house is on fire, don’t sit back like old me, and let this problem with human psychology prevent you from taking action, on what is in reality a 5- or 10-minute problem to solve. You may love the birds and bees: please do something. You may not care about the birds and bees, but if you care about other people: know they won’t survive without an earth to hold them.

Don’t let your own ignorance, laziness, excuses, and mental processes prevent you from taking action. That’s what I did, and now I regret every single piece of disposable plastic, every unnecessary drop of engine oil, I’ve ever used. It’s because of this regret, partially, that I now feel committed to indoctrinating everyone I come across.

Now, here are some caveats that must be mentioned. The first is that, for an egregiously long time now, the environmental movement has been headed by mostly upper-class, overwhelmingly white, privileged and often obnoxious people, who push their veganism and bike-riding squarely in your face. As a person of color, an immigrant, and a former resident of a less than privileged neighborhood, this socioeconomic, cultural barrier is something I acknowledge and have personally experienced as the greatest barrier to environmental progress.

What sucks the most about this approach is that it alienates people who would otherwise be on our side. Who, in their right mind, would hate a tree? You can either believe or not believe in Jesus, believe or not believe in lower or higher taxes, and still like to take your kids out on a hike, whether you’re in Estonia or Argentina. Very few people would damage the environment on purpose. Would you psychotically murder the chair you’re sitting on, or flush away your malaria medicine in the toilet?

In America, at least, I’ve long felt alienated from the environmental movement, for the simple reasons that the agro-industrial complex as we know it was invented by white Americans (cue: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle). In fact, the whole global capitalist “ecosystem” that we find ourselves in was invented by Europeans, specifically the British, who discovered and mined coal. So frankly, it’s hypocritical for a white person to call out Native Americans, black Americans, Brazilians, Indians, Chinese, whatever, for eating a piece of meat or driving a truck. The ripple effects of that first coal extraction, followed by the widespread colonialism, imperialism, and terror, that it enabled, automatically predisposes an entire, major batch of the world to disagree, resent, and even actively clash with spokespeople of the environmental movement. It’s the same unfortunate reason that many in the world are anti-democracy.

If you look at the climate data, the carbon generated by a single person in the United States is a full 3 times as much as generated in China. We can garner two pieces of information from this: 1) if the Chinese emitted anything close to what U.S. folks emit, we’d be completely and utterly screwed and drowned already, and 2) reduction of per capita consumption in the U.S. has a major effect, especially socially, all on its own. Regarding China in particular, the country housed the recycling Americans were personally too lazy to sort, for many years.

Unfortunately, rural white Americans have also had to endure the negative effects of capitalism for far too long, especially with regards to coal mining. Bereft of actual opportunities to make income and actual access to education, these Americans, though some of the most vocal opponents of the climate change movement, just like their Native counterparts, have had to depend on fossil fuels to put any food on the table. As a society, we have failed them, because instead of teaching them to grow their own food, we teach them to depend on going into a cave and getting cancer so they can afford a piece of chemically sprayed, subsidized beef from a chain supermarket. How could they not hate every opinion of the elite that so oppresses them, including the opinion regarding climate change?

If the climate movement is to move forward, which it must unless we all want to die, we can’t ignore the demands of people who are underprivileged, black or brown, minorities, or rural white Americans. A house divided catches, and eventually succumbs, to fire.

As such, if you’re a white, elite American, don’t feel like you can cast your blame elsewhere, or that your personal consumption can be excused. And if you’re a non-white, non-elite American, know that I’m already on your side. I fucking get it. But even though the mistakes were made by someone else, throwing us all in this shitty position, we can’t resurrect a dead person to fix our problems for us. Those bastards left their trash but the trash isn’t going to pick itself up, it’s just going to turn into toxic waste unless we pay attention to it.

So, despite all that colonialism and imperialism, try to stick with me. It’s not out of cultural bias or insensitivity that I recommend changes to your lifestyle. We have no choice, even if we hate each other, to be in it together. Our hate, our love, whatever, won’t matter, when we’re fucking drowning. Every person on this planet has to make a choice. Sink or swim.

Now the second caveat is especially important, and the #1 excuse I have heard for not being eco-friendly. It goes: “I don’t have enough time,” or, “I don’t have enough money.”

In an industrial society, money and time are about equal: that’s what the man has reduced us to. So I don’t have enough time/ I don’t have enough money are basically the same thing. Think about what you actually spend your time doing. Will taking five minutes to change your non-smart powerstrip to a smart powerstrip really prevent you from getting to your job? (Do you even like your job?) “It’s too expensive” is not an acceptable response when these days, frequently, smart powerstrips outstrip nonsmart ones in cost. Especially when shipping services can ship products directly to your door.

At one point, you either succumb to the excuse, hammered in your head from global industrial capitalism, that “this thing is not worth my time/ money,” or you accept that you CAN make a change. It doesn’t have to be the sort of extreme change some passionate folks in the radical left recommend, such as suddenly going vegan. I’m not a believer in that style of change, because it clashes with human psychology: a person isn’t going to suddenly stop eating their good ole cheeseburger that they’ve been using as a coping mechanism for twenty years to switch to a diet of rice and beans. I’m asking you to make a five-minute change, a ten-minute change. But you have to commit to doing it. You have to commit, at the very least, to give yourself an honest look at what you CAN do.

If you can’t commit to even an honest appraisal of yourself, then ask yourself what you are committing to instead: because each moment in your life is a choice to live in one manner or another. Do you want to see the future burn? The forests stripped? Plants full of Monsanto? Pollutants filling the streets?

Denial, too, is a choice, and a choice with dire consequences. It starts with yourself. Look inward and ask yourself honestly whether you have accepted or refused to accept your own role in this.

As for the argument, “my choices don’t matter,” well again: picture if we all thought that. Would life still be worth living, if even six of seven billion people completely refused to make a single change in their life that doesn’t mesh with the status quo? I refuse to believe that, even in our desensitized industrial age, the human spirit can be crushed into so robotic a state.

In this blog, I’m going to cover the lifestyle changes that I, an ordinary person (who, by the way, isn’t particularly strong and has too sensitive of a constitution and too meager a budget to survive on vegan fare), will make and have made, on behalf of the climate movement. Because I’m an environmental activist, I have, over the course of my life and especially in recent years, already made a number of changes to my lifestyle, some big, some small. These changes, to my more passionate peers, probably seem not enough. But, they’re still more than before. And, more importantly, they’re doable – for anyone.

I’ll cover the struggles I’ve encountered, what’s easy and what isn’t, pro tips and pitfalls, and anything helpful regarding either my thinking or implementation of strategies to reduce my individual carbon footprint, and, if I’m lucky, how to expand that knowledge to others. I’ve had the special privilege of being able to spend time in my life looking through books, websites, Reddit forums, and my own personal experience, sifting through information to find what’s worthwhile to the average person. Sometimes, I imagine, I’ll just shoot the shit on what it’s like to be a young, urban millennial hovering on the verge of extinction. Whatever I say on here, it’s personal, it’s random, it tries and it might fail, and that’s because I don’t want to filter it a bit. I’m not here to make your eco-friendly choices Instagrammable, or my writing a perfection. I struggle only to convey what is useful. We want change and we want it now; we want change and we want it accessible.

Let me make a few disclaimers. I live in New England, but I like to travel; so, while this blog may start north of Boston in the suburb-like college town of Somerville, Massachusetts, I don’t know where it will end. The journey, anyhow, didn’t start here; location, I feel, does not matter, so much as your own concerted effort, wherever you are.

If you like this blog, if you have comments to make it better, let me know. And spread the word: the more the merrier.

I hope my insights will at least inspire you in your own journey to become a conscientious citizen of our planet – a planet that will, I hope, remain green and blue and full of life for generations to come.

October 1, 2019

Somerville, Massachusetts