Finally,
we’re on to the official start of “The Year of Going Green.” It’s Wednesday,
October 9, 2019, and for one year I’m going to push the envelope to see how far I can go to reduce my own carbon
footprint – at the lowest cost possible, and documenting each failure and
success on the way.
Here
are the “key goals” I’d like to focus on:
1)
Reducing
direct consumption of fossil fuels
I’d like to reduce my consumption of fossil fuels to 0 if
possible. That means outfitting everything I possibly can to somehow be
renewable. And, failing that, to reduce my personal electricity and heat usage
to as low a number as possible.
Note that this is no easy task; I live in New England,
where heating is a must, especially in the winter.
To do this, I plan on:
-
Measuring
and reducing direct electricity consumption
-
Replacing
electricity that comes from fossil fuels with sources of cleaner energy
-
Relying
as little as possible on motor vehicles, even in traditional applications such
as moving large objects
-
Modifying
my apartment living space to be more
eco-friendly
2)
Reducing
participation in the agro-industrial supply chain
The supply chain of America is based on long-distance trucking,
something that directly contributes to carbon dioxide emissions. So, I want to
wean myself off that commercial supply chain as much as possible.
Of this participation in such a supply chain, what I’d most
like to remove is the agricultural component. Agriculture makes up a
significant portion of emissions, enough for me to have basically quit eating
beef.
What that means, practically, is to limit my consumption of
food to that which is locally grown or grown myself. Because everyone ‘should’
theoretically know how to produce their own food, and because food is a
live-or-die sort of item, it’s especially important to focus on this area. It
wouldn’t be realistic for me to immediately start off by manufacturing
something complicated, that I don’t have the means to do: like detergent, for
example, or paint.
But every human, up until about the early 1900s in America,
knew how to farm. It was a survival skill. At some point we Americans
completely lost touch with that skill, having outsourced all of our
agricultural needs to slaughterhouses and agricultural wastelands – Upton
Sinclair’sThe Jungle , which was
written in 1906, doesn’t seem that far removed from reality today – such that
by the 1950s and onwards, no one even remembered how to farm.
In other places around the world, ancient farming
techniques such as the ones developed by indigenous people or the Chinese and
Japanese, which naturally featured a permaculture-style setup, were replaced by
this agro-industrial model, which has displaced hundreds of millions of family
farms to make way for corporate slaughterhouses, feed mills, and invasive
monocultures that ravish the land.
As such, I think the skills of making your own food and
using methods to preserve such food are critical going forth in this movement.
Secondarily, we need to support small, local farms, and buy into CSAs
(community sustainable agriculture). CSAs can tend to be expensive, so if you
have the disposable income, it can be hard to support them. I have been
fortunate enough to be able to buy into one; the next best thing is to garden yourself.
In this upcoming year I will explore buying only local foods (even if the foods are
bought at a “corporate” grocery store), home composting, indoor and small-scale
gardening techniques, urban foraging, dumpster diving, canning, and preserving.
These are skills that any person in 1850 would have known, but which we right
now do not, because we have sold our souls, hearts, and bodies to rampant
unsustainable capitalism.
Because I’ll be new to this, expect some failures.
3)
Going
“zero waste”
The ideal of “zero waste” has caught on in the mainstream
environmental movement, but basically the point is to stop buying into the
whole disposable culture of American society. Instead of buying a crappy knife
from Walmart that doesn’t work, throwing it away, and buying another crappy
knife, get one extremely high-quality knife to use for the rest of your life.
In our culture, everything is disposable: think of how
often Apple wants you to replace your phone and get their new model. All the
engineering, labor, and materials used to build the old phone are essentially
wasted now, despite claims towards “recycling” such components. Think also of
the enormous numbers of unwanted objects you see out on the streets come moving
time; sofas ripped apart, chairs missing legs, random odds and ends, all headed
towards the noxious mouth of the landfill.
To reduce the waste that comes from that, we need to stop
thinking of every object we buy as something to be used, abused, and tossed,
and rather as permanent fixtures in our lives, fixtures that are worth keeping.
To that end, we also need to stop throwing away or shying away from “used”
items, especially clothing – which produces a significant amount of waste – and
recoup and refurbish them.
If we take this long view of our items, we can see that the
“zero waste” movement relies on the two principles before “recycle”: REDUCE and
REUSE. In the waste hierarchy, reducing and reusing are way more important than
recycling; recycling just gets exported to China, the export itself eating up
massive tons of airplane fuel, another significant source of emissions.
So, whenever we purchase something, we need to be more
mindful of the long-term consequences of that purchase.
As an example, consider you are going to the grocery store
to buy some pasta sauce. First, have we considered whether we “need” the pasta
sauce – and can’t grow the tomatoes ourselves or don’t have time to grow them?
OK – so then, what sort of pasta sauce should we buy? Are we going to buy the
sauce that comes in the plastic jar all the way from the other side of the
country? Or are we going to buy the sauce that comes in the glass jar, that’s
local (and potentially even cheaper), and the jar itself is something we can
reuse again?
You see how the “zero waste” movement is not just an ideal,
it’s an everyday mindset regarding what you purchase.
As part of the “zero waste” endeavor, I’m interested in
trying to reduce my purchasing of anything that’s disposable or only meant to
be used once, including: foods wrapped in plastic, to-go or delivery
containers, paper towels, superfluous individually canned items such as soda,
and of course, the usual culprits of plastic bags – including the produce bags
at the grocery store.
Again, my goal is to be practical and cheap, and be able to
automate this whole process so that
I’m not altogether too inconvenienced.
4)
Spread
the word about methods of combating climate change and get involved with the
environmental activist community.
Of my goals, this may be the rosiest and most personal, as
it requires me to get rid of my natural introversion to get in touch with
others. For a long time I’ve felt personally disillusioned with the state of
the world and its lackadaisical response to climate change, but last year, with
the help of the whole “Climate Strike” thing among the youth, I’ve become
interested in joining in group and community efforts regarding this problem. As
I have discussed in my “Welcome” page, one of the personal issues I’ve had is
the way that the climate movement is overwhelmingly white and privileged – as can
be seen by how Greta Thunberg has become the spokesperson of the movement. Yet,
despite the multiple social and racial issues with this movement, I’m still
passionate about nature, which has no color and no creed, but is the earth that
surrounds us all.
So, even though I’d like nothing more than to just sit in
my home doing all this myself, I feel the need to try to include everyone else
(which is why I have created this blog). I think that it’s tantamount to a
responsibility; we cannot fight something so big on our own. So, I’ll have to
get out of my house more both so I can learn how to be a better citizen of the
planet, and help others along that path.
I also feel that I’ll make faster progress with a community
of people, than on my own; despite my independent streak when it comes to
learning stuff, sometimes other people are better, or at least more efficient,
teachers.
5)
Fundraise
on behalf of the environment.
Ah, money. The old root of all evil! This is one of my further
off goals, and tied to the issue of community outreach in the climate movement.
When money buys power and leverage, it figures that the more of it you have on
your side, the better. Unfortunately, we cannot pretend that money doesn’t
exist, or that these efforts to lead greener lifestyles don’t cost a lot of
resources and time. So, in this blog, I have made it a personal goal to
implement these green lifestyle changes at as cheap a price as possible. One
step beyond that would be to raise money to, say, donate directly to the
Rainforest Trust, which is an organization buying up land in the Amazon
rainforest to prevent further deforestation.
I’d like to start on a personal level and see what I can
do, but I also want to see how these changes impact the system at large.
That
about wraps up my goals in this year.
As
far as my starting materials, I have the following:
Books:
The Urban Homestead, a book applying
traditional homesteading techniques to an urban setting, with a DIY/ punk bent
Victory Garden, an old-fashioned book
on growing crops in New England, with a focus on raised-bed farming techniques
Gaia’s Garden, the permaculture
tome, which espouses an idea of a “food forest” in which the garden and its
environs are a closed, self-sustaining ecological loop, similar to the idea of
regenerative farming
Edible Wild Plants and The Backyard Forager, two well-ranked
books on urban foraging covering a total of 60-70 commonly found plants that
you can forage
Subreddits:
r/sustainable,
provides news and tips for becoming more sustainable
r/indoorplants,
mostly plant porn but with some good tips on growing indoors
r/preppers,
the Reddit survivalist/ prepper community
r/earthporn,
for inspiration
r/natureislit,
for more inspiration
Materials:
1
unopened electricity usage monitoring kit
2
nonworking mechanical timers from Amazon
Basic
toolkit, including hammer, screwdriver, screws, wrenches, etc.
Power
drill, some sort of drill bit, saw, and workbench for woodworking
Palette
wood and crowbar (only 2 palettes in my yard, and no way to transport them)
1
working mountain bike, 3 nonworking bikes including: 1 preteen child’s bike, 1
adult road bike missing entire transmission, and 1 kid’s mountain bike with
broken wheels, salvaged from a police auction, that I hope to fix up (no
experience whatsoever in fixing up bikes)
