I love a flight of fancy as much as the next gal, but I tend to prefer writing about things I’ve actually experienced. Tethering to reality keeps the writing honest, and an important personal goal is to keep my writing honest.
I like to write about and share ideas, which I guess one could categorize as flights of fancy, but I wouldn’t quite agree because ideas can turn into Things That Actually Happen. What I’m not that hot on is writing about ideas in a way that feels didactic or preachy.
That’s all a prelude to today’s post. I got several emails last week when I posted about the current conflict between filmmaker Michael Moore and author/activist Bill McKibben. That post was really about how one sorts out making genuinely earth-positive choices from all the greenwashing chaff, and that’s what the emails focused on: How do we sort what’s authentically good for the planet from all the bluster that claims to be good but is not, so we can do those things that are really truly good?
We’re all working with these questions, and doing our flawed best to make sense of our options. I’ve made just about every ecological mistake in the book, which is ironic, given that my parents were very eco-conscious, composting on a large scale way before that was in vogue; opting for a natural lawn instead of its manicured, fertilized, mowed counterpart long before that was in vogue; and heating our home exclusively with wood from the property in a wood stove DIYed from two empty, 50-gallon steel drums (before heating with wood was identified as a producer of icky bad air pollutants).
Anyway, at this point in my life, it’s pretty clear to me that, for the most part, making sound ecological choices is almost always going to coincide with making sound financial choices. The exception would be buying organic food, which tends to be more expensive than its nonorganic analogue.
Back to my initial point. I’d like to discuss what I think are important, genuinely meaningful actions and decisions to ponder when considering earth-friendliness, but because I’ve blown it so much, I feel both unqualified and kind of phony.
So what I’d like to do is share a short list of those decisions that I consider important, even central. And interspersed and after that list, I’m also going to share how I’ve f*&!^%ed up in each of those areas too.
Here are the big ones that, in my opinion, agreeably unite environmental soundness and thrift:
*Not driving. The pinnacle: organizing your life so that you don’t need a car at all, with everywhere you frequent in reasonable walking or biking distance. Various analyses have looked at the environmental impacts of manufacturing a new Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf or Tesla Whatever; the manufacturing process is never very benign, and whether the fuel saved once these new cars are on the road “offsets” the fuel, pollution, and mineral costs of manufacture is difficult to parse. So I guess buying one of these on the used market is a viable second-place choice, but it’s a distant second, way behind using your feet to get places. (I need to acknowledge here that a friend who has two young children says that she really misses driving to work because it was the only “me time” she got in a day. So people’s situations are different, and for some there are important considerations around driving that go beyond thrift and ecology.)
*Living in the smallest house that you can reasonably live in. One uses fewer fossil fuels to heat and cool a smaller space, and one has less space to fill with one’s preferred form of consumer goods. This is a biggie for me; my proclivity to buy stuff for years means that now I have a ton of stuff to process and declutter. Economically, even if I resell everything I decide I don’t want any more, I’ll never make back what I spent; and I could really use that scrilla now—much more than I can use the stuff it bought. Ecologically, stuff takes a toll on your personal physical and mental ecology as it requires both 3-D, real-life storage and its care and maintenance occupy mental real estate.
*Gardening and foraging, mending, trading services and goods. The more you can do for yourself, the more money you save. The longer you make things last, the less waste you create. The more localized the sources for the goods and services you use and offer, the less fossil fuel-based travel you have to do to secure those goods and services.
*It’s taken me a long time to come around to this next one: I think it’s valuable to consider living near your tribe. “Near” is subjective, but being really far-flung means you’re going to fly or drive long distances to see loved ones and big-time swell your carbon footprint even as you lighten your wallet to pay for all that travel.
I’m talking to myself as much as anyone else, since, as stated above, I have conspicuously botched many of the choices listed above.
When you live in a place, whether it’s optimally sized or not, inertia sets in and it can feel overwhelming to think about moving. (I would have written the book on inertia, but I couldn’t get started.) Even if moving to a smaller place would immediately allow you to use less energy.
The non-optimally sized place where I live (too big; although that extra space has been helpful recently to accommodate family members who need to Shelter In Place) is two miles from the nearest bus stop, where a rarely sighted bus hardly ever stops, and 4.7 miles from the nearest BART station. In short, the bus is like an unreliable phantom, and I don’t have the time to walk or bike to the BART station. (I can hear my clarinet teacher from my youth, responding when I’d explain that I hadn’t practiced because I didn’t have time: “Time is not had; time is made.”) And before I had children, I moved 3000 miles from my hometown and most of the people I knew, married to a man whose hometown was halfway around the globe, disregarding the point above about living near your tribe. In my youthful exuberance, I assumed travel would be easier and more frequent than it has turned out to be.
While I garden all the time at work, my own garden at home is often neglected and certainly not as practical and productive as it could be—a classic case of The cobbler’s children go without shoes. I’m definitely not growing, foraging, and swapping very much.
One needs time to realize some of these possibilities—walking, unless we’re talking about very short distances, will take longer than driving; gardening throughout the seasons will take more time and planning than popping into Safeway for groceries. Time is the precious variable that I always wish I had more of; I know many feel the same way. So, unless we can make some pretty major lifestyle tweaks, such as relocating to a place with a great walk score, these time-rich choices are out of reach for some of us, at least at this point.
I can see now how the economics and ecology of all these decisions are and have been interwoven.
It does feel like these kinds of questions should be thoughtfully considered when young people are deciding where to land. As a younger person, I never imagined or understood that I would feel inertia, or that having and raising children in a place would sink my taproot deep deep in that location.
I appreciate the time afforded by Sheltering In Place to consider all of this. Next steps: understanding how best to make the positive changes I can make now, and beginning to plan further positive changes before my inertia turns to petrification.