Clay and Wattles

Last week, I turned forty years old. I don’t usually pay much attention to artificial milestones, but this one is as good a time to take stock as any. A few months ago I calculated how long I might expect to live assuming I reach an average life expectancy for my age, then wrote a program to display the current value on my computer desktop: as of today, I have 14062 days to go.

I have decided to put this blog on hiatus for a while. I may revive it again periodically (to write about future sustainable trips, for example). It has been fun writing it, and I have made a lot of progress toward sustainability because I’ve been publicly keeping track. However, it is time to take a break and think about other things. Sustainability is a foundation for a good life; activism is not an end in itself.

One of the standards I’ve used to measure our impact is the list of consumer activities that are most harmful to the environment according to The Union of Concerned Scientists in their book The Consumer Guide to Effective Environmental Choices (discussed here and here). Against their criteria, we’re doing well.

As a family, we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions to essentially zero. We no longer heat or power our home with fossil fuels. We’re limiting emissions from travel by using only bicycles, taxis, buses and trains. We’ve substantially reduced our use of hydroelectric power by changing our habits, replacing some of our appliances, and cutting off phantom power loads. We are not consuming large amounts of water, or polluting what we do use. We aren’t using toxic chemicals around the house or in the garden. We’re eating only organically and/or home-grown food whenever possible, in spite of the higher cost. We don’t eat meat or poultry. We’ve broken bad consumer habits and buy only what we need while considering environmental impact, packaging, and place of origin of the goods we do buy. We’ve become politically active and tried to help inform others about these issues.

My goals with this project and this site were lofty (see here and here). Truly achieving them is a lifelong process, and will never be complete.

1. Greenhouse Gas Reduction
2. No Air, Water, Soil Pollution
3. Conservation
4. Fairness
5. Personal Well-Being
6. Activism

Most of what I mentioned above falls under categories 1, 2, and 6. We’ve worked hard on that last one: this blog, my election to City Council, our donations of time and money to elections at other levels of government, letters we’ve written, further donations of time and money to organizations working for these goals. We’ve stopped contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere directly and stopped polluting air, soil, and water. At the same time, by buying carefully, buying locally, and buying less, we are minimizing our indirect impacts through manufacturing and transportation. We are contributing to conservation through activism and by supporting CPAWS, Ecology North, and Sierra Club, but buying less also contributes to that goal. Likewise, fairness comes through community and global action, union participation, careful purchases and, most importantly, from trying to avoid using more than our share of the earth’s resources.

The one goal I haven’t spent much time working on directly is number 5, personal well-being. We’ve made plenty of progress indirectly. We need less paid work because we don’t spend as much. I think the whole family feels pretty good about living more sustainably, and it has spurred us to experience things (like bus trips across the country, like the bike tour my daughter and I did this summer, like gardening) that have made our lives richer. Even so, this is the goal I intend to spend more time on for the next little while. I won’t stop any of the other stuff — still serve on City Council, still garden, still continue to reduce my environmental impact — but I want to spend more time on writing and other personal projects (like eliminating a lot of the material things we’ve accumulated over the years). I’ve started to think that another aspect of improving personal and community well-being involves reducing the time I spend interacting with a computer. I don’t suggest that computers are evil, but they have become paramount in many of our daily lives — I’d like to put the computer in its proper place.

Now that you’ve seen how well this blog thing works for reducing personal environmental impact, I challenge others to take up the mantle I am dropping and try it yourselves. People need examples. My family is one example, but we should have others — there are a thousand ways to live sustainably. How about you? It’s easy, fun, and rewarding, so why not?