Category: low-footprint living

Carbon offsets offer a way to mitigate the footprint of our everyday lives, by giving money to tree-planting projects or other enterprises that are specifically intended to mitigate carbon emissions. I got interested in carbon offsets as a way to mitigate my travel footprint, but they can be used to mitigate any aspect of one’s footprint. It’s not perfect, but it’s a tool that’s available to us for those cases when we don’t feel able to just cut out an area of consumption.

I once purchased carbon offsets for a train trip to visit my family in Virginia. If I recall correctly, the offset cost me just a couple of dollars.

I have largely given up flying, but I once purchased offsets to mitigate a couple decades of my past air travel. I think it cost me about $137 or something. Now I’m going to look into proactively purchasing offsets for the occasional Uber rides and other car rides I take.

There are various online vendors of carbon offsets. Whichever site you choose, look for the Gold Standard. The Gold Standard is the standard that’s recommended by eco experts I look to for guidance.

This site Offset Your Emissions: The Gold Standard – goldstandard.org gives an overview, and right there on the page are a number of projects you can choose from. This site is good for offsetting your overall emissions; for a site that lets you calculate and offset the impact of a specific trip, see the link in the next paragraph. The price and the amount of carbon emissions offset are displayed; you just click and buy. The projects tend to have an element of improving the lives of people in other countries (for example, creating jobs through tree-planting in Timor-Leste; improving public health through water-quality improvement in Laos) while you are helping to mitigate your household’s footprint. The site also has a carbon calculator, or you can just use their average monthly estimates for countries around the world. (Citizens of USA, Canada, and Australia emit an average of 2 tons a month, while in most of Europe and developing countries it’s 1 ton a month.)

• Calculate and offset the impact of a specific flight or other trip: cooleffect.org

• “Everything you need to know about carbon offsetting for your flights” (Katie Genter; thepointsguy.com). Includes general info, tips, and links to carbon-footprint calculators.

Amid worries over the Coronavirus epidemic, Wall Street stocks have gone down (U.S. stocks are on track to have their worst week since the 2008 financial market crisis) — but so have our carbon emissions. According to the New York Times “Climate Forward” email newsletter, “In the past month, the world has seen a remarkably large drop in emissions of carbon dioxide, the main driver of global warming” as a result of factory shutdowns and other actions taken to control the Coronavirus epidemic.

(Such drops in emissions were previously observed during the airline flight shutdowns that followed the 9-11 attacks and the eruption of a volcano in Iceland.)

I doubt that even the most ardent environmentalist would say that the emissions reduction is worth the death and suffering caused by the virus. But this side-effect of the epidemic does offer a window into what is possible if humankind were to undertake voluntary reductions in travel and other forms of consumption.

The coronavirus epidemic has also prompted at least one Neighborhood Watch chairman to plan on bringing up food-growing and rainwater collection at her upcoming neighborhood meeting, as actions that would be in her community’s interest to undertake. She has been bringing this up in the community for a long time, with little effect, but feels that the potential for the epidemic to lead to a shutdown of basic daily supplies and services might give people a stronger motivation to find value in this suggestion.

Further Reading:

The New Yorker just started a climate crisis newsletter, which provides updates from inside the climate-action movement by writer and activist Bill McKibben. You can sign up here for the free email newsletter.

In the first issue of the newsletter, McKibben includes a quote from Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the U.N.’s climate-change convention: “The decade we have just started is the most consequential decade humanity has ever faced. If we are not able to cut our current global greenhouse-gas emissions by fifty per cent over the next ten years, we will be poised to enter into a world of constant destruction of infrastructure, congested and polluted cities, rampant diseases, increasing burning and flooding, mass migrations due to extensive droughts, heat or land loss leading to the abandonment of uninhabitable areas, and political turmoil as people fight for food, water, and land. At the current level of emissions, that is the world that we are heading for. If, on the other hand, we set our minds and determination to the necessary transformation, reducing our global greenhouse gases [by] half over the next ten years, we would have actually co-created a path toward a very different world: a reforested planet with regenerated agriculture, clean and efficient transport, enjoyable cities, clean air, and ubiquitous cheap energy for everyone.”

From Quartz (qz.com): “Dutch trends forecaster Li Edelkoort has a provocative outlook on Covid-19, the deadly coronavirus strain that has upended manufacturing cycles, travel plans, and conference schedules around the world. … [T]he celebrated 69-year old design industry advisor pictured Covid-19 as a sobering force that will temper our consumerist appetites and jet-setting habits. Edelkoort … believes we can emerge from the health crisis as more conscientious humans. ‘We need to find new values—values of simple experience, of friendship,’ she told Quartz. ‘It might just turn the world around for the better.'”

And on the Deep Adaptation forum on Facebook, a fellow member mentioned hearing from some people in Italy that the quarantines have given them a rest from break-neck schedules, demanding bosses, and the like.

As ecologically minded citizens we become accustomed to dealing with grief. Wildfires, floods, wetlands paved over, animals extinct — each takes its toll not only on the physical environment but also on our own inner landscape. But some hit us harder than others. Last week I read a sentence that just flattened me:

“Unfortunately, we humans are now in a position to declare victory in our long war on insects.”

This was written by a professor and entomologist named Doug Tallamy.

And it just sums up the full hideous truth of how very powerful we humans have become. Coming face to face with the enormity of things is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s a call to wake up, be real, get one’s priorities straight. On the other hand, it can sap the will; induce depression and paralysis.

In recent years I’m finding that taking care of my mental health and becoming more deeply connected with my lifelong spiritual/metaphysical inclinations are the two top most essential things that I need in order to persist in my work as an environmental educator/activist.

Lately I have stumbled on a social movement (I rely heavily on being able to tap into social movements, even if it’s mainly online) called Deep Adaptation. It’s about acknowledging the full enormity of things, and finding ways to be ethical compassionate citizens of a reality that we as a civilization may not survive. I have relied heavily on faith, hope, and optimism to get through life and keep me going in my work. But I am no fan of false hope. The silver lining of facing the very real prospect of a societal collapse and worse is that it refines one’s choices; carves away the superfluous; helps one stop second-guessing one’s choice of freelance environmentalism as a career; certainly helps one stop feeling “too drastic” for not wanting air-conditioning or a clothes-dryer and for carrying one’s reusable cup and spoon clipped to one’s belt and refusing car rides that are out of people’s way.

By facing, to the extent of our ability and willingness, the very real prospect of societal collapse, catastrophe, and human extinction, we shift our attention to a different field of choices, and open up to new realms of creativity. This shift quite possibly increases the likelihood that we will make choices allowing humanity to survive and even thrive.

I don’t know about you, but I find it exhausting sometimes, leading what feels like a double life or straddling two worlds. I go to meetings where transportation experts are making highway plans for the year 2045. Good grief, will we still be driving the same old same old cars the same old same old ways then? I go to financial seminars where shiny young successful people are planning on how they are going to save enough money so they’ll have the $10,000 a month that they say they need to enjoy a prosperous retirement.

And I hang out in circles where people are circling up on rural homesteads, trying to hoard or grow everything to meet their family’s needs. And I know plenty of people who don’t earn $10,000 every six months, let alone every month.

I know people who own four houses and they still don’t think it’s enough. And I personally know many people who don’t have one roof over their head.

I live in a world where landscaping contractors spray herbicide through a hose; such a high volume that I wishfully asked if they were watering the plants. And I live in a world where I’m the wild crazy one for calling out, “Hey, what are you doing?”

I could go on but you get the idea. It feels like living in the twilight zone sometimes, and we all have to find our personal balance between the worlds we straddle.

Plugging into the Deep Adaptation movement is one way that I’ve found some kind of social companionship (though it is only online) in deeply facing the full enormity of things and finding a rational, humane, compassionate response moving forward. I’ve been reading about this stuff for years (and feeling it myself, for years before I found it being written about by people far more educated and articulate than I). I’ve put links in my permanent sidebar but will include them here too.

I’ll also include Doug Tallamy’s article, which offers constructive suggestions on doing our part to avert the mass extinction of insects. His article is part of a trend I’m seeing, to view our residential yards as possibly the “next frontier” (and maybe last hope) of conservation.

Further Exploration:

In my latest “stream of consciousness” video, which I recorded the day after reading the insect quote, I express overwhelm, introduce Deep Adaptation. And, I express gratitude and joy in small things around me.

Welcome Bugs Into Your Yard – You Might Just Save the World: Article by Doug Tallamy in the Washington Post

Positive Deep Adaptation Facebook group: high-level companionship for wrapping our brains around it all and moving forward

Deep Adaptation papers by Jem Bendell: 1) Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy; 2) After Climate Despair: One Tale of What Can Emerge; 3) Barriers to Dialogue on Deep Adaptation (These papers are long but I consider them essential reading; Bendell is quite simply the best writer and thinker I know of on this topic. A topic I have been contemplating and experiencing on some level since I was a child.)

Amends, graphic novel by B.T. Lowry: An aging man in a wifebeater t-shirt makes an apology to those he has exploited, including Mother Earth. I have not read this yet but saw a couple of pages of it via one of the online forums. It is heart-rendingly beautiful. (“Where I found a multi-storeyed tapestry of life, I stripped you down to a mere monocrop fertilizer holder.”) On a general note about this last link: Storytelling and other arts are gaining attention as a key channel of response to the climate crisis. (Sweden has even appointed a Chief Storyteller to help people envision a world beyond the current hyperindustrialized, runaway-profit-extracting, fossil-fuel-dominated society). (Update: I bought and have read Amends. Really recommend it! In addition to the excellent main narrative, there’s an extra treat at the end, an imaginary conversation between St. Francis of Assisi and a Greta Thunberg-like figure.)

This post had been sitting in my Drafts pile for awhile; I started it awhile back when I was keenly feeling my lack of close friends in my neighborhood. My original title for the post was, “How To Live Without Friends.”

I would not want to live without friends, nor would I encourage anyone else to try to do so. However, sometimes friendships turn out to have an expiration date or a breaking point. And some of us go through long periods of time without a close friend living nearby. It’s good to be able to find meaningful connections even under those circumstances.

One of my most influential teachers (Harry Palmer, developer of the Avatar Course and books), has a saying, “If you want to conserve natural resources, make friends.” Makes sense. For one thing, there’s the simple fact that friends share! I would be willing to bet that closer-knit communities tend to have a lower carbon footprint than ones where people don’t know their neighbors. And the thing is, we don’t all have to be close buddies; just respecting and trusting each other enough to get along is enough. This is reassuring if you don’t happen to have close friends right where you live.

Another reason I think friendship tends to lead to lower eco-footprints, is that people suffering from loneliness are more likely to engage in mindless consumption, drug/alcohol abuse, “emotional eating,” and other behaviors to fill the void.

David at Raptitude.com has written one of the best articles on friendship that I’ve ever read: How To Go Deeper in 2020 – “Over the years, hundreds of acquaintances have passed through the periphery of your social life, and surely some of them would have been great friends if, in certain moments, one of you had gone a little deeper. If someone had asked, ‘Hey why don’t we do something together?’ or ‘Do you need help with that?’ a world might have been born.”

In her excellent 16-minute TED talk, Susan Pinker asserts that day-to-day face-to-face social contact may be the top factor in longevity. (Bonus for readerly types: This link contains both the video and the transcript.) Even more than having close friends and family in the neighborhood, it’s the sheer number of contacts that matters.

Ms. Pinker’s TED talk is only focused on longevity, but face-to-face connection in a community is also essential for building social cohesion, which is a key factor in a community’s disaster-resilience.

This article by Debra Guenther at mithun.com describes the correlation between disaster-resilience and a sense of connectedness among neighbors. “Events like the Chicago heat wave (or hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, etc.) represent “shocks” to a system. There are also continuous “stresses” to communities such as slow but steadily rising tides, changing temperatures and shifting plant communities. Resilience strategies, such as social cohesion, address both shocks and stresses and allow communities to both adapt to and recover from their impacts.”

My neighborhood has some of that connectedness (and I endeavor to do things that increase it, from saying hi to passersby and introducing myself to new neighbors, to running a Little Free Library). But we also still have a lot of houses that sit empty at least part of the year. (People’s vacation houses mostly — artifact of a tourist area.) And for the residents who rent rather than own, the rents are inelastically high. The different groups of kids I was so delighted to see running around the neighborhood playing, seem to have disappeared recently. I hope the families weren’t evicted.

How cohesive is your neighborhood? And how socially stable does it feel? Growing up in a military family, we were always the ones that moved. Now, as a person choosing to stay put and try to put down roots, I’m getting to experience the other side. We live in a mobile society, and it could be that for a lot of us, building social resilience on what feels like constantly shifting sands is just going to have to become a part of our skillset.

Over the years I’ve noticed that trying to grasp or cling to stability seems to be a lost cause, but that setting out to provide stability to others seems to work. Not only does it increase the supply of stability in the universe (by however a tiny amount), but also, interestingly, the endeavor of setting out to serve as a node of stability to others seems to bounce back on me; I end up feeling a greater sense of connectedness and stability.

This is definitely one for the “Little Things Add Up” files! You know when your tube of toothpaste is totally empty? You’ve squeezed every last bit out of it, and can’t even get one tiny speck more for one last teeth-brushing? Well, for a few years now, I’ve been cutting off the very bottom of the tube (easy — just use scissors) after it reaches that point. Then I stick my brush into that newly open end of the tube to get at the toothpaste. I’ve found that the “empty” tube ends up being good for about 7 to 10 more toothbrushings! Since I’ve probably done that with 10 toothpaste tubes now, that’s like a month of free toothpaste.

The “empty” tube that ends up containing a lot more toothpaste is a great find if you get a charge out of being thrifty as I do. It also seems like a great metaphor for many things in life. Though none come to mind right now, I bet some will, and I bet you can think of some!

Update: I just now heard from one of my most loyal readers (thanks HH!), who tells me he has been doing this since he was a kid, and that his parents did it also. Not just with toothpaste tubes but with mustard tubes, lotion pump-bottles, and so on. I bet many other people out there are doing the same.

I meant to post the Riot for Austerity rules file for your reference awhile back, but either I didn’t or it got deleted. So, here you go:

This PDF contains the Riot for Austerity (90 Percent Reduction Challenge) rules. This is a set of targets for reducing your personal or household eco footprint to 10% of the U.S. average. This set of targets has guided my personal practices since about 2007.

According to my understanding, these rules were written in the mid-2000s by Sharon Astyk and Miranda Edel, the two bloggers who started the Riot for Austerity movement. They are based on the global/policy targets set forth by George Monbiot in his ground-breaking book HEAT: How To Stop the Planet Burning. The phrase “Riot for Austerity” itself was inspired by Monbiot’s observation that no one ever riots for austerity (though it might be in our interest to promote voluntary austerity).

My book Deep Green was in turn inspired by all these people’s great work.

Having roommates/housemates can be a great thing, even for those who could financially afford to live alone. Besides the cost-sharing, other benefits include more safety/security, less social isolation, and the potential for sharing tasks.

If you’re lucky (or skillful with the “Roommate Wanted” posts), the people you share space with will also share your commitment to low-footprint living. But that isn’t necessary. Very few of my apartment-mates or housemates have been particularly green-minded, but I’ve found ways 1) to not let that get in the way of my personal green goals; 2) to even sometimes motivate them to participate in green practices, even if they’re not doing it for eco reasons.

Here are some things I’ve found that have worked:

– Find people who are motivated by thrift. People who want to keep their expenses low are far more likely to be willing to share my lifestyle of doing without air conditioning, conserving water, etc.

– Don’t stress out too much about other people’s consumption. My low-footprint lifestyle is based on a set of targets called the Riot for Austerity, which gives numbers for reducing one’s footprint to 10% of the U.S. average. Many of the Riot for Austerity categories (such as consumer goods, trash volume, and water usage) are calculated on an individual level. So I just keep track of my own numbers. For the ones such as electricity usage that are calculated on a total family/household level, I hit upon the idea of treating myself and each housemate as a separate “household.” In effect, we are separate households; we are not family and have no longterm plans together. What’s cool is that because of how I run my house, our total electricity usage still only ends up being about 20% of the U.S. average! Water usage also. I have learned not to dwell on housemates’ trash volume, though I make reasonable efforts to fish their plastic bottles and other recyclables out of the trash can when they forget to put them in the recycling bin.

– If your housemates cook at home (my current ones mostly don’t), you can set rules and procedures for water-efficient dishwashing practices. If that doesn’t work, and things get too out of hand, you might have to be in charge of washing all dishes.

– I also try to keep sight of the bigger picture. My low-footprint lifestyle is important to me, but so is connection with fellow human beings. And ultimately, our ability to live and work with other people, not the fact that some people aren’t bothered by lights left on and plastic straws, is what will make or break human civilization.

I meant to post the Riot for Austerity file for your reference awhile back, but either I didn’t or it got deleted. So I’ll dig it up and post it for you here when I can. OK, here you go:

This PDF contains the Riot for Austerity (90 Percent Reduction Challenge) rules. Note, according to my understanding, these rules were written in the mid-2000s by Sharon Astyk and Miranda Edel, the two bloggers who started the Riot for Austerity movement. They are based on the global/policy targets set forth by George Monbiot in his ground-breaking book HEAT: How To Stop the Planet Burning. The phrase “Riot for Austerity” itself was inspired by Monbiot’s observation that no one ever riots for austerity (though it might be in our interest to promote voluntary austerity).