Category: low-footprint living

Another great post today from one of my favorites, Revitalize or Die:

“No one should have to travel to visit beautiful places. We must invest in making our own towns livable and lovable.”

YES! And ….
(Warning: Ranty comment ahead, to my fellow “green Boomers”)

And, I would even further go on to say, to my fellow “Woodstock/Earth Day” Boomers, especially those of us who have traveled a lot in our younger years, should STOP the overseas travel, and instead get our thrills from using our resources to make our home places lovable & livable, and support the livelihoods & dreams of the younger generations.

We owe it to them. We are the most-resourced generation in history, and however unintentionally it may have been, we have gotten our wealth and security on the backs of the global majority & the rest of the planet. And borrowed ecological capital from younger generations.

Seeing the social-media posts of fellow eco Boomers, I often feel a heartsick cognitive dissonance. The endless rounds of cruises, annual European vacations, etc.

Does our demographic even notice the irony of us bemoaning the planet burning, but continuing the super-high-end travel habits & other consumerism? How are we any different from the “climate deniers” who we claim are the problem???

All these fellow eco-Boomers’ travel-porn social-media posts like, “what a quaint village, oh I love the public transportation in this country” etc. Sorry but this makes me want to retch.

Maybe if we stayed put in our own country and devoted more of our money and labor to actually changing things here?

I know, I know, a lot of you are going to say how much you do. And I believe you. However, high-end travel habits and other conspicuous consumption totally undermine whatever we do.

Not only undermine our credibility, but also actually undermine whatever political will the leaders might have, because our habits are creating massive demand for fossil fuels and other resources.

— Voting is great and necessary, but it’s not enough.
— Protesting is great and necessary, but it’s not enough.
— Writing letters to corporations is great and necessary, but it’s not enough. Same with showing up to speak at government meetings and so on.
— Running for office is wonderful and downright heroic, for those who manage it, but even that is not always enough.

The missing ingredient is where and how we are continuing to spend our big fat wallets of money. Even if you don’t feel like you have a fat wallet, all of us Boomers have a fat wallet in comparison to pretty much everyone else in the world.

Where and how we spend, or don’t spend, matters! There are so many many of us, and our habits are adding up big time. For better and for worse.

I will say something for the climate-deniers and Magas (and other groups/people who we love to self-righteously contrast our own selves with): At least they are not living in outright contradiction with their beliefs about what’s up with the biosphere!!

To put it another way: If our mouths and our wallets are saying opposite things, guess which one is going to carry more weight in the world. If we keep not matching, we have only ourselves to blame.

The admin of the “zero waste, zero judgment” group posted a #TrashAuditTuesday last week (June 24).

It’s a private group, so if you want to see the full post and the other people’s responses, you’ll need to join the group. It’s on Facebook. In the meantime, here is what I wrote:

I love this post, thank you Admin!

Just looking at my own trash, my main type of trash is plastic food packaging, including those big bags lined with shiny silvery stuff (that crackers and chips & things come in), that I am unable to avoid. It’s very frustrating, I do end up just doing without certain foods sometimes but other times I would have a hard time feeding myself properly.

I do not exaggerate when I say it was a game-changer when my local organic food store (the small intimate one, the only one near me — not any of the corporate ones) started being able to carry nutritional yeast in bulk instead of in those obnoxious thick plastic bag things (that a lot of healthy & organic foods seem to come in nowadays).

I compost all food and cardboard and paper, and do not buy any paper towels or any kind of plastic bags. And refuse plastic shopping bags at the store.

I have two housemates. They have gotten mostly on-board with composting food scraps and cardboard and such. However, one of them cooks quite a bit (a great thing for the wallet and the health!), and uses a lot of plastic Ziploc baggies which ends up being a pretty substantial part of our trash. They are usually covered with oil and marinade and stuff. So it would be a lot of labor and materials to try to clean them and reuse them. Plus there are just way too many for me to want to reuse. Still and all, it is very lightweight and not a high volume of material.

(I do put them in a mesh basket in the yard and allow the ants and other bugs to enjoy, so they get pretty clean, but I still just would not have any use for so many plastic bags.)

Same with tiny plastic yogurt containers. It’s a certain brand of yogurt that one of my housemates likes. So we just have a lot of those plastic containers. Sometimes I am able to use them in an art project or something. But most of them will ultimately be destined for trash, once the bugs & other yard-babies have cleaned them out.

And, all of us get takeout sometimes and end up with Styrofoam containers. Although, I’m starting to zero in on the establishments that either use cardboard containers, or let me bring my own container.

Mostly our trash is pretty lightweight. I would say estimate maybe two pounds/ one kilo a week. When I’m by myself, it’s more like 2 pounds or less per month. And in addition to being light in weight, our trash is fairly low-volume as well. One of the huge benefits to composting paper products and kitchen scraps.

Recent trash-cutting wins for me:

•A neighbor started roasting coffee, which he packages in widemouth mason jars. He actually wants us to return the jars so we can keep reusing them. Before, the only way I could get coffee was in these thick foil-like bags which I could never find enough uses for. I used to be able to buy coffee in bulk when I lived near a supermarket but not now. And anyway I think they have stopped offering bulk coffee in the supermarkets here anymore.

•Also, I recently started getting milk and yogurt in giant glass jars that various friends and/or commercial establishments will take back.

Further Exploration:

• (Regarding the eco-footprint of waste, someone in the ZWZJ group shared the following, and I feel OK posting it out here since it’s not a personal comment, but is about a publicly available book.) “Peter Kalmus aka Climate Human has the following annual amounts listed on p.163 of his book Being the Change.
“700 kg CO2e from food and yard waste (less 200kg CO2e if you compost all food waste, less 200 kg CO2e if you compost all yard waste, less 300 kg CO2e if you get at least 1/4 of your food from freeganism); 150 kg CO2e from sewage (unless you practice humanure.)”
“300 kg CO2e comes from paper waste (assuming you recycle paper and cardboard, otherwise it would be higher), and 300 kg CO2e from textiles. If much of your clothes are secondhand reduce your textile waste proportionally.”
“BTW I highly recommend his book. Available (low carbon) at most libraries or used at Thriftbooks.”

Various variations of this question are floating around. For example, I started working at age 14, etc.

My response:

I see your point (about having worked since your teen years or younger), but on the other hand …

Speaking as someone who, like you, remembers things were different back then.

For one thing, jobs didn’t suck anywhere near as bad back then. I mean the terms were a lot more human in a lot of ways. Even some of the really low-level fast food jobs I took, it was better in a lot of ways than it is now.

And there was always babysitting, and mowing lawns and such. Nowadays ppl are so litigious so I don’t even know if teenagers get to do that anymore.

For another thing, even with those teen jobs and pt/summer type jobs it was still possible to get a whole apartment by ourselves! Or at least a very big nice room in a house. And still have money left over to party and pay for some education. I did it many times.

Added later:
Plus with all the crazy stuff going on, wars and housing crisis and biospheric collapse and all, one can hardly blame today’s young people for wondering what is the effing point!

I actually salute people, of ALL ages, for working as little as possible, quite honestly. Enough “J-O-B” work to get by, and then use the rest of the time for your creativity and your REAL work. Whatever that is. Some of us are fortunate enough for it to overlap, which is a great goal but doesn’t always happen for everyone.

This question is out there a lot. Basically some version of, “Why should I make reductions when the elites and the fatcats are jetsetting around consuming all they can buy, and we are just going to be forced to eat bugs?”

(In response to a post in one of the Facebook eco/permie groups, about solar panels covering up acres and acres of land, I commented: “Radical reduction in electricity consumption is a huge part of the equation.” Someone posted the bug question in response to my comment.)

— “Why should we make reductions when Bill Gates is flying his personal jet everywhere? All the reductions are going to be on us, and the elites are going to force us to eat bugs.” The person also commented that whatever Bill Gates does could just as easily be done by Zoom.

This is something I often hear people say. And I can understand the line of thinking.

But: Reductions can & do bring great benefits personally. Huge money savings, and huge time savings, for example. And sheer peace of mind, from being less vulnerable. For example, learning how to do without electricity for long periods of time, with no hardship, is great freedom.

Also, there are millions of us, and only a few fatcats. Even if we just count the eco activists, and just the Boomers, there are still millions of us, and we have big wallets! Our behavior en masse is what will move the needle & shape the future.

Regarding eating bugs … Well I’ve eaten a few bugs and they’re actually not that bad. Prepared properly, they can actually be nice little tasty protein nuggets, hyperlocal, and nice and low on the food chain.

But to address the bug comment in the spirit in which it is intended …

Do you know who the last people being forced to eat bugs will be?

• People who form tight community, people who reduce their dependence on large centralized institutions, people who wean themselves off of hyperconsumerism.

• People who support their local farmers, people who know how to collect rainwater and grow food. And who know how to cooperate with their neighbors.

• People who are willing to stand up to their HOA’s. People who refuse to be totally dependent on private car ownership. And people refuse to be totally dependent on running water, electricity, artificial cooling, appliances, and all the other things we modern people take for granted are necessary.

• People who refuse to keep flying in airplanes. Or at least, people who decide to stop being dependent on flying in airplanes. Especially important for those of us who love our families.

I’m not saying those conveniences aren’t nice; I’m just saying we need to train ourselves to be able to do without them for arbitrarily long periods of time, forever if necessary.

And the more we are willing to make this training an everyday thing — to strive to minimize our consumption in everyday life — the more we will make a difference in the profit margins at the top.

If it helps to remind yourself that you are supporting war every time you unnecessarily burn energy, go ahead and tell yourself that. I sometimes tell people that, when they think I’m oh so radical and extreme for refusing to own a car anymore, and for refraining from using car transportation except on occasion.

• And people who refuse to buy more computers and other technology than they absolutely need to get by. Just what we need for communication, micro commerce, and skill-sharing. If even a percentage of us were refusing constant upgrades, the fatcats would be a lot less wealthy than they are now.

• And last but not least: People who know how to constantly find joy and peace and satisfaction in their everyday life. As opposed to needing to “get away,” buy something that won’t make you happy, etc.

PS. I am so on board the zoom thing! I’m sure pretty much everything Bill Gates or any other wealthy dude does could probably be done just as easily by zoom. Or he could hire locals to be boots on the ground. And I am particularly appalled that people — corporate fatcat, politician, academic, whatever — fly to climate conferences. (As a meme from awhile back says, if there’s anything that should be done by zoom, it’s a climate conference …)

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE. Something I thought of days after writing this. Inspired by more than one fellow environmentalist friend who told me they became burned-out; got sick of making sacrifices when they realized that all of their reductions didn’t even offset one week of a rich fatcat’s life.

And that is, we are not setting out to make reductions in order to offset other people’s overconsumption. That would be physically impossible, and no wonder people are getting demoralized if they are trying to do this.

Rather, the reason why we must make reductions is to reset the norms of what has come, in our hyperconsumerist “first world,” to be defined as a good life. (Basically the norms have been sent by USA American popular culture and then gone on to infect other wealthy countries.)

It’s not about offsetting; it’s about resetting the norms. It’s about normalizing living within limits. It’s about de-normalizing entitlement.

Why?

To bring ourselves in line with the physical ecological limits of the planet. (These have been widely documented by science.) We quite simply have a moral obligation to not take more than our share. We cannot use wealthy mega consumers as a benchmark. We need to use the 2 ton benchmark.

It’s already how the global majority lives, by default. What we in the “first world” have a responsibility to do is show how living within Earth’s limits can be done comfortably, with enough to eat, safe clean water, access to healthcare, access to learning, humane livelihoods, comfortable dwellings for all.

As eco activists we pride ourselves on listening to science, and on being fair and equitable. We must live up to our own awareness of what’s right and fair. We must walk our talk! I cannot emphasize this point enough. We will never be truly happy otherwise, and of course that gnawing dissatisfaction just leads to more consumerism.

My entire mission is about helping fellow eco folks walk our talk. My book, this blog, my talks & consults. And my house, which I have turned into a low-footprint lifestyle demonstration laboratory (visible from the sidewalk, and partly open to the public!). I call it my “Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm for Humans.”

You are not alone. There are many, many more of us than you might think. Take heart! And please don’t give up. I am 100% here for you.

* * * * * * *

This blog presents topics as they occur to me. Typically in rambling fashion. If you would prefer a more focused, organized document, read my book DEEP GREEN. It’s available to read for free on this site. There are at any given time sometimes a few print copies available as well. I believe I still have 15 or so copies left from my last micro print run. It’s only available by ordering direct through me.

Also, I am available to give talks for your neighborhood association, community, church, club, or other group. My talks are by Zoom or equivalent, so I’m available to you wherever you’re located. For more information, click on “talks and appearances” in the menu for this site. Contact me and we’ll set a date!

I have a new answer. It is, simply, “The same way that people did without XYZ for hundreds of thousands of years.” (And the same way that billions of people around the world still do without XYZ today, albeit not necessarily by choice.)

It works for lots of things: car ownership; air conditioning; 401(k); washer dryer dishwasher etc.; leaf-blower; and many more.

Maybe the best article about collapse that I have ever read, overall. I don’t have time to do a whole post on it right now, but I am just sharing the link here for now because I need to clean up all my open tabs in my browser lol, I had quite a backlog.

(I may already have shared this in the “further reading” section on a previous post, but I’m sharing it here just in case. So I can reference it if needed.)

“The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt? An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar … and mull over survival.” By Peter Watts; May 31, 2024, in an online publication called Nautilus.

https://nautil.us/the-collapse-is-coming-will-humanity-adapt-626051/

“Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future.”

And, if you want a great book about navigating the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspect of collapse, I can make no higher recommendation than this book by Terry LePage. Eye of the Storm: Facing Climate and Social Chaos with Calm and Courage. Terry is a very active leader in the Deep Adaptation movement.

• About recycling: ZeroWasteChef lets us in on what actually happens after garbage day. And how we can do some simple things to help address this mountainous problem. On this topic, also read the book Junkyard Planet, by Adam Minter. Also recommended: The story of stuff; and The story of bottled water, and the whole rest of the series. By Annie Leonard, on YouTube.

• About disposable plastic straws: “Did you know that each day the US uses an estimated 500 million straws — enough disposable straws to fill over 46,400 large school buses per year?” (Read more, and find out how you can help, whether as a consumer, a business, or a community: https://ecocycle.org/eco-living/refuse-and-reduce/be-straw-free/ ) “In February of 2011, Milo Cress (then nine years old) founded the Be Straw Free Campaign project to work together with members of the straw industry, restaurants and other businesses, schools, environmental groups, and concerned citizens to reduce the use and waste of disposable plastic straws.”

• About car-dependent culture: We always hear about how everybody has a car, 90% of Americans have a car, etc. But, the truth is that many people not only don’t have a car but are actually not able to drive. It’s not even an option for them. This coming week I will be tuning into a webinar by Anna Letitia Zivarts, disability advocate and the author of a book called When Driving Is Not an Option. The following quote is from the Google books page: “One third of people living in the United States do not have a driver license. Because the majority of involuntary nondrivers are disabled, lower income, unhoused, formerly incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, kids, young people, and the elderly, they are largely invisible. The consequence of this invisibility is a mobility system designed almost exclusively for drivers. This system has human-health, environmental, and quality-of-life costs for everyone, not just for those excluded from it. If we’re serious about addressing climate change and inequality, we must address our transportation system.”

• About clothing: Many of us enjoy fashion as self-expression. And there are lots of ways to do that without trashing the planet. Unfortunately, most new clothing these days is what you would call “fast fashion”: not well-made; and wears out quickly. We love the variety of constantly buying new clothes, And our social-media feeds make it easy by showing ridiculously adorable clothes, shoes, bags, etc., for ridiculously cheap. And we feel like there’s no big problem, as long as we just donate the items to a thrift shop or church or whatever after we’re tired of them. But the reality is that unbelievable quantities of unwanted clothing have ended up turning large areas of the planet into a dumping ground. African countries get huge bales of “charity donation” clothes foisted upon them, things that are so stained and damaged that we should be embarrassed to give them to anyone. And, in the desert in Chile, I hear there is a vast pile of clothing from all over the world (probably mainly the USA though) that is visible from space. If you want to watch a really good story documentary that sums this up, I highly recommend The True Cost. https://truecostmovie.com . You could even invite a bunch of friends to join you, either virtually or in person, and then have a discussion! One out of six people in the entire world is employed in the fashion industry. Leveraging our consumer habits to make structural changes in this sector is a major way to address the planetary crisis.

All of the above may be inconvenient truths, in that they nudge us to reduce consumption in areas of our lives that we may hold near and dear. But the convenient truth is, for those of us who are extremely worried and losing sleep about the state of the planet, is that making reductions in any of these areas will yield huge benefits. Not just to the Earth, but to our own selves.