Going green is too often presented as either an extreme stunt that real people can’t achieve or as the act of buying green products to maintain one’s current lifestyle. Thrifty Green challenges these ideas and instead advocates authentic changes in behavior that are sustainable long-term. Other blogs may tell you to switch from incandescent to compact fluorescent light bulbs; this one will advise you to turn your lights off.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Individual vs. Community Solutions


I recently gave an interview on The Jefferson Exchange public radio program where a listener called in to ask what a typical person could do to reduce their ecological footprint without moving off the grid. It was a good question. Most people can’t or don’t want to live the kind of life I had in Taos. Yet plenty of people want to lessen their impact on the earth and achieve a similar reduction in expenses. What can they do?
The list is long, the choices many. Every individual is different and must decide what makes sense for him/herself. Can you drive less somehow? Can you make improvements to the energy efficiency of your home? Can you switch to locally-grown, organic food? Any choice you can make that will save you money will usually reduce your usage of the earth’s resources as well.
But what if you are already spending as little as possible? Or what if the usual suggestions don’t apply to you? For instance, adequate public transportation doesn’t exist where you live, so you are forced to drive to work every day. Or you rent your home and your landlord refuses to install better insulation or energy-efficient appliances. Or there is no farmer’s market/community garden/natural foods store nearby, and a mainstream grocery store is your only option.
If you have exhausted all individual solutions, then you need a good community solution. You and everybody else. This is the real answer.
I brainstormed the following list of ideas to get us started. (If you can think of some more, I would love to see them.)
  • Public utilities that provide electricity and heat from renewable resources
  • Tighter energy efficiency requirements for any appliance that consumes energy
  • Regulation of public water supplies to ensure adequate quantity and quality for the future, plus enforcement of the regulation
  • More community garden spaces
  • More parks and trees in urban/suburban centers to help clean up air pollution and keep temperatures cooler
  • Recycling bins next to every garbage can in all public spaces
  • Home recycling at no greater cost than garbage pickup
  • Requirements for manufacturers to use less packaging in all their products
  • Convenient, affordable public transportation, ideally powered by renewable energy
  • Safe, convenient pedestrian and bike paths
And how do we put these ideas into practice? By asking for them. For example, ask your city council for more community garden spaces, parks, and trees. Lobby your state representative for higher renewable energy requirements for public utilities. Pressure your federal representative for changes in manufacturing laws to tighten energy efficiency standards for appliances or to use less packaging material for all products. When all else fails, call a local newspaper or television reporter and ask them to investigate the quality of the water supply in your area, or the level of air pollution and how it affects public health, or why the bus system isn’t used by more people.
Part of the beauty of living in America is that an individual can effect change simply by agitating for it. And that doesn’t have to involve angry picket signs: it can simply be a letter to your congressperson. If enough of us demand it, change will come.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Go Outside and Play


When my sisters and I were growing up in a small Colorado mountain town, every day after school we would change into our play clothes, eat EXACTLY TWO cookies, then go outside and play. These were my mother’s rules, no exceptions. We became adept at sneaking extra cookies, but we never snuck back indoors once we were kicked out.
We didn’t want to, even in winter. There was much more to do outside before the sun set than inside, so we bundled up and headed out. We dug tunnels in the snow, made “ski runs” on the piles the plows left next to our driveway, built snow forts, had snowball fights, made snow angels, went sledding on a nearby slope, and generally ran around expending energy.
In warmer weather we climbed on rocks, rode our bikes through the woods with our teddy bears in the baskets, waded in streams, picked strawberries, pretended to be explorers, played hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, and generally ran around expending energy.
As a bonus, which I didn’t recognize until decades later, we became very comfortable in the outdoors. We absorbed the nuances of our natural surroundings and the changes in the seasons without really noticing it. That fundamental knowledge has persisted into adulthood for me. I can sense a drop of a few degrees in temperature or a subtle shift in the wind. I can tell if it’s going to snow by looking at the clouds, even if common sense says the conditions are not right. I know how to cross a stream without getting wet, and when it’s too dangerous to try. My eyes are always subconsciously on the lookout for wildlife, and, consequently, I spot plenty of animals wherever I go.
Why does this matter? Two reasons. First, when you are in tune with your natural surroundings, you are capable of noticing unusual changes. For instance, late arrivals or early departures of migratory animals. Summers that are hotter, dryer, or longer than usual. Snow that is wetter than normal, or which melts faster. Autumn leaves that change colors later than usual or not at all. (Sometimes the aspen leaves here in Colorado turn black and drop off all at once, with none of the typical fiery gold display.) Rivers and lakes whose water levels are subtly or drastically different from what you expect. Atypical wind patterns or predictable weather (such as afternoon thundershowers) that becomes unpredictable.
When you notice these types of changes, you may start to wonder why they are occurring, whether they will last, what their impact is, and whether you have played a role in creating them. If you conclude that you have (for example, contributing to air pollution by driving too much, or speeding the depletion of your water supply by over-generously watering your lawn), then you may be more inclined to make a change. Change is easier when you intrinsically understand the benefits, rather than having them pointed out to you by “experts.” And voluntary change is always easier than change imposed upon you by authorities.
Second, one of the worst errors in modern thinking is that we exist apart from Nature. If you spend your days indoors, isolated from the weather and other aspects of your natural surroundings, you may fall prey to this belief. But humans are a part of Nature as much as other animals are. Spending more time outside will reconnect you to your role as a resident of your local habitat. Instead of fighting the weather (for example, staying indoors when it is cold/rainy/windy outside), you can embrace it. Rather than fearing the wilder elements of the outdoors (such as getting lost in the woods or encountering a bear), you can learn how to prevent misfortune. Instead of relying on expensive technology to improve your life (e.g., installing air conditioning in your house), you will be able to come up with cheaper, more natural solutions (e.g., planting trees on the south and west sides of your house).
Besides, surrounding yourself by greenery, inhaling the fresh air, and letting the sun warm your back are all documented ways to de-stress your psyche. And like all good things in life, you can do them for free.
So go outside and play.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The Opposite of Materialism Is Freedom


What happens when you own too much stuff? It owns you. You find yourself needing money so your stuff can occupy more space, be maintained and insured, and eventually be packed and moved. All the stuff you have invested your time, money, energy, and the planet’s resources to acquire winds up running your life.
Sometimes it creeps up on you, the way wrinkles and other signs of age do. For example, my friend Jill spent several seasons as a rafting guide in Alaska. The guides camped in tents all summer, walking into town to fetch food because none of them had a car. Jill had left her car back home in Las Vegas. When she tired of her Alaska experience, she went home to load it up and drive to her next adventure working for a casino in Reno. Two decades later, as she packed the contents of her three-thousand-square-foot house into box after box to be loaded into a moving truck, she lamented no longer being twenty years old and able to stash all her possessions into a hatchback and hit the road, the ultimate freedom.
It’s true that most of us don’t want to turn forty and still be living in a tent; there is something to be said for planning for a comfortable future. But comfortable doesn’t need to be extravagant, and extravagance is what our current consumer culture is all about. Spending to impress people (including yourself) is a bad idea. So is frivolously wasting the earth’s resources.
Luckily, there are other ways to live your life, even in modern America. My friend Ann spent her adult years living with an enviable zest. She managed to arrange her work schedule to take off extended periods of time so she could travel the globe, her favorite pastime. This included riding her bicycle to Mexico with her brother, spending eighteen months traveling solo through South America, and taking her elderly mother to Greece. For Ann, travel and experiences were vastly more important than material possessions, of which she had few. A coworker advised her early in her career to set aside 10 percent of her income in savings, which she did faithfully, managing to survive, thrive, and travel frequently on the rest. She is now retired, living comfortably in a $175,000 house for which she paid cash, despite never having netted more than $25,000 per year in her life. If she had spent her money on material goods instead, she would not have been able to pursue her hobby, and she very likely would have had to work more years to secure her future.
You are probably surrounded by people quietly bucking the mainstream, living well on less and being kinder to the planet in the process. If enough of us join them, we can secure a comfortable future for ourselves and many more generations going forward.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Off-Grid Lessons for an On-Grid Life


The following is a guest blog post I contributed to raisingthemgreen.com, a website devoted to helping to raise eco-conscious children.
I learned a lot from my year of living off the grid, but I learned even more from moving back to the mainstream. These days, on-grid with a husband, a two-year-old, and another baby on the way, I am faced with the same challenges as nearly all moms in America – most notably a severe lack of the free time I took for granted in Taos.
The question I ask myself most is how do I keep my commitment to green living when bombarded by ads for the copious convenience products – bad for the bank account, bad for the environment – that I can easily convince myself I need? More importantly, how can I teach my children the conservation lessons I learned when living off the grid?
I finally realized that the best thing any of us can do for our children is be a good example. Children learn from mimicking their role models, the most important of whom is their parents. Simply by continuing the low-impact-living habits I developed off the grid, I can teach my daughter and her sibling how to cherish the earth.
Sarah already knows to turn off the light when she leaves the room. She also knows to run water from the tap in a thin trickle, not full-blast, when washing her hands. When she is old enough to understand, we will articulate some more guidelines for other things she observes us putting into practice: only run the washing machine and dishwasher when they are full; wear your clothes more than once before declaring them dirty; recycle rather than discard; eat fresh food with a minimum of packaging; don’t go shopping unless you feel a pressing need for something, and stick to your list once you are in the store; play outside more and keep the TV off.
With the exception of the last one, the idea is to use fewer of the earth’s resources as a whole, rather than making a drastic change in any one area of our lives. But the last suggestion offers some important insight for keeping your ecological footprint to a minimum.
Television panders to our desire to buy things we don’t need. Unnecessary purchases not only deplete our bank balances, but they also have an environmental price tag. That’s because everything comes from the earth: every single item in Toys ‘R’ Us and Baby Gap began its life as part of the planet. Every time you make a purchase, you are consuming the raw materials that were extracted from the earth (sometimes at great environmental cost, such as habitat destruction) plus the energy it took to manufacture the item and transport it to the store where you bought it.
But when you turn the TV off, you cease to be influenced by the ads. You also remove yourself from the pressure to keep up with the fictional Joneses who inhabit your favorite shows. And when you send your kids outside to play instead (and possibly join them), you help instill in them a love for the natural world in all its wonder. There is no finer gift you can give them than that.

Monday, June 20, 2011

What Hath Man Wrought?


Starting in 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to summit Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain was on its way to becoming the world’s highest garbage dump. Since that time, over four thousand climbers have followed, leaving behind fifty tons of trash, including empty oxygen bottles, discarded gear, wreckage of a helicopter, human waste, and an estimated 120 corpses. In the thin, dry air and freezing
temperatures, garbage simply does not decompose. To compound the problem, climate change is causing the glaciers to recede, uncovering trash from Hillary’s time that had been buried under the snow. It is ironic and tragic that in this remote region of the earth, inaccessible except to a miniscule fraction of the world’s population, trash has become a pressing problem. On both the Nepalese and Tibetan sides, there are ongoing annual expeditions whose goal is to remove the refuse left behind by climbers and trekkers. The Nepalese government recently required a substantial deposit in addition to climbing fees in order to compel tourists to pack out what they pack in so that the mountain sacred to the local people can remain a pristine symbol of the wonder that is the natural world.
What hath God wrought? The highest mountain in the world. What hath man wrought? The world’s highest garbage dump.
To see what kind of mess foreign trekkers and climbers have made of Mount Everest, go to extremeeverest.wordpress.com , the blog of one of the cleanup missions. On a related note, the late Sir Edmund Hillary set up the Himalayan Trust, a charity that benefits the Sherpas of Nepal. The trust’s website is www.himalayantrust.co.uk

Sunday, June 5, 2011

A Thrifty Green Summer


In my previous, child-free life, summer was a time for intense playing. Maybe a trip overseas or across the country to a beach somewhere; definitely out of town every weekend. But now that we have to buy three airplane tickets and flying has become such a hassle, we are looking for other options. Besides, what is good for the bank account is good for the planet – in this case lessening the demand for jet fuel. We make a lot of decisions based on saving money, and it makes me feel good that they usually translate into conserving the earth’s resources as well.
This year I knew that if I wanted to feel good in the fall about How I Spent My Summer Vacation, I had to do some creative thinking up front. Whatever I came up with also had to address the question, “What is summer vacation for?”
The answer seems obvious: to decompress from the stress of daily living in the modern world. And if that’s the case, then it really doesn’t make sense to spend money we don’t have so we can stand in long security lines with a toddler, followed by desperately trying to get her to stay seated for several hours, only to disrupt her sleep schedule for a week before we fly home. It’s hardly an unstressful scenario.
What does make sense is coming up with low-cost, low-impact, low-stress ideas based on the Ten Essentials from last week’s post. You can do all of the following by staying at home, either on a week-long “staycation” or on a regular basis throughout the whole summer. Plus you will reap rewards far beyond those of a typical vacation, some that will stay with you for a long time.
  • Develop a deeper connection to your natural surroundings. Take time to explore the parks, trails, waterways, and other undeveloped spaces where you live. You can do this by hiking, biking, picnicking, fishing, boating, bird watching, gardening, walking your dog, stargazing, camping, or anything else that interests you that can be done outdoors.
  • Make creating or strengthening your spiritual practice the focus of your vacation. If you already go to church, become more involved. If you don’t go, start. If you prefer to meditate, chant, pray quietly by yourself, or read spiritual texts, make it a daily ritual. Maybe do some of it outside in Nature’s cathedrals.
  • Use your vacation to show the people you love how much they mean to you. Call your grandparents. Take an interest in your children’s hobbies. Do something special for your spouse. Make yourself available to your friends. We all seem to get caught up in our busy lives: this summer slow down enough to appreciate all the people in your life who mean something to you.
  • Ask yourself what hobby you have always wanted to pursue but have never had time for; then make time over the summer. Take an art class, join a singing group, learn to dance, make a quilt, recite your poetry at open mike night, audition for a play, build a birdhouse, take up tai chi, develop your cooking skills, try your hand at canoeing. Take a class or find other people with a similar interest. Whatever you choose to do, if you do it regularly for your vacation or the whole summer, it may become a habit you will continue afterward, or it may even turn into a new career.
  • Grow some of your own food. Plant a garden, some container pots of tomatoes, or herbs on your windowsill. Learn how to keep bees or raise chickens. Or find the closest farmer’s market and buy fresh, wholesome food there every week. This is another way to deepen your connection to the earth, and you will eat more healthfully as well.
  • Spend your vacation at home with no plans at all. It’s the ultimate low-stress, no-cost, environmentally-friendly option of all.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

The Ten Essentials


According to the book Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, no one should venture into the backcountry without the “ten essentials.” These are the ten things you absolutely need to stay alive: map, compass, sun protection, extra food and water, extra clothes, headlamp or flashlight, first aid kit, firestarter, matches, and a knife. Consider the list for a minute – the ten essentials will provide you with a minimum of knowledge of your whereabouts, nourishment, warmth, and health.
Notice what it lacks: electricity, plumbing, central heat, television, radio, telephones, video games, iPods/iPads/iAnything, movies, cars, electronic or other gadgets, toys, most material possessions, anything trendy or fashionable, and all the comforts of home.
I have spent a lot of time in the backcountry and have often preferred my experience there to my experience at home. It occurred to me recently that my domestic experience might be lacking a few essentials or overcompensating with stuff I don’t really need. So I have come up with a list of my own: the ten essentials for a fulfilling life in modern America, based loosely on the mountaineering list with a couple of extra categories. Virtually none of the list items has a cost, either financial or environmental. And yet if you possess them all, you can call yourself rich.
         1.     A connection to the earth
         2.     A spiritual practice
         3.     Work that you enjoy
         4.     A creative outlet
         5.     Wholesome food
         6.     Clean water
         7.     Sociable companionship
         8.     Comfortable shelter
         9.     Unstructured time
      10.     Love

Friday, April 29, 2011

A Green Checklist


The more I talk to people about my book, Thrifty Green, the more two themes emerge in their questions for me. First, what was it like to live off the grid? (Answer: relaxed, stress-free, connected with the natural world, and extraordinary overall.) And second, what can an average person do in his or her everyday life to be kinder to the environment, given that most of us can’t chuck it all and move to Taos?
What they are looking for is a list. A step-by-step checklist for living a greener life. Yet I don’t think a list quite serves the purpose of creating lasting change in people’s lives. Instead, I offer the general principle that conservation is the key to responsible stewardship of the earth. But what you choose to conserve, and how, is up to you. Whatever it is, it shouldn’t feel like a sacrifice, or I guarantee you won’t keep it up. Similarly, trying to follow somebody else’s rules eventually will become too inconvenient to continue.
It is impossible to provide boilerplate guidelines that apply to everybody. For example, some ideas (buy a new hybrid car!) might involve spending money, but maybe you don’t have any. Others may involve improving the energy efficiency of your house, but perhaps you are a renter. I could wax rhapsodic about the merits of taking public transportation, but what if it doesn’t exist where you live? Or I could advise you on environmentally-friendly ways to stay warm in the winter, but they won’t apply if you live in southern Florida.
There is no one-size-fits-all method for greening up your life. You are the expert on how you currently live and what options are available to you. The point of my book, and of this blog, is to offer examples of authentic ecological living to inspire green changes in anyone’s life. You might read a blog post and think, “I can do that,” or you may conclude, “No way.” Either way, the decision is yours. I simply hope to help you come up with your own solutions. I may include a list here or there, but it will typically consist of general principles (e.g., sharing is good) or some off-the-wall ideas (e.g., drink only water) to jumpstart your own thinking.
For those of you who absolutely must have a list, there are plenty out there beyond this blog. For example, the Department of Energy lists standard tips for saving energy in the home, located here: http://www.energy.gov/energytips.htm. If you want a list of ways to conserve water, check out FEMA’s “Are You Ready” guide at http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/appendix_a.shtm. To save gas without shelling out money for a hybrid car, follow Edmunds.com’s road-tested tips at http://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/we-test-the-tips.html?articleid=106842.
Lists may have their place, but creating solutions for your own situation will make you more apt to turn them into lifelong habits – the best way to truly practice conservation without it feeling like a sacrifice.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

On Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs


I had an interview this week with Santa Fe Public Radio’s Journey Home show (see www.diegoradio.com for the podcast). The bulk of the show, for whatever reason, turned into a referendum on the merits of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). While the host was adamantly pro-CFL and a caller adamantly against, my position is a little more nuanced than I think came across during the broadcast.
Their opposing viewpoints actually illustrate my case for me: the compact fluorescent versus incandescent debate is not over. It continues because it is one on which anybody can offer a reasonably informed opinion. Light bulbs are something we all use and are relatively simple compared to, say, the ecological advantages and commercial viability of biofuels.
I am not against CFLs: they absolutely put out more light than heat and will reduce your electricity bill accordingly. Yet neither am I for them at all cost. My objections are twofold.
First, as with any technological advance, there are some unforeseen kinks that need to be worked out. In the case of CFLs, because of their mercury content, the biggest is the issue of disposal. My radio host asserted that CFLs could be disposed of properly in a sealed landfill, which would include all landfills created in the United States in the past couple of decades. But as the caller pointed out, breaking a CFL in your home poses a contamination problem, especially if you have small children. Furthermore, the landfills in Mexico and various countries of South America where CFLs have been universally adopted are not sealed. This caller believed that CFLs are dangerous.
Second, there is a segment of the population who will proudly swap out their bulbs and pat themselves on the back for being eco-sensitive, yet who will change no other behaviors that would have a greater environmental impact, such as driving less frequently or buying less stuff overall. By making CFLs the poster child for “greening up” your life (along with buying a Prius and shopping at Whole Foods), we give people like this an excuse to quit after a half-hearted effort of limited value.
Until the debate is firmly over, my opinion remains unchanged: the best way to truly consume less energy is to turn your lights off when not using them. It is the fundamental principle of conservation.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Top Five Books on Environmental Topics


Every spring, my dad used to quip, “Spring has sprung, the grass is riz; I wonder where the birdies is?” Okay, it doesn’t make much sense, but he and I shared a love of bad poetry, so I thought I would post this couplet in homage to him.
Spring officially arrived on March 20th this year, and the birdies is singing their little hearts out in the bush outside my window. But April in Colorado can still feel like winter. It is overcast and chilly today, and it may snow tonight. In this climate, most trees don’t bud until May Day, and it doesn’t pay to plant flowers until after Memorial Day.
But at least we have the birdies, thanks in part to Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, arguably one of the most influential books on the environment ever written. Nearly forty years ago, in 1972, our government banned DDT for agricultural use, heeding Carson’s warning about its overenthusiastic employment having the potential to silence songbirds across the country.
I read Carson’s excellent book while living off the grid in Taos and found it to be both riveting and disturbing, especially for its commentary on the interplay between the industries that manufacture pesticides and the government agencies that regulate them. Silent Spring qualifies as one of my favorite books relating to the environment. Below are my top five. (If you want to recommend your favorites to me, I am always looking to add to the books piled on my nightstand waiting to be read.)
     1.         Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. This book requires you to concentrate when reading it, particularly when she describes the chemistry behind pesticides. But it is worth your attention if you want a complete, coherent picture of how chemical pesticide use came about in this country, what its negative implications are (and the science behind them), and how its use has spiraled out of control.
     2.         Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat. I read this when I was in high school and remember loving it. Never Cry Wolf tells Mowat’s story as a biologist sent to research how wolves in the Canadian Yukon were ostensibly killing all the caribou and, therefore, should be systematically hunted themselves. He finds, of course, that the wolves and caribou managed to balance their numbers just fine until humans came along and started overhunting the caribou and shooting the wolves for sport. When I tried to re-read this book recently, I was put off by the stiff language. But it doesn’t matter: the message is still sound. Besides, they made an excellent movie out of it.
     3.         Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. This is another book I read in Taos. It is a classic environmental screed in which Abbey rails against roads in national parks (among other things) and tells a rollicking good tale to boot. I may read it again for some perspective now that we are once more debating the value of roadless wilderness.
     4.         The Not-So-Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, by Sarah Susanka. Over ten years ago, Susanka adjured us to build our houses smaller but smarter. After a decade of largely ignoring her advice, our country is finally getting the message. However, remodeling rather than building new is still the most economically viable option for most people and the most environmentally friendly way to go. Hence, her latest book, Not So Big Remodeling: Tailoring Your Home for the Way You Really Live, which I am looking forward to reading.
     5.         Your Money or Your Life, by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. The original blueprint for using less stuff and reclaiming your life from the corporate treadmill, this book was my inspiration to de-clutter, de-stress, use less, and spend less.

Friday, April 8, 2011

The Bare Necessities


Traveling in a Third World country, like living off the grid, throws using less in relief. There are a minimum of necessities, and everything else is extraneous. When I talked to the various Westerners I met on a trek in Nepal, I asked them what they missed the most about their own country. No matter whether they had been gone two weeks, two months, or a full year, the number one answer was always the same: flush toilets. Old habits die hard. Squatting may work perfectly well, but if you have been trained to sit and are used to the hygienic aspects of flushing, that’s what you crave. It’s a comfortable, familiar feeling.
Also high on people’s lists were hot and cold running tap water. This was both for taking a steaming hot shower and for having potable water at your fingertips to drink, brush teeth, wash hands, and the myriad other things for which we thoughtlessly use water in industrialized nations.
One person mentioned a warm bedroom. Getting undressed at night in Nepal was chilly and unpleasant at best. At worst I didn’t even bother, but crawled into my sleeping bag fully clothed in my sweaty long underwear, cuddling a bottle of boiled water next to me.
Fresh fruit made some people’s lists, including mine. I also craved cold milk. The Swiss trekkers brought their own supply of chocolate as protection against inferior varieties, and the English folks mentioned roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. As for me, I had dreams about creamy macaroni and cheese. The other American I met longed for orange juice. Personal preference reigned, but everyone had a food item they craved and simply couldn’t get in Nepal.
The curious thing was that absolutely nobody mentioned electricity, television, radio, stereos and CDs (this was pre-MP3 technology), telephones, PDAs, video games, movies, twenty-four-hour news programs, or anything relating to information or nonparticipatory entertainment. One man remarked that he hadn’t seen a newspaper in a while, but he didn’t say he missed it. With the exception of amenities relating to staying warm and clean, no one mentioned material possessions either. No one missed cars, gadgets, cushy furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting, toys, knickknacks, or any of the plastic junk that fills most of our houses. Eliminating all but the necessities was painless. It freed us up to enjoy the great outdoors and each other’s company, two pleasures that cost nothing.

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Unintended Consequences of Conservation

We have all heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences, typically in reference to something negative that happens as a result of a law passed by the government. But an individual person’s actions can have unintended consequences too, and sometimes they can be positive. Witness the following conservation actions you can take and their potential positive consequences.
  • Put your computer on a power strip to turn it completely off when you are not using it. This little step will not only save money and energy since it won’t be drawing a phantom power load (a tiny bit of power used by anything with a battery charger or a remote control), it will also make it ever-so-slightly inconvenient to turn it back on. And that inconvenience might spur you to choose to do something else instead, such as spend time with friends and family. Human beings are social creatures: we need actual, physical contact with one another to thrive, as opposed to instant messages, chat rooms, emails, social networking sites, or video phone calls.
  • Eat your leftovers. It doesn’t matter whether they come from a restaurant or your own kitchen: if you fully consume every piece of food you buy, you will buy less food overall. Therefore you will consume fewer of the planet’s resources and spend less money. You may also decide to learn a few cooking techniques to make your leftovers more palatable. And once you perfect some recipes, you might invite some friends (or a potential love interest) over to impress them with your new skills, and who knows where that might lead?
  • Drink water. Only water. And I don’t mean flavored, sparkling, or otherwise “enhanced” water. If you stop buying and drinking soda, juice, milk, coffee, tea, alcohol, and energy drinks, you will consume fewer calories, kick potentially addictive habits, and spend less money. You also may become concerned about the quality of the water flowing from your tap. If you become concerned enough, you can write to your local water commission and press for higher standards and better regulation.
  • Keep your lights off as long as possible after the sun sets, saving energy and money by not using electricity. Then go outside (or at least take a seat by your window) and turn on all of your senses. Let your eyes adjust to the fading light and see if you can spot any creatures scuttling by, whether they are squirrels or neighbors out walking their dogs. Listen to the birds settling down for the night: their chirps are different from the ones you hear during the day. Inhale the fresh evening air, and feel how cool it is on your skin. By eliminating an artificial environment lit with electric bulbs, you can tune in to the natural one that has been there all along.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Going Green for Cheapskates


Check out the April/May issue of Natural Health magazine! On page 58, their article “The Cheapskate’s Guide to a Greener Home” features 40 ideas to save money and be kinder to the environment.
This article does a good job of providing easy-to-implement ideas that don’t cost much or which produce dividends down the road. Plenty of magazine articles tend to advise spending lots of money in order to “go green,” which is good for advertisers but counterproductive for the environmental movement as well as your personal balance sheet. So kudos to Natural Health.
Here are five more ideas to counter the idea that you need lots of money to live an environmentally-friendly life.

If you can’t afford to …
You can always …
cover your roof with solar panels,
write your senator or representative and lobby for more sustainable energy produced by public utilities. (This one made it into the article, but I like it so much I’m repeating it here.)
shop at Whole Foods,
ask your chain grocery store to stock organic items.
buy a Toyota Prius or a Nissan Leaf, but you need a new car,
buy a small, cheap car that gets terrific gas mileage, such as the Smart Fortwo or the Chevy Cruze Eco.
pay a landscape company to xeriscape your front yard,
trade skills with a friend or neighbor: while they re-do your yard, you can cook their meals, drive them to work, or watch their kids.
vacation at an eco-resort in the South Pacific,
go camping in your closest state park. The act of not taking an airplane makes this a much greener and cheaper option.

Friday, March 18, 2011

Some Facts to Consider


My book is available! If you pre-ordered it on Amazon.com, you should have received your copy by now. (Thanks, Suzanne, for alerting me.)
Here are some facts from Thrifty Green to motivate you to examine your consumption habits through the lens of Nature and possibly make some changes based on what you find.
·      An ecological footprint is the measure of our demand for the earth’s resources as compared to the earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources and absorb and neutralize the corresponding waste. In other words, it represents our habits of consumption of energy and raw materials, plus our creation of waste products such as garbage and pollution. Individuals, companies, and countries can all have an ecological footprint. According to the latest calculations available from the United Nations, in 2009, humans on the planet collectively had an ecological footprint of 1.4, meaning it would take 1.4 earths to produce the resources we consume and to render our waste harmless.
o      Potential Change: Start conserving now. Use less energy and buy less stuff.
·      According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling account for over half the energy use in a typical American home. Also, houses consume 20 percent of the energy in the United States.
o      Potential Change: Turn your heat down and your air conditioner up.
·      According to the Energy Information Administration, America has a 234-year supply of coal at today’s rate of consumption. However, the organization calculates an increased rate of consumption of 0.6% per year through 2030. With that growth rate, they recalculate that our reserves will be exhausted in 146 years.
o      Potential Change: Pressure your state’s lawmakers to require a shift to renewable energy resources.
·      In the October, 2009, issue of Consumer Report, it is reported that “almost four in five states anticipate water shortages by 2013.”
o      Potential Change: Get rid of your lawn. Plant xeric (low water use) plants instead.
·      According to the Organic Seed Alliance, the United States has lost 97 percent of its original fruit and vegetable varieties because of modern agribusiness practices.
o      Potential Change: Buy organic, heirloom produce to create a demand to bring those varieties back.
·      Plastic is a petroleum product.
o      Potential Change: Use glass for storage containers, and recycle all plastic that makes its way into your house.
·      In 2006, Americans generated 251 million tons of trash, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than half of which came from residential sources.
o      Potential Change: Recycle everything. And I mean everything: glass, plastic, paper, newspaper, cardboard, batteries, old cell phones, clothes, furniture, and anything else you consider throwing out. Recycle it or donate it instead.

Friday, March 4, 2011

A Little About Me


When I take stock of my life these days – married, new baby, living in an ordinary house in a typical neighborhood on the outskirts of Denver – it seems improbable that I spent a year living alone in a self-sustaining house in the middle of the high desert of New Mexico.  The more time that elapses between that singular, remarkable year and the present, the less I comprehend how I ever did it.  It was a year of solitary cold winter nights, power outages, and water rationing.  It involved manual labor and self-reliance.  It was a raw existence lived in the midst of Nature’s spare, clean beauty.
It was all the more remarkable because I think of myself as the average American girl next door, not an extreme environmentalist.  I grew up in a small town in the mountains of Colorado, obeying my mother’s daily command to go outside and play, regardless of season.  During the summer, my sisters and I rode our bikes through the woods with our teddy bears in the baskets on our handlebars.  In fall, we played hide-and-seek behind the quaking aspen that had turned a glorious yellow.  Even in winter we went outside to tunnel through the snow like cold-weather gophers, or to slide down the piles left by the snowplows, and by spring we fooled ourselves that it was warm enough to take off our shoes and wade in the river that was rushing with snowmelt.
From the beginning, I felt I was a part of Nature (which always has a capital ‘N’ in my mind).  I just assumed everyone else felt the same way until I became an adult and looked around to realize that most of America suffers from overdomestication, the condition of being oblivious to the natural world despite living in it.  That realization nudged me on my way toward a personal revolution.
The seeds were planted early.  They were in the lectures from my dad on the merits of parking your car in the shade with the windows cracked on a hot summer day: ‘A stiff cross-breeze is as good as air-conditioning.’  (This is not actually true.  When I was in graduate school, I drove a Honda CRX whose air conditioning had broken, and I couldn’t afford to fix it.  One summer day as I was stuck in gridlock on the beltway around Washington, D.C., I decided that cross-breezes do not, in fact, equate to air conditioning.  On the plus side, I learned that I have a high tolerance for suffering, which helps when you live a labor-intensive life like the one I had in Taos.)
There are seeds in my dad’s love of architecture, which he transmitted to me.  He was a creative thinker in terms of home building and energy use, and my formative years were spent living in a house my dad had built during the last energy crisis in the seventies.  I cut my teeth on the phrases ‘put a sweater on’ and ‘close the door, I’m not paying to heat the whole outdoors.’  I learned about south-facing windows, sun angles, and insulation early on, and the term ‘R-value’ (a measurement of the efficiency of insulation) entered my vocabulary before the age of ten.
The seeds were nurtured by a comment I ran across in a book about being able to appreciate something without wanting to possess it, an idea which, coupled with the frugal streak that runs in my family, freed me from spending bundles of money on things I didn’t need.
All of these were buried in my subconscious, ready to be exhumed twenty-five years later when I decided to build a retreat where I could go on the weekends to decompress from the stress of everyday living in modern America.
Too much stress was the true impetus for my building a house near Taos.  I built it in an environmentally-friendly way because of those seeds that had firmly sprouted in my conscience, and I built it inexpensively in deference to that deeply-rooted frugal streak.  But the reason I built it at all was that the stress of everyday life in the working world of America, coupled with some personal stress, had beaten me down to the point of exhaustion.  It had gotten so bad that my physical health suffered.  I clenched my teeth until they cracked, I had insomnia, my thoughts raced and I couldn’t shut them off, and I was on my way to a nervous breakdown.  I needed a place to go where I could find, in the words of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, a ‘still mind and a peaceful heart.’
When I graduated from college in 1990, nobody told me that the only things I would get out of a corporate job were a salary and benefits, and that there was more to life than that.  The country was in the midst of a recession, rather like today, and I was thankful to have a job that paid the bills.  But by the time I reached my thirties, I realized the bargain I had struck with my employer was that I would give them my time, energy, and skills, and they would give me money.  The fine print that I had only skimmed said that I would also give them my ideals, my principles, my physical fitness, and my mental stability.  In exchange, they would give me stress, ‘core values,’ and lip service to work-life balance – a phrase ironically coined by the corporate world where there is none.
A typical overachiever, I worked long hours, ran my office’s volunteer activities, chaired the education committee at the local Chamber of Commerce, swam three times a week, coached a master’s swim team, acted as power of attorney for my debilitated father, and climbed mountains in my spare time.  These days it wears me out just reading that sentence.  But at the time, I didn’t realize I was driving myself to the point of collapse.  Overwhelmed, I knew I needed more than just a vacation to rejuvenate; I needed a completely different way of life.
While searching for a way out, I gravitated toward the sections of the bookstore that promoted alternative lifestyles and bought books with provocative titles such as Your Money or Your Life, How to Survive Without a Salary, and Mortgage-Free! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership.  I fantasized about traveling for a year, building my own house from scavenged materials, or dropping out and becoming a ski bum.  Instead, I trekked for a month in Nepal, hired a builder who specialized in strawbale, and dropped out to live off the grid.
In October of 2006, I quit the stressful corporate job I had held for a decade, broke up with my boyfriend, sold my conventional house, and moved full-time to a small, solar-powered, strawbale house in the vast sagebrush outside of Taos, New Mexico.  I had no central heating, no source of electricity beyond what the sun provided, and no water supply other than what I caught on the roof.  Living on savings, disconnected from both mainstream America and the national power grid, I adjusted my life throughout the next four seasons to accommodate the quirks of the house and drastically downshifted the amount of electricity, water, and other resources I consumed.  By the end of a year, I discovered that what was good for me was also good for the planet, that consuming less and conserving more helps us all.

Welcome to Thrifty Green


What do you do when you go from having unreliable electricity that cuts out after three cloudy days in a row to a constant supply regardless of weather?  How do you react after living for a year with a finite water supply stored in the ground outside the house when you move to a home where water flows freely every time you open the tap?  Does your behavior change when you can simply turn the heat up if you are cold, instead of having to build a fire to warm up?
These were the issues I faced upon moving back into a conventional house in Colorado after having spent an ascetic year living off the grid in New Mexico.  I had prided myself on having a near-zero ecological footprint, and yet I found myself compromising my conservation habits out of convenience once I rejoined the mainstream.
Like most Americans, I found myself trying to get by in a tough economy.  There are hundreds of books and blogs offering thousands of tips to green up your life, from buying a hybrid car to replacing old appliances.  Yet such lists of suggestions can be overwhelming and sometimes inapplicable in people’s lives, especially if they involve spending more money.
The purpose of the Thrifty Green blog is to explore how making conscious decisions and deepening your connection to Nature can result in conservation of both the earth’s resources and your own money. It is based on the fundamental principle that conservation, not consumption, is the key to responsible stewardship of the earth.
Now let’s get started.