Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

About a year ago, I heard about some churches observing a Lenten Carbon Fast.  This year, my church joins others in this important and meaningful Lenten journey.  Whether or not you are religious or observe Lent, consider taking some or all of the suggested daily actions.

I will post one action a day for the next 40+ days (because you can be green on Sundays, too!) in addition to my regular posting.  If you would like to view the entire Carbon Fast calendar, click here.  While I love saving trees, you may want to print this (double-sided, of course) and post it on your refrigerator, or somewhere you will see it every day.

If you’re already taking a suggested action, please leave comments on that day’s posting about how you work that action into your daily life and/or how you might take it further.

At the same time  I wrote this post, I started reading Simple Prosperity by David Wann.  Yes, that was over three months ago.  Yes, I have had the book checked out from the library the entire time.  I am THAT woman, the one who keeps books forever which is unfair to other library patrons.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the book.  It was an easy read, not too long (I really have no excuse for taking three months to read it), and packed with thought-provoking statements and questions.  Each chapter starts with a few quotations:

Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like. (Will Rogers)

A [person’s] health can be judged by which [s/he] takes two at a time — pills or stairs. (Joan Welsh)

When you have Enough, you have everything you need.  There’s nothing extra to weight you down, distract, or distress you.  Enough is a fearless place . . . . To let go of clutter, then, is not deprivation; it’s lightening up and opening up space and time for something new and wonderful to happen. (Vicki Robin)

David Wann is also one of the coauthors of Affluenza.  Of the two, Simple Prosperity spoke to me more, delving deeper into the issues first broached in Affluenza.

Haven’t read either of them?  Feel free to start with either one — I guarantee these books will make you question the way you live, the things you prioritize, and the costs of such a lifestyle.  As I said in my Affluenza review, it is important for all of us, even those with only mild cases of “consumption,” to continue to ask questions, learn, and make changes in our lives.

Are you paying to heat an empty building during the day?

When we leave for work in the morning on cold winter days, we push our thermostat down to 55° F, if not a little lower (depending on where you live and how cold it gets, turning the heat off entirely could lead to frozen pipes).  Since I don’t work on Fridays anymore, I experimented and discovered that 55° F works when I’m home during the day, too!  It’s best when I’m moving around cleaning and such, but I’m okay for medium-length periods sitting at the computer, too.

Think 55° F is extreme?  Check out this NYTimes article about people choosing to live with NO heat.  They inspire me to stick with the low temps around here.

However,  I take issue with the woman who lets her faucets continually drip to keep the pipes from freezing — saving energy by not heating, but wasting water.  Is the energy saved greater than the water wasted?  Is it more important to conserve one than the other?  How do you make that comparison?

Fortunately, I rarely succumb to illness, but I’ll make the best of my current head cold by posting about the color and quantity of my snot handkerchiefs (if you were curious about the other, you’ll just have to stay that way).  I married into a wonderful handkerchief collection, most of them homemade.

Before I discovered handkerchiefs, I used toilet paper, not because it was greener, but because it was cheaper than tissue/Kleenex.  Handkerchiefs achieve the dual goals of being green environmentally and economically — save the paper from the trees and the paper in your wallet!

As a side note, for the majority of the time, I use handkerchiefs for the little sniffles here and there, usually allergy related.  I launder them in cold water, as I do most everything.  Cold water works for most laundry, and you don’t even need to buy that special laundry soap they sell!

To make sure that my current germ-infested handkerchiefs get nice and clean, without using extra resources, I’m trying a little trick that I read about for cleaning cloth diapers.  Soak the diapers, or handkerchiefs, in this case, in the bathtub after you finish bathing.  You reuse the warm, slightly soapy bathwater to jump-start the cleaning process.  I’m not sure how I would feel about doing this with actual diapers, with poop residue and such on them, but it’s a great idea for the handkerchiefs.