There’s a new farmer’s market in town, and I’m a big fan. City Greens is based on a co-op model — those who can afford it pay for the membership, which subsidizes memberships for lower income members. All members then have access to nutritious, locally grown food at wholesale prices. And they accept food stamps.
I really appreciate this model and the affordable bounty. Now that I am finished with graduate school and have a couple years with a full time job under my belt, I can stomach the regular farmer’s market prices, especially because I know how much better it is for consumers, farmers, and the environment. However, a few years ago that definitely was not the case. The price of local, organic food was a big barrier for me, despite a growing awareness of the issues.
City Greens combines affordability with education: nutrition information, cooking demonstrations, and reasons for eating locally. I hope the model is sustainable and can be replicated across the country, because this is what we need. If you want to talk health care reform, or climate bills, lets go to the root of the problem — how we eat!
A week ago, I received emails with the following subject lines from activist organizations regarding the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454):
“You have a crucial role to play”
“Climate emergency: call the US House today”
“URGENT: Clean energy bill may not pass–send a fax now!”
The main goals of the bill included establishing a carbon cap-and-trade system and setting renewable energy standards.
Some organizations simply urged me to encourage my representative to support the bill. Others highlighted how the bill had been weakened in House negotiations, saying the original provisions must be restored. In the end, I sent a message to my representative through 1Sky, asking him to work to strengthen the bill in specific ways and oppose efforts to weaken it.
In the end, the House passed a severely weakened bill. The bill passed with these major flaws:
1. Instead of auctioning emission permits (i.e. carbon credits), the bill gives away 85% of them. Giving away carbon credits is the main reason that Europe’s cap-and-trade program failed. We have a chance to learn from their mistakes, but instead we choose to make the same mistakes over again.
2. The final version of the bill puts forward a much lower renewable energy target than originally proposed, while giving money to coal companies.
3. The bill strips the EPA of their authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Despite these weaknesses, many organizations, including Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense Fund, and 1Sky considered the bill’s passage a victory and a step in the right direction.
So I’m wondering, is it really a victory? Would we be better off with no bill than one with lots of concessions to coal and oil industries? Or are the above-mentioned organizations right, that something is better than nothing, that this will be a step forward and not just more of the status quo?
I can thank my parents for giving me a green beginning. They wrapped my cute little baby bottom in cloth diapers back in the day when that meant pins and pack-a-leaks (perhaps more commonly known as “plastic pants”). My mom made most of my “baby food.” I have photo documentation of an early introduction to gardening and remember hot August days snapping green beans in the kitchen to prepare for canning (in the pressure canner, which I always thought would explode).
We dried a lot of our laundry on an outside line in the summer and a line in the basement in the winter. Not only does this decrease energy use, it makes your clothes last a lot longer, another green benefit.
In our house it was standard to turn out lights and set the thermostat conservatively. We were early adopters for fluorescent light bulbs and programmable thermostats.
Perhaps because of our state’s bottle deposit, we always saved bottles and cans and returned them to the store for recycling. Once our town started a recycling program, we were there. I often assume that others my age were raised similarly and am surprised when that is not the case. I spent a year transferring one roommate’s recyclable trash from the trash can to the recycling bin, and I was particularly perplexed because she was from California. I mean, California, isn’t the state just full of green people? How do you grow up in California and not know about recycling?
For one reason or another, I’ve been interested in “green” before the word was anything other than a color. I don’t know if this still happens in elementary schools, but do you remember the little book sales they used to do in school? I would go home with a little colorful handout with paperback book titles. Sometimes they also sold posters — posters with kittens on them. But I digress. We were big fans of the library, so getting to buy a book was a rare treat, and I still remember that one of my selections in third grade was, “50 Simple Things You Can do to Save the Earth.” I was struggling to remember the exact title of the book, but I’m pretty sure that’s it, and it’s still around — now with a website! At the bottom of this page you can download a PDF of the original book for free.
A few weeks ago, when it was hot, but not yet unbearably hot, I was getting ready to leave work for the day. I started to take off the sweater that lives in my office, and paused, thinking that I didn’t have anything warm to put on for going outside. And then my brain started functioning again, and I remembered, “Oh, it’s 80 degrees outside, you don’t need a sweater or jacket outside, only inside.”
Many work places and indoor public spaces could reduce their electricity use, thereby saving themselves a lot of dollars on cooling costs AND reducing the their carbon footprint, by setting the thermostat a little higher in the summer. Until that happens, here is the tale of the resident sweater.
A navy blue zip-up sweater permanently resides in my office to help me survive frigid office temperatures that occur in the middle of the summer. When it is 100 million degrees outside, but the office feels like the inside of a meat locker. By permanently resides in my office, I mean this. In the summer of 2005 I started grad school and worked as a research assistant in the same building. At some point during that summer, I decided I needed a permanent source of warmth that I could wear over almost anything, something I wouldn’t mind leaving at the office, and this sweater that I never really wore for anything else seemed like the perfect solution. And because I always wore it over other clothes, and not directly against my skin, and somehow got lucky and never spilled any food on it, I never took it home to wash it. Ever.
See? Not dirty at all.
Fast forward two years to the summer of 2007. Degree in hand, I landed a full time job that just happened to be in the same building. So instead of packing up my cubicle and taking everything home, I just moved everything down the hall into my new pseudo-office (i.e., a cubicle in disguise). Including the sweater. Because why take it home and wash it, if it clearly wasn’t dirty?
Then, during the summer of 2008, I moved with my employer to a new building. I packed most of my office contents in boxes for the moving service (which had to be done while we still had a week left in the old building), but there were some things I wanted to move myself. I put the sweater in this category so it would be available right up to the last minute in that frigid place.
So it happened that, at the end of the last day in the old building, my trusty sweater saw daylight for the first time in three years. And then I took it back to my house, and, are you ready for this? I washed it. For the first time in 3 years.
It survived that washing and just finished its 11th month in it’s new residence. That means it has 2 years and 1 month to go until the next washing.
A few thoughts on this article about recycling electronics:
1. Recycling or no, the amount of waste we produce is appalling. Reduce, with some reuse, should be our focus.
2. As the article mentions, not everything can be recycled: ” . . . and the plastics, which have no reuse market, are often shipped overseas to developing countries for disposal.” Lovely, let’s just send all of our crap to developing countries. Can you say injustice?
3. The fact that we produce this much electronic waste is no accident: ” . . . manufacturers build obsolescence into many of their designs, causing outdated electronics to become the bane of the waste system.” And the bane of the environment.
4. If you haven’t already seen “The Story of Stuff,” it is very relevant and well worth your time.
Her Green Life 