Jon Roth's blog

Some portion of the time I’m doing something relative to this project, actually moving my hands, feet and eyes for such tasks as mixing soil for garden boxes, monitoring the sun at different times of the day on the house and garage roofs, looking for possible locations for solar panels, researching heat sources, reviewing utility bills, or planning errands so that I can spend more time on the bike and less in the car. Some portion of the time, I think the greater portion, I’m thinking about it all, contemplating our next move, wondering how effective anything we’ve done might really be, or imagining the net effect of all we might do and struggling to see it in the larger context of global health.

I find it easy to get lost in the details of this endeavor. For my family, and I suspect for most in our culture, reducing our carbon footprint is not an event like setting a bone and waiting for it to heal. It’s more like treating a thousand cuts while trying to learn how to walk through the briar patch. Avoid one cane of briars only to walk into another. Feel the relief of one group of cuts healing only to have new scrapes appear somewhere else.

We’ve been busy with our collection of carbon reducing projects: changing light bulbs, researching and getting quotes for home insulation improvements, weather stripping and hot water pipe wrapping. We’ve been learning about efficient appliances, on-demand hot water heaters, and pellet stoves. We’ve gotten rid of our old, inefficient cars and replaced them with small, efficient cars, one a hybrid. We’ve built half a dozen large garden boxes in our city lot back yard and are accumulating the compost soil mixture to fill them to begin growing as much of our own food as we can. We’ve eliminated a large portion of our lawn and are getting rid of our gas-powered lawn mower in favor of a reel mower. We’re beginning to look into solar panels. We’ve started planning our meals differently and buying our food differently to support agriculture closer to home and production that creates less waste and uses less energy while giving us healthier food.

Yes, we seem to have quite a few seeds in the ground as it were. We’re also doing a fair amount of reading on the subject to see how others are approaching carbon emissions and energy and to learn in greater detail why we’re doing this project in the first place and what kinds of effects we can have.

We’re nearly four months into what we’re loosely referring to as “the project,” and we’ve learned a few things.

I did the week’s grocery shopping today with Mark Bittman’s book, Food Matters, fresh in my mind. Much like those grapes from Chile that got me started down this road, certain food items I saw in the store today took on a new hue, like they were off-gassing the cumulative product of all of the fossil fuels, fertilizers, and other chemicals that went into their production and transport. That perspective made them less appetizing and effectively kept them out of my cart.

The list I carried was very much like every other week’s list I’ve shopped with. It contained the ingredients and staples we’d need to for the week’s planned meals plus school lunches and snacks. The difference today was what I reached for to fill each item. If the label showed a long list of ingredients with extensive names, I didn’t put it into my cart. If it came from too far away, I looked for a more local version or simple didn’t buy it but found something that would make a reasonable substitute.

We’re reading the new Auden Schendler book, Getting Green Done. He doesn’t pull punches, apparently doesn’t have a taste for sugar coatings, and isn’t out to make friends as much as he simply seeks to tell you how he sees it. He’s reporting from the front lines, as he says in his subtitle, of the sustainability revolution.

Here’s a strong message we’re getting from this work: one family in Michigan changing all our bulbs to compact fluorescents, improving the insulation in our house, switching to more energy efficient transportation, along with every other change we make this year, is a mere teaspoon of water in the ocean.

The scale of the climate change we’re experiencing and the environmental degradation our species is causing is so daunting that our humble 2009 project could actually have Negative consequences. That never occurred to me before, as I was in the camp that believes that every little bit is an honorable contribution, and hey, maybe a few others might take inspiration from what we’re doing. Not enough at all, says Schendler.

Much of what we’re accumulating in the early stages of this experience is awareness. We’ve all probably heard admonishments, directly or indirectly, for unwrapping a package of hamburger from the grocery store without paying any mind to the steer from which it came. For me that becomes an echo in the back of my mind when I’m shopping, though it’s rarely stopped me from buying hamburger. More often, it’s my intention to take responsibility for having killed the steer. I’m a steer killer; it’s a personal thing that I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But I don’t generally take it any farther than that, to think about the feedlots where the steer spent its brief life, the acres of corn, tons of fertilizer, tankers of pesticide, all the fossil fuel, and the vast amounts of freshwater required to process and ship that hamburger in the neat little packages to the grocery store where I can pick up a pound and drop it into my shopping cart.

As my wife says about it, “It’s just downright depressing.”

If I thought the origin and delivery chain through from beginning to end, I’d change my habits out of the sheer weight of my new awareness of the far reaching consequences my simple, mindless actions bring.