Joyfully Green: 7 entries from January 2013

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Instantly Greener: Idle Thoughts

I love drive-throughs. Not only can I get what I want in any weather (it's been nasty lately!) without getting out of my car, but I also can drive around with my trusty co-pilot, Delilah (above). Here's what I don't love about drive-throughs: breathing in the fumes from other cars that are idling. If you're waiting in a line for a minute or more, why not turn off the engine? You're not going anywhere--might as well save the gas and cut the pollution.

Twenty-five percent of the gas consumed in every car is used when it's not even in motion. Unless you're Oprah, Bill Gates, or Thurston Howell III and money isn't an issue for you, wasting money on gas you're not using is pretty much the same thing as tossing the dollar bills out into the breeze. Once I timed how long it took me to get from the end of the drive-through line at CVS to the pick-up window: sixteen minutes. And yes, my car was off except for the few seconds to pull forward, so I was quite pleased that I'd saved all of that gas.

I think people would be more aware of the fact that toxic fumes are spewing out of their tailpipes if the gases were colored neon yellow, or even better, dirty brown. But since it doesn't really look like anything is happening, we tend to forget all of the gaseous garbage that our cars are emitting. It's important to keep it in check, though, especially at pick-up lines at schools. Do you really want to spew carcinogens and toxic substances onto the playground where kids are running around, trying to get fresh air? According to this article from Scientific American, idling vehicles emit carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and soot particles, while diesel fuel vehicles emit additional carcinogens and toxic substances. All of this dirty air has been linked to respiratory diseases, heart attacks, and asthma attacks.

Twenty-five states currently have "no idling" laws. Where does your state stand on this issue? Take a look at this source on idling regulations by state (it doesn't just apply to truckers). And the next time you're at the drive-through at your bank, your drugstore, or (gasp!) a fast-food restaurant (I won't report you to Michael Pollan), do a big favor for your wallet, our lungs, and the planet--turn off your car.

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Posted on 01/29/2013 at 09:44 PM in Instantly Greener | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: asthma, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, carcinogens, diesel fuel, fumes, heart attacks, idling, respiratory diseases, tailpipes, wasting gas

Pictures & Ponderings: Thoreau and the Woods

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."

-- Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" (1854)

Food for thought: What is your primary relationship to nature? Creator, Destroyer, Waster, Enjoyer?

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Posted on 01/28/2013 at 07:29 AM in books, nature, Thoreau | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: Henry David Thoreau, walking in the woods

Enjoying the Great Outdoors...Without Leaving the House?

Today's guilty confession from this nature-loving blog girl: I haven't really been outside for a week. There, I've said it. In my defense, the temperature in the mornings has been hovering between 4 and 8 degrees--Fahrenheit, not Celsius--with a bitter, bone-chilling, unrelenting wind. What I've learned from this run of really, really cold weather is that I'd make a terrible Canadian. Or Chicagoan, for that matter. I'm half-Swedish, so you'd think I could handle the cold by genetics alone, but my other half is Italian, so it all evens out.

Most of the snow is gone now and has been replaced with sheets of ice; therefore, simply walking around outside has become a challenge. When I took our books back to the library yesterday, I promptly fell flat on my back, feet whipped out from under me, on a sheet of black ice. I was somehow heart-warmed to hear a total stranger blurt out a blue streak of obscenities in raw, unadulterated concern for me as he rushed over, lickety-split, to help me up. "You're lucky that you're not an old lady--you would have been TOAST!" he gasped in relief after I assured him that I was fine.

Other than still walking the dog four times a day (probably setting all kinds of speed-walking records), I just haven't had the get-up-and-go to get out there. My blogger friend Debi at Go Explore Nature (whom I told you about in 10 Green "Gifts" That Won't Cost You a Dime) has been on a mission this month to post a suggestion every single day for getting outdoors with the kids. (Debi lives in L.A., mind you.) She has some very clever and creative suggestions, even for cold weather, and I plan on following many of them...as soon as the temperature inches up into the double digits again.

But until then, here's what I'm doing to appreciate nature...

As soon as I open the blinds, I watch the sun rising. It rises a little after 7 a.m. now---not such an ungodly hour. When I wake up the kids, they watch the sun rise with me. Peaceful.

As I eat my breakfast, after the kids have gone off to school, I watch the rather large herd of white-tailed deer wandering out of the woods for their own breakfasts, or cozying up along our stone wall in the back yard, shielding themselves from the wind. I saw this momma deer keeping a watchful eye on her fawn while pretending to relax. (I could relate to her.)

Another doe, pictured below, seems to have bitten into something that bit her back--a thorny bush, perhaps. See her tongue split in half and hanging out? Her tongue stayed out, flapping limply in the wind. Poor thing.

I am a firm believer in "a room with a view", so the desk in my office faces a window where I can watch the day unfolding outside. If I stared at a computer screen all day without these visual breaks of nature, I would not be a happy camper and I'm sure I'd need eyeglasses much thicker than the ones I own now.

When I do get outside for the dog-walks, I often hear Canadian Geese overhead. I marvel at their V formations and the way the leader honks to the others to guide them along, and they honk right back in response. Nice teamwork, guys!

When it's too cold to go out at night, we can still gaze at the stars from the warmth of our bedrooms. Tonight we found Orion, and my son re-read the story behind the constellation. My favorite constellation has always been the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, so that's the first thing I seek out. We also study the phases of the moon--my daughter is a bit obsessed. ("The moon! The mooooooooooon!" she shrieks whenever it's full.)

In the daytime, we can look out on our forest and see what's afoot or aflutter. We keep our two plexiglass bird-feeders well-stocked with seeds, so from the kitchen and master bath, we can watch who's flying in for a bite. (Below: Tufted Titmouse; Chickadee.)

It's helped us enormously that we bought an easy-to-use field guide for birds of New Jersey a few years back. Sure, we already knew the Blue Jays, Cardinals, and Chickadees, but now we also know what a Dark-eyed Junco is--turns out we have LOTS of those little cuties.

So, yes--we are indoors for now, but we are still finding our own ways to appreciate the Great Outdoors.

Food for thought: How are you interacting with nature this winter? What animals have you seen out foraging?

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Posted on 01/24/2013 at 09:25 PM in deer, fun, nature, winter | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: Blue Jays, Cardinals, Chickadees, constellations, Dark-eyed Junco, field guide for birds, Orion, Pleades, star-gazing, white-tailed deer

Instantly Greener: Unplug It!

For this premier edition of "Instantly Greener", I'm choosing something that's super-easy to do and might just save you a couple hundred bucks over the course of a year: Unplug any appliances that you're not using, right now. That includes the toaster you use for 5 minutes a day and don't use for the other 23 hours and 55 minutes, and the coffee-maker you use for a half hour a day and don't use for the other 23-and-a-half hours. Don't even get me started on the cell phone charger that's plugged in indefinitely with no cell phone in sight.

Why should you unplug an appliance if it's already switched off? For the same reason that you wouldn't allow a slow trickle of water to run from your faucet for months on end (at least I hope you wouldn't): natural resources are going down the drain. This wasteful effect is called "Phantom Load" or "Vampire Energy" and according to Sally Deneen of The Daily Green, "If your home is typical, you live with 20 vampires. They add about $200 to your annual energy bill. That’s because the 'off' button doesn’t really mean 'off' these days; instead, it means 'standby.'"

Vampires might be all the rage thanks to the "Twilight" movies, but they're not so appealing when they're adding up to higher energy costs and lower natural resources. Don't let yourself get sucked in--unplug those vampires today.

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Posted on 01/23/2013 at 01:48 PM in Instantly Greener | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: energy vampires, lowering electricity bills, phantom load, reducing energy costs, unplugging, vampire appliances, vampire energy

The Myth of Throwing Things "Away"

I've just finished reading two really trashy books. No, I'm not talking about a Danielle Steel novel or Fifty Shades of Grey; I'm talking about books on garbage. Because here's my confesssion of the day: I'm slightly obsessed with worrying about trash. My long-suffering in-laws know this fact all too well, as every time they innocently go to throw out an apple core or banana peel at our house, I'm snatching it away from them (or out of the trash can, if I haven't gotten to them quickly enough) to stick it in the compost bin. They lovingly call me "the Green Police." I know I'm insufferable in this regard, but I can't help myself when it comes to the stuff we're throwing away. The problem, as I see it, is this: When we throw things "away", where are they actually going? The two books I just finished reading answer this question in great detail, and are called Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte (2005, Little, Brown and Company) and Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Tooby Beth Terry (2012, Skyhorse Publishing).

Elizabeth Royte makes me look like a wanton litterbug. She painstakingly logged all of the contents of her trash for months on end (ugh, no thanks!), laying it out on her kitchen floor and writing down everything she tossed out. Then she tried to track where her trash actually ended up, riding with the NYC garbage men who collected her cans, visiting various landfills and recycling facilities. Although I wouldn't follow in her footsteps, I found out some fascinating things from her book:

Until the early 1890s's, wild pigs--around 100,000 of them!--roamed the streets of NYC, feasting on the trash that was tossed out the windows and doors of homes--a very strange means of trash disposal indeed. An outbreak of cholera put an end to it, when every last pig was slaughtered.
Garbage collectors are three times more likely to be killed on the job than police officers or firefighters. In addition to working in traffic and hauling hazardous materials like sharp metal, broken glass, poisons, and acids that can burst in the truck, each worker lifts about five to six tons per day, spread out in 75-lb. bags.
A Granny Smith apple can biodegrade completely in two weeks or last several thousand years. It's dependent on sunlight and oxygen to biodegrade, and landfills bury trash in layers so thick, biodegradation isn't possible.
The dumps of the Roman Empire are still leaching (leaking toxic fluids).
Plastics were invented in the 1940's and marketed as disposable, sanitary, and convenient. Instead of the previous model of mending, trading, or reusing, throwing things away became the desired norm.
More people recycle in America than vote.

That last fact might seem like good news on the environmental front, but the sad truth is that recycling also takes a lot of labor and resources. And it creates a bad global trade cycle: We ship most of our recyclable plastics overseas in huge containers to Asia, where they're turned into cheap goods (manufactured under terrible conditions for the workers and the environment) and then sold right back to us. (Look at the bottom of the first ten plastic things you see in your home and count how many of them say "Made in China." That's where your recycled plastic bottles have traveled--straight back into your home.)

One of Royte's main points is that when we recycle, it's a sort of penance for our consumerism and wastefulness. Instead of just not buying the product in the first place, we buy it and toss it out at the end of its "useful" life--because, after all, recycling is good! Trash is going somewhere else! Our house is clean again...and ready for more stuff!

Garbage Land deals with a lot of the inherent guilt of throwing things away--things we bought with our hard-earned money but no longer want or need--and Royte posits that if we had to throw things out in clear plastic bags instead of opaque ones, we would probably throw out a lot less stuff. (It reminded me of Michael Pollan writing in The Omnivore's Dilemma how there probably would be a lot less meat-eaters if slaughterhouses had glass walls.) Much of the time, we conveniently don't think about our garbage at all. She quotes one of the sanitation men: "People think there's a garbage fairy. You put your trash on the curb, and then pffft, it's gone."

Royte delves into some possible scenarios for the future of trash, such as trying to achieve Zero Waste by creating products that don't end up in the landfill; paying for your trash to be removed but having your recycling taken away for free (as in San Francisco); enacting laws for extended producer responsibility (EPR), which means manufacturers take back the product and packaging; resorting to landfill mining once our resources have sadly run out. Truth be told, this book was as depressing as it was fascinating.

Although Beth Terry also sifts through her trash and tallies it diligently (again, that's more than I'm willing to do), she also fills an entire book (impressively made without a plastic binding or cover) with suggestions of how to dramatically lessen the amount of things we throw away send to the landfill or overseas. First, she goes through the very good reasons why we should avoid plastic (it's made from fossil fuels; it contains toxic chemicals that can leach into your food and beverages; it pollutes the land, air, and oceans; it harms the workers who manufacture it...just to name a few). But the rest of the book is about switching out plastic for healthier, eco-friendlier options, and Terry includes many sources for them. Some suggestions are a lot easier to follow than others--for example, I'm going to start buying bar soap instead of liquid soap in plastic bottles, and no more of those little "microbeads" in products for scrubbing--they're just little plastic particles that end up in our waterways. Other suggestions take more effort, such as buying the foods you need from bulk bins and using your own containers for them. I'm definitely going to get some reusable produce bags (we go through a lot of fruits and veggies), and she gives several suggestions for them. The book's a keeper.

Terry is an inspiration--she even successfully lobbied Clorox to take back its Brita water filters from consumers. (Just thinking about her hard-fought campaign makes me tired.) Most of all, though, I appreciated her humor. In my favorite passage, she talks about falling off the plastic-free wagon when she went on a road trip with her dad: "What started out with one Cheeto snuck from one bag turned into an orgy of Flamin' Hot Cheeto madness. My dad would buy a new bag of them every time we stopped for gas, and I'd munch out, until finally, towards the end of a long exhausting trip, I found myself buying the Cheetos myself. We were on a Cheetos bender..." So you see, even hard-core environmentalists know how tough it is to be 100% green, 24/7. (As I said in my post entitled 10 Green "Gifts" That Won't Cost You a Dime, you can find Terry's informative and entertaining writing on her blog called MyPlasticFreeLife.com.)

Good luck on your own quest for less stuff, and therefore, less garbage!

Food for thought: Look into your kitchen garbage can. (You don't have to pick through it and tally it.) Is there anything in there that you could have recycled or composted? (By the way, I'm going to review composters in the spring.) What is at least one disposable plastic thing you can stop buying?

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© 2013 by Joy Sussman/JoyfullyGreen.com. All rights reserved. Text and artwork digitally fingerprinted and protected by MyFreeCopyright.com. (Artwork created with the Flowpaper app by Diatom Studios for iPad.) Site licensed by Creative Commons.

Posted on 01/17/2013 at 04:01 PM in books, declutter, eco-friendly, perspective | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tags: Beth Terry, composting, Elizabeth Royte, EPR, extended producer responsibility, garbage, Michael Pollan, plastic, plastics made in China, recycling, The Omnivore's Dilemma, waste management, Zero Waste

Breaking Up with the UPS Man (My Ode to Non-Consumerism)

When I was walking the dog yesterday afternoon, I saw the friendly face of a familiar man with whom I've lost touch in the past couple of months--his tell-tale brown outfit had given him away from a distance. It was the UPS Man. We waved to each other from across the neighbor's lawn, and I thought of that ubiquitous Gotye song (which even my five-year-old has been singing) about break-ups: "Now You're Just Somebody That I Used to Know." Because the truth of the matter is this: Other than food and absolute essentials, I don't want to buy any more stuff. I have enough stuff. In fact, I have much more than enough, and this year, (as I said in Looking Back, Looking Forward: My Green Year in Review), one of my goals is to find new homes for it, so that I end the year with a lot less than I have now.

I especially do not want stuff that arrives on a big truck (which uses lots of gas and spews out fumes) and is packaged in a cardboard box (made out of long-forgotten trees), nestled among plastic air pillows (polluting the air, water, and land from cradle to grave), or worse: styrofoam peanuts (which I hope will be outlawed someday, when it finally becomes apparent to lawmakers that polystyrene is a very bad thing indeed).

I used to get lots of packages, and there was a certain thrill in hearing the UPS Man driving up the street in his unmistakably noisy, big brown truck, making the turn onto our driveway, delivering large and small boxes from Amazon.com, or One Kings Lane (a hard addiction to break--don't let yourself get sucked in!), or various toy stores for the kids, or Drugstore.com for some beauty or health item that simply couldn't wait, or whatever else I thought I needed, but didn't really, truly need.

Last week, while my kids were selecting books at the library (in a laboriously slow manner that only kids can master when they know their parents have someplace else to go), I picked up a copy of Architectural Digest and flipped to a phenomenally gorgeous house in Europe. It was decorated to the hilt, by a world-famous design firm. Momentarily, I was thinking: "Wow, the owners must love spending their days and nights in this stunning house!" And then I came across a sentence that nearly nauseated me: "The owners have four other homes, also decorated by the same firm." Four other homes?! Before I come across as too judgmental, let me say that I can understand people wanting a warm-weather home and a cold-weather home. However, owning five houses seems, to me, just a tad excessive. Why on earth are people collecting so many houses? To fill them with even more stuff, which they will see maybe two or three times a year, when they pass through for a weekend. Extra homes have become a sort of glamorized version of those orange self-storage rental units that keep springing up along the highways. I've always said to my husband, when passing those infinitely long rows of orange units, "If we ever get to the point where we're renting space for stuff that won't fit into our house, it'll be time to have a big bonfire." (Not that I'm literally for incinerating stuff, but you get the point.)

Author David Owen, in his book entitled The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works, writes: "A house is essentially a huge box filled with complicated things that want to break--a box that sits outside, day and night, in the rain and snow, surrounded by creatures that would like to eat it." Adding to Owen's definition, just think of all of the stuff you put into a house: things you need to dust, wash, rinse, dry, repair (good luck!), file, organize, trip over, take for tune-ups, change the batteries in, pay interest on, insure, mend (a lost art), put into storage, take out of storage, and ultimately, throw out (which has its own set of problems).

When I think of all the gifts I've been given, the ones that mean the most to me have almost always been the experiences. Last year, my in-laws took our extended family on a two-week trip to Israel. That ranks right up there as one of the all-time greatest gifts of my life, and everybody else on the trip was similarly overwhelmed by the generosity and meaningfulness of that gift.

Last year, we also traveled to the 100th birthday party of my great aunt, who is like the most beloved grandmother to me. Of course, we got her a big bouquet, but when I surprised her the next day with a visit, where just the two of us sat together--hugging, crying, and talking about her life and all of our happy and hilarious times together--I know that was one of the most meaningful hours of both of our lives.

So, here's what I want to spend money on this year (and beyond): unfussy dinners with friends and relatives, lessons for the kids (and maybe for myself), and travel with my family. Experiences, not things. Because, not to be morbid, but ultimately, at the end of my days, I want my life to have been filled with experiences, with things I learned, with good times spent with the people I love. Not with stuff. As they say (or at least as Kaufman and Hart said), "You can't take it with you", but the memories will live on, for everybody who had the good fortune to share in their making.

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Posted on 01/10/2013 at 04:45 PM in happiness, minimalism, non-consumerism, perspective, priorities | Permalink | Comments (10)

Tags: commercialism, Israel, meaningful gifts, minimalism, non-consumerism, overconsumption, plastic, polystyrene, spending less

Green Lessons Courtesy of My Dog

As somebody who grew up with cats, I never thought I'd ever be a "dog person." However, after developing an asthmatic allergy to cats in my forties (dastardly tricks of the body!), the decision was made for me. I couldn't see myself (or my family) without a pet, and so...enter the dog. And a whole new way of living. Unlike cats, who can stay indoors happily, curled up in the ultra-coziest spots in the house, dogs need to get outdoors--in any weather (even the first stages of hurricanes, although those outings are far less leisurely).

My dog (the lovely Delilah, featured in the photos here) has literally changed my life, urging me to get outside five times a day, for four half-mile walks around our hilly neighborhood and one nighttime lawn visit, in which I can look up at the vast ceiling of stars with almost the same wonder as when I was a child. The brisk walks are great aerobic substitutes for the sterile and boring Stairmaster--unlike staring at a TV screen while exercising, there's something different to behold practically every day.

Today's morning walk featured a 19-degree temperature and a chilling wind, but onward we marched, regardless. My friends from Chicago and Minnesota have taught me that if you bundle up in enough layers, you can temporarily trick yourself into thinking it's not sub-zero weather. We paused to observe a leafless tree filling up with chatty little blackbirds, decorating it like ornaments. We stopped to greet neighbors and their own dogs. (While Delilah's greeting is full-on, exuberant sniffing and jumping, my own greeting is a tad more restrained.) "Cat people" do not have these daily occasions for neighborly chats. In fact, my husband (also a lifelong cat person) and I both found it a bit jarring at first. (Pssst...People can be friendly!) While the New Yorker in me previously would have been happy to charge ahead without as much as a greeting (let alone a glancing acknowledgement), the dog owner in me now makes time for these small pleasantries. It's downright civil.

About a year ago, I'm sorry to say that we had one of those hidden electrical fences installed, thinking it would add some enjoyment to our outdoor time by letting our dog romp around the yard with the kids. Instead, it added $6,000 in electrical damage to our house when the system was struck by lightning a couple of months later. (If you google electrical dog fences and lightning strikes, you'll find this scenario is alarmingly common. But it makes sense, when you consider that you're encircling your house with a live electrical current.) We're lucky our whole house didn't go up in flames. After pulling up all of the fried and shredded wires around our yard and painting over the scorch marks in the garage, we didn't have the fence repaired and reactivated. It was good riddance--I never cottoned to the idea of shocking the poor dog, even though the fence company assured us it was a perfectly safe training method. Besides, the dog gets better exercise on the half-mile walks, as do we. I know some people swear by those hidden dog fences, but I felt like (for us, anyway) our fence was the "lazy way out" of exercising our dog. (And one of our neighbors recently lost their dog for a night, when it bounded beyond its electrical fence to charge after a fox. Some temptations are just too great. We also have black bears and coyotes in our neighborhood, and there's no hidden fence to keep those guys out--I don't want to let our dog outside unsupervised.) If you've already got an electrical fence for your dog and you're sold on its merits, I would strongly advise that, at the very least, you switch it off when you hear an approaching thunderstorm, and when you go away for the summer.

But back to more pleasant thoughts. Here's what I've learned so far from the velvety, delightful Delilah:

Cuddling with a warm, snoozy hound is more emotionally fulfilling than anything you could buy in a store or anything you could watch on TV.
Take time to really smell the fresh air, the food on your plate, your children's just-washed hair, even your family members first thing in the morning.
Never mind Facebook--go out of your way to greet your friends face-to-face. (Of course, Delilah prefers nose-to-tail.)
I can multi-task by picking up litter while walking the dog. It makes the next walk more pleasant and less annoying to not see the same styrofoam coffee cup in the gutter, or candy wrappers on the lawn.
As the bumper sticker says: Wag more. Bark less.
Stop to really listen. You might be surprised to find what's out-and-about, within your range of vision.
The years are short and fleeting, so make time each day to be peaceful and mindful, healthy and happy, affectionate and cuddle-worthy, loyal and truthful, eager and adventurous, but above all: kind-hearted.