Our environment

I wrote this piece about a year ago.

When did talking about saving the environment become in vogue? We run around in our gas guzzeling, mega sized SUV's, buying material goods as if it were a race. But a race to what? I always think of that phrase "he who has the most toys wins." But what do you win? A ton of debt? Death by clutter? I don't know who wins, but I do know who is currently losing. Our planet. That's right, Mother Earth cannot continue to support our insane rate at which we are sucking up her resources.

In an attempt to reduce my own resource hogging, I've been working on transitioning our household to a more environmentally friendly one. Nothing too drastic, we aren't going off grid anytime soon, I like AC and my computer too much! I thought if I write about some of the things we have done, are doing and are planning to do in our progression to a greener life, it might spark some talk from others about things you may be doing or have read about. I'm always on the lookout for new ideas.

The first idea that pops into many minds is hybrid cars. So, if money happens to grow on trees at your house, give some serious thought to buying a hybrid vehicle. (By the way, if money does grow on trees at your house, please root me a clipping from that tree!) Well, as much as I'd love to just go out and buy a new car, it's not going to happen. My main reason (besides the lack of that tree) is that I already have a relatively new car and it's still under warranty. I should stop now and admit, while I call it a car, I drive an SUV. It's a small SUV, but it's an SUV all the same. My husband drives a VW Passat and his car and my little SUV get comprable gas mileage. We are fortunate though, we work at the same location and carpool together. This save a huge amount of money on gas and wear and tear on our cars. Not to mention less emissions into the air. Add to that the fact that most hybrid vehicles are running about 10k more than a comprabely equiped gas only model of the same car and for me, at this piont in time, a hybrid just isn't feasable. I'll do my part for the environment by keeping my vehicles in good working order and getting their regularlyy scheduled maintenence.



1. Electric bubls. If you haven't gotten yourself some of those cute little baby florescent bulbs for all your lamps at home, do yourself a huge favor and get thee to the hardware store! They not only use less energy, but the last forever, which will save you money in the long run. Yes, they are more expensive initially, but you buy them far less frequently. Who says you can't be money conscious while being earth conscious?

2. Change your filter on your AC unit regularly. Get the quality filters too, if you can afford them. The AC has to work a lot harder when you have a dirty filter. This means more polutants in the air as well as more money out of your pocket.

3. www.greendimes.com This site claims to be able to assit you in reducing your junk mail. Given how much junk mail that we recieve in a week, any bit helps. The tremendous waste of paper for all of this junk is a shame. Paper comes from trees. Let's keep the trees standing and less crap filling up our mail boxes.

4. Shopping bags. Buy reusable fabric bags or make your own. Whole Foods and lots of other markets sell the fabric bags. If you Google "eco bags," you will come up with a plethora of sites that you can purchase bags. A lot of recycling companies will not take the plastic grocery bags and then they just end up in a landfill. Yuck.

5. House cleaning. I hate cleaning house. I can come up with about a 1001 different things I'd rather do, including stare at a blank wall, but sadly we can't avoid cleaning forever. Cleaning with environmentally friendly products is not only good for the environment, but they are good for you too. Do you really want to expose yourself to all those nasty, harsh chemicals? I've been using the Seventh Generation products that I can get at Whole Foods. I also use the Mrs. Myers products too. The Mrs. Myers can be found at Whole Foods, World Market and lots of little mom and pop natural food stores. Plain old vinegar and baking soda can also be handy cleaning products too!

6. Feminine products. Yes gents, we need to touch on this too. You can purchase good quality reusable pads these days. In a vast array of patterns! Don't laugh. Check out http://www.newmoonpads.com/ or http://goddessmoons.com/products.htm just to get an idea of what's out there. I have to admit that I have not purchased these myself. Due to working outside the home, I've been kind of reluctant to give them a try, but I am going to order a few to try it out. I have recently switched to the organic cotten tampons that you can get nowadays. The packaging is all recycled paper. Every bit helps in recycling. If you are gutsy enough, you might try http://www.keeper.com/ for those that prefer tampons.

7. This next one is kind of inline with #6. The reusable pad idea got me to thinking about make up. In particular, those cotton squares that I use every morning and evening to apply the astringent or clarifying tonic to my face. I could do the same thing with some soft fabric, like flannel or something similar. Those could easily get tossed into a mesh bag to be washed with the towels. After the initial investment in the flannel material, it would save you money and cut down on the amount of trash your produce that ends up rotting slowly away for a milenia in a landfill.

8. Eat less meat. No, I'm not trying to convince you to go vegetarian or vegan, just to eat less meat. Factory farming is hell on the environment. The waste and crud that is produced as a byproduct of factory farming is disgusting. It seeps into the lakes, rivers, streams etc. Besides, just about everyone in America could stand to have a healthy, low fat meal once or twice a week. It wouldn't kill any of us.

9. Buy quality products that will last you a long time. I don't mean buy the most expensive, but rather, do your research and find products that are well made. Expensive doesn't always equal good, just as cheap doesn't always mean bad quality. Look at websites such as Consumer Reports, Edmonds and any place else you come across product reviews. It'll be worth your time in the long run to do a little bit of leg work ahead of time. This might even save you some wasted purchases, which will cut down on clutter!

10. Bottled water. No, I'm not going to sit here like the esteemed Mayor of San Fransisco and tell you that tap water is just fine to drink. However, if your tap water does taste just fine to you, consider yourself lucky. The tap water here is well, foul. What I will suggest though is to consider one of the big water coolers that you can get the 3 or 5 gallon jugs to use. Those big jugs are reusable and the cost of renting the cooler part really isn't that much. You can even buy the coolers at Lowe's and Home Depot, so I'm sure a lot of other places sell them too. If you buy a reusable water bottle, like a Nalgene or a Sigg bottle, you can refill many times from home. This will cut down on the amount of individual water bottles that often don't make it to the recycling truck. My office doesn't have the water cooler yet, so we have to buy the individual bottles. We also don't recycle (another I'm working on), so I collect my water bottles and bring them home to recycle. But I keep forgetting to actually bring them home. Last count I had about 6 bottles sitting there waiting to be recycled.

11. I recently made the switch to cloth napkins in our house. We have used paper napkins for ages, even though I've always kept fabric napkins that match my place mats for the holidays. So it got me to thinking, why not just buy some plain white cloth napkins that can be washed and bleached (in non-chlorine bleach) when needed? They don't have to be fancy or even match a table cloth or place mat. My husband and I eat most of our meals on TV trays in the living room anyway. I use fabric dish towels all the time, so cloth napkins just made sense to me. If you are creative and motivated, you could even buy some material and make them yourself. Sadly, I just don't have that kind of time and my package of 6 cloth napkins came from World Market for $9.99. Well worth $10.00 bucks in my opinion. Eventually I'll buy a few more packs, maybe even in a few colors.

As you no doubt have noticed, I'm a photographer. I love film photography, but the chemicals are not nice to the environment. They probably aren't horribly nice to me either. But as a fan of black and white photography, I have always just dealt with the chemicals. Enter digital photography! While I still love playing in a dark room, I have to say, the new age of chemical free photography is nice. Digital photography has spoiled me with the instant gratification of knowing whether or not I just captured that one shot I wanted. The digital age has changed photography, as a profession, drastically. We can have photos from weddings and portrature sittings in the matter of hours or days instead of weeks. Photo journalists can have photographs for news stories on websites minutes after they snapped the shots. Printing digital photos has never been easier, you don't even have to leave your house! You can print from home or upload your shots onto one of literally thousands of sites and have high quality enlargements shipped to you. My personal favorite part of digital photography, never having to worry about a scratched negative. :-)