Something Shiny! » Green

Frog is my co-pilot

emily — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:09:01 +0000

Goodness, I have a blog, don’t I? Where were we? Oh, right, I got my PhD and fell off the face of the world for two weeks. (Actually, because of my PhD and the lead up to it, I’d fallen off the face of the world for the two months prior, but we’ll just keep that between us.) So! Now you want to hear about our frog, right? I thought so.

Years ago, when John and I were brand-new Gainesvillians, we found a small plastic frog just outside the doors of PetCo. Perhaps a small child had grabbed it and then dropped it (the child’s guardian having paid for it or not), or perhaps it had fallen out of someone’s shopping bag. In any case, here it was in front of us. In the normal course of events, we wouldn’t have thought twice about it and we would have gone on our merry way, leaving the frog to its fate. For whatever reason, though, we both felt compelled to take this plastic yellow and black frog along with us. We put it on the dashboard in John’s truck, right in front of the passenger seat. And there it has remained, for nearly eight years. It’s quite faded now, especially on its back. And we’ve almost lost it a number of times (usually just after detailing the truck, when the dash is especially slippery), but we’ve always dutifully restored it to its perch. Several months ago, we started talking seriously about selling John’s truck and getting something more sensible (read: something that doesn’t guzzle gas at an alarming rate). When we finally decided on what vehicle to buy, what surprised me was how quick the entire process was. What surprised me even more, though, was how worried my subconscious was about that plastic frog. I even dreamed that we sold the truck with the frog in it, then raced around town trying to find the buyer so that we could retrieve it. These days, while the truck is no longer in our possession, the frog still is, sunning happily on the dash of our new Subaru. I think he’s pleased with our choice.

Crazy bag lady

emily — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:25:56 +0000

In class a few weeks ago, my students and I were talking about sustainability and whose responsibility it is to make life more sustainable. Is it up to the individual? To communities? To society at large? To the government? And many of my students argued that it was up to the government to make life more sustainable, or at least to educate us on how we can be more sustainable. I talked to them about Cleveland’s decision to fine people who don’t recycle and asked them what they thought of that. Pretty unanimously, they felt that Cleveland was going too far, and that people shouldn’t be forced to do things like recycle. (Ignore for the moment the fact that they held those two ideas in their heads at the same time: government should be responsible for making life more sustainable, but that citizens shouldn’t be required by governments to recycle. If you think about it too much, your head will explode.) After the Cleveland discussion, one of my students in my last class started talking about her high school math teacher, who was (in her words) “insane” about recycling. Apparently this teacher was so “insane” that she only generated, “like,” one bag of trash every week. At that point, the rest of the class gasped and remarked about how “insane” that was. And all I could think about was how, at our house, we only generate one bag of trash every week.

Conspicuous consumption

emily — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 15:28:44 +0000

One of the great things about teaching this new humanities class is that I get to talk with my students about things other than American History that interest me. Their reading for yesterday was from Cradle to Cradle and I took the opportunity to engage them in discussion about things and why we’re so driven to purchase more and more and more things. I asked how many of them considered themselves to be independent, self-confident people. Almost all raised their hands. I asked how many of them had cell phones (all of them) and for how many was this their first phone (none of them). How many phones had they had? It ranged from four on the low end to nine on the high end. Bear in mind, most of these kids are 18 years old. Nine phones in eighteen years is a new phone every two years since birth, or a new phone every year since the age of 9. I asked them to explain why they had replaced their phones. With a couple exceptions, none had replaced them because the phones were broken. Instead, they replaced them because they wanted new phones. I held up my cell phone, an LG flip phone. It was new four years ago and it still works just fine. Nonetheless, they laughed out loud. I don’t mind that they laughed, I told them, and I pressed them to tell me what made my phone uncool. “It’s a flip phone!” “It doesn’t have apps!” “It doesn’t have internet!” “It’s not… new!” Then I asked how we know that phone isn’t cool, and how we know what things are cool. “The companies selling the phones tell us.” “Marketing tells us.” “Advertising tells us.” “Oprah tells us.” So, we’re independent, self-confident, free-thinking people… who are being led around by the noses by companies who want us to buy their stuff. Why do we buy their stuff? “It makes us happy.” “We want to keep up with our friends.” “We don’t want to look stupid.” Does stuff make us special? Does an iPhone make us special? If everyone can buy the same stuff, are we all the same? Are we just a sum of our purchases, if they’re so important? And then we talked about where all this stuff goes. What did they do with their phones when they got the new ones? “Throw them away.” And where is away? I told them about Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island, once the highest point on the eastern seaboard. I told them about the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling around in the ocean between Hawaii and California. It’s a ball of trash twice the size of Texas, with millions of tons of trash, held in that area of the ocean because of ocean currents. And it’s not the only one. I showed them the last ten minutes of The Story of Stuff and we talked afterwards about what we could do, on an individual level, to help. I encouraged them to tune in, not stick their heads in the sand, and get in the game. And I left them with a quote from Paul Hawken: “Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.” Just think about what we can do if we unplug and put our minds to it.

Get me out of here

emily — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:30:16 +0000

I. Just. Don’t. Belong.

Courtesy of the Gainesville Sun

Crunchy granola

emily — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:38:35 +0000

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about me (well, okay, some of you knew this, but most of you didn’t): I make our own cereal. The cereal we eat for breakfast most days of the week, I make every two weeks or so. We made the decision a couple years ago to stop eating processed foods and, more importantly, to know more about what’s in the food we eat (read In Defense of Food, yo, and never look at your grocery store the same way again). What we learned was more than a little alarming. The crap that gets put into the food we Americans eat (is it the same elsewhere? I honestly don’t know) is horrifying. And no, I’m not talking about fingers and whatnot, a la The Jungle, but it’s still scary. And to what end? To support the corn industry? Because it’s cheaper? Because the FDA can’t say no to Big Soy? (I’m making that up; I don’t know if there’s a Big Soy.) Whatever the reason is that there’s HFCS, for example, in just about everything, I refuse to believe that it’s because it’s good for us. The ingredients in most commercial processed foods was enough to push us to make a change. And we started with cereal. I like knowing what, exactly, is in the food we eat. I like knowing that we’re in greater control of what goes into our bodies. And I like providing for our family, as banal as that sounds. Anyway! I didn’t mean to turn this into a soapbox discussion; I was just blogging about what I’m doing right now. So! ::clears throat:: What are you doing?

Made to break

emily — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:45:01 +0000

Last week we had a repairman come out to the house to check out our dishwasher. We’ve had it three years this April and recently, it started making noises that suggested it was in dire need of medical assistance. Or at least a large martini. For $80, the repairman clucked and shook his head as he disassembled the dishwasher and promptly told us that the motor was on its way to the motor graveyard. Could we have it fixed? He laughed; sure, he could fix it. For about $275. But that wouldn’t do us much good, he explained, since the computer board would be the next to go. And when you consider that we spent $500 on the dishwasher in the first place… well, that just doesn’t make good economic sense. So, we’re well on our way to buying a new dishwasher to replace the one that was brand-new not even three years ago. Does this strike anyone else as completely effed up? My grandmother has had the same toaster since at least the 1960s. It works just like the day she bought it, which is to say perfectly. In the time we’ve been enjoying toast in this household, we’ve replaced our toaster no fewer than four times. And sure, it’s easy to chuckle and say, “well, they don’t make ‘em like they used to!” But why is that? Why are things made so cheaply these days? And, more importantly, is there anything we can do about it?

NaBloPoMo: Our Thanksgiving Tom

emily — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:24:57 +0000

For many years now, we’ve eschewed the traditional Butterball turkey in favor of a more natural Thanksgiving. Usually this has meant ordering an organic turkey from afar and picking it up locally. This year, though, we acted early. At the beginning of the summer, I contacted a local farm and put my name on the list for a local, organic, free-range, non-scary turkey. They emailed last weekend and told me the turkey would be available to pick up on Wednesday. I’ll confess, I was a little worried: picking up a turkey the day before Thanksgiving usually spells disaster because the turkey won’t have had time to defrost properly. But we’d gotten this far and we were determined to see it through. If all else failed, we reasoned, we could always cook something else. As it turned out, we needn’t have worried. We drove down to the farm on Wednesday in a rainstorm of biblical proportions. Lee Windham, of Four Arrows Ranch, welcomed us into her house and pulled a fresh (not frozen) turkey out of her fridge. It had been slaughtered and cleaned just a couple days prior. She apologized for the weight; heritage turkeys tend to be a bit smaller than the broad-breasted freaks turkeys that Americans have come to expect. But people, that was the best turkey I’ve ever tasted. Flavorful, plump and juicy, we didn’t care that he was a little smaller than his mass-produced brethren. He was just perfect. And for that, we were truly thankful.

NaBloPoMo: Crazy Al

emily — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:08:08 +0000

If you haven’t already seen Al Gore’s recent SNL appearance, it’s really worth a look:

“Farm News”

emily — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:37:04 +0000

It’s been awhile since I’ve enthralled you all with a green-living-related rant, so I thought I’d indulge you. Here goes! We didn’t get a chance to get to our normal local egg place the weekend before last, and had to settle for grocery store eggs. We knew we didn’t need that many, so we just got a half dozen in a little package marked “The Country Hen.” Cough, cough. Open the carton and you’ll find “Farm News” from the Country Hen. How quaint! This small chicken farmer in Massachusetts has included a little newsletter for me to read! Perhaps we can exchange Christmas cards! Being of a suspicious nature, though, I couldn’t help myself. I looked up the address for “The Country Hen” in Hubbardston, Massachusetts on Google Maps and clicked on the satellite image. Small country farm? No, no. It is to laugh. Here’s what I found:

It’s a CAFO! And it’s happy to see you! Based on the scale at the bottom of the map, you can figure that each of those enormous, ah, chicken houses is about 400 feet long. Go to the (cough) farm’s website, and you’ll see that they say that the chickens live in “sunlit spacious barns,” eat “certified organic feed,” allowing them to produce “simply healthy and delicious eggs!” It’s a chicken wonderland! It’s Club Med: Poultry Edition! They get massages and pedicures and see personal trainers three times a week! Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find this about their organic feed: “We do not reveal the source [of the organic feed] as it is one of our trade secrets.” Really? Trade secret? Because I was under the impression that chickens eat things like grass, bugs, and plants. You know, things found in “nature,” not something that’s a “trade secret.” The Country Hen they may be, but a small country farm they’re not. It’s greenwashing like this that makes it really tough to buy food with a conscience. Buyer beware, and don’t believe everything you read!

We can do this!

emily — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:14:22 +0000

I got an email from Al Gore this morning. Me and Al, we’re tight like that. He pointed out that in order to make a difference with regard to climate change, we can’t just change light bulbs, we need to change laws. That’s actually what he said: “we can’t just change light bulbs– we need to change laws.” Al’s good with words like that. Anyway, he told me that Congress is debating clean energy legislation and he asked me to sign a petition supporting that legislation. I thought it was a great idea. Al’s good with the big ideas. Anyway, in case you don’t have a direct line to Al like I do*, you can sign the petition online! Where it says “who asked you to sign”, just give Al my email address: eamcasey@yahoo.com. Now go forth and help the planet! It’s good for your skin and it helps cure depression, too!**

*No, I don’t really have a direct line to Al (sob!). But he keeps in touch with me and lots of other Americans through RepowerAmerica.

**While studies haven’t directly shown a link between climate change and skin or depression, I’m sure it’s just because those studies haven’t been done yet.