Diamond-Cut Life

I think many perceive green wonky people to be grim, austere Puritan types. But my experience is quite different from that. Here’s what my dining room sounded like (loosely translated) last night when my Green Girls social circle came over for dinner. I was proposing a CRAG to them as I had planned.

Micki: “So what’s this CRAG thing? A guy I can date?”

Me: “No, honey, it’s a Carbon Rationing Action Group. We would support each other on using less energy and driving alone less.”

Colleen: “I want to do it.”

Micki: “Easy for you to say; you’re already married. I need to meet Craigs and Toms and . . . “

Vicki: “But I love hot water, I’m addicted to baths. I would need a whole new twelve-step group. How would that fit into my schedule?”

Noelle: “We do all these things to reduce our footprint at my house but we never measure it. And I want to measure it. So I’m in.”

Me: “Great! So Colleen and Noelle and I are in.”

Vicki: “I’m afraid if I joined I would get a bad grade, like a C minus.”

Me: “No, sweetie, it’s not judgmental. You’re having that PTSD thing from grade school again.”

Vicki: “But still! Why don’t you just copy me on the CRAG emails.”

Laurie: “Hey, weren’t you going to invite Jane from your carpool into Green Girls?”

Me: “Well! She said last week that she was in the carpool ONLY for the money it saved her. So I didn’t invite her.”

Colleen: “Only for the money, omigod!”

Me: “But I can still be friends with her.”

Vicki: “Wow, you’re so tolerant.”

Me: “Hey, I was ready to support you on that new twelve-step group for hot water addiction. So don’t put me down.”

On March 2 I wrote about my household’s deliberations over which hybrid should be the replacement for our single car, a battered 15 year old Nissan. People have been asking me, “So what have you decided?” It’s almost like they’re wondering if a new baby will be a boy or a girl.

The answer: we don’t want this new baby (new car) until late summer. At the earliest, if then. I can name three reasons (and maybe you’d like to add some more).

1.) I don’t want to fertilize the market with a car purchase. Our nation already has way too many cars of any ilk (250 million, and that’s just the registered ones). Most of these run just fine and don’t need replacement. It takes 20 barrels of oil just to make a car, I’ve read. So, we’d have to drive a hybrid 20,000 miles to save that much oil if it got double the average car’s mileage. And why would I want a motivation to drive 20,000 miles?

2.) Babies (new cars) are very needy and therefore disruptive to sexiness. Thor is already trying to set rules about no eating or drinking in our hypothetical new car. I am already outraged: “Who’s driving things here, us or the car?” (You can tell I currently drink coffee every morning in our ratty Nissan with impunity.) This marital disagreement has not yet hampered our sex life, but you never know when a playful power struggle might escalate.

3.) Cars are not sexy, anyway. It was only when we were semi-homeless teenagers that there was a legitimate association between cars and sex. Has your sex life not improved since you were 18, moved out and got a better place to neck than a car? I rest my case.

I am happy to learn this morning that Pierce County in Washington is protecting its rich farmland in the Puyallup Valley from developers.

Why? I’ll get really basic. The land has already been developed. It was logged many years ago and converted into farmland. Farmland is its highest, most brilliant and diamond-cut use. The Pacific Northwest soils are so fertile they support more biomass than any other soil on our continent. Why would we plant strip-malls and subdivisions on that kind of soil?

Is there anybody, aside from developers looking for a quick profit, who is looking objectively at our nation and saying, “Wow, we are so low on subdivisions and strip-malls. We need to build more of them. Way too much food growing here; got to pave that soil over.”   I ask you?

In 2006 I wrote and produced a short film for Oregon League of Conservation Voters in which I interviewed eight Oregonians. Two of them, a husband and wife, owned a small farm in Washington County. They stood in front of their barn with their three children and told me, “We’re worried. We can feel the urban growth boundary marching toward us. You know, once you put concrete over this soil, you don’t get it back again.”

My idea of today’s best read is not anything by me, but rather, John Tierney’s excellent article on carbon footprint and behavior change in the New York Times.

I entered his contest to invent the best name for a little device that will give people a steady feedback loop on their home’s energy consumption. Research shows that these visual cues nudge people into consuming more carefully and using less energy. I submitted the name TerraNudge.

But since I doubt I’ll win the first place prize – a copy of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,”  by Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago, I’ll probably need to go out and buy one. 

This past Saturday night we went to the Bicycle Transportation Alliance’s (BTA’s) annual awards dinner and auction, attended by about 800 people. It’s called Alice B. Toeclips and it was invented about a decade ago by my awesome friend and mentor Karen Frost, the founding director of the BTA.

I had good conversations with great people at Toeclips, and just one reservation I’ll get to in a minute. I believe deeply in bicycling, and I specifically believe in it as the ideal form of transportation, rather than just recreation. I liked executive director Scott Bricker’s gutsiness when he stated his vision of bicycling as something that can help save the world. Given global warming and most people’s addiction to fossil fuels (not to mention obesity in the U.S.) I think he is right.

So, my reservation? It’s not that Alice B. Toeclips was a fundraiser, because I believe in raising money for good causes, and I enjoy giving. I’ve done successful fundraising myself. But I’m developing a problem, a values-conflict with auctions, with hundreds of feet of tables loaded with goods and services that are luxuries. I know that auctions are a good way for businesses to affordably donate to nonprofits. I get it.

But then it stops being grassroots. It becomes high-on-the-hog. When the live auction starts and the auctioneer is doing the high-powered, hypnotic, show-biz patter to get us to bid higher and higher on luxury items, it feels slick, like I’m in Las Vegas, like I’m being hustled.

I know that grant funding can only take a nonprofit so far, whether from federal, state, or Metro sources, and that fundraising has to then supply the rest of the organization’s budget. But auctions are very expensive to coordinate and produce. I know because I’ve done one. The profit margin doesn’t necessarily put you ahead of where you’d have been if you’d just asked sincerely for straight donations, rather than promoting more consumption of things that well-off people really don’t need.

How do you grow a great movement that can help save the world without buying into the materialism of that same world? I’m open to input.

Hybrid: a result of cross-breeding. Easter: a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Christ — celebrated the Sunday following the first full moon of the vernal equinox.

Wait a minute. Easter is famously Christian, but its timing is completely earth-centered, ruled by nature, which is to say it is pagan. Easter is a hybrid holiday. Christianity has been shown by scholars to have deep roots in the earlier earth-centered religions, described well by Viola and Barna in their book Pagan Christianity.

I find Easter joyful. I also find working the earth joyful. The hybrid thing is in me, body and soul. I have a both/and life of going to church and also being earth-centered. The first art-show I ever did, back in 1993, was actually called Pagan Christianity (long before the above book was written).

Every year in church I sing the centuries-old hymns like “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and feel a deep, swimming flood of connection to all things and all people. I don’t worry about details of dogma or theology. There is so much we share in common. We all have our struggles, our dark nights, our joys and little victories. We all eat food that comes from the earth; we’re all dead without that. We all seek hope.

Jesus being resurrected after his crucifixion, his conquering of death, carries the same archetypal principle as the life-giving spring (the vernal equinox) emerging victorious from the bitter, death-dealing winter. This is not just a Christian principle, but a life principle.

Hybrid cars, very popular these days, are powered by a cross between electric batteries and a combustion engine. Like many agricultural cross-breedings, a hybrid car uses scarce resources more efficiently, more wisely than either of its parents. Maybe Easter, hybrid that it is of pagan and Christian truths, has equally good things to offer us.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Craigslist is cool. But I’ve recently learned from the Business of Green blog about CRAGs, which I think are even cooler.

CRAGs are Carbon Rationing Action Groups, active mostly in the United Kingdom, so far. People join to become mutually supportive and accountable about lightening their carbon footprint.

Why do I find this so relevant? All my experience tells me that it’s only when you watch and measure a thing that you reduce it. (A household’s financial spending is one good example.) And the average carbon footprint in the U.S. , roughly 18,000 tons, is about twice that in the U.K., and four times that which CRAG folks generally set as their goal.

Thor’s and my electricity bill shows us our electricity consumption is 53% of the norm in our area. But we don’t have any measuring stick for our transportation emissions, nor any idea of what our green friends’ overall carbon footprints are in relation to ours. Friendly competition can be a fun and healthy thing.

Here are my next steps: I’m going to talk about starting a CRAG with folks at the Alice B. Toeclips bicycling awards event tonight, and my Green Girls dinner group next weekend, and with my new ski-trip friends when we next get together. And I’ll report back within early April about how the CRAG idea is coming along.

Every household has its own little culture. Within Thor’s and mine, I did the unthinkable last night: I drove (did not walk) the 3/10 mile from our house over to choir practice.

This was not even in the Prius or other hybrid we have yet to purchase, but in our 1993 Nissan Sentra. As I was stepping out the door to walk to the church, I realized there was a hard, driving rain. Changing into rain gear would make me late. I didn’t want to be either late or soaked, so I jumped into the car for the 3/10 mile journey. Normal in many households; unthinkable in mine.

How would I respond to a ‘normal’ person’s charge of being obsessively PC (politically correct)? Well, my answer is about context and about the dismissive power of labels.

The context is that Portland Oregon (where we live) wins awards for being the Most Sustainable City in the nation. We are ‘early adopters’ in that arena, with excellent public transit, bike lanes, land use and biodiesel availability. So my household makes choices in a city-state context of sustainability.

Concerning the label of PC or any other label: it’s a form of dismissal. For instance, to say that New Yorkers are rude, or Southerners ignorant, dismisses them from further thought. It also makes them lower-than, less worthy than the one labeling them. “Portlanders not wanting to drive? How PC!” — and the speaker and listener toss away the notion of driving less, without thinking about what they’ve tossed.

That thing of not thinking is how we’ve landed in the global warming mess we’re in.

My work-day today involves getting input from my statewide transportation-options group about my idea of an Oregon residential energy tax credit (RETC, rhymes with Betsy) for carpooling, and then meeting up with a leader of the state’s Drive Less, Save More publicity campaign.

And you can bet I will not be driving to those meetings — though I’ll admit to my colleagues my slip-up last night :).

I wrote on Monday about what a blast Thor and I just had on a Portland Parks and Recreation trip to Crater Lake, Oregon. Who’d have thought that skiing in a snowstorm could be so fun?

Since my vision of the diamond-cut life involves true sustainability, how sustainable was this group venture? Well, our crew of 22 created far fewer emissions with our snowshoes and cross-country skis than if we’d been on snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles (ATV’s). And vanpooling with 11 people in each van was certainly fuel-efficient. But how about our polypropylene and fleece clothing, which is all petroleum-based? And what of the large amounts of embodied energy in our high-tech skis, poles and snowshoes?

Most folks on this trip were strongly drawn to sustainability, and a number of us worked in the field. The group agreed on the merits of green buildings, renewable energy and human services, but never questioned (out loud, at least) the lion’s share of resources embedded in our own sports equipment and clothing.

Which was quite human of us. It’s hard to be objective about yourself and your choices. But I’m trying to be objective, so: How do you not use the petroleum-based clothing that keeps you warm and dry in sub-freezing conditions? Once these things are invented, how can you abstain? People had plenty of fun in the snow before high-tech clothes and gear were invented. So why are we so hooked on the current inventions?

I’m good at being happy, at finding joy in simple things and the natural world and in most people I meet, but I don’t know how to truly transcend this materialistic, fossil-fuel-based culture that I was born into. I do not have all the answers on how to live the sustainable, diamond-cut life of my vision.

I am open to people’s best advice.

When I was on Amtrak’s Empire Builder train heading east to Glacier last fall, I met a friendly mortgage broker in the lounge car as we clackety-clacked through the Gorge. We chatted (a longtime habit of mine).

“My industry made loans to people who were in no way ready to buy a house,” she said. “It’s not ethical. You should form a relationship with people who can’t yet afford it, and help them make a plan to buy later. It’s not all about getting a house right now, or getting rich overnight.”

I wish more people had had mortgage brokers like her in the past few years.

The collapse of Bear Stearns due to the sub-prime mortgage frenzy does not surprise me. It reminds me of Enron’s implosion earlier in the decade. In both cases, people got drunk on greed. What do people do when they’re drunk? Ill-advised things they regret later, things they wouldn’t do when sober. And it wasn’t just the mortgage and investment industries that were money drunk; it was also the home-buyers who weren’t willing to wait and save for down payments, or bought far more house than they could afford.

I have been money drunk too, though not in the context of buying homes. It feels so much better being sober, believe me. Ethics and common sense both dictate that we only buy what we can truly afford. The earth’s resources hold up better that way, too.

The friendly, ethical mortgage broker I met on the Empire Builder helped me understand all this. If we’re drunk with greed, we need to get sober before we buy or sell things. And if an empire is unsustainable, it is better left unbuilt.