Great, Green Job Opening

I’m hiring! Rather, the state agency I work for is hiring me a full-time assistant to work on the Governor’s Commuter Challenge (I am the program manager). Full job description and link to apply is here

Perhaps I’m biased, but this is the coolest project in the greenest state in the nation (Oregon). The theme of the Challenge is “Save Money, Reduce Emissions, Share The Ride.” My assistant program manager will help me reach out to 8,500 Capitol Mall employees and encourage them to commute without driving alone, with a special emphasis on carpooling.

Please help spread the word to people who want to work in sustainability.

The Very Best Diet, Part I

You have probably read by now that our country has been getting dramatically more obese for twenty years now. Most people I know seem to want to lose weight and be more lean and fit. Diets, though, are famous for non-lasting results and nasty backlash effects.

My philosophy of the diamond-cut life naturally has a different take on weight loss and dieting than the mainstream culture does. (I’m not making any money on any of this after all, which can help with objectivity.) The little-publicized fact is that our body-weight is rising in conjunction with the miles we drive in our cars and the hours we spend in them. Incidentally our carbon emissions are on the same upward trajectory.

Think about it. Sit in a car more, gain more weight. Use your body to get yourself around, lose weight. Too simple, huh.

My conclusion: it is the car-use that needs the diet, not the well-meaning person. (You may think the car is well-meaning, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt over inanimate objects).

photo by Jill Greenseth

Here is the very best diet I know. I would call it the Low-Car Diet except that my nice pals at the car-share company Zipcar already use that name for their fun summer program.) I subscribe to the diet below and am often asked how I stay so slim. (I don’t talk much about the time back in college when I got really fat, it’s too embarrassing.)

• Use stairs instead of elevators and escalators
• Bicycle for trips and errands of five miles and less
• Walk for trips and errands of up to two miles
• Use transit whenever possible (entails more walking than cars)
• Pick a church or other steady destination that’s within walking distance
• Use the car only when nothing else will work for the purpose at hand

Next week I’ll write about the other very best diet I know. It’s almost as fun and carbon-reducing as this one!

Love In The Time Of Global Warming

“Love In The Time Of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about a fifty-year love triangle. Love in the time of global warming is, for me, my own love triangle. The three players are the world, global warming and myself.

Perito Moreno Glacier calving, Patagonia.
Photo by Hanmi Meyer

When I am even halfway happy I experience the world as my lover. I cherish it, I notice a hundred endearing things about it, I want to nurture it and help it flourish. Global warming threatens the world with pain, suffering, the destruction of species and millions of people. I feel about global warming the way I’d feel about a person trying to maim and mutilate my in-person lover. I want to do whatever is within my power to prevent my beloved’s pain and suffering.

I see what’s within my power as being both big-picture things like political and policy work (macro) and hands-on-in-my-own- household things (micro). The CRAG (Carbon Reduction Action Group) I’m starting (with Ewan O’Leary, Colleen Kaleda and their spouses) is largely the hands-on type. But I think it can spread and become a big-picture thing, also.

Our culture construes love as primarily a romantic one-to-one thing, but I find that an impoverished notion of love. I say that even as I am happily married. A narrow, couple-only focus can suck two people dry, in my experience, while a shared mission in the world can bring a couple into community with others. I actually met and fell in love with my husband Thor Hinckley in the context of fighting global warming. He was leading a workshop on renewable energy that I attended. Our relationship is the best one I’ve had (and I’ve had several).

Love feels like joy to us, like haven and happiness, and global warming way different from love, like doom, danger, a dark future. But love and global warming are wrapped tightly around each other in my heart. My love for the world means I cannot passively tolerate a business-as-usual life as global warming menaces it. Here I am, in an ongoing love triangle, but a healthy, vital one: love in the time of global warming.

Our Carbon Reduction Group

The funny thing about climate change (also known as global warming) is that it is so invisible to us, while so serious. Our daily lives here in the affluent U.S. don’t look different despite the icecaps melting, etc. But our lives should look different — we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050. So Colleen and I are starting a Carbon Reduction Action Group (here is my first look at this).

This means we and whoever joins us will be counting our households’ monthly greenhouse gas emissions in three ways: our heating bills, electricity bills and transportation (personal use, not business use). The idea is healthy competition with ourselves to steadily reduce our emissions down to a sustainable level, especially given that government is not taking the lead.

To clarify, CRAG in the United Kingdom is a Carbon Rationing Action Group. I’ve noticed though that the term ‘rationing’ is seen differently in the UK than in the U.S., i.e. with less morbid fear. So I’m doing as some others have done by using the term ‘carbon reduction action group’ rather than ‘carbon rationing action group’. Got to respect your market.

If you find this idea daunting you’re not alone. Half my friends freaked at the idea of counting and reporting their emissions. But I know in my gut this is absolutely doable. More soon.

Carpool Survivor

I am lucky enough to be in a carpool with five great people for my two-hour round-trip commute. (I found them through Carpool Match Northwest.) We save money, save emissions and have fun. So on the morning of April Fool’s day I tossed off a prank email to them.

I wrote: “It has been such a pleasure knowing you! My new inheritance means I can now afford a new Prius. I’ll soon be driving alone to work in it with Steve Earle cranked up full blast. warmly, Alison.” I chose Prius rather than Hummer to enhance my credibility.

Still, I thought they would zing me back with: “B.S.! April Fools!” Or at least: “If we agree to play Steve Earle, won’t you stay?” But instead, I basically got a dead silence. Not good. So in the late afternoon I emailed that it had been a fraud. “Of course I’m still in the carpool. I can’t believe you believed me! I’m not a gold-digger, not with you for the money.”

It turned out that Sam had decided I was a rank poser, only having pretended all this time to care about the environment. (Have I mentioned my carpool is 67% environmental attorneys?) He was laughing by the time he debriefed with me — “This is carpool survivor!” he said, but I could see he had seriously disliked me for an entire day. Whoa. John was more vulnerable. He said that, knowing break-ups often happen for reasons other than the stated ones, he’d been convinced I’d just manufactured an excuse to dump them all. (I decided this might not be the right day to ask John about his abandonment issues.)

It doesn’t take a background in counseling (though I happen to have one) to see that a carpool can bond and take on some family dynamics. It wasn’t that funny to threaten to leave. I had upset them.

Yesterday, a gorgeous spring afternoon, I was waiting for the gang at the Agriculture building at the Mill Creek bridge. I climbed up on the bridge embankment just for fun. As Sam and John approached, I yelled, “My carpool hates me! I’m going to jump!”

“Don’t jump!” they called. I climbed on down and all six of us got into Richard’s van. We talked, read and joked the hour back to Portland, probably happier together than many families. While driving alone isolates us from others, the game of Carpool Survivor rewards us with community and I plan to be the ‘last woman standing’ in it.