blog

The plastic litter crisis is massive and worldwide, and we finally seem to be getting serious about handling it. States and even entire countries are banning single-use plastic bags and plastic straws. Other bans are sure to follow.

On the personal and household level, many people I know have been trying their best to avoid single-use plastics for a long time now. And more people are getting on board, as they come face to face with horrifying images of whales, turtles, birds, and other wildlife killed or severely injured by plastics blowing in the wind and drifting in the water.

Sometimes it seems impossible to avoid single-use plastics. But we can all start somewhere, and this article 7 Ways To Live Without Disposable Plastic (from ReturnToNow.org) offers some good tips.

I disagree with one of their suggestions, to use biodegradable trash bags instead of plastic. I would replace that with “Do without trash bags altogether.” They aren’t necessary in most cases. Just put trash directly into the trash bin. (As long as you be sure to keep food and liquids out of the trash, your trash will be dry and not stinky, and can just go directly in the can.)

My favorite tip in the article is one I’ve been doing for most of my life: Do as much of your shopping as possible at places such as farmers’ markets, which offer produce and other goods without packaging.

Banning single-use plastics will help stem the tide of this deadly litter. But what about all the plastic trash that is already out there, loose in the environment? (This includes not just single-use plastics, but also plastics that are reusable but end up discarded rather than saved.) Blowing in the wind or drifting in the water, discarded plastics cause damage to the water, the land, and all living creatures as they slowly degrade.

The new thing these days is to denounce plastics as “evil.” But really, plastics have allowed many important advances in (for example) the medical field. A smarter attitude would be to treat the plastics that are already out there as a resource to be “harvested” and used. In the field of permaculture design, we call that mind-set “turning problems into assets” or “obtaining a yield.”

Recently I read about a company in Spain that’s making fabric out of discarded plastics, which are retrieved from the ocean. Bonus: the people retrieving it are fishermen/women, whose livelihood has been suffering due to overfishing of fish!

Most of us are familiar with the three R’s “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” as well as a fourth R that has more recently entered the mainstream: “Refuse.”

Harvesting plastics would be an example of a fifth “R” which I just now thought of: “Reclaim.”

Nature doesn’t make trash. We don’t need to either. What we call trash, what is currently polluting the environment and harming all of life, will be cleaned up faster (and at a profit rather than a cost) if we can think of it as a resource. This principle works well in all areas of life. Try it out and let me know what you come up with!

Reclaiming plastic trash as a resource is an example of a “cradle to cradle” approach, taking into account the full life cycle of everything we manufacture. For a deeper look at this mind-set, I highly recommend the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough. As McDonough points out on the book’s web page, “Everything is a resource for something else. In nature, the “waste” of one system becomes food for another. Everything can be designed to be disassembled and safely returned to the soil as biological nutrients, or re-utilized as high quality materials for new products as technical nutrients without contamination.”

When I first came across this concept about 15 years ago, it was a huge breath of fresh air and a major puzzle piece fallen into place. How far might we be able to go, how much better a place might we make the world, by adopting this mentality in every area of our lives?

Great post about How To Create Reality – Mr. Money Mustache – about a fabulous (fictitious) place called Cyclocroft:

“Someone sent me a beautiful 3-D mockup of a fictional, car-free city of 50,000 people, set in the scenic nook of land* between Boulder, Colorado and Longmont, where I live. It came complete with street plans, detailed descriptions and dozens of cool photos, both real and computer-generated, showing how it would feel to live there. They called it Cyclocroft, in honor of the generally pro-bike stance of Mustachian culture.”

The oft-repeated saying is true, if we can imagine it we can create it. And indeed, in order to be able to create something that breaks the stale mold of “the way it’s always been,” we NEED to be able to imagine that something different.

Something I find helpful to remember when someone tells me some idea is cool or interesting but not practical.

“It’s Time To Unfriend Fertilizer,” writes John Moran in the Gainesville (Florida, USA) Sun. Fertilizer runoff is causing a horrific eco crisis in waterways and harming wildlife everywhere (not just in Florida). And if that isn’t enough to get us to reexamine our mainstream practices, fertilizer runoff is poisoning the fish that we eat, and is wrecking tourism too. People like to point the finger at agriculture, but lawns are a huge culprit as well.

The article is focused on the downside of fertilizer, but the same can be said for herbicides. They are causing far-reaching damage, and lawns are a major contributor.

But what if you love having a soft patch of grass to sit on or look at? No problem. Choose a variety that’s naturally adapted to your region. Or, tolerate diversity: redefine “lawn” as a clipped patch containing multiple varieties of soft ground cover, as opposed to the monoculture that takes so much labor and chemical intervention to maintain.

But even if you love your lawn, you might really love the savings of water, labor, money, and aggravation from adding hardy native flowers and shrubs to your yard, at least around the borders or in attractive “island” formations. One couple mentioned in the article reduced their water consumption by 80 percent by switching their lawn over to native plants. (The photo of their yard is gorgeous.)

But, some might ask, how would we get along without fertilizers and herbicides?

An excellent alternative to industrial fertilizer is compost.

Here are my three favorite alternatives to herbicides:

– Learn about the plant life of your bioregion. Notice, “This isn’t a weed — it’s a wildflower; it is actually breathtakingly beautiful; and the bees and butterflies love it!” And let that wildflower be.

– Find out about your local wild edible and medicinal plants. Notice, “This isn’t a weed — it’s a highly nutritious vegetable! Or a free herbal medicine!” And harvest it.

– Learn the basics of soil, mulch, and compost. Notice, “This isn’t a weed! It’s a bundle of nutrients and organic matter, and I can ‘chop and drop’ it to build soil and nourish other plants!”

Are you familiar with that great book by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, Your Money Or Your Life? (The book, in addition to its own awesomeness, has a preface by Mr. Money Mustache, one of my “financial footprint” heroes; he is mentioned in my book.) Well, I think someone needs to write a sequel, Your Lawn Or Your Life!

If money were sprouting up all over our yards, no one in their right mind would rake it up, cram it into garbage bags, and put it by the curbside for the trash pickup. Well, the “weeds” that sprout up in our yards are as valuable as money. More so, in fact, because ultimately we’d be able to survive a whole lot longer without money than we could if all the soil and plant life disappeared!

Further Reading

Save Bees by Holding Back on the Mowing: “Gardeners should leave at least a strip of their lawn un-mowed … to help halt the decline in bees, experts have said. Perfectly manicured grass is depriving the crucial pollinating insects of the wildflowers they need to feed on …”

Beautiful No-Mow Yards: 50 Amazing Lawn Alternatives (book by Evelyn Hadden): “What has your perfect green lawn done for you lately? Is it really worth the time, effort, and resources you lavish on it? … Hadden showcases dozens of inspiring, eco-friendly alternatives to that demanding (and dare we say boring?) green turf. Trade your lawn for a lively prairie or replace it with a runoff-reducing rain garden. Swap it for an interactive adventure garden or convert it to a low-maintenance living carpet.”

Ms. Hadden is a founder or founding member of two organizations I never knew existed until now: lesslawn.com and the Lawn Reform Coalition (“We are a loose coalition of writers and activists (including lawn-haters and lawn-improvers) from across the country spreading up-to-date solutions to the many problems caused by a lawn culture that demands perfection, conformity, and way too many inputs — especially water, fertilizer, and pesticides. Not to mention millions of acres of lawn that could be something else.”)

Nature, with rain and dew as its painting medium, used a rubber door-mat as a stencil on my back porch.

(The rubber door-mat had started crumbling and turning my feet black, which is why I removed it. Only to find a beautiful surprise waiting underneath! The rubber mat is now unobtrusively but usefully undergoing its final decomposition, as part of the mulch layer in one of my landscape beds.)

I’ve always been a fan of the patterns created by nature interacting with human-made stuff. I even like the black and green areas created by silt and algae on the concrete. It just adds to the beauty, as far as I’m concerned. I always did find great beauty in Roman ruins, mossy English rock walls, and things of that kind.

Not everyone likes such a “disorderly” look; some people think it looks messy — which is why things like pressure-washers and leaf-blowers have become such a dominant part of everyday life. But, if you’re a person who likes the more natural look or can at least learn to live with it, you can save yourself a whole lot of time and aggravation. When surfaces don’t need to be kept uniformly pin-neat, it saves a lot of labor, money, energy, and of course fossil fuels. And by reducing the use of the outdoor cleaning machinery that has become so ubiquitous, you are also contributing to a reduction in the noise level around you, making the outdoor environment more pleasant for you and your neighbors.

I look forward to observing the ongoing progress of nature’s artwork on my little concrete slab porch.

What nature-art have you noticed lately in your environment?

A drip of water seems like nothing, but those drips add up fast. One plumbing company, using USGS data, calculated that “if your faucet dripped once every second every day, all day, it would only take four and a half hours to reach one gallon. Every day you would waste 5 gallons of water or 2,082 gallons per year.”

One straw in the ocean, one plastic bag littering the street … We’ve seen how those add up, with horrific consequences.

Fortunately the reverse is true too. Fixing that drippy faucet; picking up that piece of trash. It adds up!

Another thing that adds up is little kindnesses that make people’s life easier. This morning I had an email newsletter from Zazzle, one of the online services I use to make prints of my art. “We’ve updated our Zazzle user agreement,” the email informed me. But instead of simply providing a link to the full-length document of the updated user agreement (which they did), Zazzle additionally provided a link to just the highlights. To me, reading this capsule summary was a great way to start the morning. I felt disproportionately happy.

Or maybe my happiness wasn’t disproportionate at all! Maybe it was perfectly appropriate. Have you ever had someone send you a link, and it turned out to lead to some 80-page document or hour-long video, and it was obvious the person expected you to wade through the whole thing? Is it only me, or is that frustrating?

Whether it’s a friend or a service provider wanting me to view this content, a nutshell summary is a much desired, but all too often absent, accompaniment to a link. It may even be a lost art; a casualty of the social-media age.

Anyway, thank you Zazzle! When someone is considerate is a seemingly small way, it can have a huge impact. And the impact ripples out to everyone the recipient of the courtesy interacts with, at least for the morning and maybe for the whole day, or longer. And although I’ve never done the math, I’m pretty sure this kind of considerateness reduces our collective eco footprint, in as significant a way as fixing a drippy faucet saves water.

Further Reading and Action:

USGS – Faucet Drip Calculator – Got dripping faucets? Calculate how much water you can save by fixing them!

For those of you who would like to experiment with A/C-free living (or for those of you who are already doing it but are encountering difficulties of various kinds — or, for those of you who are doing it, love it, but are having trouble explaining your choice to the people around you), I’ve compiled a digest of articles on this topic. Enjoy! I’ve been living without A/C by choice for just about my whole adult life, and I found these articles enjoyable and empowering.

(FYI, I found these articles by googling “people who live without air conditioning are healthier,” and the search brought up many many more articles than I’ve linked here! So you can find a lot more than what I’ve shared below.)

• I don’t need air conditioning and neither do you (The Washington Post): Clinical social worker Olivia Snyder lives on the fifth floor of a Philadelphia apartment building with southern exposure and no air conditioning. It gets so hot, she says, “I don’t want to turn on the burners, let alone the oven.” But window units offend her. “Air conditioners are ugly. I really like the view,” she says. Also, “I hate sleeping with the noise. I’m super-weird about noise.” … There are a thousand reasons my family does without central air. Actually, several thousand. …

• Mama Remembers the South Before Air-Conditioning (Southern Living magazine): “Living without air-conditioning used to be normal to Southerners,” Mama says. “But everybody’s gotten so used to being cool all the time that people can’t even go outside without burning up. We never used to complain about the heat. We just said, ‘Well, it’s summer.’ And we drank a lot of water.”…

• Can We Live without Air Conditioning? (JSTOR Daily): Currently, as the world gets hotter, AC use expands. But all this cool comfort comes at a cost. … Susanna Robbins reviews how air conditioning helped transform the South and Southwest into the Sunbelt. She notes that air conditioning radically changed traditional architecture and social and labor relations in these desert and sub-tropical regions, most notably in ending the “easy-going lifestyle” best suited to broiling hot days.

• How to Live Without Air Conditioning (Boston Globe): Can Americans kick our addiction to cool? Maybe more happily than we think …

• 24 Tricks to Survive Hot Summer Nights (without A/C) (Greatist.com)

• How Did People Survive Before Air Conditioning? (ApartmentTherapy.com):Currently the porch, like the fireplace, is a charming but somewhat vestigial architectural feature. But in the past porches were incredibly important, not just for shading the windows of a home, but also for providing a place where people could sit outside, out of the glare of the sun, and perhaps enjoy a breeze. These days, when it’s hot, people flock inside, but in the past it was the opposite: temperatures indoors and out were more or less the same, and the porch was much less stuffy than the rest of the house. This led to a whole culture of people sitting outside on their porches after supper, which has essentially disappeared.

• Can you live without air conditioning in your life? Is it a need or just a want? (discussion thread on Quora): I am from the southern part of India which is known for its tropical climate. Summers are generally warm and sultry with quite high levels of humidity. The AC was a fairly recent addition to Kerala’s homes. Even now, most homes don’t have an AC. They are quite okay with it too. One noteworthy aspect is that back in the days, houses were built with lots of outlets for cross-ventilation. Even in the summers, the insides of the houses remained comfortable. (Includes some really nice photos of traditional houses in India and the Middle East that were designed in the days before A/C and are very comfortable without it.) 

• 10 Things Living without A/C Taught Me (Frugal Farm Wife blog): good commonsense advice — adjust your routine according to the season; learn to accept sweat; conserve your movements and more.

• Europe to America: Your Love of Air Conditioning Is Stupid (Washington Post): “The bottom line is that America’s a big, rich, hot country,” Cox told The Post. “But if the second, fourth, and fifth most populous nations — India, Indonesia, and Brazil, all hot and humid — were to use as much energy per capita for air-conditioning as does the U.S., it would require 100 percent of those countries’ electricity supplies, plus all of the electricity generated by Mexico, the U.K., Italy, and the entire continent of Africa,” he added. …”If everyone were to adopt the U.S.’s air-conditioning lifestyle, energy use could rise tenfold by 2050,” Cox added, referring to the 87-percent ratio of households with air-conditioning in the United States. Given that most of the world’s booming cities are  in tropical places, and that none of them have so far deliberately adopted the European approach to air-conditioning, such calculations should raise justified concerns.

• Living Without Air Conditioning Can Damage Your Brain: I figured it wouldn’t be fair to only present one side of things, so I’m including this article … by a guy who runs a heating and air-conditioning company.

• Becoming Native To This Place: Essay by Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute and author of the book by the same title. This absolute jewel of an essay (it’s very lengthy but worth reading every bit) appears on the website of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Although it addresses a far wider terrain than artificial climate control or the lack thereof, I simply had to include it in this post for you. Jackson talks about the very nature of place, of people and cultures that are truly committed to the land they live on, and how it would behoove each of us to get back to that mentality and really commit to whatever place we call home. I particularly love the passage where he talks about coming across old garden-club newsletters in an abandoned farmhouse: The August 1936 program was dedicated to coping with the heat: roll call was “Hot Weather Drinks”; next came “Suggestions for Hot Weather Lunches”; a Mrs. Rogler offered “Ways of Keeping Cool.” By modern standards these people were poor. There was a kind of naiveté among these relatively unschooled women. … But the monthly agendas of these women were filled with decency, with efforts to learn about everything from the birds to our government and to cope with their problems, the weather, and diseases. Here is the irony: they were living up to a far broader spectrum of their potential than most of us do today! I am not suggesting that we go back to 1923 or even to 1964. But I will say that those people in that particular generation, in places like Matfield Green, were further along in the necessary journey to become native to their places, even as they were losing ground, than we are today.

When people ask why I don’t use air conditioning, I sometimes tell them (besides explaining that I don’t like to be cold, at all, EVER) that I prefer living in an open-window house for the same reason I prefer eating a peach at room temperature rather than refrigerated. It’s the best analogy I can think of. Life just “tastes” better to me when it’s not artificially chilled.

Today my open windows brought me another treat: the sound of clarinet music, being played by someone a few houses down. Technically it wasn’t beautiful music; it just sounded like someone practicing. But I experienced it as beautiful. And it struck me that I could not remember when I had last heard that sound; the sound of music being practiced (I mean, by someone other than a professional musician doing sound-check, for example). It struck me as a sweet relic of a simpler, bygone, more analog era.

Back when I lived in Tokyo, I used to love hearing people practice music in Yoyogi Park. Practicing in parks is probably more common in densely populated urban places like Tokyo or Manhattan where people live in too close quarters to practice indoors. What a treat! It made an already sweet, warm spring day even more special. Not everyone feels able to do without air conditioning, and I’m not picking on people who use A/C. I do think it might enhance everyone’s enjoyment (as well as reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and reducing our bodies’ dependence on climate control) to open the windows at least sometimes. The world is so tasty through an open window!

So how about you? Have you tried open-air? Or, is it your default mode? If so, what are some sweet treats you’ve gotten? (And if you’ve experienced any difficulties, what are they?)

Speaking of sweet treats, here’s a truly delightful essay by one of my favorite writer/teachers, Madisyn Taylor of the DailyOM. It’s about appreciating the little pleasures of life that make us happy. A cup of hot tea; finding a puppy rummaging in the laundry basket; the laughter of a baby — simple but truly delightful things like that. (By the way, DailyOM has an e-newsletter you can subscribe to; you’ll find a link on the page. I’m a longtime subscriber and always look forward to seeing Madisyn’s name in my inbox.)