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April 2008 archive
How do you really celebrate Earth Day?
Today, Earth Day turns 38. (Not the Earth, but the day itself). One of my favorite parenting websites (okay, this website is like a frenemy — love to hate it and hate to love it.) Anyway, they didn’t even mention Earthday on their daily email, they mentioned the new really expensive stroller I should buy.
NPR is recommending, today, that we take transit or bike. I like that recommendation. Many of my favorite green stores are recommending you come in and buy something green—usually one of my favorite activities. The government has a long list of ways that kids can help save the Earth. Some of them even look like fun.
I think Earth Day has become like many kids' first birthday parties, something that comes from a place of love, but ends up being a little too commercial to feel like a true celebration.
So, what are some alternative ways to bring meaning back to the day? To really use it to celebrate our dependency upon, our love of, and our connection with the Earth.
I guess you could use today to do all those things you’ve been meaning to do all year to green your home life... like buy your household carbon credits for the year (note to self) or research the best water filter and finally fulfill your goal of giving up on all plastic water bottles (which, by the way, would be a GREAT green goal for everyone).
Or you can take transit instead of your car to your playdate or, even better, get your bike seat hooked onto your bicycle and take your kid there by peddling.
Or you can commit to buying NOTHING today. Though I am a fan of supporting our local, green products and stores, a great present for the Earth is to save the gas, the packaging, the transporting, the eventual recycling or disposing of the thing and simply buy nothing at all today.
And what about throwing an Earth Day party for everyone on your block and using nothing disposable? Use it as a chance to get to know your neighbors, to talk publicly about your green goals, to finally resolve your condo's recycling issue.
Maybe while you are out there partying you will pick up some of the garbage that has collected on the sidewalk, in the road, or in the park near your house. And then when you come home you can write a book with your kid about what you did together on Earth Day where you paste in leaves, and crumpled notes, and little bits of plastic bag that you found.
Posted on April 22, 2008 at 3:02 p.m. by Green Mama. Discuss (3 comments)
Why Bother With Small, Individual Eco-actions?
Why bother? That's the question posed by Michael Pollan in the Sunday New York Times yesterday (April 20, 2008.) Why mess around with all these actions to live greener, when somewhere else in the world there is guaranteed to be at least one person who is cancelling out your efforts. Certainly there is at least one individual in Asia who is purchasing his or her first car, eating more meat than before, moving into a larger house that needs more heat, and so on.
As Pollan puts it (in a particularly bleak paragraph of the essay): "Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge."
I have found a certain level of peace with this reality by realizing that I can't live with myself if I DON'T make the effort, however inadequate. I know I won't halt climate change and biodiversity destruction with my vegetable garden and my Prius. But the day I stop trying, I hope one of my friends comes to my aid, because it will be a sure sign that I have slipped into a serious depression. For me, not to at least try is to give up hope.
I also put a certain amount of faith in the fact that while climate science is not on our side, behavioral social science is. We know that peoples' behavior is heavily influenced by peers. "If you do bother, you will set an example for other people," Pollan writes. "If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction fo behavioral change, markets for all manner of green preocuts and alternative technologies will prosper and expand...Not having things might become cooler than having them."
And as we know, politicians seldom have the power to lead; they have to follow the direction pointed out to them by voters. They are truly our public servants. Our small green actions also point out the direction we want leaders to move.
Posted on April 21, 2008 at 10:17 a.m. by Jill. Discuss (1 comment)
Mr. Anti-Green Becomes the Next Laurie David
Jay Dandy, the person that up until now I’ve thought of as my least green friend, the most indoorsy of all my acquaintances, stopped by my house yesterday evening.
“I have something for you,” he announced.
“Hello to you, too.”
“Hold out your hands.” He unzipped his jacket and dug into the front pocket of his jeans, ready to pull out my gift. “No, no. You need both hands. Cup them together.”
A fistful of double AA batteries dropped into my outstretched hands. “I was hoping for M&Ms.”
Jay shoved his hand back into his jeans and pulled out and deposited another shower of batteries. “Keep your hands right there.”
Load after load of batteries, mostly small ones but with a few jumbo C and D’s thrown in, were loaded into my hands, so many they started to fall onto the floor.
It turned out that this was six months' worth of the Dandy-Weber household’s batteries, and that ever since Jay’s last visit to the Nature Museum with his kids, he’s been saving batteries. He noticed the battery recycling tube in the museum vestibule and has been collecting them ever since.
Not only has Jay been saving batteries to recycle—or actually, to be more specific, for me to recycle for him—he’s been recycling everything in his household. When I asked him how he got to be so green all of a sudden, he said, “It’s not recent. I’ve been changing without your realizing. You just have me stuck in your mind. I’ve been recycling for years now. I even pack back up those toner cartridges and mail them in.”
“Why, though? What changed? When?” I wondered how I missed the fact that this friend of my husband’s and mine from college was no longer Mr. Anti-Green.
There’s some kind of lesson in here about trying to see people in this moment, rather than keeping them pigeonholed as the person they were 20 years ago. Possibly there’s also a cultural message in the fact that someone who a decade ago wouldn’t have been caught dead recycling has caught the bug.
Later, we had a whole conversation about reusable batteries. Jay likes his wireless keyboard and wireless mouse because it keeps his whole desk clean. (At least his tidiness hasn’t changed.) These two tools are his biggest battery hogs, much more than his kids’ various toys. He says the reusable batteries wear out too quickly for his taste, though he does use them elsewhere.
So if anyone reading this has a battery charger and a brand of reusables that they believe to be long-lasting, please post it here.
It could save me from having another bag full of 47 batteries to bring into work again six months from now.
Posted on April 17, 2008 at 12:45 p.m. by Jill. Discuss (0 comments)
Sex a Chick
Does anyone know how to sex a chick?
The 4-H boy who sold me the four Faverolle chicks did not. It's possible that of the four chicks now in my possession, not one is capable of laying an egg and all of them are illegal. (In Chicago, the rule is that you can't own a rooster and you can't slaughter chickens within city limits. Owning hens is okay, at least for now. My understanding is that the City Council considered banning chickens altogether last fall, but backed down for the time being. If anyone knows an update on this, I'd be interested.)
As the chicks grow older, the roosters and hens will distinguish themselves from one another. The 4-H boy did say he'd take any roosters back from me and trade them for hens. He shows the birds, and salmon Faverolle roosters are gloriously beautiful. The hens are no slouches either, being a pretty buff color. They produce eggs that have a tawny tint to them.
My hope is at least two of the chicks peeping away in my bathroom are hens; two is the number I'd like to end up with anyway.
Two seems pleasingly metro; four starts to sound like Green Acres.
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 9:12 p.m. by Jill. Discuss (1 comment)
Thirty Thousand Pets for One City House
That's "pets" not "pests," in case you read the title wrong.
At our house, up until yesterday we had 30,002 pets. A dog, a leopard gecko, and 30,000 honey bees. (By the end of the summer the bee population will double to 60,000.) Out of these multitudes of so-called pets, only one individual can we actually physically pet. Predictably, that honor goes only to the sole mammal in the group.
Until today. In my never-ending quests to eat as locally as possible and to make prodigious amounts of smelly household work for myself, I acquired four chicks. I've been interested in the possibility of raising hens for some time, because I know they:
a) Eat household scraps.
b) Eat bugs out of the lawn and garden.
c) Provide an extremely high quality waste product that makes for potent compost.
d) Offer up six to eight eggs a week, the freshest and tastiest imaginable.
Now I've made the leap. Four little yellow puffballs with scrawny, toothpick-length legs are in a brood box under a heat lamp in a bathtub on the second floor of our house. Petting their fluff is irresistable. I'm not certain they enjoy it any more than the gecko does, but at least they don't sting me the way the bees would.
I never really noticed how truly bird-like chickens are. I always lumped them in with cows and sheep and all the other animals on Old MacDonald's Farm, but already at six days old, our chicks have noticeable feathers on their wings. They are vigorous little things, flapping those wings, eating constantly, determined to grow. The will to stay alive and to thrive and move forward in life is nakedly apparent in each of them.
Posted on April 13, 2008 at 8:41 p.m. by Jill. Discuss (0 comments)
Mood Rings -- The New Green Bling
"I'd like to see a new green fad for electronic jewelry with real-time displays of carbon footprints. These could be mood rings, bracelets, lapel pins or anything else that could change color depending on how much electricity you use, how much gasoline your car burns, how much you travel."
"The displays might change color from red to yellow to green as a carbon footprint diminishes...The green might be a dim shade for those who have bought carbon credits to offset their energy use, but a much brighter shade for those who've reduced emission to below-average without having to buy credits."
"Of course it would be a chore to set up monitors for energy use, but plenty of greens are willing to give lots of time to the cause. Some are accused of being religious zealots -- global warmists. But one of the advantages of religion is that it inspires people to acts of selflessness for the common good."
So writes John Tierney, who is rapidly turning into one of my favorite environmental writers. His mood ring concept is both godawful and brilliant, which is why I like it so much.
Tierney's impetus for suggesting mood rings comes from a recognition that we need to apply the lessons of social psychology and behavioral economics to climate maintenance. Conservation psychologists like Carol Saunders are very clear in their findings that when it comes to convincing someone to care about nature and the environment and take action, what other people are doing--the social norm--makes an enormous impact on individual behavior.
The mood ring wouldn't be a personal thing, that you would monitor in solitude the way you do your electric bill. The mood ring shows an individual how he or she stacks up against other people that he or she cares about. Am I ahead? Am I behind? Am I holding my own with the rest of my crowd, and blending in well with my peer group?
What do you think -- would you wear one? Could you convince your mom and your dentist and your mechanic and the coolest person at work to wear one?
John Tierney, "Are We Ready to Track Carbon Footprints?" New York Times, March 25, 2008
Are We Ready to Track Carbon Footprints? by John Tierney
Posted on April 9, 2008 at 9 a.m. by Jill. Discuss (5 comments)
Taxis, carseats, and transit... oh my!
It’s another day as a car-free mother of a toddler and I’m standing on the corner with Zella Rose in her sling and a huge, toddler carseat at my side. I called a taxi but it never came. So, I’ve dragged the carseat, the baby, and all the baby’s stuff to the corner. Empty taxis are swooshing by me. Some slow down, but none of them stop.
I often run into this one neighbor while waiting for a bus or taxi on this particular corner. He is an attractive black man in his mid-30s. When I was pregnant, he once rushed out to hold an umbrella over my head in the rain. Today, he is standing on the concrete that serves as the apartment building’s front yard, and offering commentary, “You’ve heard, I suppose, of how hard it can be for a black man to catch a cab,” he says and I smile knowingly. I step further into the street, waving harder. Two more empty taxis keep on driving. “Well, I guess it’s worse being a woman with a baby,” he continues. We both laugh. He tries his luck in the street waving down taxis for me. No luck. I feel like together we set the scene for some sort of bad joke. (“Have you heard the one about the black guy, the mama, and the baby trying to catch a cab?”)
We’re still laughing when a taxi finally stops.
It takes me five full minutes to get the carseat into the taxi and still it doesn’t seem secure. And then we’re off, a full hour and twenty minutes later than I’d hoped.
I like the expert’s opinion on these things, so I ask the taxi driver why no one else would stop for me. “It’s the baby,” he says. “They probably didn’t see the car seat. You gotta’ have one. The law, you know,” he says and puts his cell phone up to his ear to answer a call.
I didn’t actually know and, well, it didn’t seem quite right. I know lots of people who take their babies in taxis without carseats, like everyone in New York City just for starters. Later that night, I got on the computer and started trying to figure out this quandary: if you are legally required to use a carseat in a taxi how come I know so many people who don’t?
Well, the taxi driver was right. My friends in New York who “Always take cabs without carseats, I’m sure it’s fine,” are also right. In most states, such as in New York, children aren’t required to be in carseats while in taxis as well as other forms of public transit. This was also true for Illinois, until 2004, when the state passed the Booster Law. I still can’t figure out all of the details of this law, but I read page after page of legalese, before giving in and calling a Chicago cop. (I love 3-1-1, the city’s information line.)
The cop confirmed that children do have to be restrained while riding in a taxi in Illinois. Indeed, he explained, that a taxi driver can be fined and lose his license if he is caught carrying a child as a passenger without an appropriate carseat.
Now, I find this incredibly irritating. I don’t mind the state telling me I have to put my kid in a carseat in my car, but when using public transit, this just seems wrong. And, yes, I am lumping taxis in with public transit! This is because I am far more likely to take my child on the bus somewhere if I know that we can take a taxi if we have to. Come on, we’ve all had transit horror stories, and what makes them great stories and not just horrible, is that you have a way out. Imagine being trapped for hours on a broken down train where you can get off the train but your choices are to either walk 10 miles back home with your crying baby or break the law and get in a taxi without the carseat. Not to mention, it doesn’t seem like the taxi driver should be help accountable, but rather the parent.
Do other people get this upset about these kinds of laws?
We all have stories about what our parents did. My friend just told me how her parents used to put them to bed in their sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon and then LEAVE them sleeping outside until, early in the morning, the parents would sneak into the car and drive them to their grandparents in Indiana.
What are our stories? How does our generation balance the laws, demands of parenting, and the desire to be either car-free or less dependent on personal car ownership?
Should young children be required to be in carseats in taxis? Should they wear seatbelts while on a school bus? Does it upset you that you can go without a carseat in a taxi in New York or Minneapolis, but not in Chicago? What do you do when you leave the house intending to ride public transit? Do you take a just-in-case carseat? Have you ever found it nearly impossible to get a taxi to stop with you and your baby? Share your stories!
Posted on April 7, 2008 at 7:34 p.m. by Green Mama. Discuss (8 comments)
Randy for ramps
Sunday Dinner Chicago is making the food for a party at my house on Tuesday. This is a fabulous small business, using local, organic sustainble ingredients that happen to taste sublime the way their chefs combine them. They're featuring ramps in their menues right now. Ramps are wild leeks, the plant with the glossy green leaves that you see poking up through the brown leaf litter on the forest floor of Cook County forest preserves right now.
Try looking for ramps in the markets, and get a hint of spring. Whole Foods sometimes has them, or Fox & Obel.
http://sundaydinnerchicago.com
Posted on April 6, 2008 at 8:54 p.m. by Jill. Discuss (0 comments)
