Climate Action

In the interest of all of us working together to help each other mitigate the in-progress climate apocalypse, I thought I’d update my list of actions.

Maybe a lot of this will seem tiny and pedantic, it seems that way to me, but I include it because I don’t want anybody else to think anything they can do is insignificant. Some of it likely also will seem huge and daunting; believe me that it felt that way to me before I built up the momentum to make it happen.

It all matters. What you’re doing matters.

Please—and especially if you’re doing something I’m not—would you share your own version of this?

New as of this week:

• Cooking with meat only one night a week.
• Using no plastics to wash dishes.

Forthcoming:

• Using no plastics in dental hygiene.
• I might have a line on some very local eggs I can get with net zero packaging.
• More as I think of it.

What I was already doing:

• Residential rooftop solar panels, 4.2Kw.
• Electric car, 2017 Chevy Bolt, charging exclusively in my garage, from the solar panels.
• Two 80 gallon rain barrels, from which I do 85% of my watering.
• Fractional greywater reuse from dishwashing, shower and basement dehumidifier, amounting to maybe another 5% of my watering.
• Making all my own bread and yogurt saves on some packaging. Kneading my bread by hand saves some energy.
• Two apple trees, a cherry tree, an elderberry bush, strawberries, grapes, hops, sunflowers, sunchokes, garlic, raspberries, serviceberries etc, feeding my family and local wildlife as much as I can from our tiny third of an acre.
• Compost, both using redworms in the basement and a big old compost pile outside.
• No pesticides, no fertilizer.
• Homebrewed beer and cider accounts for maybe half of the alcohol consumed in my household, saving some packaging and shipping. Also the electricity for my brew kettle comes from solar, I reuse waste water for cleaning or next batch and compost or bake with spent grains. Also 100% of the apples I use for cider are wildcrafted or home-grown.
• Biking. To the grocery store, liquor store, garden store, hairdresser, health food store, hardware store, post office, to the woods and fields for foraging. And of course for exercise.
• Volunteering with my town’s environmental resources committee.
• Volunteer litter cleanup.
• Reckoning is a nonprofit annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice, which I founded in 2016 and fund 90% on my own.
• No plastics for shaving.
• Buying local as much as I can, less than I could/should, but things like fruit, veg, honey, grain for brewing, beer. I try to buy beer in cans for the reduced packaging, though I’d go back to glass if anybody in this country would reuse beer bottles.
• Living in a freshwater-locked state (Michigan), I don’t eat ocean fish unless I travel to a coast.
• Volunteering and donating to Elissa Slotkin, who is running for my local flippable House seat, MI-08.
• Foraging for herbs, mushrooms, wild fruit. I do this responsibly and small-scale, but it saves having to buy those things, saves packaging and shipping.
• I wear clothes and shoes until they fall apart. Wife constantly pointing out holes in everything.
• Human-powered lawnmower. Also human-powered snowblower (shovel), human-powered leafblower (rake), human-powered weedwhacker (sickle/shears).
• I buy few new books (I use ebooks and the library and buy used and share).
• My kid has a million toys, a lot of them are hand-me-down, but I do pretty well keeping him entertained with sticks and leaves and stuff around the house. That’s got to mean something.
• I don’t play video games. Not a judgment, but it’s got to account for some energy use.
• I carry a travel mug everywhere and use it for tea, coffee, soda, water. I don’t buy bottled water. I don’t use straws.

Areas where I’m not there yet:

• Gas heat and hot water.
• I still own one gas car and use it maybe 20% of the time.
• Electricity I use in excess of solar panel generation (electric car takes up a lot) comes from shitty Michigan power generation, which was still 60% coal last I checked.
• I take a plane occasionally, though I pack ridiculously light and rarely fly anywhere further than the East Coast. I’d use more trains if there were more.
• My mental health necessitates I live near woods, so I am farther from things than if I lived in a city.
• I have one kid. I hear they are resource hogs. Sigh. I do hope and work hard to prepare him to overcome that.
• If you see something I’ve got a blind spot about, please tell me? Thank you in advance.

Thank you for reading and caring. <3