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Well, I guess that I’m long overdue for a post.
Since school started I’ve been very busy as per the usual. Between crew practice five days a week, trying to captain a fencing team, full time classes and part-time work, things have been a little hectic. But I have a few minutes so it’s time to chat about our progress.
In my Environmental Sustainability class at Portland State, we’ve talked a lot about sustainable lifestyles, economies and industries. The first day of class we were asked to calculate our ecological footprint using the website: http://earthday.net/footprint/
It is an interesting calculation that estimates how many planets it would take if everyone lived like you. For example, when I took this quiz my total footprint was 5 acres. In comparison, the average ecological footprint in the U.S. is 24 acres a person and compares that to the available 4.5 biologically productive acres per person worldwide. If everyone lived like me we would need 1.2 planets. Take the quiz and post your results!
In the same class, one of our term projects is to do two personal water audits using a kit from the city. Basically you calculate how many gallons of water per minute every fixture in your home uses. Peter and I are lucky enough to be living in a LEED Silver certified building that happens to be furnished with low-flow showers, sinks and toilets. My calculated water use (at home) this last week was 91.35 gallons. Not bad considering the average American uses 173 gallons per day. I am astonished by that figure especially when you consider the world average is just 43 gallons per day.
Peter and I have started to do more of our grocery shopping at the local People’s Co-op which is a convenient 3 mile bike ride from our apartment. It is a great little food store in an awesome cob building. They carry all organic, mostly local foods as well as natural and organic bulk foods and tons of yummy vegan treats.
After learning about the policy side of pesticides and herbicides in my Environmental Law & Policy class I have stopped buying non-organic produce all together. It is amazing how many known carcinogenic pesticides there are that are still being used on produce today.
I feel like our buy-nothing experiment is working well. I tried to use my debit card to buy groceries the other day and I couldn’t remember what my PIN was. That is a pretty awesome feeling. Plus we have been making our own kinds of fun. Instead of going to a movie theater and paying $8 a person for a two-hour movie, it is much more fun to watch a DVD and make cupcakes with a good friend.
This last weekend I worked on making a gift for an upcoming birthday. I won’t reveal yet what it is but I am very proud of making something so useful out of reused material that I had laying around. 
–Jenny
About a week ago I helped my dad out by picking up his Subaru station wagon from the auto shop – it was getting some upholstery work done on its 21 year old interior. So I rode my bike to the shop, threw the bike in the back of the wagon, and sat down in the drivers seat, keys in hand.
It took me a few minutes to re-familiarize myself with the controls of what used to be my regular ride to high school. It took just a second to figure out which key starts the engine, and another few seconds to get the radio and mirrors adjusted, but it was the essentials that took the longest–the pedals. I’m sitting in the parking lot looking down in the footwell, thinking “OK, I know one of these things is to accelerate and one is to stop, but which is which? And more importantly… what does that third pedal do?”. By this time the autoshop guys who handed me the keys after I told them I was picking up the car for my dad were starting to wonder if maybe I was lying and perhaps they should be calling the cops… Fortunately I was able to reload my stick-shift driving program, figure out the clutch again, and avoid hitting the shop’s garage door and bushes on the way out.
So lets just say I don’t drive frequently these days. It definitely saves me some money though. That said, I still get rides from friends or family fairly often. But if one reason for doing this experiment is to see if I can live without needing to interact with a system that relies on money, then getting others to pay for things like gas — essentially buying by proxy — is technically cheating. The other more immediate and important reason not to get free rides is that in the end, someone is giving money to the oil companies who are doing a darn good job ensuring our society stays car-dependent (thus resulting in over 42,000 automobile crash deaths per year), and keeping us in places like Iraq (thus resulting in a hellofalotof American soldiers and Iraqi civilians dieing) so we can ensure our petroleum security.
So here’s my new, reinforced, resolution:
In 2008, I will minimize the number of trips I take in cars. Also, to offset the money that goes to Big Oil’s lobbyists when I take trips in automobiles, I will track how many miles I travel by car and give 10 cents per mile to the Bicycle Transportation Alliance and the Willamette Pedestrian Coalition so they can encourage cycling and walking for transportation as an alternative to driving.
