Breakfast: Kashi cereal with soy milk.
Lunch: Two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I know, I know!), 1 plum, 1 peach, Some wasabi peas.
Dinner: A little bit of leftover pasta primevera, a bowl of left over rice and beans, a big salad and some more fruit.
Cravings: A Labor-Day cookout with all the meat-laden bells and whistles!
Mood: Really good, I seem to hitting some sort of stride.
In a series of events I can only describe as cosmic (so melodramatic, right?), I found Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Selected Essays lying on top of someone’s garbage on the way home from Urban Foraging last week. Its first essay, if you’re not familiar with the text, is ‘Nature,’ a founding tracts of transcendentalism that opens with this; “Our age is retrospective. … The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Now, people of a particular nature will accuse me of making up this anecdote; but it’s the truth, so we’ll just ignore those people. Anyway, Emerson’s idea, that we should live in harmony with nature, not solely as its master, was on my mind as I reading my colleague Sharon Begley’s blog, Lab Notes, and this fact just leaped out at me:
Worldwide, gas flaring is sending into the atmosphere the greenhouse-warming equivalent of 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year. That’s more than one-third of the 1,197 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions from every home in the U.S. last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, and more than one-fifth of the 1,965 million metric tons from all the trucks, planes, SUVs and every other vehicle in the U.S. that year.
And it’s all wasted: flaring natural gas makes the stuff go up in smoke, literally. Looked at from the point of view of sheer waste, the 168 billion cubic meters of flared gas equals 27 percent of all the natural gas used in the U.S. last year, with a market value of $40 billion. As the World Bank says, “Capture and use of the flared gas is an obvious candidate in efforts to reduce global carbon emissions. It is a so called low-hanging fruit relative to other carbon emissions reductions.” Are we still going to claim that cutting carbon emissions means unacceptable sacrifices in how we live?
Isn’t this just an amazing fact? You’d think people would be breaking out into spontaneous celebration, waving balloons made out of plastic bags. I really expected nothing less then press conferences hosted by giddy scientists pouring champagne on the chairman of the World Bank, taking phone calls from the President and planning trips to Disney World. Oil executives should be sobbing and breaking down on Larry King overwhelmed at the possibility of some good press. Why do I just hear yawning silence? Shouldn’t we be demanding that this ‘low-hanging fruit’ get picked immediately? Wouldn’t this kind of carbon reduction give us a huge self-esteem boost which would in turn lead us to do our own part and finally turn off the water while we’re brushing our teeth? Or to speak in what appears to be the unifying language of this debate; “How many polar bears and penguins would this save?” And how many other goodies does the World Bank have up its sleeve? What other planet-saving secrets are they keeping from us ? (Yes, I will be dialing down the paranoia shortly.) And why is everyone hysterically waving us off regular light bulbs when we all should be marching in the streets insisting on the capture and use of gas flaring!
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not solely advocating solutions that abdicate us of personal responsibility. I am merely suggesting that if we want to truly justify our actions as consumers, maybe we should not only be measuring the carbon footprint of our daily lives; but also measuring the footprint we leave by not demanding that our vendors (and that’s what these companies are, not matter how big Exxon-Mobil gets, it’s still our money they’re spending) attempt real and sustainable change. Are we so cynical about the power of the money that we think change is impossible despite overwhelming evidence that it isn’t. The highlights of our history teach us that time and time again, Americans have stood up to wrong and demanded right. (We’re not perfect, I know, but then again, who is?) Shoot, that’s how we got started as a nation. Abolition, Universal Suffrage, an end to Jim Crow and a Civil Rights Act – and sure, there were a lot of people opposed to those things but, - they’re on the books now.
As I talked about earlier this week, America ’s Second Harvest (that’s day 7 if y’all are losing track) swoops in and attempts to get all our excess food and groceries and give it to the hungry. I’ll be blogging at you about Second Harvest some more next week. They do some pretty amazing work to get stuff that would otherwise be thrown away to people who need it but can’ afford it. Freegans live off that same excess in an attempt, not only to illuminate the issues surrounding that excess, but to boycott it as well. Both are indirect ways of engaging our waste problem since neither actively agitates for its destruction. In other others word, these solutions have a symbiotic relationship with the problem they seek to solve. Although I acknowledge that - to back up from the intellectual cliff I’ve walked myself out on - it’s a start. If we are really outraged by a system that wastes 40 to 50% away of the food it produces (according to Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona .) and for which we bear some of the blame, we need to figure out what to ask for and get it. Jones suggests cutting food waste by half could reduce our impact on the environmental by 25 percent just by the fact that we’ll be filling up less landfills and using fewer chemicals such as fertilizers, and pesticides . Not only does that seem like low-hanging fruit to me, it also seems completely square with Emerson’s point as well. Nature is wondrous in its complexity (you know you were obsessed with the Planet Earth series too.), breath-taking in its scale, awe-inspiring in its beauty and magnificent in its destructive ability. We owe it to ourselves and our future to try a little harmony and demand that our vendors do the same.
Good News: Not sick of salad or rice and beans. According to some very rough estimates, I have saved $300 towards my Freedom Savings Account.
Bad News: Really sick of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Worries: I’m getting a little preachy, right? Well, I’ll calm down, There’s a holiday weekend coming up. See ya on Tuesday and please wish me luck over Labor Day weekend.
