10,000

The AP is reporting that up to 10,000 people may be dead in Myanmar as a result of a cyclone there.

I feel like stopping there. One second of silence for every person would be 2 1/2 hours of silence.

When 3000 people died on 9/11, the US mobilized it's armed forces for a massive response. This is 3 times that number. We are a nation that talks about the value of the life of every human being... so much so that we no longer fund birth control information for people who want it.

Why did so many people die? Rising oceans and more ferocious storms. In other words, another global warming storm.

It's not "coming", it's here.

And we need to change our lives. We can't wait until global warming means more than fewer days to ski and more days to tan. For 10,000 unique souls global warming came home on Saturday.

Ray Bradbury and Transportation

I had an interesting set of experiences coming into work this morning and they got me to thinking about two Ray Bradbury works that use very different transportation settings.

In "The Illustrated Man", published in a collection in 1951, the title character travels in a world where being on foot is normal. It is the ride in a car that is unusual. But that's slipping away. The story is partially about how it is the weird who get left out of progress. In Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, driving incredibly fast down the road is the goal. Roads predominate, but they are also insulated as hitting animals and people on the road is a kind of sport. It is not until the main character falls completely outside of modern life that he finds a world not dominated by the presence and danger of roads.

So, where are we 50 years on from the publication of the books (and 60 from the actual writing, and 70 from the experiences that seeded the writing)?

• This morning I walked to my local bus stop instead of driving to the park n' ride. I got to see the faces of people zooming by in their cars. They were looking at me, trying to figure out why I was there. Or whether the brown-skinned man next to me was a threat. Or why we were there together.
• The man, an Indian immigrant told me about his work, asked about my family, showed me his flip-flops and talked about his early-morning walk through the grass.
• When I arrived at my destination, where I change from riding to walking the last 1.5 miles to work, a woman stopped in the parking lot and asked if I needed a ride somewhere. I said "no" and "thanks" and headed on. At the major intersection on the corner, a car rolled into the cross walk after watching the stream of left-hand turns from the opposite side of the intersection go... but at least there weren't several cars in the crosswalk.
• In the construction section, the sidewalk is back to being all filled (it had two holes and no crossings in it last Friday), very pristine, white, and empty.
• At the next light, another lady stopped and asked if I wanted a ride.
• Then the section where I walk the shoulder because there's a half-mile span where the sidewalk hasn't been built. In general, people in this section give me some extra space, staying on the left side of their lane, which gives a good 10 feet between the edge of the road where I walk and the passenger side of their car. But one nervous older man cruised along the road with the right tire of his half-ton pickup on the shoulder line.
• A friend of mine who was out for a ride over the weekend got caught in a rain storm. She took shelter under an overpass, taking herself and her bike off the shoulder to wait it out. She was struck by a car that was that far out of its lane. During the day. (She's bruised and has some ligament damage but otherwise fine.)

So, we haven't made the full transition to Fahrenheit 451, but we're closer to that than we are to "The Illustrated Man". It looks like Bradbury correctly interpreted many of the trends of his day.

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I heard a car industry lobbiest on the radio yesterday whining that "many car manufacturers have had to pull their efficient models because people weren't buying them." Well, they're often ugly. My former roommate, a good guy who ate organic and recycled and biked and walked, would comment on how ugly the Prius was every time he saw one, and then go back to converting his truck to biodiesel.
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I sent a note to my senator to encourage increased CAFE standards and got a reply yesterday. He doesn't want a fixed standard because it's important to let the industry to make advances in safety and comfort too.

I wanted to reply with the report out last week that shows that smaller cars are also safer than SUVs, but then I got my Real Age report, where I got told that I would add time to my life if I drove a bigger car. When a 5-star crash test rated for driver and passenger car isn't safe enough because it isn't big enough on a test that's being advertised on all media channels and even mentioned in a book I'm reading.... well, that's when the mountain looks too big.

But my dad taught me how to hike big mountains:

• Go with a friend.
• Take a map, some food, some clothing, and a way to call for help.
• Wear good shoes.
• Find a pace that keeps you from being breathless, but keeps you headed onward. Don't stop and start.
  
• Don't focus on the trail or how high the mountain is. Keep an eye on it, but spend most of your time enjoying where you are.

Averages and Absolutes

I have always hated being graded on the curve. My physics teacher in high school tried to explain that the curve is just a way of assigning grades to the natural distribution in class and plotted several sets of test scores on the board to demonstrate how sensible it was, but that only increased my resentment. I am much more of the kind of person who likes a list of expectations that I can live up to. Although my favorite grading system of all was the class where there were 1100 points available on assignments during the semester and if you got 900 to 1000 points you got an A.

There are two things that frustrate me about using the bell curve as a standard. First, my results are as much dependent on what everyone else is doing as they are on my own efforts. If I start out in the average range at the beginning of a class, and we're all presented the same opportunities to learn and take them at the same rate, I am still looking at a C, regardless of how much I've learned. Yuck. Second, the curve is completely reflective of groupthink. If in that physics class, we all had decided that it was fun to give the wrong answers on the test, we would have instant grade inflation.

So, when it comes to talking about what our carbon footprints look like, it frustrates me that all the carbon calculators talk about results in relative terms. Okay, so I'm doing better than average for a US citizen. Fine. Tell me how I'm doing in relationship to what it would feel like if the US had signed on to Kyoto and if we were actually holding steady at 1990 emissions in spite of increased population.

The Riot for Austerity -- 90% reduction rules take what looks like a really good stab at that. They are using the figure that the world needs to reduce its emissions by 80% to reverse global warming, and since the west, and primarily the US contributes the most, we need to cut farther for it to average out. This is beyond Kyoto, but it targets the final destination: getting the ice cap and glaciers back soon enough that species like the polar bear have a chance at survival.

Of course, being a real-world event, carbon emission does follow a bell curve. And volunteering to be 5-sigma on the austerity end of the curve reshapes the curve when what we actually need is to move the curve. I wonder about this with gas. So I volunteer (and am planning) to make further changes that will allow me to save 500 gallons a year over what I was using two years ago (15,000 miles at 22 mpg verses 6,000 miles at 34 mpg). With the way things are, it's not like the 500 gallons aren't going to be burned anyway. They'll be burned, but at a modestly lower cost for the person who buys them because demand is down.

So in addition to personal action, we also need community action so that people who might have consumed more but who are able to consume less make different choices, and we need political action. We are in another energy crisis, not because of a lack of supply, but because of the negative effects of trying to consume an over-abundance. We should be looking at what worked in the 1970's to address that crisis and look for ways to build that into our system today.

Ideas from Vegas - post 3

From Louise Hay on Saturday morning:

The turmoil in the world in regard to weather is a reflection of the turmoil in the state of human consciousness.

I'm not convinced there is a direct-line connection between human thought and the material world, but I am convinced that we act in ways that are consistent with our beliefs about the world, whether we are conscious or unconscious of those beliefs. I have experienced how changing my thoughts has made my life better. I know that the pace of change can be sudden or slow and methodical.

In particular, my life has become richer -- emotionally, physically, and professionally -- as I have moved away from the need for enemies. I know that at times I have used the perception of "enemies" to motivate me into actions that were fundamentally out of sync with my nature. When I believed fat was my enemy, I exercised myself into injury and eventually knee surgery.

I don't know what would happen on the global warming front if the world made a sudden shift to not needing to create enemies, ala 1984, but it's interesting to consider.

Ideas from Vegas - post 2

From Bill Phillips' talk on Saturday morning:

When you are trying to make a change, you have far more power to make it when your heart is in the change than when you try to do it out of your head alone.

Bill's new work is on the process of transformation -- inspired by his work in helping people transform their bodies through exercise and nutrition, but also bigger than that. In this point in his talk, he was using the work of the Heartmath Institute. But even without electromagnetic measurements, we can see the sense of a change being more powerful when it comes from the desire to have a different experience of the world than when we want to see political change, or we want to see less littering, or we want to know the polar bears will have their icy habitat for centuries to come. Or because we know we should.

Heartful changes the ones that have real staying power. And they're the ones that seem authentic and compelling to others.

Ideas from Vegas - post 1

One thing that keeps echoing in my head is something Wayne Dyer said in the keynote session on Friday night:

Three lies of the ego:

• I am what I own.
• I am what I do.
• I am what people think about me.

It's easy enough to understand that "I am what I own" includes what I refuse to own, what I'm too poor to own, what I'm too rich to own and what I could never imagine owning. And it's pretty easy to see that "I am what I do" includes what I don't do, what I do for work, what my hobbies are, who I'm married to, who I'm parenting, what kind of exercise I do and the spiritual teachers I'm listening to. And "I am what people think about me" means I need to manage what people think about me to make sure they have the right impression of me.

If these are all lies of the ego, then when I am busy acting them out, I'm acting out of my ego and not my authentic self.

In terms of pursuing a smaller carbon footprint, my ego can threaten to derail me by whining about the fun toys I'm missing out on, by encouraging me to feel inadequate when I buy a cheaper car, or carpool, or ride the bus, or ride a bike, or walk. Alternately, it can tempt me with the idea that somehow I've achieved something by engaging in a project like this. And finally, it can tempt me to listen to the positive and negative opinions of others about me and change so that I can improve those opinions.

So, it seems to me that the ego is one of the forces that's resisting the changes necessary for sustainability.

Quote of the day

I will try this day to live a simple, sincere, and serene life, repelling [thoughts] of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness and magnanimity; exercising economy in expenditure, generosity in giving, and thoughtfulness in conversation.

"A Morning Resolve" (edited)
Forward Day By Day
February/March/April 2007

More information here.

Something to be grateful for: common currency

One of the books I started reading during my illness this week is Bill McKibben's new book Deep Economy. The introductory material is about establishing the need to think about the world in a radically new way... the "why you need this book" part of the book. The picture is pretty bleak:

• If the resources of the world were spread out equally, my life would look like the average Pakistani's, rather than mine (especially discouraging when Fox's new talking head is so informed about the lives of Pakistanis)
• Global Warming is the result of extracting vast reserves of energy stored in carbon from under the ground, removing the energy, and putting the carbon in the air
• We are less than 25 years from a radical change in our lifestyles, forced by any combination of peak oil, the gap between the haves and have-nots, rising temperatures, massive trauma to the biological mono-culture we've become used to eating
• and so on.

Of course, for people paying attention at any cycle rate, this isn't particularly new stuff. But ingesting a big dose of it at once can be a huge bummer.

Using the spirit of Pronoia -- challenge despair -- I have this balancing thought:
The Industrial Revolution hasn't just been about extracting what we want from the earth at higher efficiencies... it has also been about establishing a common currency for the world. It is monetary and linguistic, but it is also energetic. The Industrial Revolution has largely resulted in a world where everything we care about--heat, clean water, transportation, communication, health, food production and storage, community, entertainment, education--can be powered by electricity. And the beauty of electricity as a currency is that electricity doesn't care where it comes from.

Today the wind blows by my house, the sun beats down on the shingles of my roof, and my bikes stand largely unused in my garage. This post is powered by wind-power if you ask the accounting niceties of the power company... but the reality is 90% of the electricity came from coal.

We are stuck in Industrial Revolution ways of producing power. We are long past the time when it's made sense. (Add the cost of resource wars fought since 1950 into your gas, oil, and electrical bill.) But a new world is already living breath-by-breath with the one we're in now. I imagine we are not so far away from a day when we sign up for spinning classes not just for the exercise and the community-building, but because the power is donated to the local health clinic.

Pronoia

A wonderful book I've been reading while exploring these changes in my life is Rob Brezsney's Pronoia. Or, as the full title says: "Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings".

In the book, Rob tells the story of having been challenged at Burning Man one year. Like so many voices, Vox Feminista is one I'm familiar with, Rob was on the "the world is going to hell in a handbasket and we really need to change" bandwagon. He's basically a funny, community-oriented, good-natured guy, so these new friends challenged him to bring that to his message of change.

The resulting book is one of crazed, rejuvenating playfulness. Exercises about looking at things backwards and inside out; turning expectations and paradigms on their heads; connecting with people in surprising, loving, intimate ways.

I am finding this book a great leavening agent for my perspective and life as I go through this project of thinking deeply about my life and its impacts. I will be using the Pronoia tag for posts on observations about what's working, what's fun, and what's positive in this process of change.

Not so big!

"The average size of new single-family homes in the US increased from 1,500 square feet to 2,266 square feet between 1970 and 2000."

My townhome is 1260 sq ft, not including the basement.

"The Census Bureau also reports that the average household size declined over the past 30 years, from 3.1 people per household in 1970 to 2.6 people per household in 2002. Thus, the square feet per person have nearly doubled in thirty years, from 483 to 872."

With three adults living here, we have 420 sq ft each, again, not including the basement.

An interesting article on historical homes and neighborhoods in Denver by a local real-estate agent.

A selection of homes currently for sale in one of the historical neighborhoods in Denver:



Note that the average for the ten homes in the screen shot is 2828 sq ft. (The image links to a larger version.) I think this is likely a representative sample of homes scraped off the lot and replaced with larger homes, homes with the tops popped, classic homes, and I see one condo conversion of an apartment building in there.

The scrapers are particularly depressing for me. I understand the motivation... in June of 1965 a flood hit the Platte river, which runs through the heart of Denver. Since the Platte is used for drainage, the flood forced water into the basements of thousands of homes in the area resulting in foundation cracks. So, at some point, those houses will have to be replaced.

But frequently the houses are being replaced with mansion-like houses with large garages. The minimum-required open space on a lot is filled by paving -- sidewalks, patios, and parking. And the result is a 6,000 square-foot home in a classic, tree-lined residential neighborhood. But the character of the neighborhood comes from lawns and mature trees, which the new home has no space for. Additionally, as the article I quoted from above argues, a 4,000+ sq ft home can never be made green enough to offset the costs to build it.

The challenge of living smaller and lighter is acurately, though ironically summed up in the first three comments to this article announcing a Global Warming campaign in Pensacola, FL. As suthernboy writes:

the only global warming we need to be worried about is all the hot air that is coming out of these politician's mouths that are heading this Global Warming Campaign. They are polluting the airwaves with all their enviromentalist crap trying to tell people how they should run their lives.

Living closer to other people means inevitably we must change our behavior to accommodate them. Of course, we are simultaneously asking them to change for us, but perhaps those requests seem so practical to us that we don't notice.

So, I think one of the challenges of living greener, of living not so big, is trying to remember -- culturally -- how to live with other people.

The Green Triangle

About 10 years ago, I viewed my life through the lens of recovering from overspending. One of the important books to me at that time was Living Cheaply with Style by Ernest Callenbach. I recently found my copy in a box and flipped through it to see what it might offer at this stage in my life. I was entertained by the comment about how CFLs might evolve into pleasant home lighting in the future. But I was struck by the sensibility of Callenbach's Green Triangle.

The concept is that our health, our finances, and the ecosystem are three points on a triangle. Whenever we act for the health of one of these, the other two are also benefitted. So now, although I'm looking at my life through the lens of living more gently on the earth, my actions are very much in line with my friends who are trying to improve their health naturally or who are looking for ways to save money.

From another perspective, the green triangle might be seen as the legs of a three-legged stool. Sensible decisions are informed by all three elements. It doesn't make sense for me to drink corn-syrup sweetened drinks even through they might be cheaper than bottled water, because they are worse for my health and for the environment.

From a third perspective, the green triangle might describe three phases in a cycle of a spiral. By making choices that move toward the greener end of the spectrum, we can offset choices in the other direction. I can drive my car to a gym to work out on a treadmill in the air conditioning, or I can take a walk. I actually do both, but considering the weight of various options, maybe I can make a greener choice today.

Green Energy and Carbon Credits

This is a bit of a rant. I believe in green energy. I believe in public utilities doing electricity production using renewable means. But the truth is, once the electricity goes on the grid it becomes part of one huge, indistinguishable pool of electricity. In other words, even if I subscribe to Windsource (and I did as soon as it became available) 90% of my electricity still comes from coal. This is because in Colorado, 90% of all electricity generation comes from coal.

Similarly, I like programs like TerraPass, NativeEnergy, and CarbonFund. I like places that collect dollars and oversee investing those dollars in programs that will reduce carbon. But even though I participate in one of those programs, I don't think that absolves me from concern. And no, I'm neither Catholic, Jewish, nor Scotch, I didn't grow up in a single-parent home, or a hippy home, or the child of Great Depression survivors.

What I did grow up as is the daughter of an inventor with a passion for R&D. I signed up for Windsource not so I could put a sticker on my window, but so that more wind generators could be built. I signed up for my carbon program not so I could feel less guilty, but so that we would have a better understanding of what we can do to sequester carbon. So I like these programs.

Here's the thing though... why are the prices so low? I mean, $50 to offset all the carbon emitted by generating electricity and burning natural gas for my house for a year? That's peanuts. I do know there's a limit to what these programs can put to use at any one time, but I also know that those of us who can should be putting more money into the fight.

• What about creating a fund that installs solar panels on low income houses? Say something like the Habitat for Humanity program for solar?
• What about microlending programs that allow people to borrow money to replace inefficient appliances to be paid back by the savings on their electric bills?
• What about paying the neighborhood can collector to pick up other recyclables as well?
• What about building programs at the local non-profit for installing solar?

Okay. End rant. ;-)

Carbon Diet

Another way to think of what I'm doing... the carbon diet.

Had the U.S. signed the Kyoto Protocol, it would have required us to cut CO2 emissions by about 3100 pounds per person annually. That's about a tenth as much as many climate scientists say is necessary to limit global warming, but I am going to use it as my personal goal for 2007 and see how fast I can reach it.

I'm not sure who the author is on that, but it's on The Green Guide.

3100 pounds to meet Kyoto. I'm not sure what my emissions were when Kyoto was drafted, but I think it's a more than reasonable goal to remove 3100 lbs, or a ton and a half, from my life.

Some ways I can think of to do this:

• Drive less. 1000 miles = .45 tons in my car.
• Change incandescent lights to fluorescent lights (According to my account at One Billion Bulbs I've already cut 1000 lbs of carbon this year.)
  
• Conserve electricity at home -- according to this government report every kWh I use at home produces 2 lbs of carbon dioxide. In Feb. we used 892 kWhs of electricity, for 1784 lbs, or .89 tons. That's 10 tons a year right there. But then again, that's winter use. Ideas on saving electricity here.

But the scary number in that quote is the one that says we have to do ten times that to halt global warming. I can't even fathom what changes would have to happen in my life to reduce my carbon impact by 15 tons. Every carbon calculator I use says my current carbon footprint is about 7.5 tons... the US average.

Cutting my emissions by 15 tons means there are things that have to fundamentally change about my life ... I imagine recycling drives and owning one car per family and the carpool to work has four people in it... like Dagwood Bumstead's. I imagine riding my bike to the store and harvesting vegetables out of my victory garden, and learning to sew pockets on my karate gi's so I can use them for work clothes. In fact, I imagine the US on war footing in WWII, when we went all out to beat an enemy that was out to take away our freedom.

I think of those things and wonder why we are fighting a war against an ideology that has a problem with our lifestyle, instead of fighting the war against Global Warming, which will impact not just our lifestyle, not just our economic freedom, but our access to food and shelter.

Why Not-So-Big Living?

I love Sarah Susanka's books. I ran across The Not So Big House many years ago while I lived in an apartment and I've carried it with me through many moves. It occupies a prominent place in my current home.

I like the idea of living small. I don't do it very well. I grew up in a large home in an urban neighborhood and over time our three stories filled up with books and paper and art and projects and clothes and furniture. There's an amount of stuff that makes my life feel grown-up. There's a period of time that I feel I have to go shopping, even if I have 5 pairs of jeans, 3 pairs of khakis, 4 pairs of dress slacks, enough dress shirts to go for two weeks without a repeat and enough underwear to go the same time without washing anything. In short, I have too much stuff to make living small easy.

I like the idea of living small, but I am not a hermit. The cabin in the forest isn't my style. I want a comfortable but urban life. I don't throw parties often, but I like having people around. I like my space to feel like they are welcome. I also have significant people in my life for periods of time. None have "taken" yet, but I haven't given up hope.

What appeals to me most about living small is the idea of not adding my footprint to the millions of careless footprints trampling the ecosystem. I believe there is an amount of space one needs, and more than that is wasteful, frankly. I love the concept of "enoughness" as presented in Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez. I currently have more than enough stuff, I am spending more than enough money. I'm restless about my impact on the world and I want to explore lessening it.

For a time in my childhood, a Mennonite family lived across from us and the mother, Karen, was our primary babysitter. I remember helping in the huge garden, washing dishes by hand, eating everything I took, cleaning up after myself, and never, ever pretending anything was a gun. I also remember being appreciated. There was little stuff in their home, but there was always room for friends... and for a rambunctious, odd little girl to explore a different world. Here's to making a little more of that world real.