Bottom-up Change

A truism that guides my actions, but which I cannot verify with any degree of certainty is that change happens from the bottom up. When I involved myself in the urbanization and downtown revitalization of Albuquerque, I took note of two density strategies--the more organic Nob Hill "plant a thousand trees and see what happens" efforts, and the "plant a gigantic forest in rows" strategy (which involved a lot of planning and city money). Unsurprisingly, the organic effort yielded faster results. This example is one of but many anecdotes I can point to, but it's hardly scientific. My gut tells me that this is usually the story that plays out. The uncertainty in the bottom-up approach keeps most of the hucksters to take advantage of sure bets away, and maximizes the interest and goodwill of the parties who benefit from positive change. In my limited experience, even the success of the most planned efforts stems from the effort at the ground level. No grassroots, and you have very little chance of success. So, as I plan my return to Phoenix, I'm contemplating where to put my effort to magnify my own successes (and to course correct my failures). Rather than catalog all of my thoughts, I'll point you to this article that summarizes about 80% of my plans. Beyond this pretty comprehensive list, I'll write a later blog post about how I'm going to try to use my new position as a UX lab director to create a space for discovering what makes people feel more inspired to increase their sustainability efforts. 

Earth Hour Tonight at 8:30

The World Wildlife Fund has some great ideas for tonight's Earth Hour here. Hope to see more of you out and about in the dark tonight during this hour.

Activism, slactivism, and consumer choice

Katherine Murtinko, in her post "Personal solutions can't save the planet" at Treehugger.com challenges her readers to go beyond the "be the change you want to see in the world," and to seek opportunities to join with like-minded neighbors to change the locality, region, country, and world policies that lock our destruction of the commons. Part of the reason I moved back to Arizona was the hopeful shoots of ecological awareness I saw sprouting in the distance (light rail, denser urban growth, the disappearance of pools and green lawns, and ASU's leading role in sustainability). I also was intrigued by a city in such harsh conditions facing the crisis that we all will eventually have to reckon with. This is my chance to be part of something that could bend the curve on environmental catastrophe, and a place that will only heighten the tension. Let's hope I/we are up to the challenge.

Giving the Earth Its Sabbath, and Hopefully Its Jubilee

The LORD spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the LORD. For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits, but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the LORD. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap what grows of itself in your harvest, or gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. The Sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you, and for your cattle and for the wild animals that are in your land: all its yield shall be for food.”

Leviticus 25:1-7

One of the things that has been a surprise to me as I look for ways to shrink my carbon footprint has been the unearthing of things from my past. When I grew up on the joint Navajo-Hopi reservation, my parents lived the life of quasi-preppers--complete with multiple gardens, mountains of dehydrated food, and guns in the house. What seemed somewhat normal to me was a curiosity to my friends. I would take them on tours of our walls of dehydrated food cans (which had everything from run-of-the-mill TVP chunks to the more exotic shrimp creole and banana cream pie cans). Because my mom was raised on a farm, and my dad always liked the idea of self-sufficiency, this web of practices didn't have quite the raced/classed/gender/politics meaning it does today when discussing "preppers." My parents had a subscription to Organic Gardening, and we had three sheds out in the back, a clothes wire, and piles of all sort of recycling and composting. It was just home to me.

Part of home was getting out into nature all of the time. Living in a small town (large for a reservation, but tiny in comparison to most towns in the U.S.), much of my free time was hiking across the desert, doing battle with ants, or hanging out at what I affectionately called the local "ponds" (which were, in reality, either drainage ditches or reservoirs). We would occasionally camp as a family, and definitely spend as much time outdoors as possible. As I have gotten older, and my academic career matured, my habits have trended indoors. My recent climate awakening has left me scrambling for ways to mitigate my footprint--much of which has happened as a result of my indoor migration. I have quickly learned that one of the best ways for me to reduce my environmental impact is to shed my house/office/car carapace, and to wander into the world unencumbered. This week, M. and I made good on a membership to Nature Kenya that I earlier purchased so that she could attend the local bird walks. Rather than stick indoors, I decided to deepen my very new knowledge of our local bird population--especially since M. had purchased a "Birds of East Africa" guide, and I had purchased and brought a schmancy pair of Nikon binoculars (incidentally--this purchase of binoculars also put me more squarely in the shadow of my father, who purchased a pair of family binoculars when I was quite young).

For this hike, our Nature Kenya group went to a place called "Paradise Lost." From the initial signage, it looks like a tourist trap.

Its history, however, is a bit more complicated. This complex of caves and lakes is surrounded by a coffee plantation. As Kenya has developed, much of this plantation has gradually given way to suburban housing development; however, the fields of coffee bushes still dominate the landscape.

Despite the prevalence of the coffee bushes, the attraction for the birds is the diversity of plants that the area water affords.

Over the course of our visit to Paradise lost, our fellow birders spotted 78 different kinds of birds. We saw a number of flycatchers, sunbirds, and kites. Even more special was spotting our first (and much-hoped-for) malachite kingfisher and cinnamon-chested bee-eater.

The highlight for the group was when we approached the Mau-Mau cave, there was a Ayer's hawk-eagle hanging out very close to the group. We took over 20 minutes trying to identify the exact species, and it was only when someone with a telephoto lens camera emailed a raptor expert that we made our positive identification.

Walking around wildlife not only reduced my carbon footprint for the day, it also helped me better identify with the animals and plants I'm hoping to impact less. Of course, the biggest benefit for me was reducing my apocalyptic panic, and replacing it with the hope that sooner than later, we will give the earth its much-deserved Sabbath.

Living Lightly

In my quest for a carbon-negative life, one of my abiding fascinations/obsessions is with how much plastic has come to dominate our food culture. Here in Kenya, it is almost impossible to get away from the ubiquitous water bottle. To get by, I brought my partner's metal water bottle, and we fill up from water coolers that are stocked with recyclable large water bottles. Still, this is the tip of the iceberg. We reuse any plastic that we can avoid throwing away, and we try to avoid buying anything in plastic that we can (opting for glass, etc.).

Still, this is nowhere near as abstemious as one can get. This young man from India (in the US) conducted a personal life experiment where he tried to avoid waste for two years. He eventually was able to get rid of even toilet paper. Although I can't see myself going this far, this article has definitely moved my goal posts.

If you want to read more about this recycling demigod, you can read his blog here.

Looking for solutions

The purpose of this blog is to chronicle our efforts to reverse our environmental damage, and ultimately to point to successes for emulation. Saving the world should be fun, yes?

To that end, let me introduce you to a guy who has built his own island of vegetation in the middle of the Arizona desert, Jake. Watch and see how much you can accomplish on your own with some patience and love of nature.

If at first you don't succeed

I'm only a few weeks into my carbon challenge, and I'm finding that even the basic things like calculating carbon footprints and buying carbon credits is a challenge. Although I'm still buying TerraPass carbon credits, their methods for calculation seem a bit...um...generous. The more I research on human carbon footprints, the more I think that Carbonfund's methods ring true. Not only are they a bit more pessimistic on how easily remediated our activity is, they also have a few other things recommending them. 1. They are a charity (tax deductible!), and a 4-star rated one at that.  and 2. The money goes towards remediation, sequestration, and renewable energy project development.

If we are going to march our way out of this problem, we are going to have to take bold action and try  multiple things. In that spirit, we're going to work with both TerraPass and Carbonfund, and keep looking for ways to calculate our true effect on the environment.

Baseline Carbon Footprint

I stated earlier that my stretch goal is to get to carbon negative by 2030. Scratch that. I would like to get to carbon negative this year through offsets, and reduce the amount that I need to offset each year by about 7%.

So, to get going on this trek, I used the EPA's Carbon Footprint Calculator (still online, thankfully).

Turns out that Miriam and I have a smaller than average carbon footprint for two U.S.ians. We put about about 11 tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between the both of us (couples usually average around 14 tons). This likely has to do with living in an apartment that is well insulated, and owning one car--a Honda Civic (and flying often, on the negative side of the ledger). So, bully for us starting at a not-as-terrible place.

So, to kick this off, I'm going to get us to carbon negative the easy way--through buying carbon credits via Terra Pass. To be safe, I'm  going to buy double the offsets our consumption merits (by their calculations, at least). They will take our monthly payments and use them to build renewable energy installations or to methane flaring.

This is really just the start, though. We're going to keep trying to switch our primary consumption to renewable energy sources, to decrease consumption where possible, and increase efficiency of our consumption. Additionally, we are going to look for ways to support environmental remediation, and to advocate for local, regional, national, and international change in addressing climate change. So, we're on the road, and the prospect of a very long journey seems a bit brighter today.

Grief

During a daytime drive after the election, I was hit by a familiar light, and it blinded me. The light is metaphorical, of course, and it came in the form of a resigned biologist talking about the inevitably of ecological and social collapse. Hearing this biologist on the darker side of a discussion about global warming didn't hit me as much as detonate the news about record warmth that has been coming in percussively year-after-year, and now month-after-month. The despair of this particular scientist, and his willingness to retire early and give up as an advocate sent me into a bit of a tailspin.

It was a familiar story.

I had heard something nearly as psyche shattering when I was an undergraduate taking a course in Environmental Ethics. The professor (Dr. Bowman, a professor of theology, and the yearly "Voice of God" in our Christmas Feast of Lights show) sketched out the scenario of runaway greenhouse effect, where life quickly becomes hellish, and every sort of human behavior is quickly unleashed under the stresses of ecological and social collapse. This was hour one of day one, and we were wrecked as a class. During the class break, we all left the class and stared out the windows at what seemed a doomed world. After the break, the professor told us "that's the worst-case scenario, and here are other possibilities." We were challenged throughout the semester to see how we could contribute to making sure the worst-case scenario didn't play out. Over the course of the semester, we set about planning a life of advocacy and activism.

This one despondent scientist drove me to the Internet to see if what he was saying is indeed true, and to my horror, I could neither fully confirm, nor confidently disprove his case. After poring through a wide range of both experts and dabblers, there emerged a range of expectations between full extinction by 2030 and gradual change over 100 years (complete skepticism was rejected). Alarmingly, I found other very smart scientists who have also dropped out of their practice because what they discovered was too alarming, and their attempts to communicate results ridiculed (being cast as Cassandras). Like my earlier seminar, I was left on the doorstop of the desperate scenario without assurances of the better possibilities.

This made for more than a few sleepless nights. It was only in the depths of my anxiety that I realized I had not only confronted this 25 years ago in a seminar, but that I had confronted this anxiety from other existential threats as a child in church and in bible study. In a sense, we all have to deal with our certain personal annihilation, and with the potential demise of life around us. We live in a tenuous web, and we are only certain to disconnect from it ourselves. Nothing else is guaranteed

This realization also forced me to recognize that facing my own demise exacts a responsibility for those around me. My limitations require me to account for how I spend my time, efforts, and attention. Knowing that changes--possibly terrible ones--sit on the horizon, made me recognize that I have lived in a bit of a comfortable blindness. As much as I hoped I could be back to the earlier beliefs, I couldn't. That earlier person was dead.

I needed to accept that fact, grieve for a period, and then move on. It was at that moment that I decided that following the hopeless scientists was not an option. Neither was following the steps of the optimist, or the extreme skeptic. Instead, I would need to find the environmental version of Pascal's wager. I had to find a path that I could believe in, no matter the scenario that unfolded--from rapid catastrophe to comfortable glide path.

Now that I have buried the person who considered our stewardship of this planet as a side-issue, I must hit the road of the person who has left familiar country, and who is on a journey to figure out how to live consonant with the values of a person who wants to care for the people, the animals, and plants and the planet that he has called home. I'm now a pilgrim creating a path that will connect my footsteps to a better future--whatever form that limited time may take.