SECONDHAND NATION

A Green Year: Going Green In Every Season

 

If you've got "Go!Green!" overload, but still feel the need to make some positive environmental changes, then I've got just the book for you.

Don't bother with green craft books or organic cook books or any other nonsense. 

Just get Jodi Helmer's The Green Year:  365 Small Things You Can Do To Make a Big Difference.

It's the simplest concept, really.  A daily almanac, organized by seasons, of small steps you can take to tread lighter on the earth.

Similar to a daily devotional, and in a easy-to-carry size, The Green Year is a really good intro for people thinking about getting greener, for whatever reason.  There are energy-saving techniques, cooking and housekeeping tips, consumer product information, transportation and travel recommendations and outdoors and garden ideas.

Here are few samples: 

May 10:  Toss lemon peels in your garden to keep cats from using your soil as a litter box.

October 28:  Stock your bathroom with bars of soap.  The scented body wash in your shower is packaged in a plastic container made of non-renewable, petroleum-based sources and uses a lot more packaging than a bar of soap.  If every household in the United States replaced one bottle of body wash with a bar of soap, it would save almost 2. 5 million pounds of plastic containers from going to the landfill. 

December 21:  Pay a teenager to shovel your driveway.  You could go outside and do it yourself or you could help one of the teenagers in your neighborhood earn some spending money.  Shoveling the driveway by hand is also better for the environment.  Research shows that small gasoline engines, like those used in snow blowers, produce the same amount of pollution as a car. 

Not high-faluting stuff, no technical science, nothing requiring insane levels of carpentry or that you live in a Geodesic Dome home.   But good, daily reminders of the steps you can take for a better world.

Because I'm always interested in the thrift side of the green movement, I asked Jodi Helmer where she found herself in the whole dilemma of thrift stores being simultaneously a "green choice" and an unfortunate by-product of our nation's unrelenting lust for consumerism.

"I fall somewhere in the middle, and here’s why," Helmer explained.  "We do need to evaluate our consumption habits.  We spend a lot of money on things we don’t need or and we don’t know their origins.  We spend less money on things that are expendable – we buy something really cheap and then use it for a year and no longer have a use for it."

She continued.  "We can’t change the fact that once somebody has purchased something, it’s out there.  I think the best place to get it is a GoodWill or a consignment.  Do we need to stop accumulating things and participating in mass consumption of goods? Yes.  But because so many of us have accumulated things, there’s nothing wrong with giving those products a second life." 

Helmer used an example from her own life.  She had been a career counselor at one point and had accumulated a wardrobe of work wear that she found herself no longer needing.  

"The suits already existed," she says.  "I needed them at a point in my life.   I could have tossed them in a trash bag.  I could have given them to Good Will.  I donated them to Dress for Success.  It’s a choice we can make.  It’s a great organization. "

Helmer also points out the obvious appeal of reuse. 

"Somebody was telling me this the other day, about donating newspapers and blankets to animal shelters," she recalls.  "Or pots and pans that are falling apart - you can donate them for food and water dishes for the dogs.  We can’t get away from needing new things.  But what we are going to do with the things we can no longer use?"  

According to Helmer,  about 4 billion tons of clothing every year get thrown away,  4% of which goes into the landfills. 

"We can’t feel guilty about buying the things that we need and want," Helmer says.  "It's  part of our culture.  But we need to reevaluate our idea of need.  And we need to rethink some of our wants."

I think I'm digging Jodi Helmer.  Check her more of her writing here.  

The Green Year makes a great housewarming or wedding gift, and it's ideal for anyone who is reticent about going green and just needs some simple encouragement. 

Book Review: Eco-Friendly Families by Helen Coronato

The rapid rise in popularity of eco-chic trends has resulted in an algal bloom of handbooks for consumers on how to "go green."

Couple this with the hip mothering set that seeks to baby-wear, breast-feed and otherwise develop an optimum beginning for their kids, and naturally, you wouldn't be surprised to see Helen Coronato's Eco-Friendly Families, (Penguin 2008), available for publication August 5th.

I admit I feared the book might have nothing more to offer than the basic green prescriptions found in banal women's magazines ("Ride your beach cruisers together to the farmer's market!"  "Pack lunches in tupperwear!")

But this book is packed with good ideas, many of which I found myself jotting down to do for myself. 

For example:  How can I remember to bring reuseable bags to the grocery store?

Assign a kid to carry them, Coronato suggests, creating a habit that a 6-year-old can handle, a simple task that a child can remember when a frazzled parent might not.  Or simply start every grocery list with the reminder "Remember bags!"

Yeah, yeah, the cynical mom might think.  My kid doesn't care about anything unless it's a plastic-wrapped Happy Meal toy.  How am I supposed to interest my 10 year old in taking care of the planet?

Take away toys or belongings that don't get played with, Coronato suggests.  Put them away in a clear-plastic storage tote, where they can see what they are missing.  Teach them a basic environmental premise:  "When you don't take care of your things, you lose them."

There's also a great discussion on packaging, and ways families can reduce their consumption of one-use packaging, as well as a primer on recycling - a practice that gets a lot of lip service, but not a lot of follow-through.  As I am constantly challenged by Micheal Pollan  and always seek  to "vote with my fork", I also appreciated the section on food choices and the rationale for eating locally and organically. 

Even if you've got the enviro-speak down, this book is a nice source for kid-friendly activities that are also planet-conscious.  Coronato has a wide array of things to do with kids to teach them about gardening or reusing materials, broken down by season and by age-group.   She also goes through an entire house, room-by-room, with suggestions for making green changes, from everything to decorating to appliance selections.  The green homeschooling set will want to have this book on hand and it would also make a nice gift for the earthy mother-to-be. 

A few quibbles, of course. 

One is the mention of Arbonne International, a direct-selling natural beauty products company, including a website for a specific vendor, leaves me cold, especially after reading Fuss Bucket editor Stacey Schultz's recent cover story in Brain, Child magazine about the sketchy practices of companies like Arbonne.  Such an intimate product pitch seemed out-of-place for a book.

Another worrisome part about the eco-trend is that it is clearly marketed toward a middle-class demographic, and Eco-Friendly Families reflects this.  While one might argue that the work of entities like Majora Carter's Sustainable South Bronx organization break the socioeconomic stereotype of what the environmental movement is, Coronato's book is definitely a resource that moms with time and money to spare will seek out.  Discussions of allowances, "greening" projects that include lawn, garden and garage, and exhortations to "live simpler" by donating excess possessions to thrift stores or charity overtly remind us what population is being targeted here.  Considering making home-made cleaners, while a great idea, does assume a luxury of time and a level of privilege that many families do not enjoy.  And while targeting the bloated suburban ideal - a model within which I currently live - is certainly the best place to start, I think that if the eco-trend hopes to flourish, it will find ways to make itself matter to all socioeconomic populations. 

The final issue I had about the book is that while packed with great activities and recipes and lists of organizations and websites and projects that are wonderful sources for families wishing to go green, the text lacked a bit of oomph.  The green movement does suffer from being preachy, and the tone of Coronato's writing feels a bit too wholesome, leaving me to fret that going green will turn us all into Ned Flanders. While I'm not averse to planting seeds and making homemade gifts, the cumulative effect of all these well-meaning projects gave me a bit of a curmudgeonly allergic reaction.  Here is where I would have appreciated a more personal touch from the author, not necessarily a warts-and-all view, but perhaps a few personal anecdotes on the struggle to go green.  For example:  How do you deal with having a kid with a Big Mac attack?  How do you explain to your toddler that throwing litter out of a car window is terrible idea?  How does it feel to try to implement these changes and have your teenaged, brand-obsessed daughter glare at you?  What do you do when your efforts back-fire? 

This last concern is quite minor, because, as I've stated before, being one of the hip, "Lazy Environmentalists" which is largely nothing more than a vapid marketing shill, is much worse.  Eco-Friendly Families has nothing of that glib, too-cool-for-school tone.  Instead, Eco-Friendly Families is a solution-packed book that seeks to roll up its sleeves and inspire the modern middle class to change their wasteful ways.  

Helen Coronato is the kind of environmentalist unafraid of the hard work that real change demands - namely, the kind our planet's predicament sorely needs.   

Book Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

If you live in the Midwest and have been noticing little bits of sparkly fluff explosively cartwheeling about the atmosphere late at night, don't panic.  It's not an alien invasion or evil wizards or anything like that.

No, that's just my mind, getting totally BLOWN AWAY, while I stay up late reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin, 2006). 

Okay, I admit that it's not like I never heard of a farmer's market or that I imagined what transpires in modern slaughterhouses to be a day at the beach.  But who knew that over 100 pages on the history of corn in North America could be so riveting?  Or mushroom hunting?  Or just plain old hunting after all?  Did you know that there are wild pigs in California?  The cocktail-party trivia factor alone makes this book worthwhile.

Since I'm late to the party on reviewing, many others have complained that Pollan offers too much description and not enough proscription for us clueless omnivores out there who think food comes from grocery stores, drive-thrus and vending machines.  But getting a feel for the industrial-food business and its strangle-hold on our gullets is unfortunately necessary these days.  Industrial food production is a long and winding chain that has very little to do with nurturing people or the environment for that matter.  You'd think people would be more interested in where the chow they shovel into their maws comes from, but this isn't the case.  Clearly, we've got better things to do, like not read books or continually sit on our asses.

Pollan reviews the ethics of meat-eating , with a primer on animal rights that made me want to read everything written by animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, but manages not to shove down your throat - excuse the pun - any dietary decrees.  After being told that margarine is okay but not to eat bread, I'm a bit weary of magic bullets, thanks.   

The discussion Big Organic left me feeling embarrassed for ever darkening the door of Whole (Paycheck) Foods, not to mention the constant pats on the back I gave myself for buying organic cherries and prebagged and pre-washed salad. 

(Long Rambling Aside:  Uh, let's define what the prefix "pre" really means in the case of the bagged and pre-washed salad.  Yes, it's clearly bagged.  But that little green inchworm I find in there from time to time?  Suggests that my definition of "washed" clearly diverges in a yellow wood with that of Earthbound Farms.) 

What I appreciated about The Omnivore's Dilemma is that the author leaves you asking more questions than you would have guessed you'd need answers to prior to unpacking his heavy tome. But that's cool with me.  Every 15 seconds I am told by some dumbshit from the modern media machine noteworthy proclamations like having fat friends makes you fat or no-shit-sherlock revelations like talking to babies makes them smarter than plopping them in front of televisions.

Enough with this rickety advice masquerading as certainty!  We are a nation obsessed with certainty, unable to sit still through the discomfiting consideration that complex concepts require. We need to wrestle with the omnivore's dilemma for a while, deal with our squirming desire to grasp at the nearest conclusion before making catchy-headline pronouncements. 

Since reading the book, I've calculated the logistics of buying local food and pondered the offerings of my local foodshed.  I've researched food preservation and wondered how I can figure out the proper timing to can and freeze according to the harvest.   I've considered the work involved in changing to a meatless diet.  I've been wracked with guilt for how much household wisdom we have lost, in just a few generations, about how to wrest our meals from nature in ways that don't produce giant lagoons of pig shit.  I'm cogitating and contemplating and making lists of everything I know and don't know.  I don't think I've been as moved to act by a book since I was a rambunctious liberal arts major.   

And I'm not the only one.  A great blog with a great name, The Ethicurean, (featuring an enviably fabulous tagline:  Chew the Right Thing) has been similarly inspired and offers constant comment on the state of our national eating disorder.  The Ethicureans follow the Gospel of Pollan and have introduced me to a great new acronym - S/O/L/E food, which encourages people to make choices that are either Sustainable, Organic, Local or Ethical. 

A pretty good guideline, and quite a ringer, too, with the homonym and double meaning.  But I'm still in the middle of my own personal food dilemmas and will be for some time to come, which underscores again to me what an important book Pollan has written. 

Food Not Lawns: Book Review

All Urban-Squatting Black Flaggers take note:  I am a homeowner.  Yes, I decided to rent out my hard-earned money so that I could live in a box that sits out in the rain and rots. 

Owning my home means I have a lawn, too.  A while back I selected some review titles for a publication that has since folded (Clamor Magazine) and one of them piqued my interest:

Food Not Lawns: How to Turn your Yard into a Garden and your Neighborhood into a Community by H.C. Flores

Wow, I thought.  I'm gonna re-haul my lawn, grow vegetables, freak out the neighborhood and transform my front yard into a meeting space where we can all get acquainted, eat raspberries from the bush, create harmony and collapse in a heap of naked bodies like in 70's nature porn...

Well.  Not quite.  But I did want to see about transforming my lawn.  Having nothing but boring grass seems like a waste of time, plus there's that mowing business, which requires gas and effort and a slight sense of timing.  And having a wild rumpus of plants where sedate, changeless grass once grew all supports my vision of living in a witch cottage, where children dare to ring the bell...

Unfortunately, Flores' doesn't offer much for someone like me.  There's a lot of rehashing about why I should give a shit about the environment (which I do) and why I should learn the pleasures of growing my own food (which I have) and why I should quit my job, work from home and be barefoot more often (yes, yes and no, I hate calluses.)  So after being beaten with the Eco-Stick, I'm sitting there waiting for the actual information that will help me:  How to transform this bitch of a monoculture surrounding my house? 

What Flores wrote with respect to that topic could have filled a pamphlet. (The gist?  Cover your lawn with mulch, let it kill the grass, add poop and soil, plant.  The End.) Instead, she goes on for 333 pages about why our planet is being pillaged and rapined and why we must acquire the painful urgency required to give a big stinging shit about it. 

I wanted to punch a hole in the book and scream "I Do!  I Do Give a Shit!  But I'm not getting rid of my refrigerator or my car just yet and I'm not making a water pond to filter greywater in the backyard because I live in Minnesota where there are 876 trillion mosquitoes who would love to breed there.  And I'm not raising chickens or doing skill shares in the park or dumpster diving behind greenhouses!  So put down your damn acoustic guitar and tell me how to convert the grass to the garden already!"

I mean, I'm a homeowner and so are my neighbors.  We obviously are paying mortgages to somebody.  So we're not going to quit our jobs and dread our hair and start raising chickens in the garage.  But can't we still make a difference environmentally-speaking?  I mean, the people who don't have lawns might be riding around on these kinda tall single-speed bikes and not eating meat and planting guerilla gardens, but shouldn't you try to meet the lawn-mongers where they mow? 

It's an interesting book, cram-packed with ideas and how-tos:  seed saving, garden layering, composting, working with children, kinship gardens, water-wise garden plans, consensus-building.  I hate to bash a book that offers so many solutions, except that I believe the author spent too much time belaboring the point about environmental degradation.  If I'm buying a book about transforming my lawn into a garden, chances are good that I'm already converted. 

So buy it (or dig it out of the dumpster behind the book collective, whatever) and keep it on the shelf as a good reference as you grow more ambitious and radical.   Don't be tempted to do everything at once, as I was, otherwise you'll get pissed at the book and throw it in your compost (which you can do, as it's printed on recycled paper).