Awareness of Three Realms of Improvement

 

This lens may help me catch a light switch, and flick it off, that before I would have missed. It's tuned me to the faint hum of the laser printer in my office closet that I now unplug when I'm not printing (after I learned that laser printers, while turned OFF, consume 17% of the electricity they use while in use!). It helps me assess how I spend my recreational time so that I more often choose healthier, less energy-intensive ways to entertain myself. It helps me think about my company's work practices and analyse the logistics of our communications, client meetings, and co-worker interactions so that we're able to perform the same work we have for eleven years while using a fraction of the gasoline and electricity that we used to (even with having more than doubled our staff). This lens helps me perform a similar analysis at home, looking at where and what we buy for groceries, how we plan our errands and weekly routine, and how we choose to spend our family time, so that we're now burning roughly a third of the gasoline that we did just over a year ago, and our electricity use is down by close to 20% (our natural gas use is down only slightly, but we're working on that -- just completed an insulation project a couple weeks ago so watching the meter!)

 

My lens tends to use three different focal distances too: 

 

1. the little things that we can do every day to reduce our energy consumption and gradually shift our habits toward that lighter footprint we want

2. the bigger things that cost money, planning, and time, but have the potential to return greater efficiencies and reductions

3. the community things that can have an effect beyond our household, and so ultimately can make a more substantial difference

 

When I began this project, the first two items were on my radar, but I hadn't thought much about the third. Now I understand that the community things are really the most important of all. Technology and our mobile culture have taken aspects of community common to our parents and grandparents out of our lives. My favorite thinkers on lower impact living (Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan) have me convinced that re-introducing some of the fading communal arts and events into our modern lives is a way not only to feed our human need for close society, but also a way to make it easier and more natural for us to share resources and collectively consume less. 

 

Much of this coming year, 2010, for me will be about rediscovering and trying out historical community habits such as neighborhood farming, chore sharing, and resource sharing. I'm not about to go beating pots and pans around my neighborhood and trying to get my neighbors to do as I do or think the way I think, but I will start some neighborhood projects and invite those who are interested to join in.