Maintaining Green Motivation in the Workplace

This post is my submission to February’s APLS Blog Carnival. This month’s topic is how to stay motivated about green living. Check Going Green Mama on February 24 for the carnival round-up and lots of great ideas to keep your motivation levels high.

Recently I posted about the changes to our family’s life, which led to some changes for Greening Families. With the launch of my husband’s business, we have made the switch to complete self-employment, something we have been working toward for years. We are already reaping benefits in terms of flexible schedules (we both attended our daughters’ Valentine’s Day parties at school with zero guilt – amazing!) but the change has also meant longer-than-normal hours for me over the last few months as Rich’s business – and income – got off the ground.

When I am racing a deadline, I sometimes have a hard time maintaining my motivation for green habits, especially the ones that take a little extra time. Since I know many others are starting or growing their own businesses these days, I wanted to share some tips to maintaining green motivation in the workplace. (I also wanted to encourage myself to keep following the green path so this article itself is a form of self-motivation!) Here are my top twelve tips for greening your home office: Read more

Simple Changes for Healthier Eating

Photo by chrissi

After posting an earlier article on how to afford organic food, I realized that it may have given the impression that I believe organic food is healthy food. I do believe, based upon loads of research (like this and this) and my family’s own experiences, that organic food is healthier than non-organic options of the same items.

However, I don’t believe that organic = healthy. A diet of chips and cookies is not high quality nutrition, even if the chips are made with organically grown potatoes and the cookies contain only unrefined sweeteners. Choosing organic food is only one consideration of many for healthier eating.

It can seem like eating healthier is amazing complicated but there are some simple changes you and your family can make that will have you all eating healthier soon. Here are a few: Read more

Family Friendly Ways to Save Energy

Image by hortongrou

Like many people, we’ve been reviewing all our bills and looking for ways to reduce our spending wherever possible. Since we’re also trying to reduce our use of nonrenewable resources, finding ways to save energy are bonus items. The Koala Sisters (aka our daughters) got into the act so we bring you four family friendly ways to save energy. Read more

I Want to Eat Organic Food But How Can I Afford It?

Photo by lusi

January is a time for resolutions, many of which focus on health and finances. To help people get off to a good start on their goals this year, I want to discuss a topic that comes up frequently as we chat with other parents. How the heck is it possible to eat organic food when finances are tight?

We’ve been able to switch almost all of our food purchases to organic items without increasing the money we spend on food. Here is what helped us: Read more

Family Friday: For the Birds

Photo by chidsey

Lucas Miller begins the new year with another fun and inexpensive activity that will get you and your kids out into nature. The Christian Science Monitor’s gardening section recently shared planting advice in Annuals and Perennials that Attract Birds to Your Yard so, if you have wee ones, know you can also explore the world of birding by bringing nature to you. Read more

Thinking About Next Steps for Greening Families

Pondering the future of Greening Families...

The last several months have been exceedingly busy for my family. My business has been more in demand than ever. As someone who is self-employed, I always feel an internal pull to make hay while the sun shines since future projects (and thus future income) are never guaranteed. I’ve had additional reasons to do just that since Rich launched his own business with his partners in 2009, making our family completely self-employed. It is fair to say that switch caused my normally high level of concern about finances to go up a couple of levels!

We believed in the new business, obviously, but expected it would take some time for Rich’s work level to ramp up to a point where he would bring in much income. As a result I took virtually every job that came my way happily. Then things began to move faster than we had anticipated for KELL Partners and Rich’s work level went up significantly. There are start-up costs to cover so his income still hasn’t rebounded but everything looks promising. Suddenly Rich and I were both working very long hours and trading off caring for our daughters, pets, and home to give each other uninterrupted time to complete work projects.

We’re still in that zone and I anticipate being here for some months to come. We’re still working to green our life but right now I want to spend my free time with my daughters (and my hard working husband when our work stars align!) rather than more time with my computer. What does that mean for Greening Families?

I’ve really enjoyed writing this blog and helping others who are interested in greening their lives but need to cut back right now. I’ve decided to post here to once a week, on Fridays, until things settle down a bit. We also tackle the broader topic of sustainable living on Family Profits, so check for helpful information there as well.

Why do you read Greening Families? As part of my “working smarter” push, I want to make sure I’m hitting the topics you’re most interested in so please let me know how I can best help you green your family.

Our Journey to Green

This post is a submission to December’s APLS Blog Carnival. Read about the journeys others have taken and are currently taking at The Conscious Shopper, one of my favorite green blogs, on December 18.

We’re deep into goal setting for 2010 around here so the topic for December’s APLS Carnival fit into our ongoing discussions perfectly. Below is an overview of the main vehicles that led us to begin making changes to live a greener life. I’ll be reviewing our progress towards our 2009 goals and laying out our goals for 2010 in a future post.

Our journey began more than ten years ago with finances as the impetus. As I wrote on our sister site, Family Profits, when we met both Rich and I were carrying significant student loan and credit card debt. The total when we finally added it up (it took us a couple of years to work up the nerve) was more than $180,000 worth of debt. That’s right, we were $180,000 in the hole even after making payments for several years. Not a good place to be.

We knew we wanted to pay off all our debt. Since we worked mainly in nonprofit organizations, we weren’t bringing home the Big Bucks so had to learn how to be super frugal. One of the unanticipated benefits of living frugally was that it was also a green lifestyle. We didn’t buy much of anything and the few things we did buy were often used. We were all over Reduce and Reuse because those actions saved us tons of money but we began to love the difference it made to our impact on the environment as well.

The next leg of our journey was spurred by medical issues. A week before our wedding, a driver ran a red light and T-boned my car, narrowly missing a direct hit to the driver’s side door. My car was totaled and I was injured pretty badly. My recovery took more than a year and led us to explore complementary and alternative medicine. Rich gave it a try as well and soon discovered that his back pain, for which surgery had been recommended, completely disappeared when MSG was removed from his diet.

We began to pay close attention to the food we consumed and as a result made many changes to our diet. We switched first to less processed foods, then to whole foods, then to locally grown organic options. Our spending on food remained fairly constant during these switches, in large part because we traded “convenience” for healthier options. A host of green living topics were revealed to us through these changes and we’re now huge proponents of organic farming, local food options such as CSAs, and the Slow Food movement.

The decision to become parents sparked the next shift. There is nothing like being completely responsible for the health and welfare of another living creature to get one’s attention! The more we learned about fetal and child development, the more concerned we became about items that had alwasy seemed innocuous. From baby lotion to sippy cups, there were serious matters to consider at every turn. While scientists argued about potential long-term effects and “safe” levels of exposure to various chemicals and compounds, it was clear to us that our first job as parents was to protect our children and so evoked the Precautionary Principle whenever we weren’t sure what to do.

New changes, like storing food in glass containers and making our own cleaning supplies, were implemented. And it became clear that the journey to a greener life was one that could last our whole lives.

Now that our daughters are a little older, the lives lived by other families is becoming the driver of change for us. We want all children, human and animal, to have the chance to grow up healthy and strong. We’re talking a lot this month about what we can do to help make that a reality but I can already see that more alterations will be coming to our lives soon. And I can’t wait.

Sustainable Living and You: November APLS Carnival

Photo by tatlin

Greening Families is pleased to be hosting November’s APLS Blog Carnival. I’ve appreciated the conversations on sustainability and green living that the APLS Blog Carnival has sparked so am glad for the opportunity to directly support their continuation. If you are interested in serving as a host of a future carnival, simply contact Robbie from Going Green Mama at goinggreenmama[at]gmail[dot]com. December’s carnival will be hosted by Erin at The Conscious Shopper. Be sure to visit her site in a month’s time to read where the discussion goes next.

The topic for November’s APLS Blog Carnival was how people have been affected by their efforts to live a more sustainable life. The questions posed included:

What have your efforts to live a more sustainable life taught you about yourself? Have you been able to change a behavior you initially thought you could not? What has surprised you about your own capacity in your efforts to live more sustainably?

Here is what folks had to say. Read more

Family Friday: Owl Prowls

Photo by Ivan Rahn

With the days getting shorter and the nights getting longer, what is a nature-starved family to do? Once again, Lucas Miller has the answer! This month he discusses how to go on an owl prowl with your kids. With a little preparation, warm clothes, and patience, you are sure to have a good time. And the possibilities for learning about the world around us are owl-t of this world!

This month we’re going to talk about owls.  Owls have fascinated and humans for millenia (they appear on many ancient petraglyphs and artifacts) but, with Harry Potter and a number of other children’s books featuring them prominently, they seem to be especially hip at this cultural moment.

Most owls are non-migratory so, even in the winter, you can still hear and even see them. Winter’s actually a great time to go on an “owl prowl” because you won’t have to keep the kids up way past bedtime since the sun sets earlier. Read more

Green Books Campaign – Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

Leave a comment below to be registered for Greening Families’ very first Giveaway. The randomly selected winner will receive a copy of this book, as well as the honor of being our first winner! The winner will be drawn on Sunday, November 22.

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris’ website.

Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore is not an enumeration of the scientific details of research on climate change, as I thought when I first saw the title. It is instead a discussion of the efforts to hide and distort scientific findings by an extremely well-funded and -coordinated public relations blitz that is using the same game plan used successfully to protect tobacco from regulation for years.

Both of the authors are very qualified to discuss these issues. James Hoggan has more than 35 years of experience in public relations. He is the president of Hoggan & Associates, an award-winning Canadian public relations firm which he founded in 1972.  Richard Littlemore worked as a reporter for twenty years for Canadian newspapers, including the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun, before he moved into freelance writing. He also sat as a delegate to the Canadian government’s Kyoto Implementation Process. Mr. Hoggan and Mr. Littlemore co-founded DeSmogBlog.com, for which Mr. Littlemore is the Editor-in-Chief, because they believe,

“There is a line between public relations and propaganda – or there should be. And there is a difference between using your skills, in good faith, to help rescue a battered reputation and using them to twist the truth – to sow confusion and doubt on an issue that is critical to human survival”

The book covers numerous crossings of that line, discussed in a clear and engaging manner. The information I found most enlightening and, frankly, distressing was the data shared on lobbying on the issue of climate change. Here are just a few of the facts shared:

• In 2004, the Center for Public Integrity reported that the oil-and-gas industry had spent more than $420 million on lobbying and political contributions in the preceding six years.
• More than 14% of that total – $60 million – came from one company, Exxon Mobil. (Yes, the same Exxon Mobile that has been earning record-breaking profits again and again and again.)
• Other pieces of the energy sector were equally active in purchasing lobbyists’ time. Southern Company is one of the United States’ largest generators of electricity, the great majority of which comes from burning coal, spent $25 million of lobbying between 2001 and 2004 plus another $4.4 million for political contributions.
• Between 2004 and 2009, there has been an increase of more than 300% in the number of registered lobbyists on climate change. There are now more than 4 climate lobbyists for each member of Congress.
• Spending for lobbyists has been increasing significantly. In 2007 alone, the oil-and-gas industry spent $82 million on lobbying. That increased 57% for 2008, bringing the total for lobbying in 2008 to $128.6 million.

Clearly the businesses involved believe their investment in lobbyists is worth it because they are not only maintaining this spending, even during this time of serious cost-saving measures, but also increasing it considerably. Given the articles linked above on Exxon Mobile’s record-shattering profits, I guess they are right.

The book contains much more explanation and detail about the extent of the movement to confuse, or at the very least postpone, a true dialogue on global warming and our world’s best next steps. I have to admit that PR is one of the professions for which I have not felt many positive feelings so the obvious depth of the authors’ feelings of betrayal in the first couple of chapters was initially startling. But as they laid out issue after issue and itemized common practices in manipulating the public discussion on global warming, I better understood the intensity of their outrage.

Global warming is a topic that has become incredibly politicized. The last chapter contains a piece of advice that surely everyone can agree makes sense.

“But this is not a time for easy answers. This is a time for right answers, which you will find only if you insist on the best sources, the respected journals and national science academies that have no agenda other than advancing the scope of human knowledge.”

The consequences of misunderstanding or underestimating the effects of global warming are too great. We need right answers. The information in Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming can help you discern where spin is getting in the way of the facts.

As mentioned above, Eco-Libris organized the Green Books campaign to highlight the fact that there are more eco-friendly methods available for book publishers. This book was printed on forest-friendly 100% post-consumer recycled paper, thus providing a market for all the junk mail and school worksheets we have been so diligently recycling. The paper was also processed chlorine-free. This means the publishers, Greystone Books, saved water as well as trees. As detailed on PlanetGreen.com, an 8×11 inch sheet of paper made with chlorine chemistry requires more than thirteen ounces of water (for each sheet!) while those made with chlorine-free technology require less than two ounces of water. After living through the hottest summer on record in Austin, which exacerbated our ongoing drought and pushed Lake Travis to its third lowest levels, I have a much deeper appreciation for water savings so was happy to see this! The book feels and reads exactly like our other books so the changes in the way this book was produced did not cause any loss of quality while still saving significant resources. I encourage you to check out the other books featured in the Green Book Campaign and to consider the publishing process utilized when purchasing books!

To help spread the word, Greening Families is offering its first Giveaway! To be entered to win our gently used copy of Climate Cover-Up, which we received as part of the Green Books Campaign, please leave a comment below on this post. We will announce the randomly selected winner on Sunday, November 22.

Logo designed by Susan Newman

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