Deciding to Decide

This month the APLS Blog Carnival is focused on decision making. Deciding to live a sustainable life is a big decision, which is made harder by the fact that is then followed by many smaller choices. How do people decide where to focus their time and energy? What are those areas of focus? And what drops off in the meantime? Below are my (past and current) answers; be sure to check The Good Life on March 18 to read about the decisions others have made.

When my family first made a conscious decision to live a greener, more sustainable life, it was made up of only two people – my husband and me. At that point our top priority was saving money so we could pay off our debt. For us that meant scaling back across the board, exploring the world of thrift stores and used cars, and finding hobbies that didn’t involve expenditures. Having such a clear cut objective made lots of decisions easy and helped us make many of changes to our life. Read more

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

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

Can Your Friends Make You Green?

This post is part of October’s APLS Blog Carnival. Check out what others have to say about October’s topic of proselytizing green at Greenhab on October 19 or join the conversation yourself!

This month’s topic immediately made me think about a headline I saw recently that read “Are Your Friends Making You Fat?” The article, which discusses how two social scientists, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, used data collected as part of the Framingham Heart Study to measure the impact people had on others in their life, included this quote:

By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.

Friends also help people go green, I wondered?

When we first started making changes to green our life, we often felt alone. That feeling of isolation was, in and of itself, a barrier. On Tuesday mornings, it was tempting to sleep in a bit and let the recycling truck pass us by since we were then the only family on our block who would drag a recycling bin to the curb. I could feel the influence of our neighbors’ actions even though they hadn’t said a word.

On the flip side, a number of the changes we have made were spurred by everyday interactions with others. A helpful parent stopped me in the school parking lot to let me know one of our tires was a bit flat; as a result we started regular air pressure checks. We saw a lady at the grocery store using pretty reusable produce bags and asked her about them; now we have eliminated that source of plastic into our home.

And I can see times when we have had an impact on others as well. A dinner party turned into a discussion about our CSA after folks saw information posted on our refrigerator, with one of the families then joining the CSA themselves. A birthday party shifted to a conversation about reuse after a mom commented on our sand/water table and I told her we bought it for $5 at Goodwill. And, thankfully, we are no longer the only family on our block recycling!

I want to influence others positively so will continue making green choices and looking for others who can teach me how to live a greener life. I believe strongly that actions speak louder than words so am more likely to proselytize the green life through my behavior but have seen again and again behaviors leading to conversations. And I am always up for a chat about greening families!

As I was wrapping this up I came across an article on the need for sociologists to study conversations around climate change on Nature.com. It is an interesting read so check it out!

Available Space Rather Than Size

This post is part of September’s APLS Blog Carnival. Learn how others feel their household’s size affects their efforts to live a green life at crstn85 on September 19 to read all the submissions.

This month APLS took me on a walk down memory lane. As I pondered these questions:

When does size matter?… what efforts that you make are easier to do because of your household size? Which are harder and make you wish there were a better way?

I thought about our current life, our life with a two-year old and a baby, the toddler and a pregnant mom on bedrest life, our adjustment to parenthood with our eldest child, and our life pre-children. Read more

Go Green and Save Money or Save Money and Go Green?

This post is part of August’s APLS Blog Carnival. Learn how to go green and save money by visiting Going Green Mama on August 19 to read all the submissions.

I appreciated the opportunity to write about this month’s APLS topic “Green on the Cheap,” in large part because it has given me the opportunity to make a public confession. I didn’t begin my green journey because I was troubled about the plight of polar bears or was appalled at the size of my carbon footprint. Nope, my initial reasons for going green had nothing to do with living an eco-friendly life. I simply wanted to get out of debt. Read more

A Day to Remember the Earth

This is my entry to the Affluent Persons Living Sustainably or APLS Carnival. April’s topic is whether Earth Day is still relevant. The selected entries will be hosted by Ruchi at Arduous Blog on April 22 so be sure to take a break from your Earth Day activities to read what everyone has to say. You can learn more about this and future carnivals at APLS.

I believe that while the significance of Earth Day has changed since its founding, there is still a need to designate a day to celebrate and honor the earth and to educate ourselves for the best ways to do so.

In my view, the current version of Earth Day is a cross between an anniversary and the keynote speech at a multi-day conference. I love my husband every day but our anniversary provides us a special opportunity to review our relationship, be proud of the accomplishments we have made, and re-dedicate ourselves to our future. Among the crush of everyday life, we need a reminder to think about how we care for the earth. Read more

(Teaching) Charity Begins at Home

I’ve written previously about the effect the book Beatrice’s Goat has had on our life but this month’s APLS Carnival topic of favorite charities got me thinking about the book’s impact from a different angle.

Beatrice’s Goat tells the true story of how a goat from Heifer International changed the life of Beatrice Biira and her family. This little Ugandan girl dearly wanted to go to school but her family was unable to afford the cost. Thanks to the gift of the goat, they were able to save up enough money for Beatrice to attend school, where she excelled. She came to the United States to continue her schooling and has now begun graduate studies in international development. Her plan is to return to Uganda upon graduation so she can expand opportunities for others.

This book led us to donate to Heifer International, a nonprofit that works with communities to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth, and also sparked multiple conversations with our children. We’ve talked about supporting charities before but this experience was different. Since they have been old enough to choose, one of their birthday presents has been the ability to select the recipient of a charitable donation. They usually pick the local PBS station, in part because they are big fans of The Biscuit Brothers.

But those donations were very tangible for them. The Biscuit Brothers perform regularly in our area. (They even sang “Happy Birthday” to one of our girls at a local concert when they saw her wearing an “I’m the Birthday Girl” button. Biscuit Brothers, if you read this, she is still talking about it more than two years later. Thank you!) And we often watch shows on PBS so that organization is a part of our life.The majority of our other donations have been local as well so they have met the people our donations have gone to or seen their programs.

Heifer International was different. The story of Beatrice and the subsequent donation we made to Heifer International helped them understand that there are people all over the world who need help. Even when things are fine here, somewhere somebody needs help. This experience also showed them that what we do here, in our home, can make a difference.

There are many who can use a helping hand right now. How will you make a difference today?

This is my entry to the Affluent Persons Living Sustainably or APLS Carnival. March’s topic is charity. The selected entries will be hosted by Green Resolutions on March 20 so be sure to visit and learn about some worthy charities. You can learn more about this and future carnivals at APLS.

Call of the Wild

This is my second entry to the Affluent Persons Living Sustainably or APLS Carnival. February’s topic is connections between experiences in nature and sustainable living. The selected entries will be hosted by Green Phone Booth on February 20 so be sure to visit and read what everyone has to say. You can learn more about this and future carnivals at APLS.

Both of my children have had a passionate love affair with the natural world since they were very young. Their reactions to all creatures great and small have helped me to see how omnipresent the natural world is and how powerful its hold on us. Read more

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