8 weeks of clean living

Here’s another great guest article from my friend Lauren. I think it’s very appropriate given that I worried, with my last post, whether the tone was too preachy or normative. Enjoy!

I recently watched an interesting, if simplistic, video of a man outlining his view of global warming and what should be done about it. At the end, the man urges his viewers to do their part by sharing his video with others and spreading the word about what individuals can do to help slow global warming. His message started me thinking, yet again, about how to balance my desire to spread the word and my desire not to perpetuate the unfortunate stereotype of the self-righteous, superior environmentalist.

These days, I spend a very large proportion of my time thinking about the environmentally-friendliness of my actions. I feel good about some of the things I make an effort to do, like drying clothes on a rack and eating CSA food, and guilty about things I have a hard time stopping, like using hot water and producing garbage. Many of my closest friends feel as concerned about environmental issues as I do, so around them I don’t have to bite my tongue. But I have many times watched friends and roommates and co-workers throw paper and glass bottles in the trash, or leave the water running for ages, and I don’t know what I should do.

I feel very strongly that the man in the video is right. I can make various eco-friendly changes in my life and feel good about it, but if I am one of very few who do so, relative to the population, what effect can it possibly have? Without major changes in public policy (which I strongly believe can and must happen, but that will undoubtedly take years), it is going to require many individuals choosing to make personal changes to produce any positive effect on various environmental issues. Therefore, isn’t it my responsibility, if I feel strongly about these issues, to try to increase that population?

Somehow, despite my conscious knowledge of this responsibility, it still feels just wrong to reprimand someone in their home or office for doing something eco-unfriendly. Or even to suggest that they do it another way. The meager solution I’ve found so far is that I can only try to suggest changes when I judge that the person will likely respond positively, or at least neutrally. I of course end up leaving some situations feeling sad that I can’t comfortably do more to help others understand the consequences of their actions, but if I hope to prevent resentment and loss of friends I don’t really see another solution. Any ideas?

A couple of days ago, I took the MTS Route 30 down to La Jolla and went for a pleasant snorkeling trip at the La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Preserve. The Preserve has a bunch of really cool fish, including tons of large phlegmatic orange ones, and accordingly there are many people in the water at any one time, so it’s also a fairly safe place to swim around.

The trip made me think about the environmental impact of how we entertain ourselves. It seems to me that activities appropriate and unique to one’s region can have a smaller environmental footprint (and cost less) than those activities that attempt to be as general as possible. For example, movies are the quintessential generalizable entertainment experience. No matter where one is or which theater one sees a movie in, the content and overall experience are essentially the same. On the other hand, going for a walk or a swim can take on vastly different dimensions depending on one’s location. In order to create a movie experience, gobs of energy and resources must be used in the production and the subsequent display of a film. In contrast, going snorkeling or bodyboarding or taking a hike in the mountains has no real energy cost outside of transportation, and if one lives nearby there really is no substantial energy cost to the activity (except for the up front costs of fabricating a snorkel, bodyboard or backpack).

In a way, these thoughts remind me of the native gardening trend, where only native plants are used in one’s garden in order to reduce water and pesticide use. By exploiting the properties of one’s region, one saves time, energy and effort while creating something unique compared to more idealized (and generalized) cookie-cutter lawns and gardens.

For these reasons, over the next few weeks I will continue to explore entertainment possibilities that are low-environmental-impact and appropriate to the San Diego area. I’ll mark them under the “Local” and “Entertainment” categories along the right hand side of this page.

In an earlier post, I talked about my plan to drive the speed limit for a long road trip from Southern California to Northern California. The experiment went pretty well, as I was able to stay near 70 for practically all of the trip. Additionally, the car I drove on the way back had a really easy to use cruise control function, which I used extensively and supposedly increased my fuel efficiency a little bit.

There is a ton of online guidance concerning all the ways one can increase the fuel efficiency of one’s car (for example here, here and here [pdf]) both mechanically and behaviorally. I’m primarily interested in the behavioral modifications that lead to increased fuel efficiency. In terms of behavioral suggestions, I think there is one central heuristic that encompasses all of them: a complete and total aversion to touching the brakes. When I drive, I’m essentially playing a mental videogame (in some cars, like the Prius, this videogame can be surprisingly literal) where I gain points for coasting and lose points for heavy acceleration and especially braking. In this way, I expect to lose as little fuel as possible to inefficient low gears and necessary stops.

Needless to say, there’s a little bit of tension between legality, safety and efficiency. Obviously safety should come first, but oftentimes legality, in the form of full and complete stops at stop signs for example, might be justifiably set aside for efficiency. If I’m going up a hill I’ll try to time things just right in order to coast to a very low speed at a stop sign and then accelerate away from it without ever having touched the brakes. Another trick is to touch one’s brakes extremely lightly so that the brake lights come on and it looks like one is stopping when really one is simply coasting then accelerating. So far I haven’t gotten a ticket, and if I do I imagine it might change my behavior.

Despite the fact that avoiding substantial acceleration and braking is in general safer and more economical, many drivers I see on the road act like they’re in some sort of pitiful race where everyone is continually stymied by traffic laws. The maneuver that annoys me the most proceeds as follows: I see that there is a red light 200 feet ahead and immediately take my foot off of the accelerator. The person behind me, unsatisfied with my resulting speed, floors it and passes me to the left. Said person then slams on their brakes at the light while I am still coasting towards it. When the light turns green, they are at a complete stop and I’m still going 20 mph, at which point I accelerate through the light and pass them. End result: I’ve used less fuel and caused less wear and tear on my car to end up well ahead of the person that passed me.

The only difference between me and this other driver is our driving mentality. How to change one’s driving mentality from “go as fast as possible at all times” to “slower can actually be faster and save me money (and never touch the brakes!)” is not quite clear to me, but given enough reflection it seems like an obvious choice.

One of the concepts that I imagine will turn up more than once in this blog is what I like to call a diseconomy of scale. I don’t mean it in the corporate sense, but rather in a personal sense where bigger is not necessarily better despite strong intuitions to the contrary. A simple example of this might be sodas at a movie theater. The base price for soda is very high and adding additional capacity to one’s soda is relatively inexpensive. Initially this seems like a simple economy of scale: the more soda one buys, the cheaper it is per ounce (and therefore the cheaper it is per unit of pleasurable drinking experience). However, other factors such as number of empty calories consumed and likelihood of having to run to the restroom during the climactic moments of the film are also increased when you spring for the extra $.30. Depending on one’s priorities and the rate of diminishing returns on the drinking pleasure, one might actually be paying more for a net negative, all things considered.

That said, I think housing decisions can often fall prey to fallacious economy of scale thinking. Presumably this is what leads to the often-mocked McMansion phenomenon. Illustrating an alternative to this kind of thinking, Inhabitat has a neat little article up listing their top five tiniest prefab homes. Obviously, as a house becomes smaller it takes much less energy to heat and cool it, light it, and less material to construct it, among other efficiencies. I want one!