{"id":8729,"date":"2009-06-23T12:33:13","date_gmt":"2009-06-23T17:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=8729"},"modified":"2009-06-23T12:33:13","modified_gmt":"2009-06-23T17:33:13","slug":"the-accidental-environmentalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2009\/06\/the-accidental-environmentalist\/","title":{"rendered":"The Accidental Environmentalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never really set out to be environmentally conscious–not that I don’t like the idea, of course, just that other priorities . . . well, took priority.<\/p>\n

(In fact, I griped in a previous post<\/a> about the intersection of environmentalism and feminism.)<\/p>\n

But I was reflecting on our household this morning, and realized that if you aggregated all of the data, I would imagine that our family’s environmental impact is probably in the very lowest strata (for Americans, anyway, but that’s another post) of energy and resource use.<\/p>\n

We have two cars, yes, but my husband works from home and I try to spend as little time in the car as possible. (Not for environmental reasons, but mostly because I think the other half of that lovely little Mormon phrase about home being a heaven on earth should be about car trips with kids giving you a preview of . . . a different kingdom.) So we average less than three tanks of gas per month between the two of us.<\/p>\n

I bought a bunch of those re-usable grocery bags. Not to save the planet, but to save my children from the spray of profanity that accompanies the spray of pickle juice when those wafer-thin plastic bags break over the wood floor. (The plastic bags that do make it into this house are re-used as trash bags.)<\/p>\n

We don’t buy many processed foods. (I’m too cheap. And lots of sodium makes me feel oogy.)<\/p>\n

We don’t eat a lot of meat. (Although there’s usually a little in each meal. That’s just a personal preference thing.)<\/p>\n

We’ve filmed our windows and are replacing the roof in a color so light that we had to plead with the HOA to permit it . . . not to save the whales, but because we’ve already<\/em> had over a month of +\/-100 degree days this year. (If I knew what the emoticon for “ugh” was, I’d use it here. That, or despair.)<\/p>\n

We buy lots of things used (books, a washing machine, homeschooling materials, a rug for the living room, yet another bookcase) because I’m cheap and craigslist is fun.<\/p>\n

And while I was tinkering around online, exploring the wonders of deregulated energy, I discovered that we could have 100% renewable energy for a whopping extra 10$\/month. So that was the one environmentally correct decision that I made at personal expense but, good grief, it’s only 10 dollars. It felt churlish to go with coal when given that option.<\/p>\n

So here’s the punchline: I’m guessing we use fewer resources than 80-90% of Americans, despite our larger-than-average house, family, and financial resources. And it isn’t because of an ideological commitment. So what does this imply for efforts to protect our natural resources?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never really set out to be environmentally conscious–not that I don’t like the idea, of course, just that other priorities . . . well, took priority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8729"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8731,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8729\/revisions\/8731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}