Saturday Diary: Reducing my carbon footprint 'n@
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Just a year or so ago, our 14-year-old minivan died.
Its last official act was to take me to cover a Hillary Clinton rally for the Post-Gazette, but when I drove onto the California University campus, the air conditioning compressor unit failed, essentially shutting down the car -- locking the steering wheel, the brakes, immobilizing everything. I glided to a stop on campus, and within minutes campus police had arrived and ordered that the car be towed away.
I loved that minivan. Our babies grew up in it, becoming children squabbling in the back seat and then, teenagers either delivering the silent treatment or orders to let them off "upstreet" in Squirrel Hill. We had hoped to drive it into the ground, or, at least, to 200,000 miles, but our mechanic told us, forget it, so we said goodbye with the odometer reading 160,000 and, with gas prices hitting $4 a gallon, decided to try living with one car for a while.
For my ultra-frugal husband, it was all about saving money. For me, it was that, too, but also something more: a chance to reduce what the scientists and environmentalists call our carbon footprint.
I love the term, reducing your carbon footprint. It so neatly sums up a concept I don't quite understand, except that it has something to do with how the energy spent on my daily activities -- driving a car, burning an incandescent bulb or eating food grown half a world away -- contributes to global warming by emitting greenhouse gases.
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I am not the evangelist type. I have never seen "An Inconvenient Truth." (I don't like movies that make me anxious.) I am not a joiner, I don't do movements or sign petitions or paste bumper stickers on my car (except for one that says " 'N@").
I am also really, really bad about forcing my family to eat their vegetables, having decided long ago to not battle about food since I would lose, big time, to my chips-and-salsa-loving son, my hummus-and-pita-bread-loving daughters and my Stouffer's-chicken-pot-pie-and-big-bowl-of-ice-cream-loving husband.
No doubt if they read this, they will chortle at my hypocrisy, since I'm a Ben & Jerry's fan. Except that I also love the idea of vegetables and vow here and now that I would cook them -- squash gratin? green beans in brown butter? roasted beets glazed in a little orange juice and ginger? -- if someone in my house would just eat them.
Fat chance.
But there's this guy I know who started a great little business delivering boxes of produce, meat, dairy products and other food items all grown on farms within 150 miles of Pittsburgh. While no one in my house is particularly interested in his wares, I figured, why not try to help him out a little? So I got eight or nine people at the Post-Gazette to sign up, and now he's dropping veggie boxes off at the paper.
Still, our record of environmentally virtuous behavior is mixed. My husband often takes the bus to work, but the trip takes one full hour, door to door, compared to 20 minutes by car, and I -- an impatient sort, with carpooling duties to boot -- find it an egregious waste of time. I did buy a bicycle, although I hardly ever ride it (Pittsburgh's hills are annoying). But with 17-year-old twins agitating to drive, we had little choice, finally, but to buy a second car -- a friend's old Subaru for $2,000. If you're going to have two cars, better to re-use and recycle one of them, anyway.
Then there's the compost. In what has become an annual harbinger of spring, a truck bearing black, rich, chocolate-cake-like matter -- recycled leaves, grass and god-knows-what-else -- made its way down our narrow back alley a few mornings ago and, amidst much grinding and squealing of brakes, dumped eight cubic yards of the stuff along the side of the road. Every year we do this, my neighbors and I, and when the truck arrives, we stand around in the morning chill cracking jokes and feeling ... neighborly. And virtuous, too, at the thought of all those tomatoes that we'll grow ourselves.
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Michael Pollan wrote in The New York Times a year ago -- just around the time my minivan died -- that "the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us ... and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences."
In the age-old pantheon of virtues, though, I'm not exactly sure how growing one's own lettuce and tomatoes fits in (although I'm trying beets, carrots and eggplant in containers in a sunny spot on a walkway against the back porch this year). Is this the virtue of self-reliance -- an essentially solitary act -- or a gesture of community, a desire to do something that benefits the greater good?
Somehow, I know that whatever I'm doing will never be enough. But I love the small, incremental, ordinary act of planting a vegetable garden. I love the smell of tomato leaves on a hot day before a thunderstorm, and the peppery taste of spinach, endive, romaine and the salad mix that now goes by the fancy name of mesclun.
And I know that whatever emerges from that rich soil dumped in my back alley last week will taste better than anything I could buy in a store.
Now if I could just get my teenagers to stop taking those 30-minute showers ...
First Published March 28, 2009 12:00 am
