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Completely Unplugged, Fully Green
Joanne Kaufman, New York Times
SIMON WOODS, who is 6, would like to play on a baseball team. His mother, Sharon Astyk, is sympathetic, but is also heavily committed to shrinking her family’s carbon footprint. “We haven’t been able to find a league that doesn’t involve a long drive,” she said. “I say that it isn’t good for the planet, so we play catch in the yard.”
That is one way that Ms. Astyk, a mother of four, expresses her concern for the environment. She has unplugged the family refrigerator, using it as an icebox during warmer months by putting in frozen jugs of water as the coolant (in colder weather, she stores milk and butter outdoors). Her farmhouse in Knox, N.Y., has a homemade composting toilet and gets its heat from a wood stove; the average indoor winter temperature is 52 degrees.
Many people who can comfortably use “carbon footprint,” “global warming” and “energy offset” in a sentence will toss a bottle or can into a blue recycling bin and call it a day. Those who are somewhat more committed may swap incandescent bulbs for compact fluorescents, rely on cloth shopping bags and turn to mass transit.
Then there are people like Ms. Astyk, 36, a writer and a farmer who is trying, with the aid of a specially designed calculator, to whittle her family’s energy use to 10 percent of the national average. She and her husband, Eric Woods, a college professor, grow virtually all their own produce, raise chickens and turkeys, and spend only $1,000 a year in consumer goods, most of which they buy used. They air-dry their clothes, and their four sons often sleep huddled together to pool body heat.
They began this regimen in 2002. “My husband and I started to talk about climate change, and oil prices were going up,” Ms. Astyk said. “The other factor was a justice issue. There was a great disparity between the resources used by the third world and by us, so we decided we had to cut back.” Some people may view Ms. Astyk and her family as role models, pioneers who will lead us to a cleaner earth.
Others may see them as colorful eccentrics, people with admirable intentions who have arrived at a way of life close to zealotry. To others they come across as “energy anorexics,” obsessing over personal carbon emissions to an unhealthy degree, the way crash dieters watch the bathroom scale.
Ms. Astyk has heard such talk but says her neighbors’ attitudes have softened as energy prices have risen. “People have moved gradually from ‘Sharon is a fruitcake’ to ‘Sharon is a fruitcake who might make some sense,’ ” she said.
… To some mental health professionals, the compulsion to live green in the extreme can suggest a kind of disorder.
“If you can’t have something in your house that isn’t green or organic, if you can’t eat at a relative’s house because they don’t serve organic food, if you’re criticizing friends because they’re not living up to your standards of green, that’s a problem,” said Elizabeth Carll, a psychologist in Huntington, N.Y., who specializes in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
Certainly there is no recognized syndrome in mental health related to the compulsion toward living a green life.
(17 October 2008)
Sharon Astyk’s reaction to the article: I was a Whore for the Mainstream Media.
Congratulations to Sharon and the other greenies for making it into the NY Times. It’s a very important article, an early step in getting social acceptance.
I wouldn’t be too upset that the article doesn’t present the exact views we might want. These things take time, and the pioneers always appear odd to the mainstream. Women’s rights, anti-slavery, organic food, worker’s rights – these took decades and centuries to become accepted.
Besides if the NY TImes were to get it right, there would be no need for people to buy Sharon’s books. (See a recent review of her “Depletion and Abundance”.)
The suggestion in the article that this way of life might be a mental disorder was particularly rich. Let’s see, green living is healthy, ecologically responsible and financially prudent. It promotes family and community values.
If this be madness, let’s have more of it! -BA
A tipping point for the climate action movement
Ruth Ratcliffe, Green Left
“How can we maintain a safe and habitable climate? That’s the question we need to pose to build this movement”, Kirrliee Boyd from the Adelaide Hills Climate Action Group told a workshop at the Climate Emergency — No More Business as Usual conference on October 10-11.
The conference was a collaboration between the Australian Education Union (SA) and the newly formed Climate Emergency Action Network (CLEAN). More than 250 people from a wide range of organisations and communities participated in a day and a half of plenums and workshops that marked an important step forward in Australia’s climate action movement.
… Permaculturalist and solidarity activist Robyn Francis reflected the outrage of everyone present that hundreds of billions of dollars have been almost instantly found by governments to bail out financial institutions, yet very little money has been made available to tackle climate change.
Francis spoke passionately about the example of Cuba, which overcame a “peak oil” crisis in the early 1990s — when imports of oil, food and goods from the USSR dried up almost overnight — largely through a “permaculture revolution”. Today, she said, Cuba is the only country that is “living within its ecological footprint” while also providing good quality health, education and other services to the whole population.
Dave Kerin, convenor of Union Solidarity in Victoria, told conference participants that “growing vegies in the backyard, building actions in your communities … all of these are important. But there’s only one group on this planet with the power to save it: organised labour.”
Kerin argued that, far from being threatened by the changes to production necessary to avert climate catastrophe, working people stood to benefit from such changes. He quoted Greenpeace research that shows that if Australia adopted a 10% mandatory renewable energy target (the target is currently 2%), more 14,000 new jobs would be created.
(18 October 2008)
Gus Speth: Change Everything Now
Jeff Goodell, Orion magazine
One of the nation’s most mainstream environmentalists says it’s time to get a lot more radical
Interview with Gus Speth
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JAMES GUSTAVE “Gus” Speth’s office at Yale reeks of Old World charm, with a high ceiling and dark, wood-paneled walls adorned with souvenirs from his travels in Africa and Asia. Speth, sixty-six, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is a tall, genial man who wears conservative striped ties and speaks in a quiet southern drawl. If America can be said to have a distinguished elder statesman of environmental policy, Speth is it. Before he arrived at Yale, he cofounded the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most powerful environmental groups in the U.S., then went on to serve as a top environmental policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter. In 1982, he founded the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, which he headed for a decade. He also served as a senior advisor to President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team and spent seven years as the top administrator in the Development Programme at the United Nations.
It’s not surprising that Speth would end up in a wood-paneled office at Yale. What is surprising, however, is that he uses his bully pulpit in academia to push for a 1960s-style take-it-to-the-streets revolution. His new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale University Press), is nothing less than a call for an uprising that would reinvent modern capitalism and replace it with, well, a postmodern capitalism that values sustainability over growth, and doing good over making a quick buck. Sound idealistic? It is—but that’s part of the book’s appeal. Speth goes beyond finger-wagging to indict consumer capitalism itself for the rape and pillage of the natural world. His proximate concern is global warming and the impact it will have on civilized life as we know it
(September/October 2008 issue)
How do we deal with an energy crisis?
Adam Testa, The Southern (Illinois)
More than 30 years have passed since President Jimmy Carter called for the creation of a national energy policy to address the nation’s greatest peacetime challenge of his life – ensuring reliable energy for the nation.
Carter’s message went largely unheeded in Southern Illinois and elsewhere until recently, when working people began feeling the pinch of higher utility rates, skyrocketing gasoline prices and lost purchasing power for the oil-related necessities of life – food trucked to groceries and consumer goods hauled to stores.
Today, people are changing their lives in our region to address the new realities of energy – conserving fossil fuels by taking steps at home to reduce their consumption of electricity, switching to high-mileage vehicles or reducing the amount of miles they drive by switching to bicycles.
On the home front
Bill King said the recent rate hike by AmerenCIPS was the impetus to change the way he uses electricity in his Benton residence.
“Since CIPS socked it to us, we’ve changed all our light bulbs to the energy efficient ones and instead of having all the lights on, we run basically one light and our TV at night,” he said “Also, when we buy appliances, I really read the ratings now.”
(18 October 2008)
