Virescent

I can already feel the swell of righteous anger- I know, I know. Valentine’s Day is a dreadful prospect for everyone involved. You’re either under pressure to come up with something really special- flowers! roses! diamonds! dinner reservations! all of the above!- for your snuggly-pumpkin, or scared and wondering if your snookie-poo is coming to come through with something really special for you, or if you haven’t got a cuddle-woogums then, well, you’re cranky. About this time of year, I start hearing the anti-establishment rants from males of my aquaintance- Valentine’s Day is created by advertisers to convince women that we have to buy them things and then they get mad at us when we don’t and everything’s pink and those candy hearts are gross and I hate it and etc.

They’re right, except for the candy hearts thing. Apparently the greeting card industry has an award named for the lady who invented the Valentine’s day card. And now they’re capitalizing on haters by selling Anti-Valentine’s day cards! Genius!

Plus, all this shiny red waste. Big packages for little waxy chocolates, plastic wrap, cheaply-made toys, forests of obnoxious cards, tons and tons of dying flowers shipped all over at exorbitant prices…and all the hippies crying green ecotears. Why are we making love so unsustainable?

Some go so far as to declare their non-participation in this non-event: I will not bow to the follies of popular culture, I above the red and pink pressures. Works perfectly if you’re single, but you try explaining to your wimbly-bipple that you’re not going to be extra-sweet to him/her/it for one little day just because somebody had the gall to suggest that you do so. (Here’s a helpful tip: this will always go poorly for you. If it doesn’t go poorly for you, dump him/her/it and look for someone with a backbone.)

Me, I like Valentine’s Day. I’m looking forward to it. I think you’d like Valentine’s Day, too, if we made a few rules for it. Here’s my proposal:

1 ) No gross, over-processed red and pink-wrapped chocolates/candies. “Gift Food” is not a gift, nor is it food. Try making something actually tasty.

2 ) No stuffed animals (ok, unless it’s your best friend from forever and you compete to see who can come up with the most ridiculous one even though she always wins, even the year you found the purple snake with heart spots, because of that one vibrating pink lion…).

3 ) No store-bought cards. “I Love You” doesn’t count if it was written by a committee, mass produced, and purchased. (Try making a pop-up card. Fun, and demonstrative, and just think of all the things you can…never mind.)

4 ) Both halves of the couple must plan nice things for their hunnie-muffins.

5 ) If you do buy jewelry, don’t symbolize your love with a product of bloodshed, underpaid sweat, and intestinal delivery. Go vintage, or fair-trade, or lab-grown, or recycled, or at least certified. And similarly with flowers- why are you killing so many pretty things to tell her she’s pretty? Get her a live plant if you can (let her kill it). But really,

6 ) You don’t need to spend money at all. This is about love, and celebrating strong relationships, and taking the time to appreciate having your puddle-widgkins. So do that in a way that’s just for the two of you, and not for Hallmark/Godiva/DeBeer’s, also. Two’s company, three’s just wrong.

7 ) Call your parents and grandparents.

8 ) If you haven’t found your ookle-dumpling yet, see 7). Then don’t take it so personally (statistically you’ll find your mumbly-cupcake someday, and it’s not like angst makes you more attractive, unless you’re one of those people), take a deep breath, and go hang out with cool people and do fun things.

What do you think? A dash of anti-consumerism, a pinch of anti-advertisements, and a shot of self-confidence makes Valentine’s more sustainable, and maybe even bearable.

Happy New Year! Now’s apparently the time to look back on 2007 and reflect on how far I have, sustainably, come. Seeing as I do that about once a month anyway, and I’ve only had this deal going since September, I’ll spare you the complete recap for now. I hear tell that others also use this time to make resolutions. That’s not how I roll, but I’ll go ahead and at least make another monthly goal.

After a 3-state Christmas tour, this eco-tryer was done. Mostly. Done enough to write about it, but not done enough to stop playing that Christmas music yet. I’m hoping my loved ones will stage an intervention soon, because I’m getting sick of it.

There were some pretty sustainable aspects of my season. I purchased no wrapping paper or boxes, but I did use wrapping paper left from last year (it’s not metallic, so it can be recycled). Once all that stuff is gone, I’ll reconsider how I wrap gifts. I padded all my shipped gifts with my shredded papers. Bows and gift bags were saved for reuse. Most of my decorations were left over from last year- I only purchased two strands of LEDs. Since they were a funny color, I didn’t use them on my tree, but I did use them. I did use strands of inefficient lights, but I plugged them in infrequently (It helped to not be home very much for the holidays).

I worked hard to make the gifts I gave as low-impact and useful as possible, and it paid off. Talking with folks kept my list guess-free, and for far-flung relatives my mother was an invaluable source. Since the number of places selling eco-friendly/fair-trade things is still limited, the shopping was pretty simple for me, and I was done much more quickly than last year: that added sustainability of a non-environmental kind. I am especially proud of giving my very conservative grandfather Gingrich’s “Contract with the Earth” for his Dec 26th birthday- excellent compromise. As for my haul, well: my indoor composter will arrive any day now! Soon, I’ll be reducing “up to 120 lbs” of food scraps a month to useful garden crud! I also received a wonderful movie, The Day After Tomorrow (tagline: This year, a sweater won’t do), which is sort of a documentary of climate change occurring, only it’s entirely made up. I also got The Core (We killed the planet), which might not be about climate change, but certainly involves ridiculous weather. Everything else was pretty, useful, and appreciated, especially the abundance of soups.

At the same time, I did a lot of driving (three states worth!), and I threw away much more than usual (wrappings for new things, fast food containers, staying in a home without recycling access). The LED light experiment was disappointing, and I need to work on that more wisely next year. Also, my Christmas tree started to smell funny a few days ago, sort of like inappropriately aged cheese, but I dumped in some lemon juice in the tree water and then an large amount of vinegar, and either I’ve gotten used to it or the vinegar did the trick.

So, new goal for the month: I was going to do something with my composter and food waste, but since that’s not together yet, I’ll wait on it. I have a bunch of stuff, and I just got more stuff. I’m going to spend the new few weeks reducing the stuff I own- clean out my closets. Appropriate for the new year, and necessary if I’m going to be able to put any of my new stuff away.

And Happy Whatever You Do to you and yours.

See, it’s a metaphor: my ecofriendly transport, wrapped in the inefficient lights. I’m getting better, but I’ve got a ways to go.

First, to establish how dire the LED situation was, this photo of my tree in regular incandescent bulbs and my garland in LEDs:

As you can see, they are decidedly, icily blue. I decided to wrap them around my garland, since they actually look nice there, and to reuse my regular lights for the tree this year. Next year, I know to look early and often for yellow-white LEDs. They come in lots of bulb colors, too, and some have happily tacky shapes, like candy canes or whatever, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find some yellow or gold ones.

So, my LEDs are now at peace. And my tree is decorated! I forget, every year, how excited this makes me, and how much I always want to just stay home all day and sit with my tree. She’s got red and white glass balls and some gold spangly wire I saved last year, and almost everything else on it was given to me by my mother from our family’s tree- a starter kit. And all the presents you see waiting under it are recycled or fair trade or made from organic ingredients- I did pretty well following my own gift guide this year, and ended up saving worlds of time and money, since I found everything I wanted online or at Ten Thousand Villages. Giant actually had a decent selection of fair trade/organic (FTO) coffees- in their specialty foods aisle, not the coffee aisle- and Whole Foods has a passel of FTO hot chocolate. Thus, my shopping is nearly done, too.

Ok, I’m going to go sit with my tree and drink some FTO hot chocolate, and yeah, turn on Christmas music.

Roll over, solar: some awesome guy in Japan hooked up an aquarium’s electric eel to its Christmas display.

“If we could gather all electric eels from all around the world, we would be able to light up an unimaginably giant Christmas tree,” Minawa told Reuters Television.

Thanks to Minawa, one day I’ll be charging my ceel phone with my slippery friend, “Sparky”- if he can be spared from his work on the unimaginably giant tree.

I keep promising tree pictures, and then letting you down. I’m sorry. A combination of Indiana, two violent colds, and final exams are going to prevent the tree from being fully dressed for at least another week. We did put up the LED lights, though, so I could at least have something besides a naked tree to look at, but that’s actually caused me a dilemma.

The LED light strings are a very bright, blue-white light. It’s very sterile, and completely unlike the cheery yellowy glow from the regular strands of lights I have used on trees and in classier dorm-room decorating all my life. By the by- the BBC has a helpful story on what LED lights are and some of their promising applications, and they mention this problem of cold, blue-based light. Now, I’ve heard the same complaint about CFLs- they don’t give off the quality of light people are used to from regular tungsten bulbs, I hate the way they look, wah. I used to think these people were whiny. It’s the future! Get a decent lampshade! The white translucent shades and the vaguely yellow tinge of my walls make my CFL glow pretty homey, actually. Lighting designers are working on this, slightly reluctantly. Apparently the bigshot design people love incandescent bulbs- their shape, their glow, their iconic status- and hate the way CFLs shine.  But more and more are playing with ways to make the compact fluorescents appealing (hey guys:  try Ikea lampshades and “apartment complex off-white” walls).  Plus, since they don’t get as hot as incandescents, the designers can put materials closer to the bulb and not worry about combustion.  So that’s exciting for them, right?  Moving into a brave new well-lit world?  Anyway, LEDs are supposed to solve all this because their light comes in lots of colors, depending on the chemicals used (see the BBC article).  My problem now is, they use blue for almost everything, including “white”, and I hate the way they look.  Wah!

I like my gold and red tree decorations, and the old lights made it look so nice.  The LEDs will make it look awful.  Granted, they’d look great with silver ornaments, and blue decorations (Hanukkah people, LEDs are perfect for you!).  And if you mix lots of colors on your tree, then LEDs work fine.  All the stuff I have is red and gold, though.  I don’t want to buy a new set of ornaments just to make my lights look not sad.   Maybe they sell non blue-tinged white LEDs?

So now the guilt sets in.  Use LEDs on the tree and suck up that they’re stupid-looking, or use the older lights and suck up some extra power? I won’t have to buy any new sets of lights- I still have them from last year, and they’re not too tangled.  And there are plenty of other places I can put my LEDs- on the balcony, or the bookshelves, or in my garland.

This is going to take some time to mull over.  Fortunately, I haven’t got time to decorate the tree now, anyway.

First, I have a request to make of you. There’s a massive food shortage at food banks around the country. The Capitol Area Food Banks can use all the donations they can get for this holiday season (and all the time, really). They’re having a non-perishable food drive December 14th (next Friday), so if you can stop by one of their truck locations in DC/MD/VA and give, or get something to one of their drop-off centers at that website some other day, it would mean a lot to a lot of hungry people. Best way to make your holiday sustainable is to help make sure other people have a good one, too.

Second, I have a Christmas tree. After a couple (or maybe 4…) wrong turns, we located Oak Shade Farm, which is somewhere out near Rixeyville, VA- a little over an hour’s drive from where 66 and the Beltway intersect. It’s actually not that hard to find, we just had a few difficulties involving signs and reading them and such. Anyway, I found my tree. There it is, in its live, organic glory. It’s a white pine- very fat and fluffy, and about seven feet tall. The finding and cutting and tying-on-my-car’s-roof didn’t take very long, which is good, because I had some important bunny-holding to accomplish. Yes, they fit in one hand, and they were so soft it was difficult to determine when one was petting them. As an additional benefit, adorable children were also attracted to holding the adorable bunnies, so there was this perfect storm of cuteness hovering over the tree farm. If you’re looking for a tree, head to Oak Shade: free hot cider, bunnies, mountain vistas, and big nice-smelling organic trees for $40 and under. Even with the cost of gas, that makes them less expensive than the scrawny, sad trees in lots around here.

My tree is now up and watered, and is waiting for its trimmings. I picked up a couple of strings of LED Christmas lights today. Target had a small selection of them, but it looked as though the lights had already been picked over. I have a few strands of regular Christmas lights already, but LED lights use about 1/10th of the energy of the regular lights, last years and years longer, and emit much less heat, so there’s very little danger of them igniting your tree if it gets a little crispy. Regular light strings tend to use much more energy precisely because they lose so much of it to heat. So LEDs are more expensive to begin with, but they’re safer and last longer. Well, actually, from my experience people give up on light strings because they balled them up the year before and can’t get them untangled the next year, and LEDs aren’t going to solve that particular issue. So wrapping them up neatly is just as big a deal as having a good set to begin with. Maybe the extra up-front cost will be an incentive to treat them more carefully? I’ll post pictures when I get around to sprucing her up (it’ll be hard, she’s such a pine…).

For our latest installment of “Green Issues only Rich People Have”, we examine how to eco-up a Museum/Opera/Awards/Disease Gala for hundreds of the Well-Connected. These events typically involve elaborate catered meals of unpronounceable foods and literally tons of tailor-made decorations and fresh-cut flowers. Sure it looks pretty, but was Mother Nature invited this year?

After the party, most of the stuff gets thrown out. Things like tables and tableware are normally rented, and attendees and workers can generally snag the lighter decor and flower arrangements to take home for one last gasp, but that’s only a small part of the overall set up. The NYT describes the halting efforts of expensive event planners across the US to fancify their incredibly wasteful to-dos with more environmentally friendly decorations. Some have used recycled objects in their designs- one guy glued soda cans and bottles caps to the windows of the Barneys New York store for their Christmas display (hey, NYCityfolk, can you go visit the storefront and take some pictures for me?).  Another guy shredded 3 tons of paper, soaked it in organic flame retardant, and rolled it into balls to hang from the event space’s ceiling. Let’s just say that I never get to do anything like that at work. There’s no word on how the food is being done better yet, though (more organic? Who gets the leftovers?).

What can we learn from this for our own holidays? The Barneys guys offers a suggestion:

“You can do this stuff at home…You can go gold with decaffeinated Diet Coke, and there’s lots of blue and silver in drinks like Pepsi and Red Bull. You can make wreathes out of old silver pot scrubbers. We’ve done a green version of the 12 Days of Christmas, which I will happily sing to you and which ends with ‘a Prius in a pear tree.’”

A professor from the University of Florida makes an apt observation on this juxtaposition of Ultimate Consumption and Going Green:

“It’s all about symbols and sensation,” said Professor Twitchell, whose many books deal with how marketing shapes a society. “That’s what I find so fascinating about our Prius culture. We know things are wrong. We don’t know what we can do. We can’t know. And so we do what marketers encourage us to do to get those feelings we want to have. We buy the Prius, we recycle at the party, pretty much overlooking the fact that what we know about these objects and these actions comes from their marketing.”

Good call, Twitchell. Making actions sustainable requires reflection and research, especially for an event that is rooted in excess. The very nature of huge parties becomes the display of wealth- “We can afford to drop the GDP of a small nation on one night to impress you and make you give us money/thank you for all the money you gave us so we could throw this party! This is a normal impulse!” So maybe let’s rethink the whole concept of spending-money-to-awe for these things.  I feel like Rich People would be cool if maybe for one event, say, a cancer fundraiser, the organizers just donated 95% of the budget to actual cancer and had them all over to the MOMA for Brunswick Stew and beer. Everyone loves Brunswick Stew and beer. Do they have cancer fundraisers at the MOMA? I would know if I were rich. Anyway, they could decorate with some big collection boxes and give some markers to kids with cancer so they could make signs labeling the boxes, and boom, funds raised. That’s not exactly a “green” plan yet, but there’s a base you can easily work from: organicise the stew, get the beer from a local brewery (organic brewery?), compost or donate the leftovers to the needy, and recycle/auction off the kid’s posters, and there goes your impact.

Now that I have illustrated why I will never be a good expensive party planner, I wish to leave you with the description of the decorations for the alleged “greenest party of the year”:

The décor was supplied by Gelitin, four male Viennese conceptual artists who wore high heels and buckets on their heads but no pants, and who spent the evening building a plywood structure over the bewildered guests’ heads. Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor, sang a 16th-century melody called “Flow My Tears.” And then the Gelitin members, along with three Icelandic artists, also men, from a collective called Moms, took the buckets off their heads and urinated — with dead-eye accuracy, said Dodie Kazanjian, a Vogue editor and one of the events’ hosts — into one another’s pails.

Gives me an idea for my holiday party…

It’s 4 weeks from Christmas Day, and this is an intimidating number for me, given that my Halloween decorations are still up. Fortunately, Rockefeller Center is better prepared for the season than I am. They’re going sustainable, too- their Christmas tree is getting 5 miles of super-efficient LED lights, available in smaller lengths at stores near you. Plus they cut it down with a handsaw, instead of the gas-powered chainsaws. A handsaw! Seriously, this tree is gigantic, and the sweat equity puts some oomph in the season. And they’re going to turn it into lumber for Habitat for Humanity once the season is over.

The article contains a few more tidbits about changes Rockefeller Center is making to be green year-round, with the largest solar roof in New York City and plans for the installation of a green roof. This gives Rockefeller Plaza-based NBC’s fluffy “Green Week” (I posted about it here) much more respectability. And the solar panels are from GE- Jack Donaghy would be proud.

My tree won’t be up until Sunday, when I pick it up from the organic tree farm. I promise photos. Meanwhile, if you’re casting about for gift ideas (after my BHA Gift Guide! Surely you’re all set…) check out these plans from the New American Dream website for thoughtful, inexpensive, and ecohappy gifts. They also have link to “Simplify the Holidays” with a lot of other advice in it for making the holiday season more sustainable and less-consumer driven.

I’m breaking from blogging over the holiday, but I’d like to start a little thanks giving here in the meanwhile. The prompt: what green technology are you thankful for this year?

I’m thankful for Dongtan, a new Chinese city planned to minimize energy use and be all sorts of environmentally friendly. I’m thankful for Dongtan because it shows that China is paying attention to the environment and sustainable living, and it shows that the world’s biggest emissions producer and one of the largest countries on earth can make exciting and inventive changes to the way it operates. I’m thankful for the example that sets to other governments. And I’m thankful for Dongtan because reading articles about it helped sparked my interest in green design and helped inspire me to enroll in architecture school earlier this year.

So, what clean technology are you thankful for?