Global Climate Change - What's Trash Got to Do With It?

In honor of Blog Action Day powered by Change.org and the final day of our trash reduction Eco-Challenge sponsored by the Northwest Earth Institute, I decided to try and count the ways that reducing our trash output reduces our greenhouse gas production.

1. Less fuel burned to ship trash to landfills.
2. Less methane produced as trash degrades in landfills.
3. Less packaging produced = less fuel burned to produce packaging.
4. Also less fuel burned to mechanically package products, and to ship packing materials.
5. Recycled products require less energy to produce than products made from virgin materials.
6. Using fewer raw materials requires less destruction of carbon-sequestering plants such as trees.

Anything else you can think of???

Mindful Parenting Meditation

So, I'm on a big mindfulness kick right now. Bear with me.

One of my big struggles is being present when I'm with my kids. I'm not one of those moms who loves sitting on the floor playing trains for two hours (not that I've met many who are, now that I think about it) and my mind is always racing with the dozens of other things I could be "getting done" with that time. When Bess was very small I found a quote by Patricia Clafford that I really liked and hung it up in my home office:

The work will wait while you show the child the rainbow, but the rainbow won't wait while you do the work.

I try to remind myself of this, that the laundry and the bills will always be there but I have only a short time to spend with my children before they grow up and away. So here is my new Parenting Meditation:

Breathing in, I know that the work will wait.
Breathing out, I know that the rainbow will not wait.
In breath, work will wait.
Out breath, rainbow will not wait.

Try it!

I am home.

The day and a half that I spent with Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastics of Blue Cliff Monastery was nothing short of amazing. I left feeling rested, energized and inspired, and anxious to learn more about Buddhism. We had two dharma talks

morning chants, lunch meditation, deep meditation

and the most amazing walking meditation outside on streets closed to traffic.


I've always been fascinated by the lessons of compassion, peace and patience taught by Zen Buddhism, but could never quite figure out how to incorporate a practice into my life. I am anxious, after this weekend, to find a way to do so.

Peaceful Action, Open Heart

I am very excited that I will be spending tonight and tomorrow learning from the beloved Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. So for today, a quote:

"A bodhisattva is someone who has compassion within himself or herself and who is able to make another person smile or help someone suffer less. Every one of us is capable of this.”

Garbage is Boring.

There, I've said it. Boring. B-O-R-I-N-G. We've been doing this challenge for less than a week, and I don't know what else to say about it. I'm tapped out.

We're still doing it, of course. Buying food with less packaging. Carefully recycling. Composting. Re-using. Blah, blah, blah. It makes a difference, and it is definitely an area where my family NI (needs improvement, in the jargon of kindergarten report cards) but...it's not sexy. And it's not fun to write about buying carrots that are tied together with a rubber band instead of a plastic bag.

I am finding myself thinking that this BORING factor is one of the biggest obstacles facing the environmental movement. We know we need to save power, save fuel, throw out less stuff, decrease our carbon emissions, and those are the really important things. But when I surf around looking at "green" blogs (and believe me, I read a lot of them, though I am aware that there are probably literally hundreds of thousands that I've never heard of), these things are rarely mentioned.

One of my pet peeves are "green" blogs that feature frequent giveaways. I am sure that these contests drive traffic to the blogs, but is that really green? Should environmentalists be looking for the next slightly-lower-impact-product (and figuring out ways to ship said product to a reader who is potentially thousands of miles away)? Or should the goal be to decrease consumption overall? Are eco-friendly clothing/books/toys/whatevers turned into garbage any less frequently than their less-green alternatives? Is the green product boom just a way for us to continue our consumerist mindset while feeling less guilty about it?

So...I've digressed from garbage. But I'm sure you'll forgive me. Garbage isn't any less boring to read about than it is to write about.

Homemade Notebook

One of our family's big areas of focus during our Trash Reduction Challenge is to find other ways to use "garbage". For one thing, it reduces the amount of things we throw out, but for another, if we can make things we need out of things we already have, we don't need to buy as much.

This weekend, Bess wanted to create a nature journal where she could draw and collect leaves and flowers, so we made one ourselves out of things we otherwise would have thrown away - scrap office paper, cardboard, and packing paper.

There are several websites that show how to make fancy bound books at home. I can't vouch for any of them since I haven't used them, but if you're really interested in the official way to do it, a Google search will return more ideas than you know what to do with.

First, we cut two pieces of stiff cardboard slightly larger than a standard sheet of office paper, and a piece of packing paper slightly larger than the two pieces of cardboard with a small space left between them for the "spine" spine of the book. We glued the cardboard to the paper, and then wrapped and glued the edges.







Next, we took about thirty sheets of scrap office paper and punched holes in them using a three-hole punch. We used twine to tie the papers together so that they would lie flat.





We glued the first and last pages to the covers so that the edges of the paper were in line with the inside edges of the cardboard covers. We propped up the inside pages so that the covers could dry without the pages sticking together.





And - voila! Bess decorated the cover and we're ready to journal!

Just Two Words

Today's thought for reducing waste:

Diva Cup

Need I say more?

Garbage Haiku

Our family is participating in the Northwest Earth Institute Eco-Challenge, and our challenge is to reduce the amount of trash we produce as a family. When I told my husband that the goal is to throw out less garbage, he asked me, "Then what are we supposed to do with it?" Make less, silly!

So in honor of the start of our challenge, I have written a Garbage Haiku:

We toss too much trash.
Two full cans a week sometimes!
This week, just one bag?

I'll continue to blog on our progress throughout the Challenge, which ends on October 15. If you'd like to make a pledge on behalf or our family, please click here.

An Auspicious Day

AhimsaMama would be remiss if she did not take a moment to acknowledge Mahatma Gandhi, who was born 140 years ago today.

Here is my favorite explanation of the concept of Ahimsa - it comes from a conversation between Gandhiji and Dr. Howard Thurman, an African-American minister and writer:

...without a direct active expression of it, non-violence to my mind is meaningless. It is the greatest and the activist force in the world. One cannot be passively non-violent. In fact 'non-violence' is a term I had to coin in order to bring out the root meaning of Ahimsa. In spite of the negative particle 'non', it is no negative force. Superficially we are surrounded in life by strife and bloodshed, life living upon life. But some great seer, who ages ago penetrated the centre of truth, said: It is not through strife and violence but through non-violence that man [sic] can fulfil his destiny and his duty to his fellow creatures. It is a force which is more positive than electricity, and more powerful than even ether. At the centre [sic] of non-violence is a force which is self-acting. Ahimsa means 'love' in the Pauline sense, and yet something more than the 'love' defined by St. Paul, although I know St. Paul's beautiful definition is good enough for all practical purposes. Ahimsa includes the whole creation, and not only human. Besides 'love' in the English language has other connotations, and so I was compelled to use the negative word. But it does not, as I have told you, express a negative force, but a force superior to all the forces put together. One person who can express Ahimsa in life exercises a force superior to all the forces of brutality.

BooksBooksBooksBooks!!!!

As my readers know, I love books. LOVE them. I had a library built to house them in my house. I still have boxes of them in the attic, even after filling all the shelves in my library. I use them as decorations, as furniture, as friends, as escape...I cannot fully express my love for books. Like, my list of my greatest loves in my life would do like this: my kids, my husband, and then tied for third would be my mom, grandmother, sister, and my books. Okay, maybe books would be fourth, but it would be close. ;)

I like to own my books, because I like to loan the ones that move me to other people - to set them free, as it were. However, I have come to realize that not only is this expensive, but it is not exactly green. There are many things about the publishing industry - paper, printing, distribution - that give me pause. I started trying to buy books used, but that's still expensive. Now, I try to take them out of the library, and then only buy them if I really feel that they are a necessary addition to my personal collection. Luckily, the reference librarians in town here are just lovely, and don't seem to mind tracking down obscure titles from libraries three states away. So far.

Anyway....I just came across a website for a company called Better World Books, and I am in love with them! They sell new and used books (with no shipping charge) and donate a portion of their proceeds to high-impact education and literacy organizations around the world, such as Books for Africa, Invisible Children, Room to Read and Worldfund. They sponsor book drives and collect used books, saving them from landfills and turning them into money for literacy projects. I love it!