The Everyday Environmentalist


With Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris agreement yesterday, those of us who are passionate about care of the earth are, if not surprised, still frustrated. What we are not is powerless. If the data in this chart, or this one is accurate (and as I’ve been hearing variations on this theme a lot the last two days, I have no reason to think otherwise), then we, as individuals in the U.S., have a lot of room to reduce our carbon footprint. There’s no rule that says we have to wait for our leaders to mandate it. Why don’t we, as individuals, take the lead?

Today I re-present:


35+ ways to green up your real life (and often save money in the process)


In the Kitchen

  1. Take your own bags to the grocery store. Cloth is even better than paper or plastic.
    2. Buy fresh, not prepackaged. Making mac & cheese or pancakes from scratch really doesn’t require more time, and veggies you cook yourself lose less nutritional value.
    3. Buy organic.
    4. Buy local.
    5. Grow your own vegetables.
    6. Compost.
    7. Recycle.Yes, even so far as bringing home the plastic ware from the fast food restaurants which don’t offer recycling. This is a biggie!
    8. Wash and reuse Ziploc bags.
    9. Wait to run the dishwasher till it’s full.

Vehicles and driving

  1. Turn off the car. (Another biggie.) Why run your engine while you check your phone, wait for kids at their lessons/practices, or for your spouse at the grocery store? Every bit of that is unnecessary pollution. Turn it off.
    11. Slow down! The faster you drive, the more gas you burn, and it really doesn’t make a significant difference in time, anyway.
    12. Make one trip to the grocery store for the week—IOW, plan and shop with a list.
    13. Combine trips & walk from errand to errand when possible. Not when convenient–when possible.
    14. Take advantage of public transportation.
    15. Carpool.
    16. Make sure the tires are at the proper pressure (you get better gas mileage).

Around the house

  1. Buy refills on cleaners instead of a new squeeze bottle every time
    18. Buy used, and don’t buy things you don’t need. (Another big one!)
    19. Use compact fluorescent bulbs.
    20. Turn the lights off.
    21. Turn the computer off, or at least put it to sleep. Why have it running while you’re sleeping? And in the summer it’s adding to the heat that the air conditioner has to fight.
    22. Unplug electronics. They draw power even when not in use.
    23. Use Recycled Paper.
    24. Print on the back sides of used paper for rough drafts.
    25. Turn the thermostat up a degree in the summer and down a degree in the winter.
    26. Seal doors & windows with caulking or weather strips.
    27. Get double pane windows.
    28. Replace old appliances.
    29. Set the water heater no higher than 120.
    30. Take shorter showers.
    31. Dry clothes on a line instead of in the dryer.
    32. Plant a tree
    33. Replace parts of your lawn with native plants–wildflowers, low-maintenance ground cover, and so on–so the mowing takes less time and gasoline.

For the Family

  1. Use cloth diapers. There are diaper services that can do the cleaning for you.
    35. Toilet train early. In my experience, the success or failure toilet training has much more to do with parental commitment than a child’s “readiness.” (Since I’ve toilet trained four kids, and the only one who was over 2 was the one with a disability, I stand by that statement.)
    Bonus: Practice Natural Family Planning. No plastic, no chemicals going into the water supply, no waste. And despite what you may have heard…it works.

(This post was originally published on May 29, 2007, but I fine-tune it every time I re-post it.)


In Which I Visit A Wind Farm and Alex Rolls His Eyes Repeatedly


What shall I say about wind turbines?

Wind Farm Solo

The way Alex geeks out about Percy Jackson and Star Wars is the way I geek out about wind farms. I think they are really cool.

(Alex says I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, geek out about wind farms. He says I don’t know anything about them.)

But that is not entirely for lack of trying. I did, after all, spend four weeks before we went to Omaha, poring over maps, trying to find the name and contact info for a wind farm in the hopes that we could wrangle a tour.

Okay. So Alex says he knows almost every single freaking Greek myth, and I know nothing about wind farms. Therefore, this is a poor comparison.

But he’s laughing. And so am I. So we’re going to just go with it. And no, Alex, we are not going to look up Greek myths to prove your point. I got it. I’m ignoring it.

The point is, we stopped for gas in a tiny little town in the far northwest corner of Missouri, and almost as soon as we topped the rise, there they were: a whole landscape of wind turbines. And, unlike the one we saw in Perry, Iowa over Memorial Day—these were RUNNING.

I have wanted for several years to know what these things sound like. One of the big arguments against wind farms is the noise, after all. So I was very curious to know exactly what kind of noise level we’re talking about here. But I live in, hmmm, a state that is, by and large, unconvinced of the desirability of alternative energy. And although locally we are starting to have a middlingly-decent amount of solar, there’s only one wind turbine in my town, and it’s not one of those big suckers with the blades as long as two semi tractor beds.

Wind Farm Blade

So after we filled up the van, I asked the young woman at the counter where there was a road that would take us out among them, very close to them, without trespassing.

She looked at me like I was crazy, and she said: “Um, I don’t know? I live here, but I don’t really know anything about it.”

Well, then. There you go.

So we wandered east out of town for about two or three miles until we hit the jackpot: a gravel road bisecting two enormous soybean fields, with a dozen or so wind turbines scattered around them.

Wind Farm Landscape

We pulled into the driveway, stopping shy of the (open) gate that said “authorized personnel only,” and got out.

(How about that shadow?)

(How about that shadow?)

Wind Farm base

So what does a wind farm sound like? Alex says: “They didn’t sound like ANYTHING! They sounded like WIND BLOWING!”

I’d hoped to share a video, because I can’t be the only one who’s curious about this, right? (Right????) But it was incredibly windy that day, so the video I took with the DSLR came out with nothing but, well, wind noise. But the answer to my long-burning question about a) how much noise does a wind farm make, and b) what kind of noise, exactly, is: there’s a low hum that I can’t describe very well because it was buried under the noise of the wind blowing across the ridges. And then there’s the slow, lazy pulse of the blades: sssshhhhSHOOPsssshhhhSHOOPsssshhhhSHOOP.

It’s not silent by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not as loud as I-70 from my backyard, which is a mile from the highway. So anyone who fusses about noise pollution needs to just calm down, because people are always building monstrosities of homes twelve feet from eight-lane freeways, so the whole noise pollution argument doesn’t hold water.

And I got to stand at the base of a running wind turbine. Check that one off the bucket list.

Why was I excited for the papal encyclical? The challenge of Laudato Si (Reblog)


I’ve been following blogger Margaret Felice for quite some time, and when I read the following post late last week, I felt as if it was written just for me. I admit I have not had time to dig into Laudato Si yet, but I officially downloaded it onto my computer for an upcoming road trip. In the meantime, I give you Margaret:

The first point at which I thought the Pope might be laughing at me was paragraph 55.


I can almost see him writing “smh” in the margin, shaking his zuchettoed head. Those Americans and their air-conditioning.

Pope_Francis_South_Korea_2014_(1)There was no air conditioner going in our house on the morning the encyclical dropped, but I was basking in the breeze of our overhead fans as I scrutinized the document Thursday morning. I hunched over my laptop until moments before I had to leave for an appointment, ignoring my husband (except when he brought me an english muffin, God bless him) and ignoring my visiting brother (except to show him where the eggs and frying pan were – breakfast is an important thing in our house). I was so excited to read Laudato Si.

I should admit, I was expecting my lifelong environmentalism to be vindicated, and it was. And if I’m being honest, I should admit what I was not expecting: to also be admonished.  I suppose I knew dispassionately that such criticism was likely, but it still stung when it came.



The encyclical contains a lot of hope, and some practical solutions which I hope to share in a later post. But what has stuck with me more than the suggestions and the exhortations is the realization that I’m not perfect, either. After running out the door to get to the first of that day’s appointments, I made this admission on Twitter:

I recycle and don’t use air-conditioning in the house and hang my clothes outside and grow food and eat locally and teach my students that care for the environment is care for people.

One can do good things and still have more good things to do. 

Read the rest here.

Where Have The Fireflies Gone?


Photo by jamelah, via Flickr

I miss fireflies.

When I was little, the fireflies were everywhere. I remember trekking through the tall grass north of the house to the pond with my cousin and catching one to bring back and put in a jar, where we watched it all night. Apparently as a child I wasn’t as creeped out by the prospect of ticks as I am now, because I’m pretty sure I was wearing shorts. Maybe the vividness of that memory comes from the fact that this cousin was my first-ever best friend and since she lived on the west coast, seeing her was a once-every-other-year occasion.

In the past decade or so, I had thought that my memory of the fireflies was skewed by time and by the tendency of a fanciful child to enlarge all enchanting things. But there was a night, a few years ago, when Christian and I stood on the deck looking down over the lawn and the deep, dark places in the woods, at the profusion of silent lights blinking lazily. I said, “This is what I remember. Why isn’t it like this all the time?”

Not long after, I found out that there really aren’t as many fireflies as there used to be. Mostly it has to do with the destruction of habitat and the uptick in light pollution. There’s also some speculation that the “fogging” done by cities to discourage mosquitoes also discourages fireflies. But it hasn’t been studied a whole lot yet, as best I can tell.

It’s hard for me to accept the thoughtlessness I see unfolding around me in people’s interactions with the world. It’s much bigger than the fireflies; they’re just an example that comes to mind at this time of year. I don’t think the people who sit with their cars and air conditioners running for half an hour in the parking lot while their kids take swim lessons or piano have hostile intentions toward the world. I think they just don’t want to put up with any discomfort. I don’t think the people who dump huge amounts of recyclables in trash bags bound for the landfill are hell-bent on squandering the resources and the space that make this precious world so beautiful. I think they just don’t think it through and live intentionally.

And that’s really the key. We’re so used to our comfort, our convenience, that we aren’t intentional about how we use things. We get so caught up in our TV shows and our social media and whatever other “strange gods,” as Elizabeth Scalia put it, that it doesn’t occur to us that every single action we take, or don’t take, has a ripple effect on the world.

Nothing we do is without consequence.

Pope Francis is due to release an encyclical next week on climate change. I’m really looking forward to seeing what he has to say, and I’m praying that it makes a difference.

How Our Family Practices Environmental Stewardship

Fall 2013 Portraits 020small






  • We use leftover water from meals to water plants.
  • One word: Freecycle.


What’s YOUR Problem?


Photo by Duncan C, via Flickr

Life is unpredictable, but over the past several years I’ve learned there’s one thing I can count on with absolute certainty: somewhere between one week and two days before university graduation, I will lose my voice. It happens virtually every semester, just before I join the platform party at honors convocation as the official singer of the alma mater.

This year was no exception. For three days I took cough syrup, slathered myself with Vicks, and drank tea in an attempt to get the slow-moving virus to clear my body before graduation. It happened just in time. Praise the Lord, I had a voice on Saturday morning.

But the thing that stands out to me about this weekend is that the commencement speeches were the best I’ve ever heard. Jim McKelvey, who co-founded Square, had everyone laughing at intervals, but the message was serious. He wanted to point out to the graduates that no longer can they count on praise or immediate feedback like grades to keep them motivated. From here on out, they have to motivate themselves.

It could have been a real downer of a message, except for the humor and the takeaway: Find a problem. Find a problem that bugs you down so deep, you’re on fire about it. A problem so troublesome, it gets you out of bed in the morning. Find that problem, he said, and then go fix it. And if you succeed, find another one to solve.

After McKelvey came Jim Held, the owner of Stone Hill Winery in Herman, Missouri, who was being awarded an honorary doctorate. He came to the microphone and said, “I could talk about the wine industry in Missouri, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the last 2 1/2 years of my life.” It was a simple but powerful story of a stroke he was told he wouldn’t recover from–and did. He changed his bad habits, and he changed his future. The takeaway: the choices you make have consequences. So make good ones.

I come out of this weekend feeling pretty blessed, for many reasons I can’t go into in public. But this blessing I can share: I feel tremendously blessed to be staring down age 40 with a clear sense of what my life-motivating problems are–the ones that motivate me to get out of bed in the morning. There are two. One of them I outlined on Friday. The other is the need for a healthier view of sexuality, one that recognizes and embraces the message Jim Held underscored: personal responsibility and self control, the fact that choices and consequences go together and you must take the responsibility to exercise self-control to achieve the outcome you value.

I feel even more blessed that these two passions of mine dovetail so seamlessly: that living out a sexuality that respects the way we are put together (as opposed to slapping a pharmaceutical on something that isn’t broken in a misguided attempt to “free” sexual expression from its natural consequences) also respects the earth.

My question for you today is this: what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning? What global problem do you want to solve? You don’t have to answer that publicly, but think about it. And if you’re willing to share, so much the better.

Itching For A Fight (a 7QT post)






And so I didn’t say a word.





Not so fast.

Photo by Rachel Knickmeyer, via Flickr


“Because that’s the rule they made, honey.”

“But why?”








Dawn on Cloud Nine, by Krasnickaja Katya, via Wiki Commons


I believe in global warming.





End rant.


A Farm Story

Parched ground

Parched ground (Photo credit: Al Jazeera English)

Growing up on the farm is on a short list of things that define who I am. My memories are filled with gigantic, buttery harvest moons rising through the jagged tips of cornstalks, of leaf piles reduced to pulsing embers that mirrored the night sky, of glittering frosty dawns and mist hanging over the woods, the roar of the grain dryer and the drop in the stomach while jumping off stacked hay bales. My entire childhood is woven with the fabric of the earth.

But there is a darker side that time has edited to make it more palatable. It’s not that I’ve forgotten the tough parts, but like childbirth, you dissociate from the visceral memory of how unpleasant things can be. And children (both as children, and as adults who’ve moved away from home) are insulated, anyway, from their parents’ fear and uncertainty.

This spring was lovely in rural Missouri. Early, but lovely. On Mothers Day, we ate dinner on the deck with my parents. It had been about a week since the last rain, and we were starting to look for another. None of us could imagine that it wouldn’t rain again for three months.

When the heat arrived in June, we shook our heads at how early it was–those 100+ days usually don’t set in until later in July or August. But surely we’d get a thunderstorm out of that blast furnace. It couldn’t last more than a week or two.

But it did. Week after miserable week it went on, and as my lawn crisped, and I watered furiously in the early mornings, I started watching the weather for my parents’ area, too. Every once in a while, a weak attempt at a storm would drift across the area, but only once did it leave more than a scattering of droplets in the forty-mile swath covering our house and all my parents’ fields. “Not even enough to settle the dust,” as my dad would say.

At last the rest of the country figured out this was a big deal. Wells were drying up, rivers were so low that navigation was questionable. When the storms finally came, it was far too late for the corn crop, and possibly too late for some of the soybeans. When my parents sampled their fields, they found ears with passable yields and ears with virtually nothing on them at all. Then there was the concern about a particular mold that thrives in drought conditions and can render the grain unusable. There was no way to tell how things would shake out until harvest began. Uncertainty is more punishing than a coup de grace.

Harvest began early, averaging 30 bushels per acre–not even a quarter of a normal yield, but better than nothing. But the corn was too wet, so they put it in the grain bins to dry, then sent it to the elevators. When the mold numbers finally came back this weekend, they were not good. My parents’ entire corn crop suddenly became completely useless. An entire year’s work and investment, gone. Harvest stopped. My dad, instead of running the combine through the field, instead went in with a mower and a disk to turn it all under.

Why am I telling you this story? Because the world removed from the land and from agricultural exposure needs to know what goes on beyond the grocery aisles. From these crops the cattle that become your steaks and burgers are fed. From these crops come the corn starch, the corn chips, the soft drinks and juices and cereals containing high-fructose corn syrup. We can argue the health benefits (or lack thereof) of many of these products, but the fact is they are staples of our lives. You may think it has nothing to do with you, but it does.

Some are convinced that the severity and breadth of this drought can only be attributed to climate change. Others are more cautious. Invoking climate change is not a popular point of view in some circles; most conservatives point to experts who say the whole idea that humans can adversely impact the environment is big-headed nonsense. Well, maybe it is. And maybe it isn’t. Considering what’s happening around us, we can’t afford to dismiss the idea of our own culpability on a knee-jerk reaction. The fallout from this drought will hurt your pocketbook and mine, but that’s just a nuisance. The people who will be most affected are the poorest people, those who can least weather it. Maybe this drought has nothing whatsoever to do with our vehicle and power plant emission. But what could it possibly hurt for each of us to cut back our usage, look humbly at our interactions with the world and rethink our assumptions? To act like the stewards we’re supposed to be, instead of the consumers we’ve become?

Living Mindfully

Litter Lout

Litter Lout (Photo credit: Smabs Sputzer)

I think most of us, most of the time, don’t think about what we’re doing. I think we live our lives on inertia, nudged by forces we’re not even aware of in directions whose validity we never question. Most of what we do is done on autopilot, a series of habits we’re not even aware we have. We assume that however we’re doing things right now is the only way it can possibly work. Every day, I look around the world and want to pull my hair out, wondering how people can miss what seems so obvious to me.

How, for instance, did we get brainwashed into thinking we have to buy name brand laundry detergents and bathroom cleaners, when you can make both in less than half an hour from completely natural ingredients–and they work just as well (and sometimes better)?

How can a family half our size, who spends most of their day away from home, generate 2-3 times as much trash as we do?

Why do people sit in parking lots and run their cars for a quarter of an hour at school pickup or the grocery store? Do they not understand how much poison they’re spewing into the air–much less how much money they’re burning? Or do they just not care? Sure, it’s hot–find a shady spot to wait outside the car. It’s inconvenient, but it’s only an inconvenience.

What are people thinking when they toss fast food bags, plastic bottles, and cigarette butts out their car windows? I mean really–what are they thinking? Where do they think all that trash is going to end up?

Why do people who see the wisdom of a chemical-free diet not recognize the inherent philosophical conflict of using pharmaceuticals to shut down their reproductive systems, as if that is the only, or even the best, way to plan families?

These sorts of frustrations underscore how very differently I live than most of the people in America. It’s tempting–very tempting–for me to wag my finger self-righteously at everyone else. But I know I’m guilty, too. Driving my kids to their three separate schools, with their three separate schedules, causes me to put 40 miles on my van every Tuesday, even though none of the schools are more than 5 miles from my house. Nobody’s forcing me to put Nicholas in preschool. And if I care enough, I can try to find someone to carpool with.

How often do we take time to look critically at our own lives and identify places that could or should be adjusted? We work very hard to protect the status quo, because we can’t imagine what we would do if we had to change our habits. And yet things happen, and we do have to change. The car breaks down, and you figure out how to make do without it. Prices go up, and you adjust your purchasing habits accordingly. We always think we can’t change, but we can. We just don’t think.

I’ve been reciting this like a mantra lately: doing religious writing is like a nonstop examination of conscience. And I’m so thankful. I’m never, ever comfortable–I’m always squirming–but it means I’m also living mindfully. And that has to be a good thing.

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The Everyday Environmentalist