📝 In This Week’s Nutty Goodness
This Might Suit Your Fancy: Resources for calculating how much water your home uses and where, sizing a rainwater tank and using grey water.
Where The Roots Meet The Soil: Everything from cheese to toilet paper is made overseas but you have a choice as to whether or not you continue supporting the fuel usage. Let’s talk about what grows closer, what can be traded out and when you might want to consider an alternative.
Inspirational Stories: Tracking oil spills years later!
🐝 This Might Suit Your Fancy
Ethical Consumer, find what your shopping for according to your concerns.
Identify Greener Products & Services, the EPA has helped consolidate ways to find home products and services. Might be good to get an idea what to look for.
Transfarmation, a farmer led movement to a better food system.
🎙️Where The Roots Meet The Soil
Taking Action For The Climate At Home: Hidden Fossil Fuel Uses
Let’s be real, giving up living completely dependent on fossil fuels isn’t easy. To be fully transparent, I’m not entirely against fossil fuel usage. I think its usage would have been tampered a long time ago had fuel efficiency technology been allowed to advance.
Without getting off on a tangent, swapping one historically irresponsible fuel industry for another isn’t what I call progress though. Mining went through its golden era, caused a lot of environmental harm and with the focus on electricity production, it’s back.
As society has “advanced” and specialization has allowed us to free ourselves of growing food, making our own clothing and building shelter, we’ve become spoiled by the access to purchases that exceed our personal climate budget.
China’s study found that nearly 75% of urban energy consumption is “embodied in the infrastructure and in the consumption of goods and services in the city.” (source: resilience.org)
Let’s explore how you can take steps to curb your climate spending of fossil fuels.
Start By Checking Where Your Food Or Home Goods Are Manufactured
It’s estimated Americans offshore 10 - 15% of their energy usage through buying products that are made or grown in other countries. (source: OurWordinData.org)
Make a list where you can keep track of what it is where it’s made and what your options are: can you grow it? can you buy it from a closer manufacturer? is there a reasonable alternative? is this a non-negotiable or guilty pleasure?
Your local circumstances will make this different for everyone, but there are some that are common like bananas, pineapple, coffee, cocoa, vanilla beans, black pepper and cinnamon.
🔖Did you miss the last article when I talked about Replacing Your Lawn: Rock, Paper, Garden?
Home & Consumer Goods: What To Consider
Your silverware, for example, the embodied energy would be all the energy used to mine, extract, refine, and process the materials constituting the fork; manufacture the fork; transport and sell to an end user; and dispose of the fork at the end of its use.
What you can do: check where it’s manufactured and find out how it’s manufactured. Are they using sustainable harvesting, mining or other practices?
Is there a way to reduce how far it has to travel? Or find an alternative.
Make no mistake, I’m not saying to buy cheap. I advocate buying the highest appropriate quality. If it’s a can opener buy so you don’t need to buy another one every year.
If it’s a shirt, don’t sacrifice fair labor practices so you can buy cheap AND have to buy again in 3 years. That’s like adding insult to injury.
If you buy cheap toilet paper but have to use 2 or 3 times as much, you aren’t saving the environment or money. And those trees didn’t get up and walk to your grocery store.
The family trip your kids will still talk about at 30
Intrepid just launched eight new Premium Family trips across Borneo, Morocco, India, Costa Rica and more — small groups, experienced local guides, elevated stays, and immersive cultural experiences designed specifically for families. All the logistics sorted so you can actually enjoy it.
Soaps & Waxes Examples
This is where your knowledge of how to make these things will either help or harm your climate budget. Start by looking up “xxx manufactured in the USA.” If you aren’t in the USA, insert the country where you live.
I used this search for “laundry soap” and got Earth Breeze, Clean People and Branch Basics. There are two things I’m looking at with laundry soap, where it’s manufactured so it travels less and how much water am I paying for in the product.
If you don’t know, I am here to break it to you that crayons are made from waxy crude oil. The waxes are sent to your favorite crayon company in a variety of natural colors that occur.
Natural beeswax candles or soywax are alternatives that you can either make yourself or purchase. The same consideration for how far the products you purchase apply.
It’s more likely that you can find beeswax close to you and it’s likely healthier for you to breath.
🦋 Stay Inspired
Organizations Around The World Are Staging Eco-Interventions
30 Years After Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Prince William Sound Regional Citizen’s Advisory Council
Till next time,
Elisa Navarette
P.S. Was this useful? Have ideas on what I should publish next? Tap the poll or reply to this email. I read every response.