Diamond-Cut Life

Ewan O’Leary, the founder of the carbon offset company Little Carbon Feet, wrote the below (in italics) in response to my and Brandt Smith’s dialogue on Rethinking the Entitlement of Travel. I agree with Ewan that we’re in a lifeboat (emergency) situation with needing to reduce our carbon emissions — hence the title “Paddling the Carbon Lifeboat”.

Concerning ‘forced conservation’, my understanding of U.S. history is that during World War II, the rationing of gas, meat, etc. was not voluntary, but mandatory (forced).  Tom Brokaw famously termed my parents’ generation “the Greatest Generation” due to their ability to work and sacrifice for a shared greater good. Where is our greatness now, in the time of global warming?

Ewan O’Leary writing: This touches on an important quality found in some human beings - that of radical acceptance, or the ability to accept a reality that is in complete opposition to what we have always believed and acted on.

It is radical to think about travel in this way . . . .

I am going to side with Einstein on this - we can’t solve our current problems with the same level of thinking that created them. Our fascination with technology is what got us into this position. We need to look at something else, such as our behavior, to get us out.

We may be at the pinnacle of human frenzy, rather than the pinnacle of human development.We need to change our behavior. Instead of looking at technological solutions, let’s look at behavioral solutions, which is where radical acceptance fits in. And in terms of forced conservation, B Smith is right [you can't force people to conserve]. But not in a lifeboat.

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Happy Fourth of July! It’s our nation’s birthday. I’ve posted Ideas for celebrating below, based on this basic life-principle we all tend to forget:

A nation starts its life in the beginning as land, as earth — before people arrived to populate it. And that land, the soil, water and things that grow on it, are what’s supporting all of our lives. This is true for all people in all nations, which is why I chose the earth-flag photo. Honoring our nation should involve honoring the earth and land.

Patriotism does not have to be at the expense of any other nation or people. Also, patriotism can employ some healthy critical thinking about our actions, and a spirit of self-improvement.

Reject the TV and movies in favor of outdoors. Summer weather is too precious to be sitting sedentary indoors. Get outdoors, instead: walk and bike, throw Frisbees and softballs around, run through sprinklers; take nature hikes; play volleyball, soccer or croquet. Besides, no TV constitutes a great diet.

Make your own food instead of buying pre-packaged food. Sure, it takes more time, but that’s what three-day weekends give us a rich supply of. Apple pies are American, so bake one. If you are pie-crust-challenged like me, make a fruit cobbler like I do (sweetly forgiving by nature). See Cooking For Climate Change

Better yet, grow your own food: get out in the garden. It’s highly patriotic to nurture the land we’re living on, and to not just depend on people far away to feed us. As I write, our blueberries and strawberries need to be picked again, and if you were to show up at my front door, I would have beautiful lettuce leaves to share with you, including “red sails” and “deer’s tongue”. Also, working in the front garden makes us available for some great chats with neighbors.

Read a good book. The founding fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution read a lot of good books. We should emulate them. Use the library if needed: your taxpayer dollars at work. Two of my favorite reads are Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Eric Brende’s Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. These books inspire while they also entertain.

Go to church. The beauty of worship, to me, is in getting past details of dogma and realizing we are part of something much greater than ourselves, a Creation guided by love. Another great thing about church is the inter-generational community it fosters. If you’re on the political left, don’t reject religion just because the political right has tried to co-opt it and brand it as conservative. Take a look at my Confession: I Love Church.

photo courtesy of waywuwei

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My blogosphere colleague Brandt Smith of Wealth and Wisdom commented on yesterday’s post on hybrids and electric cars in a way that intrigued me. He was responding to my belief that electric cars and hybrids are the only cars that have a future in our carbon-constrained world.

“Ahh, a topic for the engineer in me. . . . the biggest issue [with electric cars] is the charge time. It’s fine for most daily drivers. It falls short if you are going longer distances. This is an area where technology needs to catch up.”

I’m sure most people, engineers and otherwise, see it as Brandt sees it: cars are supposed to go long distances. Our cultural assumption is that engineers and technology will always let our cars go long distances — if not on gasoline, then on another fuel source like hydrogen fuel cells that we unthinkingly expect will give us what petroleum has given us: abundant travel.

But I see no evidence that assumption is based in reality. Hydrogen fuel cells, for instance, have been “twenty years away” for at least ten years now. Our emotional attachment to travel is clouding our thinking. Because we like to go long distances at will (and I admit I enjoy travel as much as anyone) we expect the energy sources in the world to support that preference. But that’s circular reasoning. It’s like a child saying, “I like ice cream, so the world has to arrange itself to deliver ice cream to me.”  Don’t we need to scale our expectations from a more adult perspective?

I suggest rethinking our belief we are entitled to travel. I suggest that given the reality of current fuel sources and how they drive global warming, we learn to be happy staying closer to home.

I realize many will reject this idea, from the travel industry to the oil industry to engineers understandably excited by the challenge of developing new technologies. But I’d be interested to hear objections that are grounded in the reality of global warming, rather than driven by emotion-based desires to keep profits, industries and careers entrenched in the current status quo. The current status quo is a carbon-based economy and set of lifestyle expectations that are taking us over a cliff.

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My friend from Santa Cruz, concerned about global warming as I am, asked for advice yesterday about the car purchase she needs to make.

It happens my husband Thor did lots of research recently about whether to buy a Prius or a Honda Civic hybrid. We chose the Honda, for reasons given here, but we use even our hybrid sparingly, between my carpool and Thor now bicycling to work. (He takes the bus to work in the non-summer months.)

I’m surprised sometimes by the trivial (to me, at least) concerns some people have about cars. For instance, a downside I’ve heard about the Honda Civic hybrid that we own is its noisiness on the highway. Larger vehicles (think SUV’s) are evidently quieter at high speeds, due to lots of soundproofing materials, which add heavy bulk, which use more gas [Read more →]

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There are hundreds of news stories in any given month, and some of them are important, but I am convinced that the ‘slow news’ of how we each of us is spending our dollars is one of the most central stories in each of our lives.

Think about it. People who have spent years living ‘beneath their means’ still have their feet solidly under them even as the housing market and stock market take downturns.

There is tremendous power in thrift, in spending sparingly. Saving every month instead of going farther into debt, yields us freedom [Read more →]

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to slash Exxon’s punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill back to a fraction of the original ruling is immoral. We should be outraged that the Supreme Court is essentially excusing Exxon from making reparations, and not consume this as just another piece of ordinary news.

I deliberately use that word ‘immorality’ because the concept of immorality has been co-opted in recent decades to micro-level concerns, such as who has sex with whom. [Read more →]

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The following is a guest post by Jim Meyer. Diamond-Cut Life welcomes your topical submissions. If you would like to write a guest post, please contact us.

Let’s get frank about the current pressures on the US lifestyle and environment as it’s been constructed up to now: A lot of people are getting squeezed.

We currently have an environment and infrastructure based on cheap transportation and fuel costs. However, that’s slowly eroding as the US catches up to the what the majority of the western world has had for quite some time: true market-based energy prices. Energy is expensive, and going to be ever-more so until we redesign the infrastructure. So, who’s first to start this change? [Read more →]

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I was delighted to find this morning that Andrew Brown, the Oakland Athletics pitcher who was the subject of my recent post on cool commuting, wrote me in response. When he says some of his fellow A’s are now also using BART,  I’m impressed as always by how much we influence those around us with our positive choices. Behavior  is truly contagious.  Andrew Brown’s words are below in italics; the bolded words are my own emphasis. Thank you, Mr. Brown!

My father told me about this article and I decided to look it up.  I am actually on the Bart right now as I write this. And  I do believe in cutting back in emissions.  With the price of gas, the wait in traffic, and the crisis of global warming, I fully enjoy going on the Bart.  Even some of my teammates are doing it as well. So thank you for the very nice things said about me and hopefully it has encouraged others to not only take care of this earth, but to save a little money, and to enjoy life.  God Bless, Andrew Brown

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My carpool-pals don’t just help me save gas money and carbon emissions, they also pass good information on to me. Thanks to my baseball-loving ‘pool, I’ve learned about Andrew Brown, the relief pitcher for the Oakland Athletics who uses his bicycle and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to get to the ballpark for home games. Susan Slusser reported.

There is so much I find interesting about Andrew Brown’s choice of how to get to work. For one thing, he had an appendectomy just a few weeks ago, yet is choosing a physically [Read more →]

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Running is just about the most natural sport possible, the sport our pre-Industrial ancestors did, the one that doesn’t burn any fossil fuels. You’d think that fun in the time of global warming would make liberal use of running — and it would, but you’d need to rethink Hood To Coast.

Hood To Coast is the signature Oregon relay race, the biggest relay in North America, that takes place every summer on the weekend before Labor Day. Twelve-person teams are divided into two vans of six runners who take turns running legs of three to seven miles, handing off a bracelet at interchanges. It starts at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood and ends at the coastal town of Seaside.

You run and drive through the night, you love and hate [Read more →]

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