Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
I like this beautiful video, produced by Climate Desk, because it brings climate change home to us.
Martha Carlson: “Anyone can see a picture of the polar bear but what does it look like in *my* backyard with *my* animals or *my* plants?”
Bringing it home, where it has been all this time, of course, unbeknownst to us. Well, no longer. I like maple sugar. I like the maples. Call me a conservative, but I’d like to keep them.
I’m reading Gura’s book, American Transcendentalism, A History, and on page 19 there it is:
Toward that end they called “for immediate application of ideas to life,” so that in this brave new world a thinker “was called on to justify himself on the spot by building an engine, and setting something in motion.”
Exactly. Let’s build this engine!
We started our Riot in October of 2008. In the interest of making my bookkeeping easier, I’m going to count Year Three as a 14 month year. The percentages (of US National Average) for Year Three for (1) Gasoline, (2) Electricity, (3) Heating Oil and (4) Water are as follows:
| year three | 29.1 | 14.6 | 24.5 | 15.3 |
| year two | 51.2 | 13.4 | 48.0 | 26.5 |
| year one | 24.8 | 18.2 | 77 | 15 |
Next year I’ll calculate not by percentage but by solid numbers (gallons, KwH), because I am sure that with the fluctuating economy, etc., the consumption of the Average US household changes, and I’m not sure if these changes are reflected in the admittedly simple Riot calculator. Still, it’s a baseline.
1. Gasoline. Gasoline is still our bugbear. Year Two is so high because we calculated in our trip to Europe, which same trip we took this year, though I’ve not figured it in because I don’t know how anymore. So, by all intents and purposes, our consumption should still be up there in the 50th percentile.
2. Electricity. Year Three was of course the year we installed solar (switched on in August). Â Solar is actually more costly than the Wind energy we were purchasing from NSTAR, so while we kept our consumption level, our percentage went up a little compared to Year Two.
3. Heating Oil. As you can see, we made the most headway with heating oil in Year Two, when we installed the woodstove. That we cut the consumption of heating oil even further in Year Three is due to three factors: (1) so far, to not having experienced a Winter, (2) to being even more vigilant with our woodstove than before when it did get cold, and (3) to discovering that our oil furnace is more efficient than I had been figuring (I recalculated for Year Three only).
4. Water. The fact that the growing season was moderately wet and that the garden was anyway rather neglected during Year Three is partially the cause for our water consumption going back down to Year One standards.
All in all, these comparisons are useful only as a way to keep us on the straight path and indicating the most problematic areas, in this case reconfirming gasoline as something that could really, again, bear improving upon. And we might just do that, in Year Four!
We have a few plans for the new year. Just a few. But I think my most important aim is to connect meaningfully with someone, every day. That could be a phone call with a  friend who is far away, an impromptu lunch with an acquaintance, a meeting with fellow activists, a speech to strangers followed by a conversation, making a new  friend. Or some time with myself.
I’m a private person. I can be by myself or in the cocoon of my family for days on end. I never had a great many friends, but I am close with those I have. My resolution is to give more thanks for them. For how wonderful it is that you show up on their doorstep and they make you stay longer than you had planned. That someone is there to take care of your child at a pinch, or to pick you up from the airport even though it’s late. Someone who will meet you, at a second’s notice, at a nearby conservation area on a nice day for a paper bag lunch. Someone new, who invites you to a festive meal and you arrive finding her oldest friends gathered there as well. Someone who hears you don’t have plans for New Year’s Eve and who out of the blue invites you to dinner… I resolve to be more mindful of my friends, to make every meeting count.
And over the last year, with the start of my activism, I’ve learned that one can really never have enough friends, how enriching it is to make new friends.  For in new friends especially we see what we can become, what we are capable of, and how we can be of service. We see the variation of humanity, the great mystery and adventure of the other. I resolve to be more interested about who it is behind the face that I encounter for the first, maybe third time, and to ask of them, especially: how are you different from me? What can I learn from you, what gifts do you bear? And how can I help you, empower you?
All this is really part and parcel of my third resolution, which is to be more conscious about self care. Discovering the awesome power of community made me neglect, for a while there, my care of self. I wasn’t eating and drinking right, or spending the time and energy on family, art and study that I was used to. I seesawed from me to community and back again, burning the candle at both ends. By now I have come to glimpse that self care and community work are not two poles, but rather two sides of the coin that is me. I am thinking that at any time I can flip that coin and go with which ends up on top, knowing it will even out at the end. And that, most importantly, caring for the one implies caring for the other. For truly, how can I be a friend of myself without befriending another, and vice versa? I resolve to test that idea, to make it work.
So there you have it, my New Year’s resolution, in short: to be mindful of the other, of myself, every day, face to face.
This is the Riot for the month of December 2011 for the three of us. Half of that month we were away in my hometown in Belgium, which explains the low numbers. Our first year’s averages were calculated here, our second year’s averages can be found here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers!
Gasoline. Â Calculated per person. I’ve not calculated in our flights to Europe, forgot how to do that.
3.22 gallons per person
7.8% of the US National Average
Electricity. This is reckoned per household, not per person. With the grey skies and the low angle of the sun, our solar production is down, but it should, of course, go back up as of now. According to our solar meter, we produced 1403 kWh since the system was turned on, 176 kWh in December.  (You can follow our solar harvest live, here).
So in November we consumed:
176 (solar) + 108 (wind) = Â 284 kWh
12.7% of the US National Average
Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person.
{ ALERT } The way I have been calculating our heating oil consumption is by reading off the furnace how many hours it ran, then multiplying it by .85 because that’s the amount of gallons of oil I *thought* it used. Now DH just told me that our furnace is more efficient than that and the correct number is .65. Which is great news, don’t get me wrong, but gee! I’ve used the new number for this month but will adjust the other numbers in my all-year assessment { / ALERT }
I turned on our heat on 13 December, the day before we left for Belgium. The thermostat was set at 45F to prevent pipes freezing in case it should get really cold (which it didn’t, no snow either). ironically, even though we weren’t here to use the furnace for hot water, etc., we consumed more oil than in November because we weren’t here, that is, because we couldn’t use our wood stove to heat the place and forego the furnace.
14.95 gallons of oil
24.3% of the US National Average
Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers.
10 lbs. pp per month
7%Â of the US National Average
Water. This is calculated per person.
204.46 gallons pp.
6.8%Â of the US National Average
I found an old journal (last part of 2007) in a stack of novels hidden behind a chair in my little “office”. I am usually very careful with my journals, keeping them together and safe. This one isn’t the usual black moleskine but a fancy cloth one given to me by a friend, and that’s probably why it was separated. I opened it, curious about the year 2007, and on page one I read:
~
I’m going to write a new story. A short story, an essay, a novel, a poem, or maybe a definition, an etymology, or a map or itinerary, a history, a geography. I don’t know yet. I have some inklings. It will be “American”  in that it will be concerned with situating me – someone – in a landscape. “Situating” is perhaps not the word: letting her be, get lost, find her way. And it will be “American” as in “natural”, nature-bound: about the freedom and potential and the rule of nature, and mourning it. No matter what will be the point of writing it, I need write it, on pen and paper, scratch it as much as write it: ETCH it and so it is alive.
Even if you despair about the future, you still need to take care of the present. It is in the present that your urge, you life, soul, animus exists, lives. It may aim towards and work for tomorrow, next year, “retirement”, but it aims and works now.
~
They’re connected: writing, the story and the now. I’m still doing that, four years later, asserting a story (my imagination, my freedom), in the present (the way things are), to be able to face an uncertain future.  I guess that’s  my way of coping, living.
In the meantime my neighbor’s pine tree has interposed itself between the sun and my office window and I can feel its shadow on my back. In Winter in an unheated house one is so close to the edge, the margin between warm enough and cold is so narrow a tree makes all the difference.
Now I can’t stop blogging! I just wanted share this, from Jim Harrison’s North American Image Cycle:
The boy stood in the burning house. Set it up
that way, and with all windows open. I don’t want
a roof. I want to fill all those spaces where we
never allow words to occur.
That’s what I feel like. The house is burning. I want to fearlessly invite and feed and explore that fear.
A Fugue.
I’m reading the newly arrived Life in the Soil. Actually, I’m devouring it. And it’s not even that particularly well or passionately written.
I started wondering about this as I marveled over acellular slime molds and trichomycetes and realized that I often take refuge in books about soil and geology when I am down about the state of the world. In the first days of my “awakening” to climate change, peak oil and what have you, I fed on McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, like Henry, swallowing all 712 pages whole in the matter of a week.
Why?
Glaciers, archaebacteria: they are the kind of Earth without us. The kind of Earth that, given enough geological time, will be there after we are gone. Maybe what I am looking for in these books is perspective. I mourn so deeply what we might lose, and it seems such a shame. But these books tell me that, in another scheme of things, it doesn’t matter so much. From the perspective of the glacier, of the lichen, we don’t matter that much…
Does it work? I lose myself in the text, in the imagining of these things so utterly un-human. That’s something at least. When I read about art, about philosophy, it’s all so thoroughly human. Even a medieval religious icon or a 17th century piece of music are tainted with my sense of loss, of futility. So, losing myself in this Earth-without-us helps take my mind off things.
But then there is always the moment when I come out of the text to be reminded that it was written by a human. The science was done by humans. That knowledge and imagination, once we’re gone, will be gone as well – all that work, all that passion – for nothing! True, the real thing will still be there, the lichen, the glacier, geological time. But here I am, just holding a book, and sighing too much.
Aren’t you glad this wasn’t another “tutorial” (remember “Calcium in the Soil,” in 8 parts)?
Lately I’ve been in several situations and conversations that have brought home for me an important shift in how I as an activist (and many other activists) consider my priorities and view my task.
I stumbled into The Situation some months back. With the Green Team we have been focusing on recycling. At the beginning of the school year one of our two elementary schools went online with deep recycling. That’s recycling each and every scrap of paper and plastic, drastically reducing the school’s waste stream (you can see the posters we put up here). After testing that system for a couple of months we started the system at the school the other elementary school, which I represent.
It was clear that most of the bulk of the remaining trash bags was styrofoam trays. That one school consumes (and trashes) no less than 265 of these, every day! Our town’s recycling center does not take  these. So I thought I and a small group of parents could possibly collect these trays ourselves and bring them to a recycler int he neighborhood that does. But before I started rounding up volunteers I needed to find out what this entailed.  So I started the system while I was there anyway, during lunch, for two weeks, training the kids and the staff.
It entailed the following:
It was discouraging, but I persevered, trying to find the best methods of shaking, Â rinsing, storing… Then the Situation arrived.
I thought if I could wash them and store them at the school I could at least dispense with tasks 1. and 2.  I arrived 15 minutes before dismissal and began. The only place available to do the rinsing was a custodian closet with a floor sink. It was so small I bumped into things. It smelled of cleaning chemicals. I  also didn’t want to make work for the custodian so was overly careful not to spill and splash. It was dark. It was lonely. I must already have been thinking “this isn’t right” because I closed the door so no one could see what I was doing from the corridor. Then the bell rang. I poked my head out the door and called Amie before she ran outside.
She came into the little room, I closed the door behind her and she looked at the scene in dismay.
What are you doing? she asked with a frown.
I explained. She sighed, Oh Mama!
That tone, half pitiful, half ashamed, said it all. Time to ditch this project! Time to prioritize!