What this is.

Some years ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine where we began to consider what changes we would need to make in our respective lives so that, at the end of the day, we had produced no garbage. We, of course, are the sort of women who thrill at this sort of game, scanning our lives for condemnable excesses and coming up with alternatives. It is, truth be told, sort of fascinating. How do we clean our ears without q-tips? How does one handle her period? What do we do about prophylactics?

Recently, while chatting with another friend, she explained to me her boyfriend's perspective on recycling, which is that it is, in fact, quite energy intensive and not the cure-all that we sometimes assume. There is the energy expended for roadside pick up, of trucking the recyclables to possibly a regional center, and then of course the energy spent to process the materials into, you know, whatever.

I, of course, am an enthusiastic and meticulous recycler. My own blue bins often exhibit an orderliness and attention that is often lacking in mostly every other aspect of my life. For me, recycling is a magical process in which I have long had a kind of childlike faith. So strong is my conviction in the absolute goodness and energy-neutrality of recycling that it has never occurred to me to wonder what happens to the objects of my beautifully organized recycling bins after they leave the domain of my sidewalk.

My naivete, I will agree, is of the boundless type.

So I have been thinking about this. I have had, recently, quite a bit of time to think. And I have been thinking that now is perhaps the time to really commit to the pursuit of sustainability in a day-to-day fashion, concretely instead of in the theoretical fashion that I have leaned towards in the past. The origins of my concern for the environment are rooted in my youth, and the scope of my concern for the environment are both local and global, present and future. It is easy to become immobilized by the enormity of the challenges we face, and in fact immobilized is what I have often been. And so I have chosen to abandon as my focus, initially, the big picture and focus instead on the small locus of influence that I have, which for now consists of my life and this apartment that I share.

My intention for this blog is to explore the methods that we use and the challenges that we face on our journey towards personal sustainability, to a life without waste. At the same time I plan to use this format to explore other topics related to sustainability in which I would like to know more, such as the role of poverty and wealth in sustainability, urban planning issues, and the examination of the philosophical underpinnings of such a pursuit, to name a few. I wouldn't imagine that a true pursuit of sustainability could be complete without attention to such matters.

So to anyone who stumbles upon this blog I thank you now for your interest, and any information or feedback you wish to share. And of course to each I wish you luck in your own pursuit of sustainable living, in whatever form that takes.

Eva