Bag habits

Did you ever have one of those mornings when you woke up to find that one of your habits came home with you? It happened to me the other day. As I wiped the sleep from my eyes and put the water on for tea, there it was, languishing over the back of a kitchen chair: another reusable bag.

Most bags are easy to refuse, but this one certainly had its charm. There was the allure of the soft  blue recycled fabric, not to mention the colorful webbing of the handles (also made of recycled materials) that flirted with me and Sven when we first saw it. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment purchased 7,000 of these bags in a variety of colors for distribution for free free as part of the educational campaign for the City’s Checkout Bag Ordinance which went into effect on October 1.

The purpose of this legislation is to encourage customers to bring their own checkout bags, in order to reduce the impact of disposable bags to the City and the environment.

 

How the laundry organized the fridge

Organizing can be this way: You start with a desire to make something better and more efficient. You get started on that single task, but then you find that one thing leads to another, and suddenly you’re going on an unexpected journey around your home or office. Sound familiar?

The interconnectedness of the seemingly disparate parts that make up workable and efficient systems is among the many features I love about the organizing process. It takes you places, it helps you discover things, and it lets you improvise along the way. There are no “rights” or “wrongs” but what works for you, the individual. The process can be overwhelming and a complete diversion that ends in a larger sense of disarray than you could ever have imagined. I’ve been there. Who knew that giving laundry day a lift would provide one such voyage.

 

The greatest “swag” of all

A week ago, I returned from a visit to NYC where I attended the BlogHer 2012 conference. As I do before any trip, I printed out my handy packing list and meticulously crossed things off as they entered the suitcase staging zone (a.k.a. the floor of my office). I was prepared for almost everything, including layers to ward off the chill of air conditioning, a thermal mug to keep my morning tea warm and my afternoon thirst trash-free, and a pen with an extra refill for all the notes I anticipated taking in the breakout sessions. I say almost everything because the one thing I was unprepared for was unpackable. It looked like this:

 

And it happens to me

It may come as a refreshing surprise to learn that I am not immune to impulsive purchases. The most common are farmer-generated and occur at outdoor markets year-round (at least here in the San Francisco Bay Area). Visually inspiring and delicious, veggies and fruits often lead to impromptu desires. That’s me (right) communing with a bundle of scapes at a friend’s farm stand at the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market in Seattle last month. The temptation was strong, but I resisted them despite the lure of their curls!

But here’s a first for me: while leaving the Mission Community Market last night, I got side-tracked not by produce, but by a towel.

 

A different kind of love song

When you think of love songs, I bet lines like “Oh baby, baby, baby, baaaaaaaaby, I love you” and other word conglomerations of that ilk come to mind. These songs run the gamut of happy, sad, mournful, or even overly goopy.

Leave it to my sweetie to write a song for me that speaks to what we value, not to mention what I spend my days navigating in varying degrees while I make a living. The lyrics go like this:

Shed
by Sven Eberlein

I’ve got a closet full of things
don’t know how they made it in
there’s that sweater I don’t like
and the tapes left behind by my friend Mike

I’ve tried to clear it out before
but all that stuff keeps getting more
my house is looking like a store
and now I can’t even close the door

 

Chicken in a jar

This is a post about changing a habit. Habits take time. They require practice. Practice makes almost perfect. Why almost perfect? I believe that perfection is a perceived destination and that the journey is the actual destination.

If you’re like me, I’m on several journeys at any given time. This is about my journey to deepen a habit: to reduce my consumption of unnecessary waste and single use items. While this is something I’ve been working on for years and have gotten very good at, I was inspired to up my game after meeting Beth Terry, blogger extraordinaire and tireless crusader of My Plastic-free Life, in 2010. At the time, Beth interviewed me for an awesome piece she wrote about bringing our own reusable containers out into the world.

When I saw her April 17 post on Facebook announcing she would be attending the Lunchbox Project SF, a pre-Earth Day “large-scale Day of Action in which San Franciscans will order lunch in our own, reusable containers,” I kept my schedule clear so I could meet her for lunch with the very thing that brought us together in the first place!

 

The start of a revolution

For starters, I haven’t started a revolution…yet! But this blog post is a bit revolutionary for me. This paragraph aside, the story you are about to read was penned by my partner, Sven, around a series of photographs I shot on a historic day in the sustainability movement. It was a foggy morning that found us on our way to Sacramento to pursue what we hoped would be our first true documentary collaboration. His recorder in hand, my cameras’ viewfinders taking turns at my eye, we’re happy to share the fruits of this creative jam session. The day was…

January 3, 2012: California becomes the sixth state to adopt law that allows the formation of corporations whose main purpose isn’t to make money.

A day at the Secretary of State’s office in Sacramento, where California’s first twelve businesses filed to operate as benefit corporations.

California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento’s Capitol Park, only a short walk from the Secretary of State’s Corporate Filing Office, honoring Brien Thomas (B.T.) Collins, Vietnam War veteran and CA Assembly Member, who “never wavered in the belief that one should give something back to society.”

I hope five or ten years from now we’ll look back on this day and say “this was the start of a revolution, because the existing paradigm isn’t working anymore. This is the future.”

- Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, California’s first benefit corporation.

 

Trashin’ up the holidaze

Few things made me roll my eyes more than the media reports of a woman who pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers in what is now a toss up between self-defense and defensive shopping. I find it hard to imagine why on earth one would ever put themselves in the situation where the ritual of gift shopping for loved ones becomes a life or death struggle and race to the cash register. This is not sustainable in any sense of the holiday spirit.

 

Band-Aids, beans and label things

During my years attending Rutgers University, there was one very tall building near the main campus in downtown New Brunswick that literally stood out: the appropriately white and sterile-looking corporate headquarters that was (and still is) Johnson & Johnson. Knowing they were based right there led my young self to assume that every Band-Aid ® and gauze pad I’d ever purchased in the red, white, and blue box was manufactured somewhere nearby.

Fast forward to today, more than (ahem) twenty years later. A box of Band-Aids ® sits beside me. Times have changed. Their distinctive logo remains the same, but the box design has been modernized in ways unimaginable back then. The FSC, or Forest Stewardship Council logo appears on the box. In a nutshell, this means their boxes are made from responsibly managed forests. The box also reveals that this all-American seeming product is made in…Brazil! There’s a possible irony there that I’m just going to avoid for today.

 

Cartoonist nails it

Thank you to cartoonist Barbara Smaller for brilliantly summing up one of my nagging thoughts on consumerism and “stuff” in the November 15, 2010 issue of The New Yorker: