by Laura Parker Roerden

Best Investments in Sustainability

Last Memorial Day our family finally replaced our 15-year old premium-gas guzzling car. You could say that it was high time! But it was also an opportunity to think out of the box about our transportation needs and the challenges facing our planet. We bought an electric vehicle (EV): the Chevy Bolt. In those fifteen years, a lot changed in regards to transportation options. Here are four reasons to consider an EV this season.

1. IT’S CHEAPER THAN A CONVENTIONAL CAR

We knew we wanted to reduce our carbon footprint, but until we started shopping we hadn’t realized how much money we could also save by no longer having to gas up. It turns out that free EV chargers are everywhere! Who knew? We are eight months and 12,000 miles in and have yet to pay a penny for energy. By the end of a year of operating, we estimate we will have wracked up $1,200-$1,500 in gas savings alone. Also see details of federal tax credits (up to $7,500) and any offered by your state. For more explanation about how the total cost of ownership (TCO) is much lower on EVs than in conventional gasoline powered cars see this article.

2. IT’S SUPRISINGLY FUN

The EV experience has turned out to be a surprisingly great ride and fun lifestyle. A large network of EV owners offer their own garages as plug ins to other owners travelling through Plug Share. So becoming an EV owner is a bit like owning a Harley-Davidson motorcycle: you find yourself suddenly part of a large community of people with whom you share something in common.

Chargepoint, an easy-to-use app for your phone lists free and pay chargers along the routes that you are travelling. I’ve occasionally combined errands with opportunities to charge, discovering in the process wonderful treasures. I’ve been to new libraries where I’ve read books I wouldn’t have otherwise. Or I’ve ended up at an unfamiliar family-owned cafe where the new vantage helped me work more effectively on a project. You can also slide right into premium spaces in busy places like the beach on a hot day, where you can re-charge both your own and your car’s batteries. Lastly, strangers everywhere strike up conversations with you about your ride. They really should add this part of the experience to the brochure. It’s been the best part of EV ownership!

And if you have range anxiety, consider that EV ownership more accurately resembles owning a cell phone. We are in the habit of nightly charging, which means we always have a full tank. For most trips, this is more than sufficient charge.

3. END OF THE YEAR IS PERFECT TIMING

If you’re in need of a new car there is no better time than right now to consider either purchasing or leasing an EV. Leases start at $139/month, and can be researched through Massachusetts Energy Consumer Alliance, which offers everything you need to shop for a discounted car on their website including handy comparisons. Also, both federal ($7,500) tax incentives are still available.

New Years Eve and New Years Day is traditionally one of the best times of the year to buy a car, with discounts ranging from 7-9% as car manufacturers are incentivized to move inventory and meet both quarterly and annual sales goals.

4. YOU’LL BE LOWERING YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT

For the chorus of naysayers who might say, “But the energy you’re charging your car with is also dirty,” the answer is: nowhere near as dirty as a gas car. For a complete discussion of the environmental impact of EVs cradle to grave, see this well-researched article from the Union of Concerned Scientists. And since the devil is in the details, the UCS also offers an interactive online tool that compares the EV you are thinking of buying to conventional gas and hybrid options using the energy grid mix specific to your zip code. Here is the data on how our Chevy Bolt compares:

There’s plenty of reason to believe that 2020 will be a great year for EVs, with more and more models joining the marketplace. Mass Energy’s Dive Green Program Coordinator Anna Vanderspek had this to say: ““After running Drive Green with Mass Energy for a couple years now, we are looking forward to an exciting 2020! Lots of people have gotten excellent deals on cars like the Chevrolet Bolt and Volt and Nissan LEAF so far, and we are excited for the new electric cars coming on the market.”

We’ve recently installed solar panels on our barn so that we can charge the car and power our house with the sun. Growing up on a farm, I think I’ve always appreciated the way the sun grew the hay and corn that fed the cows that produced the high-butter fat milk used to make the butter and ice cream our wholesaler supplied to area homes. Driving a vehicle also powered by the sun is oddly reconnecting to those ancient rhythms and relationships.

In a nod to that history, we bought our Bolt in what we like to refer to as Jo-Erl Farm Blue—so our car matches our tractor. While that coordination might not be on your car shopping list, we hope you’ll now look into an EV as a best investment in sustainability.

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

Learn more about From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women.

Best Investments in Sustainability

by Maria Dee

We don’t wrap Christmas presents. To tell you that this started as an earth-friendly initiative would be a lie. During the Christmas season of  2010, I had a 9-year old, a 4-year old, and an 11-month old. My husband and I had a Christmas Eve routine that worked with two kids:  we would stay awake after the kids would go to bed, and while they slept, we would assemble toys and wrap presents. We usually had some drinks and dessert, listening to Christmas music or watching the “A Christmas Story” marathon. At some point we’d split up to wrap each other’s gifts, and then we’d finish the night admiring the mountain of presents under the tree.

And then our 3rd child came, and I knew that was all over.  I had never been so tired in my entire life. Wouldn’t the kids be just as happy to receive presents if they were UNwrapped? Those kids never slept past 6AM, and with the excitement of Christmas they’d wake up at 5. I was so tired that my eyeballs throbbed, and I just wanted to throw those toys into a sack and get myself to bed.

Lightbulb. Grab-bag, the Christmas edition!! So I’m sorry, Mother Earth. This was totally about me and catching some Zzzzzz.

But it does turn out to be a win for Mother Earth.

Would you believe that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we create 25% more garbage, equalling about 25 million tons of waste? Only a fastidious few of gift recipients will open the packages delicately without tearing it, with the intention of reusing it for another gift. Paper gift bags and tissue are only marginally more likely to be saved and used another time. Cloth sacks are reusable, year after year. And isn’t that the image that many of us have of Santa, a sack thrown over his shoulder as he heads down the chimney, the sacks of toys piled up in his reindeer-drawn sleigh?

In 2010, I spent $50 on 5 large cloth sacks. I have not bought Christmas wrapping paper since then. Some friends, inspired by the idea, made their own out of fabric or pillow cases, and then gave me some, too! When I am unsure about getting a gift sack back, like at a Secret Santa or for teacher gifts, I reach under my bed for the remaining rolls of Christmas wrap that are, yes, 7 years old.

Christmas morning in my house is just as festive as it ever has been. We tag the presents with the kids’ names, and the kids take turns reaching into the bags and giving the gift to its recipient. Each year, though, I am stunned at the amount of trash still created—factory packaging is full of plastic and cardboard, and both the recycling and trash bins are piled high. But the trash would be 25% higher without that effort.

Maria Dee lives in Boston with her husband and three children. She’s an accidental environmentalist, a result of focusing on every day ways to reduce waste without sacrificing convenience, too much money, and her sense of humor. She also pretends she can sing, take photos, and make a difference in Boston politics.

Be sure to not miss a Salt from the Earth post by subscribing here:

Learn more about From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability.

by Guest Blogger Sarah Harrison Roy of Running Girl Eats

Best Investments in Sustainability

 

About Sarah Harrison Roy and Running Girl Eats

Holistic Nutrition Coach Licensed * Institute for Integrative Nutrition, MBA * Simmons College

My goal is to help people move beyond emotional eating and to healthier more desirable habits.

I combine philosophies of a few great experts, licensing as a Holistic Nutrition Coach, and a lifetime of experience in my own battle with emotional eating, anorexia, and addiction. I offer to you what has worked for me and my clients. Together we get to the root cause of your eating struggles.

No more dieting, depriving, calorie counting, product testing, disappointment, and distress around what we see as our lack of willpower.

I choose to see that our eating struggles exist as a doorway into the other areas of our life that need love and attention. Our struggles with emotional eating habits shine a light on what we can learn and change in order to feel more life satisfaction in our relationships, career, physical body, and spiritual world.

Please visit my website at Running Girl Eats and schedule an Introduction if you would like to get to know me better and hear more about how I can help you.

—————————————————————–

Learn more about From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability

and make sure you don’t miss another one by subscribing:

Or contact us to become a guest blogger! We want to hear about the Best Investments in Sustainability from your home.

Best Investments in Sustainability

by Laura Parker Roerden

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers — Wordsworth.

A whole culture of shopping has sprouted up around Thanksgiving weekend: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. But perhaps you also have heard of Giving Tuesday. The first three are ways to get a jump on holiday shopping and some deep discounts in an attempt to check off some boxes on our to-do lists. But Giving Tuesday is an entirely different phenomenon. This day encourages a deeper giving; one that asks us to align our actions to our values and ideals.

Now what does all this have to do with sustainability, you ask? The obvious answer would be: choose an environmentally-focused effort to get involved in or donate to for Giving Tuesday. But I want to suggest something even more radical: Giving Tuesday is a reminder of the power of service to create sustainability in communities and to create hope in our hearts.

The problems we face can feel insurmountable: until we roll up our sleeves and face them together.

Author Liz Cunningham, in her beautiful book Ocean Country, speaks about service as she travels the globe uncovering stories of every day people working in their communities to address real problems facing the ocean. On the surface, their efforts looked like they might not add up to a solution. But in fact, they so often miraculously do. Liz summarizes: “I learned that the heart of hope is the passion of rescue.”

It’s something we all have: that drive to make a deep difference to the world. It feels good to give. And giving literally gives back. Numerous studies that have looked at service as a tool for education enumerate important gains in attitudes toward self, attitudes toward school and learning, civic engagement, social skills, and academic performance.

I’ve seen this many times in my work directing Ocean Matters, a marine science through service project, where young people literally bloom like flowers before our eyes as they give deeply in service to a problem facing the ocean. When given a choice between simply goofing off and working, even when in a tropical paradise, the teens always choose the work.

One Ocean Matters student Robyn described it this way: “I think back to those last couple days [of the program], when we were putting together our research report, doing standard deviations, working really hard. We wouldn’t have accomplished that much if we didn’t all feel that way about the reef and care about the project and the topic. I have a quotation that sums it up: ‘Nothing in the world is accomplished without passion.'”

Caring deeply and activating hope can be a gift we give ourselves and the young people in our lives.

Wishing you all a #GivingTuesday that sustains your soul, your family, and your community!

For more information about designing service learning projects for young people see Service is Learning: Activating Hope on #GivingTuesday in the Ocean Matters blog.

Ocean Matters is a 501(c)3 nonprofit led by international luminaries including National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary.

Learn more about From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women.

Best Investments in Sustainability

by Laura Parker Roerden

What’s better than something you do to help create a more sustainable earth and life? Something you simply stop doing; especially if it’s a chore in which you had previously invested time, money, and effort.

It turns out that the late fall chore of removing your leaves is not only bad for the earth, it’s bad for your lawn and gardens. Instead, hang up your rake and sit this fall out.

Simply do one last mowing of your leaf-littered grass. The mowing will mulch the leaves into tiny pieces that will provide several benefits to your lawn and gardens over the winter:

1. As the leaves decompose they will add nutrients back into the soil, eliminating your need to do fertilizing come spring.
2. Leaf litter provides cover for wildlife including chipmucks, turtles, and pollinators like moths and butterflies, whose larvae is also attached to the leaves.
3. This ecosystem of micro-organisms, insects, and larvae within the leaf litter is an important base of the food chain that desirable backyard wildlife like song birds and butterflies rely on.
4. The leaf litter will act as mulch, suppressing weed growth in your lawn.

Your IN-action, in this case, will help the earth in several other ways. Fertilizer run-off from land, which enters rivers and ends up in the sea, is responsible for dead zones in aquatic ecosystems. The extra nutrients of the added fertilizer causes too much algae to bloom, which as it decomposes takes oxygen out of the system, causing fish kills. More than 33 million tons of waste in landfills is simply bags of discarded leaves, which when wrapped in plastic, are unable to provide any nourishment to the ecosystem. You could say, that leaves discarded are entirely wasted, as nature prefers recycling and always relies on cycles of death feeding resurrection.

Fall is such a beautiful, if fleeting, time of year. Instead of the many hours of raking and bagging your leaves, use this new found time to go apple picking or drink cocoa in front of a fire outside with your loved ones. Or simply sit and watch the lengthening shadows and enjoy a kaleidoscope turn as wildlife from late fall are replaced by winter’s.

We leave our leaves, and just this weekend I noticed a family of 9 stunningly bright eastern bluebirds enjoying the fruits of a chokeberry bush on the edge of our lawn, who as they competed for the berries sent off flickers of indigo like a single jewel with many facets.

Price Comparison: Save $50-$100 in Leaf Bags and Fertilizer plus 3-6 hours of Labor
Subscribe to Salt from the Earth Blog and the “From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability” column!

Learn more about From the Shaker: Best Investments in Sustainability.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women.

Best Investments in Sustainability

by Laura Parker Roerden

My family decided we would cut back on our plastic pollution recently and have been slowly replacing plastic items with real ones. The health risks are real–plastic is entering our waterways, the ocean and our food webs, concentrating dangerous chemicals in the food we eat. So we took a look at it together. What were we doing well? What could we improve upon?

One of the worst offenders for single-use plastic in our home was yogurt containers, which in many places are not recyclable. We love yogurt. I’m the daughter of dairy farmer, so I tend to like all milk products. Yogurt, in particular, has undeniable health and immune system benefits. But we were throwing a mountains worth of plastic into our recycling bins each week and spending a small fortune on it.

One day a friend, Women Working for Oceans founder Barb Burgess, mentioned that she was making yogurt at home after a French neighbor had said to her with astonishment, “You don’t make your own yogurt?” Perhaps to the French not making your own yogurt is like buying a plastic-wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The whole point is its simplicity.  Well, okay then! If it is that easy, then why not try it?

Turns out it’s true: not only is it easy and cheaper to make your own yogurt, but making it yourself feels nurturing and homey. The whole process conjures up images of clay crock pots and cotton towels, of French countrysides, and wooden breakfast tables with the first light of morning where families connect before heading off into their days.

It reminds us of a time when we understood food as a reflection of the land and where fermentation was a necessity of economy and safe storage; and we had a healthy co-habitation with the bacterial engines that drive life. Barb told me that she makes yogurt with her husband Bill every night for their morning breakfast, creating a nice ritual of togetherness.

Making your own yogurt can even engage you and your children’s ingenuity and problem solving skills, as you search for simple ways to maintain a several hour heat source between 110 and 115 F for 5-10 hours. Some people achieve this through their oven; others by buying yogurt makers. But there is an entire culture of rogue solutions to this task including DIY wooden containers with light bulbs; use of an already heated oven from making dinner (simply shut off the stove, but keep it closed overnight); repurposing crockpots and food dehydrators; heating pads; microwaves; placement over radiators; to even cuddling in bed with a jar and a hot water bottle. My own kids suggested our chicken brooder to incubate yogurt, but I don’t even want to talk about the cleanliness implications of that idea!

I have a healthy fear of bacterial processes run amock (farming will do that to you) so I favor the stable temperature approach of a commercial yogurt maker or oven. But you’ll be nothing short of delighted if you spend some time indulging on Pinterest on home-made yogurt incubation ideas: people’s creativity will make you believe there is indeed hope for humanity.

Home-Made Yogurt Recipe

• Milk (whole or skim, depending on the consistency you’d like)
• Yogurt culture (this can come from commercial prepared plain yogurt, just save a little for use in this recipe) or you can buy cultures online. I buy cultures, as they tend to be of higher quality of the immune system enhancing live bacteria than commercially-prepared yogurt and more consistently perform. They are also inexpensive and do not involve buying more plastic.
• Candy (food) thermometer
• Oven-safe pan with cover
• Ice for a bath that will cool your pan

Safety Note: Be sure your equipment is clean and sanitized. Right out of the dishwasher should be sufficient if your settings are hot.

1. Heat milk on stove to just around a simmer of 180 F degrees for 30 minutes. You can transfer the pan to the oven for this stage if you don’t want to babysit the maintenance of temperature on the stove top.
2. Cool the pan quickly to a temperature of 115 F degrees in an ice bath. Add yogurt culture (follow directions on packet) and stir.
3. Incubate: Keep the yogurt at 115 F degrees for 5-10 hours. You can do this safely by keeping it in the pan with a lid on it in the oven at temperature. Or transfer to clean glass containers in a simple yogurt maker and plug in.
4. If you incubated in your pan, transfer to clean glass jars (small mason canning jars work beautifully) and store in the refrigerator. This is where you can add fruit preserves at the bottom.

Fruit and toppings can be added at any stage, but I’d recommend making plain yogurt the first time to add toppings later, so that you’re aware of the thickness you are working with before adding thinning ingredients like fruit, which contains a good amount of water. You’ll need to experiment to do this in a way that finishes with a result you like.

Since we make fruit preserves anyway, I’ve had best results by putting a little fruit preserve in the bottom of the jar for the incubation process, before pouring the milk on top. The times I’ve added sugar to fruit and cooked it down, then added this quick preserve to the milk for throughout flavor coverage have resulted in much too thin yogurt for my taste (though I will say blueberries work better than strawberries.) You can always add gelatin to thicken at this stage, but that just sounds too fussy to me. The goal is simplicity.

Price Comparison: 3-9 X More to BUY
$4.56 gallon for homemade yogurt
$38.40 gallon for commercially-prepared yogurt (if bought in 6 ounce cups)
$14.08 gallon for commercially prepared yogurt (if bought in larger containers)

Subscribe to Salt from the Earth Blog and the From the Shaker Best Investments in Sustainability column!

Related Post: Six Steps for Solving Single-Use Plastic While Building Resilient Children

Learn more about From the Shaker Best Investments in Sustainability.

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.

Introducing the From the Shaker Column!

Each Friday Salt from the Earth will feature a best investment in sustainability for your family, farm, or homestead. We believe that the best targets for sustainability in our lives should be:

1. less expensive,
2. earth and health friendly,
3. soul-satisfying,
4. easy to do!

Inspired by the Shakers, who first married form with function, the solutions we will offer in this column will be small changes you can make that deliver big dividends in all criterion.

Let sprinkles of salt, or sustainability, add spice to your life!

Be sure to receive our column and posts to your inbox by singing up below. You can catch up on back issues here. 

We love having guest bloggers, so if you have a topic to pitch, just let us know.

[contact-form-7 id=”2080″ title=”Contact form 1″]

Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.