Being six months into our pledge seems an appropriate time to reflect: on what’s going well, and what is not.  As we’ve mentioned a few places, including in this Oregonian op-ed, being effective parents in a world on the brink has come to mean three things for us: reducing our footprint, becoming politically active around climate, and raising kids who appreciate the earth and will fight for it.  I’ll do a retrospective on each of these in turn, starting with the first: reducing the carbon we produce.  (For those who are first-time readers of the blog, these posts will be a bit longer than what is traditional.) 

In general, Sara and I are quite proud of what we’ve accomplished over the past half year in this arena.  We are almost completely vegetarian in our diet, swapping tofu for beef in our tacos.  In fact, we’re bordering on being vegan.  I can’t remember the last time I drank cow’s milk (or any other milk from an animal), and we often rely on cheese substitutes.  Though, I will say that cheese has been pretty tough, and is where we lapse the most.  We also try to eat chicken once a week so that the kids can have some meat and their little bodies will remember how to process it.  That way, if they decide to follow in our dietary footsteps eventually, they’ll be able to make that choice (we’ve heard others say that raising kids vegetarian or vegan can make it hard to reintroduce meat if the children haven’t been raised with it—their systems just won’t process it). 

We’ve also reduced our footprint related to transportation.  I’m taking the bus to work, and have begun working from home two days a week, largely to decrease that footprint further.  Since Sara needs to drive to her school, we decided to trade in our gas-guzzling SUV for a plug-in hybrid.  As I’ve mentioned in the blog before, I love our Hyundai Ioniq.  We owned the car for 3.5 months before we needed to buy a tank of gas.  The car can go about 30 miles fully electric, which means commuting and getting the kids to school occurs without burning any carbon.  Last I looked, we average over 100 MPGe in that car.  The only complaint we have is that it’s hard to find charging stations when we’re not at home, especially since google and Apple maps tend to be pretty misleading.  I can’t tell you how many times we’ve navigated to an e-vehicle charging station only to find nothing there. 

The more difficult aspect of transportation has been air travel.  We made a pledge to only fly once per year for personal reasons, and have already violated that rule.  While we have good reason for those violations—life changes that require a bit of jet setting—it’s easy to imagine there will always be an excuse.  One idea we’ve toyed with is changing our pledge to a commitment that we will only expend a certain amount of CO2 each year in the air.  Taking off and landing burn the most fuel, so it’s plausible we could do one long trip and not have as big a footprint as if we’d done two short trips.  Regardless, flying is one of the worst things we can do for the planet and its atmosphere and, here, we are failing. 

Further, this whole issue leaves aside work travel.  I fly at least three times per year for work, and I can often hit six flights.  As much as I want to tell people I’ll just Skype into meetings, such is not the norm, and it’s hard to convince people to let me go that direction.  I try to buy offsets for all my flights, but forgetting to purchase those offsets is as easy as remembering.  Even sadder, I had a conversation with my company’s CFO and urged her to budget to pay for carbon offsets for all the company’s flights.  We’re an education nonprofit, and she still said that paying for those offsets is “beyond the scope of our mission.”  So, the company is dedicated to helping students learn, it’s just not overly concerned that there might not be an inhabitable planet for kids a few generations out, nor do its leaders care that the organization is complicit.  Sigh…

Finally, our efforts to reduce our energy consumption at home have been a mixed bag.  We have reduced the waste we send to a landfill, turned the thermostat way down (despite being cold too often), decreased our shower time to five minutes, and bought more local produce.  However, we also continue to do laundry using the dryer rather than a clothes line, often fail to make it to the farmer’s market or co-op for food, and still have appliances that aren’t super energy-efficient.  Plus, we keep delaying buying offsets for our family’s overall, non-travel footprint.  We have done so much, but there is still so much to be done.

While giving ourselves a grade on reducing our footprint is difficult, I will say that the process has been way more manageable—maybe even enjoyable—than we anticipated.  Paying attention to the choices we make about our planet on a daily basis is invigorating, and gives us a sense of purpose.  We hope that, eventually, we will be part of a community thinking about these issues day in, day out.  Community would certainly make this process less lonely. 

As we have discovered, far and away the hardest part about fighting for our kids and the planet’s future is deciding to do so in the first place.  Hopefully, more and more of our friends and family will do the same.

Share this page