Cleansing Our Footprint

Can't really say it any better than my green rock-star husband, David Gottfried.  As we near the final 5 days of our cleanse, I'm thinking about how food choices can lessen my ecological footprint.

Water Footprint

Water is such a crucial metric to consider: it takes 2400 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat vs. 40 gallons to produce one pound of vegetables. For more info, check out the movie Flow, a great documentary on the global water crisis.

If you come to our deep green 1915 Craftsman in Rockridge, you'll notice that we care a lot about saving water. My husband wrote the initial white paper on the LEED rating system to score a building's green-ness, and we were delighted to score higher than any other remodelled residence when we received LEED-Platinum in 2008. Rainwater fills our Caroma toilets (you'll notice it's a little yellow from the leaves that mix with the rainwater), and our tubs and sinks get re-used as greywater to water our landscaping. All of our appliances are Energy-Star, and we are always saving our pennies for more rainwater capture bins.

Choosing more veggies, and reducing meat significantly lowers your water footprint. From my review of the literature, I'm increasingly convinced by the health benefits of eating vegan. While you may respond, "Dr. Sara, puh-lease, I'm restricted so much - now you're going to take away meat?" -- my response is that you should not take it from me. Start with vegan Mondays, or go vegan for 90 days, and see what happens to your chronic joint achiness, your mild constipation, your frequent viral infections. Let the deep knowing from your own body inform your decisions.

Carbon footprint, well, you know eating local saves carbon. More on that another time.

Shameless Plug for Husband, David Gottfried

My husband, David Gottfried, was just the cover story for a newspaper in Dubai. Here it is. He's my favorite green rock star.

Call to Action: Green Your Lifestyle, Attitude & Behavior

We need to transform how we live in the world. We must do this in the next two to three years, or it will be too late. A new synthesis of the world literature by the United Nations group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month is a brave and inspiring call to action.

My husband and I were reading the New York Times this morning, which is to say that we were getting about one minute of focused concentration before our toddler would need us. We felt that much of our mounting alarm and wish for expeditious intervention to lessen climate change was reflected in a new document (check it out at nytimes.com/dotearth) called the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What inspired me about the article on page 3 of the front sections were the following:
1. The synthesis report was approved by 130 nations. That's not easy when you are aware of the science involved.
2. It is personal -- the cost of action is less than the cost of inaction, to paraphrase Jeff Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute. We need to get rid of our two cars (and just keep the Prius), we need to make our homes energy-efficient, we need to walk and bike when we can, we need to think carefully about our consumption and it's effect on climate change, we need to figure out how best to model this for our kids and encourage them to join us on the path of earth stewardship. We need to find ways to integrate social justice into the movement so it's not just the upper classes who are able to afford to "green" their homes, lives and closets.
3. Achim Steiner - head of the UN Environment Program - wants this message sent to individuals and not just world leaders: "What we need is a new ethic in which every person changes lifestyle, attitude and behavior."

My husband and I have been paying a lot of attention to "greening" our lives over the five years we've been together. He regularly uses a tool he invented from his developer days -- a "Life Balance Sheet" as a way of benchmarking his place in the world and how he's contributing to the triple bottom line of green. We are deep in the design of a deep-green remodel of a small bungalow in our hometown of Rockridge here in Oakland. We are trying to be mindful of our mutual tendencies to be overachieving and under-relaxed, and how this affects our health, connection and our kids. This is my corner - the intersection of health and green. We are lessening our carbon footprint, although some experiments are more successful than others.

Meanwhile, the UN report pumps up the urgency. I would love to hear from other moms, yoginis and fellow warriors who have figured out how to lessen the carbon footprint of driving our beautiful kids many miles to the glorious schools we've chosen for them. I've found carpooling to be much harder to pull off than it should be -- perhaps again getting to Mr. Steiner's comment about us needing a new ethic of lifestyle, attitude and behavior, so that driving our kids to school is less about our individual needs, schedule and convenience, and more about modeling for our kids our willingness to try new things to do our part in reducing climate change.

Get inspired, do your part. Walk the talk. Tell us about it. Namaste and blessings, SG.