Going Vegetarian

For my experience diving into sustainability, I chose to go vegetarian. I told this to my mom today and she replied with the expected skepticism. There was a long pause and then a “Really?”

Really, I am going vegetarian. Earlier, one of my friends tried to convince me to eat some meat. “It’s not like your teacher is going to know,” she replied when I told her, and it’s true. No one would know if I slipped a piece of bacon or ate some meat sauce, except me. This is something I am tackling for myself, to show that I have the ability to change my lifestyle to make the world a little more inhabitable. So far it has not been all that difficult. Sure, sometimes I see my friends eating meat that looks good, but I have not yet been seriously tempted to break the vow, with the exception of one time.

Last weekend I went to Coachella in Indio, California. There were quite a few vegetarian options, as it was a gathering of well to do hippies. One particularly hot afternoon, after waiting in a crowd for a band to start on one of the outdoor stages, my lack of sleep and dehydration caught up with me, and I had to abandon my spot and seek refuge in the misty and shady rest areas. I believe that my change in diet had to do with this temporary weakness, as I had gone vegetarian only a few days before and my body was still adjusting to different types and amounts of protein and fats. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than a good American hot dog, or even spaghetti and meatballs, and the food vendors at the festival offered more than enough meat options to tempt me. I resisted and got a delicious falafel instead, but it got me thinking. If it was hard to be a vegetarian at a festival like Coachella, there must be some situations in which is seems near impossible.

The dining halls at UCLA are a great place to be vegetarian. There are always vegetarian options and plentiful salad bars. There are even a lot of vegan options, and it takes no extra work or special planning to simply ask for the vegetarian sauce. However, the real world is not like this. Not every culture is so willing to accept someone who says no to meat. Even going to a backyard barbeque is difficult, and the California tradition that is In-N-Out is greatly diminished without the hamburger.

This effect of culture on our food patterns is something that I find interesting and would like to explore as part of my project. From the American obsession with red meat to the Hindu aversion to it, where we grow up and what society says about eating influences what we choose to eat. This is a topic I will explore in further posts about the status of my adventure. As of now, I am on week two of being vegetarian and going strong!

Response to Radical Simplicity by Jim Merkel

You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

Radical Simplicity by Jim Merkel is aptly named. Merkel's journey into sustainability and living a bare bones life is at some points inspiring and others merely terrifying. He earns little, spends little, and tries to use as few of the earth's resources as possible. While it is a noble endeavor, it isn't something that any old person can go out and do. You have to have enough money stored up to buy a house and live mostly off the interest from the rest of your savings, and that is not an easy amount to come by. You also have to have an objective view of your place in society and on earth in order to be able to make the necessary sacrifices, and that is something that is even harder to come by. You need to be able to recognize that currently we are skydiving without a parachute; we are using resources at an unsustainable rate and assuming that we’ll be gone before it becomes an issue.

At the heart of the problem is the idea that we can be anything, do anything, and have anything we want, but in reality this is not the case. We cannot all become Nobel Prize winning scientists, or else the Nobel Prize would no longer hold prestige. We cannot all become rich, because there is a finite amount of money in the world. If we had all the money we wanted, money would no longer hold value. However, that rarely translates that to the idea that I personally should take less so that others can have more. Merkel is able to understand that idea and apply it to his life, something that few others are capable of. Many people never learn that what is best for them may not be best for humanity as a whole, and that lesson is central to living as Merkel does. Rarely is it mentioned that succeeding in following your dreams usually means that someone else failed in pursuing theirs.

I know that my footprint of over twenty acres is unsustainable, and that it means that someone somewhere else must live off of much less, but my personal goals get in the way of being able to accurately weight the costs and benefits of my lifestyle. I want to become a physicist, a career path that isn't conducive to 20-hour workweeks. I want to live in the city and travel across the world and pursue a Ph.D. None of those things fit into a simple life a la Merkel, and he understands that. He knows that very few people are going to abandon their dreams in order to live a more equitable life, because that’s just not the way humans are programmed. In the long run, we must be willing to reduce our population by extreme measures like government mandated family planning or else alter the idea that hard work and professional success are goals to strive for. Personally I would push for the first of those options, but it would be a very unpopular campaign.

While I may not drop out of college and go live in the woods, Radical Simplicity has given me some ideas for making my life more sustainable. I can’t implement many of the ideas just yet, as I live in university housing and eat in the dining halls and don't own a car or control where my tuition dollars go. However, in the future I can grow a garden, ride my bike, and buy fewer packaged goods, and I plan on doing all of those things. While I probably won't give up my car or live on $5000 a year, I already have started thinking twice before purchasing goods, especially those that come in a lot of packaging. I have gotten ideas about how to live more sustainably, but in the end, I do not want to live in the woods like Merkel does. I want to accomplish certain things in my life, not just survive, and on some level all humans have that desire. Unfortunately that leaves us in a bit of a bind, and eventually we will have to sacrifice control over some aspects of our lives, either in the area of reproduction or productivity.

Ecological Footprinting

First of all, there is an awesome site called worldmapper.org that has a whole collection of cartograms, maps where the size of each country is not determined by land area but by another variable, from the basics such as population to more specific but interesting data such as patents granted, or in the case of the map below, ecological footprint.

Technical notes for this map.

Notice that this is total, not average, ecological footprint, which is why India and China are on par with the United States. They have larger populations and smaller average footprints than the Americans' 24 acres. If everyone lived like Americans, we would need over five earths to sustain us. Considering that I share a bedroom with two other people in a building that houses over a thousand people and that I don’t have a car, I thought my ecological footprint would be significantly below the average American’s, even if it was more than the world average. However, after calculating my footprint, I discovered that mine, at 25.6 acres, was not only larger than the world average, but also larger than the average American’s. Housing and transportation, two factors that I thought would take up much of footprint as they do for the average American, were not the biggest contributors to my footprint. Instead, my largest footprint contribution came from monthly goods and services, especially from my spending on education.

The footprint from college was bigger than any other category, including food, and was much bigger than any other single item on the list. This made me wonder how the footprint factor for education was calculated; what items were included? The buildings and grounds? The research labs and textbooks? I cannot imagine how going to college creates a bigger footprint than all of my food. I also wonder about using how much we pay for education as an indicator of its footprint. Do private schools have significantly bigger footprints because tuition is higher? Or is the responsibility for the footprint simply shifted from the government to the individual tuition payer? The way the footprint calculator is set up, the responsibility for the footprint lies with the individual who financed it, not necessarily who uses or demands it.

The process of calculating my ecological footprint brought up many questions for me. I realized how little I know about what contributes to my footprint. I had to call my parents to ask about our insurance and phone bills, and look up information about my dorm to answer many of the other questions. I take many of the material goods in my life for granted and never stop to question where they came from or whether I really need them.

The other thing I noticed about my footprint was that there aren’t many small changes I could make that would have a significant impact on my footprint. Producing less trash perhaps, or using a little less electricity might save a few square meters, but without changing my lifestyle, such as eating less or dropping out of college, my footprint won’t change dramatically.

There is, however, one change I could make now that would affect my footprint, and that is going vegetarian. My meat consumption accounted for over half of my entire food footprint, and accordingly I am trying out vegetarianism for my class project, and have just completed week one. Going vegetarian alone will cut four acres off of my footprint.

In the “medium” term, such as in the next few years, I plan to reduce my footprint by reducing my waste output and eventually moving into an apartment, where I will have more control over where my food comes from and what goods I purchase to use. While my short-term plan of going vegetarian may or may not last, I am confident that I will be able to reduce my meat consumption significantly, if not completely.

In the long term, after college, I would like to live in a city. While growing my own food may be difficult, hopefully I will be able to take part in a community garden or at least have access to farmers’ markets. Living in an apartment will reduce my housing footprint, and biking or taking the metro around the city will keep my transportation footprint low.

Overall, this process was frustrating and while I’m not entirely convinced it accurately describes my footprint, it was worthwhile and opened my eyes to many aspects of my consumption that I rarely considered. As I grow older and begin to settle into a lifestyle after college, aspects of the process of foot printing will influence the choices I make and the way I consume.

Trash Inventory

I never really thought about how much I throw away, and not just paper. Tossing an empty container or a bit of tinfoil is something that happens out of habit and ignorant bliss. As part of an ongoing effort to make my lifestyle more sustainable, recognizing exactly what I use up was the first step, and toward that end I recorded everything I threw away for an entire week.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would I turn out to be like the average American, throwing away 4.6 lbs of garbage a day[1]? Would my habit of getting food to go push me over that amount, or would my bare bones college lifestyle land me below average?

This is what I ended up throwing away last week:

While I was recording my garbage amount, I felt like I wasn’t writing very much down, but when I tallied it at the end of the week, I realized that even a little bit each day adds up. While I am well below the average of 4.6 pounds a day (I probably had less than 4.6 pounds for the whole week, and much of it was recycled), over time my garbage will add up and add significantly to landfills.

The issue of only seeing our impacts in small doses leads to the mindset that it doesn’t much matter what we do because we are such a small part of the world. I didn’t think I was producing that much trash when I only saw the amount for each day, but when I added it up at the end of the week, I realized that it was quite a lot. Many people don’t think about how all the miles they drive and all the plastic they consume and throw away adds up to full landfills and global warming because each individual decision they make, such as whether to ride the bus a couple miles to the mall or to take a car, doesn’t make much of an impact. It’s the aggregate of all of those decisions that determines one’s effect on the environment, and many people fail to think about that.

Most of the garbage I produced had to do with the transportation of food, such as cups, wrappers, and containers. It is easy to get a bagel in a bag with a small container of cream cheese and disposable knife, and when one lives in the dorms, it is the only way to get food to eat later. Since I am not allowed to take food out the dining halls and I do not have space to store food in my room, I am forced to use the take out options if I want to eat anywhere but in the dining halls. On occasion, the option is available to bring your own supplies, like your own cup to get coffee. However, as soon as I realized that bringing my own cup would mean carrying it around all day, as I go straight from breakfast to class, and washing it everyday in the common bathrooms, I went back to getting paper cups and throwing them away.

We toss these resources because we are forced to make the decision between having more time in the present and having a trash filled planet in the future, and humans really blow at planning ahead. What is one more coffee cup in the landfill if it means we don’t have to do as much work now? The immediate benefits of disposables appear to outweigh seemingly miniscule long-term consequences, but those small consequences add up and create big problems.

[1] Annenberg Foundation. Garbage. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/interactives/garbage/intro.html