Technically, I’m on vacation, so this might end up being short. However, since I forgot to tell our managing editor that I wasn’t going to have anything for noon today, well, here I am putting something together at the last minute.

I wanted to spend another minute discussing the realms of responsibility for environmentalism. I mentioned earlier that corporate America could be doing more to help in the cause. A recent article in the NY Times that I can’t seem to find any longer also lamented the lack of environmental leadership from our corporate and industrial higher-ups, and even went to far as to say that the small things that people do every day to green their lives puts up a facade of progress that might actually prevent real progress from occurring.

All of this also intersects with my post last week, where I tried to acknowledge a perceived lack of forethought by the DC City Council when enacting a $0.05 tax on both paper and plastic bags under the auspices of cleaning up the woefully filthy Anacostia river. The purpose of my post was to express that there are other uses for plastic and paper bags, and that the city council might not have fully thought through the ramifications of their actions. I offered that the recent uptick in unscooped dog poop around my neighborhood could be an unintended consenquence of placing a value on the previously free plastic grocery bag.

However, I wasn’t trying to say that the tax was unnecessary. I wasn’t suggesting that these people have a right to be lazy about poop scooping. What I was trying to say is that a full policy analysis of the law might have resulted in a different outcome. Why not, perhaps, a fund for purchasing and filling poop bag dispensers that could be maintained by neighbors in highly unscooped areas? Paid for by the bag tax, residents could receive and maintain caches of poop bags to make it oh so easy for dog owners and walkers to do the right thing.

This point was missed by most of those who reacted to my post, online or via email. Many said that the bag tax wasn’t the cause of this increase in poop, but lazy dog owners were. To that I say this: If a tax on grocery bags is necessary to modify DC citizens’ behavior to prevent pollution via improperly disposed of plastic bags, why is it that we assume that those same citizens should have the wherewithal to go the extra mile and now purchase plastic bags to clean up their doggies’ stoolies. There is the right thing to do, and the easy thing to do, and humans have shown time and again that they’ll almost always choose the easy one. Why should this situation be any different? If there were easier and more effective ways to change people’s behavior, such as education, enforcement or, heck, even public humiliation, don’t you think they would have been successful by now at reducing pollution, dog poop or otherwise?

My example above, of supplying free poop bags in highly unscooped areas, is very similar to what some cities do when it comes to other types of “plastic bags.”  Namely, condoms.  While living in San Francisco, I never bought condoms.  I didn’t need to.  I’d just walk down the block and stop into a gay bar, reach into the dispenser and pull out a handful.  It was important enough for the city of San Francisco to decrease the barriers to safer sex that they (or a non-profit likely receiving city funds) reduced the cost of safer sex to zero.   A group in DC is working in a similar effort, and turning heads while doing it.

I’m not advocating for the total abdication of personal responsibility.  I’m taking a realistic approach to problem solving, factoring unintended consequences and human behavior into the mix. Idealists do a good job of painting visions for the future, but you also need realists like me to help pave the road to that future.

Subtitle:  Bag Tax Equals Dog Poop

Photo by the author.

The District of Columbia recently enacted a tax on shopping bags.   The supposed motivation for this tax was to help the highly polluted Anacostia, the tributary of the Potomac that joins its more famous cousin in the heart of the monumental core.  This tax helps the river in two ways, supposedly.  First, it encourages reuse of plastic bags or use of reusable non-plastic bags, resulting in fewer bags mindlessly disposed of in the street, washing through the city’s storm drains into the river.  Secondly, the money raised from the collection of this tax also is to go to the clean-up of the Anacostia river and its watershed.  All in all, it sound pretty sensible from an environmental perspective. Right?

My biggest complaints with this tax were two-fold.  First off, it’s only $0.05 and not enough in my mind to encourage behavioral changes or raise enough money.  Secondly, the tax applies to both plastic and paper bags.  While plastic bags stick around in the environment for decades and paper biodegrades in days or weeks, the tax applies to both, regardless.  Sounds pretty stupid to me.

This tax went into effect on January 1, 2010.  So far, I’ve have more than one opportunity to explain to a livid customer why they were being charged “a nickle per” for their grocery bags.  I’ve made an effort to bring my own bags to the grocery store when I go shopping (but then again, I did that before, too).  I’ve been seeing people walking around with more and more reusable shopping bags.  Perhaps, despite the nominal per-bag tax, the reminder at the register when the clerk asks if the customer wants a bag is enough to constantly remind individuals that these resources do have value and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Which leads me to the purpose of this post.  Perhaps you’ve pieced it together by now, but if you haven’t I’m not going to give it away quite yet.

When deciding upon some policy that will affect hundreds of thousands of people every day, I would generally think policy makers would really sit down and evaluate all the potential consequences of their actions.  In the case of a bag tax, for example, I would imagine that some people would find the nickle tax so trivial that it wouldn’t modify their behavior at all, so they’d continue to use and improperly dispose of plastic bags as before.  This is the reason I thought the tax should only apply to the “bad” item, the plastic bag, and the “good” item, the paper bag,  should be provided as a free alternative.

It appears that there is another consequence of this new tax that no one might have predicted, but they could have.  A full policy analysis would have evaluated all the things that happen to plastic bags once they leave the store.  First, they serve their primary purpose for hauling recently purchased items.  Secondly, many of these bags are used again, as trash can liners, lunch bags, and (yes) poop scoop bags.  A good policy analyst would have considered the full impact of this tax and thought to herself, if people start to value grocery bags and start to reuse them, they won’t want to pick up dog poop with them.

So, this explains why I keep seeing so much more dog poop around DC than I did before January 1.  The photo above was taken by me, and in it you should be able to see at least 4 stoolies lying about in the grassy tree box.  Good times.

It is so important that our elected officials and decision-makers think about the potential unintended consequences of their policies.  David Catania, the DC Council member who spearheaded the movement to legalize same-sex marriage in DC, has stated that once marriage equality is achieved, they anticipate removing DC’s domestic partnership registration.  This is another example of what I would call bad policy.

Marriage equality is great, but sometimes people aren’t ready to take that big step.  Sometimes committed relationships need extra support to blossom into potential marriages and life-long committed, story-book bliss.  Domestic partnership registration serves a purpose, and removing it because full marriage equality is achieved is short sighted, and the equivalent of dog poop.

Originally published on 9/21/2009

Image from mormonchic.com

My father celebrated a birthday recently, and when I started thinking about a gift, I started considering the environmental impact of gift-giving for the first time. (Writing this column has green on my mind, it seems.) After thinking about it for a while, a familiar expression came to mind: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The most obviously green gift is giving a cash donation in the gift recipients honor or name. A quick financial transaction results in a needy do-gooding organization receiving much-needed funding, and most organizations will send a nice card to your gift recipient.

Last year for Christmas, all gifts to immediate family were donations in their names to the Washington Animal Rescue League (WARL). Recently, WARL rescued over 100 Dachshunds from a puppy mill in West Virginia. I grew up with wiener-dogs and everyone in our family loves them, so I thought this would be an appropriate way to reflect my family members’ canine affection and help a needy non-profit while preventing increased production of more junk that would eventually go into landfills. I doubt any one of my family members were disappointed by such a gift, considering they are well-off enough to get themselves anything they’d want. For my father’s birthday this year, I chose to make another donation to WARL.

It might not be obvious to everyone, but the in the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” the order of the words express a preference. The most preferable action is to reduce consumption. Sending a charity gift is one such way to reduce the impact of gift giving.

The idea of giving “reused” gifts might seem objectionable at first. However, many reused items have great value, such as antiques, baseball cards, vintage coins, or first edition books. Tapping into a gift recipient’s interests and finding a reused and collectible gift is a great way to reduce the environmental impact of gift giving. Many potentially valuable reused gifts are available on craigslist, ebay and freecycle.

Finally, if you have to give a gift that is a recently manufactured item, you can keep the environmental impact low by finding an item made from recycled materials. Some potential gifts hide their recycled nature, and others celebrate it. Examples of the first include a belt made from recycled auto tires and a necklace made from recycled paper. An example of the latter is a juice pouch totebag, currently available from Target or you can make one yourself.

You can top off a green gift with a reused gift bag or reused wrapping paper. Or heck, just wrap it in the comics section of the Sunday newspaper.

Green gifting seems to be in direct conflict with the current proliferation of “fancy, up-scale” stuff that is currently being foisted upon mainstream gay culture. Hopefully some people can begin to realize that doing more with less is better not only for the environment, but also for one’s bank account.

It’s pretty easy to give environmentally friendly gifts. You just need to think about it a little bit, and often have a bit of forethought. Keep this in mind now before the winter holiday season creeps up on you, and start planning green gifts now.

Chili is the perfect winter food. It’s hot and hearty, and can both warm and fill you up on a cold winter day. One big complaint of mine with making homemade chili is that the usual chili bean, the kidney bean, requires a lot of soaking and cooking before it can be used in a recipe. Unless of course you buy them in cans, which is heavy and expensive and worse for the environment than using dry beans. The quick and easy solution to this is to use lentils instead of kidneys. Sure they are not your traditional chili bean, but you don’t have to do a lot of prep work to use dry lentils and they taste really good. Here’s my recipe for lentil chili.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 brick extra firm tofu, grated
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 large can crushed tomatoes
• 5 cups of water
• 2 cups of lentils
• 4 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 small zucchini, diced
• salt and pepper to taste

The Way

Add the oil to a large soup pot and place on a hot burner. Dice the onion, add to the pot and stir.  Grate the tofu with a cheese greater.  If the tofu is firm enough, it should end up looking like grated white cheese.  If not, it might get kinda mushy.  If your tofu is too soft to grate, just crumble it with your fingers.  Add the tofu and garlic to the pot and stir for a few minutes, letting the onion, garlic and tofu all get some time at the bottom of the pot.

When the onion starts to look translucent, add the can of tomatoes, water, lentils and chili powder.  Stir and bring to a boil.  Reduce the heat and simmer for about 30 minutes and then add the diced zucchini.  (The lentils take longer to cook than the zucchini, so we give them a head start.)  Add more water one cup at a time if the chili is starting to look too thick.  Bring back to a boil and simmer for an additional 20 minutes or so until everything is just about cooked.  Stir in salt and pepper to taste.  (If you’re like me, you’ll want a good 4 tablespoons of salt.)

Another option is to use half lentils and half brown rice.  Rice and beans combine to make a “perfect protein” which makes a great meat substitute.  Of course, the tofu in this recipe adds not only texture but more protein.

Serve hot with fresh made corn bread or a slice of crusty bread.

The best part of last week’s split pea soup recipe is that you can easily make lentil soup using the exact same recipe, just swapping lentils for split peas. I did just that this evening, so I am not reposting a whole new video. However, I did make this recipe a little different. Instead of adding in the dried spices from last time, I seasoned this soup with lemon juice and cumin, salt and pepper. I also added cubed potato to add more texture and to make it a little more hearty. In the video below, I briefly describe this new soup and illustrate how to peel and chop a potato and juice a lemon.
Here’s the recipe:

• 1 onion, diced
• 3 carrots, diced
• 4 stalks of celery, diced
• 4 cloves of garlic, squashed and minced
• 2 medium potatoes, cubed
• 8 cups of water
• 2 cups of lentils, french or green
• 1 bouillon cube
• 1 tablespoon of salt
• 1/4 cup ground cumin powder
• the juice of 2 lemons, about 1/2 cup.

Combine all the ingredients except the lemon juice in a large soup pot and bring to a boil.  (Alternatively, you can sauté the first 4 ingredients together for a while, adding some salt, until the onions become translucent.  Then add the water, lentils and spices.)  After reaching a rolling boil, reduce the heat and simmer for about an hour, until the lentils are soft and the potato cubes are not hard in the center.  Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice.  (It’s my belief that the delicate flavor of the lemon juice would break down when boiled with the rest of the ingredients.  Therefore, it should be stirred in at the end.)

This recipe is high in protein, fiber and vitamins A and C.  A serving size of about 14 oz (that’s a big bowl of soup!) provides 14 grams of protein, lots of dietary fiber, vitamins and iron.

This week I make a huge pot of split pea soup this week.  Enjoy the video and let me know if you have any questions!

Ingredients:

• 1 onion, diced
• 3 carrots, diced
• 4 stalks of celery, diced
• 4 cloves of garlic, squashed and minced
• 8 cups of water
• 2 cups of split peas
• 1 bouillon cube
• 1 tablespoon of salt
• 1 tsp each dried parsley, basil and oregano, black pepper

Watch the video for cooking instructions!

Things are a little mixed up around here, and I was unable to do a video of the huge pot of soup I made tonight.  However, instead of posting a video, I’ll just post the recipe and links to steps that I’ve already posted.

From what I understand, minestrone soup was invented to use up extra ingredients that one happens to have around the kitchen.  As such, it feels silly going out and buying small amounts of random vegetables and tossing them together.  But it’s such a great soup, with a wide variety of vegetables and legumes to provide a lot of protein, carbs and nutrients.  Enjoy.

Here we go.

Minestrone Soup

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb dry small pasta, like tiny elbows, alphabets(?) or orzo
• 1 onion, diced
• 3 stalks of celery, diced
• 2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar or red wine
• 1 large can of diced tomatoes
• 1 cube vegetarian bouillon
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 large potatoes, diced
• 1 medium zucchini, diced
• 1 medium yellow summer squash, diced
• 1 handful green beans, cut into small lengths
• 1 large can kidney beans, drained
• 1 large can chick peas, drained
• Herbs and spices (salt, black pepper, dried oregano, basil and parsley)

Directions

Cook the pasta according to the directions. When done, drain and rinse with cold water, then drizzle with olive oil.

Dice the onion and celery.  (Click links above for video instructions.)  Pour the olive oil into a large soup pot and put on high heat.  Once hot, add the celery and onion.  Sauteé for about 5 minutes, or until the onion is translucent.  Add the vinegar or wine and cook for an additional 5 minutes or so, until the steam rising from the pot no longer smells like vinegar or alcohol, depending on the ingredient you used.  The goal here is to cook off the alcohol or vinegar, keeping the robust flavor of the grape-based liquid.

Add the tomatoes to the mixture.  Fill up the empty can with water and add to the pot as well, stirring in the bouillon cube.  Add the potato and carrot and simmer for 5 minutes or so.  (Potatoes and carrots take longer to cook than the remaining ingredients, so they are added to the mixture first.)  Once you’ve given the harder vegetables a head start, add the rest of the ingredients.  Bring to a boil and cook for an additional 20 minutes or so.   When done, the potato cubesand the green beans bits should be firm but not too hard.

The pasta should be added to the soup before serving.  If you plan to keep the soup around for a while, keep the pasta separate and only add just before eating.  The pasta will soak up all the liquid from the soup and then fall apart.  Ick.

Let me take this moment to mention that I bring soup to work with me every day.  Instead of bringing it in a thermos or Rubbermaid container, I use mason jars in which pasta sauce comes.  It’s another way to make use of resources that you already have around.  I buy a brand of pasta sauce that comes in traditional mason jars.  Once I use one, I wash it and keep it around for packing soup for lunch, or even using as water glasses.  It’s a win-win.  I get free thermoses, and I save lots of resources from landfill or the recycling center.

Click the image to purchase from Lambda Rising.

I am indeed going to focus on cooking instruction in this space in the coming months. However, I just spent a week off the grid and haven’t spent any time in the kitchen lately. So today, instead of a video, I’ll share with you some comments about a book I’m currently reading, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.

The book’s first subtitle is “An Eater’s Manifesto” but the second subtitle, cutely hidden on the band holding together the bunch of lettuce on the cover is the title of this post:  Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.  Not surprisingly, this book is right up my alley.  So much so, actually, that I wasn’t even going to buy it, since I figured me reading it would be like the choir buying the sheet music.  But then I reconsidered and figured it could probably teach me something.  It has already, and I’m only halfway through it.

Since I haven’t finished it yet, I can provide a full review of the book.  But what I can do is explain the second subtitle a bit more, since I think it resonates exactly with what I’m trying to do in this space.  There are three parts, and I’ll start with the first:

Eat Food:  Why should this require much explanation?  Well, because “food” is a very specific term here.  He’s referring to actual whole foods here, unprocessed natural food items.  If something you have in your cupboard or pantry has more than 5 ingredients, and each ingredient has more than 5 syllables, then it’s probably not food by Pollan’s definition.  The first section of the book goes into great detail about what is “food” and what isn’t, and how it came to be that most of the grocery store shelves are filled with nutrient-delivery devices (my term) than actual food.  He also explores in the first section why actual food is so much better for one’s health than processed foods.

Not Too Much:  This is a given.  Overeating is a huge problem in our country.  Portion sizes are out of control, and an obvious solution to this is to limit the amount of actual food you eat.  This at times is a challenge for me, as my boyfriend eats like a horse and I often feel tempted to try to keep up.  Lately, I’ve been stopping myself after my first helping, watching on as he goes back for seconds or thirds.  Oh, and he’s rail thin.  Go figure.

Mostly Plants:  I’ve spent some time describing why plant-based foods are better for the environment.  Turns out, they’re often better for us too.   Once I finish the book, I’m sure I’ll have more handy facts and rationale for persuading one to choose foods lower on the food chain.

As I stated above, the sad fact is that most items we find in our local grocery stores are not “food” per se but “food products” that are made from whole foods that are broken down and re-assembled in a variety of combinations.  People are too busy to cook, and often don’t have the skills, knowledge and motivation to make it a priority.  I feel like this is especially true for many queer people, as we often find that the development of “self” and getting our own needs met (socially and emotionally) take precedence.  My job here is to help encourage new priorities while providing some instruction and knowledge.  Wish me luck.

Check back next week for another video where I make something else yummy, or perhaps spend some time describing what tools are needed for any starter kitchen.

I whipped up a great huge pot of Black Bean Soup last week, velvety and seasoned with toasted cumin and chipotle peppers.  Good stuff.  You can do it yourself at home.  Just watch this video.

Please note, the upload of some of the pieces is taking forever.  However, the intro and one-minute overview are up and viewable.  Check back when all the pieces have been uploaded.

Starting today, this column is going to be something completely different.  As I’ve brought to your attention before, the production of meat for human consumption is one of the largest contributors to global warming greenhouse gases and other pollution.  Instead of continuing along with an intellectual discussion of self-greening, I’m going to start showing people how to make delicious food that doesn’t harm the environment.

Today is the first of a hopefully long series of videos spotlighting cooking technique and vegetarian cuisine.  I have to mention that today’s clip was filmed a few months ago, so the items I’m cooking with are not likely any longer in season.  So, if you want to cook and eat local produce, you might not be able to make this recipe until next summer.  However, if you don’t care where your broccoli and basil come from, then get cracking.

There is much more to come, and most recipes will be seasonally appropriate, too.  Enjoy.

** Update:  Turns out the 10-minute limit is still in full force, despite what someone told me.  We’ll edit it into clips and get it re-uploaded ASAP. **

** Update 2: Should be fixed now. Check out the video. **

Cooking with Zack and Michael, Episode 1
Pesto Pasta Salad with Broccoli, Walnuts and Radishes.

So, I think the intellectual portion of this column is winding down. I’ve pretty much spanned the green universe, describing how different aspects of one’s life can be made more environmentally friendly. The one major area that I haven’t quite addressed adequately is probably the most important step in one’s personal adventure towards green living:  making it a priority.

I have chosen to make environmentalism a high priority in my life, and it shows in nearly every aspect of how I live on a daily basis, from the food I eat, to how I get to work.  As I’ve stated before on this site, I am lucky (in my perspective) to have been able to establish my own self worth and personality relatively early on in my emotional development, and that provides a strong foundation for beginning to care about other things besides getting my own needs met.  Sadly, I feel that the majority of queer people don’t have that same luxury.

From my novice assessment of queer sociology, many queer people (gay men and women, bisexuals, trans-folk) have challenges within and without that prevent them from being able to prioritize environmentalism in their lives.  Gay men and women struggle with the self-acceptance and then societal acceptance of their orientation.  Bisexual people, even after coming out and gaining a modicum of acceptance, must constantly challenge the traditional sexual orientation binary from both straight and gay communities.  Trans-folk need to experience self-awakening and then move forward with the long process of transitioning, fighting trans-phobia and a lack of understanding on the part of, basically, everyone the whole time.  How on earth could any of us find the time to care about other issues?

The answer is illusive, but not unattainable.

When I talk with people who feel hopelessly single and are frustrated with the current venues available for meeting potential dates, I always mention one thing that I think is a very good way to work around the problem:  first, find out what you like and what interests you;  second, start doing that, and you’ll meet people similarly oriented with whom you share interests, and those people could turn into potential dates and relationships.

I think the crux of this mind-set is that if you stop worrying about it and just get on with leading a fulfilling life, you will find what you’re looking for.  I think there might be a bit of an analogy here for more than just dating.  I think that if we queer people throughout all our struggles find the energy and opportunity to focus on other aspects of our lives, such as environmentalism and being a constructive member of the global community, the other parts of our lives might just fall into place a bit easier.  Perhaps all of this struggling we are doing to self-actualize as queer people might be a bit easier if we didn’t focus on it all the time.  Anyone who things I’m crazy should read The Tao of Pooh, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

With this, I’m going to end the intellectual portion of this column.  From here on out, I am going to focus on food.  I’ll use this space to share recipes and techniques for making simple, delicious, vegetarian and environmentally meals.  Hopefully I’ll help break down some of the barriers between queer people and eco-conscious cuisine.  Stay tuned.

Image from mormonchic.com

My father celebrated a birthday recently, and when I started thinking about a gift, I started considering the environmental impact of gift-giving for the first time. (Writing this column has green on my mind, it seems.) After thinking about it for a while, a familiar expression came to mind:  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

The most obviously green gift is giving a cash donation in the gift recipients honor or name. A quick financial transaction results in a needy do-gooding organization receiving much-needed funding, and most organizations will send a nice card to your gift recipient.

Last year for Christmas, all gifts to immediate family were donations in their names to the Washington Animal Rescue League (WARL).  Recently, WARL rescued over 100 Dachshunds from a puppy mill in West Virginia.  I grew up with wiener-dogs and everyone in our family loves them, so I thought this would be an appropriate way to reflect my family members’ canine affection and help a needy non-profit while preventing increased production of more junk that would eventually go into landfills.  I doubt any one of my family members were disappointed by such a gift, considering they are well-off enough to get themselves anything they’d want.   For my father’s birthday this year, I chose to make another donation to WARL.

It might not be obvious to everyone, but the in the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” the order of the words express a preference.  The most preferable action is to reduce consumption. Sending a charity gift is one such way to reduce the impact of gift giving.

The idea of giving “reused” gifts might seem objectionable at first.  However, many reused items have great value, such as antiques, baseball cards, vintage coins, or first edition books.  Tapping into a gift recipient’s interests and finding a reused and collectible gift is a great way to reduce the environmental impact of gift giving. Many potentially valuable reused gifts are available on craigslist, ebay and freecycle.

Finally, if you have to give a gift that is a recently manufactured item, you can keep the environmental impact low by finding an item made from recycled materials.   Some potential gifts hide their recycled nature, and others celebrate it.  Examples of the first include a belt made from recycled auto tires and a necklace made from recycled paper.  An example of the latter is a juice pouch totebag, currently available from Target or you can make one yourself.

You can top off a green gift with a reused gift bag or reused wrapping paper.  Or heck, just wrap it in the comics section of the Sunday newspaper.

Green gifting seems to be in direct conflict with the current proliferation of “fancy, up-scale” stuff that is currently being foisted upon mainstream gay culture.  Hopefully some people can begin to realize that doing more with less is better not only for the environment, but also for one’s bank account.

It’s pretty easy to give environmentally friendly gifts.  You just need to think about it a little bit, and often have a bit of forethought.  Keep this in mind now before the winter holiday season creeps up on you, and start planning green gifts now.

Yes, we have no need for more bananas. Image from mocoloco.com. Artist: Doug Fishbone.

There’s something interesting about humans, or it might just be Americans (I can’t find any documentation about this.)  When someone hands us something, we take it.  It’s pretty amazing.  If you’re at the office right now, find something lying around and walk up to a colleague (hopefully one who likes you) and hand this thing to them.  When they ask you what it is and why you gave it to them, tell them you’re doing an experiment.  I’d actually LOVE for everyone reading this to get up right now and try it.  Share the reaction you got in the comments.

Again, someone hands us something, we take it.  It is illustrative of a common economic principle that things have value (or utility) and you’d rather have something than not have it.  This concept is so basic to economics (or human nature?) that I doubt any economics book ever bothers to question this “given” or describe it’s origins.  Once in an economics class, when talking about the idea of diminishing marginal utility, I asked my professor when and/or how an object becomes undesirable.  “Oh, never!  More is always better than less.”  I was shocked.  “So, what if I simply don’t want another banana.  What if my pockets are full, my stomach is full, and I don’t have any room for any more bananas?!?”  The professor stated that, according to economic theory, I’d still want another one.  I may not like it as much as the previous one, but I’d still take it.  I nearly got up and walked out of the class, and would have if I didn’t need this course for a grad school prereq.

Marketers understand this fact.  Corporations collective mouths water when they think of how easy it is to get new products (if cheap) or marketing material for new products into our hands.  Or to get us to walk around with showcasing their logos on our heads, chests, backs or hanging from our shoulders.  My mind is swimming with examples in my recent past when I was offered some item of moderately substantial value and my first instinct was to take it.  And each of these items had some corporate logo on it that I had no interest in sharing with the world.  I’ve personally gotten to the point where I either refuse or give back these items.  And how SURPRISED people are!  “What, don’t you want this ugly black tote bag covered in corporate logos?”

Particularly devious are the marketers for alcohol products.  They team up with a venue or promoter for an event, cover the walls with their marketing materials, and then once they get you all liquored up, hand you fistfuls of cheap junk that you take because, well, it’s free, and well, you’re drunk. The next thing you know, you’re a walking billboard for Absolut, or Bacardi, or The Captain.

But have you ever stopped to think where these products come from?  And how long they’ll actually be useful to you (if at all) once you get them home?   T-shirts, ball caps, shoulder bags, red-blinking plastic shot glasses that double as dice?  What a waste.

The thing is, there are a bunch of things that we need in our culture that should be free and readily available but aren’t.  For one, condoms.  Why don’t these alcohol companies simply give out condoms with their logos and slogans on them?   They’re made of latex (a renewable resource), pocket-sized, and always in need for gay men and straight people.  (If any gay woman out there personally knows of a good use of a condom, please let me know.)  I’m sure in this day and age, there are dozens of cheap items that could be given away for free to great societal benefit.

I walked through the Adams Morgan Day Festival today where all sorts of business were handing out stuff for free.  Despite my natural instincts, I refused nearly everything.  I was very impressed, however, with the giveaways from the Friendship Animal Hospital.  They were passing out canvas totebags made from 100% recycled cotton, and ball-point pens made from 100% recycled materials, including cardboard, plastic and wood.  Pretty cool, and useful.  Why can’t more business be more environmentally responsible with their swag?

There definitely is such thing as too much of a good thing.  Bananas are great.  I’ll buy a bunch at the grocery store, maybe two.  But if someone offered me 3 more bunches on top of those I’ve just bought, I’d have to say no.  I’d recommend that, next time someone hands you something and says it’s free, ask yourself what the true cost is.

PS:  For related reading, check out the following books:

• The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup
• Cheap:  The High Cost of Discount Culture:  Ellen Ruppel Shell
• Wal-Mart:  The High Cost of Low Price:  Greg Spotts

Image by Cathy Willcox

Thank you so much for your efforts over the past few years to make environmentally friendly products and services.  Unfortunately, you simply aren’t doing enough.  I’m sorry to break the news to you in such a public forum, but you have to learn this somehow.

I’m sorry to report that we American can see a greener future than that which you’re currently plotting for us.  We need more, and we need it now  What am I talking about?  Let me share an example with you.

I saw a movie this evening, and purchased a large bottle of Dasani water from the concession stand.  (I know some people feel that Dasani is evil, but I was horribly thirsty and the other shops near the theater were all closed.)  After the movie finished, I carried my empty plastic bottle into the lobby to look for an appropriate recycling bin.  On my way out, I passed nearly 10 trash cans all filled to the brim with empty Raisinettes boxes and soda cups, mixed with a variety of recyclables.  I kept going, clutching on to the bottle.  As I approached the escalators, I spotted a 5-foot tall black plastic water bottle-shaped receptacle inviting me to recycle my Dasani bottle.  I happily deposited my bottle into the bin, but not without complaining to my friends that the recycling container was most likely empty save my bottle, since no one but me would bother to carry a bottle past so many opportunities to throw it out.  And really, what was this bottle made out of?  Recycled Dasani bottles, or from fresh petroleum?

This simple example is one of a thousand opportunities where corporate America tries yet fails to do the right thing.  Or perhaps it’s an example of greenwashing, where corporations put a green spin on things without actually doing anything to actually improve the environmental quality of their products and practices.  Either way, it needs to stop, and corporate America needs to start actually helping enable us to live in a more environmentally friendly manner.  Being green is easy, but it can be much easier once corporate America gets in line with the rest of us who want to make this world a better place. Please do your part.

Sincerely,

Michael

Surprisingly similar, but not the bed I slept in.

I’m going to take a different approach to today’s column.  Normally I start from the environmental perspective and then (stretch to?) connect it to queer culture or mainstream gay culture.  Today I’m going to take a recent personal experience connected to modern gay culture and then stretch to make it an environmental issue.  Hopefully the stretch won’t be too, um stretchy.

I hate fancy. I hate luxury  I hate premium.  I hate executive.  I hate, and I say this as strongly as possible, all of these expressions of excess that have permeated our American lives.  It used to be that a house in the suburbs and a nice Caddy were signs of success.  We’ve taken this further, flaunting our excess through obvious, ostentatious expressions of wasted resources.  Modern well-off Americans squeeze their hulking frames into disgustingly oversized luxury SUVs to walk their dogs around the block.  Well, not all of them, but you get the point.

I recently had the opportunity to stay the night in a luxury hotel on a business trip.  The room was pretty standard, actually, with all the usual features, but one aspect of it really just made me angry:  the bed, and more specifically, the pillows.  This king-sized bed had at least 8 pillows on it of varying shapes and sizes.  Some were huge square puffs covered in coarsely woven fabric with ruffled trim. Others were standard square throw pillows you’d find on any suburban couch.  Others still were thin, rectangular and dark brown, resembling over-sized round-edged chocolate bars.  Underneath all of these fancy decorative pillows were two standard queen-sized sleeping pillows with white, high thread-count pillow cases.  Of all the pillows on this bed, only two of them were made for resting one’s head while sleeping.   And sadly, I needed three.

Why does this hotel keep so many unusable pillows on the bed?  What purpose do they serve?   Sure, they’re pretty, and maybe if I wanted to sit propped up on the bed they could assist in that.  But why such excess?  This hotel had 16 rooms per floor and 24 floors.   That adds up to 2304 completely useless pillows.   What a waste.

Washington DC was, at least until recently, experiencing a housing boom.  Developers were moving in to underused and disinvested neighborhoods and constructing lots of multi-unit buildings, many with ground floor retail.  In general, it was great to see revitalization of so many neighborhoods that had been on the edge of decline for so many years.  The disappointment set in, however, as the buildings began to come on the market.  Large signs advertising the new apartments screamed “NEW LUXURY CONDOS” and “EXECUTIVE LOFTS”.  Nearly all the new units came fully equipped with granite countertops, marble entryways, stainless steel appliances.   Luxury strikes again.

The three Rs of environmentalism are Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.  The third gets most of the attention.  The idea of reusing things instead of disposing of them is a brilliant idea, and designers need to do a better job of considering the “afterlife” of the packaging of products they develop.  But the easiest way to have a huge impact on the environment is to reduce your consumption of resources.  This reduction of consumption is in direct conflict with the decadent, luxury lifestyle that is readily becoming the new American dream, one which is all too often targeted at the gay community.  A major component of “mainstream gay culture” is decadence and luxury.

(Note: the primary definition of the word decadent is “in a state of decay.’)

Washington DC’s gay nightlife scene has changed pretty drastically over the past handful of years.  To my recollection, it all started when one venue reopened a previously fire-damaged floor with a look and feel totally unique to gay bars in DC at the time.  The interior design and decor were so fancy that it looked like you were walking into a Pottery Barn catalog:  long elegant leather couches wrapped gently around corners.  Comfy upholstered ottomans played triple duty as footrest, coffee table and extra seating.  Pendulum fixtures cast cones of light onto the marble bar, where grinning young gentlemen in sleeveless black t-shirts waited patiently to charge you $7 for a bottle of Blue Moon beer.   While I thought this innovation was ridiculous, the venue had no problems paying its bills.  The gays wanted to drink in luxury.

This entry to the scene was followed by another, then yet another bar, each of which tried to up the ante on “fancy”.  Finally a new gay “super disco club” opened that surrounds its large wooden dance floors with high-design interiors, state of the art lighting systems and full-wall video displays.  Not only can we drink in luxury, now we can dance in it.

Why are we engaged in this arms race of decadence?   Does the interior of a space really have such a huge impact on the amount of fun we have in it?  I go out to bars and clubs to be entertained by music (live, or to dance to) and to socialize.  I can do both of those things in a large black box as easily as I could in a white one with light-up floors lined with white leather couches.  Perhaps without all the shiny objects and flickering screens, I’d actually be more likely to talk to other people since I’d have fewer distractions.

Fancy, luxury, decadence…  these things exemplify unnecessary use of resources.  This is my personal call to STOP THE MADNESS.   Let’s begin a tradition of sensibility, of simplicity, of adequacy.  I crave cozy and uncomplicated.  I want these things in my home life and my social life, and the earth is better place for it.

What do you think?  Please fill in this week’s poll, the TNG “Fancy” Survey.  Last week’s survey on litter is still open, too.

Responses to the question: Do you want children?

Interesting responses here in last week’s Reproduction Poll. A plurality want children, a large percentage definitely don’t, and maybe one-third aren’t sure. There’s an interesting contradiction here in the replies, though. While the largest percentage of people want to have kids that are a genetic combination of the DNA of themselves and their significant others, passing on their DNA is the least likely reason for wanting to have children. Perhaps people are concerned that they can only truly love their own biological child, but maybe they think their own DNA isn’t necessarily special enough to be passed on to a new generation.

When I sliced the data a little deeper, I found no correlation between gender identity and a desire to have children. Both male- and female-identified respondents wanted or didn’t want children, and the two respondents identifying with non-binary genders were split 50/50 on the desire to have children.

Thanks for participating, and please check out this week’s environmental survey, the TNG Litter Poll.

Do you want or have children?
	Yes 12 40% No 8 27% Maybe 6 20% Undecided 2 7% Other 2 7% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

In your ideal world, where would your children come from?
	The genetic combination of my DNA with my partner’s 11 37% The DNA of someone else combined with either that of me or my partner 2 7% An international adoption agency. 5 17% A national or local adoption agency. 7 23% An open adoption 2 7% Other 3 10% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What are your reasons for wanting children?
	Pass on my DNA 4 13% Pass on my knowledge and experience 10 33% Raise queer-friendly straight people 7 23% Experience the joys of raising another human being 18 60% To share love with another being 22 73% Other 1 3% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What is your gender identity?
	Female 8 27% Male 20 67% MTF 0 0% FTM 1 3% Genderqueer 1 3% Other 0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What is your orientation?
	Gay 19 63% Lesbian 5 17% Queer 5 17% Straight 0 0% Bisexual 1 3% Other 0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

I mentioned in an earlier column that there are three major ways that the products we consume cause damage to the environment: production of products, consumption of products and disposal of products. Today, I’m going to rant about the urban litter problem for a bit, which is firmly nestled in our environmental damage spectrum between the consumption and disposal of products.

The majority of litter that I come across is food packaging. Small, single-serving packages cleverly designed to spotlight a product’s compelling aspects, highly engineered and air-tight to ensure freshness, shiny and colorful to catch the eye. If food manufacturers spent as much time thinking about product’s packaging after the product is consumed instead of before, we wouldn’t have a problem. However, packaging designers only think of two things: how to convince someone to purchase the product and then ensure that the product is good/fresh enough to be purchased again. Very rarely is the end of the packaging lifecycle considered when it’s designed.

My apartment building is located directly between our neighborhood CVS and a subsidized housing complex. The two blocks that separate those those two locations are constantly strewn with litter, and from my unscientific research, much of it comes from children living in the housing complex buying stuff at the CVS: candy bar wrappers, plastic shopping bags, soda cans and bottles. I once watched a little girl walking down the block from CVS reach into her shopping bag, pull out it’s only contents (a single pack of chewing gum), discard the bag right there on the sidewalk, unwrap the gum package and throw the packaging a few steps away from the bag, and then walk right into the housing complex. The best part is that there are two city-installed trash bins on the sidewalk between the two locations that, for all intents and purposes, might as well not exist.

Witnessing this sort of completely clueless behavior results in one of three reactions from me. The first is to simply shake my head and hope for a speedy end to our species. The second is to pick up the freshly discarded litter and throw it away. The third is to pick up said items, run up to the person who dropped them and say, politely, “Excuse me. You dropped this.” Amazingly, when I do the third, the confused litterbug usually responds equally politely, apologizing and taking the items from me and carrying them away.

Just yesterday I witnessed a woman, laden with Safeway shopping bags, take a break on my block by propping herself up against a window sill of the insurance company next to my building. She sweetened her walk home from the grocery store by reaching into her shopping bag and pulling out an ice cream sandwich, which she promptly unwrapped and, without thinking, discarded the packaging on the sidewalk 5 feet in front of her as she began to enjoy her sandwich. I took it upon myself to walk up to her and ask politely, “Pardon me. Would you mind if I threw this out for you?” She apologized for littering as I walked 20 steps away to a trash can to dispose of her garbage for her.

Litter is a very, very complex issue and culpability rests with many different parties, as do the potential solutions. One of the biggest and most sensitive issues involves who does the littering. In my experience, it us usually disenfranchised minorities who have the least respect for our urban spaces. And really, how can you blame them? Surely these people have a lot more to worry about than where their gum wrappers will end up. These people doubtlessly have little room in their hearts to take pride in their neighborhoods, as these spaces have been officially neglected and abandoned over the past century. Insipring civic pride in disenfranchized populations seems to be a very difficult task, as you’ll likely have to solve many of their other problems before they have the energy to care.  (Of course, in my mind, the little things can start adding up to bigger things, and I am a firm beliver in the “fixing broken windows” theory, as long as it’s a part of a larger strategy.)

However, the consumer is not the only entity responsible for urban litter.  They are just the end of a chain of consumption, every link of which has the opportunity to cut down on the litter problem.

Product producers should begin by making more environmentally friendly packaging.  All packaging should be 100% recyclable, 100% reusable, 100% bio-degradable, or a 100% mixture of the above.  No longer should manufacturers wrap products in materials intended for the landfill or city streets, sidewalks and gutters.

Purchase locations should also become part of the solution instead of part of the problem.  Drug and convenience stores should not provide plastic bags for purchases of only single items.   These stores should donate portions of their profits to local organizations that not only clean the streets and sidewalks daily, but do it visibly as they help to educate local residents of the hazzards of their bevavior.

I would love to see what would happen if every product or store logo on a package or bag was required to have a microchip embedded into it that, when scanned, would provide the equivalent of the UPC code data.  Large bags of litter could be cleaned up from our streets and scanned, with fines being sent to the proper parties.  Companies like McDonalds, Coca Cola, M&M/Mars, Frito-Lay, CVS, Safeway, Giant, etc., would receive montly bills that would go to pay for the cost of cleaning up after their patrons.  If the packaging and bags were pulled from environmentally sensitive areas, there would also be a per-item fine attached.  How would these companies react?  What sorts of efforts would they undertake to ensure their customers did the right thing with their refuse once there was an economic incentive attached?

What is the intersection between this aspect of environmentalism and queer community?   “The gays” have long been seen as urban pioneers, moving into disinvested neighborhoods and bringing new life to formerly blighted spaces.  This process is also known as gentrification and it carries with it all the positives and negatives of the term.  I would like to think that the improvement of urban spaces can help lift the spirits of residents and inspire civic pride, but sadly I fear the opposite occurs:  tension builds between the haves and the have-nots, which can lead to further disenfranchisement as the new neighbors flaunt their wealth and ignore the existing residents, creating new community instead of trying to participate in the one that already exists.

Superficially speaking, mainstream gay culture also involves a lot of drinking and party-going.  These activities result in drunken late-night snacks from convenience stores and fast food restaurants, and who know how concerned drunk people will be with the proper disposal of the packaging their hangover prevention foods come in.

Otherwise, I think we all share the responsibility of maintaining clean and safe streets and sidewalks, lakes and rivers.  I’m interested in hearing from you.  Please tell me how conscious you are of litter and product packaging by participating in this week’s environmental survey.

TNG Litter Survey.

Oh, and the polls are still open on last week’s Reproduction Survey, so check that out too.

The reasoning being people’s diet choices were interesting.  Nearly everyone chose “taste” as one of their reasons.  But not all!  One pescetarian and one vegetarian claimed “health and well-being” and “environmental impact” respectively as their only reason for their diet.  Additionally, people with more traditional diets as well as those with more radical ones all think that their diets are tasty.  Other reasons submitted under “other” included contrarianism, animal welfare and ethics.  I find it interesting that over half of the respondants said that “habit” and “convenience” were motivations for their choices.  While the majority of those “taking the easy way out” were meat eaters, not all of them:  some found that a vegetarian or pescetarian diet was convenient and habitual.

I don’t think I drew enough non-male responses to draw any conclusions about gender and diet, though none of the females who replied were vegetarian or vegan:  two pescetarians and one carnivore!

Thanks for responding, and check out the new TNG Reproduction Survey.

How would you classify your diet?
	Carnivore (meat and potatoes) 4 19% Omnivore (a wide variety of meats, fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, eggs) 7 33% Vegetarian (vegetables, dairy, eggs) 4 19% Vegan (vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts only) 2 10% Fruitarian (only fruits) 0 0% Other 4 19% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What reasons inform your diet?
	Convenience and ease 11 52% Health and well-being 17 81% Taste 19 90% Habit 12 57% Environmental impact 12 57% Other 3 14% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What is your gender identity?
	Female 3 14% Male 18 86% MTF 0 0% FTM 0 0% Genderqueer 0 0% Other 0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

What is your orientation?
	Gay 18 86% Lesbian 2 10% Queer 1 5% Straight 0 0% Bisexual 0 0% Other 0 0% People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

I’m currently home sick, recovering from a tonsillectomy. For those not familiar with the tonsils, they are glands that hang out in the back of your throat and help prevent nasty bugs from infecting your respiratory system. They also have a tendency to get infected, in some people more than others, and are often removed surgically from little kids who get regular throat infections. I used to get throat infections all the time as a kid, but for some reason my doctors decided to remove my adenoids, the tonsils’ cousins that hang out in the back of the sinuses, but not my tonsils. In my adult years, I have been repeatedly getting throat infections and my doctor decided it was time for my tonsils to go as well.

I was pretty apprehensive about getting this sort of surgery, but not for any of the usual reasons. See, I have some strange belief that modern medicine is for the weak. Or rather, that most illnesses are preventable through good diet, exercise, and avoiding toxins. I maintain an excellent diet, get ample exercise and only appreciate the fun toxins in moderation. Therefore, I should be a healthy person. But I’m not. I’m a weak person. A person who, save for modern medicine, should be dead by now.

Somewhere interconnected with all these notions is the idea that modern medicine and our modern uber-respect for all human life is slowly choking our planet. I’m afraid that we humans are becoming a cancer, infecting the larger organism of which we are a part: the Earth. And the Earth is slowly letting us know that we need to reign in our numbers or it will do it for us.

I tried to explain my apprehension about this surgery to my shrink recently, suggesting that if my body wasn’t capable of surviving in this world without surgery or antibiotics, I didn’t deserve to continue living. I was flawed. I was bucking Darwin’s theory of natural selection, cheating the system. My shrink suggested that it wasn’t entirely my fault, that we’ve had modern medicine a long time, and pre-modern medicine for a long time before that, and we’ve been replacing “survival of the fittest” with “survival of the everyone-with-means-to-acquire-health-care” for just as long. That made me feel better about my own decision to get surgery, but not necessarily about the well-being of the planet.

While lying in bed this morning, half awake and half asleep, floating on a hillbilly-heroine cloud, I started thinking about life and death, and the roll each individual plays in the perpetuation of our species.  I wondered whether I’d even be alive today if it weren’t for modern medicine.  I thought back to each of my parents, and each of their parents, and so on, imagining that if only one of them had had the misfortune of passing away before reproducing, I wouldn’t be here today.  If my paternal grandmother’s great great grandfather Samuel Fuller hadn’t survived the trip across the Atlantic on the Mayflower, I wouldn’t be alive today.  Woah.

The winds shifted a bit in my mind, and my oxycodone-cloud drifted to new territory, where I started thinking back about the looming  human overpopulation problem.  I thought about the book Ishmael, which describes the probable situation that we humans are indeed living out of sync with the Earth and either it will destroy us or we will destroy it.  And I started thinking about the idea of queers as population control.  And maybe despite what the religious right think, we homos are put on this Earth for a very good reason: to provide the benefits of extra bodies helping create order in the world without the risk of increasing the population.  Personally, I find some comfort in this notion while I’m sure others will find it offensive.

There was a time that I really wanted to have my own biological children.  I had thought that I liked my genes and wanted to pass them on.  More recently, I started thinking about how selfish this notion can be.  I was placed on this planet oriented in such a way that I will not create a new life while going about my ordinary daily activities.  Who am I to actively undo that natural situation?  But then again, I benefit from other aspects of modern medicine, so why not this one?

While reading some William Gibson sci-fi novel years ago, I encountered a female character, this bad ass lesbian who worked with a geneticist to biologically combine her DNA with that of her female lover to create an embryo, their daughter.  I thought about how cool that would be if we queers could actually combine our DNA to create biological offspring.  But now, I think I’m happy adopting a puppy and maybe eventually (but unlikely?) a child.

So, what do you think?  Do you want your own biological children, or would you be satisfied raising someone else’s?  Or do you have no need for kids in your life.  Respond on the comments, or take this week’s survey where I ask questions about motivations for having kids, what where you might want to get them from.

TNG Reproduction Survey

I’ve been focusing so far on two very important aspects of green living: food and transportation. Choices we make every day in regards to what we eat and how we get around greatly impact the environment. These two aspects also interact with one another when it comes to the source of the foods we eat. Locally grown produce is about the healthiest thing you can eat, as it is low on the food chain and doesn’t require a lot of resources to travel from the farmer’s field to your supper plate.

One easy way to secure a lot of fresh, local produce is to participate in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). This potentially cryptic term is actually just what it says: agriculture supported by the local community. Here’s how it works. You pay up front and then get a weekly supply of fresh vegetables delivered to your door or a farmer’s market near your house. Unlike when you buy produce at the grocery store, you actually help pay the farmer for the resources used to grow the food, it actually belongs to you in a way. You basically buy a “share” of the farmer’s yield, which is why CSA is often called “farm share.”

In the video above, I talk you through the contents of my box of produce from this past weekend. I’ve already included a lot of the items into food I prepared last night, that my boyfriend and I will enjoy for lunch all week long: the basil and radishes are two ingredients in a pesto pasta salad; and the corn and peppers play key roles in a black bean and fresh corn salad. I actually video-taped the preparation of these dishes and will post them online soon.

I know a lot of queer people who cook. But for each that buys fresh produce and makes delicious food from it, there is at least two more who assemble meals out of pre-packaged, processed foodstuffs. I often wonder about people’s motivations, and where there is anything particular about sexual orientation and gender identity that might influence how we decide to feed ourselves. I, for one, spent a lot of time helping my mother in the kitchen while my brothers were outside playing “home run derby” in the cul-de-sac in front of our house, and picked up a lot of skills and recipes along the way. I appreciate the connection between food, family and culture, and take pride in preparing foods that remind me of and pay homage to my past.

Like last week, I’m going to conduct another poll. This one is about our eating habits. Please click below to let me know how you choose to feed yourself, and where those products come from.

TNG Diet Survey

Finally, I have pictures from all the CSA boxes I’ve received this year so far.  Take a look at all the amazing fruits and vegetables that I’ve had delivered to the farmer’s market 2 blocks from my apartment.

Image from sutsy.com

Last week, I discussed the different ways food items can be “un-green”, and suggested that home-made (or locally made) vegetarian meals composed of locally sourced ingredients are the greenest things we can eat. Today I’m going to talk a bit about transportation.

As I mentioned, transportation of food items is one large factor in the un-green-ness of many food products. Transportation in general plays a huge role in climate change and pollution.

Since the end of World War II, the general urban trend has been the decongestion of the city, with house first and then jobs decades later moving out from the urban core into the inner and then outer suburbs. While decentralization has its benefits, there are also costs. One major cost of decentralization is the increased transportation needed to go from a decentralized household to a decentralized job. As our cities spread out further and further from the core, sprawling across what was former farmland, it costs more and more to get from one location to another.

Many people move out to the ‘burbs for the placid, American-dream lifestyle that has been marketed to us since the end of the second world war. Many others who would like to live closer to their jobs and to other destinations end up living further out because they perceive suburban living as cheaper. It turns out that’s not always the case. Recent research has been working to quantify the combined cost of housing and transportation and publicize these costs, to help individuals make better housing choices. One recent effort along these lines is the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index, a product of the Center for Neighborhood Technology. This index pairs average transportation costs with average housing costs to determine locations that are considered affordable. While the bigger regional maps are hard to differentiate between, when one zooms into the center of a region, you start to see a lot of zones in the inner areas that become more affordable when transportation costs are factored in.

Luckily, queer people have an additional motivation for living closer in: we need to be able to find one another pretty easily. The concept of the gay ghetto has been discussed a few times on this site already. But the general concept is that the decline of the urban core coincided with the gay rights movement, and lots of gay people came out of the closet, then the woodwork, and moved into previously neglected neighborhoods to begin to create their own community.

Oddly enough (or perhaps not), as we gain greater acceptance from mainstream culture in America, we queers become more and more likely to fall back to the American-dream ideal of living in the suburbs. A gay family in white-picket-fence-ville isn’t nearly as scandalous as it used to be, and it appears to be becoming even more commonplace. And with this continued decentralization comes increased transportation costs and environmental degradation.

As an urban planner, environmentalist, transit geek and city aficionado, I have an obvious leaning towards urban, car-free living. However, I think if nothing else, the fact that urban living (including Zipcar) can often be more cost effective than suburban living, and most definitely more convenient, should be a compelling reason for people to consider living in cities versus suburbs.  The environmental benefit is a happy side-effect to the cost savings of being able to live without monthly auto loan and insurance payments.

Urban living does not guarantee freedom from cars and fewer auto trips.  I have to share the fact that I have a friend who lives about one and a half miles from his job, and both his apartment and work location are in the city, yet he drives to work.  Granted he has a parking spot at home and free parking at work, so that provides some incentives and shields him from some of the costs of car ownership, and I guess he likes getting to work quickly, but it seems completely wasteful to me.

So, as I conclude this discussion of environmentalism through urban living, let me introduce a new feature, a quick poll of readers.  Today, I’ll ask about how you get around and I’ll summarize the poll results in next week’s column.

There are so many aspects of one’s life that can be “greened” that it’s hard to find a good place to start. Let’s start with food, because it’s something that everyone does every day and the layers of greenability are like that of an onion: copious. I’m going to explore the greening of food through an example of what I call the least green food item:   Individually Packaged, Processed, Frozen Meat Entrees

I’m nominating frozen meat entrees as the least green of all possible foods. Unfortunately, they are often the most convenient for busy people on the go, and make up the a good sized portion the caloric intake of a lot of people I know. So, what’s so bad?

Individual Packaging: while the ability to “heat and eat” a food item is very appealing to those who dislike doing dishes, the disposable packaging is extremely wasteful. While often recyclable (in part at least), the boxes, bowls and “revolutionary grilling” trays tend to end up in the landfill, wasting valuable resources.

Processed: these sorts of food items are generally made in a factory somewhere. As economics dictate, having one large factor is more cost effective than having one in each state, major market or metropolitan area. As such, these items all get made in one place and are shipped to your local grocery store. Who knows the landmarks and roadside attractions your lunch today has seen? South of the Border? Wall Drug? The World’s Largest Ball of Twine?  Even if you live in farm country, if you are eating processed foods, they likely travel many many miles before ending up in your microwave.  This transportation wastes a lot of fuel, and contributes to global warming and local pollution.

Frozen: Frozen foods have one major drawback, which is that they must be kept frozen once they’re made. This means that all the transportation mentioned above must be done in freezer trucks, resulting in more fuel and more pollution. Once these meals arrive at your grocery store, they must be kept frozen as well, using electricity that, in many regions in the US, is still generated by burning coal, which is rarely good for the environment.

Meat:  As I mentioned before, the meat industry is the largest generator of greenhouse gases.    According to an infographic linked from the referenced article, a meal of vegetables and rice requires 1/16th as much fossil fuel as a 6 oz. steak, and results in 1/25th of the greenhouse gas emissions.

So, what’s the alternative to the above?   Well, logically speaking, it’s homemade, whole, fresh, local, vegetarian entrees.

Homemade meals require little packaging unless you want to make them portable.  For this, you can reuse other containers that foods have come in. I keep a storehouse of mason jars in my pantry from all the pasta sauce I’ve purchased.  In the wintertime, I cook pots of soup and fill the jars with them.  Other containers are seemingly infinitely reusable as well, such as hummus containers, and yogurt tubs.  Why buy food in a container that you are going to throw away when you can make food at home and put it into containers you already have?  Additionally, when one buys whole foods, those foods come in their own, biodegradable packaging.  Think onions, potatoes and bananas.  (Unless you shop at Trader Joe’s, where even the produce comes wrapped in plastic packaging.)  If composting is available nearby, you can easily return all this “packaging” to the earth.

The other big dimension here is “local.”  If you can purchase foods that come from nearby, you can drastically reduce the fuel consumption required to put that food on your plate. Shop at farmers markets.  Sign up for Community Supported Agriculture. Shape your diet around local seasonal foods.

Finally, the vegetarian aspect is important. Meat eats up a lot of resources and creates a lot of pollution, so dining on vegetarian options instead will have a much lighter impact on the environment.

Now, where you get these meals is up to you. Dine at the hot/salad bar at Whole Foods and compost your dining materials, or buy the ingredients yourself and do it at home. The options are there, waiting to be explored.

Original Illustration by Cathryn

So, where are we in this conversation?  I’ve described my motivations for being an environmentalist, and some anecdotal proof suggesting I’m not totally off base.  I’ve done an evaluation of how green my lifestyle really is (not green enough, it seems), and reviewed all the ways that our post-industrial consumer culture puts stresses on the environment.  In the comments on my last post, someone expressed disappointment that I wasn’t really discussing the queer/green intersection.  I had addressed this briefly in an earlier post, and from here on out that will be the focus of my writing in this space.  I just wanted to establish some background first.

So, the first step in living a greener lifestyle is really to realize that nearly everything we touch in our modern world came from somewhere and will go somewhere when we’re done.  Look up from your computer (or iPhone?) and look around you?  What do you see?  Ask yourself where that item came from, and imagine where it will go when it’s “broken.”  Someone put up a sign in the laundry room of my building saying, “Throw it away?  There is no ‘away’.  Please recycle.”  Making that realization is really the first big step.  (That’s why I keep hammering that in.  It needs to be incorporated into one’s general consciousness.)

But once you’ve made that realization, what next?  I’m not suggesting we eschew all commercial products and return to living in the wild.  As I said earlier, the meaning of life is to create order out of chaos, and we make so many beautiful things and add so much elegant order to the universe through our technological advancements.  The secret is to create more order than disorder.   But it’s time to go from theory to practice.  How does one go about living in harmony with the environment?

We need to start making informed choices with the items that come into our lives, and once they’ve reached their useful lives, dispose of these items properly or find other uses for them.  It is here where green and queer intersect.  Mainstream gay culture is anything but green.  It’s a machine specifically designed to separate gay men (with their high salaries and inferiority complexes) from their money.  The companies that target us focus very little on where their products come from or where they’ll go once we are finished with them.

I proposed earlier that gay men are less likely to be green because they’re too busy getting their own needs met.  But it’s not entirely their fault.  The easiest way for us all to live greener lifestyles would be for all the products and services available to us to be greener.  I’m currently at a cafe drinking an iced tea.  It came in a disposable plastic cup.  The cafe could have given me a glass instead, washed with eco-friendly dish soap and infinitely reusable.  Or they could use those plastic-like cups that are made from corn starch.  But instead, I end up throwing out something that will probably sit in a landfill for the next few hundred years.

It’s likely a Catch 22:  the queers worth marketing towards don’t care about the environment, so no green products or service are marketed towards them.  Without easy access to green products and with no ads appealing to our supposedly lacking environmental sensibilities, we have few opportunities to spend our money on green products or develop or reaffirm those sensibilities.

In looking for potential advertisers for this site, we’ve been pretty picky about what sorts of images we want to display and messages we want to send.  The current ad network we are working with have a lot of gay-oriented ads.  Happily many of them are for gay health issues, but many are auto related (car tires and auto insurance) or gay travel destinations.  Of all the products I’ve seen available for TNG placement, not a single one employs a green angle.

Perhaps it’s time to break that cycle, and to let corporations and marketers know that we demand greener products and services more readily available to us, and we want to know about them.  I’ll definitely be attempting to raise awareness of this fact in the coming posts here in this space.  I’ll also be helping to raise the awareness of green issues to queer people in general, simply by addressing environmental issues on the site regularly.

I promise, this is the last heady post in this series.  It’s time to get down to green tacks.

Original illustration by Cathryn Chandler.

So far in this space, I’ve described what I’m trying to do, I’ve shared with you the meaning of life and how our current lifestyles are out of sync with it, and provided some evidence of the elegance of nature as proof that life-equals-order.  Basically, we are living out of sync with nature, and living in a more green fashion will result in better connection between us and our planet.  In general, I refer to anti-environmentalism as the creation of “disorder” and in today’s column I’m going to explore the sources of such disorder.

Sadly, anti-environmental disorder comes from near every aspect of our modern lives.  Using an example I discussed before, all other species live in concert with nature, they live with nature, a part of it.  Somehow over the past few thousand years, we have tried to overcome nature, supersede it, dominate it.  Living this way, while sustaining our current modern way of life, threatens the way of “all life” on our earth, by changing our planet into a chaotic, disordered mess.  This disorder comes in many flavors, from many aspects of our lives, but their causes can be narrowed down into three categories:  the creation of goods, the consumption or use of goods, and the disposal of goods.

The creation of products for human consumption creates a lot of waste, a lot of disorder.  For every Egg McMuffin, bottle of Coca-Cola, and pint of Ben and Jerry’s;  for every block of wood, blender and iPhone, there is an unmeasurable amount of waste created.  Each of these products can be broken down into their component parts, most of which don’t occur very naturally in nature on their own.  These components must be dug out of the earth, or grown in a field or a feed lot, in order to be used by us.  Unfortunately, in our modern times, we don’t usually like things they way they come from nature, so we have to modify them.  Ores and metals must be refined, whole wheat is split up into starch and bran, corn is transformed into corn syrup and then modified into high-fructose corn syrup.  And each step in this process removes these ingredients away from the earth, and also removes from the ingredients components that must be disposed of somehow.

Especially wasteful is the development of animal products.  First, raising animals for food creates a lot of waste, and our modern industrial farming practices don’t really care too much for how that waste is treated.  Animals also produce a large amount of methane gas, which is a large contributor to global warming. One statistic from an article I read a while ago stated that more greenhouse gases come from the raising of farm animals than come from our cars.  All of this waste gas floating through the atmosphere is a huge example of what I’ve referred to as disorder.

The consumption of products causes a lot of problems and disorder in our world.  One omni-present example is driving:  the consumption of automobile fuel, rubber tires and brake pads, etc.  Driving takes a lot of different elements not normally found in our natural environment and spews them across the land scape.  Carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions are just the tip of the iceberg.  Potentially more deadly are fine particulate matter which are too small for our cillia to push them naturally out of our airways and are thought to cause myriad health problems.

Aside from driving, the consumption of nearly every other product we use has some sort of impact.  A bunch of bananas, the earth’s nearly perfect food, still has a brand name & bar code sticker on it that must be disposed of.  Nearly everything we purchase in our modern culture comes in packaging that must be discarded at some point.  And how much of this ends up discarded on the ground, tossed aside in parking lots, on sidewalks, out of car and bus windows, as we eagerly dig through it to find the target of our desire:  the new fun product we just purchased.  Most people, I fear, simply find packaging a barrier between them and their joy, and think very little about where it will go when they discard it.

Luckily, much packaging is designed to be reused:  I pack soup for lunch in the wintertime inside mason jars that originally came to my door filled with store-bought pasta sauce; my spice rack is composed entirely of reused hummus containers that happen to be dishwasher-safe and airtight.   Sadly, most manufacturers don’t keep packaging reuse in mind when designing the packaging for products.  The design it like a special gift wrap, specially made to show off the product and educate of its many uses.

Finally, disposal of products causes a lot of disorder in our world.  Think of everything around you right now at the moment you read this.  Grab one item.  How long do you think it will be with you.  Where will it go when you are done?  Can it be used for any other purpose?  Where will it end up, and how long will it stay there?  The first item at my fingertips is a Papermate brand ball-point pen.  It will last until the ink runs out (or dries up), which is probably a month or two.  Not bad for a 99-cent item.  Once its original useful life is over, there isn’t much I can do with it.  I could turn it into a drinking straw, or perhaps use it to make a bong.  But most likely, it will get tossed in the garbage and end up in a landfill, where it will sit for decades, if not centuries.  Every item that surrounds you probably has a similar fate!

I’ll spend a lot more time in this space exploring how we can better live our lives in harmony with the environment, illustrating opportunities for employing items that are more environmentally friendly to create, consume and dispose of.