by Jen Hatmaker
Brandon and I technically work from home, so you would think a one-car system would work, but you would be wrong. Especially since it’s summer and I am in full mom mode. I’m neck deep in waterparks, movies, swimming pools, camps, and “Kids Eat Free” destinations. Perhaps this is obvious, but none of these are next door. The car has seen a lot of action.
Additionally, and again, perhaps this is obvious, but the working from home thing suffers with the offspring up in our grill every day. Every summer, I bid farewell to productivity. But because Sunday sermons and book deadlines are fairly inflexible, Brandon and I vacate the house so we can keep our little jobs by actually doing them. We do this by driving away from home. In our cars.
Our first upset came courtesy of my travel schedule. I spend a decent amount of time flying somewhere to speak. I’m no stranger to the airport or its little cousin, Parking Garage, who babysits my car for $10 a day. So when packing for a convention in Orlando, I said, “Oh my gosh. You have to take me to the airport. This is so awesome for me! Uh, sorry for you.” No parking garage, no smoldering walk to the terminal, no $20 exit fee, no dementia-related “where did I park?” dilemma, one husband and three little faces waiting for me at the curb when I deplane.
Yes, please.
Less driving is theoretically marvelous for me, albeit practically challenging. To reduce our dependence on two cars, we would need to reconsider how and where we live. We’d have to think like my friend Carson who lives downtown with her little family, riding their bikes everywhere. (I ran into Carson at Target around Christmas with my basket burgeoning with presents. I asked her what she was giving her daughter, and she replied: “An apron.” I just blinked at her dumbly, like a pigeon.)
Or we’d need to reconsider our availability, driving all over Austin for lunches, meetings, coffees, and sessions. Come to you? Yes. Drive to your part of town? Sure. Meet for coffee instead of talk on the phone? No problem. You need me? On my way. This has rendered us slaves to two cars. Leary of letting someone down or substituting a two-hour lunch with a twenty-minute phone call, we pass out our time like Halloween candy, traversing the city and feeding the odometer.
What if we said, “Wednesdays are for meetings, and the other days are off-limits”? Would anyone die? If we stopped letting the tail wag the dog, could a one-car scenario work for us? It seems like simple planning, and a proactive stance could revolutionize the way we drive, maybe even the way we live.
Which reminds me, I need to text Brandon; I fly home tomorrow at 2:35, and he’s picking me up. I’ll be the girl on the passenger pick-up curb casually checking e-mails and waiting leisurely for my driver.
Girlcation in NYC: I kid you not, at this exact moment, that smoking car with the bomb was left in Times Square, and police started clearing us out. We were like, "What is everyone spazzing out for? Calm down! OH LOOK! Sephora!"
Day 10
The Council is split on green habits; five really try, and one doesn’t at all (I shan’t name names, but said person not only employs zero green efforts; she lies about it). The rest of us waffle between zeal and guilt, diligence and hypocrisy. Here are Becky’s ruminations on going green:
Before I moved to Austin, I was in no way green. I wasn’t even teal. Since then I have tried to live more responsibly. I keep shopping bags in the car, I recycle, I take old batteries to Radio Shack (meaning I keep a pile of batteries so long that my husband gets sick of it and takes it for me), and I send away my empty ink cartridges. Recently I joined the KP Project that tends my garden for half the produce. Therefore, I garden.
Since I garden (chuckling), I decided to compost. I feel very Ma Ingalls sending my daughters out to dump the countertop compost bin—an ice bucket I got at Goodwill—into the backyard “compost bin,” (i.e., a trash can with holes punched in the side). I laugh every time the girls do the heebie-jeebie dance at the sight of God’s little creatures doing their work.
Although I recycle so much more, there are four thousand ways I can live more green. One thing is sure: my carbon footprint will always lead back to Sonic until some tree-hugging hippie discovers a non-Styrofoam vehicle to deliver the icy perfection that is the Sonic soda.
Sorry, planet.
Day 11
You know what’s a layup for buying local in Austin? Dining out. No hay problema. Austin is a jackpot of locally owned, independent restaurants. This is a foodie town, so choosing Olive Garden instead of Carmelo’s is like skipping a Jonny Lang concert for the Jonas Brothers; cause for great scorn. When discussing a good steak, a friend of ours asserted with absolute seriousness: “Well, you can’t beat Chili’s,” and we have repeated that line behind his back one million times since.
Like music, we take food seriously here in the capital city. Plenty of remarkable chefs call Austin home. You’re more likely to drive past Salt Lick, Magnolia Cafe, Iron Cactus, or Matt’s El Rancho than an Applebee’s around here. This gives us plenty of opportunities to eat creative, innovative food and act superior. (Notable exceptions to the chain aversion: Chick-fil-A, P.F. Chang’s, and Whole Foods. I’m comfortable with some hypocrisy.)
So although Sonic and Starbucks are off the menu, I can still drive my (one) little car to Leaf, Moonshine, and Eastside Café. (Please come to Austin immediately and eat at these restaurants.) Circulating my money back into Austin’s economy is thinly veiled as noble, barely disguised as purely preferential.
Day 12
Why buy local?
Food:
•Most produce is shipped an average of fifteen hundred miles to your grocery store, and that’s just domestic produce. International mileage is substantially higher.
•We can only afford this because of artificially low energy prices we currently enjoy and by externalizing the environmental costs of such a wasteful food system.
—Cheap oil will not last forever though. World oil production has already peaked, and while demand for energy continues to grow, supply will soon start dwindling, sending the price of energy through the roof. We’ll be forced then to reevaluate our food systems.
•By subsidizing large-scale agriculture with government handouts, we:
—Expedite the extinction of small farmers and diversified crops.
—Facilitate agriculture that is destroying and polluting our soils and water, weakening our communities, and concentrating wealth and power into a few hands.
❍Industrial food production is entirely dependent on fossil fuels, which create greenhouse gases that are significant contributors to climate change. The biggest fossil fuel use in industrial farming is not transporting food or fueling machinery; it’s chemicals. As much as 40 percent of the energy used in the food system goes toward the production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
❍Food processors use large amounts of paper and plastic packaging to keep food from spoiling as it is transported and stored for long periods of time. This packaging is difficult or impossible to reuse or recycle.3
—These large-scale, agribusiness-oriented food systems are bound to fail on the long term, sunk by their own unsustainability.
•Only 18 cents of every dollar, when buying at a supermarket, go to the grower. 82 cents go to various unnecessary middlemen.4
—Farmers’ markets enable farmers to keep 80 to 90 cents of each dollar spent by the consumer.
Goods and Services:
•When you buy from an independent, locally owned business, twice the money recirculates through the community, doubling the positive impact on the local economy.5
•Nonprofit organizations receive on average 250 percent more support from smaller business owners than they do from large businesses.
•Help keep our communities unique; our one-of-a-kind businesses are integral to the distinctive character of our cities.
•Reduce environmental impact.
—
Locally owned businesses generally make more local purchases requiring less transportation.
•Small local businesses are the largest employer nationally and provide the most jobs to residents in our community.
•A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses ensures innovation and low prices over the long term. A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based not on a national sales plan but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
•Local businesses owned by people who live in the community are less likely to leave and are more invested in the community’s future.6
Day 13
We had our first cognizant 7 fail. Okay, we actually had two. In the same day.
The first came courtesy of back-to-school shopping. Like all children, mine are mutants growing at unnatural rates. Overnight, their jeans become capris, and their big toes emerge from their shoes. It’s ridiculous. Although we test the feasibility of last year’s shoes at the end of every summer, it’s like Cinderella’s stepsisters jamming their hammertoes into the tiny crystal slippers that look like they were made for Cabbage Patch dolls. No dice.
This created quite a conundrum for “buying local.”
I researched, I hunted, I made phone calls, I googled, but I couldn’t find a local tennis shoe that wasn’t made out of hemp or straw. The only option was RunTex, a local high-end runners’ store, but the day I spend $110 dollars on a pair of shoes for my eight-year-old is the day someone needs to slap the tarnation out of me. Sorry. Not even for 7 will I turn into an imbecile.
I waited until the last second hoping to solve the dilemma, but with school starting in four days, I went to Academy and bought them Nike’s. Just do it? I did.
Failure 2 was a result of poor planning. I signed up to bring not one but two people dinner this evening. Somehow I imagined that back-to-school shopping, sour cream chicken enchilada creation, and food delivery could fit into a four-hour window. They might have were it not for that stinkin’ recipe; www.cooks.com is a liar. Those enchiladas take “30 minutes to prep” only if Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay are my sous chefs chopping, pureeing, sautéing, and shredding while I’m executing the other forty-nine steps.
An hour behind, I realized I wouldn’t make it home in time to hand the car off so Brandon could bring Caleb to his first football practice. Preparing them for this conundrum, I threw out an asinine question: “Can you go twenty minutes late?”
Three seconds of stunned silence followed while one thirty-eight-year old and one third-grader tried to comprehend the blasphemy I’d just uttered. Then their brains recovered and the poop hit the fan:
“It’s my first practice!”
“He’s getting his uniform!”
“I wouldn’t even miss five minutes!”
“I want to stake his place on defense!”
“The coach will think I’m a slacker!”
“We’re not going to be that family who traipses in late!”
“This is football, Mom! It’s not like school!”
“This is football, Jen! It’s not like church!”
Reader, allow me to explain the seriousness that is football in Texas. There are things we take lightly here, like education and soccer. Texas ranked 48th on SAT scores, but who cares when UT has the number one college football recruiting class in the nation? So what if he can’t read; our incoming offensive lineman ran a 5.10 40 at the combine. In Texas, football is first. Decrease the enthusiasm by 86 percent, and you’ll find every other sport.
Of course I know this, even subscribe to it. We have season tickets on the front row at Darrell K. Royal Texas Memorial Stadium where we get on TV every other game, due largely to our grizzly seatmate to the left who holds signs like “Bob Stoops drives a minivan” and rings a cowbell after every play. I once turned down a conference because it was during the Red River Shootout. I love football like most girls love shopping.
So I owned my temporary insanity, blaming my faux pas on the Nike’s and the stress they caused me. I promised to drive like Danica Patrick to get back on time. Midway through my second delivery, I called and told them to take the other car to practice; I wouldn’t make it unless my car turned into a flying DeLorean.
And the one-car family became two.
You could argue that pee wee football practice wasn’t a sufficient reason to breach 7, but I’d like you to come down here and say that to our faces. Do you think Vince Young’s mom made him late for practice while he finished his English homework? Clearly she did not. And the whole state is grateful. Some things are more important than others. When my son is employed by the NFL as a tight end, anchoring the strong side and developing a sturdier pocket, he will point back to his upbringing, extolling the factors that led to his success, and among them will be this:
“My mom made sure I was never late for practice.”
Day 15
I realize the novelty of recycling wore off around 1992, but somewhat late to the party, please indulge my enthusiasm. We decided to recycle every possible item this month: glass, tin, cardboard, plastic, batteries, ink cartridges, paper, and cans. Even our food scraps are recycled into compost, and leftover water goes to Lady’s bowl. I have bins for every category just inside the garage door. Breaking news:
We have like zero trash.
We used to roll our trash bin out with the lid propped halfway open, thanks to eight bags of waste crammed inside. Our family was keeping the landfill business in top working order. That big trash swirl in the ocean Oprah did a show on? I think I recognized the cereal boxes I cut Box Tops out of before promoting them to their second career as pollution.
But after the spaghetti boxes and jelly jars and coffee tins and detergent bottles relocate to the recycling bins, there is almost nothing left. We put out one small trash bag for the whole week.
This has become an obsession for me. I inspect the trash can every day to see if something can be rescued for recycling. Every time I find a plastic container or cardboard box, the family gets another rendition of “Why This Does Not Go into the Trash Anymore,” which they LOVE. I study my recycling bins once a day, marveling at how much trash we generate. I will not do the math on how much we’ve tossed that could’ve been repurposed.
Speaking of, the U.S. has 3,091 active landfills and more than ten thousand old municipal landfills. The environmental issues these generate run the gamut from hazardous waste, toxic gas emissions, low-level radioactive waste, and leakage into ground and surface water. The health hazards posed cause much protestation and controversy.
Then there is the issue of volume, which even the most sophisticated system can handle for only so long. Americans generate trash at an astonishing rate of 4.6 pounds per day per person, 251 million tons per year.7 This is twice as much trash per person as most other developed countries. Trash production has almost tripled since 1960, thanks to the onslaught of prepackaged everything-under-the-sun.
Trash in a landfill will stay there, as is, for a super long time. Trash is dumped in sections (called cells), compacted, and covered with dirt before the next round. With little oxygen and moisture, trash does not decompose rapidly, as landfills aren’t meant to break down trash, only bury it. When a landfill closes—because no site can bury trash indefinitely—it must be monitored for thirty years because of the contamination threat.
This is an unprecedented problem as ours is the first society to generate disposable material by the millions of tons annually. Plastic bottles, containers and packaging, technology waste . . . these are the byproducts of “modern progress.” Cheese didn’t always come packaged in plastic with paper dividers; people used to just make their own and then eat it.
Twenty-five years ago you’d be hard pressed to find a bottle of water for sale, but thanks to a clever industry who repackaged ba
sic tap water and sold it to a society of convenience as a superior option, as if they collected it from the runoff of the Colorado Rockies, we now consume 8.6 million gallons of bottled water a year, at only a wee cost increase of 240 to 10,000 times the price of tap water.8 Then into the trash, la de da. For the bargain price of a dollar, I receive sixteen ounces of tap water and contribute to the waste crisis.
But just when I was feeling tickled pink about recycling, I read this:
The most effective way to stop this trend is by preventing waste in the first place. . . . Waste is not just created when consumers throw items away. Throughout the life cycle of a product, from extraction of raw materials to transportation to processing and manufacturing facilities to manufacture and use, waste is generated. Reusing items or making them with less material decreases waste dramatically. Ultimately, less materials will need to be recycled or sent to landfills or waste combustion facilities.9
In other words, by the time I put my glass in the recycling bin, it has already caused the lion’s share of damage via processing and shipping. I’m not sure we should throw a party over a recycled bottle that was commercially mold-blown in a factory with its little friends, and then burned up 11,884 nautical miles getting from the processing plant in Brazil to Italy then back to my pantry. Recycling at that point is like ordering a super-sized Big Mac Value Meal then adding, “With a Diet Coke, please.” Nice try, sister.
True reform involves purchasing fewer disposable materials in the first place, like bulk products, produce from the farmer’s market, and second-hand goods that have already shed their packaging. Best practices include reusing containers over and over, lowering the consumption of single-use materials. Recycling is probably a third-tier tactic toward genuinely reducing waste for maximum impact.
