I feel like I’m developing sustainability ADHD.  Maybe life ADHD.  There’s so much to focus on and so little time.  Every day there’s a new issue, new article, new published findings.  Time is the real scarce resource, and it’s hard to figure out what the priorities are and what is the best way to filter information, both in my personal and my intellectual life.  (Also, must find time to compartmentalize less…)  Lately, I find myself desperately in need of figuring out what I can get away with not knowing.

Community & Knowing & Doing

One thing is keeping me sane, and that is this -

I think at this point I’m comfortable saying that in the midst of everything else, all the issues, all the noise, the most important thing is community.

Photo CC || http://www.flickr.com/photos/mranathema

Community makes things easier.  Work shared, knowledge pooled – engaging with a like-minded community makes getting things done that much easier.  Connecting with a community lets you, as a person, know a little (or a lot!) less.  It helps to take away some of the research overwhelm, the knowledge overwhelm… frankly, just the general overwhelm.

Connecting with our communities also gives us a stake in something, makes things worth preserving and protecting, makes goals worth working towards.  Community feedback, or peer pressure, is a far more powerful influence than we imagine.  Communities help us to care.

Communities help us live lives that are sustainable for us; get-up-every-day-and-live-it, personally sustainable lives.

This Weekend – A Task

I’m traveling out of town this week, in DC attending a conference for the Army.  The conference is during the day, but the evenings are what it’s all about .  I’m getting the chance to reconnect with friends who I haven’t seen in over a year.  My wonderful, beloved, DC community.  People who I would honestly like to be in touch with more frequently.  I’m reconnecting with pieces of my community that I’ve lost touch with.

It would be awesome if this weekend, you could connect with someone in your community.  Whatever community means to you, whatever tribe would serve your life mission right now – reach out and make a connection.  It could be as long as stopping by someone’s house for a visit or as short as taking five minutes to send an email or post on a forum.  Do it.  It will make your life better.  It will make their life better.

And then check back in and let us know how it went?

Related posts:

1. Five Things NaNoWriMo Teaches Us About Sustainability

Happy Saturday, everyone.  It’s been a fairly good week in sustainability news.  And by that I mean that no additional catastrophes (at least not that I heard of) joined the more or less Hollywood-esque summer we’ve been “enjoying.”

Along those lines, here’s a great article about how to lower your movie theater and popcorn budget this summer; just turn on the news.

Alright, sorry… /end cynicism.

Last week I wrote a bit about writing a new, more epic story for your life.  This family did just that.  They set a goal, they started working towards it, and they reached their goal two years before they had hoped to.  For those skeptics out there, it is possible and people are doing it.  Check out Family of Four Grows Their Food in a Swimming Pool.

After Copenhagen there was a lot of discussion about addressing climate change on a local or regional level.  But maybe what we need to be doing in the wake of the failure of federal climate change policy is celebrating the EPA.

Getting even smaller, this week I concluded that I don’t have to do all of it.  But because we definitely want to do some of it ourselves, check out Sustainable Eats’ Simple Lives Thursday blog hop for a ton of great thoughts, ideas, recipes and discussions about living more sustainably on an individual level.  And oh… the recipes.  Yum.

And finally, I can’t believe it’s almost September.  I didn’t participate in One Small Change in July and August, but I’m pondering what I want to do for September.  One idea I had was having a No Plastic month, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.  Are you signing up for the next One Small Change challenge?

Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend!

Related posts:

1. Sustainability Saturday – #3
2. Sustainability Saturday #5
3. Sustainability Saturday – #2

I’ve been gone for a month.  Not gone as in spontaneously corporeally disembodied, but absent from the blog, the news, e-mail, and the internet at large.  I was several days behind hearing about the death of federal climate change legislation.  Yikes.  That’s a big miss for me.

This was a month for regrouping.  My husband returned from Iraq for good (for now) at the beginning of July, and we’ve been enjoying his time off and figuring out what life looks like when we’re not separated by multiple countries and an ocean.  The Army calls it establishing a “New Norm,” but basically it looks like very quiet insanity.  We’re both back to work now, so maybe that’s what “normal” means.

We also went on vacation.  And it was a vacation – a totally awesome, 100% decadent vacation.  Serious business, long, don’t care about anything while we’re doing it vacation.  Instead of writing about climate change legislation I was – not going to lie – floating endlessly around a lazy river, actually by that point taking a vacation from the vacation.

Here’s the thing… our vacation was the opposite of green: we went to Disney World.  And I resolved not to feel guilty about it the whole time I was there.  After all, guilt didn’t prevent me from going to Disney World, it just would have ruined the trip for me and probably DH as well, since I’m the worst person in the world at keeping my mouth shut.  (An absence from the internet does nothing to quiet my brain or keep me from being an over-analytical pest to my friends and family.)

A few months ago I won a copy of A Million Miles in a Thousand Years in an online giveaway.  In order to be eligible for the giveaway, I wrote this post about the function of personal story within cultural narrative.  I’m so glad that I did.  I took the book with me on our vacation and read it on the plane.  It was awesome and everyone should read it.  Maybe it was because of the book, but instead of feeling crippling guilt (which I had already promised myself I would not do), I spent the trip unintentionally noticing story.

I know there are countless reasons to criticize Disney, but the fact is that Disney is good at story.  They’ve built a billion dollar empire on epic stories, and on selling people stuff that makes them feel like they are, just for a day, just until the fireworks are over, a part of one of those stories.  And Walt Disney himself was passionate about stories; not just the fantasy pieces, but envisioning a better future as well.

I’m not surprised corporations are successfully capitalizing on story, because society right now pretty much sucks at stories.  And I think we all have a fundamental need to be living a good story, an epic story.  When we’re not, we try to fill the holes with shopping, junk food, and watching other people’s stories.  They’re not even the good ones (reality TV??), just a quick fix, anything to fill the hole we feel but can’t quite identify.  And we’re unhappy, because it’s not enough, and you can’t cover a void of meaning with a Band-Aid.

In my post about story, I said that I think we need to find a way in which our own personal stories relate to a new cultural narrative, build a new social story.  Now I wonder if maybe it works differently.  Maybe it’s about rewriting our own lives so that we are forced to grow as characters in a better story.  Maybe the aggregate of everyone reshaping their boring, unsatisfying, or negative stories into something bigger yet more personal would be even more powerful.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m satisfied with the story I’m living right now.  I’m happy, but I feel like a bigger story is right there, hovering on the periphery of my life.  I keep swiveling my head really fast to see it, but so far I just end up with a headache.  I’m definitely going to keep trying though.

How about you?  How are your stories?

Related posts:

1. How Our Stories Serve Us

Sometimes I wear myself out worrying about the big picture.  I know I’m not the only one who does this.  Just last week, Psychologists for Social Responsibility warned that if we do not see dramatic political action on climate change by the end of this year, there is a risk that “millions of people will develop severe and persistent anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, aggression, and other troubled behavior…”

These symptoms are almost identical to caregiver’s syndrome. The Psychologists for Social Responsibility did not list exhaustion (which is a primary symptom of caregiver’s syndrome), but I wouldn’t hesitate to wager that activists and concerned citizens around the world are there already.

And it’s not just climate change.  Sustainability activists of all kinds are living this reality on a daily basis.

Therefore, it’s becoming increasingly important to realize that sustainability isn’t just about the outside.  The outside matters, but you count too.  Because you won’t be able to help anyone if you succumb to global caregiver’s syndrome.

Here are five quick and easy ways I’ve found to boost my energy and my spirits when life is getting to be too much.

1.  Turn Off The News

“But I need to stay informed!” you protest.  You are sufficiently informed.  You’re so informed it’s making you feel like crap.  Turn off your TV.  Shut down your computer.  If you must rationalize it, tell yourself that your news-free time conserves energy.  Just turn it all off!

2.  Go Outside

Did you know that vitamin D deficiencies are commonly associated with depression and anxiety?  Our bodies synthesize vitamin D from sunlight.  Go outside and get some.  And while you’re out there, take a breath of fresh air.*  You might as well take advantage of that while we still have it.

*”Fresh” may vary based on your geographical location.

3. Cut Yourself Some Slack

Remember that you can’t do it all.  We live on a huge planet with over 6 billion other people.  We are facing the greatest innovative challenge in human history.  You cannot do it alone (and you will not have to).  The world doesn’t gain anything when you beat yourself up for being one person.  In fact, it stands a lot to lose if you pummel yourself into a state of guilt-ridden apathy.  So give yourself a damn break.

4. Give Yourself Some Credit

I know that some days, the little stuff you do doesn’t seem like it makes any difference.  One person couldn’t possibly matter all that much.  And isn’t incrementalism just an excuse to make ourselves feel better about our excessive lifestyles?

Stop it.  Give yourself a little credit.  Making lifestyle choices that reflect your values does count for something, and directing your consumer purchasing power towards greener alternatives is a necessary first step.  If everyone in the U.S. were to take those same little steps, we would reduce our overall emissions by 8.5% – that is no small reduction.  Remember that we are all connected, and little ripples can turn into big waves.  Give yourself credit for moving in the right direction.  We can’t take giant leaps forward if we’re all facing backwards.

5.  Talk To Hopeful People

Cynics are a dime a dozen.  At least 75% of the people I talk to on a daily basis think that it can’t be done.  “It” ranges across the board – getting out of debt, getting good grades, finding a job, dealing with major global issues.  Stay away from those cranky people!  Don’t hang out with downers.  Take a break from the consistently negative people in your life.  And then go find people who share your convictions AND believe that something can be done. (Fellow sustainability nerds can find a bunch of positive people hanging out at Worldchanging.)

The problems that we face are complex.  There will not be any easy answers.  We are embarking on a marathon of activism, engagement, and change.  You have something unique and valuable to bring to the table, and we’re gonna need you for the long haul.  You won’t be able to play your part unless you first take care of yourself.

What are some tricks that you’ve developed to prevent global caretaker’s syndrome?  What helps you keep going?

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I have decided that this year, for the first time ever, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  I first heard about NaNoWriMo during my senior year of college.  For various reasons that often resembled excuses, I did not sign up that year, nor have I any year since.  But no more excuses!  This year nothing will be an excuse.  From my messy house to the impending doom of the holidays, nothing will dissuade me from trying to write 50,000 words.

Now that the first week has come and gone, I realize that even if I do not reach my goal, I still will have learned much from my NaNoWriMo experience.  Apart from the personal insight gained from attempting something like this, I have also noticed five things that NaNoWriMo can teach us about the pursuit of sustainability.

1. New Habits

They say that it takes anywhere from 21 to 66 days to form a new habit.  While I have already seen some incredible word counts (some people are already at 40,000+ words!), for most of us NaNoWriMo will be an exercise in perseverance for the full 30 days.  It will require daily writing, tapping away slowly towards that 50,000th word.  Whether we are forced to employ guerrilla writing tactics for fifteen minutes here and there, or are able to block off several hours at a time, we’re all going to be getting in the habit of writing.

Living sustainably is also about habits, no matter where you are on the spectrum.  From the person who just realized that glass can (and should) be recycled to the homesteader who has gone completely off the grid, sustainability is about forming new habits.

But it’s not only about the external, physical habits like recycling, utilizing public transportation, and eating less meat.  It’s also about internal and intellectual habits.  Reading the news, raising your awareness, and looking at things from different angles is a key part of sustainability.  Forming these kind of internal habits puts you in a position to participate in big picture societal inflection points from a conscious and informed standpoint.  Engagement is one of the most important habits you can develop.

2. Community

One of the things that makes NaNoWriMo awesome is the community around it.  Thousands of people around the world are working separately but together towards a common goal.  Just look at #NaNoWriMo on Twitter or meander through the NaNoWriMo forums, and you will see an outpouring of support, commiseration, advice, sympathy, humor and compassion.

As a world, if we are going to move towards a bright green future, or any future, we need to re-familiarize ourselves with the concept of community.  The problems we face right now are global problems.  They will affect each and every one of us.  They must be addressed with global solutions.  No one person, no one country can address these problems unilaterally with any hope for success.  It is going to take the commitment, the innovative power, and the cooperation of communities, locally and globally.

3. Accountability

NaNoWriMo is great because it gives you a thousand ways to hold yourself accountable for doing what you said you were going to do.  One of the specific strategies they recommend is to tell everyone you know that you are going to write a novel during the month of November.  That way, even when you really want to quit, you’ll keep going so as not to embarrass yourselves in front of everyone else.  From the little word count widget that now lives on my blog’s sidebar to spamming my Facebook and Twitter friends with daily updates on my progress, I am trying to make full use of the accountability mechanisms for NaNoWriMo.

Accountability is necessarily a part of any achievement.  Whether you are accountable to your boss at work, your spouse, your kids, or even just to yourself, being accountable matters.  We need to find a way to quantify and be held accountable for safeguarding the future of our species and our planet.  This will be no easy task.  As we’ve seen with the international and even the domestic climate change policy negotiations, it is very difficult to reach a consensus on how we will measure and enforce accountability for issues of common goods.

But, difficult or not, it is imperative that we find a way to hold ourselves, our companies, and our governments accountable for building a sustainable future.

4.  Do Something Hard

It seems like somewhere along the line, we got the idea that everything was supposed to be easy.  I’m not sure why we think things are supposed to be easy, or when we developed this societal aversion towards challenge and hard work.  But the truth is that if you really want something, you’re gonna have to do the work.  And it’s not always going to be easy.  In fact, it’s probably going to be pretty damn hard.

No one said that writing 50,000 words in 30 days was going to be easy, and no one said building a sustainable future would be easy.  But guess what?  We’re doing it anyways.

5.  Show Up

NaNoWriMo is all about showing up for 30 days, for 50,000 words.

Sustainability is the same as anything else in life.  You can’t get something from nothing.  You can’t just sit back and assume everything is going to take care of itself.  If you do, you forfeit your right to whine when it doesn’t turn out the way you had hoped.  The first step to anything meaningful is showing up.

You can revise a bad first draft into a great book. But you can’t revise a blank page into anything but a blank page.  And you can’t succeed if you don’t show up.

No related posts.

“Environmental solutions that depend solely on will power are doomed to fail,” states David Owen, author of the soon to be released book Green Metropolis, which was recently reviewed in the New York Times. Owen argues that cities are the answer to the sustainable living issue, as a variety of factors (public transportation, smaller living spaces, etc.) result in a smaller environmental footprint for urban dwellers than that of their suburban counterparts.  I can’t really comment on that without reading the book, but I look forward to taking a closer look when it is released.

In the meantime, Owen’s gloomy assertion of will power may not be true.  In a similarly gloomy straw poll, Reuters concludes that people are unwilling to make radical lifestyle changes that will help the environment.  However, the poll found that people are more likely to make fundamental life changes for altruistic reasons than they are for financial reasons.

So how does that work?  People are willing to make little changes, such as recycling, for altruistic reasons.  Other small changes, like using compact flourescent lightbulbs, have financial advantages in addition to being environmentally beneficial.  But few people are going to become vegetarians because it will save them money, even though it will.  It takes a greater calling to stop eating meat or give up your vehicle.

This means that Owen’s assertion may be incorrect and fundamentally changes the discussion on incentivizing global change from the ground up.  While financial incentive programs may be sufficient to motivate incremental change, they will not be enough to bring change on the level required to avoid disastrous levels of environmental decline.  Fundamental change on a global scale will be the sum of individuals changing their lives for the greater good.

At the heart of this equation lie education and mechanisms.  People need to be educated on the issues at hand.  And once they are convinced, the mechanisms for action must be clear.  As mentioned today on TreeHugger regarding a new iPhone application that helps buyers choose organic produce, no one wants to “read through a scientific article at each produce bin.”  Global interrelation is all shades of gray, but we must begin to break down information on sustainability into bite size chunks, or the battle for the masses will be lost.

We also must fundamentally reevaluate our understanding of motivation, because some changes can’t be bought.  Some changes happen because you believe in them.

Related posts:

1. Climate Change Is Just Like Raising Baby Mice
2. Ten Climate Change Terms Everyone Should Know