My daily commute

I have to say, I love my car. Not the strange kind of love that some people have, where they freak out if the body is scratched. I just simply like it. It is the first car I purchased on my own and it is the size of a boat. My 17-year-old Pontiac Bonneville has a nose about 30 feet long and could take on just about any whimpy car you can think of. I named it Maurice, or Mo for short.

Now, I don't drive an awful lot. I am a student after all. Any MSU student who thinks driving on to campus will save them time is either nuts or lives way off campus. But I do drive to work, to the store and to other various after-class activities. Oh, and sometimes I drive to my night class because parking is free and it is dark when the class ends at 9pm. I wouldn't say I am a driving lunatic, but I have to wonder, can I cut down my commuting time?  Google Maps tells me that it will take 30 minutes to bike from my apartment to my office. Now, I have inspected the route and half of it is without bike paths and crosswalks. I am pretty sure I am not a skilled enough biker to battle with SUVs and minivans on Hagadorn Road. So, biking to work is out. Plus, I don't actually have enough time scheduled in between classes and work to make the trek and still have time for lunch and a change of clothes.

But I am going to make a more concentrated effort to bike elsewhere. Despite the fact that is is getting cold out. I can't promise I will bike in the dead of winter. I value my life and limbs too much to risk biking around campus on ice while dodging pedestrians and other bikers. But I will try to bike everywhere feasible, I think. Even my 6pm class (parking is free after 6, so I am guilty of driving into campus for that class ...). I'll have to let you know how this new effort goes!

My wilderness experience

I just got back from a fabulous three-day weekend at Nordhouse Dunes near Manistee, Michigan. It was the best weekend I have had in a long time! The trip was for my Wilderness Writing & Experiences course through the School of Journalism. The class consists of one camping trip. That's it. We turn in a journal at the end of the trip and write a nature essay at the end of it. It is quite literally the best class I have ever taken.

We left on Friday morning, had a quick stop in Muskegon for a lesson on sand dune ecology, and arrived at our camp site around 4pm. There were are 13 students, the professor and a graduate student. The trip was completely unstructured. We were told to do whatever we felt like doing in the park. I hiked with a group to find Nordhouse Lake, a mile or two south of our campsite. Frankly, I am surprised we found it at all because the trails weren't marked all that well!

Lake Michigan. Sigh.....

All in all, the weekend was a perfect respite from the pressure of life here at school and made me think more about my place in the world. The park was an officially designated wilderness area, but it wasn't without touches of humanity. Not only were there the obvious signs, such as the camp sites, but also I saw wrappers on the ground and cans along the side of the road. I saw some of these things even when I felt complete isolated from the world in the middle of the forest. I felt as if I could take 20 steps off the trail and be completely lost from society. But then I would look down and see a gum wrapper and the fantasy would be ruined. But it also reminded me that through human actions and just by chance we are intrinsically linked with nature and the wild and cannot be separated from it, for better or for worse. What that means for how we should be living, though, is something I will have to think about further. 

Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey

Today I went through my apartment and checked all of our light bulbs (all 31 of them) to see if I needed to buy CFLs (compact flourescent lights). Of the 31, I need to replace 18. Supposedly our apartment managers (names shall not be mentioned...) have gone through the apartment and made it more energy efficient, but as far as I can tell, they changed the bulbs in the common area and ignored the ones in the back of the apartment. Actually, that is pretty typical of the follow-through in our apartment's office (except for the time I got stung on the butt -- but that's a different story!).  Anyway, the light fixtures were more difficult to check than I thought. A lot of them were sealed really tightly and I had to enlist help from a roommate's boyfriend to do the last one for me. Sadly, reciting the childhood phrase "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" does not mean you can untwist anything!

When will I buy the CFL's, you ask? Considering my schedule in the next week, I have no clue! But very soon! Or ... actually, maybe after my next paycheck. Finances are looking pretty slim after that Sam's Club run.

I need to come up with future projects to further this experiment, so here are a few I have thought of (with a little help from David Bach's book Go Green, Live Rich):
--Use greener make-up. I have always heard about all the toxic chemicals in make-up (here is an article from the Huggington Post) and David Bach says there are affordable brands of toxic-free make-up, so why not? Plus, aren't a lot of them tested on animals?
--Unplug appliances. I know this one is supposed to be easy, but my outlet is behind my desk! I can't reach it without contorting myself and shifting half the furniture in my bedroom around. I wondered if surge protectors still use ghost energy when switched off, but I think they do. There are, of course, special surge protectors you can buy...if you have extra $$$ to spend on a new surge protector. Also, does this extend to things like the living room lamps? Because I can see my roommates getting frustrated if I start unplugging those regularly. On the plus side, even though I use my coffee pot daily, I unplug it all the time!

I'll let you know more when I am struck with another genius idea!

Sticker Shock

Buying groceries in bulk is better for the environment, right? That's what I am telling myself because after one trip to Sam's Club for groceries and other essentials, I am out $400. There goes that paycheck! I didn't realize saving money would cost so much. Luckily, the cost will eventually be split between me and my other three roommates, but as an initial payment it was quite a lot.

Only a fraction of the total, which filled the back of a jeep.

But of course, we won't have to buy toilet paper or paper towel for months. There is less packaging on all of our products and everything was cheaper per unit. So overall, it was a good thing. Plus, I won't have to pay for groceries for a long time (not only because we have a LOT of food, but also because my roommates now owe me money and will pay for future trips to the store.

While I was loading all the various foods and toiletries onto the conveyor belt, though, I had to wonder. How can all of this pure consumption be good for the environment? It is hard to see exactly how much extra we need just to live in a college apartment when you buy it in small quantities over time. When you buy a month or two's worth all at once, it really hits home. If I need 48 rolls of toilet papers and 10 containers of Clorox wipes to survive, I don't think I could make it in the wilderness. Then again, all of these supplies originally came from nature at some point. We have just diluted them and morphed to until they no longer resemble anything natural. It sort of proves how much we have separated ourselves from the wilderness.

Beginnings

Welcome! I am a Michigan State University senior studying Journalism and Environmental Studies. This semester I will be keeping this blog for one of my classes, Environmental Attitudes and Concepts. My purpose will be to document my attempt to live sustainably as an MSU student and my quest to discover what exactly living sustainably means.

Before I started taking this class, I would have considered this an easy assignment. What does living sustainably mean? Obviously it means being "green" by purchasing organic and local foods, recycling, etc. Right? Well after a week in the course, I have begun to realize the issues are more complicated than they seem. This course (and our book, Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash) has introduced me to an idea I hadn't considered before. That "wilderness" isn't a type of a physical thing, but instead a state of mind and that humans use this idea of wilderness to separate themselves from nature. This has important implications, because if humans are separate from wilderness then any changes made are unnatural and disrupt the natural cycle. But are humans actually separate from the environment, or are we actually nothing more than over-developed apes? If that is true, then all of the anthropogenic changes are simply part of the natural cycle. These are the ideas I will be struggling with throughout the semester. *sigh*

 ...Wish me luck!

In addition to this internal struggle, I am going to implement some changes in my life to try and live a life more balanced with the natural world. I am going to start small with easy changes like replacing my incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent lights (CFLs) and work my way up to more life-altering changes. Well, time to get started!