Not every day is a good day to take the bus

I thought about taking public transportation to work three days this week but decided against it on Wednesday because I planned to go to the gym after work and didn't want to get home too late (it's a bit slower than driving). So Tuesday and today I took the train to work, but Wednesday I drove and got a flat tire. Hmm, maybe there's a message in that.

Jokes aside, I'm proud that I took the train twice this week. When summer rolled around, I started sporadically taking it again, as I'd done last summer, and this week is my first double. If I'd gone for the triple maybe that mysterious nail or whatever it was wouldn't have lodged itself in my front passenger tire. But luckily the tire just needed to be patched and not replaced. It took a half hour after work and I got to the gym late (irony noted), but all in all it wasn't so bad.

What I really learned this week is that I need to plan out my public transportation days better. I forgot about my book club meeting when I decided to take the train on Tuesday, so by the time I got home I was going to be late so I decided not to go. Then today I planned to run from my office to the train station after work, which saves time because I get my exercise as I'm commuting home. But I'd forgotten that I'm starting tomorrow at a school and needed to bring some stuff home with me. So instead of heading out for a three-mile run at 6 p.m., I sprinted to the bus stop (carrying my bag with my unused running clothes in it). I got stuck in the no-bus dead zone and caught a 16 bus 10 minutes later. I swear that was the slowest bus ever so by the time I got home I was hungry but still had to run. I definitely got that message. I'm not going to take the 16 bus in the evening because it's so unpredictable. It saves time to run to the train station and take the Red Line to the Blue line. So next week, I'll try to plan better.

Do my actions really make a difference?

That's a common question in the debate over protecting the environment and stopping global warming. The refrain we hear is yes, everyone's actions make a difference. Drive less. Take shorter showers. Use reusable bags. Recycle. These are the actions I've discussed in my blog as I've chronicled my attempts to "do my part." They're the changes that while small and fairly easy, make me feel good that I'm making things better. Today after taking a quick shower, I took the train to work. I ate lunch, pulling a cooked chicken sausage out of a reused Ziploc bag. I bought a can of Sprite and meant to recycle it (oops, I left it behind but I have faith that someone else recycled it instead of throwing it away), and then I took the train home at the end of the day.

Then tonight I read an interesting article on alternet.org, a website featuring stories with alternative and progressive viewpoints that don't get covered in the mainstream press. The article, "Taking Shorter Showers Doesn't Cut It: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change," written by Derrick Jensen, an environmental activist, and originally published in Orion Magazine, had some sobering statistics about how our individual actions make little difference in the grand scheme of things. As the headline suggests, taking shorter showers won't save our water supply because 90 percent of water use is by agriculture. I thought a valid criticism was that An Inconvenient Truth focuses only on the solutions individuals can take to stop global warming. This statistic summed up Jensen's argument well: "Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide."

The writer didn't intend to leave us feeling hopeless, he wants to wake us to the reality that we need to change our society and not just our individual habits. So tonight will I leave my computer turned on because it doesn't make a difference? No. But at the same time I can feel less guilty about the bath I want to take.

I'm not sure what to take away from this. I feel good about the changes I've made to my lifestyle because it's better than doing nothing but I'm not working toward larger, community-wide changes. I think cities (or even better, the state and country) should require businesses to charge customers for plastic bags, which would get more people using reusable bags, but I'm not writing letters or attending city council meetings or joining activist groups to fight for it. It's easier to be responsible for just myself and blog once a week about my latest small victory or stumble. In the short term, it's refreshing to know I don't have to carry the burden of the world on my shoulders. But in the long term, am I going to make a bigger commitment? It's something for all of us to think about.

McDonald's McCafes: a gamble with the environment

On my two-mile drive down Long Beach Boulevard from the train station today, I passed four reminders from McDonald's that I should be drinking its coffee. That would be three McDonald's restaurants telling me "Now serving McCafe" and enticing me with giant posters of mocha lattes topped with whipped cream, plus a billboard in case I missed the ads plastered across the stores. I think McDonald's really wants us to buy its "specialty" espresso drinks.

Even I am not immune to the powers of good marketing (the commercials are funny). Last week I decided to try a McCafe because if it tasted good but was cheaper than Starbucks or another coffee chain, then it would be a good option. I went through the drive-thru and ordered a small iced latte. I shouldn't have been surprised that in McDonald's super-sized world, a small would be 16 ounces of seriously strong coffee. It was so potent I saved half for the next day, which did make the $3 price a good deal, although it wasn't as cheap as I expected (iced drinks are more expensive; their hot lattes are cheaper).

Then the very next day, after I'd enjoyed my day-old latte, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about McDonald's coffee investment and I felt bad about supporting what will likely lead to an increase in milk consumption, if McDonald's gamble pays off. The article quoted a dairy expert saying, "When per capita milk consumption rose in 2006 for the first time in 20 years, McDonald's was a prime reason." Why? McDonald's had started offering milk in plastic containers, which became so popular that other fast-food chains followed its lead. "The dairy industry is counting on the same sort of effect from McDonald's espresso coffee drinks," the article said, and then had this shocking statistic, "which can contain up to 80 percent milk." If (let's be real ... when) McCafes become popular, that's a lot of milk -- 1 1/2 cups for a 16-ounce drink. That means a lot of milk production, which is not good for the environment (cows are a source of methane pollution, plus concerns over the amount of water used on dairy farms).

But when I made this argument to my coworker, she played devil's advocate and said "So are poor people not allowed to buy coffee but rich people who can afford Starbucks can?" No, of course not. I know that Starbucks and other coffee chains have led to more people drinking coffee and thus consuming more milk, but my concern with McDonald's is that it's even more pervasive in our culture and its coffee is cheaper, which could lead to people buying coffee more often, no matter their income.

I think the solution is that everyone should buy less coffee and try to make it at home more often. I'm not saying I'm a saint. I buy coffee about once a week, the last time being on Sunday after a run. I felt like I deserved to indulge and since I'd gotten up too early to make coffee, I decided to splurge on an iced latte at Seattle's Best. But was my impulse buy worth $2.80 for a measly 12-ounce drink that also wasted a plastic cup? In the time it took me to wait in line, I could have gone home and made my own coffee. And I would have been happier with it. They were out of vanilla so I flavored my latte with cinnamon, which doesn't taste so great. And when I make coffee at home, I use a half cup of milk, probably less than what was in my McCafe or Seattle's Best drink.

And let's face it, making your own coffee saves money too. McDonald's may be promoting their drinks as a cheaper alternative to Starbucks but MyCafe beats out McCafe any day.

Saving water in the shower

One of the sacrifices I'm making for the environment is publicly sharing my personal life in this blog. So here's my second post about showering. Yes it's about hygiene, but water -- and will we have enough of it in the future -- is a big issue so I feel it's justified.

In my first post I timed my showers for a few days and found that when I tried, I could get them around five minutes long. Not under five, which was my goal, but not too shabby either. One other trick to saving water would be to turn off the water when shaving. But call me a spoiled American, but that just didn't sound pleasant. Today I thought of this halfway through shaving so at that point I sucked it up and reluctantly turned off the water. I expected immediate goose bumps and my core body temperature to take a nose dive. No water diva here, it wasn't that bad. It may help that it's summer, but I didn't get cold. And I shaved faster, theoretically saving time but here I am blogging about it before I leave for work so the time saving is a wash (oh that was bad I know).

I once had a roommate who was from France and I could hear him turn off the water mid-shower, presumably to shave, so my guess is that this is common in Europe but hasn't taken hold in wasteful America. I'm not going to make any grand promises, but I'll try to turn off the water again. If I can get it to become habit, it may become second nature, liking turning off the water when I brush my teeth or wash my face. Now I'd better go because the clock is ticking and my drive to work isn't getting any shorter.

Oh, and coming up, a post about McDonald's. ...

Recycling my running shoes

I run, therefore I am ... constantly going through running shoes. Before my environmental awareness was kicked into full gear, I would throw away my old (dirty, smelly) running shoes. But a few months ago when I bought a new pair of my favorite Adidas Supernovas, I held onto my old pair because I vaguely remembered hearing about shoe recycling and donation programs. For weeks and weeks now, they have been sitting in a pile of "things to blog about" as a way of reminding myself to look into that. So today when my co-worker asked the "Urban Dieter" if I knew what to do with old shoes, I didn't have an answer. My other co-worker quickly found information online about shoe recycling offered by Nike (making me feel a little embarrassed for dragging my feet on this). The Reuse-A-Shoe website says the rubber, foam and fabric in your old shoes is shredded and then used in the manufacturing of sports and playground surfaces.

I admit I've never been a Nike fan, especially since my college days when the company was accused of operating sweatshops (although in retrospect I'm sure Nike wasn't the only culprit). I've never worn anything Nike but they take any brand, not just Nikes, and they have a drop-off location down the street from my office at The Grove.

A quick search of "shoe recycling" found some other programs, although Nike's seems to be the biggest. There are a few donation programs that collect newish shoes to give to people in the US and other countries, like Soles4Souls and One World Running, which is based in Boulder, Colorado but my local running store Runners High is a drop-off location. However, I'm not sure if my shoes are too old to be reused.

Either way, this seems easy enough. I can now check blogging about recycling my shoes off my list. The next step is to get around to dropping them off.