another reason to love paying taxes

One of the biggest sources of anxiety for me about doing this "no buy" thing has been knowing that I would not be able to go out and buy a book any time the whim seizes me. Seriously, I was really worried about it. For years I've been haunted by embarrasingly huge overdue fines which have kept me ashamed to show my face at any of our public libraries. I was dubious of my own ability to scout out specific titles at used book stores. So I was really worried that doing the Compact would mean my reading life would suffer big-time.

Books have always been, for me, a great source of joy. I love reading, always have, and books figure into my best memories, one way or another. Our book collection is immense. Last year, in an effort to make space in our house, we started culling our books (a first! We cull everything else, sometimes with reckless abandon, but up until last year, books were off-limits. We kept every book we've ever owned. We're kinda weird about books in this house). But we were desperate for space, so we went through our library, book by book. After a long while we had a pretty hefty stack of books that we could bring ourselves to part with, without feeling all twitchy and depressed.

Dominic and I lovingly boxed up the books, old friends that they were, hoping that they would bring joy, stimulation and information to someone, somewhere....we just weren't sure who. We didn't feel right simply hauling them off to the half price bookstores...it seemed so impersonal. Plus, who can put a price on them? Dominic then had the brilliant idea to donate them to the Stillwater prison. What better place for all of our books to go? We loved the idea of sharing our library with folks who might not be exposed to some of the titles anywhere else, and people who might be inspired to think or act in new ways as a result of reading some of them. He carted off 30 boxes of books for the prison librarian, who giddily received them and assured us they'd be put to good use.

Now that we have kids, books factor into our lives even more than before. Lucy loves reading and Julian is so interested in books, so now seemed like the perfect time for me to face the music. I am happy to report that I now have a new library card, which is free and clear of all debts or overdue fines! And the good people at the fines desk didn't mock me or throw stones at me or anything! One of our new favorite places is the Minneapolis Central Library. When I took the kids there a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure whose eyes were bigger, mine or Lucy's. So many books! (I kid you not...it's been a really long time since I've been to a library...)Their kids area is truly one of the best places in town, with fun interactive exhibits and great colors and textures. Plus, the book collection rocks. Oh, and there's a coffee shop. The mix of people at the library is wonderfully diverse, too. I can't believe it's been so long since I've been to a library. B+N has got nothing on this place. I feel like a whole new world has been opened up.

We checked out 12 books for the kids, and we have read each one about a hundred times since getting home. I explained to Lucy how a library works, and now every time she picks up a book, any book, she asks me, "Are we keeping this one?"

Conserving energy

In the spirit of the whole "conserving resources" thing, we thought it would be a good idea to look at our family's energy resources and consumption habits. Aren't we such geeks?

So, last week we had an energy audit. We figured it would be useful to know where our house is losing heat --and what a perfect weekend for it! The auditor spent about 2 hours at the house, during which time Lucy was utterly captivated by the huge fan he set up in the back door, to start a draft and get the hot air moving out the openings in the house. Auditor went thru the house with an infrared sensor, and could see all the places our house is leaking air. Yikes. I was shocked to learn how many air leaks we have in the house.

Leaky spots: Power outlets, light fixtures, windows, trim around windows, attic access panel, and even the ceiling in our bedroom, which has no insulation! (the room used to be a porch.)

Insulation materials aren't on our original list of exceptions, but...now that we know we're losing so much heat and wasting so much energy, it seemed a little irresponsible if not downright silly NOT to do the things he suggested to insulate the house better. We wondered very briefly about getting used window plastic and weatherizing tape....uh...yeah...then it was off to Homey D...the total amount Dominic spent on insulating goodies was $98.00...as luck would have it he had in his wallet a $100 gift card. So even though we had a surprise shopping trip, at least it didn't cost us anything.

I signed on to the Minnesota Energy Challenge, this week too...pretty cool initiative. You fill out a quick questionnaire, and the site determines (roughly of course) the carbon footprint of your household (according to this site, the Selly household is emitting 40,385 pounds of co2 per year....whew.) The best thing about this program is the next step. there are scads of ideas and suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint, everything from using cf lightbulbs to biking to work to shortening your time in the shower. Each action has a corresponding energy savings. Based on the choices I committed to, we are set to reduce our co2 output by 20% this year.

That, plus the energy audit, gave us some really tangible stuff to do to make a difference in our energy use, a huge improvement in our conservation efforts.

So Far, So Good

Another weekend has gone by and here we sit, bemoaning the fact that we can't buy anything. What were we thinking?? We're waiting for this miserable year to end.

Just kidding.

Believe it or not, Dom actually emptied out a vacuum cleaner bag and reused it today. He wasn't even trying to be totally hard core (although, wasn't it??) but did it because neither one of us was up for schlepping out in search of the obscure type of vacuum cleaner bag we need. (it's funny that this is just the thing Joe Soucheray asked me about last week!) We had too much else to do.

The Article

This past Tuesday, the Star Tribune ran an article about the Compact, and there was a sidebar mention of our family gearing up to do this for a year. I've gotten some great feedback from people who saw the article, including a handful of emails from folks I wouldn't have expected to give two cents about something like this. Most people are pretty supportive and intrigued. Although, some people think it's a crazy idea, maybe even a bit stupid? I've had no fewer than 5 people ask me if we are "allowed" to buy toilet paper. Or they'll try to throw me a curve ball and ask if we're "allowed" to buy other random stuff (vacuum cleaner bags, underwear, etc.)

So, what are we really doing here? As Dom put it in his post, we aren't trying to change the world. We just want to reduce the impact of one family, be more mindful of our behavior. We aren't trying to cram this down anyone's throat.

Buuuut, in case you're wondering about the impact of your choices or lifestyle on the environment and the world's resources, there are a number of great tools on the Internet for calculating one's Ecological Footprint. Here is one such quiz. Currently, my Ecological Footprint is "16" which means that it takes about 16 productive acres of land to support my habits. If everyone on the planet had my consumption habits, it would take 3.5 Earths to sustain the population. Yikes. There are lots of these calculators floating around out there. I once took a great class on this very topic, where we tried out a number of them and compared results. Pretty interesting stuff.

Joe Suchnsuch

Garage Logic gave Patty a call at home yesterday. It went out live on Joe Soucheray's radio show. He took her to task for giving up purchasing goods while still holding investments (the implication being that we're hypocrites because we've sworn off buying new things this year but still hold stock in companies who make money because people buy their things).
I've heard flavors of this argument before. We get it sometimes because we don't have a television, and yet we still watch DVDs on the computer. A number of people have tried to point that out as hypocritical, because we don't swear off movies entirely. And they're right. We definitely should put a television in every room of the house, leave them on constantly, and get a dish to pipe 500 channels of crap to them 24/7. The fact is, by not having cable or a television receiver, we choose what we want to watch when we want to watch it. And we're not subjected to the advertising (although we usually do scarf down most of a bag of popcorn by the time the previews are through... but those aren't really 'ads', are they?).
It's like finding out someone only puts their baby to sleep on their back because it decreases incents of SIDs and saying "oh yeah? well you still put the baby in a car seat, don't you? Some babies die in car accidents every year. That's hypocritical to put it to sleep on its back because you're not doing everything you can to avoid the untimely death of your infant!" It makes no sense.
And this is the crux of the argument, I think. If you can't do everything, then you're a hypocrite to do anything at all. This argument is not only fallacious, it's also a cop-out. It's supposed to serve as some justification for doing nothing, but I don't think it does.
The fact is, we're not trying to save the world. We're trying to reduce the amount of material goods we consume in this year. There are a number of reasons for that, and they're not all because we're do-gooders trying to save the planet. In the process of doing this, however, we will consume less resources than we would if we were not doing this, and that is good.
It's like Bill McKibben says, we could all have a "bubble" that follows us around representing the amount of resources we consume in a year. The average American's bubble would be 10x the size of bubbles from most other nations. We're making our bubbles smaller this year. We're not trying to pop them. It's not possible.

Nothing New

I must admit, when Patty asked if I wanted to put a moratorium on buying "new things" in 2008 I said yes almost immediately. I had no idea what the "compact" was, but it sounded like a great idea to me. In my thinking, anything we can do to stave off the steady stream of items coming through the door is a good thing.
For two years now Patty and I have been "culling". Sort, pitch, donate, repeat. We gave 600 books away. We've given scores of boxes of goods to ARC. And yet our 2400 sq ft home is still full. So "shutting off the inputs" has to help.
I think it will be interesting to see which areas challenge us in this. Neither of us have hardly noticed at all, but we're not even two weeks into the thing. I think we'll learn a lot about the difference between what we need and what we want. It will also be interesting to see more of what's on the second-hand market. Between ebay, craig's list, and the used books on Amazon, we might not even have to go to many second-hand stores. I guess we'll see.
I'm interested also to see the difference it makes in our finances. As our financial counselor, Ruth Hayden, says: It's not what you make it's what you keep that counts. We saved about 20% of our income this year. It'll be interesting to see how much more we'll be able to do with this moratorium in place.
It'll be interesting to see what exceptions we end making, if any. My guess is that at some point we'll really need something and have to get it. We tried to anticipate as many of the have-to-haves on our exclusion list, but I'm sure there's things we didn't think of.
We also plan to continue culling.