I will enjoy 2 meatless or vegan meal(s) each day of the challenge.
COMPLETED 11
DAILY ACTIONS
Food
Keep Track of Wasted Food
#3 Reduced Food Waste
I will keep a daily log of food I throw away during the EcoChallenge, either because it went bad before I ate it, I put too much on my plate, or it was scraps from food preparation.
COMPLETED 13
DAILY ACTIONS
Food
Learn More about Silvopasture
#9 Silvopasture
I will spend at least 30 minutes watching videos and/or reading about the environmental benefits of silvopasture.
COMPLETED
ONE-TIME ACTION
Transport
Use Muscle Power
#49 Cars
I will cut my car trip mileage by only taking necessary trips, and I will only use muscle-powered transportation for all other trips.
COMPLETED 4
DAILY ACTIONS
Participant Feed
Reflection, encouragement, and relationship building are all important aspects of getting a new habit to stick.
Share thoughts, encourage others, and reinforce positive new habits on the Feed.
To get started, share “your why.” Why did you join the challenge and choose the actions you did?
I believe political pressure and pressure on businesses to do more toward the protection of the environment and environmental justice are our best hope for truly mitigating climate change.
This being the last day, I wanted to say that this was a very worth-while activity for me and for others, no doubt, in helping us to expand our knowledge and understanding about the variety of ways we can mitigate climate change. I also learned about myself a little more. Some things are hard for me, and others are easy. When it comes to transportation, I still use too much gas-powered energy, though I do try to not make many quick forays with a car but rather cluster my activities into a smaller number of trips. When it comes to food waste, my weakness is coffee. I don't like old, cold, or reheated coffee. This results in my throwing away more coffee than I'd like. We do donate to environmental groups and environmental and other economic justice groups, e.g. Women for Women International; Environment, NC; NC Warn; Heifer International; Planned Parenthood, and the NC Dogwood Alliance among others. It is a drop in the bucket when one thinks of all the needs.
Some things were easy to do, as they are part of my routine anyway, such as minimizing meat products and having very little food waste. Others, though I am committed to reducing miles using mechanized transportation, are not so easy. It takes a lot of planning and quite a bit of time. We have good, free public transport here in Chapel Hill, but my trips often take me to places where two different buses are needed and they are not easily connected. Even when they do have a shared connection, they do not run that frequently (30 min in daytime during the week and 60 min in the evening and not at all or 60 min week-ends. Only one of the buses is actually close to my house. The rest require an initial walk of about 20 minutes. Not bad on a nice day. Though I am retired, I do have time-sensitive activities. Getting to Durham is even harder. So basically I walk Saturday to the farmer market with a backpack and fanny pack, and on Mondays, to my T'ai Chi class and back on UNC campus, and to the New Kadampa Buddhist Center on Wednesday evenings when it is light enough out.
I did not understand how to add to my daily challenges' tally as I completed them, but luckily our team leader, showed me how so now I am up-to-date. It's been fun to track what I eat and if it is vegetarian at least twice a day. It is, and at least twice a week it is vegetarian for all three meals. it helps that our younger son is a Buddhist practitioner and and while he is not wholly vegetarian, he prefers vegetarian meals.
Heat pumps. I had not realized that that is what all air-conditioners are but what is new to me about heat pumps is that we already have it as that is the only way electrical systems work. So ours works not only as airconditioning, but as also a heating system in the winter.
I actually have more to add to some of my earlier posts. For instance, today I talked to a young farmer about silvoculture and it turns out he actually is working on it. He already grazes his pigs in a forest. He says Chapel Hill area is great for silvoculture.
How do your transportation choices affect your engagement in your community? Does your experience or enjoyment differ while walking, riding transit, biking or driving?
I love walking and am fortunate enough to live in a community that has a good number of walking/biking paths. I am afraid to ride a bike anymore as I am over 70 and do not have great balance anymore. But I walk to as many places as I can, enjoying the changing seasons, from walking with rubber boots through slushy streets to watching the birds and flowers along Bolin Creek. I am also learning about more and more bus routes so I do not have to depend on my car for further destinations. So far I've learned the N, NS, G, T, and A buses' routes. By walking I also meet more people. Some I actually know, but most are waving acquaintances. Since we are new to the community, this is not surprising. I also walk to our local farmer's market, choosing between 2 the one I can walk to. I just bought a backpack that will make it easier to carry groceries.
In your opinion, what contributes to people in North America eating more meat than any other countries? What does this say about North American values and ways of living?
Lower cost of meat in America than elsewhere is a big part of why we eat so much meat in the U.S. As an immigrant from Hungary, married to an immigrant from Germany, we both remember that we ate meat maybe three times a week. Most of our meals in Hungary when I was a child were bean soup and noodles with cottage cheese, or fried cabbage strudle, of scalloped potatoes, or squash casserole. Chicken was a treat for Sundays. the famous Hungarian gulyas had plenty of gravy, so a big part of the meal was gravy with bread. In any case, the beef was tough as leather because the beef was old, beyond being a milk cow, and did not get all the corn and other extra feeding beyond the pasture. I am not sure it's only a question of values. The U.S. has had a long history of abundance and so people have come to expect meat at every dinner. On the other hand, new values of caring about the animals themselves and how they are treated is making many people vegetarians, something Hungarians certainly did not value.
I am not sure how to edit or add to my previous comment, so I am using 'reply' to add to what I wrote previously. I have been keeping a food diary regarding meatless meals. I have kept the diary and stayed with 2 meatless meals since day 1 (April 3). At first it was a challenge, because I noticed that I had ignored the fact that often my lunch includes chicken broth with veggies. So I reorganized my meals to be sure to restrict myself to only one meat dish a day. It was not hard. Making sure I get enough protein was the bigger challenge, but since we can eat eggs and milk products it's not hard. I also made hummus so I could have a protein rich lunch without constantly eating either eggs or cheese. We also eat other nuts.
An average American throws out about 240 lbs of food per year. The average family of four spends $1,500 a year on food that they throw out. Where would you rather use this money?
Actually, our family does not throw much food away. In the week since starting the diary on the 3rd, we threw away as a family 7 1/2 ounces soda bread that we bought but it turned out we all disliked it. We ate at least a quarter of the loaf over several days before we gave up. Since you can't just donate open food to anyone, I composted it. I really do have a horror of wasting a scrap. We also tried a pumpkin pie that we found too sweet, but at least we felt that because it was good quality we could offer it as a snack to a group that was meeting that night. They enjoyed it and someone even took home the left-overs. Lastly, we try not to, but we sometimes end up wasting coffee if we made too much and it's too late to finish it. Luckily, most of the time my husband is willing to reheat coffee. Not me. This waste is expensive for us as a family and I hate to think of the workers who put their labor into planting and harvesting it, having their work thrown out.
I was not surprised about the idea of Silvoculture, but I'd never heard of the term before. In a wonderful book, The Inner Life of Animals, Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, writes about the long -time custom of pasturing pigs in the woods in Spain and Portugal. And I've read about pigs (now dogs because they create less damage to the soil) rooting for truffles in southern France, but I did not know it could be so widely used, even by cattle and goats. Of course out West (U.S.) sheep herders herded their sheep up into the mountains until quite recently, but I think the sheep were not good for the native ecology. So I think there is a lot more research to be done. Never the less, I think if manged correctly, and in the right forests, it seems like this is a wonderfully mutually beneficial system for animals and the forest, while also mitigating the total methane emission by livestock, especially cattle. Interesting to think of livestock amid pecan trees.
