This is really an excellent post, and very doable in many ways, thanks very much!

JoLynn from The Fit Shack’s last blog post..How to Get Motivated to Shape Up When You Don’t Want To

Earth Day got away from me this year, at least until they closed Interstate 10 so President Bush’s motorcade could get to the Baton Rouge airport after he planted a tree in New Orleans. It was Earth Day, and they spent all that extra fuel traveling the 160 or so miles from B.R. to N.O. and then back to B.R. They could have landed Air Force One at the Naval Air Station just south of New Orleans in Belle Chase. That would have only been about a 20 mile drive to the tree-planting location. Well, the Bush administration has never been big on environmentalism and I don’t know why I should expect a change now.

Anyway, I greatly applaud your $30 food budget for 30 days and donating the rest of your food budget to the charity you chose, close to where you live. I strongly believe everyone can make a difference if they start in their own homes and in their own communities.

What we do daily and on every grocery trip is buy products that have recyclable packaging. We now recycle more than we throw away in garbage. The garbage is going to be decreased significantly again when we finish setting up the compost bin in the back yard. My son is doing a homeschool science project about composting.

My primary business is run out of my house, so I don’t commute at all for it, but my part-time job requires I drive 68 miles per week which isn’t too bad. Next semester I hope to cut it to only 48 miles per week by cutting out one of the locations I go to for only one student for one hour. It’s a twenty mile drive to and from that location.

My cousin works for a company in Kansas that reprocesses used vegetable oil into biodiesel. Their trucks go around to the large fast food chains in the area and pump out the dirty used oil and pump in the virgin vegetable (soybean) oil they use to fry foods. Reprocessing consists of good filtration of the dirty oil so it can be used as diesel fuel. The sediment (stuff left after the oil is filtered) is composted into their soybean fields as natural fertilizer. I don’t know the name of the company, but he described the entire process from soybean production to composting and generating the biodiesel as one of many processes used in food production in the U.S. It made the last family reunion facinating for me. I talked to him at length about the chemistry and processes, and totally forgot to note the company name! The trucks also run on their own reprocessed biodiesel.

This is very profitable because the fast food chains pay for the new oil plus a fee to have the old oil removed and reprocessed. Then the biodiesel is sold as fuel. There is little waste, only the CO2 produced when vehicles burn the biodiesel. IMHO, this is the fuel for the near future that will prevent acreage from being diverted from food production to fuel production, which has happened with corn used to produce ethanol. The corn thing is causing a significant world food shortage and food price increase. Many poor countries that had people on the edge 6 months ago are now actually starving today. This has to stop and it has to stop now.

Way to go!
Sherri

Being the Change I Wish to See – Sherri’s last blog post..Today is Creativity and Innovation Day

@Andrew – thanks for that contribution. I agree that just talking to your neighbors about issues you care about is a big step forward and much more than many of us do.

I do try to live by the list – except the no car part – I’m an extreme commuter according to the Census! I’m working from home as much as possible, but I still drive way too much.

Another blip about social change is just to tell people to have conversations. Maybe you aren’t interested in large scale social change, that’s fine; instead invite everyone on your block to come by for a conversation about planting some new trees or something. It doesn’t have to be controversial, it’s called community building and it’s something people seem to be lacking these days. When we all see that we can work together, and that we may have different viewpoints but similar goals, we can achieve anything.

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