Why am I feeling so fond of the exuberantly oversized mushroom from the ancient forest? Well . . .I like that it isn’t constraining its identity, or conforming to a damned thing. The writer in me, the instinctual creative one, resonates to that. And I see that I’ve been letting my paid work in transportation options consume me, letting the job live rent-free in my mind during non-working hours like an unwelcome squatter. In contrast, I used to walk around excitedly writing, in my mind, my next post for Diamond-Cut Life. The writer in me used to be running the internal show when I wasn’t working.  As I’ve let my work crowd out my writing, my posts have dwindled. At least one faithful reader has said she misses my steadier voice.

I have a mushrooming need to be more than my paid work, much as I love my job. My writer self has gotten elbowed aside too far. It’s not quite as simple as: Oh! I need to live like the forest mushroom, big and wild, funky and unrestrained, and write like crazy. It’s not as simple as that because I’m passionate about my paid work too, and a job is a precious thing, nothing to take for granted. At the same time, I’m putting a stop to the job living rent-free in my mind when I’m not working.  No more squatting. My writer self takes charge when work is done each day.

Postscript: Blythe cooked and seasoned her beautiful monster mushroom last night with butter, wine and salt, and shared it with the rest of us, like a little communion. It was delicious. We happily ate little bowlfuls of the wild food before we walked over to Opal Creek lodge for dinner.  The forest’s fantastical mushroom fed both my body and soul.

• Off The Grid In The Ancient Forest
• Tale Of Wildlife Brought Back From Collapse
• Triptych Of Grace
• The Win-Win Of A Work-For-Rent Arrangement
• Optimists As Problem-Solvers

• Cleaner, Greener Lives in Oregon
• The Climate Doesn’t Play Politics
• The 99th Day Of A Greenish President
• Our Carbon Reduction Group
• How Does Change Happen?

I notice that the sustainability movement happens on a wide spectrum. It ranges from people’s lifestyles and consumption habits on the one end (the usual focus of both Diamond-Cut Life and community based social marketing) to high-level creation of policy on the other end (i.e. regulations and legislation that protect things like clean air for everyone’s greater good). Carbon cap and trade is in the policy category, and one version of it, the Kerry-Boxer bill, is being considered in the Senate currently. Unfortunately, Kerry-Boxer is a weak version of cap and trade. For instance, even the Wall Street Journal reports that under it, major oil companies like Exxon would end up with a net carbon bill of about $277 million, such a small percentage of its annual profits that it would change nothing Exxon is doing. Change, obviously, is what has to happen to address global warming.

I don’t want to criticize people like Senator Barbara Boxer who are putting themselves way out on the line for a bill that is actually progressive in relation to our change-averse culture. So I won’t. Instead, I’ll point out that our culture and our politics are dangerously out of touch with the natural world that is sustaining all our lives. The politicians, businesses and citizens who are opposing carbon cap and trade because it interrupts business as usual are ignoring that our rapidly warming climate doesn’t care about anyone’s  business. We depend on the climate. The climate doesn’t depend on us. We have to get over our fear of change, and sharply reduce our carbon emissions. A carbon tax or fee would be more effective than carbon cap and trade.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr points out that policy changes for sustainability are the greatest leverage points to create change.  California’s progressive energy policy is a prime example: it is the only state whose energy use is flatlining instead of growing. However. Politicians, ever mindful of the next election, will only pass legislation that the people electing them will accept. And it is generally only the people open to change, including changes in their own lifestyles and consumption habits, that will support the politicians willing to pass change-oriented legislation. Hence, my crafting of the diamond-cut life, the life high in joy and low in consumption, continues on.

• The Climate Doesn’t Play Politics
• House Votes on Carbon Cap & Trade Bill This Friday
• Self-Reliance Versus Government Control
• Better Than Bigger: Getting to Enough
• Responses To: How Does Change Happen?

The reason my household is untroubled by mandatory furlough is that we live well below our means, happily. That means that the small reduction in income isn’t painful to us. We have a smallish house, one small car, and like to cook and have friends over for dinner. They have us over for dinner. It’s community. We hang out; conversation is our recreation. Thor and I don’t buy or hanker for much stuff (not watching any TV helps with that). I still love to clothes-shop at Goodwill. Friendships, family, volunteer work, bicycling, reading and singing in my church choir entertain us royally.

A colleague and I discussed furloughs recently. “I’d rather take furlough than have one of my coworkers lose their job,” Randi said. “Me too,” I said fervently. “Everyone needs a job.” I ran into an old church friend when I went running in Mt. Tabor park last Friday. He reads the news and swiftly guessed that I was on furlough.

“If you’re going to make a sacrifice, enjoy it!” he smiled. “I’m happy to make a sacrifice,” I smiled back. But I misspoke. While I believe in making sacrifices, Thor’s and my combined income is good-sized enough that we’re not really making any sacrifice (Thor does not work for the state, and earns twice as much as I do). The people for whom furlough means real sacrifice are the single-income families, particularly where that single salary is a small one. It takes living wages in the first place to then live below your means as my household does, and not everybody makes a living wage. But everyone’s wages should be enough to live on, not lavishly, but with dignity.

• Top Five Tips On Breaking Free of Credit Cards
• House Votes on Carbon Cap & Trade Bill This Friday
• Laid Off: Not A Disaster If . . . .
• Giving Feels Great: Blog Action Day
• Focus the Nation: The Unanswered Question

Lots of cold weather ahead of us. The overriding principle in slashing your heating bill is to focus on keeping people warm, not keeping space or stuff warm per se.

• Install a programable thermostat and set it so the heat is only on when you’re both in the house and awake. This is the most powerful single thing you can do to burn less fuel and save on your heating bill. Our heating bill dropped swiftly and significantly after ny non-techie husband installed ours in 15 minutes with a screwdriver.  Our heat now goes on 15 minutes before we get up in the morning, and off 15 minutes before the last person leaves for work. Here’s one of many places to buy a programmable thermostat. You can easily override it – but the default needs to be that it dials way down shortly before bedtime and also before your daily departure to work.
• Reduce the amount of space you’re heating. This is the second most powerful thing you can do to slash your heating bill. If you seldom use a room during the winter (a back bedroom or heated basement, for example), simply close its heating vent. Then remember to keep its door shut. Our laundry room is in our basement, but we never heat it. We just zip in to handle laundry, and zip back out.
• Wear fleece in the house. Its sweet caresss against the skin and comfort quotient just can’t be beat, in my book. And it enables us to happily keep the thermostat at 67 or 68 degrees.
• Generate your own body heat by being active rather than sedentary. Remember, the goal is to keep you warm, not necessarily the entire house warm. Vacuuming warms me up quickly, especially when I move furniture around. Hanging up clothes to dry rather than using the dryer burns more self-warming calories, and saves a considerable amount on your energy bill over time.
• Indulge in good, cozy footwear, since much body heat gets lost through the feet. I wear fleece socks for warmth plus Teva sandals for grip on our hardwood floors. In general, if we have bare feet, bare arms or bare legs indoors in  the wintertime, we’re overspending on heating because we’re not focused on keeping the person warm.
• Keep drawers and closet and cupboard doors closed. If they’re open, you’re paying to keep them warm. Do you really intend to do that? Don’t forget to close the doors to the microwave, washer, dryer, toy chest and clothes hampers. A bed skirt helps to avoid heating the space under the bed.
• If you work from home during the day you can use an electric space heater to heat just your workspace and dial back that programable thermostat.
• Install insulation. We installed ours in the crawl-spaces in our attic in autumn 2005, and the difference was swift and certain. The house now heats up faster (using less fuel), and takes longer to lose its heat. The reverse is true is summer. Insulation is a good investment.
• Tightly seal around doors and windows. You can use old towels right now to stop drafts around a leaky door or window. Caulking for around windows and doors, new weatherstripping and door sweeps (they seal the bottom of exterior doors) are available at most supermarkets and are cheap and easy to install. Here is a good hands-on account of weatherizing a lovely, drafty old home from Christine, a fellow blogger.
• Seal that fireplace. While it’s cozy to sit around a crackling fire, fireplaces are notorious for pulling the heated air out of a room and sending it up the chimney even especially when in use. A fireplace store will sell you doors you can use to seal up that “hole in the wall” when it’s not in use.

• How To Slash Your Heating Bill
• Heating Our House With Biodiesel, II
• How To Slash Your Electricity Bill
• Cooking For Climate Change, Part 1
• Winter Storms: Slow Down, Snuggle In

Another defining characteristic of Sam was his brains, some said his brilliance. And this was what made me love working for Sam: he delighted in my smartness as I reveled in his.  I was passionate about our mission, and it was heady to have a boss that I could  riff with in our one-on-one meetings, strategizing to experiment this way with this project, and to seek this type of funding for another, and hey, the latest findings here on human behavior is something we can weave into the proposal we’re co-writing.  I rose to my smartest, professional self whenever I was in Sam’s presence. He was unthreatened by my presenting mental challenges to him. Sam got me, and I got him, in a plainly platonic way that never got muddied by sexual tension.

The problem was that Sam was rarely around. He cancelled as many of his scheduled meetings with me as he kept, and my projects suffered for lack of information only he had and decisions only he could make. Sam and I once decided to develop a key relationship in another town with Solomon, an expert in our field. But after Sam cancelled three appointments with him in a row, Solomon dropped the idea of partnering with us. Sam seemed oblivious that a major opportunity had gone down the drain. And as Sam the Mad King broke promises to me, I unwillingly became a promise-breaker to the committees I facilitated. Plans could not move forward without him.

Why was Sam never around? The reasons were as diverse as faces at a United Nations meeting: vacations (sometimes a week per month for months in a row), conferences, dramatic  illnesses that sprang out of nowhere, family members needing to be driven places, great chunky blocks mysteriously marked “hold” on his Outlook calendar. Ann the office manager shrugged, “This is the way Sam has always been and the way he’ll always be.”  People tried to expect little of him. Ann and Sam were tightly defensive of his need to work at will, to come and go as he pleased without accounting to anyone else. Sam also refused to work past 4:30 or on weekends no matter how far behind he got.

I know what you are wondering: didn’t Sam suffer any consequences for dropping so many balls so frequently? Not really, largely because the nonprofit Sam and I worked for filled a niche that no other organization filled in that faraway state. This meant that the clients we served and the providers with whom we contracted had no choices other than us. If we broke our commitments or fell down on meeting their needs, well, we were still the only game in town.

I experienced Sam as the Mad King, putting me through the depths of despair and the heights of professional elation, my projects going in fits and starts as he capriciously popped in and I captured his attention, and then did not see him for days. The whole office danced around his attendance whims. I had cerebral arrest when he withheld his presence, and glorious flights of shared ideas when he returned.

One contributor to this somewhat unusual experience of a job was my own passionate nature. I wanted so much for my projects to succeed that I experienced Sam — central to that success — in a more intense way than a laid-back, easygoing person would have experienced him.

The other half of the Mad King drama, though, was Sam’s plain old poor behavior and lack of negative consequences for it. Negative consequences almost always reshape behavior to some degree. In a future post I’ll write about some ways I tried dealing with the Mad King, with varying degrees of success.

• Deb’s Take On Happiness
• When Deniers Of Global Warming Are Hurting Us All
• Martin Luther King Day and Inauguration Eve
• Seeking To Be Sustainable In An Earthquake
• I Have A Dream — 2008 Update

I ran it by my husband Thor when we talked last night on the phone, the idea I can be aggressive. “Oh yeah, “ he said matter-of-factly, as if agreeing I have blonde hair. I burst out laughing. Spouses excel at reality checks, among other things.

My pursuit of the diamond-cut life is fueled by my passion for a world that can actually sustain itself. My work-work is hard going right now, with my insomnia giving me three nights in a row of little rest. But I’m eager to show up in 50 minutes for day two of the Glasers’ training. As troubled as the world is, my ability to be contribute to it can only be improved by trainings like these and being in lively, supportive communities, even ones lasting just three days. They make my passion and sometimes mercurial energy more sustainable. In particular, I am pondering the precept that passion needs to be well-paced to avoid burnout . . . . .  and warmly rather than aggressively expressed.

• Getting Consumed By Sustainability
• Seeking To Be Sustainable In An Earthquake
• The Heart Of The Matter
• Nights Of Passion, No Regrets In The Morning
• The Fun of Being In Training

• The Best $400 We Spent This Month
• When Less Is More
• Carpooling Is Cool
• The Fun of Being In Training
• Great, Green Job Opening

The Java Worshippers

Dawn spawns seekers of

Caffeine-infused visions.  Hark!

They speak in bright tongues.

____________________________

And this haiku is in honor of my four young chickens: Cleopatra, Lolita, Sangria and Dawn, who are collectively now laying 20 eggs a week and thereby helping me feel more food-secure. Moreover, my chickens entertain me with their antics when I let them out to roam the garden. In case you’re wondering why I have four chickens when Portland only allows three, well, attrition is always a possibility. And you know I have trouble coloring inside the lines.

Clucking Around

Glossy sheen, harsh squawks.

Alert, fecund faces, their

Strut chock-full of life.

photos courtesy of Ineedcoffee/coffee hero and neighborhood notes pdx, respectively.

• Our Chickens’ First Eggs And My Inner Farmer
• Chickens Bring People Together
• The Case For Hybrids and Sex
• High-Joy, No-Cost Fun: Haiku
• Urban Farming: Food Security Plus Fun

350 is shorthand for a survivable climate. Our atmosphere, the one that keeps us (and all other creatures) alive in this surprisingly delicate world, can safely contain only 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. We’re already at 390, which is why glaciers are disappearing and global warming is progressing so much faster than scientists had predicted just two years ago.

In December, world leaders are meeting in Copenhagen to decide on carbon emissions policies (carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming). The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population, yet produces 25% of its carbon emissions, more per person than any other country. To date, we’ve done essentially nothing to contain ourselves (remember Kyoto, for example?).

The 350 movement, 350.org,  is organizing an international day of climate action on October 24. Tens of thousands of people in 111 countries will do all manner of public demonstrations on October 24 — to create a highly specific expectation of the Copenhagen conference. That expectation is policies that will bring carbon dioxide down to a maximum of 350 parts per million.

Carbon emissions have indeed got to be regulated by governments to avert planetary disaster; the reductions will not happen voluntarily. And public pressure can influence top leaders. For example, Mr. McKibben reports that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton while running for president last year both made their energy policies more climate-friendly as a direct result of public demonstrations concerning global warming. But here is my frustration:

Lacking in Mr. McKibben’s message and the otherwise excellent 350.org website is the truth that 350 means the business world and all our lives taking a sharp turn in the road. The burning of the coal and oil that create the carbon emissions is extremely profitable (think Exxon, for instance) and also makes our lives in the developed world much easier than they’d otherwise be (think traveling long distances at will, and using electricity unthinkingly).

For instance, I did not hear the word ’sacrifice’ once in Mr. McKibben’s keynote, nor the phrase “smaller profits for businesses”. Governments are afraid to regulate carbon emissions because of these challenges: big oil and big coal are addicted to big profits, and the average citizen is addicted to cheap fossil fuels.  World leaders are afraid they’ll get voted out of power if they create 350-friendly policies. We have to convince them that we’re willing to be the change that 350 represents, that we’re willing to contain our carbon footprints.

Getting carbon dioxide down to 350 parts per million will mean a sharp turn from business as usual.  It means leading more disciplined lives, as nations, businesses, communities and households. If 350 is the most important number in the world, willingness to break our addiction to cheap fossil fuels is the most important message in the world.

• Another VP Candidate Wedded to Fossil Fuels
• Gustav And Living In Harm’s Way
• Spitzer, Sex and Sustainability
• 52 Billion Miles Saved!
• Is Diamond-Cut Life Elitist?