Survey: How Much Control Do You Have, The Sequel

That was a hard one. I first thought about checking "People all over the world make drastic changes to improve their lives, you just do it." but then thought that that is not true. That is not how evolution works. Many people won't just change. It's the ones that can change that will survive.

I think we need an option for "I'm dependent on my car, and will not be able to change quickly enough."

my husband sees meeting our immediate needs as far more important than making changes for the better, but i'm slowly reducing our meat in-take and getting him to recycle. he balks at the much higher expense for better lightbulbs, but we are slowly replacing them.
housing costs are insane in the neighborhood we live in, so we rent and can't make changes. We need to stay where we are because the schools are the best in our city and we had to fight just to get our teen in to this high schoo; but, i work 12 miles across the city from our house and my husbands job requires that he spend a lot of time in his truck - which is a requirement for his job in itself.
i learn so much from reading TH and i want to incorporate this information in our lives, but getting my husband to change, especially when he doesn't find the general topics interesting, is really hard. :)

You do the most you can. When you've done that, prove yourself wrong and find something else you can do. It's been working for me so far.

I guess my science background has ingrained the whole "Try to prove yourself wrong" mentality in me.

And liz, does your husband understand that many of the things you can do that are green will also pay for themselves very quickly, and then save you money constantly for many years? The "expensive" light bulbs are a LOT cheaper than incandescents when you consider energy costs. Solar hot water heaters pay for themselves in under 2 years. Insulation can pay for itself in a year or two. Maybe you can convince your husband with numbers. He might not go for "Because it's green," but he'll probably go for "Because we'll end up with an extra $500 a year," or however much it is.

Liz,(&anthony)

I agree with Anthony.. I usually win a lot of disagreements (and win people over) with the economic incentinves (sp?) more than "save the world". I live "inside the beltway" (WashDC) where A LOT of people have the "us or them" (read Dem or Republican) mentality... so with the old-school Dem, you frame it as a "global warming" arguement... with the old-school Republican - frame it as an economic, keep our money in the US arguement... in the end the Earth wins, you just spin it differently to win the converts :)

Cheers, & happy friday!
tom-tom

well the answer is certainly not living in tiny houses/apartments, driving tiny cars, and generally using less. We have a design problem. City life as we know it was never designed to be sustainable. Huge, extravagant country homes or suburban mcmansions are just as unsustainably designed. Fundamentally and unequivocally, they do not recycle and use local energy flows, and they do not infinitely recycle their resources. Both ways are ecological parking lots that require massive external inputs.

Sustainability is qualitative, not quantitative. So using less per person, however noble, is at best palliative & transitional, and any gains from using less would be overriden by increasing population and time.

So what we have is a design problem not an efficiency problem, as Cradle to Cradle mentions, unless the efficiency comes from a whole systems, eternal (or length of the life of the sun) perspective. Let us not vault the tiny homed person who still burns a "tiny" bit of petroleum but still has no understanding of or relationship to nature. The "No Impact" man is honourable, but it is ultimately a sad state to be in. Let us be proactive about being a "Positive Impact" men and women. Let us instead use our dollar & voting power & ingenuity to support, design, and learn from natural systems that have no long distance, external inputs other than the local ecology, but that can house and be enriched by humans.

Like liz's husband should, I look at being green from an economical point of view. I prefer local food because my money stays it the local economy ( and because I trust were it comes from). I recycle because in the long run it will save me money. It's usually cheaper for manufactures to used recycled material then new. I tun off the lights and AC to cut my electric bill. And those are just a few examples.

I live in a townhouse complex. Recently, one of my neighbours bought a new place and moved out. Unfortunately, they have had trouble selling it, and haven't been able to recoup their cost from that property.

So what did they do? They rented it out to someone.

Pretty simple solution eh? I guess if you're faced with a problem, you find a solution. Especially when it's a big problem that you can't afford not to solve. Or, you can sit around and whine.