Hope you’ve all been well. Looking forward to warmer weather? I know I am.

So, what are you thinking about for winter? How to keep your heating bills down?

They’re much better than plastic bags from the grocery store. Why? For one thing, they’re the right size, they’re thicker, and if you put the bags in a covered garbage can outside and then put that in with the garbage, there’s a lot less stink involved than with plastic grocery store bags. In our household, that’s the only reason to have plastic grocery bags at all, given that we have plenty of reusable bags, so hooray for decreased usage of plastic bags. For another, they’ll biodegrade eventually, and plastic bags won’t. They also are corn-based, and Maria of Green Home Experts here in Oak Park says that the more popular Bio Bags are petroleum-based. That might explain why they didn’t work out in the doggie dooley. (09/25/2010 correction: as you can see in the comment below, I must have misunderstood Maria, and BioBags are NOT petroleum-based. Oops, my mistake!)

Even better, they’re produced locally in Chicago.

Whether these will work in the doggie dooley remains to be seen, but the folks at poopbags.com seem to think so. I’ll certainly report back on that. You can get them online and at other various local locations, but if you’re in Oak Park, you can get them at Sirius Cooks on Harrison. Love that store.

I could rationalize it by saying that I don’t fly very often, and I already know I’ll never be perfectly green. But air travel is pretty rough on the environment, significantly more so than driving a car. While the additional weight to carry me and my luggage on the plane isn’t going to add much to a flight that will go from Chicago to London whether I’m on it or not, it’s not the same as completely avoiding air travel. Or I could try to undo some of the damage with carbon offsets.

We hear less these days about carbon offsets because it seems that so many selling them are not actually doing anything to offset greenhouse gas emissions. They’re just taking the money. Supposedly there are some legit companies out there, but I’m not sure who they are. There are also, from what I hear, watchdog organizations that have lists of legit companies, so if I find any of those, maybe I can go that route.

So, readers, what would you do? Do you think I’m worrying about this too much? Do you know of any carbon offset watchdog organizations, ones that you trust?

I saw all sorts of things I could preserve. Apple season is in full swing, so I could have bought a bunch for dehydrating and/or making into jam or jelly. Instead, we bought only a bagful – for eating now. I could have had more blueberries for jam, and I could have bought tons of tomatoes for sauce and salsa.

But lately I’ve realized that it’s very easy for me to pile on too much, especially during weekends, and I really do need weekends to recover from the work week. I could spend the entire weekend making sauce and jam and what have you and not get a real weekend. In fact, I’ve done this several times lately, but it’s because I want to have this food over the winter and to cut down on the amount of pre-canned food that comes from far away. Besides that, it just tastes so much better.

Instead, all I’m going to do is freeze most of the Mirai sweet corn and freeze a few more bell peppers.

All the same, while I enjoy doing things for myself, I wish I could wave a magic wand and have it all preserved. I need a Preservation Fairy. Anyone know where I can get one of those?

- Cars and trucks would run on sustainable, clean-burning, cleanly produced, alternative fuels such as algae-produced fuel, and those fuels would be cheap and not require too much in the way of food to eat
- Plastics would be made of compostable bioplastics instead of petroleum
- Because we could power vehicles cheaply and cleanly, we wouldn’t contribute to greenhouse gases or peak oil by eating foods that aren’t local, so we could choose non-local foods, or local foods simply because they taste better
- Technology would aid the mass production of food in a clean, sustainable way, with no toxic waste, no decimation of the soil, etc.
- Solar panels and/or wind turbines that produce all of a house or office building’s energy needs and not just some would come standard
- Most of the items we buy, plastic or not, would come from renewable and sustainably produced resources, and the items would biodegrade in a reasonable amount of time or get recycled easily

Do I think we can attain all of these, and keep our lifestyles the same? Probably not. Maybe I should ask for world peace, living wages for all, and a pony while I’m at it? The last two are particularly unrealistic, given the state of technology today. It takes a lot of roof real estate to get enough solar panels for all the needs of even a house, and wind turbines are often unrealistic on a small scale.

Can we achieve some of those things? I hope so. I think alternative fuel for cars and wide use of bioplastics might happen, maybe soon, even though I’m a little skeptical because of the environmental impact of growing enough corn and potatoes to fulfill the American plastic habit. In the meantime, many fewer cars on the road because of viable mass transit, intercity and intracity, really appeals to me.

Unfortunately, I think that real change is likely to affect the lifestyle to which we are accustomed, in most cases. One reason I don’t eat meat is because of the environmental impact – it takes lots more space, water, and resources to produce meat than it does anything plant-based. Americans eat a lot of meat, and cutting down is either unappealing or even unthinkable to many. We don’t currently have viable mass transit in most of the country, but in many uncrowded places, even viable mass transit won’t be nearly as convenient as a car. It also takes a lot of work to cut down on food miles, costs a lot of money to install solar panels, and is often quite expensive to buy items that aren’t made overseas. And right now we don’t have the circumstances that would make those considerations unnecessary.

But it’s nice to dream, isn’t it?

Have anything to add to the list? Let me know in the comments.

What went wrong? Well, I have a theory that I over-watered early on. That can cause rot and that in turn can cause poor yield. The plants themselves were healthy for most of that time, but they sure didn’t make many taters.

However, I will continue undaunted because believe it or not, it’s hard to daunt me. I have a plan for the unfinished back of the basement that includes more seed potatoes, the same garbage can, and some soil. It gets cold back there in the winter, so I’m not entirely sure of what I’ll be able to do. But no one ever learned by staying in their comfort zone, right?

Potatoes aren’t the only thing going back there either, and we’ll have to see how the other things do as well.

For one thing, by manufacturing products overseas and bringing them back to the United States to sell, we end up using a lot of fuel, none of it produced in sustainable or green ways. Secondly, I think the ability to buy products so cheaply encourages us to consume, consume, consume. We don’t buy well-made items for their value and keep them for long periods of time the way our grandparents did. Instead, those items are intended to be disposable and they often end up on a landfill. Then the cycle begins anew with even more STUFF.

Another reason is the deplorable working conditions found in factories in places like China. They’re similar to what spawned revolutions and the formation of unions here in the United States – namely, inhumane, cruel, barely tolerable situations for which workers are not paid living wages. As a result, instead of American-made products made by workers who have organized to demand decent working conditions and living wages, we have overseas jobs where workers toil for what amounts to pennies. And we keep it that way because it’s a a vicious cycle.

You have to admit, as a business strategy, it works, at least for now. As long as oil remains relatively inexpensive, it’s cost-effective to produce overseas and ship back to the United States to sell at low cost and in large volume. It’s much more expensive to produce in the States and manufacture items that have to sell at a higher price point to make a profit. As we’re all feeling the crunch in these less-than-ideal times, buying cheap stuff is all many of us can do. So, given a choice between two items, who is going to buy the more expensive item even if it’s better quality? It’s not even a choice for someone who can’t afford the more expensive one.

I think all of us, not just Americans, deserve living wages – and I suspect some people agree with me but do not agree with my “means”, so to speak. I just don’t believe that the current way is economically sustainable OR environmentally sustainable. Given how many people are in the world now, if everyone is going to have enough, it ultimately means consuming less. We’re not going to stop buying stuff any time soon, but if we can stop the cycle, we can buy for value.

I have to admit too that getting new stuff is fun. Talking about consuming less is a buzzkill, no?