Carbon Challenge update

I haven't been picking up bottles lately, both because I've been busy with work, and also because the water levels have been up and nearly all of the bottles on the shore have been washed away. But the tally's at 50kg saved from recycling so far, and running.

In any case, here are a few things I've noticed:

• There are a lot of little baggies around the trail and sidewalk with brown doo inside.
  
  If you're going to take the effort to put it in a bag, why not go all the way? Boo to pet owners! I've always been deeply ambivalent toward pet ownership. But that's a story for another day.
  
• It's abundantly clear that nearly all the trash thrown out by pedestrians consists of drink containers - coffee cups and soft drink bottles. Although I think that the recent backlash against bottled water is a little bit reactionary, one observation in particular sticks in my mind:
  
  What would the world be like if every person on Earth insisted that all of the fluid they drank had to come from a bottle?
  
  So many of us are moving toward this extreme that bottled water is not just a fashion or a pet cause anymore.
  
• I read this excellent recent piece in the Economist recently about waste and the environment. And even if I'm not saving energy by recycling, it made me feel better about disposing of the bottles and cans rather than letting them wash into the ocean.
  
• There need to be more trash bins and (at least some) recycle bins on the Charles river trail, especially on the Cambridge side.
  
  Who's in charge of this? The Memorial Drive area seems to fall within the purview of several jurisdictions: MIT, the State of Massachusetts, and the Department of Conservation and Recreation. But my sense is that the latter exercises practical oversight (not least because DCR was the organization that had my car towed several times!). So send them an email to see what they can do about putting more trash bins and recycle bins on the trail.
  
• I've always wondered why it was impossible to actually redeem deposits in the city of Boston.
  
  Now I can recycle on campus (although not in my dorm!). But the first year I lived in downtown Boston I spent literally months seeking out every grocery store in town trying to find a place I could get my deposits back, or at least recycle the bottles I had. The Shaw's in Back Bay does take deposit redemptions, but at some absurdly low daily cap of 100 bottles or something like that. It must be some kind of scheme to get around mandatory deposit laws.

Update on my aviation carbon challenge

Thanks to Jessica, Jason, and Chuck for taking my aviation carbon challenge, saving a whopping 14.4 metric tons of CO2 (I used the Atmosfair calculator to get these totals)! Check out the sidebar on this blog for a running total of the savings from this carbon challenge. Obviously, I can't take complete credit for these commitments for conservation, but I'd love to have more excuses to give away copies of my favorite David Attenborough documentaries. So I'm looking for more challenge-takers.

On a related note, I watched this excellent lecture by Sloan professor Rebecca Henderson the other day. The theme was how to get organizations to accomplish positive change for sustainability. But several of the lessons apply equally well to our personal lives:

• Don't perpetuate negative values
  
  We can all point to forces beyond our control (e.g. our car-centric cities, the geographic disperson of our families and friends) which cause us to adopt resource-intensive lifestyles. But most of us have more discretion than we think to make changes and to reduce our own roles in perpetuating these environmentally costly social norms. All social change begins with an individual, an individual who at some point realized that she had the power to make a change in her own life.
  
  
• The only way to make change is to get started
  
  You can't learn to golf like Tiger Woods by watching videos, and we can't make the world more sustainable by watching An Inconvenient Truth. We have to get down to it. Rebecca talks about two paths toward change: revolutionary and incremental. The first way involves completely overhauling the way we do things, and starting over from scratch. The second way involves tackling the low-hanging fruit (e.g. long-distance travel, for many of us) and building on incremental success. Both paths can work, but both involve getting our sneakers dirty and truly Walking the Talk.