It's a five-minute walk from my front door to Horsepen Bayou, and from there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump into the wilderness of suburban Houston. In December, my wife Susan and I will venture into these woods in search of a fallen branch ... but not just any branch.
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| The backwoods of Sylvan Rodriguez Park |
We have observed this ritual for several years, and the goal is fairly straightforward: find a branch that's four to five feet long, has several offshoots, and won't crumble in our hands. It's not always as simple as it sounds, but we know when we've found the right branch. Once we bring it home, we anchor the branch in a corner of the dining room and load it with handmade decorations and a string of lights. Voilà, we have an instant Christmas tree. The entire adventure uses no gasoline, creates no pollution, and adds no wear and tear on our car. The only energy expended is the calories we burn walking to and from the park. No experience could be more fun or healthier. And we spare the life of a tree. Think of that.
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| Last year's Christmas branch |
A Ride in the Park
Like most people, Susan and I consume a lot of energy—driving to and from work, heating and cooling our house, cooking our meals. And there are the energy expenditures we don't think about, such as those it takes to produce, package, and transport the stuff we buy from halfway around the world. All that energy consumption adds up.
So how can we consume less? What can we do to make incremental changes in our lives? Food journalist Michael Pollan says we cannot "wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we're living our lives" (31). It's up to us, all of us, to make positive changes in our lives, no matter how small. It can be doing something as simple as hopping on your bike to run an errand. Not only will you save a little money, but also you might discover a quiet little park you hadn't seen before. That's what happened to Susan and me a few months ago when we rode our bikes to the grocery store. We sat in the park as the sun set and watched a hawk fly from tree to tree. It was a beautiful experience that came to us by chance, and it was one we never would have experienced if we had driven by the park. You have to get close to nature to appreciate it.
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| Camino South Park, Clear Lake, Texas |
Who knows, if you begin riding your bike to run errands, you might continue riding for the sheer pleasure of it. After Hurricane Ike went through Houston in 2008, Susan and I got our bikes out because we weren't sure when we would be able to get gasoline, but in the five years since then, we have ridden our bicycles almost every week. Every time I get on a bike, even after decades of riding, I still feel the thrill of balancing on two wheels and gliding through the air. It feels almost like flying.
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| Susan at Huntsville State Park |
A Stroll in the Yard
Earlier this year, Susan and I decided to make a more significant dent in our energy consumption. Susan put an ad on Craig's List, and within a few hours we sold our sputtering ten-year-old lawnmower for fifty dollars. We applied that money toward the purchase of a reel mower, the kind of push mower your grandfather used in the first half of the twentieth century—except this mower is designed with twenty-first century technology.
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| Fiskars Reel Mower |
You can imagine how quiet is, and best of all, it uses no gasoline or motor oil, and there's no spark plug to replace or crank to pull. It just takes a little elbow grease to operate as well as a little extra time. I used to spend thirty minutes mowing my yard with a power mower, and now it takes me forty. While our yard is admittedly small, if it were twice as big, it would take only twenty additional minutes to mow it.
A Hike in the Wilderness
A few years ago, while hiking to the top of Mount Garfield, at Crater Lake (in Oregon), Susan and I met a woman who was carrying a water bottle in a beautiful sling. It was woven in brilliant colors, and she told us she had bought it in Guatemala. I coveted that sling but never found one like it. A few months later, as luck would have it, Susan saw a photo on Pinterest of a water bottle sling made from old cargo pants. I reminded her that I had a pair of worn cargo shorts that were threadbare, so she cut out the pockets, sewed on straps made of cotton webbing, and we had our own unique slings for water bottles.
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| Homemade water bottle sling, Acadia National Park (in Maine) |
We take our slings with us every time we travel and even carry them on walks in the neighborhood. Those old cargo shorts had been favorites of mine, but they had so many holes that I'd stopped wearing them in public years before. Because they were so comfortable, however, I couldn't make myself part with them. Repurposing the shorts not only gave them a new function but also allowed me to hang onto something I valued for sentimental reasons.
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| Hiking at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico |
Positive Consumption
Activist Brian Tokar asks if the "small changes in personal lifeways [are] sufficient to change the world and prevent catastrophe." He acknowledges that the answer is no but adds, "Moving forward, from changes at the personal level to the community level and beyond, challenges us to reach beyond conventional expectation and create living examples of a richer quality of life that's considerably lower in material consumption" (248). It is easy to think it is a sacrifice to consume less, but the reality in this case is that less can mean more. The richness to which Tokar alludes comes from something as simple as taking a walk in the woods and coming back with a branch.
Works Cited
Keogh, Martin, ed. Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010. Print.
Pollan, Michael. "Why Bother?" Keogh 29-37.
Tokar, Brian. "To Endure Climate Chaos, Live Dangerously and Cultivate Hope." Keogh 247-52.
