Quiet Consumption

As mentioned in my last post, I recently had a themed dinner party where we talked about global warming and where we might be as a nation and as a world in forty to sixty years. One of the conclusions was that everyone around the table was quite pleased with the changes each of us had made in an effort to help reduce our personal footprint. All of us were recycling, a few of us were composting our kitchen waste, one couple was actively engaged in the solar energy business and had converted their home into an energy producer instead of an energy consumer. I was proud of my vegetable gardens and explained how I thought that was helping. Everyone around the table was quite pleased with the efforts they were making and there was some talk about how other parts of the country needed to catch up with what we were doing in California.

Then I hear that, if California were a separate nation, we would be the twelfth largest producer of greenhouse gases. I did not hear how we stack up on a per capita or land mass basis, but the information was still staggering.

Our love for cars is certainly the first place to look when looking for a culprit. We all know we drive too big of cars to too many places, though we always seem to have great purpose and good intentions.

But, is it really the car that is driving us to damage our planet so? Beyond car-pooling, buying more efficient cars and thinking before we take long trips, what are we to do? The world is what it is. Our economy lives on cheap fuel and there is very little we can do about it.

Then, the other day, I needed to make room for a new computer desk I bought. I bought it on-line, so I have no idea where it was made, where the wood came from, or whether this piece of furniture had criss-crossed the nation or the world a few times on its way from manufacturer to wholesaler to warehouser to retailer to shipper to me. And to be honest, I didn’t care. I had found a piece of furniture I liked and had bought it.

Well, before the furniture arrived, I needed to move some stuff. I looked in the closet of my new office. It used to be my son’s bedroom before he went off to college. It was filled with boxes upon boxes of stuff we would someday have a yard sale to get rid of. The last yard sale we had was ten years ago and I have no intention of spending a precious weekend sitting out in the hot sun letting people pick through my old stuff and talking me down to fifty cents for a pile of books.

I am droning on about this stuff, because I am betting I am not the only one that is absolutely drowning in crap I have not used in years and will probably never use again. I am hording useful stuff that is not being used. And then, on one of my rare trips to Napa, I am confounded by the shear volume of crap that is stacked into just one K-Mart or Target, let alone the factory outlets, the book stores, the kitchen stores (my favorite), Toys-R-Us, Costco and on and on. How did these things get here? Who made them and at what cost? Where do they go if they are not purchased? Where do they go if they are purchased? How many closets and bookshelves and storage units can we fill with our crap?

I am lucky. I live on a street that has “affordable housing” a few blocks away. Anything I put a ‘Free’ sign on is gone by the next morning. I feel like that is the best recycling. I have given away everything from TVs to tea sets. I just set out about three bags of stuffed animals my daughter left behind a few years back and I just found a home for a large bag of ‘valuable’ beanie babies. They are going on a Rotoplast (Rotary sponsored cleft-palette repair) mission to Nicaragua.

So what is my point? I believe that the consumption and hoarding of stuff that we don’t really need is the true source of Global Warming. Recycling is fine, but what if we just don’t buy stuff we don’t need and immediately give away stuff we don’t use any more. With the money we save we could afford to buy that electric car or the solar panels that are really going to help.

Greening the Inn: An Opening Salvo

My father was the first environmentalist I ever knew, and the term had not even been coined yet. Save the greenbacks, save the greenbacks, that was his motto. Though there is now a TV commercial camping on this saying, the idea of not purchasing what you don’t need, taking care of what you do have, and reusing what is wearing out is an age-old tradition. I’m sure many of you reading this had parents or grandparents with these same values. My father died with his fists tightly clenched around things he could not take with him, and that is sad. But he also died leaving a legacy of ‘conservative usage’ that I might have acknowledged sooner.

I remember my father going through the Inn’s garbage, picking out the old soap bars and saving them in a box. I remember he had us all collecting the bath towels that were starting to fray around the edges and setting up a little sewing factory downstairs to re-hem these nice plush towels. Then when the new hems started failing we used biased tape to get one more go-around out of them. Why, he didn’t even put air-conditioning in the bottom two floors of the Main Building, insisting that the top floor would insulate the lower floors. And, of course, it cooled off so nicely in the evenings. And, he had very purposefully built the Inn with most of the windows facing east so they were protected from the blasting afternoon sun. He even had a huge wine cork collection to someday make trivets out of, and he was absolutely positive you could make perfectly good drinking glasses out of old wine bottles if you could get a good enough glass cutter. The waste of these things was just too much for him.

For many years I rebelled, taking great pleasure in buying things, not taking care of them very well, and rejoicing in dropping them off at the dump when I was done with them. Now I find myself coming full-circle and embracing my father’s values. Well, not quite, but he is certainly inspiring me to look in places I might not have even thought of when it comes to re-using and recycling.

And, the idea of ‘conservative usage’ may be the biggest idea of all. But how does that square with running a quality Inn? Very well, thank you. For one thing, the vast majority of furniture my parents bought for the Inn thirty-odd years ago is still in use. Most hotels throw out every stick of furniture every five to seven years. Is that environmentally friendly? When the Inn buys new mattresses, we buy top of the line mattresses with a fifteen-year life, not some cheap thing that will end up in the landfill in five years. And then, we make every effort, when remodeling rooms, to give away everything, even down to the carpet, to staff or friends of staff. So far, almost everything we have used in our rooms has had at least one more life after we were done with it. Is that enough for an ‘opening salvo’? Please comment. I intend for this blog to be an open forum where new ideas can filter into a small business where luxury and social conscience can live together.

It's Keen to be Green