Low carbon lifestyle
Few days back, I was chatting with my good friend - Paul Valente - who was born and grew up in Marin but moved to Thailand a few years back and is running few interesting businesses both local as well as online. He is one of the few people in the world that practice outright what they preach. (In Paul’s case, he preaches less and practices more
Several years back, my family was invited to spend a couple of days with Paul and his parents where they were camping in Lake Pillsbury. It was our first camping experience and our daughter was about 10 months old. It was a great experience although we had difficulties that all first-timers would go through. We carried some disposable cutlery and after a lunch, I threw away one of the plastic forks. Paul picked up, washed it told we can use that several times more before discarding it. It was an educating experience for me.
When I grew up in Manapad, a small village close to the tip of India, recycling is not a fancy or hippie thing. It is part and parcel of people’s lives. At the end of of every academic year, we would take the written part of the notebooks used in the year and separate them from the unused pages. The used pages get bundled and sold to the “recycled paper merchant” that visits the village once in a while. (Rarely, do we get money for “selling” the used paper. Most of the times, it would be a bartering thing - for dates or fruits). The unused paper would be used to make notebooks for the next year. This is only a start. We NEVER wasted practically anything. The groceries (such as pulses and spices) are wrapped in torn newspapers and wrapped with coir threads. The wrapped paper would be collected all year long and the thread would be collected into a yarn ball as well. This recycling merchant is not interested in these torn pieces of different shaped pieces of paper spoiled by dough, spices and what not. So, this is what my grandmother would do - she would soak them in water and get all the newspaper ink out and use the dough-looking paste to make handmade bowls which can be used in the kitchen for keeping onions, salt, palm sugar and similar things. I remember the time when we had a lot of LP records left over after “Audio Casettes” - a then disruptive technology - eliminated gramophones, my father came up with this idea of heating them un hotwater, bending them at the shape of the bottom of a pot and then use that as a canvas. He gave these handmade paintings as gifts. I would pay anything to get a few of them now. I can go on and on and on about the ways where we reused and recycled things. Right after doing the engineering school, I went to Bahrain, a cute little island country located in the Arabian Sea south of Saudi Arabia. I could not bring myself to throw newspaper or used milk cartons into the trash. After realizing the apartment I lived turned into a large trash can, I somehow threw them all away and started to be more consuming than recycling. After coming to the US, this has only increased.
Up until the camping incident. It was an eye opener to me. It was refreshing to see people here in the US with strong thoghts about recycling. It was just a year since I moved to California. After the camping incident, I have seen more people who are way more strict and even anal about recycling here in Marin county. For a brief period of time, I consulted with Paul Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute on their WiserEarth project and traveled with Peggy Duvette to India in helping her set up the outsourcing team for WiserEarth. The association with these “green” people have deepened my commitment to living a low carbin life.
As soon as I told him about the daul-geographic life and the needed air travel, his question is on the carbon footprint this lifestyle would demand. Giving the chat transcript below:
Posted: September 28th, 2008 under Low Carbon Life Style.
Tags: Big Yellow Taxi, Carbon Footprint, Paul Valente, Recycling
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