Food, Water, Energy Nexus: Reducing your Ecological Footprint - 3

I am going to attempt to sum up my thoughts about being the Nexus and how I have come to be where I am in that process.  And it IS a process! 

My beautiful mom, carrying me, 1984

Sometimes I blame the American culture and the times we live in for my inability to be further along in this process than I am at this point in my life, because it is so easy to not change, to not inform ourselves and to look away.  But, I do have a conscience that seems to transcend all that and continually push me towards being more responsible with my time on this wonderful planet we call our home. 

Home, 1989

I’ll start way back with when I was a child.  I grew up on a farm, on almost 200 acres, in beautiful upstate NY.  My family was just this side of the Amish lifestyle by many standards.  We did have running water, but we also had a hand pump: one over the kitchen sink and one out by the barn.  We did have electric heat, but we mostly used the wood stove.  We had a car, but I also remember making trips to the Corner Store about 6 miles away with a horse and buggy.  Oh and the garden!  It was my dads baby…at least a few acres and it was always gorgeous.  My dad plowed it with his team of  Belgian work horses.  We had goats and a jersey cow.  We made soap, cheese, butter, and even ice cream by hand! We had chickens and raised our own eggs, veggies and meat.  The later of which convinced me to stop eating meat at the age of 8 and never look back.  I loved my animals too much to see my dad butcher them.  My dad and I had a talk about it and he quit, at least in front of me.  But I wouldn’t eat them anymore and I still don’t.  So that is a summary of where I came from, but all that changed when I was about 14 and we lost the farm and moved to an apartment in town. 

Now I know that that description seems a bit dated right? Like we were basically in the 1800s? And now we can be sustainable and still live in a city and not have our own garden or have a garden on our rooftop or some other new-to-me idea.  There are many other options.  I realize that.  But, nevertheless, that is how I grew up and I am very thankful for that perspective and all that knowledge that I still have somewhere tucked away in my mind.

Starting as a teenager, I spent about the next 10 years not really giving much thought to the way I lived.  I moved a lot and traveled a lot and learned a lot about how other people live and what they care about and why.  I shopped wherever food was the cheapest and did not go out of my way to recycle anything.

Our small garden, first year since the 1980s!

Melon from the garden

That brings me up to where I am now.  I care deeply about the planet and I want to make changes for the future of my children.  We have a garden and chickens; we eat mostly whole foods and cook at home.  We recycle and buy almost everything locally. 

However, I just took the Global Footprint Network calculator (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/) and we would still need 3, THREE, (!!!!!) earths to handle my reckless way of life!! This is horrible and tells me how much better I could be and should be doing.  The main reasons, according to the Global Footprint Network calculator, are that we use electric cooling that runs almost all the time.  We bought an older home last year and recently discovered that the cooling ducts have holes in them so I figure our “Energy Use” is as bad as it gets.  Also, we have 2 big vehicles.  We have a farm and a horse trailer and a big family, so we use those vehicles.  It is very normal for this area to have a truck and 4-wheel drive because of all the dirt roads, horse country and flooding in the rainy season.  I have been looking into getting an electric car so that we would have only one big truck and one smaller vehicle for running around. 

So there you have it.  This is my honest look at my relationship to the Nexus and how I plan on growing my awareness and doing better, for my children, for the planet and for us all.  I am going to wrap this up now and call the bank about an EV loan! Wish me luck.