One Geek, One Earth

Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur

While you drift in sleep, turtles ride the curve of the deep, seeking their inspiration from the sky. From tranquil tropic bays or nightmare maelstroms hissing foam, they come unseen to share our air. Each sharp exhalation affirms, “Life yet endures.” Each inhaled gasp vows, “Life will continue.” With each breath they declare to the stars and wild silence. By night and by light, sea turtles glide always, their parallel universe strangely alien, yet intertwining with ours.

Those words are the second paragraph of the book and they illustrate so well the power of this book- it is, at times, as much as poetry as science, as much stories as it is facts.

This book is about the sea turtle and all its varieties. A warm blooded reptile, it is basically a living dinosaur.

The book itself is divided into three sections:

• Part I: Atlantic
• Part II: Between Oceans
• Part III: Pacific

In each section, he talks about the different types of sea turtles that make their way through that part of the world, from the Green Turtles to the Loggerheads to the massive Leatherbacks. What made this book so fascinating for me were two elements.

First, the sea turtle itself is just a fascinating creature - a warm blooded reptile, as the subtitle to the book says, the world’s last living dinosaur, weighing up to a ton. Imagine a turtle that weighs half as much as your car. An incredible navigator, a Leatherback sea turtle can unerringly cross the Atlantic Ocean, returning to the exact place it was born 30 years ago to lay its eggs. I get lost pulling out of my own driveway. But as the book points out, they’re in serious danger of extinction due to numerous reasons - fishing nets, people eating turtle eggs, light pollution causing the mother turtles to avoid the beaches they need (and hatchling to get confused as to where they are going). And you can tell that Dr. Safina really cares about the turtles.

Which makes the second compelling factor in the book all that more amazing: he tells the stories of all the people involved in or related to the life of a sea turtle, including the shrimpers whose nets end up catching turtles; the scientists diving to the incredible depths of the ocean with the turtles; the poachers who gather eggs in Mexico because the eggs are a delicacy (and rumored to be an aphrodisiac!); the harpooners hunting swordfish in Nova Scotia who pass by the Leatherback turtles swimming in the cold Canadian waters. He tells all of their stories (and more) and he does so without prejudice or bias - he just tells the story. Even if you don’t agree with some of the people that he interacts with, you at least come to an understanding of WHY they do what they do. And that understanding of all the factors allows him to paint the true and complete story of the sea turtles.

It also doesn’t hurt that he knows the science and can give it to the reader in an easily understandable form and intersperse the science with almost poetic descriptions of scenery and people. For example, talking about New Guinea:

Some of the local people here have already felt insulted that the world would look here and see the needs of turtles more than of the people themselves. Fewer than half have been to school; they want education for their children. They want access to markets. They want what other people have. They live in a beautiful place with more leisure and more priceless waterfront than they could ever use. But there have always been unquenched desires in paradise. The human heart will cast itself out of Eden every time, because it has needs that heaven never addresses.

I highly recommend this book. It is a compelling read about an important environmental topic. Run, don’t walk, to your local library and check out a copy.

So Joy and I are getting ready to sell the house (which is why my posts have not been as frequent as I would like). In case you’ve never had to do this, the procedure basically involves making the house look like nobody actually lives there by cleaning it constantly and removing everything from counters, rooms, etc. You’re basically trying to make it easy for the person buying your house to imagine themselves living in it. This is a long and involved process that is going to take us another week or two.

For me, the move has a nice frugality effect. As we pack up DVDs and books and other knick knacks, we ask ourselves, “Do we really need this?” If we don’t, it leaves the house. We’re making good use of environmentally friendly options like the free section of Craigslist and Freecycle.org to give things away to people who want them rather than throwing them away in the dump. We’re also using the Clorox Green Works products I mentioned previously, and they are working very well, although we haven’t gotten to the serious test of bathroom cleaning yet.

Besides the frugality effect, I think the move also helps me out environmentally. This decluttering/pruning effect is good for me. Training myself to use and need less stuff helps me get out of the consumer cycle. That has to be good for me producing less waste. Plus, we’re trying to move closer to work, which will mean less driving, less gas spent, less pollution from my car, etc. Raleigh/Durham does not have a robust mass transit system, so cutting my driving distance is one of the few things I can do in this sprawled out town.

When we get closer to actually looking for a house, I want to blog some on what kind of environmentally friendly factors I’m looking for in the house itself - but right now, I’m so busy cleaning, I haven’t even had time to think about it. This will definitely be the last move I make for a long, long time.

Sometimes your workplace can seem like it is in an entirely different universe from your home. That makes it much easier for someone like me who is still learning to change his habits to fall out of them when I get to work and back into them when I get home. So I’ve made a conscious effort to try and be better about being eco-friendly at work.

Turn off your computer and accessories

For the longest time, I kept my work computer on when I left work because I liked being able to come in the morning and get started right away. Now I turn the computer, monitor, and printer off when I leave and I find something else to do with those first few minutes of the day. I create a daily to do list that helps keep me focused, but you could get that morning coffee, catch up with coworkers, or anything else that takes a couple of minutes. It certainly doesn’t have to be idle time.

Keep your paper use low and recycle

It can be very easy at a well equipped workplace to be printing scads of documents. My big flaw was printing out email that had lists of webpage changes. I liked not having to switch being the window with the email and the window with my web page editor. Now I’ve raised my screen resolution and found a way to scrunch the two windows next to each other. If you can’t stop the printing habit, make sure to recycle what you use. This is actually easier for me at work than at home - the recycling center at home doesn’t have a white paper recycling bin, strangely enough. And if you get a chance, look at corporate documents and see if any of them could be distributed electronically rather than via paper.

Dump the plastic kitchen utensils

My workplace has a fantastic kitchen area and they even have a free soda fountain downstairs. But they have plastic cups, plastic utensils, paper plates, and all sorts of other things that are too easy to use and abuse. Get in the habit with me, as I start bringing my utensils and buying a drink container to use so I can dump the disposable cups. It also helps to give up the soda and just drink water. Healthier and I won’t have to wash my drink container anywhere near as often.

In the restroom

“If it is yellow, let it mellow” doesn’t really apply in the modern work restroom, where everything auto flushes about 3 seconds after you’re done. While there isn’t much to be done about that, what you can do is start using hand sanitizer rather than washing your hands (unless of course, they really need to be washed). It saves water (a big concern here in North Carolina) and it also saves either paper towels or the energy used for a hand dryer. If you’re part of a small business, just go ahead and buy it yourself and if you’re part of a large organization that doesn’t provide hand sanitizer, talk to your facilities manager about making some available. Just make sure that the sanitizer is greater than 60% alcohol, or it won’t be effective.

If I were to meet a random married couple on the street and ask them if they have differences about how hot or cold the house is, I’d be willing to bet that they do because the odds would definitely be in my favor. Joy and I are no different. I’m pretty temperature insensitive. It needs to be really hot or really cold for me to notice. Joy, on the other hand, tends to get cold easier. So that means that in the wintertime, we would prefer to have the house at different temperatures. So juggling the thermostat comes into play several ways:

1. Setting the overall thermostat temperature. We have a heat pump and I must admit to occasionally getting confused by the non-digital thermostat. If the switch is set to heat and the temperature is set to 80, why does the house only heat to 70? I feel embarrassed at being defeated by a basic piece of equipment, but it is true. I never feel like I know how to set the temperature gauge to get the house temperature where I want it. So Joy ends up being the one to set the temperature, which means she gets to set it higher than I would prefer, both in comfort level and in energy saving level. That’s the benefit of not being an equipment moron, I guess.
2. Lack of an automatic thermostat. The lack of an automatic thermostat hampers some potential energy saving techniques. Joy got an electric blanket for Christmas, Aurora has a heavy winter blanket, and I sleep better when it is colder at night. In theory, it would be nice to have the thermostat turn down a half hour before bedtime and turn back up again a half hour before wake up time so that we won’t freeze when we take a shower (especially since the warm water gets turned off and on in the middle of the shower). But the electric thermostat we bought a couple years wasn’t compatible with the heat pump (I think) and I was a little too worried about electrocuting myself to try it. Now that we’re going to move in 6-8 months, there’s not a lot of point in changing it out. It’ll be something to worry about for the new house.
3. Turning it off when not in use. The new thing we’re going to try is shutting the thermostat off if we’re going to be gone during the day. If we had an automatic thermostat, we could let that handle it, but instead we’re just going to try and remember to shut it off ourselves. We’re out of the house 8am-5pm on Tuesday, 8am-12pm on Wednesday, and 12pm-12am on Friday, so that adds up to 25 hours a week that we could be saving electricity - like having a 6 day week. It is rarely cold enough here in the Triangle that we have to worry about freezing pipes and ours are insulated inside anyway. The hard part will be remembering to do it, since all 3 times, we’re juggling Aurora plus multiple other things as we leave the house. But like any good habit, it will just take repetition.

I’m hoping we’ll see some decent savings out of this and when we move to a new house, we’re going to make sure to get an automatic thermostat in place.

One of the things I’m learning as I start to immerse myself in the green news world is that there are a lot of things that would seem to have an obvious green benefit, but when you look closer, it isn’t such an obvious decision. I had been reading about bamboo and how it was a trendy option for flooring and furniture because it grows so quickly, making it an excellent renewable resource. But then I did some reading at Gristmill and Treehugger and it turns out the choice isn’t that easy. Oftentimes the people harvesting the bamboo are tearing down natural forests to plant bamboo and are using pesticides as part of the growing process. So what seemed like an obviously green choice suddenly requires a lot more thought.

In my case, Joy and I have been deciding what to do about our drinking water situation. Joy drinks a lot of bottled water and I’m planning to move away from drinking a lot of Kool-aid (I really don’t need all that sugar). It seemed like the easy decision would be to get a Brita pitcher. But the decision was complicated by the fact that we’re in a drought. Does the environmental savings from not buying all these bottles of water (that are now being recycled) outweigh the fact that we’ll be using more local water, which is in short supply these days? What I originally thought was going to be an easy decision turned out to be a little more complex. We thought about it for a little bit and decided that the amount of water saved from drinking bottled water was not a particularly high percentage of our water usage, so it was best to go with the Brita pitcher and stop buying the bottled water.

So no easy choices. I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised by that.

Sunday is our regular grocery store day - we normally like to get up early and get to the store while it is still quiet. This time we bought some reusable canvas bags to hold the groceries in, rather than using the flimsy plastic bags. We ended up buying 5 bags - they’re branded with the Kroger logo and are insulated on the inside. For $1.99/bag, that’s not a bad deal. 5 bags ended up not being quite enough - we had a relatively large shopping trip this week - so we’ll need to get 1 or 2 more bags next week. But overall, even putting aside how much more eco-friendly these are, I much preferred the experience using them. They carried more, so less trips taking the bags inside the house, and the sturdy handles made the carrying easier. I highly recommend these things.

Part of changing my habits is also working on changing the family’s habits. My wife is, thankfully, cheerfully on board and willing to help in whatever fashion she can. My five year old daughter (actually, she doesn’t turn 5 until Groundhog Day, but I feel ok fudging the numbers here), on the other hand is a bit of a harder sell. Not because she’s not willing, mind you. Mostly because it can be hard to explain to her why we should do certain things.

For example, she understands pretty well why we need to conserve water - if we use too much, then we’ll run out. But then she wants to apply that logic across the board.

“So, Daddy, if we waste electricity, then we’ll run out of power and I won’t be able to play my computer, right?”

Then I explain that electricity, for the most part, comes from coal burning plants which put pollution in the air, which makes it hard for us to breathe. And she generally gets that. And she understands that throwing stuff away means it gets put in a big pile which keeps growing bigger (“Do the garbage men take the garbage to the big pile? Woowwww. . .”). But even when she understands, she’s 5. And that means she easily forgets because she’s so busy. So she’ll be in the shower and spending forever getting her hair wet. Or she’ll leave her room light on along with her music when she rushes to the living room to do something else. And that’s ok - I don’t expect her to be a tiny little environmentalist, especially when I’m at the beginning of the learning process myself. But I do hope she’s learning a little bit with me that will stick with her as she grows up.

I forgot to mention that I also have changed my general power consumption habits. In addition to just generally turning off lights and using said lights less frequently (I tend to brush my teeth without the lights on because the habit is so strong I don’t need the lights to be able to know what I’m doing), but I’m also turning off my computer, monitor, and printer when not in use. I grew up thinking that it was better for the life of the computer to leave it on. Now I know that isn’t true, so I make sure it is off whenever I’m not using it and I keep the power saving features on high settings. Combined with the CFLs, it seems to be paying off - on average, I’m saving 10-20 KW per day, which is resulting in a substantially lower energy bill and more importantly, much less energy used.

I can’t claim to have done a whole lot for the environment up to this point in my life. I guess for the purposes of this blog, that’s probably a good thing, since I wouldn’t have anything to write about otherwise. But for the purposes of the environment, not so good.

Lightbulbs

I have replaced most of the lightbulbs in my house with compact fluorescents. There are a few that I haven’t managed to get yet, namely the two outside lights (front porch, back deck) and the lights in the main bathroom. The shower light and bath light are both traditional fluorescents, but the lights over the sink are 8 large spherical 60W incandescents. Since I haven’t had the money to replace those, I just try not to use the sink overheads unless absolutely necessary; the bath light plus frosted window usually provides enough unless it is pitch dark.

Recycling

We do a minimal amount of recycling. I get the daily paper, which is one of my small pleasures. I like the physicality of the newspaper, much like I prefer a real book over an e-book. We recycle the newspaper and we recycle corrugated cardboard. We don’t drink soda, so no aluminum cans to recycle. I recycle white paper at work but I tend to slack here at home.

Water Conservation

I’m in North Carolina (specifically the Raleigh-Durham area), which is in the middle of the worst drought since the weather folks started keeping records. I have to drive over a section of Falls Lake every day and it has been basically a dry plain for months. It’s a shallow section, but still. All the cities are down to shockingly small amounts of water. I live in Granville County, so I’m not technically under any water restrictions like the city residents are, but I’m doing my best to keep water usage down. We’re following the old “If it’s yellow, let it mellow” routine to keep our toilet water usage minimal. I’m also taking showers by getting wet, turning off the water, shampooing my hair, turning on the water and rinsing, off with the water again while I soap up, and then a final quick burst. Not my favorite way to take a shower, but such is life in the midst of a drought. My wife and I were never big lawn waterers, so we don’t have to worry about that.

Driving

I’ve changed my driving habits so as not to accelerate and brake so quickly and generally try and keep a smoother rate of speed transition. This has paid off in improved gas mileage from about 24-25 mpg to 26-28mpg (I drive a Mazda 626, 4 cylinder). Unfortunately, for my weekend gaming, I have to make a 45 min drive there and back again. I end up using a full tank of gas every week. One of the major disadvantages of where we live is that while we’re a 15 min jaunt down the interstate to where the wife and I work, we tend to be 30 min+ away from everything else. We’re 15 mins away from the first decent grocery store, and unfortunately none of that is going to change until we move, which will hopefully happen sometime this year. We’re planning to move somewhere closer to a good grocery story and to our friends, cutting into all the time we end up spending in the car.

Next up, what’s the first step on the trip to eco-friendliness?