One Geek, One Earth

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.

So, what’s this blog about?

Imagine, if you will, a typical 30 something geek. Works at a techie job (web designer). Does pen paper gaming every weekend. Plays video games, especially RPGs with a good story. Reads science-fiction and fantasy novels. Takes part in a fake sports league - not just fantasy sports, mind you, but a whole league based on sports teams that don’t actually exist. Add in a fantastic wife and a 5 year old daughter. And there I am. Not really any different from most geeks out there. Living a fairly carefree life, not really thinking much about anything other than just making it to the next day.

Then a few months ago, I was reading financial blogs in order to get my financial house in shape. I wasn’t in a lot of debt, but it felt like I had been in debt forever. The Simple Dollar had just finished reviewing Your Money or Your Life and I decided to rent a copy from the library (go, cheap books, go). As I worked my way through it, one theme kept popping back up over and over where I couldn’t avoid it.

Get yourself out of debt and create passive income so you won’t have to work anymore and you can pursue your dream, your cause.

Dream? Cause? I realized that I didn’t have a dream. If I were to win the lottery and not have to work another moment in my life, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. This left me really unsettled. How could I not have a dream? At first, I tried to convince myself that it was okay, nothing wrong with just living the way I was living. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that while I loved my family dearly (and still do), I needed something to help give my life as an individual person meaning. So why not give myself a cause and work on devoting myself to it? And so here we are.

So why environmentalism?

I could’ve just pulled it out of a hat, in some respects. It wasn’t the specific cause as much as it was the devotion to something real that mattered to me. That said, there were quite a few reasons why I picked environmentalism over my other options.

1. It was already on my radar. Going green had been one of those causes I had always been peripherally aware of and thought, “I really do something for that cause” and then I would promptly forget about it and go on with my life.
2. Fits in with my job. I work at the Fuqua School of Business, which is Duke University’s business graduate school. The school is going through a lot of changes, one of which is trying to become better at creating “leaders of consequence” - business leaders who care about the big global issues, of which environmentalism and corporate sustainability is a big one. So educating myself about environmentalism at the same time my business does works out well.
3. Trendy. Kind of a silly point, I know. Noone likes a bandwagon hopper. But the advantage of becoming eco-friendly as the issue starts to reach critical mass is that it will be easier for me to find information about eco-friendy things I can do and eco-friendly products to replace what I’m using now.
4. Frugal. My other major life task at the moment is to become frugal and perhaps learn how to live a simpler life. Unlike some causes, environmentalism generally fits hand in hand with frugality; saving energy saves money, saving gas saves money, etc.
5. Cooking. One of my new hobbies is learning how to cook. I think I would like to learn how to garden and grow some of my own food.
6. Self contained. Perhaps most importantly for me at this point in my life, learning how to be eco-friendly can be relatively self contained. If I don’t want to go out to rallies and fund raisers and I don’t want to try and convince everyone I know to convert to the cause, I don’t have to. This isn’t to say that I won’t ever reach that point. But right now, I can go on an internal journey of change and work on learning on how to convert myself before I convert others.

What’s Probably Not Going to Ever Happen

I’m not terribly likely to become a hippie and move into the upper mountains where the air is thin, growing the hemp for my own clothes and sitting on the front porch meditating about bigger issues. I’m a geek, hence the title of the blog. I love my computer games. I love a well constructed movie of any genre. Heck, I even like the occasional bit of reality TV (Amazing Race, I’m looking at you). I don’t have any urge to give up these pursuits and I don’t think it is necessary. So while the majority of posts will obviously be about becoming eco-friendly, they will be from the geek’s perspective. And I might slip a post in here and there about poker or this fantastic new game I just played. It’s a long journey to where I want to go, after all. And hopefully, Faithful Reader, you’ll enjoy reading about my journey as much as I’m expecting to enjoy living it.