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.

Please note: This will be an exceptionally geeky post. Those with heart conditions may wish to look away.

Background: I play in two regular roleplaying games on Friday nights and Saturday nights. The Friday night game is very casual D&D. The Saturday night game is a more serious endeavor, although it is still a lot of sitting around and just having fun. But for a variety of reasons the current game we were playing has ended (it was a Serenity/Firefly themed game, for the curious) and I’ve taken over the gamemastering (GM) duties for some unknown length of time. This was short notice, so I’m still struggling to figure out what game I want to run. I’ve thought about a WWII superhero game or an Old Republic Star Wars game.

My friend, Jay, who is also a member of the game (and until recently the GM of the game most of the time) suggested that I should combine the research for this blog with my GM duties and do a superhero game themed around a group of superheroes that would handle environmental problems and natural disasters and such. This, on the surface should be something I would jump all over. It’s a good idea that would save me some time which is my most valuable commodity these days. But I found myself oddly reluctant.

Captain Planet, the hideous 80s cartoon

There are several reasons related to the game itself. First, the idea of an environmentally focused superhero group creates Captain Planet flashbacks, which can never be good things. Second, it becomes much harder to create villains - villains whose only motivation is to destroy the environment tend to feel kind of silly. It can be done, but it requires more nuance than I think I have. Third, how many times will the group have to rescue people from a tsunami before it gets old?

But the real reason that I didn’t take to it is that this blog is really about small environmental issues and about how I can change how I as an individual affect the environment. The kind of research I’d have to do for a environmental superhero game would be so big picture that I’m not sure how much it would cross over. There are plenty of blogs focused on big picture environmental issues. I think I’ll just stay small for the time being (and remain Galadriel [/LotR joke]).

Besides, this means my players get to fight Nazis or wield lightsabers. Neither of those options is ever bad.

Every month at Fuqua, there is a “Fast Break” where we can all hang out and get free coffee and breakfast and listen to someone talk about what they’re doing at Fuqua. This month, it was Professor Gavan Fitzsimons who is a consumer psychologist. He talked about research he is doing about brands and their unconscious affect. In brief, every brand has a personality (Budweiser is fun-loving, DeBeers is serious, etc). And just like how we are unconsciously affected by other people’s personalities when we are near them (we’re often crankier when near a grumpy person or happier when near a cheerful person), we are affected by brands even when we’re just intaking them at an unconscious, unaware level.

How does it work?

The experiment involved subliminally priming people with either the Apple logo (associated with creativity) or the IBM logo (not associated with creativity). There was also a control group that was primed with nothing. Then after they were unknowingly primed, they were asked to a classic creativity test - the unusual uses test, where you have to identify out of the ordinary uses for common objects. The IBM folks were slighly less creative than the control group. The Apple folks were substantially more creative, thinking of more uses. And if they were forced to do something uncreative after being primed and then given the test, they were even more creative. Seeing the brand, even unconsciously, had allowed the participants to interact and be influenced by the brand’s personality.

Why do I care?

We’re flashed with thousand of brands every day on average, so on a personal level, we should probably be paying more attention and try to make sure our radar is up. But how it is relevant to this blog is that I think the green movement should be fighting fire with fire and trying to take advantage of this tendency. For the most part, I don’t think green organizations are interested in marketing themselves. But perhaps they should be. Gather together as like minded groups, come up with a single logo that represents a willingness to support environmental causes. Then start attaching the logo to products that fit with the cause, allowing green companies to use it, maybe promote it with commercials. In other words, establish a brand. And then perhaps in a few years, someone will be walking down the street, see one of these logos unconsciously and recycle their soda can instead of throwing it away. Multiply that to a large scale and that’s how big change happens.

What do you think? Too evil to do? Or instead am I just not thinking big enough?

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.