Sean Reyes

Picking up liter! Rather than completing this in my neighborhood, I actually decided to go pick up liter at a park near where I work. I have always notices little bits trash which tends to accumulate, and I happened to have a trash picker upper so I thought I would start there. Turns out it was quite fun, and good just to be outside on one of the few days when it has been sunny. I hope to make this a regular thing, since I'm usually here and I have easy access to a trash can at my work I can use to dispose of the liter.

So, this is a late in the game post, but it happened about a month ago. My wife and I had decided we wanted to invest in a more renewable method of transportation, mostly because I have a long commute and we were spending about 400 dollars a month in gas. In addition to the cost, we recognized that we simply did not want to burn that much gas. So our research was actually about the incentives available for electric vehicles, of which there are a few. There were three that we found, a 7,000 federal tax credit, 2,500 credit, and a 5,000 Oregon Charge Ahead rebate. The latter credits is something which has to be applied for and is based on income and a first come first served. Even with the first two credits, plus the money we'd be saving in gas, the car payments seemed more than worth it. So we bought a new Nissan Leaf! I love it. :D

Not buy things, unless I NEED them? How utterly un-American. This was actually easier than I originally thought, I think part of that is because I have vey little free time in which to go shopping. I biggest example of this though is something I mentioned in class in Thursday. I was able to borrow from my museum a 150 year old candle mold, for the purposes of making my own tapered candles for use in my Eco Change project. I had originally planned on buying a modern reproduction, these tend to tun somewhere between 80 and 90 bucks, not to mention the cost in energy to make and shop to my house. So I borrowed and original, and used items which I already had on hand to make the candles. This meant I had to be imaginative and repurpose items, you'll notice the cooking skewers holding the wicks in place. This was actually really fun to do, and felt like a puzzle, with the end result being whatever I could think of. My take away from this process is simple, how else can I do the same thing? Borrow, repurpose, or simply do without.

I loved imaging the people who have uses this in the past. :)

Hello friends!
For my challenge this week I watched the documentary What the Health, which examines the link between diet and disease. So, this documentary left me feeling kind of miserable, I would recommend it but caution anyone who wants to watch it that it is HEAVY. It starts by challenging common misconceptions about the causes of common diseases such as diabetes. Interviewing experts that posit that the high cases of diabetes are causes by a meat saturated diet rather than sugar. This goes along for the rest of the movie in which the discussion revolves around the links between processed meat and negative health impacts such as cancer and diabetes. This is dovetailed in with conversations about the effect of mass meat production an consumption of the environment and related civil rights abuses which take place. Most notable, examples of pork production in North Carolina taking place near communities of color or poor communities. So when literal lakes of pig shit are sprayed onto nearby drainage fields, the residents suffer many negative health impacts including asthma. The filmmaker further attests, with expert testimony, that this system is perpetuated by the United States government simply to drive higher rates of consumption, boiling it all down to the bottom line. Even arguing that meat and dairy industries invest tens of millions into organizations like the National Cancer Association to prevent such organizations from creating public connections between animal products and ill health effects.

I love meat and cheese. if so, watching this has made me seriously reconsider my consumption habits. Which is why my next challenge will be to eat two vegetarian meals per day. Instead of meat based, not in addition to. In case that wasn't clear. lol Here's the trailer if y'all want to check it out.

https://youtu.be/Jf44vLndiRM

Watersheds!
This week I learned about the local water shed here in the Willamette Valley, though the topic ballooned out to include our aquifers in addition to the water table. One think I was immediately struck by as I began to do some research is how fortunate we are in the Willamette Valley to have no worried about water, until recently. I had no idea what comprised a watershed or water table and what the differences are. So I started embarrassingly small by googling 'what is a water shed.' The simple answer I found was simply, a land bases drainage system, how rainfall snowmelt and other sources of water eventually drain into the Ocean. I learned the the Willamette river water shed is the largest in Oregon covering over 11,000 miles and ending in the Columbia with the headwaters from the river starting down around Eugene. This area also corresponds to the the largest aquifer in the state, known as the Willamette rough Regional Aquifer System , an Aquifer being an underground layer of water. The more I learned, the more I realized that despite drought, we're still quite fortunate to have such large water system here in the Valley, a reason I suspect for our incredibly rich farmland. Though one thing is troubling, and that is the rate at which the aquifer and water table gets replenished, with concrete cites and suburban sprawl a lot of rainfall simply gets drained into our watershed without replenishing deeper sources of water here in the valley. It makes me wonder how we can replenish our unseen water sources as much as our seen water sources.

Photo Courtesy of USGS
https://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha730/ch_h/H-text12.html

Ok friends, this week I tried to say 'no to plastic' emphasis on the TRIED. It is HARD. I started my grocery chopping for the week trying to commit to no plastic. I usually start my whopping in the produce section, so this meant no little plastic bags to put my produce in. I brough some small cloth bags, or I otherwise just carried them loose. This was fairly easy and I am pleased to say I reduced my plastic use this week by many little bags. Where it got tricky, was when I was confronted with certain products which did not have non-plastic alternatives. For instance, grape tomatoes, for this I gave into my laziness and instead of reworking my recipes for the week I went ahead a bought them in their plastic shield. Other items I was more successful, no plastic milk jug, went glass. No plastic pasta bag, carboard instead. At the end of this week, I think I significantly reduced the amount of plastic I used, but I was not able to cut it our completely.

My wife and I spent some time Sunday evening to watch No Impact Man, we've been curious for a while to live more sustainably and since it was parts of the material for the class I thought it would be a good fit. I had some difficulty connecting on any level with the subjects of the documentary, their actions seemed extreme and unattainable for everyday people. I was glad to see similar comments added to the documentary itself when discussing his work in 2010, one critic going so far as to call No Impact Man 'bourgeoisie', and I found myself not able to completely disagree. As someone who grew up very poor, the idea of living without many of modern America's conveniences was more or less a fact of living. For much of my life I ate little fast food and reused clothes and did without manufactured products, this of course was not by choice. I mentioned this briefly in class as a major mental hurdle to living more sustainably, I struggle with my own values of what's 'fair' when I think about giving up a lifestyle I've never even been able to live.

This week I attempted to eat 4 organic meals. I succeeded, but my thoughts on it are mixed. I have bought, and usually try to buy organic products at the store, though I do not usually prepare a complete meal solely from organic products. One of the meals I made was organic chicken with roasted organic veggies. It was good, though quite frankly, I did not notice a difference in the meal or how I felt afterwards. I did however notice that my groceries were more expensive this week. I think it would be much easier to convince myself to buy mor organic products if I were able to notice more of a difference. Perhaps I could if it was more consistent? Other than, chicken and veggies I made shepherd's pie, salmon and baby potatoes over a bed of fresh spinach, and lemon ginger honey tea. I know that last one isn't a meal, but I used all organic products and my wife has been getting over Covid, so I'm counting it. lol

I've been conducting research into alternatives to the GDP, or gross domestic product. As I understand it the GDP is a measure of the combined economic output of the United States, a total amount being ascribed to the value of all products made here in the US. When I started this research, I suppose I took its for granted that this was just how it was done. giving little or no though to even the possibility of the alternative. Something I realized during my research is, this system doesn't take into account the true cost of production, and I certainly doesn't take into account the well being of the people who live in such a system. One alternative I found which I really like is called the Human Development Index. This includes education, life expectancy and per capita income to determines an economic well being. This system places emphasize on the individuals happiness and well being rather than just the whole output. This method seems to take a more bottom up approach to determining the success of an economy rather than the other way around. I tend to boil this theory down to, it's not about how much stuff we can make, which is not sustainable, but if we're given opportunities to grow as individuals.