Post-Post week 10--Carbon problem/Community solutions

Post-Post week 10—calculating my carbon footprint

Okay, so I have known I’ve been part of the carbon pollution problem, but these survey/math exercises showed me in a stunning way how much I’m been wounding the earth I say I love. I took the Nature Conservancy survey and the totals were shocking.
Results for CO2 were calculated for one year--

--Home energy total 14 tons of CO2            (42% above average)

--Driving and flying total 7.1 tons of CO2    (38% below average)

--Food and Diet total 3.4 tons of CO2          ( 4% below average)

--Buying and waste total .9 tons of CO2      (21% below average)

Next, I took the water use survey, and these results were another bummer. I personally use 133 gallons of water daily-ugh! (133 X 365days =  48,545 gallons yearly)

By now I was expecting bad news, but my contribution of 3, 643 tons of solid waste was still a jolt—almost 4,000 tons—good grief!

Before I took these surveys, I would have said I was doing pretty well.  Obviously, not!

The last part of our instructions asked me to multiply my totals with larger groups.  I multiplied my carbon total for year by 400,000, which is approximately how many folks live in the Peace River Watershed. The total for one year came out to be 51,200,000 tons of CO2.  This is mind blowing!

I spent some time visiting the world sites, but I was confused about how to compare my totals to world totals.  What I do understand is that the United States uses more than its share of resources and that it (and I mean me, too) is a significant polluter. This has to change!

Today it's raining in my yard. I don’t have an official rain barrel, but I put out a plastic garbage container along with a plastic bucket and a watering pitcher to catch my first ever water to use for outside needs. One of my personal proverbs says—Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.  This has mostly meant relationally, but I'm now including it to mean environmentally.  

I drove over to USF to be with Cristin last Friday. (I felt guilty about the gas I was using.)  We went out to dinner at a cool vegan restaurant, The Loving Hut. The big screen TV was running some sort of Asian channel that was pushing the importance of vegan foods because they were not only good for people but they were good for the environment. We accept that fact, and that is one of the reasons we chose that restaurant, but Cristin confessed it was hard to sustain wise choices without a supportive community. This is a genuine concern, and my prayer is that we can all find communities (family, friends, work, church, and/or city) that creatively and consciously seek to cooperate with God’s grace in order to be part of the solution, not so much part of the problem.