Here is a challenge, LWV-PA members: Can you come up with a list of five changes to your daily routine that will pinch your purse or inconvenience your habits while improving our chances to mitigate climate change? These need to be interruptive enough to remind you constantly that catastrophe awaits humanity if we don’t meet our goals for reducing carbon emissions within the next decade or so.

The Natural Resources Committee of LWV-PA decided—in addition to pushing our City Council members to make their Climate Action Plans more action-focused and not extend their planning phases indefinitely—that we members should make a personal pledge to our committee. We developed a list of changes in our daily lives that contribute in a positive way to heading off the ever-worsening effects of global warming.

We wanted these changes to cost and upset our ordinary lives enough to remind us daily of the crisis in our future if we continue “normal living.” Our joint list needed to be adjusted for each member: Some don’t cook or prepare their own meals, while others live in apartments where hanging laundry on a line is more difficult.

Drying clothes in the sun. (Peter Parker)

Here are the five basic behavioral changes we are experimenting with in order to assess their degrees of difficulty:

1.  Eat beef, pork, lamb, or chicken no more than twice a week. Fill in with vegetables, salads, fruit, avocados, nuts, pasta, grains, beans, and seafood or fish. Project Drawdown places this change toward the top of its list of life changes that make the biggest carbon footprint reductions.
2.  Buy no fruit or meat in a plastic container or wrap. That means a request to the meat counter folks and farmers’ market vendors: “Wrapped in paper, please!” Likewise, ask your supermarket butchers to offer paper-wrapped service.
3.  Reduce dependence on summer air conditioning and winter heating.
4.   Put up clotheslines, or after your laundry is partially dried in a drier, drape it over flat surfaces like beds to complete the drying process.
5. Purchase light, reusable bags, available in some markets, to take to the store to hold vegetables and fruits. To prevent wilt in your refrigerator, transfer your produce to plastic bags when you arrive home (let’s face it, we all have a drawerful). Then rewash those plastic bags. Ask your market to sell reusable bags. Let stores know our concerns.

Other suggestions for changes in our habits:

6. Save cold water that runs as you wait for it to turn hot. Use it to water plants.

7. Change your incandescent light bulbs to LEDs.

8. To store leftovers, buy purse-like silicon containers with zippered seals. Once you get used to them, you’ll appreciate the fact that they save all kinds of space—think of a bunch of small pouches in your refrigerator lined up one by one rather than round-bottomed cartons.

Please join us in this project and give us your feedback. Note that these are also feel-good endeavors. Have fun and let’s help save the Earth!

—Julie Parker, Natural Resources Committee (naturalresources [at] lwv-pa.org)