radiofree.asia

Category: Ask Umbra

  • Should I give up dairy because of climate change?

    Dear Umbra,

    I gave up meat because of climate change. Now I see that dairy is very bad, too. I don’t know that I can give up both. How can I reduce my dairy-related climate impact and still, you know, enjoy food? Are some types of dairy less bad than others for the climate? Is hard cheese better or worse than medium or soft? I don’t like going all or nothing. Help!

    –Mozzarella, Inverness, Labneh, Kefir? I’m Torn!


    Dear MILK IT,

    “I don’t like going all or nothing” could easily be the official Umbra motto. Living a planetarily perfect life is a fine aspiration, but no matter how hard you try, there will always be a gap between what you’re currently doing and what you “should” be doing from a climate perspective. To that end, a little compromise is almost always in order. 

    Let’s start with your assertion that “dairy is very bad.” There are a number of metrics that you can use to describe the environmental impact of dairy products, and by some they certainly look pretty bad! That’s because milk is primarily produced by cows — we’ll get to the other kinds of milk, don’t worry — and cows produce a lot of the potent greenhouse gas methane. Methane’s global warming potential is around 85 times that of carbon dioxide over one or two decades. And cows make it simply by living and breathing. 

    Ruminant livestock, mostly cattle, account for 3 gigatons of methane per year — around 30 percent of all global methane emissions. And an analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy found that the overall emissions of the dairy industry increased by 11 percent between 2015 and 2017, while production of milk only increased by 8 percent. I don’t think I have to belabor the point that in a world where we’re desperately trying to reduce overall emissions, this is not a positive development.

    But what is the climate footprint of one serving of cheese? One meta-analysis ranked the greenhouse gas emissions by weight of over a hundred foods from highest to lowest — with buffalo meat at the top and onions at the bottom. That list put cheese and butter in the 14th and 15th spots, respectively, right below mussels and above something called “rhombus,” which I guess is a type of fish in addition to a kind of polygon. But cheese and butter’s high footprint is a little deceptive given that you’re not as likely to eat a half-pound of concentrated dairy product as you are a half-pound of seafood. (I did have a friend in high school who used to take a stick of butter, dip it in sugar, and take a bite, but that’s not really recommended.)

    If you make your way down the carbon-intensive food list, you’ll find that milk and yogurt — unconcentrated cheese, if you will — are ranked closer to avocados, eggplants, and quinoa, which you don’t see villainized quite as frequently for their negative climate impacts. That’s probably because, contrary to what you may read about millennials, the American diet does not typically include massive quantities of avocados, eggplant, and quinoa. However we are incredibly fond of all forms of dairy. 

    To answer your question about whether certain forms of dairy — soft cheese vs. hard, for example — have lower or higher environmental impacts: They do, but it’s pretty marginal. Soft cheese has more water content by weight than hard cheese, and tends to require less heat and time to make. As a result, soft cheeses are ever so slightly less burdensome on the environment than their hard counterparts. (If you’re hell-bent on getting rid of your taste for dairy, might I recommend referring to soft and hard cheeses as wet and dry, respectively? It could do the trick.)

    But, again, so much of a food’s climate rating depends on how you eat it. Think of how you’d throw a healthy dollop of yogurt on a pile of granola as compared to only nibbling on a bit of aged grana padano. Due to their disparate portions and densities, these treats actually have similar carbon footprints.

    Even if you care about the planet, eating (or not eating) foods solely based on their environmental virtues may not be the best dietary plan, said Jude Capper, an animal scientist and livestock sustainability consultant. “We have to balance nutritional needs and environmental needs,” she said. “We can all have very low-carbon diets if we look at literature, and foods with lowest carbon footprints per pound and per kilo are sugars, honeys, syrups, etc. We can all live off that, but that leads to obesity and diabetes.”

    Dairy may not be the greenest of the green food groups, but it’s still a compelling source of nutrition for many people, said Ermias Kebreab, director of the World Food Center at the University of California, Davis, and an expert in sustainable agriculture. He emphasized that we generally want humans to be well-nourished, and dairy products are very good at doing that because they are dense in protein, calories, vitamins, and minerals. And when you look at milk’s carbon footprint in terms of its nutritional value, it’s actually a very efficient food, especially when compared to many of its plant-based counterparts. 

    There are, of course, a whole host of nuances within the milk production process itself. (Aren’t there always!) Are the cows grass-fed or grain-fed? Grass-fed actually produces more methane, but grain-fed requires more land and resources for feed production! Are they on pasture, where there’s an opportunity for carbon sequestration (because cow manure can make soil healthier and better at soaking up carbon)? There are several interesting ideas floating around about ways to get cows to produce a bit less methane (including feeding them seaweed!) but none of them are perfect. One analysis of the carbon footprints of different types of dairy farms, for example, found emissions were lowest overall when cows were confined to stalls in a barn. That’s not a particularly appetizing thought if you also care about animal welfare! 

    What about other ruminants, you might ask? Cows, sheep, and goats all produce milk — and methane. Of this group, cows produce the most per animal due to their larger size. But, by some accounts, sheep milk actually results in the most methane per volume of milk. (Lamb, by the same token, has a higher carbon footprint than beef.) If we’re talking about true efficiency in the realm of dairy, it’s possible that goat milk is environmentally superior because goats don’t require as much land as cows to thrive, and they’ll truly eat any old thing! They’re converting all kinds of waste into tasty chèvre all day long!

    But if you really want to find a way to keep cheese in your life while minimizing the harm you do the planet, you might want to start by not letting the items you do purchase go bad. It won’t surprise anyone who’s purchased heavy cream in their lifetime that dairy products overall have a pretty high rate of waste, especially at the consumer level — far less than meat, according to one analysis, but more than any other fresh food category. We came up with a little method for food waste prevention in your own fridge last year, which you can check out here.

    MILK IT, my friend, you’re already doing a lot. Giving up meat — especially red meat — is big. That’s one reason the recipe website Epicurious just decided to stop publishing new recipes with beef. There’s probably no more substantial change you can make to the environmental impact of your diet, as I wrote last year, and all further cuts and modifications you make after that in the name of climate change probably won’t add up to match it. 

    Because in the end, most of us just don’t eat cheese and milk and yogurt the same way we eat meat! They’re typically complements, not main courses! Especially since you’ve already made the meat-free shift, I say go ahead and let yourself have a little Gouda. Be intentional about how you do it — don’t gorge, and don’t waste. Because for the love of curds*, it’s not too much to ask to enjoy what we eat. 

    Cheesily,

    Umbra

    *Yet again, if you are really determined to get off dairy, just keep repeating the word “curds” to yourself. Horrible.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Should I give up dairy because of climate change? on Apr 29, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Does Earth Day need a day off?

    Dear Umbra,

    Why does Earth Day make me feel so… weary?

    — The Impossible Race to Escape Despair

    Dear TIRED,

    April 22 can feel a bit exhausting if you are someone who cares about the environment or, to go a step beyond, someone who tries to maintain the integrity of the climate on this big old blue ball. You recycle, even though you know recycling is very flawed. You try not to eat a lot of red meat, even though you know individual action won’t fix climate change on its own. You never miss a local election even though some politicians continue to discuss global warming as a hypothetical. And now the day has once again arrived for you to “celebrate” the planet while being acutely aware of just how much we’re trashing it the other 364 days of the year.

    Some context about how we ended up here: The holiday started in 1970 as the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson, who had been trying to make environmental issues a political priority in the U.S. for years without any real headway. And the first Earth Day was a resounding victory: With roughly 1,000 demonstrations and events nationwide, it captured the attention of the country on the urgency of the national pollution crisis, which paved the way for the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

    But after 51 years, Earth Day has buckled somewhat under the weight of the world’s environmental problems. Perhaps because those problems have become increasingly imminent, life-threatening (on a human species scale), and complicated to address both diplomatically and politically. And rather than stake hope in a widespread societal overhaul, many understandably overwhelmed people have adopted the “do what you can” approach when it comes to personal environmental footprints. Indeed, Earth Day’s 20th anniversary in 1990 helped to usher in the idea of green consumerism, complete with big corporate sponsors. Big brands and corporations really took that marketing angle and ran with it right up to today — which is probably no small part of your disillusionment! 

    And now here we are in the year 2021, when the issue of climate is more or less mainstream. On the one hand, growing environmental awareness has given us the best chance in decades of just maybe passing some kind of meaningful climate legislation. And yet when, say,  Coca-Cola instructs its brand accounts to tweet “Love your mother <3” on April 22, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in our ability to tackle climate change as a society. After all, many of the businesses attempting to greenwash themselves are responsible for the same greenhouse gases, plastic pollution, toxic fumes, illegal land-grabs, and human rights violations that have landed the planet in its current predicament. It can be hard to avoid thinking that a day that was meant to be both celebratory and revolutionary has become so appropriated that it’s a tawdry insult to real progress.

    Setting aside a day to wallow in our own cynicism generally does not feel good. It’s exhausting to believe the world is bad or lost.  

    I called Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer-winning environmental journalist who has spent her career covering such uplifting topics as the political machinations that perpetuate climate change, mass extinction, and geoengineering the climate to save ourselves. I imagined that if anyone would be warranted in cynicism, it would be Kolbert. And yet! When I asked her about how she wards off a sense of defeat given her particular beat, here’s what she said: “There just really isn’t any option besides trying to press forward, persisting in the hope that something will be done, even despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.” Or, as Oscar Wilde famously put it, “the triumph of hope over experience.” (Granted, Wilde was talking about second marriages and not the mitigation of climate change, but it works!)

    Kolbert’s response really stuck with me. Earth Day has been ridiculed for being too individual-oriented — something along the lines of the “hopes and prayers” approach to societal improvement. But as I remarked to her at the time, there’s something almost religious about her Wildean approach to environmental action because it’s so dependent on faith in a better future. 

    And you don’t seem to be asking about how to fix Earth Day as an institution, TIRED. You are asking about how to resolve your feelings about Earth Day itself. You seem fearful of the effect your own disillusionment is having on your motivation, and that is where some quasi-religious practices might actually help. It’s kind of funny to advocate for something so intangible as “faith” on a day that’s ostensibly to bring attention to scientific fact — the measurable and observable degradation of the environment, that is. But a lot of people engage in religious practice to recenter themselves and reassert their values, and I think that something many of us could use right now.

    I spoke with Adam Rome, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo who literally wrote the book on Earth Day and asked what he thought the holiday’s founder would think of its current devolution.He emphasized that Senator Nelson never had any expectation that future Earth Days could match that spirit or legislative success, but the day’s cultural trajectory may have been a surprise. Rome says that Nelson “had no idea that [Earth Day] would become a trade show, which it is in a lot of places now, or that some of the discussions that kids would have in school would be with corporate-sponsored materials.”

    Because part of Nelson’s real intention was that Earth Day would be about — believe it or not — soul-searching. Environmental issues are extremely complex. That reality forms the foundation of this very column! And change that addresses the root causes (like structural inequality, consumerism, racism) of something as seemingly straightforward as pollution  requires a real assessment of what we want for the future and why. “That’s never easy,” Rome said. “There has to be some struggle, some hard work that leads to it. Gaylord Nelson, I think, hoped that would happen: that people would grapple with the issues in a way that would be transformative.”

    Even — or especially? — people who are very wrapped up in the conundrum of climate change on a daily basis can be in need of the occasional moment of reflection. Elizabeth Kolbert said she considered Earth Day to be a good opportunity to spend time with yourself, reflect, maybe enjoy nature. I personally can’t think of better advice. I hesitate to use the term “self-care” because that’s a concept that’s been as cheapened and commercialized as April 22 itself. But if the idea of Earth Day makes you tired, that probably speaks to your exhaustion with the realities of climate change and environmental degradation writ large. And they are very exhausting realities!

    I think everyone can agree it is supremely dumb to devote only one day a year to appreciating the Earth. What if, instead of a day spent wringing your hands over greenwashing, Earth Day were the one day you could make a conscious effort to get some hope and energy back? It could be a kind of annual Sabbath devoted to rest and reset and reflection and reappreciation of what we’re all trying to do here: Live on this planet as carefully and as well as we can.

    Take the day off, babe, and feel better tomorrow. 

    Restfully,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Does Earth Day need a day off?

    Dear Umbra,

    Why does Earth Day make me feel so… weary?

    — The Impossible Race to Escape Despair


    Dear TIRED,

    April 22 can feel a bit exhausting if you are someone who cares about the environment or, to go a step beyond, someone who tries to maintain the integrity of the climate on this big old blue ball. You recycle, even though you know recycling is very flawed. You try not to eat a lot of red meat, even though you know individual action won’t fix climate change on its own. You never miss a local election even though some politicians continue to discuss global warming as a hypothetical. And now the day has once again arrived for you to “celebrate” the planet while being acutely aware of just how much we’re trashing it the other 364 days of the year.

    Some context about how we ended up here: The holiday started in 1970 as the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson, who had been trying to make environmental issues a political priority in the U.S. for years without any real headway. And the first Earth Day was a resounding victory: With roughly 1,000 demonstrations and events nationwide, it captured the attention of the country on the urgency of the national pollution crisis, which paved the way for the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

    But after 51 years, Earth Day has buckled somewhat under the weight of the world’s environmental problems. Perhaps because those problems have become increasingly imminent, life-threatening (on a human species scale), and complicated to address both diplomatically and politically. And rather than stake hope in a widespread societal overhaul, many understandably overwhelmed people have adopted the “do what you can” approach when it comes to personal environmental footprints. Indeed, Earth Day’s 20th anniversary in 1990 helped to usher in the idea of green consumerism, complete with big corporate sponsors. Big brands and corporations really took that marketing angle and ran with it right up to today — which is probably no small part of your disillusionment! 

    And now here we are in the year 2021, when the issue of climate is more or less mainstream. On the one hand, growing environmental awareness has given us the best chance in decades of just maybe passing some kind of meaningful climate legislation. And yet when, say,  Coca-Cola instructs its brand accounts to tweet “Love your mother <3” on April 22, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in our ability to tackle climate change as a society. After all, many of the businesses attempting to greenwash themselves are responsible for the same greenhouse gases, plastic pollution, toxic fumes, illegal land-grabs, and human rights violations that have landed the planet in its current predicament. It can be hard to avoid thinking that a day that was meant to be both celebratory and revolutionary has become so appropriated that it’s a tawdry insult to real progress.

    Setting aside a day to wallow in our own cynicism generally does not feel good. It’s exhausting to believe the world is bad or lost.  

    I called Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer-winning environmental journalist who has spent her career covering such uplifting topics as the political machinations that perpetuate climate change, mass extinction, and geoengineering the climate to save ourselves. I imagined that if anyone would be warranted in cynicism, it would be Kolbert. And yet! When I asked her about how she wards off a sense of defeat given her particular beat, here’s what she said: “There just really isn’t any option besides trying to press forward, persisting in the hope that something will be done, even despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.” Or, as Oscar Wilde famously put it, “the triumph of hope over experience.” (Granted, Wilde was talking about second marriages and not the mitigation of climate change, but it works!)

    Kolbert’s response really stuck with me. Earth Day has been ridiculed for being too individual-oriented — something along the lines of the “hopes and prayers” approach to societal improvement. But as I remarked to her at the time, there’s something almost religious about her Wildean approach to environmental action because it’s so dependent on faith in a better future. 

    And you don’t seem to be asking about how to fix Earth Day as an institution, TIRED. You are asking about how to resolve your feelings about Earth Day itself. You seem fearful of the effect your own disillusionment is having on your motivation, and that is where some quasi-religious practices might actually help. It’s kind of funny to advocate for something so intangible as “faith” on a day that’s ostensibly to bring attention to scientific fact — the measurable and observable degradation of the environment, that is. But a lot of people engage in religious practice to recenter themselves and reassert their values, and I think that something many of us could use right now.

    I spoke with Adam Rome, a professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo who literally wrote the book on Earth Day and asked what he thought the holiday’s founder would think of its current devolution. He emphasized that Senator Nelson never had any expectation that future Earth Days could match that spirit or legislative success, but the day’s cultural trajectory may have been a surprise. Rome says that Nelson “had no idea that [Earth Day] would become a trade show, which it is in a lot of places now, or that some of the discussions that kids would have in school would be with corporate-sponsored materials.”

    Because part of Nelson’s real intention was that Earth Day would be about — believe it or not — soul-searching. Environmental issues are extremely complex. That reality forms the foundation of this very column! And change that addresses the root causes (like structural inequality, consumerism, racism) of something as seemingly straightforward as pollution  requires a real assessment of what we want for the future and why. “That’s never easy,” Rome said. “There has to be some struggle, some hard work that leads to it. Gaylord Nelson, I think, hoped that would happen: that people would grapple with the issues in a way that would be transformative.”

    Even — or especially? — people who are very wrapped up in the conundrum of climate change on a daily basis can be in need of the occasional moment of reflection. Elizabeth Kolbert said she considered Earth Day to be a good opportunity to spend time with yourself, reflect, maybe enjoy nature. I personally can’t think of better advice. I hesitate to use the term “self-care” because that’s a concept that’s been as cheapened and commercialized as April 22 itself. But if the idea of Earth Day makes you tired, that probably speaks to your exhaustion with the realities of climate change and environmental degradation writ large. And they are very exhausting realities!

    I think everyone can agree it is supremely dumb to devote only one day a year to appreciating the Earth. What if, instead of a day spent wringing your hands over greenwashing, Earth Day were the one day you could make a conscious effort to get some hope and energy back? It could be a kind of annual Sabbath devoted to rest and reset and reflection and reappreciation of what we’re all trying to do here: Live on this planet as carefully and as well as we can.

    Take the day off, babe, and feel better tomorrow. 

    Restfully,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Does Earth Day need a day off? on Apr 22, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • What do NFTs mean for art? And for the Earth?

    Dear Umbra,

    Should I be worried about non-fungible tokens? Every day I’m told about how liberating this NFT market is for artists like myself, but I’m filled with dread.

    – Not Immediately Felicitating Technological Yahoos


    Dear NIFTY,

    If you’re anything like me, worry and dread are like Hilary Duff songs. I’m not entirely sure how they snuck their way into my brain, but there they are, far louder than I’d prefer. How much longer have we got on this blue marble? Am I doing enough? Is my cat eating the right amount of food? I worry.

    But non-fungible tokens? Nah. And yes, I’ve heard about the threat these digital collector’s items allegedly pose to the Earth’s climate. We’ll get to that shortly.

    First, for those of you who have been doing your best to get through life without ever learning what an NFT is, I regret to inform you that it’s time to do so. I’ll try to make this exercise as painless as possible. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and fungible is just a chewy way of saying interchangeable. Some things, like currencies, have to be fungible in order for society to work properly. The value and utility of one dollar (or yuan or bitcoin) is exactly the same as any other. It doesn’t matter which particular dollar you’re holding, because it is fungible with all other dollars.

    But most other assets aren’t like that. For example, each of these paintings by Vincent van Gogh sold for around $50 million in the late 1980s, suggesting they’re of comparable value — but you probably prefer one to the other. (I like the irises. The portrait of Roulin looks like a werewolf.) If you were in a position to actually shell out $50 million for a van Gogh, you’d care about authenticity, and you’d care about which one you got. Likewise, prints or reproductions don’t carry the same value as the original — apologies to your dorm room art collection. All to say: The paintings are not fungible.

    But the NFTs you are referring to aren’t exactly hanging in the Louvre. They’re online, which makes their value as collectible items a little harder to understand, but fundamentally they are records of ownership. Ownership of what, you ask? Well, this is where things get sticky. Digital real estate. Actual real estate. Domain names. A T-shirt for your avatar. Virtual sports cards. And, to your point, art, including digital art. Even when it refers to a pixel-art GIF of a Pop-Tart cat, an NFT is a public certificate of authenticity that identifies an artwork’s owner and usually contains a link to the piece. And that is worth something — at least, to some people.

    Perhaps you heard that an NFT of a JPG by the artist Beeple (“the first purely digital work of art ever offered by a major auction house,” according to a tweet by Christie’s) just fetched a cool $70 million. To be crystal clear here: That means some start-up founder who’s now out $70 million can go to sleep knowing that they are the only person in the world who truly owns that digital image. To each their own! (“I feel like I got a steal,” the buyer told the New York Times.)

    NIFTY, I suspect the people in your life hyping NFTs argue that they’re a good thing for those hoping to break into the art world. With a few clicks and some cash for transaction fees, anyone can create an NFT and offer it up for auction. Who needs Christie’s when you have OpenSea or Rarible? There’s no stodgy institution dictating what is worth a fortune and what isn’t. For some artists, that might imply a lower barrier to entry and an easier time making a living on their practice.

    But one big problem with NFTs — and the reason they fill many climate-concerned people with dread, at the very least — is that they’re parked on digital ledgers that tend to be pretty carbon-intensive. That’s because they require a huge amount of computing power.

    In order for these certificates of online ownership to be trustworthy, they need to be publicly available and unfalsifiable. Enter blockchains: databases maintained on a whole bunch of different computers at once for the purpose of security. Most NFTs exist as tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, for example, a digital ledger for the cryptocurrency Ether. Just like you put cash (fungible) and concert tickets (non-fungible) in your real-world wallet, you put cryptocurrencies and NFTs in the same crypto wallet. 

    Implementing anti-fraud measures on blockchains often requires a huge amount of electricity. As you’re likely aware, most of that electricity still comes from the burning of fossil fuels, especially in China, where the lion’s share of these blockchain security operations (also called “mines”) currently exist. Cryptocurrency mines basically look like data centers, and running and cooling them accounts for more than 99 percent of the Ethereum network’s emissions. If you use one of these blockchains and benefit from these mines, one could argue you’re at least a little complicit in laying the path toward planetary destruction. 

    But life is complicated, isn’t it, NIFTY? And as our usual Umbra Eve Andrews argues on the regular, it’s just not possible or practical to live your life by some kind of climate purity test. Just because you’re an artist who’s interested in NFTs doesn’t make you a planetary villain. Maybe you’re trying to make rent, or maybe you’re just trying to see what this brave new blockchain world is all about. In that case, I say, have at it. Care about the planet? Great. Find a blockchain that doesn’t require so much electricity to maintain! Sure, there are a couple of NFT carbon-footprint calculators out there in the world, but I’m not convinced the footprinting approach is the right way to grapple with cryptocurrencies’ ecological impacts. (Recall that it was the oil industry that helped popularize the notion of a carbon footprint in the first place. “Why should we decarbonize the energy sector? You’re the one using all that electricity to heat your home.”)

    Instead, skip the footprinting and consider an eco-friendly crypto art platform like Kalamint, hic et nunc, or Pixeos, the latter of which runs on an allegedly carbon-neutral blockchain. Heck, here’s a spreadsheet someone made of clean platforms. (You’re looking for the stuff in green.) Whole communities are cropping up around the environmental impact of NFTs. Join one! Use your dread to hold them accountable! If you want to try out the digital thing and skip the planetary dread, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

    But I don’t even know if your dread is planetary in nature, and frankly, I’m not sure being an artist is going to be any easier on the blockchain than it is in real life. There are still gatekeepers here: The top crypto art marketplaces are curated by their employees. And I imagine there are plenty of NFT collectors who are in it primarily for the money laundering and tax evasion potential — hardly a crowd committed to wealth redistribution. Is that so different from the other art market?

    The bright side, NIFTY, is that your question demonstrates emotional depth and self-awareness. Pathos! I think the important thing is to channel your energy into your craft. Continue to hone it. If you’re living on Earth in 2021, I think you have enough to worry about as it is. It’s easier than it ought to be to get swept up in dread these days.

    I wonder, though, if I could be so bold as to question whether it’s only dread that you’re feeling right now. Something I’ve been feeling lately is a little bit of dizzy wistfulness: a heightened sense of the precarities and impermanence around me. It’s hard to get a grip with so much moving and passing. The world is moving so quickly these days. Viruses and vaccines and vipers all sorts; even something as seemingly benign as a new way to sell art can feel unsettling when familiarity seems increasingly hard to come by. 

    But there can be a sad little beauty in this movement, and I wonder if you’re feeling some of that, too. Transience itself can sharpen our appreciation of the beauty in front of us. Maybe what it means to be an artist is changing, and maybe that feels bittersweet at best and quite tragic at worst. But what is grief, climate or artistic or otherwise, other than an acknowledgement that you love something enough to care that it’s changing?

    I, for one, am not feeling particularly liberated by all these blockchains or the non-fungibility of all these tokens. I hear your worry and dread: A lot is changing. But art itself, its practice and creation — none of that has changed, and you don’t have to change, either. You can choose to notice what’s passing, but you don’t need to pass along with it. If you do decide you want to throw your art up on some digital marketplace, I’ll respect the hustle. (Though I’d strongly encourage you to choose a climate-friendly option.) But I think you should only do it if that kind of experimentation feels exciting and worth your curiosity.

    Besides, the NFT market is currently crashing. Do you really need another roller coaster to ride? These things might be a faint memory by next year! I am forced, once again, to return to the immortal advice of Ms. Hilary Duff: “Laugh it off let it go and / When you wake up it will seem / So yesterday, so yesterday.”

    Whatever you decide, please, for the love of all that is fleeting and permanent, just keep making your art.

    Cryptically,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What do NFTs mean for art? And for the Earth? on Apr 15, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • What do NFTs mean for art? And for the Earth?

    Dear Umbra,

    Should I be worried about non-fungible tokens? Every day I’m told about how liberating this NFT market is for artists like myself, but I’m filled with dread.

    – Not Immediately Felicitating Technological Yahoos

    Dear NIFTY,

    If you’re anything like me, worry and dread are like Hilary Duff songs. I’m not entirely sure how they snuck their way into my brain, but there they are, far louder than I’d prefer. How much longer have we got on this blue marble? Am I doing enough? Is my cat eating the right amount of food? I worry.

    But non-fungible tokens? Nah. And yes, I’ve heard about the threat these digital collector’s items allegedly pose to the Earth’s climate. We’ll get to that shortly.

    First, for those of you who have been doing your best to get through life without ever learning what an NFT is, I regret to inform you that it’s time to do so. I’ll try to make this exercise as painless as possible. NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and fungible is just a chewy way of saying interchangeable. Some things, like currencies, have to be fungible in order for society to work properly. The value and utility of one dollar (or yuan or bitcoin) is exactly the same as any other. It doesn’t matter which particular dollar you’re holding, because it is fungible with all other dollars.

    But most other assets aren’t like that. For example, each of these paintings by Vincent van Gogh sold for around $50 million in the late 1980s, suggesting they’re of comparable value — but you probably prefer one to the other. (I like the irises. The portrait of Roulin looks like a werewolf.) If you were in a position to actually shell out $50 million for a van Gogh, you’d care about authenticity, and you’d care about which one you got. Likewise, prints or reproductions don’t carry the same value as the original — apologies to your dorm room art collection. All to say: The paintings are not fungible.

    But the NFTs you are referring to aren’t exactly hanging in the Louvre. They’re online, which makes their value as collectible items a little harder to understand, but fundamentally they are records of ownership. Ownership of what, you ask? Well, this is where things get sticky. Digital real estate. Actual real estate. Domain names. A T-shirt for your avatar. Virtual sports cards. And, to your point, art, including digital art. Even when it refers to a pixel-art GIF of a Pop-Tart cat, an NFT is a public certificate of authenticity that identifies an artwork’s owner and usually contains a link to the piece. And that is worth something — at least, to some people.

    Perhaps you heard that an NFT of a JPG by the artist Beeple (“the first purely digital work of art ever offered by a major auction house,” according to a tweet by Christie’s) just fetched a cool $70 million. To be crystal clear here: That means some start-up founder who’s now out $70 million can go to sleep knowing that they are the only person in the world who truly owns that digital image. To each their own! (“I feel like I got a steal,” the buyer told the New York Times.)

    NIFTY, I suspect the people in your life hyping NFTs argue that they’re a good thing for those hoping to break into the art world. With a few clicks and some cash for transaction fees, anyone can create an NFT and offer it up for auction. Who needs Christie’s when you have OpenSea or Rarible? There’s no stodgy institution dictating what is worth a fortune and what isn’t. For some artists, that might imply a lower barrier to entry and an easier time making a living on their practice.

    But one big problem with NFTs — and the reason they fill many climate-concerned people with dread, at the very least — is that they’re parked on digital ledgers that tend to be pretty carbon-intensive. That’s because they require a huge amount of computing power.

    In order for these certificates of online ownership to be trustworthy, they need to be publicly available and unfalsifiable. Enter blockchains: databases maintained on a whole bunch of different computers at once for the purpose of security. Most NFTs exist as tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, for example, a digital ledger for the cryptocurrency Ether. Just like you put cash (fungible) and concert tickets (non-fungible) in your real-world wallet, you put cryptocurrencies and NFTs in the same crypto wallet. 

    Implementing anti-fraud measures on blockchains often requires a huge amount of electricity. As you’re likely aware, most of that electricity still comes from the burning of fossil fuels, especially in China, where the lion’s share of these blockchain security operations (also called “mines”) currently exist. Cryptocurrency mines basically look like data centers, and running and cooling them accounts for more than 99 percent of the Ethereum network’s emissions. If you use one of these blockchains and benefit from these mines, one could argue you’re at least a little complicit in laying the path toward planetary destruction. 

    But life is complicated, isn’t it, NIFTY? And as our usual Umbra Eve Andrews argues on the regular, it’s just not possible or practical to live your life by some kind of climate purity test. Just because you’re an artist who’s interested in NFTs doesn’t make you a planetary villain. Maybe you’re trying to make rent, or maybe you’re just trying to see what this brave new blockchain world is all about. In that case, I say, have at it. Care about the planet? Great. Find a blockchain that doesn’t require so much electricity to maintain! Sure, there are a couple of NFT carbon-footprint calculators out there in the world, but I’m not convinced the footprinting approach is the right way to grapple with cryptocurrencies’ ecological impacts. (Recall that it was the oil industry that helped popularize the notion of a carbon footprint in the first place. “Why should we decarbonize the energy sector? You’re the one using all that electricity to heat your home.”)

    Instead, skip the footprinting and consider an eco-friendly crypto art platform like Kalamint, hic et nunc, or Pixeos, the latter of which runs on an allegedly carbon-neutral blockchain. Heck, here’s a spreadsheet someone made of clean platforms. (You’re looking for the stuff in green.) Whole communities are cropping up around the environmental impact of NFTs. Join one! Use your dread to hold them accountable! If you want to try out the digital thing and skip the planetary dread, where there’s a will, there’s a way.

    But I don’t even know if your dread is planetary in nature, and frankly, I’m not sure being an artist is going to be any easier on the blockchain than it is in real life. There are still gatekeepers here: The top crypto art marketplaces are curated by their employees. And I imagine there are plenty of NFT collectors who are in it primarily for the money laundering and tax evasion potential — hardly a crowd committed to wealth redistribution. Is that so different from the other art market?

    The bright side, NIFTY, is that your question demonstrates emotional depth and self-awareness. Pathos! I think the important thing is to channel your energy into your craft. Continue to hone it. If you’re living on Earth in 2021, I think you have enough to worry about as it is. It’s easier than it ought to be to get swept up in dread these days.

    I wonder, though, if I could be so bold as to question whether it’s only dread that you’re feeling right now. Something I’ve been feeling lately is a little bit of dizzy wistfulness: a heightened sense of the precarities and impermanence around me. It’s hard to get a grip with so much moving and passing. The world is moving so quickly these days. Viruses and vaccines and vipers all sorts; even something as seemingly benign as a new way to sell art can feel unsettling when familiarity seems increasingly hard to come by. 

    But there can be a sad little beauty in this movement, and I wonder if you’re feeling some of that, too. Transience itself can sharpen our appreciation of the beauty in front of us. Maybe what it means to be an artist is changing, and maybe that feels bittersweet at best and quite tragic at worst. But what is grief, climate or artistic or otherwise, other than an acknowledgement that you love something enough to care that it’s changing?

    I, for one, am not feeling particularly liberated by all these blockchains or the non-fungibility of all these tokens. I hear your worry and dread: A lot is changing. But art itself, its practice and creation — none of that has changed, and you don’t have to change, either. You can choose to notice what’s passing, but you don’t need to pass along with it. If you do decide you want to throw your art up on some digital marketplace, I’ll respect the hustle. (Though I’d strongly encourage you to choose a climate-friendly option.) But I think you should only do it if that kind of experimentation feels exciting and worth your curiosity.

    Besides, the NFT market is currently crashing. Do you really need another roller coaster to ride? These things might be a faint memory by next year! I am forced, once again, to return to the immortal advice of Ms. Hilary Duff: “Laugh it off let it go and / When you wake up it will seem / So yesterday, so yesterday.”

    Whatever you decide, please, for the love of all that is fleeting and permanent, just keep making your art.

    Cryptically,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How do I get my neighbors to stop littering?

    Dear Umbra,

    Why do you think people litter, and what is the best way to discourage littering in one’s community when there is wide economic disparity?

    — Taking Responsibility Around Scraps, Honorably

    Dear TRASH,

    I get the sense that you’re writing from or about a gentrifying neighborhood, a rich source of tensions in Umbra’s mailbox. And litter itself is such a deeply complex salad of environmental issues!  

    We can begin with the obvious: the fact that we wouldn’t have so much litter without the production of so many single-use items that need to be disposed of. According to the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful, roadside litter decreased by 61 percent between 1969 and 2009, while the use of plastic packaging increased more than threefold — and accordingly, plastic litter increased by 165 percent. But there’s a plot twist! Keep America Beautiful, which is kind of the national authority on litter, was originally founded by packaging companies in the 1950s to frame waste as an issue of personal rather than corporate responsibility. So that’s the systemic background against which all personal trash-disposal choices take place.

    But the ways in which humans deal with trash are enormously complex! Here are two truths: Litter is generally perceived as ugly and unpleasant, and lower-income neighborhoods tend to have more litter. This isn’t, however, because people with less money care less about the cleanliness and beauty of their environment. Wesley Schultz, a social psychologist with California State University of Santa Monica, has spent a lot of time collecting data on why people litter, and the answer doesn’t have to do much with any internal motivation or value system. A more productive question, he says, would be: When do people litter?

    Turns out that litter begets more litter. If you see a sidewalk or parklet scattered with cigarette butts and beer cans and chip bags, you’re more likely to toss your own detritus there. The same is true if there’s no trash receptacle nearby. 

    “When we watch some litter or see a lot of litter, we say, ‘that person doesn’t care,’ or ‘that person has values that don’t align with mine,’” says Schultz. “And that turns out overwhelmingly not to be true. Most people think that littering is wrong; most people want to live in clean environments.”

    So you can see how there’s kind of a vicious cycle: Pre-existing litter inspires the idea that no one really cares how a certain area looks, so why bother keeping it clean, leading to more litter. There’s a clear corollary here in how we treat low-income neighborhoods on a society-wide scale: They are the sites of garbage incinerators, polluting industrial operations, and straight-up illegal dumping. If some company or entity is coming into your neighborhood and dumping or spewing hazardous waste everywhere, stray cigarette butts will probably seem like the least of your problems.

    There’s an interesting tidbit that I found in an analysis of roadside litter in the state of Pennsylvania. More than half of all roadside litter was found to have been thrown from cars by drivers, and arterial roads and highways carry a greater concentration of litter per mile than local roads, which suggests a greater tendency to litter in a place that you’re simply passing through than in one that you call home. In the case of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, for example, the rush of outsider revelers to new bars and restaurants created a whole bunch of new street trash — an instance of the gentrification process making a neighborhood dirtier!

    Which brings us to yet another problem facing low-income neighborhoods. If you’re constantly being pushed from one neighborhood to another due to rising rents, what motivation do you have to invest in the community where you happen to have a lease? And once a neighborhood gets cleaned up and more desirable to live in, does that mean that it soon won’t be affordable for the people who already live there? When a community does get together to make a neighborhood cleaner and more beautiful and more appealing to live in, it seems wildly unfair for anyone who participated in that effort to then be pushed out. 

    Dave Breingan, executive director of the community development organization Lawrenceville United in Pittsburgh, suggests that community trash pickups are a really simple way to bring together newcomers and longtime residents of a neighborhood. “For people who are new to the neighborhood, I think it’s important that they understand the work that has already been done in that place by their neighbors and get to know them, and understand what the issues are for the gentrified,” he explains. “And if you’re moving into a community you do have a sense of responsibility to the people who helped make that neighborhood livable for you.”

    One such community trash pickup in Pittsburgh is an annual event called the Garbage Olympics, which — full disclosure — my sister helps organize. The premise is that neighborhoods compete against one another to see who can pick up the most litter. It’s been a successful way to introduce neighbors to one another and form community bonds, and guess what? Those bonds are theoretically how you organize against policies that restrict zoning and prevent the creation of affordable housing, if displacement is a concern for you. Or, on a shorter-term scale, it’s how you get together and demand better waste infrastructure (like sidewalk trash cans and recycling receptacles) in your neighborhood! 

    Renée Robinson, a co-founder of the Garbage Olympics and a longtime Pittsburgh resident, acknowledges that some uncomfortable racial and socioeconomic dynamics can come into play during the pickups. “I find that more young white people are picking up trash than Black people” who already live in the community, she says, which can create friction. “Because you do want people to do things to clean your community, regardless of color or socioeconomic status, but it can be like, ‘I’m coming in to clean your community because you guys can’t take care of it.’ And I don’t have an answer to that.”

    But she did advise this: If you are inspired to clean up litter in your community, see if someone is already doing just that! Oftentimes tensions arise in changing neighborhoods because longtime residents think (white) newcomers are recreating and replacing efforts that have already been underway. “Say, ‘Hey I’m new here, are there folks already doing this and how can I participate?’” she says. “‘And if there’s not, then is there a way for people who want to help start something up?’ That process can be daunting at times, but I think that’s how you don’t step on people’s toes, that’s how you build community, and it shows that you’re an ally — not, ‘I’m coming here to take over.’”

    So here’s what I would caution if you, TRASH, are inspired to start your own similar enterprise in a neighborhood in which you are a newcomer. You won’t get far without the buy-in of your longtime resident neighbors, and you won’t get that buy-in with the assumption that they’re totally fine with all the trash lying around and just haven’t thought about how to deal with it. Remember: You’re trying to build a safe and clean community around your home, and that’s what all your neighbors want as well.

    Collaboratively,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How do I get my neighbors to stop littering?

    Dear Umbra,

    Why do you think people litter, and what is the best way to discourage littering in one’s community when there is wide economic disparity?

    — Taking Responsibility Around Scraps, Honorably


    Dear TRASH,

    I get the sense that you’re writing from or about a gentrifying neighborhood, a rich source of tensions in Umbra’s mailbox. And litter itself is such a deeply complex salad of environmental issues!  

    We can begin with the obvious: the fact that we wouldn’t have so much litter without the production of so many single-use items that need to be disposed of. According to the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful, roadside litter decreased by 61 percent between 1969 and 2009, while the use of plastic packaging increased more than threefold — and accordingly, plastic litter increased by 165 percent. But there’s a plot twist! Keep America Beautiful, which is kind of the national authority on litter, was originally founded by packaging companies in the 1950s to frame waste as an issue of personal rather than corporate responsibility. So that’s the systemic background against which all personal trash-disposal choices take place.

    But the ways in which humans deal with trash are enormously complex! Here are two truths: Litter is generally perceived as ugly and unpleasant, and lower-income neighborhoods tend to have more litter. This isn’t, however, because people with less money care less about the cleanliness and beauty of their environment. Wesley Schultz, a social psychologist with California State University of Santa Monica, has spent a lot of time collecting data on why people litter, and the answer doesn’t have to do much with any internal motivation or value system. A more productive question, he says, would be: When do people litter?

    Turns out that litter begets more litter. If you see a sidewalk or parklet scattered with cigarette butts and beer cans and chip bags, you’re more likely to toss your own detritus there. The same is true if there’s no trash receptacle nearby. 

    “When we watch some litter or see a lot of litter, we say, ‘that person doesn’t care,’ or ‘that person has values that don’t align with mine,’” says Schultz. “And that turns out overwhelmingly not to be true. Most people think that littering is wrong; most people want to live in clean environments.”

    So you can see how there’s kind of a vicious cycle: Pre-existing litter inspires the idea that no one really cares how a certain area looks, so why bother keeping it clean, leading to more litter. There’s a clear corollary here in how we treat low-income neighborhoods on a society-wide scale: They are the sites of garbage incinerators, polluting industrial operations, and straight-up illegal dumping. If some company or entity is coming into your neighborhood and dumping or spewing hazardous waste everywhere, stray cigarette butts will probably seem like the least of your problems.

    There’s an interesting tidbit that I found in an analysis of roadside litter in the state of Pennsylvania. More than half of all roadside litter was found to have been thrown from cars by drivers, and arterial roads and highways carry a greater concentration of litter per mile than local roads, which suggests a greater tendency to litter in a place that you’re simply passing through than in one that you call home. In the case of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, for example, the rush of outsider revelers to new bars and restaurants created a whole bunch of new street trash — an instance of the gentrification process making a neighborhood dirtier!

    Which brings us to yet another problem facing low-income neighborhoods. If you’re constantly being pushed from one neighborhood to another due to rising rents, what motivation do you have to invest in the community where you happen to have a lease? And once a neighborhood gets cleaned up and more desirable to live in, does that mean that it soon won’t be affordable for the people who already live there? When a community does get together to make a neighborhood cleaner and more beautiful and more appealing to live in, it seems wildly unfair for anyone who participated in that effort to then be pushed out. 

    Dave Breingan, executive director of the community development organization Lawrenceville United in Pittsburgh, suggests that community trash pickups are a really simple way to bring together newcomers and longtime residents of a neighborhood. “For people who are new to the neighborhood, I think it’s important that they understand the work that has already been done in that place by their neighbors and get to know them, and understand what the issues are for the gentrified,” he explains. “And if you’re moving into a community you do have a sense of responsibility to the people who helped make that neighborhood livable for you.”

    One such community trash pickup in Pittsburgh is an annual event called the Garbage Olympics, which — full disclosure — my sister helps organize. The premise is that neighborhoods compete against one another to see who can pick up the most litter. It’s been a successful way to introduce neighbors to one another and form community bonds, and guess what? Those bonds are theoretically how you organize against policies that restrict zoning and prevent the creation of affordable housing, if displacement is a concern for you. Or, on a shorter-term scale, it’s how you get together and demand better waste infrastructure (like sidewalk trash cans and recycling receptacles) in your neighborhood! 

    Renée Robinson, a co-founder of the Garbage Olympics and a longtime Pittsburgh resident, acknowledges that some uncomfortable racial and socioeconomic dynamics can come into play during the pickups. “I find that more young white people are picking up trash than Black people” who already live in the community, she says, which can create friction. “Because you do want people to do things to clean your community, regardless of color or socioeconomic status, but it can be like, ‘I’m coming in to clean your community because you guys can’t take care of it.’ And I don’t have an answer to that.”

    But she did advise this: If you are inspired to clean up litter in your community, see if someone is already doing just that! Oftentimes tensions arise in changing neighborhoods because longtime residents think (white) newcomers are recreating and replacing efforts that have already been underway. “Say, ‘Hey I’m new here, are there folks already doing this and how can I participate?’” she says. “‘And if there’s not, then is there a way for people who want to help start something up?’ That process can be daunting at times, but I think that’s how you don’t step on people’s toes, that’s how you build community, and it shows that you’re an ally — not, ‘I’m coming here to take over.’”

    So here’s what I would caution if you, TRASH, are inspired to start your own similar enterprise in a neighborhood in which you are a newcomer. You won’t get far without the buy-in of your longtime resident neighbors, and you won’t get that buy-in with the assumption that they’re totally fine with all the trash lying around and just haven’t thought about how to deal with it. Remember: You’re trying to build a safe and clean community around your home, and that’s what all your neighbors want as well.

    Collaboratively,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How do I get my neighbors to stop littering? on Apr 8, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • We found them: The weirdest questions on living sustainably

    Here at Ask Umbra HQ, we receive many fascinating climate-adjacent questions every day, and we endeavor to answer the ones that we think will be most applicable and interesting to you, dear readers. And then there are the ones that end up in the metaphorical compost bin, because they are just a tad unhinged.

    But this week, on a day whose best self is ostensibly a celebration of fun and foolery, we went digging into said bin to share with you a few of the more oddball queries. Let’s celebrate these rejected letters in the spirit of “no bad questions!” Please enjoy. 

    Q. If I melt the endless small amounts of plastic wrap, bags, etc., of unknowable composition into a solid mass, what can be done with it? 

    I mean, truly the only limit here is the boundaries of your imagination. You can do anything your precious heart desires with a large, melted hunk of plastic — use it as a table centerpiece or a projectile for a made-up sport, cover it in whipped cream and serve it to someone as a practical joke, attach it to a chain and wear it as a statement necklace. 

    But my biggest question is: Why? Is this a bearing-the-cross statement in honor of Easter? Do you want to keep a constant reminder of the trash you’ve created? Or are you inventing your own bespoke form of plastic recycling? (That’s not quite how it works.) No matter your intent, I doubt it’s worth the effort — and potential toxic fumes — to create … a plastic lump? Burning garbage is generally frowned upon in terms of the air pollution it can create. Definitely don’t do this indoors. I just don’t see a method that will make this exercise worthwhile!

    Q. Even if I place all my waste products in a Mason jar and seal it — what if it breaks and all its contents leak into the landfill?!!! 

    Baby, that’s just show business! The whole trash-in-a-Mason-jar thing was envisioned as a sort of viral way to help people minimize the waste they produce. It involves producing so little garbage that you can fit a year’s worth of trash into a 16-ounce glass jar. So right, your question seems to be: What do you do with the jar at the end of the year?

    Because if you succeed at this challenge, that doesn’t mean the Mason jar, once filled and sealed, suddenly has the power to evaporate said trash into nonexistence. In fact, the smartest thing to do would be to empty the contents of the jar into the garbage, wash the jar out, and use it all over again. 

    The way you propose to use said trash jar seems to be a rather inconvenient and, I have to say, resource-intensive substitute for a garbage bag. I can almost guarantee that if you put all of your waste products into a mason jar, it will break and its contents will leak into the landfill. 

    Q. Bigfin squid I NEED MORE INFO. I need information can you help?

    I am comically far from a squid authority: A few years ago I was so confident that the diameter of a giant squid’s eyeball was 8 feet that I bet on it with an ex-boyfriend. The only thing I find more infuriating than knowing so little about the mysteries of the deep ocean is losing at gambling. And of course I lost that bet! Imagine an organism with an 8-foot-wide eyeball! (It’s closer to 1 foot, by the way, which is still absurd.)

    And yet, I live to serve. So I googled “bigfin squid” and after a brief perusal of the top image results I have to tell you that in this particular case, I absolutely refuse to help. This creature is a 25-foot-long daddy longlegs that swims, and fortunately for everyone it’s very rarely seen. And for everyone’s mental health, let’s keep it that way! 

    Q. I want to grow up and act my age. Therefore, do I make the first step by throwing away my stuffed animals? 

    My heart! I actually don’t think this question is that weird, as many adults still have a stuffed animal or two lurking in their homes. I assume that this question came my way because it deals with the ever-alluring topic of “disposing of things responsibly,” which applies to around half of the dilemmas that land in my inbox. 

    Our younger selves can imbue stuffed animals, dolls, and even less anthropomorphic toys with entire personalities. Children especially love to find and invent ways to relate to the things around them, and I think that’s beautiful! Now that you are an adult, I don’t think abandoning that instinct for empathy is necessarily a requirement for you to “grow up and act your age.” 

    But I’ll admit that there is something a little eyebrow-raising about an adult bedroom filled to the brim with stuffies. I’m not sure how old you are now, but one assumes that you will eventually occupy an adult bedroom and the time will come for at least some of your stuffed animals to move on to new homes. 

    I’ll propose the following solutions:

    1. Keep your dearest, most well-loved, and probably filthiest stuffed animals in some sort of memory chest. You’ll be so happy to see them from time to time when you’re grown up! 
    2. Of the remaining stuffed animals, ask your friends to come over and take the ones they like most! If you’re of an age where you feel embarrassed revealing your collection to your friends, proceed to step 3.
    3. Donate your best-condition stuffed animals to a local toy drive or Goodwill or similar organization. They have a chance to be loved by someone else!
    4. As a last resort, 2012 Umbra covered the recycling of stuffed animals, which do count as textiles, as long as they’re clean and dry. 

    I don’t usually have time to answer all the weird and wonderful questions you send into Umbra, so this has been a real treat. But I want to emphasize that if you think your question is dumb, please send it because I sincerely love all forms of wonderment. And maybe others are wondering the same things you are — even about hentai! (We’ll save that one for next April Fool’s Day.)

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline We found them: The weirdest questions on living sustainably on Apr 1, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • I have a COVID-19 vaccine appointment. Do I deserve it?

    Dear Umbra,

    I am eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine and my doctor has contacted me about an upcoming appointment. But I feel like others in more polluted communities could use it more than me. Should I get it or wait?

    — Self-Hating Over Terrible System

    Dear SHOTS,

    Vaccine guilt is certainly the newest symptom to arise in the year-long psychodrama that is the COVID-19 pandemic. Before you even get to the ethical quandaries of worthiness, determining one’s own vaccine eligibility status is a challenge in its own right. Every state has a disparate and often Byzantine system to decide which groups should have priority over others, and those lists are updated and modified seemingly every other week! Twenty-something-year-old smokers in one state may have no trouble getting a vaccine appointment while in another, seniors with severe asthma are still waiting for a call from their doctor.

    COVID-19 vaccine eligibility, as it turns out, isn’t much of a meritocracy. Add to that the fact that privileged groups — those with faster internet access and familiarity, more powerful social connections, and more free time — can more easily navigate the system of appointments, and you have a recipe for public health injustice.

    The cruelest reality of the vaccine system is that it is exactly those who are likely to struggle to get a COVID-19 vaccine appointment who need the shot the most! That includes people of color, service workers, the elderly, and the disabled. And to your point, those demographic groups are more likely to live in heavily polluted communities. Exposure to air pollution has been shown to be a significant risk factor for more severe COVID-19 outcomes. And yet, those burdened neighborhoods have been shunted aside in the vaccine rollout in places like Chicago.

    You, SHOTS, have found yourself in a much-coveted position: You can access the vaccine in every sense of the word. There is a whole world of advice already out there about whether or not a person should take a vaccine when offered one, and the answer from medical professionals seems to be a resounding “yes, please, take it!” The larger goal of vaccinations is to create herd immunity, so the more people who can no longer act as disease vectors, the better.

    And yet! Not every vaccination story screams “public health triumph.” Personally, any time I hear about someone who rushed to a clinic after hours to grab an extra dose they found out about via a friend of a friend, I think: Wasn’t there anyone you could have called who might need it more? Because while herd immunity is certainly the end goal, protecting those who have a higher risk of death by virtue of their jobs, health issues, or surrounding environment is a more urgent need. This dilemma will (hopefully) fade as more and more extremely vulnerable people are vaccinated, but in the meantime, there’s certainly no small amount of self-flagellation associated with getting a spot ahead of others in the lengthy vaccine line.

    And yet the logistics of your particular situation limit your options. If you make an appointment for yourself to get a vaccine and pull a switcheroo at the last minute with a friend, family member, or even acquaintance who you feel needs it more, your intended good deed would likely yield a host of complications for the proffering hospital, clinic, or health department. Your decision could just end up being counterproductive for the vaccine distribution process. And the workers in that system are under extreme duress as it is!

    You want to know what to do about your individual vaccine appointment, but that might be the wrong question to ask if your concern is really about environmental and epidemiological injustice. Perhaps we should start with why air pollution isn’t one of the factors that qualifies you to get a vaccine despite the fact that compromised lungs tend to make you more susceptible to respiratory illness. If you can claim to have smoked 100 cigarettes in your lifetime, for example, you will currently find yourself in a vaccine priority group in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and a handful of other states — because, yes, being a smoker makes you more susceptible to COVID-19. 

    Why ask people to count every drunken Marlboro of their existence rather than their distance from the nearest coal-burning power plant or major freeway? Well, determining someone’s exposure to air pollution is a far more complicated thing to figure out, said Russell Zerbo, an advocate with the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia. “How would you even begin to put that in an evaluation to figure out someone’s need?” Zero asked. “How deep are you going to go into someone’s life in terms of questionnaires, and is it at the front of their mind that they live next to this demolition site or other possible source of air pollution?”

    Not that it’s a bad idea — just difficult to execute. Zerbo said it would be “pretty radical, in a good way” to include questions in the eligibility questionnaires that address what kind of a neighborhood you live in, what kind of pollution sources are nearby, what the condition of the inside of your home is. (Because, not to fearmonger, but there are many potent sources of air pollution, even inside your very own kitchen!) 

    Air quality itself is something that is famously variable in how it’s measured and shared with the community. It can vary pretty significantly across even city blocks, and is affected by so many different forms of contamination, be it particulate matter or toxic chemicals or a combo platter of both, which is the specialty of my home of Allegheny County. But that said, it’s no secret that some neighborhoods and towns have far more documented sources of air pollution. It’s no secret where the industrial facilities, trash incinerators, and shipping warehouses in your city are located. Even the Environmental Protection Agency has an interactive tool where you can get a pretty good sense of your area’s pollution burden.

    And certain areas have tried to take neighborhood factors into their COVID-19 vaccine rollout. In Dallas County, Texas, officials actually attempted to prioritize certain ZIP codes so that all residents of these poorer, more racially diverse, and heavily polluted areas would be eligible. But then the state government shot that down idea, threatening to reduce their vaccine allocation unless they returned to the standard age-based system. 

    I posed your specific vaccine question to Sherri Mixon, the director of the T.R. Hoover Community Development Center in South Dallas, who is working with a group of local stakeholders to get the less computer-savvy residents of the area vaccinated. 

    “I’d tell that reader to not feel guilty,” she said, “But I’m gonna tell that reader also: Now that you are aware of the disparity, use your voice, use your skill, get out there and help those communities, because when you help them, you also help your city as a whole. We can’t get back to our regular way of life until we are all vaccinated. And it’s gonna take people that are vaccinated to go back and work in these communities to help others become vaccinated.”

    The guilt you are feeling over your level of privilege does not in and of itself help those who are less fortunate. COVID-19 is a dire threat and has caused untold damage — physical, economic, psychological — in the past year, but the disparities in death rates and vaccine distribution are expressions of the racial and socioeconomic inequities that have permeated American society for generations. Once the pandemic ends, those injustices still have to be dealt with!

    For example, I talked to 76-year-old activist and former U.S. Steel employee Art Thomas, who has lived in the Western Pennsylvania town of Clairton almost his entire life. Clairtonians breathe some of the most toxic air in the entire country, courtesy of one of the very few remaining steel mills in the region that continues to operate there, and the town has extremely high rates of both cancer risk and poverty. Here’s what Thomas said to me: 

    “I believe Clairton air is killing more people here than all the violence and coronavirus and everything else. Personally, I don’t know anyone in the city of Clairton that died from COVID. If you want to get into people with cancers, pulmonary diseases, sleeping with CPACs and stuff like that, I know a whole bunch of them. I wear a mask, I wash my hands, I keep my distance, I don’t go to Trump rallies, so I think I’ll survive the COVID. But I gotta breathe every day the stuff they’re putting in the air, so I’m more scared of the Clairton mill.”

    There are plenty of opportunities for vaccinated individuals to give back right now: You could volunteer with the local health department, for example, which can probably use extra hands doing administrative work for clinics. But what about after the pandemic? I urge you not to abandon your concerns for those polluted communities. Do some research into civic engagement opportunities. What meetings and votes can you show up to? What organizations can you volunteer for? Offer to help wherever you can, while being careful not to assume you know what’s best. 

    One day we won’t have to be afraid of every cough within a 1-mile radius, and that will be an excellent day indeed! But it won’t mean that every threat to marginalized or vulnerable people has been abolished. There’s still work to be done.

    In good health,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • I have a COVID-19 vaccine appointment. Do I deserve it?

    Dear Umbra,

    I am eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine and my doctor has contacted me about an upcoming appointment. But I feel like others in more polluted communities could use it more than me. Should I get it or wait?

    — Self-Hating Over Terrible System


    Dear SHOTS,

    Vaccine guilt is certainly the newest symptom to arise in the year-long psychodrama that is the COVID-19 pandemic. Before you even get to the ethical quandaries of worthiness, determining one’s own vaccine eligibility status is a challenge in its own right. Every state has a disparate and often Byzantine system to decide which groups should have priority over others, and those lists are updated and modified seemingly every other week! Twenty-something-year-old smokers in one state may have no trouble getting a vaccine appointment while in another, seniors with severe asthma are still waiting for a call from their doctor.

    COVID-19 vaccine eligibility, as it turns out, isn’t much of a meritocracy. Add to that the fact that privileged groups — those with faster internet access and familiarity, more powerful social connections, and more free time — can more easily navigate the system of appointments, and you have a recipe for public health injustice.

    The cruelest reality of the vaccine system is that it is exactly those who are likely to struggle to get a COVID-19 vaccine appointment who need the shot the most! That includes people of color, service workers, the elderly, and the disabled. And to your point, those demographic groups are more likely to live in heavily polluted communities. Exposure to air pollution has been shown to be a significant risk factor for more severe COVID-19 outcomes. And yet, those burdened neighborhoods have been shunted aside in the vaccine rollout in places like Chicago.

    You, SHOTS, have found yourself in a much-coveted position: You can access the vaccine in every sense of the word. There is a whole world of advice already out there about whether or not a person should take a vaccine when offered one, and the answer from medical professionals seems to be a resounding “yes, please, take it!” The larger goal of vaccinations is to create herd immunity, so the more people who can no longer act as disease vectors, the better.

    And yet! Not every vaccination story screams “public health triumph.” Personally, any time I hear about someone who rushed to a clinic after hours to grab an extra dose they found out about via a friend of a friend, I think: Wasn’t there anyone you could have called who might need it more? Because while herd immunity is certainly the end goal, protecting those who have a higher risk of death by virtue of their jobs, health issues, or surrounding environment is a more urgent need. This dilemma will (hopefully) fade as more and more extremely vulnerable people are vaccinated, but in the meantime, there’s certainly no small amount of self-flagellation associated with getting a spot ahead of others in the lengthy vaccine line.

    And yet the logistics of your particular situation limit your options. If you make an appointment for yourself to get a vaccine and pull a switcheroo at the last minute with a friend, family member, or even acquaintance who you feel needs it more, your intended good deed would likely yield a host of complications for the proffering hospital, clinic, or health department. Your decision could just end up being counterproductive for the vaccine distribution process. And the workers in that system are under extreme duress as it is!

    You want to know what to do about your individual vaccine appointment, but that might be the wrong question to ask if your concern is really about environmental and epidemiological injustice. Perhaps we should start with why air pollution isn’t one of the factors that qualifies you to get a vaccine despite the fact that compromised lungs tend to make you more susceptible to respiratory illness. If you can claim to have smoked 100 cigarettes in your lifetime, for example, you will currently find yourself in a vaccine priority group in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and a handful of other states — because, yes, being a smoker makes you more susceptible to COVID-19. 

    Why ask people to count every drunken Marlboro of their existence rather than their distance from the nearest coal-burning power plant or major freeway? Well, determining someone’s exposure to air pollution is a far more complicated thing to figure out, said Russell Zerbo, an advocate with the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia. “How would you even begin to put that in an evaluation to figure out someone’s need?” Zero asked. “How deep are you going to go into someone’s life in terms of questionnaires, and is it at the front of their mind that they live next to this demolition site or other possible source of air pollution?”

    Not that it’s a bad idea — just difficult to execute. Zerbo said it would be “pretty radical, in a good way” to include questions in the eligibility questionnaires that address what kind of a neighborhood you live in, what kind of pollution sources are nearby, what the condition of the inside of your home is. (Because, not to fearmonger, but there are many potent sources of air pollution, even inside your very own kitchen!) 

    Air quality itself is something that is famously variable in how it’s measured and shared with the community. It can vary pretty significantly across even city blocks, and is affected by so many different forms of contamination, be it particulate matter or toxic chemicals or a combo platter of both, which is the specialty of my home of Allegheny County. But that said, it’s no secret that some neighborhoods and towns have far more documented sources of air pollution. It’s no secret where the industrial facilities, trash incinerators, and shipping warehouses in your city are located. Even the Environmental Protection Agency has an interactive tool where you can get a pretty good sense of your area’s pollution burden.

    And certain areas have tried to take neighborhood factors into their COVID-19 vaccine rollout. In Dallas County, Texas, officials actually attempted to prioritize certain ZIP codes so that all residents of these poorer, more racially diverse, and heavily polluted areas would be eligible. But then the state government shot that down idea, threatening to reduce their vaccine allocation unless they returned to the standard age-based system. 

    I posed your specific vaccine question to Sherri Mixon, the director of the T.R. Hoover Community Development Center in South Dallas, who is working with a group of local stakeholders to get the less computer-savvy residents of the area vaccinated. 

    “I’d tell that reader to not feel guilty,” she said, “But I’m gonna tell that reader also: Now that you are aware of the disparity, use your voice, use your skill, get out there and help those communities, because when you help them, you also help your city as a whole. We can’t get back to our regular way of life until we are all vaccinated. And it’s gonna take people that are vaccinated to go back and work in these communities to help others become vaccinated.”

    The guilt you are feeling over your level of privilege does not in and of itself help those who are less fortunate. COVID-19 is a dire threat and has caused untold damage — physical, economic, psychological — in the past year, but the disparities in death rates and vaccine distribution are expressions of the racial and socioeconomic inequities that have permeated American society for generations. Once the pandemic ends, those injustices still have to be dealt with!

    For example, I talked to 76-year-old activist and former U.S. Steel employee Art Thomas, who has lived in the Western Pennsylvania town of Clairton almost his entire life. Clairtonians breathe some of the most toxic air in the entire country, courtesy of one of the very few remaining steel mills in the region that continues to operate there, and the town has extremely high rates of both cancer risk and poverty. Here’s what Thomas said to me: 

    “I believe Clairton air is killing more people here than all the violence and coronavirus and everything else. Personally, I don’t know anyone in the city of Clairton that died from COVID. If you want to get into people with cancers, pulmonary diseases, sleeping with CPACs and stuff like that, I know a whole bunch of them. I wear a mask, I wash my hands, I keep my distance, I don’t go to Trump rallies, so I think I’ll survive the COVID. But I gotta breathe every day the stuff they’re putting in the air, so I’m more scared of the Clairton mill.”

    There are plenty of opportunities for vaccinated individuals to give back right now: You could volunteer with the local health department, for example, which can probably use extra hands doing administrative work for clinics. But what about after the pandemic? I urge you not to abandon your concerns for those polluted communities. Do some research into civic engagement opportunities. What meetings and votes can you show up to? What organizations can you volunteer for? Offer to help wherever you can, while being careful not to assume you know what’s best. 

    One day we won’t have to be afraid of every cough within a 1-mile radius, and that will be an excellent day indeed! But it won’t mean that every threat to marginalized or vulnerable people has been abolished. There’s still work to be done.

    In good health,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline I have a COVID-19 vaccine appointment. Do I deserve it? on Mar 18, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • How do I tell if my relationship is worth the gas mileage?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    I started dating a woman who I met on an app during COVID-19. The relationship requires me to drive several hours every other weekend, which is fine for now, but I feel pretty guilty about all that driving from a climate perspective! But the other thing is, we’ve spent such little time together I’m not sure I really like this person or if I just don’t want to be alone.

    — Romance Or Minimized Emissions? Oof

    A. Dear ROMEO,

    There are so, so, so many unenviable romantic situations to be in during COVID-19. Just every single one seems difficult! My heart certainly goes out to the cohabiting, the married, the forced-into-a-serious-relationship-by-shutdown-order. But the single-and-seeking in particular? Let me speak from experience when I say: Woof!

    The very last thing I did before shutdown, a year ago this very week, was an extremely run-of-the-mill tacos-and-margaritas date with someone I’d been seeing in a super casual capacity. He was perfectly nice, but it was clear we had no interest in a serious future together. However, once it sunk in that (1) meeting new people would now constitute both an ethical and medical hazard and (2) I would be very much alone in a studio apartment for the foreseeable future, I started to think: “Maybe this guy is good for me! Perhaps we should weather this storm together and it will bring us closer!”

    I didn’t end up acting on that particular misguided, warm body-seeking impulse and neither did he. We didn’t see each other again and probably never will. And as much as the pursuant months were very, very lonely and isolated, I didn’t question that decision. Because — as you reference in your own question — it doesn’t feel good to tie yourself to something that your heart simply isn’t in! It can even make you feel lonelier. And we can find ourselves searching for concrete, rational excuses to leave these tepid relationships, such as, “the gas mileage of this relationship is weighing on my climate conscience.” This dilemma has actually come up in this very column before!

    If you are someone who is generally trying to lead a climate-conscious life — as you seem to be, given you’re concerned about the gas expenditures of driving to and from your girlfriend’s home — then you are probably familiar with the sensation of having to choose among several lackluster options. Let’s say there’s no good public transit and/or decent bike infrastructure in your town, so you buy as efficient a hybrid car as you can afford. Problem solved, right? But then you find yourself meticulously weighing the various planetary pros and cons of everything in the grocery aisle. You might even go down the extremely never-ending rabbit hole of what makes a “truly sustainable” purchase.

    The more you examine your life, the more you will realize how many compromises — climate and otherwise — we have to make if we are to meet our own modern, human needs. Relationships are no exception. I have also experienced the sinking feeling that there are no good matches out there, and the related downer thought that you’ll eventually have to lower your standards or be alone forever.

    And yet, it’s an undeniable fact that there are far more humans than there are net-zero-carbon items — even in a Seattle grocery co-op! And in the age of dating apps, that platitudinous sentiment really is truer than ever before. If you were an economics major examining the situation, you’d note you have many thousands of options at your literal fingertips. That incredible variety theoretically should provide a sort of countercurrent to the desire to simply shack up with the next person who checks enough of your boxes. If the goal of dating is to find the most optimized partner possible, why would you call off the hunt when your best option could be just around the corner?

    The entire premise of economics is that humans make rational decisions, which is why economics is an extremely flawed field. An excellent example of this is the realm of ostensibly environmentally-driven decisions, for which there are all kinds of measurable factors you can weigh against each other. Certain variables can be in conflict with each other and their relative values are difficult to estimate, but you could put together a spreadsheet and more or less figure out how one choice empirically compares to another in terms of carbon emissions or water usage or anything in that realm. Climate scientists do it all the time! That’s how we know things, like that red meat has a higher carbon footprint than chicken, and that cotton is a more water-intensive crop than polyester.

    And yet, over and over and over again, people will choose with their feelings over facts. You can know that by nearly every climate measure, a cheeseburger is a terrible dietary decision, but you will find a way to rationalize it if your craving for one is strong enough. I get dozens of emails from readers who feel guilty about air travel because they know about its prodigious carbon footprint. Guess what? I guarantee you that no matter what I say, each of those letter-writers will continue to take flights, if it’s to a destination they’ve always dreamed of or to see a person they dearly miss.

    Regular readers of this column know that I generally take a pretty easygoing stance when it comes to relatively minor climate sins, because the culpability of your average car commuter is negligible compared to fossil fuel companies, denialist politicians, and the big banks that fund them. We will eventually have to abandon some climate-threatening activities like driving gas-powered cars, and I appreciate that you’re already thinking about that, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with your actual dilemma here. You want to know how you feel about your current partner, and carbon footprints have nothing to do with that.

    I’m not berating you: To be clear, I’ve also been in this position. But since we are so inclined to just follow our heart’s desire when it comes to so many other, far less consequential daily choices than potentially choosing a life partner, for crying out loud, it seems insane that there’s such a block for knowing how you feel about someone. Why is it so hard to simply follow one’s feelings when it comes to romantic decisions, the one arena in which it is most advisable to do so?

    I think the easiest way to know whether you want someone in your life is to note if you miss them when they’re not. And it seems that you have plenty of opportunity to test this, if your potential person lives a couple of hours away. (I have to say — if you’re even willing to travel this distance, there has to be something appealing about this person!) Do you want to tell them things throughout the day? When you’re alone and want company, do you think of them specifically or do others come to mind? And when you have plans to see this person, do you feel happy anticipation, lukewarm dread, or nothing at all?

    My advice to you is to stop trying to measure and weigh and simply feel what you feel. Trust your instincts! And give yourself all the time you need to let those instincts really talk to you!

    Relatably,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How do I tell if my relationship is worth the gas mileage? on Mar 11, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Should I pay the true price for all the trash I produce?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    Charging consumers the full life-cycle cost, including the cost of disposal, of what they buy seems easy. Would it work?

    — Not Only Wise, Also Saves Tons of Emissions

    A. Dear NO WASTE,

    There’s been a recent surge in the social awareness of waste. Even since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many stores are reporting an uptick in interest in sustainability and no/low-waste products. Climate-conscious consumers are channeling their single-use guilt into enthusiasm for brands with limited packaging, recycled jeans, and reusable food wrappers. And, one might reason, what better way of educating shoppers about the environmental impacts of their purchases than having the full life-cycle climate cost reflected in the price tag?

    In a way, that idea reflects something called the “polluter pays principle.” It’s a concept that comes up in international climate negotiations to explain why companies from wealthy, industrialized countries should give money to developing nations to help offset the environmental damage inflicted in the process of building said wealth. It’s more or less what it sounds like: Whoever made the mess — be it carbon emissions or chemical runoff or a gazillion microplastics — should pay to clean it up in the end.

    But polluting companies aren’t engaging in mischief entirely for their own benefit. If you buy something from one of these polluting entities or use their services in some way, you arguably bear some responsibility for the mess resulting from your purchase’s creation and disposal. But is it really fair to suggest that consumers are just as much to blame for the environmental hazards of the industrial process as the producers? I think not.

    Consumer demand isn’t completely inconsequential, nor is it the driving force behind all industry decisions. The reality of modern markets and consumption is far more complex than that. Sure, people want and need to buy things to feed or clothe or otherwise take care of themselves, but businesses also have hidden ways of selling you as many of those things as humanly possible. It’s hardly your fault, for example, that the little recycling symbol means next to nothing. Or that the expensive cell phone you tell yourself you’ll use for the next decade was actually built to fail after three years.

    I think you’re suggesting that if consumers had to pay for the full disposal process of all that they buy, they’d buy far fewer unnecessary items. Businesses would then be forced to produce far fewer items, and we’d end up with less waste. I definitely see how this could be advantageous for things like electronics, which produce very expensive and hard-to-deal-with waste, and how it might be a way to curb the whole practice of planned obsolescence. (Note that France recently dealt with this problem by requiring companies to let consumers know how easy certain electronic products are to repair, instead of making those products more expensive.)

    However, in practice, there are many disadvantages to this full carbon footprint strategy of pricing. In fact, it raises a lot of the same issues of the old “individual climate responsibility” versus “systemic change” debate (that old chestnut!). Even if large companies and governments — the ones with the real power to institute systemic change — have made terrible decisions in the past with regard to climate change, what good is it for individuals to pay the price? Of course, individuals have benefited from those government or corporate decisions because we pay an artificially low price for things like food, clothing, and energy.

    There are reasons that “sustainably made” jeans cost $200. Perhaps the denim is made from regeneratively farmed cotton in a fair-wage factory that uses nontoxic dyes and offsets its water usage. It takes a lot of money to clean up your manufacturing process and compensate your employees well! But the reality is that not every consumer can afford to make the most climate-friendly purchase. Adding on the eventual cost of recycling that fabric or offsetting the carbon emissions the cotton will release in a landfill just feels excessive!

    If we propose that everyone pay the real cost — one that takes into account all the pollution that any single item produces — of everything they consume, we might be forgetting that there are many millions of Americans who can barely afford even those falsely cheap necessities. The idea of adding the cost of disposal to the price of any item is basically instituting a sort of sales tax, and as we already know, that’s a highly regressive form of tax because it disproportionately burdens people with lower incomes.

    Why? Because everyone needs to buy basic things like food and clothing, but they make up a far larger proportion of a poor household’s spending than a wealthy one’s. It just doesn’t seem right that someone who makes $20,000 a year pays the same amount of tax on a cell phone as someone who makes $200,000 a year. By the same token, it’s not really fair for that person making $20,000 to suddenly have to pay, say, 30 percent more for that cell phone, even if that reflects the true cost of its disposal.

    In my opinion, the easiest solution to the myriad “who’s picking up this check?” type problems associated with environmental and climate responsibility is to let governments take care of it, rather than foisting additional burdens onto households. And here’s the thing: You do already help pay for the government to dispose of your waste — in the form of taxes, garbage bills, and in some municipalities, like Seattle, a whole extra utility charge.

    Granted, there is at least one intriguing international example of the “polluter pays” doctrine. Switzerland is considered to be something of a marvel in terms of how much of its waste is recycled. That’s often attributed to the fact that both businesses and individuals are considered “polluters” and charged for the disposal of waste. For example, trash bags are heavily taxed, giving Swiss consumers an incentive to alter their consumption habits to produce less trash. They even have actual trash police to enforce proper recycling practices!

    But we’re back to the equity issue. Switzerland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and more importantly, it has a heftier social welfare system than the United States. If by some political miracle you were able to pass the sort of planet-focused pricing system you suggest and suddenly everything you could possibly buy was significantly more expensive than it was yesterday, there would be riots in the streets! Have you ever seen the strength of opposition to a ballot initiative that would result in a 0.1 percent tax increase?

    In the end, making things more expensive is never, ever going to be the best way to get people on board with more environmentally sound practices. Any really sustainable climate future is going to have to be built on more constructive policies than punitive ones.

    Analytically,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Should I pay the true price for all the trash I produce?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    Charging consumers the full life-cycle cost, including the cost of disposal, of what they buy seems easy. Would it work?

    — Not Only Wise, Also Saves Tons of Emissions

    A. Dear NO WASTE,

    There’s been a recent surge in the social awareness of waste. Even since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many stores are reporting an uptick in interest in sustainability and no/low-waste products. Climate-conscious consumers are channeling their single-use guilt into enthusiasm for brands with limited packaging, recycled jeans, and reusable food wrappers. And, one might reason, what better way of educating shoppers about the environmental impacts of their purchases than having the full life-cycle climate cost reflected in the price tag?

    In a way, that idea reflects something called the “polluter pays principle.” It’s a concept that comes up in international climate negotiations to explain why companies from wealthy, industrialized countries should give money to developing nations to help offset the environmental damage inflicted in the process of building said wealth. It’s more or less what it sounds like: Whoever made the mess — be it carbon emissions or chemical runoff or a gazillion microplastics — should pay to clean it up in the end.

    But polluting companies aren’t engaging in mischief entirely for their own benefit. If you buy something from one of these polluting entities or use their services in some way, you arguably bear some responsibility for the mess resulting from your purchase’s creation and disposal. But is it really fair to suggest that consumers are just as much to blame for the environmental hazards of the industrial process as the producers? I think not.

    Consumer demand isn’t completely inconsequential, nor is it the driving force behind all industry decisions. The reality of modern markets and consumption is far more complex than that. Sure, people want and need to buy things to feed or clothe or otherwise take care of themselves, but businesses also have hidden ways of selling you as many of those things as humanly possible. It’s hardly your fault, for example, that the little recycling symbol means next to nothing. Or that the expensive cell phone you tell yourself you’ll use for the next decade was actually built to fail after three years.

    I think you’re suggesting that if consumers had to pay for the full disposal process of all that they buy, they’d buy far fewer unnecessary items. Businesses would then be forced to produce far fewer items, and we’d end up with less waste. I definitely see how this could be advantageous for things like electronics, which produce very expensive and hard-to-deal-with waste, and how it might be a way to curb the whole practice of planned obsolescence. (Note that France recently dealt with this problem by requiring companies to let consumers know how easy certain electronic products are to repair, instead of making those products more expensive.)

    However, in practice, there are many disadvantages to this full carbon footprint strategy of pricing. In fact, it raises a lot of the same issues of the old “individual climate responsibility” versus “systemic change” debate (that old chestnut!). Even if large companies and governments — the ones with the real power to institute systemic change — have made terrible decisions in the past with regard to climate change, what good is it for individuals to pay the price? Of course, individuals have benefited from those government or corporate decisions because we pay an artificially low price for things like food, clothing, and energy.

    There are reasons that “sustainably made” jeans cost $200. Perhaps the denim is made from regeneratively farmed cotton in a fair-wage factory that uses nontoxic dyes and offsets its water usage. It takes a lot of money to clean up your manufacturing process and compensate your employees well! But the reality is that not every consumer can afford to make the most climate-friendly purchase. Adding on the eventual cost of recycling that fabric or offsetting the carbon emissions the cotton will release in a landfill just feels excessive!

    If we propose that everyone pay the real cost — one that takes into account all the pollution that any single item produces — of everything they consume, we might be forgetting that there are many millions of Americans who can barely afford even those falsely cheap necessities. The idea of adding the cost of disposal to the price of any item is basically instituting a sort of sales tax, and as we already know, that’s a highly regressive form of tax because it disproportionately burdens people with lower incomes.

    Why? Because everyone needs to buy basic things like food and clothing, but they make up a far larger proportion of a poor household’s spending than a wealthy one’s. It just doesn’t seem right that someone who makes $20,000 a year pays the same amount of tax on a cell phone as someone who makes $200,000 a year. By the same token, it’s not really fair for that person making $20,000 to suddenly have to pay, say, 30 percent more for that cell phone, even if that reflects the true cost of its disposal.

    In my opinion, the easiest solution to the myriad “who’s picking up this check?” type problems associated with environmental and climate responsibility is to let governments take care of it, rather than foisting additional burdens onto households. And here’s the thing: You do already help pay for the government to dispose of your waste — in the form of taxes, garbage bills, and in some municipalities, like Seattle, a whole extra utility charge.

    Granted, there is at least one intriguing international example of the “polluter pays” doctrine. Switzerland is considered to be something of a marvel in terms of how much of its waste is recycled. That’s often attributed to the fact that both businesses and individuals are considered “polluters” and charged for the disposal of waste. For example, trash bags are heavily taxed, giving Swiss consumers an incentive to alter their consumption habits to produce less trash. They even have actual trash police to enforce proper recycling practices!

    But we’re back to the equity issue. Switzerland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and more importantly, it has a heftier social welfare system than the United States. If by some political miracle you were able to pass the sort of planet-focused pricing system you suggest and suddenly everything you could possibly buy was significantly more expensive than it was yesterday, there would be riots in the streets! Have you ever seen the strength of opposition to a ballot initiative that would result in a 0.1 percent tax increase?

    In the end, making things more expensive is never, ever going to be the best way to get people on board with more environmentally sound practices. Any really sustainable climate future is going to have to be built on more constructive policies than punitive ones.

    Analytically,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Should I pay the true price for all the trash I produce? on Mar 4, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • How can I make sure my used stuff goes to those who need it most?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    How do I tell who is really deserving of giveaways in my Buy Nothing group?

    — Reducing Our Belongings Is Nice

    A. Dear ROBIN,

    First of all, kudos to you for being part of your local reduce-reuse-recycle crowd. For those unfamiliar with the Buy Nothing Project, it’s a network of neighborhood-specific Facebook groups where people can offer up or ask for items without exchanging any cash. The environmental benefit of these groups is twofold: The giver isn’t chucking their discards into the landfill, and the receiver isn’t buying something new unnecessarily. And there’s a socially sustainable angle too: By sharing resources, you’re strengthening community bonds

    But as Buy Nothing veterans know, giveaways can get rather, well, competitive. Here’s a familiar scenario: You have a fairly desirable item to give away — a Le Creuset casserole dish, a seldom-used espresso maker, a Patagonia ski jacket that doesn’t fit anymore — and you post it to your local Buy Nothing group. Ten minutes later, you have 100 people clamoring for it in the comments section. Who deserves it?

    This dilemma unearths — as you seem to suggest in your question — a whole litany of thorny social issues, starting with the very concept of “deserving.” If we interpret “deserving” to mean the highest degree of desperation, that brings up the unsavory prospect of asking people to outdo each other in demonstrating their need — on a non-anonymized public forum, no less.

    But assessing need is wrapped up in the very definition of sustainability, at least according to a 1987 report from a United Nations commission. That group interpreted sustainable development, specifically, to mean something that adequately serves people alive today without compromising the needs of people alive in the future. “It contains within it two key concepts,” the document reads, “the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

    Great, so in essence, there are a finite amount of resources in the world, they’re not evenly distributed, and we should first and foremost focus on meeting the needs of those with the least access to those resources. One could definitely argue that the purpose of Buy Nothing groups very much lines up with that general ethos, until you get to that whole “those with the least access” part. Many groups leave it up to individual members to choose a “winner.” Some givers go with a “first come, first serve” approach, which can help them get rid of stuff in a timely manner. Others — like yourself, it seems — are willing to wait in order to get items to those with more need. But in the context of giving away your unneeded or unwanted possessions, how are you supposed to tell who falls into that category?

    I believe in your good intentions, but I can’t see a way to execute them that isn’t at least partially problematic. In American culture, there’s an enormous amount of shame associated with being in a position of need. Some people equate need with some kind of moral failing, i.e., “you must have done something wrong somewhere along the way to not have enough to take care of yourself and your family.” Obviously, anyone aware of the United States’ many disparity-laced systems — healthcare, student debt, and lending practices, to name a few — understands that this is not the case, but emotions are not necessarily tied to fact.

    The shame tied to not having enough is actually part of the origin of the whole Buy Nothing Network, according to Rebecca Rockefeller, one of its co-founders. She started the first Buy Nothing group about seven years ago when she found herself single-parenting on Bainbridge Island in western Washington. She had very little money, and found the various processes that she had to go through to obtain government benefits “endlessly demoralizing.”

    “The system was designed to make me focus on how little I had, and it made me just feel like I was being judged as a bad person because I had these economic circumstances out of my control,” she said.

    Rockefeller set up a Saturday free market where she and her neighbors could bring what they had to exchange, and she was able to barter food for her family with things she had grown or made. She described the experience of being in a position to give something to her community, as opposed to being wholly dependent upon them, as transformative.

    “We need to be able to be generous and expect generosity, and that’s part of living in a community with people where you’re not put on these different hierarchical levels of power, but where compassion and generosity are a flat field,” she explained. That’s why she says the Buy Nothing community tries to frame every exchange as a gift from one person to another, rather than a transfer of wealth from haves to have-nots.

    That being said, Rockefeller said it’s natural for some Buy Nothing members to fall into a “scarcity mindset,” fearing that if some undeserving people are benefiting too much — say, one particular person seems to hover over the high-value giveaways — then somehow the larger group will suffer for it. This is where, she suspects, your qualms about your giveaways going to the “right” person come from.

    It all comes back to the U.N. definition of “sustainability” as being grounded in limited resources. There are clear examples of situations where a “scarcity mindset” is appropriate. For a painfully current example, see many cities’ highly chaotic rollouts of COVID-19 vaccine. When it comes to life-saving and limited resources, it does make a lot of sense for them to go to the people who need them most, which is why there are “tiers” of recipients.

    But most American communities — not individual households but communities as a whole — do not suffer from a lack of stuff. Just because your unwanted toaster oven did not go to the “worthiest” candidate does not constitute a moral failing. In Rockefeller’s words: “All giving is good giving and it’s all equally important”

    You are not solely responsible for efficient redistribution of wealth; you are, instead, building a culture of generosity that will inevitably better serve those who really need it. And by growing closer with the people in your community, you’ll become better aware of their needs, including those they might not feel comfortable sharing on an online forum. After all, a real, “sustainable” giving economy can’t rely solely on isolated transactions!

    Sharingly,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How can I make sure my used stuff goes to those who need it most? on Feb 18, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Can Reddit do for clean energy what it did for GameStop?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    I heard r/wallstreetbets loves clean energy. Is that good news for climate change?

    – Seriously Tripping On Nihilistic Kangaroo Stocks

    A. Dear STONKS,

    You are no doubt thinking about last week’s hedge fund-frustrating GameStop stock rally and wondering if Reddit’s market-moving lightning might strike twice. Well, buckle up, this is going to take a bit of explaining.

    For readers who aren’t quite up to speed on the latest Wall Street drama, here’s what you missed: Several months ago, some users of the forum-based site (specifically those on a subreddit called r/wallstreetbets) noticed that a lot of hedge funds had bet against the video game retailer GameStop by borrowing shares of the company, selling them, and expecting to buy them back at a lower price before returning what they’d borrowed — a practice known as shorting. This bet kind of makes sense, since GameStop (a) closed hundreds of its stores in 2020 and (b) is still figuring out its place in a video game market moving toward downloads.

    But Redditors bet otherwise, noting that if the share price rose a bit, some market feedback loops would kick into gear, and the companies that had bet against the stock would be forced — squeezed, as it were — into buying back the shares at ever-higher prices. And so when news trickled down from GameStop HQ that some executive shake-ups might be on the horizon, the share price started to tick up and more r/wallstreetbets members jumped on the train. When those market feedback loops took over, the result was a bit shocking: Even though hedge funds commit this kind of assault on one another’s portfolios all the time, the fact that a bunch of ordinary people on the internet lit the kindling around this stock rally was something new.

    In one of his dives into the GameStop zeitgeist last week, Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine described the story as one of “utter nihilism.” It certainly has the contemporary trappings: Reddit day-traders, a gargantuan short squeeze, the rapper Ja Rule, complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission, chicken tenders dunked in champagne. But to your point, STONKS, what does all that have to do with climate futures?

    Well, indeed, beyond the other shorted stocks some r/wallstreetbets members are chasing down (including movie theater chain AMC and bat mitzvah dress emporium Express), a lot of the subreddit’s users are bullish on clean energy: They’re investing in BlackRock’s clean energy exchange-traded fund, or ETF (basically a vehicle to invest in green enterprises); electric vehicle-adjacent companies like Plug Power and Blink Charging; and Tesla, blessed on high from Papa Musk himself. And that’s significant given the community’s now-proven ability to move markets.

    So if Wall Street-minded Redditors like the clean energy stocks, isn’t that good news for climate change? It’s a good question, STONKS, and not one that has an easy answer. For one, most of the clean energy tickers that have caught the eye of the subreddit aren’t heavily shorted — and thus can’t be squeezed in the same manner as GameStop. (One exception is SunPower, a photovoltaic company.) The BlackRock clean energy ETF in question, which is pinned to the value of a whole bunch of stocks, won’t move more than a couple points per month.

    In other words, the self-described degenerates over at r/wallstreetbets aren’t betting on clean energy in hopes of once again unleashing havoc in the financial sector, but because the future of clean energy is bright! They’re expecting a Biden presidency to boost the market for solar panels and wind turbines and electric vehicles, and they want to get in early.

    Biden has already directed a handful of federal agencies to stamp out the practice of subsidizing the fossil-fuel industry. In the investment world, we’d call that decision “indicative of regulatory risk,” which means there’s a chance your fossil-fuel investments will go up in flames if the president indirectly slashes the industry’s profits. Markets are supposed to reflect these risks. If a company’s stock actually has some relationship with the firm’s future cash flows — as it’s supposed to — we might expect the regulatory risk of, say, banning fracking to be embedded in a gas company’s share price.

    That would all make sense, wouldn’t it? But if the GameStop squeeze shenanigans illustrate anything, it’s the disconnect between the stock market and the “real economy” (whatever the Warren Buffett-loving heck that is). Just because GameStop’s stock was suddenly, magically worth $400 a share didn’t mean that a chain of brick-and-mortar video game shops had become fabulously profitable. But by the same token, why should we care if the Dow drops ExxonMobil? Or, perhaps more concretely, if that BlackRock ETF is up 160 percent over the past year (versus 18 percent for the S&P 500), does that growth represent speculation or real value?

    That’s why your question is a hard one. If the stock market reflects arbitrary, speculative activity more than it reflects the consensus on expected future cash flows of real companies (also a form of speculation, I suppose), then how are we supposed to read “market signals” related to climate change as even remotely reflective of what’s actually happening on the ground? If it’s all truly just a casino, then looking to the market for evidence of climate action might be a flawed notion.

    We use market signals to understand climate progress all the time, though, and my inclination is to take them with a grain of salt. Ultimately, what’s the r/wallstreetbets market signal telling us about climate change? Mostly that some people on the internet think clean energy stocks are going to make them some money, so they’re going to put up some of their own money as proof of their confidence. That fact alone probably won’t be the ticket to a net-zero future.

    The last time clean energy got a serious cash infusion — around $90 billion — we were trying to keep the world duct-taped together via the Recovery Act after the big 2008 financial crash. Needless to say, r/wallstreetbets doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around. I’m not arguing that money doesn’t matter; rather, Reddit probably won’t save the day on climate change by staging a guerrilla takeover of the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. A Green New Deal (in whatever form it might take) probably comes with a heftier price tag than, you know, the market cap of Bed Bath & Beyond.

    I disagree with the nihilism story, by the way. Just because the stock market is opaque and absurd doesn’t mean it doesn’t provoke meaningful consequences. Real people get hurt when bubbles burst and markets crash; real people are left holding the bag when hedge funds get to “recalibrate their positions” after-hours; and, to that end, real people are using the market to make a point right now. It might not be a point about the future value of GameStop — more likely, it’s a point about the future value of Wall Street.

    To bring it back to the climate, STONKS, I’d say this: Working together, enough people can make themselves heard through the market. But the fact that the stock market frequently fails to reflect real life ought to remind us that climate progress will come through more mechanisms than investments and divestments. You also need organizing and regulation and (in my humble opinion!) advice columnists.

    The common refrain on r/wallstreetbets these days is “hold the line.” Buy up — and cling to — enough shares of GameStop, and the hedge funds seeking to cover their shorts will have no choice but to buy shares from you at whatever price you name. I like to think I see a little “keep it in the ground” ethos there. For many years we’ve heard stories of climate activists buying up oil and gas leases with the sole purpose of holding them in trust: sitting on them in hopes that if enough people do the same, there won’t be any land left to drill.

    A pipe dream, certainly. But imagine a Reddit army hoovering up these leases! If r/wallstreetbets really wanted to get in on the climate game, they could probably bankrupt the oil industry.

    With a loving squeeze,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can Reddit do for clean energy what it did for GameStop? on Feb 4, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Alright, someone had to say it: Is it time to get rid of the internet?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    Cloud computing is a major emissions producer. Why is no one arguing for the dismantling of the Internet?

    — Not Everyone’s Online

    A. Dear NEO,

    I’d venture to say that many, many people have a very love-hate relationship with the internet. It’s a source of connection, but also one of stress. It facilitates convenience, but at the same time seems to suck all manner of time and energy out of the day in an anxiety-inducing spiral. It has an appetite for massive amounts of energy, but it simultaneously has all the makings of a powerful, intangible force to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

    Let’s start with some of the internet’s climate-specific pros and cons. On the plus side, the creation of “remote work” has eliminated a lot of commute-related emissions, which make up a significant part of the average person’s carbon footprint. There’s also the overall convenience factor. A lot of tasks are so much easier online — bank deposits, grocery shopping, even paying the electric bill — saving any number of car trips in favor of more efficient delivery systems. And then there’s the fact that the World Wide Web’s wild and crazy information highway means that anyone with a Wi-fi signal can learn about climate change, from the latest U.N. environmental report to the daily atmospheric carbon level.

    But, as you suggest, all that good might not be enough to offset the internet’s current climate drawbacks. A 2020 review of teleworking studies found the net energy benefit of remote work to be rather small when weighed against the environmental impact of all the infrastructure and energy that goes into data centers — the millions of servers that must be built, powered, and cooled to enable your Google searches, Zoom calls, and Instagram posts. The “cloud,” in fact, is actually just a system of data centers sprinkled all over the world that hold digital assets so you don’t have to keep them on your hard drive. One estimate of all that energy usage adds up to about 73 billion kWh, still just 2 percent of the total U.S. power demand in 2020.

    The energy used by the internet is hardly its only potential climate cost. From a social standpoint, the internet’s quick connections may have given us a warped sense of time and space, normalizing (for those of a certain privileged demographic) certain forms of very carbon-intensive travel — weekend flights to Mexico from Pittsburgh for a BFF getaway, international business trips for a 30-minute speaking engagement. Online shopping is its own particular carbon conundrum: The fact that so many objects are incredibly easy to buy has given way to the rise of unconscious consumption, an undeniable propagator of polluting industries. And that’s not even getting into influencer culture, an entire industry built around filtered 21-year-olds selling you supplement subscriptions you have never and will never need.

    And as for the internet’s wealth of information? Well, the same search engines that can find you the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also make it perilously easy to find yahoos claiming that global warming is an invention of the government. And that’s to say nothing of the nightmarish online news cycle or the dark web-fueled rise of hate groups and conspiracy theories.

    Well, yikes. Things are not looking so good in the “reasons we should keep the internet” category. But a lot of this calculation has to do with the way the internet is currently used and powered. Back to the whole cloud computing example: The carbon impact of a giant army of servers is closely tied to the source of the electricity itself; it could remain the “largest coal-powered machine on the planet,” as The New Republic rather doomily deemed it in 2019, or it could be powered by cleaner solar, wind, or nuclear power.

    Despite the explosive growth of cloud computing and proliferation of server farms, various technological advances are converging to keep total energy usage fairly stable. In 2016, an analysis commissioned by the Department of Energy found that cloud computing’s energy needs were far less than had been estimated by previous growth projections because server technology had become more efficient. For example, we’re benefiting from the advent of something called “hyperscale” server farms, which pile a ton of bare-bones servers together. By cutting out unnecessary, energy-sucking functions from the hardware, each unit requires a smaller amount of energy. One Google data center is even experimenting with using its server farm as a battery that can discharge into the electric grid around it, acting as a source of community energy.

    All that said: The internet is only expected to grow more, and to grow faster. It’s hard to predict how any efficiency advances can keep up with it.

    But at the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I’ll say this for the internet age: Communication is a billion times easier than it was 100 years ago. Young people in particular, aka those who stand to lose the most from a warmer atmosphere, have a platform to organize around climate change on a larger scale than they would have in, like, 1901. There’s even been evidence of what some people are calling a “Greta Thunberg effect,” in which people who have been exposed to her passionate pro-planet messages online are more likely to take action on climate change.

    You can wring your hands and say, “But maybe all the problems those young people have to undo would never have come about if the internet had never existed!” Sure, that is an interesting thought experiment, and there is a whole school of climate activists who long to return to a very old-school agrarian society in the name of shrinking carbon footprints. But let’s be real: The horse has long since bolted from that proverbial stable. The internet and its comforts are simply too embedded into everything that we do; once you have experienced the joys of online curry delivery, you will probably not be eager to go out and slaughter a goat for dinner. Even if extremists were to destroy every server farm in the world in the name of dismantling the internet, there would almost certainly be a major movement to bring it back as fast as possible.

    So rather than spend your energy trying to dismantle the Internet altogether — and probably making a lot of people really mad at you — push for ways to change for the better. We can have an internet that is both powered by greener energy and doesn’t perpetuate misinformation, hateful rhetoric, and apathy. In fact, I’d go so far as to say we deserve it.

    Virtually,

    Umbra

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alright, someone had to say it: Is it time to get rid of the internet? on Jan 28, 2021.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • What’s the bigger climate threat: Single-use plastic or long-haul shipping?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    I want to use less plastic, but have no bulk stores nearby. I’m considering using online stores that let you return and reuse personal care product packaging. Do CO2 emissions from mailing and refilling shampoo bottles negate their environmental good?

    — My Soap Choice Limits Emissions? Ah, Nice!

    A. Dear MS. CLEAN,

    You’re up against two great behemoths of environmental scourgery here: plastics and e-commerce. Each one is bad for the environment in its own lamentable way (more on that shortly), and yet they are similarly so embedded in our modern supply chain that avoiding them requires going to great lengths. How ridiculous is it that the simple act of buying shampoo, to your example, should entail a choice between two such ruinous forces! But let’s review the respective flaws of each to illuminate your dilemma:

    Pretty much everyone agrees that single-use plastic packaging is, outside of a medical context, remarkably wasteful. Plastic is made from fossil fuels, so obviously there’s a major threat to the climate wrapped up in its very existence. Oil and gas companies have even turned their attention more toward plastic production as the industry faces increased energy competition from renewables.

    Then there’s the disposal problem: Less than 10 percent of plastic makes it through the recycling process in the U.S. The vast majority ends up discarded in landfills, from whence it steadily floods out to sea. Plastic never decomposes into organic matter either; it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller particles that fill the air, water, and earth. That’s problematic considering many of the compounds that make up plastics are harmful to the health of animals — including humans.

    So all that makes for a pretty good argument for reusing plastic packaging as much as you can — or, alternatively, not buying things packaged in plastic at all! To that end, a bunch of different companies have cropped up in the past couple of years (Loop, by Humankind, Public Goods, to name a few) attempting to offer alternatives to single-use plastic packaging. Their approaches range from refillable bottles, like the ones you’re talking about, to biodegradable pouches. And while refillable containers are nothing new in the realm of bulk stores and food co-ops, those aren’t widely available in many parts of the country. At least when it comes to access to these refillable services, online shops are a bit of a game-changer.

    If your goal is simply to reduce plastic — a worthy one, given all the reasons we just mentioned — then it’s likely worth your while to try out one of these companies. It sounds like you don’t have a great local alternative, save making your own shampoo at home — which is, for the record, possible! But, of course, the decision gets more complicated when you look at the broader climate math. The materials used to make these containers matter too; and a virgin aluminum bottle, for instance, would need to be used 50 times before its carbon footprint per use would be less than that of a reasonably responsibly produced plastic one. (On the plus side, aluminum is more readily recyclable than most plastic.).

    Since you’re concerned about the emissions of shipping as well, I did a bit of messing around with a DHL calculator. Even if we take a higher estimate of climate costs, it turns out the carbon footprint of shipping a 2.4-pound package 2,000 miles by truck in the United States is approximately 2.5 pounds of CO2. That’s the equivalent of driving alone in a single-passenger vehicle (assuming said vehicle gets about 25 miles to the gallon) for a round trip of 3.2 miles. If you drive to the store where you purchase your shampoo and that trip exceeds 3.2 miles, it could actually be more efficient to get it shipped to your house.

    Because, as it turns out, a lot of the concern about e-commerce isn’t so much the emissions of shipping; it’s that it’s created a generally accepted practice of express-shipping impulse-buy products that might never get used at all. Consumerist culture promises bountiful convenience as some kind of American birthright; that’s why we have endless plastic and one-day express shipping in the first place. And that express-shipping has fostered an energy intensive system of warehouses and air freight and their ensuing environmental costs. But under the right circumstances, standard shipping — as we’ve just calculated — can be more fuel-efficient than traveling in a car alone.

    Shopping dilemma aside, I can give you the whole spiel on how to really maximize the environmental impact of that refillable shampoo. Don’t shampoo your hair that much — apparently it dries out your hair anyway — to get the most out of each bottle. (Personally, I’m down to washing my hair once every four days, and it’s working out!).

    But here’s a sort of bigger-picture argument for giving your refillable online options a shot: the whole goal is that reuse becomes the norm, right? That every single-use polyethylene bottle eventually goes the way of the rapidly retiring coal plant, and we can have the option to endlessly refill our liquid soaps and conditioners and face creams from a soda-fountain-style personal hygiene aisle at any grocery store or cosmetics counter? Then it’s theoretically important, from a consumer standpoint, to prove that there’s a market for this type of product.

    The more mainstream this practice becomes, the cheaper it will be to avoid single-use plastics in the future. In a phone call with Bennington College professor Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, she said: “My big fear is that alternatives to plastic, and in particular refillable and reusable products, become this niche market like organic food was 20 years ago, that it’s expensive and only affluent people can afford it. If that’s where we go with refillables and reusables, we’re not going to make the progress that must be made.”

    While I so, so, so appreciate your impulse to weigh the climate pros and cons of a decision like shampoo, I want to encourage you not to get lost in those minute calculations at the cost of the bigger picture. Let your shower-time contemplation be about big dreams, not plastic bottles.

    Cleanly,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Is wrapping paper wasteful, or is it the least of our problems?

    Q.Dear Umbra,

    My family compulsively reuses wrapping paper, to the point that I think we’ve got some from decades ago. What is wrapping paper made from, how scary is it, and most importantly, should everyone become hoarders like my family?

    — Giving In Family That Expects Reuse

    A.Dear GIFTER,

    Present wrapping is sort of the apotheosis of an environmentalist nightmare. You’re taking a gift (symbol of consumerism!) and dressing it up in shiny paper and bows and frills (single-use products!) that will be immediately discarded (landfill waste!). This is probably why environmentalists have long been considered “no fun.” Because wrapping — and, perhaps more accurately, unwrapping — presents is fun! It’s an experience replete with surprise, beauty, generosity, and other good stuff.

    There are more environmentally sound ways to do it, of course. As you already do, keeping and reusing wrapping paper and ribbon and gift bags over and over again, for years and years, is an admirable option. Avoid metallic and glittery paper, because those contain plastic or aluminium that prevent them from being recycled with paper products and therefore go straight to the landfill. (And try to strip excess tape and sticky tags and whatnot from the paper before you recycle it, but a couple of stray pieces probably won’t hurt.) Fabric ribbon is preferable over the plastic curl-able kind, because you can more easily keep and reuse it. The more hardcore enviro-heads use brown kraft paper, which is eminently recyclable, compostable, and reusable, and you can draw stuff on it, stick some pine sprigs in the ribbon, go wild!

    As to how scary wrapping paper is, let’s break things down quantitatively. A popular figure that flies around is that the average American household’s waste increases by 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, but that’s not specific to gift paraphernalia.

    Paper and paperboard waste make up about 14 percent of all municipal solid waste — an umbrella category that includes trash, recycling, composting, and other kinds of refuse — according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and we can probably assume that percentage is higher over the winter holidays. But paper products are easier and less energy-intensive to recycle than the dread plastic and metal items, so a relatively low percentage of paper — around 15 percent — ends up decomposing in landfills.

    Paper products look even better compared to other kinds of holiday waste. Food waste — all those stale holiday cookies, unsolicited fruitcake, leftovers from the elaborate Christmas meal that you made for two people — is a far greater scourge; about two-thirds of all residential food waste goes straight to the landfill, where it breaks down into harmful greenhouse gases like methane. Online shopping for 2020’s holiday season is up by 33 percent over last year, which means 33 percent more of all that plastic packaging that’s most likely not recyclable, to say nothing of the emissions from the ships, planes, and trucks that move all that stuff around.

    Is there anything wrong with your hoarding habits? No, of course not. It is never wrong to reuse something as benign as wrapping paper as much as you can or want to. When I talked to Erin Gagnon, a retail sales manager for the West Coast waste management company Recology, about your family’s practice, she said, “I love it, I love it, I love it.” (Three times! She really did!) “We love that people are really thinking through the circular economy,” referring to a system that minimizes waste and maximizes reuse.

    But the mantra of any environmentalist’s life, as I’ve said in various ways many times before, should be to not lose sight of bigger, systemic problems, such as the large slice of emissions that come from transportation and manufacturing. If your family members are wrapping 100 Amazon Prime-shipped items in 20-year-old paper, for example, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance there.

    The holidays are theoretically supposed to be about being thankful for the love and generosity in your life, giving what you can to others, and enjoying a lot of warmth and comfort. In practice, there’s often an enormous amount of guilt over the whole rigmarole of gifts — what you paid for them, where they came from, how much they will be enjoyed — and often a healthy dose of depression and inadequacy. Given these existing pressures, I would suggest not holding yourself to absolute environmental purity in every aspect of your holidays.

    That said, it’s not that hard to do eco-conscious gift wrapping, and I don’t think it’s an unreasonable burden for most people to make drawers of carefully preserved gift bags and ribbons and sheets of colorful paper dating back several presidential administrations a part of their annual holiday tradition. But I will say it probably matters more, both in a planetary and emotional sense, what’s underneath the paper.

    Glitteringly,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why do I love the mall when I hate consumerism?

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    I always crave a visit to the mall around the holidays. Why do I find it so soothing? I consider myself an anti-consumerist!

    — The Irresistible Naughtiness of Yuletide: Thrills In Malls

    A. Dear TINY TIM,

    It’s time for a little … SHOPPING HISTORY! While I am loath to consider my youth historical material, based on your question I suspect you and I are of a similar age. Especially for those of us who came of age in the pre-smartphone era, shopping centers were one of the few accessible, teen-oriented social spaces.

    As a teenager, I spent so, so, so much of my free time at this vast outdoor mall in Pittsburgh called The Waterfront. I would meet one of my closest high school friends at the Popeye’s across from the Home Depot before heading to the AMC to catch the last screening of some Jude Law rom-com. I first laid eyes on the (truly awful) boy who would occupy all of my crush energy for the entirety of 10th grade at a birthday party at P.F. Chang’s. I consumed approximately a thousand Starbucks mochas and brick-like brownies.

    But you can’t exactly separate mall culture from consumer culture. In between these landmark moments of adolescence, my friends and I spent endless hours in ambient shopping. We tried on super-low-rise jeans and pastel bikinis and midriff-baring T-shirts, imagining how this or that new addition to our “look” could reel in the attention of one idiot boy or the other, as if that would resolve any festering sense of inadequacy or sadness that we all suffered. Good old American materialism had successfully sold our short-circuiting baby brains on the idea that shopping equals happiness.

    The sociological significance of malls and shopping centers to teen culture is well-trod territory, and you can find any number of 10,000-word academic papers explaining that teens need spaces to socialize, and there simply weren’t that many places for our teenage selves to hang out outside of our parents’ homes! And places you’re meant to shop in are certainly designed to be pleasant. An enormous amount of research has been poured into creating inviting commercial spaces that also put you in the mood to treat yourself to a little splurge.

    FRIDAY
    For your consideration: Fruitcake
    A callback to a pre-modern era, an exercise in delayed gratification, and lots of brandy.
    By L.V. Anderson

    While it used to be enough to marvel at the wares themselves, shopping has since become an experience, even a form of escape. There are hints of this even in Emile Zola’s 19th century novel The Ladies’ Paradise, which is about a relatively modest shopkeeper who develops a super-grand department store:

    “A feeling of comfort penetrated [the shoppers], they seemed to be entering into spring after emerging from the winter of the street. Whilst the piercing wind, laden with rain and hail, was still blowing out of doors, the fine season was already budding forth in The Paradise galleries, with the light stuffs, soft flowery shades and rural gaiety of summer dresses and parasols.”

    Prescient, Monsieur Zola. Lush department stores gave way to the malls we’re familiar with today — sprawling retail temples in which you could easily make a day of wandering. But as the popularity of online shopping grew over the 2000s, many malls began to fall into decline. Today, there are roughly 1,000 still in existence, but experts say about a quarter are expected to close in the next five years.

    A McKinsey report from a few years back detailed how companies could cope with the impending demise of not just the mall, but the brick-and-mortar shop in general. Consumers want experiences with their things, they wrote; you need to give them a reason to want to cross your threshold that amounts to more than a merino wool sweater-cape at 30 percent off. “Mall operators,” they wrote, “must envision themselves no longer as real estate brokers, but instead as customer-facing providers of shoppable entertainment.”

    To an environmental writer, there may be no more cringeworthy phrase than “shoppable entertainment,” because it transforms the act of buying things into an activity rather than a means to procuring needed items. Those associations make up kind of the foundation of the meaningless consumerism that drives unnecessary environmental degradation and carbon emissions! “We need to find happiness and community and value in activities other than shopping,” said the writer and activist Naomi Klein in a panel on climate-conscious design last year.

    Yes, absolutely, say it a thousand more times. And yet, TINY TIM, I don’t think that means you need to perform some kind of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind brain-wipe of your fond retail-oriented memories. Intellectually, I take no pleasure in the fact that the backdrop to so many of my teenage memories were designed, at least in part, by the megacorporations behind brands like Hollister, PacSun, Abercrombie, and Gap. Atonement for my materialist 14-year-old sins is part of why I feel the need to expend tens of thousands of words beating the “don’t buy stuff you don’t need” drum over and over and over in this column.

    But emotionally? Those stupid red Starbucks cups do spark warm memories of hours spent wandering from store to store picking out presents for friends. If I walk by an Abercrombie storefront to this day, the scent of the perfume that wafts copiously out of it still stirs up the very specific intimacy I had with my friend who used to work there. The solace of these chain stores themselves, the orderliness and warm lights and promise of some new little treat to help make up for the misery of December in Western Pennsylvania has not released its grip on the pleasure centers of my brain.

    You don’t have to change what comforts you, but you can control how you react to it. Socialization and culture are very powerful forces, and your memories are indelibly formed by them. I truly find nothing wrong with the idea of wandering a Christmassy shopping district for the nostalgic ambiance alone, which is what it sounds like you enjoy the most. If shopping is supposed to be an experience, perhaps it doesn’t have to be tied to buying things. Someone worked really hard to set up those lights! Real human labor went into making and placing all those red and gold globes and evergreen sashes! It arguably needs your enjoyment to not go to waste!

    If you’re still concerned that you won’t be able to resist the call to pull out your credit card, may I recommend meandering through those painstakingly decorated shopping districts after hours. I actually think it’s really lovely to walk through these areas at night during the holidays, when all the twinkle lights are still on and the dimly lit holiday decor feels genuinely peaceful. And it feels kind of illicit, which is the best possible callback to simpler teen times.

    American culture is horrifically flawed, particularly with regard to its role in climate change, and it absolutely needs to shift. But I don’t believe that forgoing all your happy associations with materialism is a necessary precondition for becoming more climate-conscious. You just need to revisit how you seek out or recreate those associations now that you are a more aware grown-up.

    Comfortingly,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How can we hold politicians to their promises on race and climate?

    Note to readers: This week’s question was answered by Grist justice fellow Angely Mercado.

    Q. Dear Umbra,

    Politicians made a lot of environmental justice promises in 2020. How do we make sure they keep them?

    — Biden’s Elected, Radicals Need to Increase Energy

    A. Dear BERNIE,

    During this past election cycle, many top politicians promised something akin to a complete overhaul of the country’s environmental and racial legacy. And, to some extent, it feels … achievable? The bar has been lowered so much due to these past few years of the Trump administration undermining and even burying climate research! I actually teared up hearing Biden reference “science” and “climate,” alongside not just a call to root out racism, but “systemic racism” in his victory speech.

    But there’s a lot more to environmental justice than using the right lingo. Politicians, especially at the federal level, can talk a lot of game when it comes to progressive change and never carry through. As a nascent environmental justice reporter, I have to balance hope with wariness, asking who specifically will benefit from any proposed environmental policy.

    For anyone who’s new here, let’s quickly go over how racial and environmental justice are connected. You can find elements of racism baked into any number of laws and institutions; redlining has resulted in lower rates of home ownership for both Black and brown communities, pushing them closer to pollution-filled industrial zones, freeways, and urban heat islands. According to Jacqueline Patterson, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, more than 70 percent of Black Americans “are living in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards.”

    Not only are those communities of color more vulnerable to health risks such as COVID-19 (partially as a result of those conditions), they are disproportionately affected by environmental rollbacks such as the Trump administration’s relaxation of environmental enforcement during the pandemic.

    Looking at these disparities head-on can be personally upsetting. A big part of my environmental justice education was understanding how racist policies have affected neighborhoods and people that I care about. I’m from New York, where many majority Black and Latino communities have more freeways and higher rates of pollution compared to whiter, more affluent neighborhoods. I know more people who have been hospitalized for asthma attacks than I can count — when I was in elementary school, a schoolmate died after a severe attack. I don’t remember what she looked like but I remember how her classmates turned the classroom door into a shrine for her, covered in flowers and cards where her friends could leave notes about how much they missed her. And my school wasn’t the only one with a shrine to a young asthma victim.

    That is to say, BERNIE, I hear you. When I hear promises like the ones made by the incoming Biden-Harris administration to build clean energy to lower emissions and keep sustainable jobs in the country, I ask myself how it could benefit a lot of the working-class immigrant neighborhoods I grew up around. I think of the different people that these promises should focus on and I ask myself if there’s a risk of anyone falling through the cracks of the proposed policies.

    And I have to ask myself if it’s even right to feel hopeful at all. Over the last few years, agencies that enforce environmental accountability, like the Environmental Protection Agency, have been defunded and gutted,and Obama-era protections have been rolled back to the detriment of poor communities and communities of color. I want to hold on to my optimism, but as a journalist, I know I need to be objective. If I don’t see policies that will improve the lives of all the bodega owners, nannies, cab drivers, delivery people, and servers in my neighborhood, I don’t consider them to be good policies.

    I reached out to Sonal Jessel, the director of policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a New York City-based organization, and she backed up my half-hopeful, half-wary approach.

    “Being cautiously optimistic is what helps you hold people accountable — if you think it’s totally not going to work then why would you even try?” she explained. “Something that I think is making a lot of people in our field feel hopeful is that [Biden’s] platform was informed by environmental justice organizations and communities.”

    Jessel said that some of her excitement also came from hearing the kinds of conversations usually reserved for environmental justice circles show up in actual policy discussions. She credited this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests for newfound awareness of the environmental racism that Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color live with in this country.

    I’ve seen other environmental advocates take a similar excited but guarded approach. A few days after the Associated Press officially called the presidential victory for Joe Biden, my colleague Yvette Carbrara and I spoke to a number of environmental justice leaders about their reactions. They were excited for the new administration, but wanted to temper their enthusiasm until they saw proof of change.

    For example, Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator and current visiting professor at Bennington College in Vermont, told me that she wanted to see how proposed policies and laws will directly benefit frontline communities.“Every environmental enforcement case that is filed needs to be decided in a way that answers the fundamental question: What will this decision mean for the health and safety of people living in low-income communities and communities of color?” she said.

    But you don’t need a crystal ball to start to answer that question. You can look closely at Biden’s choice of advisors. For example, he recently selected Xavier Becerra, the first Latino attorney general of California (who notably challenged the Trump administration healthcare, immigration, and rollbacks on environmental regulations) to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Environmental justice advocates have already been eyeing Biden’s picks for secretary of agriculture (who will oversee both the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the U.S. Forest Service) and the secretary of housing and urban development.

    But accountability is not just a national issue. Rather than looking straight to the White House, you may find that the roots of many environmental injustices hit much closer to home. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: Some of your demands are more likely to be heard by a city councilperson than by the president.

    You can also look for local stakeholders to help you with your desire for accountability. I suggest searching around your own neighborhood and looking up local racial/environmental justice organizations to help you create a map of the resources available to your community. If you can’t find any right away, look throughout your city, county, or state for organizations that may hold educational events, local press conferences, and online teach-ins about racial and environmental issues.

    Christopher Casey, the director of voter engagement at WE ACT, emphasized that community groups have an existing infrastructure and network for setting up events, forums, and contacts for elected officials make it easier to get a response from politicians. “Many of these groups have their own coalitions … and these groups have platforms that allow you to reach more people and to engage more people, like through social media,” he said. “Become associated with any group that has an active online presence, particularly if that [presence] happened during the resistance [after Trump was elected in 2016].”

    Once you’re in contact with those groups and have access to their networks, Jessel suggests holding public forums and using them to tell stories that humanize the issues. Advocates and politicians are all aware of statistics and laws behind an environmental issue, but a human story is what helps get the urgency across to voters and leaders alike.

    Jessel recounted a story of a New Yorker who lived in public housing through the New York City Housing Authority, testified during a New York City Council meeting on the impact that decades of exposure to mold has had on her health and her kids’ health. “It was emotional for her. We saw that the chair of the public housing committee was very moved by what she said.”

    Finally, you’ll want to keep an eye out for regressive legislation. Get familiar with the docket for your local legislators. What public hearings and proposed local council acts offer the opportunity to address structural racism? Which of your local politicians are actually showing up to those hearings and voting on those acts and pieces of legislation?

    I know it’s been a very dark year, but one bright spot is how it’s demonstrated the power of effective storytelling and grassroots organizing. There’s enormous work left to be done towards environmental and racial justice, but this past year has shown that everyday people are invested in fighting for a more equitable society. The sustained protests against police brutality throughout this summer, the surge of support for frontline workers, and the efforts to keep at-risk people housed and fed during this pandemic are sources of hope.

    Just know that you’re capable of rising to the occasion.

    Watchfully,

    Umbra

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The buy-nothing gift guide that will get you through 2021

    If you’re one of those people who have been looking forward to the winter holiday season all year and takes special joy in the act of curating the most perfect, unforgettable present for each of your nearest and dearest, congratulations! It’s your time. But I also understand if you’re not really in the mood to put together a gift list: Even in years that aren’t torn to pieces by a global pandemic, December can come with its own emotional weight. And as for 2020, well … you know.

    Last December, I put together a gift guide with 79 climate-friendly, mostly material recommendations, many of which still apply to our new COVID-tainted reality. But this year, there’s something about buying or even making objects that doesn’t feel as meaningful as it normally might; it’s been a lonely year in which a lot of comfort has been derived from objects in lieu of people, and unsatisfyingly so.

    Generally speaking, we spend all year at Grist reminding people that one of the best things you personally can do for the climate is to only buy what you need and make use of what you have, to prevent the influx of unnecessary products and the propagation of consumerist ideals into your daily life. And then the holidays come around and you feel the need to express-ship a 40-percent-off cashmere sweater to your mom because you panicked and couldn’t think of anything else because that’s what you do at Christmas!

    But eschewing unnecessary shipping and manufacturing doesn’t mean you need to squash your giving instincts. On the contrary, we need connection more than ever to get us through the days and months ahead. To that end, we put together 12 ideas — one for each month of the coming year — plus a bonus to get you started — for how to share acts or experiences of kindness with people in your life, be they family, friends, or complete strangers. This gift list doesn’t require the opening of a single online shopping cart, refuses to abide by the idea that presents are just for December, and will hopefully make you and the people around you genuinely happier.

    It doesn’t require much, though I have suggestions if you are able to set a little money aside every month. Of course, that part is completely optional and only suggested for those who are able to do so.

    December 2020

    If you are anything like me, you buy some kind of planner or journal at the beginning of every year and then keep up with it for exactly four days. Tragic. Well, this year you can fill up the first day of every month with your plan to execute each of the following suggestions, and you can even track how well you followed through them if you want. But you don’t have to! Anyway, that is your only assignment for December. Please don’t buy the planner on Amazon.

    January 2021

    I think it’s apropos to kick off the new year with a general gesture of goodwill and generosity toward everyone, which is why I’m recommending donating what you can to a local mutual fund, which is a cash reserve for a community to distribute to households in need.

    No matter what kind of stimulus plan Congress passes (probably) this month, a lot of people have needed a lot of help for way too long and will for the foreseeable future, so giving cash to funds that are directly distributed to people in need is very, very timely. Here’s a more in-depth argument for the effectiveness of mutual aid programs, if you need to be convinced.

    Struggling cash-wise yourself? Take care of yourself; it’s gonna be a hard winter. But if you have a car or a reliable way to transport things, mutual funds often need people to deliver goods to families, so you could contact yours and see if they need an extra set of wheels.

    Set aside: Nothing or whatever you want — you already donated this month!

    illustration of a piggy bank being smashed by a hammer

    February

    The winter months of 2021 are more or less guaranteed to be hard, so sign up for a volunteer service that makes regular calls or runs errands for the elderly. Getting Harold on the horn every few days just to make sure he has someone to talk to might not be the sexiest Valentine of all time, but it might be more appreciated than the standard ones. Another useful bit of intergenerational information exchange: You could teach seniors how to text to be able to keep in touch with the younger people in their lives, and it’s also a more reliable form of communication in the event of a disaster.

    Set aside: $29. A dollar a day for the shortest month — with Leap Day!.

    March

    There’s a very real possibility we will still be grappling with lockdown measures and social distancing in March, aka the emotional trough of the winter (because yes, March is still winter). You’ve slogged through at least three months of cold and gray and little light, probably in a great deal of solitude, and yet the light at the end of the tunnel refuses to approach.

    Everyone has that friend or family member who has had a really, really hard pandemic.

    Voilà: March has four weeks, and each one can be devoted to sending that person a little message of care via a different medium. It’s 2021(!), so take your pick: phone, text, Zoom, letter, postcard, flower delivery, singing telegram, FaceTime, Voice Memo, a phone snapshot of a Post-It, etc. Whatever it is, send a message that’s heartfelt and lets the person know you really care about them and want them to be happy.

    Set aside: $3.14, $31.40, or $314, whatever you can afford, in honor of Pi Day. What! I was in Math League.

    Animation of a sad woman who becomes happy as she gets messagesGrist / Amelia Bates

    April

    Do you know someone who has been craving some real outdoor time but simply doesn’t have the means — a personal vehicle, a nearby bus line, or money to rent a car — to get out into the woods? Consider paying for a rental for a weekend or, if you have a car, acting as (mask-wearing, COVID-tested) chauffeur for a regional hike of their choice. They may ask you to join them for the hike itself, or they may not! After all, solo time in the woods is deeply therapeutic and good for the brain!

    Set aside: $22, for April 22, which is Earth Day. What! This is an environmental magazine!

    May

    Adopt a teen! Not, like, legally unless you’re ready for that. Even if we have a vaccine by this point in 2021, most kids will still be reeling from the transition to or from remote classwork, and, unfortunately, finals wait for no pandemic. Offer what you can to help the youths in your life — be they a sibling, a friend’s kid, or a neighbor — study for finals: the promise of snacks or a nice incentive to get them through, even just offering to sit with them outside or over Zoom while they study. Or if your calculus skills are still up to par, consider hosting some regular remote study sessions.

    Don’t give teens any more reason to believe that older generations have spectacularly let them down, because the whole climate crisis thing is a pretty strong argument for their side.

    Set aside: $18.86, for the year of the first May Day to commemorate the labor movement.

    June

    I had parents in mind when I thought of this month’s act of giving, but it can apply to any older family member with whom you have a close relationship and who can receive photos or videos on their phone. Send the recipient of your choice a photo, short video, or even just an audio recording of some minor detail of your day every day this month. Don’t post that content anywhere else on your social feeds. In the era of nonstop-updated Instagram stories, sharing these little vignettes of your life with just one person can feel uniquely intimate and special.

    Set aside: $21.28, for the number of hours and minutes of daylight on the summer solstice in Nome, Alaska!

    July

    One summer when my dad was traveling a lot for work and my mom was working full time, she commissioned my 11-year-old brother Jesse to organize a week of “Jesse Camp” to keep 5-year-old me occupied. This was a big time commitment, even for an 11-year-old, and I imagine most of the readers of this column have full-time jobs. But I would still challenge you to take the kid(s) of a sibling or cousin or friend for an afternoon or weekend (pod restrictions permitting) and do the same. Parents have been under A LOT of stress these past few months, and anything you can do to give them a break in childcare will be so much appreciated.

    Some ideas from Jesse Camp, circa 1994: long nature exploration walks in a local park, drawing sessions, the construction of Lego cities, racing each other on Big Wheel versus on. foot. Still remote? Offer to put on a 20-minute play of their favorite book or teach them the choreography for “Rain on Me” over Zoom.

    Set aside: $2.45, $24.50, or $245, in honor of America’s 245th birthday. Wow! Looking… alright for your age, baby.

    animation of a woman readiing a book to a child over zoomGrist / Amelia Bates

    August

    We’ve talked a lot about parents, kids, and elders here, but your horny single friends matter too. Look. If you’ve been single during the pandemic, you know it’s been a long and bizarre stretch. Whether you, reader, are yourself single or partnered or it’s complicated, but I’m asking you to take on the role of matchmaker and offer to set a (willing) friend up on a date that won’t drive them to finish a bottle of Pinot Grigio before 9 p.m.

    August is the sexiest month — hot, languid, not a lot of obligations — so please help out a friend who’s endured the least sexy year in modern history. And then — just a little extra effort! — organize the date for your friend yourself; save them a lot of wearying back and forth. Don’t be shy: You know your friends better than any apps and you want to see them happy. So channel your inner matchmaker, Yenta!

    Set aside: $7.00, in the spirit of the 1955 Marilyn Monroe film The Seven Year Itch — the sex-starved theme of which also describes the lockdown experience for millions of people.

    September

    At some point, most of us have declared: “Boy, if I only had the free time, I’d do (this one thing).” But while coronavirus forcibly dealt most of us a hefty hand of free time, it also came with some serious existential angst, societal upheaval, and for many, a fairly potent cocktail of isolation and depression. Not the best recipe for productivity or creativity! But it’s really hard to finish a creative project without being accountable to anyone but yourself.

    So be the person your loved one needs to be accountable to their DIY dreams: Set up a schedule to check-in with them, and deadlines (if they’re into those). You could even offer to cook for them or run errands or support them in whatever way they need to have the time and headspace to finish the thing they’ve longed to finish.

    Set aside: $11.14, in honor of the day (November 14) that Ruby Bridges became the first Black student to desegregate a Louisiana elementary school in 1960.

    October

    Fall is a good time to get to know your neighbors better, and not just because it’s election season. Political scientist Robert Putnam has written at length about how the collapse of neighborhood ties in the U.S. has hurt civic engagement levels, which are key to any kind of political change. So yeah, the block-level relationship-building does come in handy for local-level climate organizing, but it’s also just good practice.

    With winter weather just around the corner, people tend to need a little more help — cold! Sadness! Weird and arduous household chores! Consider setting up a neighbor email chain (like NextDoor, but less racist) where your neighbors can keep in touch. And be proactive about making those connections in real life too: This can be as simple as raking a neighbor’s leaves, or taking their trash to the curb, or clearing out their gutters a la Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights … minus the seduction.

    Set aside: $6.66, $66.60, or $666. Honor your inner goth.

    November

    I’m an advice columnist, not a psychic, so I have no clue what Thanksgiving is going to look like in 2021. What I do know is that you know at least one person who will have a complicated holiday, and you can be there for them. Take some weight off of Thanksgiving Day itself by scheduling simple, safe, and drama-free weekly get-togethers between the two of you. This will help November feel less like “the month when all the emotional weight of the holidays sets in” and more like “the month I’m spending more time with my friend.”

    Set aside: $16.21, to commemorate the year of the first Thanksgiving, which was actually kind of a disaster, much like Thanksgivings in the era of a pandemic.

    December

    And now we have come full circle. Remember all that cash you set aside this year? You now get to donate it to the cause of your choice, or to a loved one who you know could use it. Even if it’s not a strictly environmental cause, you can take some solace in the fact that your acts of kindness didn’t require buying into our consumerist culture..

    That’s it. 2021 is done, and hopefully it was a hell of a lot better than 2020.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.