Happy Earth Day! Number Crunching Edition

Creative take on consumption and environmentalism? You have got to check out Running the Numbers by Chris Jordan. His huge photographs depict topics like plastic cups (the closeup at left is a tiny piece of a montage he did of 1 million of them - the amount used up on airlines every six hours). I can't remember where I found this, but it's probably from BB-blog, my source for all things visually interesting.

I figure it's a fine time to do a little assembling of resources for number crunching (ie analyzing my personal consumption and resource use). So much of what's interesting to me right now is just about raising my own awareness level, and learning to make my lifestyle and economic choices more carefully.

On the home front, I've been wondering just how to calculate our basic carbon footprint. There are basic web tools out there for figuring out your water, electricity, and carbon usage.

• The EPA's got a climate change emissions calculator. Plus, they have a catalog of links to a wide range of non-EPA climate change driven calculators tracking emissions and energy usage here.
• A quick (and dirty?) carbon footprint calculator from Zerofootprint
• Zerofootprint's also got a One-Minute Water Calculator to estimate water usage for varying lifestyles
• CSPI's Eating Green Calculator and Score Your Diet will help you analyze the impact of the food you eat.
• Airhead's emissions calculator will help you decide which travel destination is the greenest choice. (via Suite101)
• Low Impact Living will calculate an environmental impact score for your household.
• Check out this article about the surprisingly lowest-impact diet of eating a little bit of meat. via Treehugger
• A paper calculator from the Environmental Defense Fund which looks like it would be great if used for a corporate enviro effort (my sister in law's been doing lots of green sourcing at her job and having a tremendous impact).

But my favorite calculator is over at Riot For Austerity. You may have to join the group to see their files, but I've been hearing about the group for awhile from lunatics luminaries like Burbanmom and I think it sounds like a great place to listen and learn. Basically, the group members are going to try to reduce their impact to spur government action and for the larger sense of living simply so that others may simply live. To join the group go to the 90% Reduction Yahoogroup. Here's part of their welcome message:

"Welcome to the Riot for Austerity 90% Emissions Reduction Project. The goal that participants have set for themselves is to cut their emissions by 90% of what the average person in the US consumes - the approximate amount people in the rich world need to reduce by in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming.... We’re doing this for several reasons. First, because it is necessary - if we want to bestow a decent world on our children, we have to cut our emissions, and much harder and faster than any government has proposed. The reason governments do not propose it is because they believe it is politically infeasible. So we want to present our leaders with as many people as possible who will stand up and say “I did it. Our nation can too.”

I don't know about you, but my personal goal? Just to live more simply. I am hoping to use the tools above to help myself learn about my consumption patterns and to make conscious choices about what I'd like to do rather then living blindly and greedily off of resources I don't really even need or notice. I figure any improvement is better than nothing, huh? Slow, steady, continual improvement.

Read more!

Sleeping Like A Neurologically Impaired Baby: Holy Mackerel! Eat Herring Instead

Well, the experts have been flopping a bit on this issue but the basic gist is that there is mercury in the really healthy deep sea fish that have high levels of beneficial omega-3s in them. And since mercury's particularly damaging for small people, pregnant or nursing women and children have had to closely watch their fish intake. (Which is a bummer, since among other benefits it seems that a high intake of the DHA fatty acids in fish could account for better sleep in infants, no small feat.) There are handy lists of fish to avoid, mercury calculators like those here and here, and lists of fish that are safe to eat. Recently it seemed like the evidence weighed in favoring eating more fish over avoiding it for groups watching mercury exposure, but research showing that it's better to consume fish than not while pregnant may have been funded by -- surprise -- the fish industry. So we're back to the longstanding advice that women of childbearing/nursing age should eat 2 servings/week of fish and limit their consumption to specific species (the fish industry study recommended greater consumption without regard to species). One fish that's been hotly debated because it's a beloved kid sandwich food is tuna, which the research shows you should probably limit no matter the type (albacore vs. light).

Testing of fish oil has shown that most is not contaminated with mercury (your grandmother was right about that cod liver oil!) but since supplements aren't heavily regulated you have to choose brands carefully. American Heart has helpful guidelines on supplementing with fish oil.

In a parallel vein, lots of enviro organizations have lists of what's sustainably fished. This site helpfully lets you track down environmentally conscious restaurants serving sustainably harvested fish. And Environmental Defense has a downloadable pocket reference guide to enviro choices re sustainably fished species. But my favorite is the NRDC guide, which combines the mercury warnings with the sustainability info in their wallet card.

The bottom line? Avoid tuna, shark, tilefish (golden bass or snapper), swordfish, orange roughy, bluefish, and sea bass. Eat as much as you want of catfish, anchovies, clams, crabs, pollock, oysters, wild salmon (not farmed, which has PCBs), sardines, sole, herring, tilapia and trout. Also, try to eat lots of fish high in omega-3s like herring, sardines, oysters and salmon. Check out the lists for further fine-tuning of this advice, and try to eat a variety of the safe fish. Read more!