Living La Vida Localiente

If you’re not on the East Coast, you may not know that we have had a heat wave for the first ten days of July. Do I have to tell you that a hundred degrees in New York City is not pretty? I didn’t think so.

What’s even more worrisome to me than the heat itself, is the fear of a power blackout. Peter and I got off easy in the last one (the Northeast power outage of 2003), but the image of those people who were on the subway when the power went out has never stopped haunting me. (To this day, I travel on the subway – always – with a water bottle and a Maglite.) I just don’t want to contribute to the possibility of that happening again, even in my own small way.

So, in a fit of social responsibility, Peter and I have been trying to live without air conditioning. Because the first floor of our house is slightly below grade, the living room is actually not unpleasant. And as long as I don’t use the oven or stove, the kitchen is fine too. The second floor, with three really powerful ceiling fans and the judicious lowering and raising of blinds, is manageable enough.

When we get to my office, however, which is an extension on the back of the house, that’s a different story. By 1 pm, when the sun has made its arc over to our backyard and is beating down on the tar roof above my head, my fingers start to stick to the keyboard and my entire body is coated in a body paint of itchy sweat.

My way of coping has been to take off the afternoons and go to the movies! I figure that the air conditioning is already on in these places and the more people who partake of it, the more efficiently it runs. (I think that’s called rationalization, but it may be true too.) I saw four matinees last week: I Am Love and Winter’ Bone, both of which I highly recommend; Please Give, which I think is fine and definitely better than sitting in an unairconditioned* office; and Great Directors, a pathetic movie that I can’t believe actually got funded and distributed (the director/producer must have her own trust fund).

Peter has been a relentless urban farmer throughout this humid hideousness, waking every morning at six to hand water (see above; did I mention that we’ve also been in a mini drought?), the result of which has been that we have been eating salads from our garden every day, not to mention peaches and raspberries, and basil by the truckloads. Breakfasts have been peach-blueberry-raspberry yogurt smoothies (made with cantaloupe ice balls that we froze at the end of last summer). 

Not so loco after all, I guess.

*The spell check function in Word does not recognize the word unairconditioned. Is that a cultural statement or what?

Responsible Cruising?

It’s been a good stretch since I’ve last written for Urbal Tea, the reason for which I can at least partially attribute to the month I was traveling with my mother.

Now, one of the topics I’ve wanted to write about for Urbal Tea is sustainable travel, to which Peter and I and Louise and Andrew are totally committed.

I am therefore chagrined to confess that the some of travel I did with my mother was anything but sustainable—I took her on a four-day cruise.

Holy Cow! My mom in front of the Carnival Imagination:

Gross Tonnage: 70,367
Length: 855 feet
Beam: 103 Feet
Cruising Speed: 21 Knots
Guest Capacity: 2,052 (double occupancy)
Total Staff: 920

I had never been on a cruise before and was a bit trepidatious about the whole thing, but it’s what she wanted to do and truth be told, it’s a very easy way to travel with an 86-year old woman. It’s also a very easy way to travel with kids, which I guess a lot of parents have figured out: it was spring break week and there were 957 children on our boat—which was less than ideal for an elderly woman and her 50-something daughter (whose idea of a cruise involves Cary Grant, Paul Henreid, or Charles Boyer). But I digress from the point of this story.

Which is the issue of environmental impact and cruise ships. In theory, traveling by boat is far less impactful than flying or driving—it takes a lot less carbon-based fuel to move a person by boat from Port A to Port B than by air or car. But the problem with cruise ships is that they are floating, luxury mini-cities and so whatever carbon emissions you might save by sailing, you more than make up for by all the waste you and your fellow passengers generate on board.

According to responsibletravel.com (quoting the United Nations Environmental Program), “On a typical one-week voyage a cruise ship generates more than 50 tonnes of garbage and a million tonnes of grey (waste) water, 210,000 gallons of sewage and 35,000 gallons of oil-contaminated water. On average, passengers on a cruise ship each account for 3.5 kilograms of rubbish daily — compared with the 0.8 kilograms each generated by local people on shore.” (In non-metric terms, that’s 7.7 pounds vs. 1.7 lbs.)

I believe it. The amount of food waste alone on our ship must have been staggering. My mother loved the endless dessert tables, but I was fixated on the unfathomable amount of food that was left on people’s trays or that I saw being carted out by waiters after each evening’s dinner.

Add to the fact that cruise ships tend to visit ecologically vulnerable areas, like coral reefs (ours went to Cozumel, for example), where both ship sewage and anchors can harm the fragile environment, and the proposition gets even dicier.

Is there a responsible way to travel by cruise ship? It’s true that lots of cruise ship lines are trying to adopt ecologically responsible practices, like converting cooking oil into diesel fuel (which gets used by farming equipment). And companies like Holland America have programs in which they donate reusable goods (linens, toiletries, dishes, mattresses) to charities.

But honestly, I think these efforts are mere drops in the bucket. Responsibletravel.com asks a really good question: What interests you in a cruise in the first place?

If it’s the chance to visit lots of different places, they suggest a number of far more eco-friendly overland tours that one can take. (Besides, most cruises spend just a few hours at any port of call, which I found absolutely frustrating. Don’t ask me how I found Cozumel because I couldn’t say after a six-hour stay.)

If you’re interested in a cruise because you want take a sailing vacation, again, there are more sustainable ways to be on the water (like renting your own barge to travel the river and canal system in England, which we did a few summers ago).

If it’s the desire to be pampered, have all your needs taken care of while your children have a safe and entertaining environment in which to let loose, there are more and more eco-friendly resorts popping up in the Caribbean every day.

Of course, what I want out of a cruise is to wind up in a stateroom with Jeremy Irons—not exactly a sustainable vacation, at least as far as my marriage is concerned.

P.S. The New York Times did a good article on this topic about a year ago. Here is the link.

Eating as a Sustainable Act

In January of 2009, my husband and I returned from a 4-month trip to Australia and New Zealand, where, in spite of the fact that we ate and drank our way across both land masses, we hiked our way as well, and therefore returned strong and fit.

Through a succession of colds and flu, and getting out of the habit of walking (which is our primary form of exercise), yet eating and drinking as if we were still the intrepid hikers, I put on a good 10 pounds over the course of the year. Peter put on at least that much.

January 2010 comes along and it’s diet time.

Now, I’ve done this before. After we got married, we turned into fat honeymooners that required a year’s worth of Weight Watchers to take off the 25 or so pounds we acquired through our love-food fest. And a few years ago, we did the South Beach diet to take off that biennial creeping 10. So I know diets “work” — in the short run. But in the long run, they don’t work — at least in the sense of keeping the biennial 10 at bay.

So this year I decided to do it differently. Yes, I did Phase 1 of South Beach religiously for three weeks (for Peter and me, it is a very easy and rewarding diet), which dropped a good six pounds right there. But I did something else as well – I decided that eating sustainably is as important as any other sustainable act of living.

Why do I need to consume more food than I need? On occasion (and I mean, occasion, like a birthday) that’s fine — in the same way that I allow myself to buy strawberries occasionally in winter. But day in and day out, why do I have to eat more food than my body calls out for? I’m against over-consuming things like plastics and gasoline. Why is food different?

I don’t think it is. I realize that the second pork chop that I might forego is not going to end up on the plate of some starving child in China (as my mother tried to get me to believe when I was younger). But I am part of a country that over-consumes food—and the truth is that if we stopped doing that, we’d not only be healthier, but we’d be able to farm our land in more sustainable ways. For instance, if we just limited the amount of beef we eat (not even give it up altogether) we could substantially cut back on the 96 million methane-producing cattle we currently graze. We’d not only use that land more productively, but put a substantial dent in greenhouse gasses as well. (Check out the Meatless Monday movement here.)

So I started paying attention to what and how much I eat. (I meditate and a book on mindful eating by Jan Chozen Bays from my friend Shell was extremely helpful here.) I started taking what seemed like a reasonable portion of food—I’m not into starvation after all — and eating it slowly and mindfully, letting my brain register my satiety. I found that I usually didn’t need or want seconds, and if I did, I took seconds of vegetables.

I also started paying attention to my hunger, and like everything else in life, I noticed that it changes. HUNGER, I have learned, is not some static state THAT MUST BE SATISFIED. For example, I work at home, so I’m just steps from my fridge. For this experiment, when the usual 10:30 a.m. hunger pangs came around, instead of responding to them, I chose instead to watch them. And sometimes (not always) they went away. They didn’t really need attending to. I didn’t have to eat.

I also started noticing the emotions attached to my hunger. One time I was out doing errands and when I felt a little bit of hunger, I noticed that I also felt panic. “What are you going to eat? When? How?” my mind started hissing with conspiratorial urgency. But instead of reacting to the panic, I just watched it—and saw both the panic and the hunger dissipate under inspection.

The upshot is this: I’ve lost 10 pounds since January 4 and – more important – I eat a lot less. Not because I am on a diet. I’m just a mindful eater now. I’m mindful of food’s impact on me and I’m mindful of my impact as an eater on this Earth. And you know what? I feel good about both.