Low Impact Week

My daughter Carol has organized a No Impact Week in South Portland, Maine, where she lives with her husband and children. Carol claims that it’s my fault she gets involved in projects such as this because I stressed caring for the environment when she was a child. I don’t remember that specifically, although I do remember taking her and her siblings for outings in the country most weekends. We tramped through woods, played in creeks, and picked wild raspberries.

At any rate, her e-mail soliciting people to join her to “spend a week limiting consumption of fossil fuels, buying nothing new (except food) reducing trash/water usage and eating locally,” must have been persuasive because she signed up 38 participants, including me. I can’t do no impact, but I can do low impact.

Our low impact week started yesterday, but I can’t claim to have changed my normal behavior very much yet. It’s easier for me to eat locally because I only have to walk to my garden, visit the chicken house, open my freezer, or go to the basement to find homegrown food. We eat potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, tomatoes, turnips, beets, greens, peppers, and more. We eat homemade bread and biscuits made of wheat milled in Kansas. Of course we eat eggs.

We use cloth napkins. All kitchen waste goes to the dog, the chickens, or the compost heap. We already recycle paper, glass, plastic, and metal. I save up bits of broken metal to take to Gunther’s, a scrap metal enterprise not far from home.

The hard part of low impact for me is transportation. We live ten miles from the nearest town and I’m way to old and decrepit to ride a bike there and back to do errands. All I can do is carefully limit my trips.

Neither can I hang laundry outside or even inside to dry for that matter. Although I didn’t have a clothes dryer for many years, arthritis has put an end to my carrying baskets of wet clothes and pinning them to a clothesline.

Still, I’ve found some things I can do to reduce our waste of resources.

Instead of rinsing each dish under a stream of water before placing it in the dishwasher, I’m using one small pan of water to rinse all the dishes and utensils.

I’ve cut a torn pillowcase and a frayed t-shirt into paper-towel-size pieces. These are for the woman who cleans our house to use. Every time she comes to clean she uses an entire roll of paper towels, which seems profligate. I sure hope she will go along with my plan to use the rags and wash them along with other laundry.

I plan to make my own laundry soap. Pam, who helps me with various tasks (including killing egg-eating snakes), gave me a gallon jug of some she made for pennies. It works quite well, maybe better than the detergent I normally buy in big cardboard boxes with a brand new plastic scoop in each box. Now I will buy three ingredients that come in little containers and make a lot of cleanser, which will be poured into the same gallon jug each time I mix it.

I’ve talked Dennis into turning off his electronic equipment when he isn’t using it, which he did for the first time last night. That was an easy sell, for he was dismayed by the amount of our last electricity bill.

I’ve resolved to always keep cloth shopping bags in my car and to remember to take them with me when I enter a store.

Finally, I’m going to go back to homemade crackers. I used to make them – both wheat and rye – until my wrists hurt too much to roll the dough thinly. Now that I have strong, fused wrists there’s no reason to keep buying crackers that come in plastic bags inside cardboard boxes and sometimes sit in plastic trays.

These changes may not add up to much, but I believe that every little bit counts. 

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer