Consider tea tree oil. I’ve switched all of my personal care products so that I’m only using organics, and tea tree oil is fairly useful as an anti-microbial agent in these products. But it’s oil from a tea tree, which means it must be pressed out of some part of that tree, leaving a lot of detritus behind. How many pounds of waste are generated per ounce of tea tree oil, and how much water, arable land, etc. is used to grow the tree for that oil? Are these trees grown on land that previously hosted diverse ecosystems, or grew food crops?

If I’m the only one using tea tree oil, it’s a sustainable practice. I’m sure I could use as much tea tree oil as I need without ever affecting the health of the biosphere. But then, I’m also sure I could use all the coal or oil I wanted without seriously affecting the health of the biosphere. It’s when you add in the other 6.7 billion of my fellow humans that we have problems with diminishing oil supplies and a heating globe. So…how many of my fellow humans can subscribe to a given “sustainable” practice before it becomes unsustainable?

I’ve recently read The Transitions Handbook, which talks all about reducing the climate impacts and oil needs of a community. One of the big themes in this movement seems to be re-skilling, or learning to do some of the things that our forebears knew how to do in order to get by on less. It’s not as stark as all that, but that’s not really the point. I guess what I want to know is, just how sustainable and regenerative were the practices that we still have access to? Things like the burning of firewood and the building of sailing ships for transoceanic commerce stripped landscapes bare of trees across large swaths of Europe and the eastern United States. Are those the skills we need to re-learn? Other, more harmonious ways of living with our local piece of nature may be lost in the pages of deep history.

All in all, I think the Transitions approach is the only practical idea we’ve had for facing the threats of peak oil and climate change, mostly because it isn’t a single idea. The concept is really just to get people together in a particular community and talk about what’s likely to be in store for the future, and how that community can best cope with it. It’s less about a single practice or strategy, and more about facing the issue squarely and engaging the ingenuity of communities.

But I do wonder whether there actually is a way that 6.7 billion people – likely to be 9 billion people before the trends reverse – can live sustainably on this planet.

I’m unconvinced, but hopeful.

Most people think about waste as throwing away something that’s still good, or not using something up completely before casting it aside. Using this definition, to reduce your waste you can simply unplug from our serial-consumption society a little bit and start using things until they’re worn out. This is what our ancestors did, mainly out of necessity, and it’s probably part of the reason many of us have furniture items that once belonged to our grandparents. Of course, things were made with a different ethic back then…one of maximized durability, not planned obsolescence. Yet even given the death-dating that takes place in the design of modern products, it’s possible to put the brakes on our ravenous appetite for things a little bit. Maybe it means hanging onto the truck you bought ten years ago, and have already paid off, even if it’s got a cracked dashboard and it’s not as shiny and new as some of the others on the road. The point is to examine those things you’re thinking about replacing, and deciding whether they’re still useful or could be repaired and be useful again.

But wait a minute. Go back to that example about the truck. This points us to another type of waste: the inefficient use of resources like gasoline that has been built into the very fiber or our lifestyles for so long. If I hang onto my truck, I’m still consuming gasoline in prodigious quantities…as if it were nearly free, and couldn’t hurt a fly once burned. Once, the prevailing wisdom – prevailing, not necessarily best-thought-out – held that these two principles were pretty much solid. We weren’t likely to run out of oil (or, at least, let’s not talk about it), and there is no such thing as global warming (oops). So, by hanging onto my truck I’m wasting quite a bit of ever-more-precious oil, and doing more than my part to degrade the environment. If I chuck the truck and get something smaller, maybe a hybrid or something, then I save quite a bit in terms of gas and environmental side-effects, but I’m pushing another used truck onto the market, which will undoubtedly result in one car somewhere else being junked. The metal parts can be recycled, but the composite panels used for the interior? I doubt it very much. (Read Cradle to Cradle for reasons why.) That also brings up the point of pushing yet another gas guzzler onto the secondary market, which means it’s unlikely I’m actually improving the gas consumption in the aggregate…unless the junker that gets retired after my truck replaces it actually got worse mileage.

So, I find myself stuck in quicksand: if I do nothing, I sink slowly and quietly below the surface. If I struggle, I only hasten the sinking by digging my way down. Emily and I are starting to see this dilemma every time we think about replacing one item with a more efficient counterpart. Replacing the dishwasher with an Energy Star version is great, but then you wind up putting that old one in a trash pile somewhere. Same goes for the washing maching we just replaced (okay, the transmission was fried on the old one, so there wasn’t much choice), our refrigerator, just about everything. We put in bamboo floors, but threw away our old carpet (nasty stuff, but still). What to do??

When you’re trying to lighten your own footprint on the Earth, it’s extremely difficult in today’s world to avoid making someone else’s that much heavier. This has to be the hardest problem we’re going to face in trying to green up our society, since removing these inefficient goods without creating ever higher mountains of trash, or flooding the secondary markets with energy-guzzling monsters is nearly impossible.

I say “up to this point” because all that changed tonight. I attended a community stakeholders’ meeting for Sustainable Alachua County (sorry, no link yet), which is apparently in the process of trying to refocus and find its identity. Before tonight, I’d been to several Saturday classes at INDIGO (a local green building supply store), but I had no idea how many organizations exist in Gainesville that orbit around that central concept of ‘Sustainability’. There must have been two hundred people in the room tonight, and many of those were representing small organizations with a tight focus on this or that environmental, social, economic, or other issue in town. The meeting lasted two hours, of which we spent at least an hour brainstorming different initiatives we would be interested in pursuing in different categories like local economy, civic engagement, education, energy, water, food, and so on.

It was incredible. The conversation in that room generated so many ideas that we found very quickly that we had to limit the brainstorm to a few prominent ideas in each subject that we could use as a springboard to get started. Three hours later, I made it home, after spending quite a bit more time after the meeting talking about ideas with other stragglers. As I write this, my mind is swimming with new ideas, and I find myself a little drunk on the sheer potential represented by that many people, all chipping away at so many different angles of this one central problem of how to make our community more sustainable. We never even really defined that word, instead relying on everyone’s intuitive sense of its meaning to lead them into the groups where they could address what they saw as the biggest problem. This was a degree of self-organization that I’ve never seen before in a group of people. There was no awkward shuffling around looking for a place where you would belong; there was no last guy to be picked for a given team. After 20 minutes brainstorming in a large group about the broad issues we thought we should tackle, everyone seemed to know where they could be of the most use to the group.

I can’t wait for the next meeting. In fact, I’ve already talked to one of the people at tonight’s meeting, and I really think we’ll be discussing the issues of our group much more before that next meeting. I feel like this is what I’ve been training for, this is where I can finally use the skills I’ve built in my career, and the knowledge I’ve gained through so many books and you, dear Internet.

By the way, my group is in charge of the civic engagement topic. The upshot of tonight’s meeting was that there are a ton of organizations in Gainesville, most of which are operating below the public consciousness. What we really need is a way to sort of “fold in” the content on several registry websites for these sorts of organizations, along with the ability to allow organizations to directly manage information in cases where they aren’t listed in another registry website. I’m guessing this will take the form of a site serving three broad categories of activity: Buy/Shop/Use, Volunteer/Provide/Sell, and Organizational Communications. The idea of folding in is to make use of content from other registry sites where possible without the need to completely replace them and compete with them. That way, they can continue to operate according to their own agenda, and can still share information with our site.

If anyone were to read this post, and have an idea of how we might put a site like that together, I’d be very interested to hear about it.

I have a Meyer lemon tree in my back yard that will probably be my first target. It seems to produce a profusion of blossoms, though we’ve only had it for a couple years, and it hasn’t borne much fruit. I recently found out why: late freezes seem to be killing the blossoms. This year has been unbelievably bad (for Florida), with temperatures reaching down into the mid-teens on several occasions already. I figure if I can get some cuttings growing, I might be able to coax some high-yielding house plants out of the deal. I’ll probably start here, but it’s definitely not all I’ve got on my mind these days.

I’ve also got my eye on some huge fig trees that produce some of the best brown turkey figs I’ve ever had. Oh, and there are three orange trees – two large, one smallish – that seem to produce pretty well. The smaller one has actually had a profound effect on the route Luke and I walk ever morning. I go out of my way to walk past this tree every day, because when it blooms, it gives off the most delicious scent that you can smell from over a block away.

I’m also coming to see the trash service as competitors. This morning, I walked past a four-foot cutting of prickly pear cactus in someone’s yard waste bin, waiting for the trash guys to come pick it up. This was more than enough to root several good cuttings, according to what I saw at the Edible Plant Project. This was near the apex of our walk, and it took me about half an hour to get back to the house, pick up my work gloves, and get the truck. I passed EWS (Emerald Waste Service, known as “Earl” to us…don’t ask) on the way, and thought, “No way he’s already been all the way around to here…” But he had, and the cactus was lost to the iron beast. Oh well, better luck next time.

This is a whole category of gardening I honestly didn’t know existed. Before talking to the Edible Plant guys, I thought cuttings were for herbs. I really can’t explain how excited I am as I think about taking some of the best that Florida has to offer – great fruit – with us when Emily graduates, and we move on to our next life.