Simple Green
Art: Thomas Cobb
There’s a phantom in your home. Some even call it a vampire. It won’t suck your blood, of course, and it’s not really a monster—unless you think $3 billion annually in wasted energy nationwide is frightening.
Fighting phantom energy use from idle laptops, VCRs and even toasters has been just one focus of My Sustainable Year, a public awareness campaign developed by Park City’s Sustainability Department on its ParkCityGreen.org website. Each week throughout the year, the program has been promoting one way we can reduce our impact on the planet, save ourselves some money and make better use of our resources. Week 8 brought the recommendation to unplug unused appliances so that all their little green and red lights stop draining power unnecessarily.
Park City Environmental Sustainability Director Diane Foster is the mastermind behind My Sustainable Year. “We figured people could try almost anything for just one week,” she says. The program aims to help Parkites look a little more closely at things we take for granted, encourage us to try doing things a little differently, and maybe lead us to discover that we can be greener without having to make drastic changes. At varying levels of commitment—can’t imagine going vegan for a week? Try cutting out meat for just a couple of days—My Sustainable Year seeks to overcome the negative associations some people have when it comes to green living.
“The environmental movement has made people think that they have to put on a hair shirt, give up their SUV and drive a two-door Toyota,” says Liza Simpson, a member of the Park City Council who has participated in the program since its beginning. “But there are a lot of little things that people can do that make a difference and really don’t affect their lifestyles.”
My Sustainable Year isn’t just a static to-do list of tips for green living. It also has a social media component, through which participants can swap ideas and perspectives. In one thread, you might have learned, for example, that there are power strips that will automatically shut power off to appliances that aren’t in use. Forum participants even supported each other during one week’s challenge of living on 20 gallons of water a day. (Really, your hair looked great.)
Thus far, the program has illuminated a whole host of little choices that are often just sitting right under our noses. City buses, for example. Have you noticed how ubiquitous they are? Next time you’re stuck behind one, imagine yourself sitting on that bus reading the paper, sipping your coffee and listening to your MP3 player. You may remember the scheduling nightmares back in the early ’90s, but if you haven’t tried the bus lately, you are missing out on the most convenient, most hassle-free way to get to the ski resorts.
Other weeks have featured tips on how to analyze a week of your trash and how to freecycle things you don’t need anymore. Still to come are lights-out or power-free weeks and weeks concerning composting, using alternative transportation and eating locally grown food. If you haven’t been participating, an archive section of the website will let you catch up on what you’ve missed.
In these difficult economic times, you might wonder why Park City is spending time and money to educate its population about ways to save the world from a global-scale problem that some people think doesn’t even exist. But living sustainably here promises benefits for the local community first and foremost. “We all believe we should have clean air,” explains Foster. “We all believe in the economics of saving energy and saving water.”
Can little things like these really make a difference? Economist and participant in My Sustainable Year Tyler Poulsen says yes: “Lots of small decisions and actions created the problem we’re facing today.” Poulsen’s research has shown that households could reduce carbon emissions by about 32 percent just by making home energy, transportation and dietary choices—did you know, for instance, that beef is 13 times more carbon intensive than chicken?
And it’s not just about altruism: remember all that money sucked up by the energy vampires. Besides, as Councilmember Simpson says, “Just because a problem is daunting doesn’t give us the excuse to do nothing.”
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