Monday Night Trash Tally

One of my No Impact challenges for Day 1 was to collect all of my day's trash and take a look at the waste I create. I had to fish some stuff out of the trash throughout the day because I forgot that I couldn't just throw stuff into a receptacle to make it magically disappear. Just the process itself helped me be more conscious of how much garbage I produce, but actually taking everything apart and looking at what I would have sent to the landfill is pretty astounding and reminds me of how thoughtless my daily consumption routine is. Here's a list of my day's trash:

4 plastic bags

4 paper towels/napkins

4 slices of moldy sourdough

2 twisty ties

2 chip bags

1 applesauce lid and container

1/2 cauliflower stem

1/4 bunch of cilantro

No Impact Weeeeee(k)!

Yesterday was supposed to mark the beginning of my No Impact experience. It's a nationwide volunteer project initiated by Colin Beaven, aka No Impact Man. He's the fellow from Greenwich Village who tried to reduce his "carbon footprint" to zero with a year long project (now a lifetime living philosophy, I believe) of living a waste and electricity free life. It was a pretty huge undertaking considering that he had a very young child, North Eastern winters can get pretty harsh even with articial heating, and he lives in New York City--one of the most consumer driven places on planet Earth. Well, he did it. And he claims that he lost weight, saved money, and most importantly, his overall satisfaction of his quality of life improved by miles.

In addition to the fact that I care deeply about the environment, the extra happiness bit is an extra motivator to try this out. Sometimes it's easy to get sucked into the downward spiral of homework and my internship, so I thought I'd take a stab at going No Impact! I'm officially starting today, since I totally forgot the project started on Sunday and I broke all the major rules for the first day. So today, my challenges are to cut out shopping for unnecessary items and carry all my trash around with me so I can look at all the waste I've created at the end of the day. Wish me luck.

Colin's blog:
www.noimpactman.typepad.com

Tree House

So one of my many recently failed art projects includes a raccoon house, which my friend Giulia and I were going to collaborate on until the person responsible for providing the actual raccoons went MIA. At my house's most recent dinner party (theme: things you can roll, like sushi, burritos, cinnamon rolls, etc.), a guest mentioned a pair of raccoons that had were becoming regular diners of his roommate's cat food in their attic. They were trying to devise safe and humane ways to get rid of their unwelcome guests, but were down in their luck in ideas. So the following day, after one too many cups of coffee (really, I just had one), I had the brilliant idea of building a treehouse with luxurious raccoon amenities! We'd be like HUD for our urban wildlife friends. I still think its a great idea, but until I actually find another situation where raccoons are in danger of becoming homeless, I'll just have to leave it in my stock pile of unrealized, seemingly silly but totally serious projects.

Anyways, all that was a back story for what I'm about to present. Ever since I saw this book in the window of St. Mark's Bookstore with these incredible tree houses on the cover a few years ago, I can't get the idea out of my mind. Tree houses, houses made out of trees, trees in our houses...More recently, Giulia brought it to the forefront of my mind when she was telling me about this tree house she was designing for her architecture class. So it was kind of naturally on my mind when this raccoon issue came up. And I thought, how perfect! It's a great opportunity to exercise my interest in what people may think are three separate worlds--animals, housing, and sustainable design and architecture. And now, there's this article in the New York Times recently about an architect who builds with whole trees! I'm linking the article below so you can all read it and keep yourselves updated in cutting edge, sustainable architecture. But in case you really really don't have time, I'm posting some pictures too. Just thinking of the possibilities of beautiful design and environmental benefits building with whole trees could yield is making my brain go off in a million directions it really shouldn't right now. I gotta write a stupid paper...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/garden/05tree.html

November Bounty

Yesterday morning I woke up early to raid the Clark Park farmer's market. I was a little worried that the seasonal chilliness would have already zapped good produce from the farm fields, but look at what I found! It was the most beautiful farmer's market I have seen since I moved to Philly! If you're wondering what that purple lump is in the left hand corner, that's cauliflower! That's right, PURPLE cauliflower! I don't exactly know what I'm gonna do with yet, so if you have any suggestions, send them my way.

I spent most of the AM hours running between my house and different grocery purveyors, emptying my duffle bag and then running out to get more. I can't think of a better way to have spent a beautiful Saturday morning. But that's not to say there weren't some sobering observation made along the way.

The local, organic food distributors in West Philly that I know of are the farmer's markets, the Mariposa Food Co-op, and Milk & Honey. I visited all three yesterday, and the customer demographics are pretty racially homogenous. Mostly White people shop at these places. I also went to the food truck, the International Foods store (which always looks like it's been looted), and Supreme Shop N Bag, where the diversity of the shoppers is much higher. It's not new information to me that the health disparities between races is huge, but every time I see young African American kids stocking up on huge quantities of junk food and think of the high rates of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and other diet related diseases that are through the roof in poor communities, I can't help but get enraged at the demographics. What really stumps me is that these two different kinds of purveyors are in the same neighborhood but are still obviously divided.

Welcome

Welcome to Artful Blogging everyone. I've been itching to get in touch with my creative capacity lately, so lets hope that I stay on top of this project despite the many many failed ones I have under my belt. Grad school has buried me in reading, and my internship has me wasting away in a corner office with no windows and nothing to do, so maybe exercising what little, whittling artistic proficiency I have is gonna keep my spirits up and in shape. It's like regular artistic calisthenics, if you will.

I'm having some issues coming up with a good name, so I thought Artful Blogging would do for now. It's broad enough to encompass my schizophrenic interests and narrow enough to pinpoint the catalyst for starting this blog. But if you have a better suggestion, please throw it my way. I'm not particularly attached.

Stay tuned in. Keep me accountable. Leave me some feedback.