Warning: snarkiness ahead.

My basic line is that there are lots of ways to be green — that is, to consciously try to reduce your impact on the planet, use resources more wisely, think about the effects of your actions, or care about the earth and its future. I respect that some people choose very different paths than I do in promoting sustainability, and I have tons of respect for the people who get out there more than I do and canvass, call, write, agitate, and activate (or whatever the verb is for what activists do). Plenty of people have smaller footprints than I do, try harder, and do more. Plenty don’t, are but are working hard to get there.

I really try to be fair, patient, and tolerant, but I fail more often than I let on. And although I don’t rant much on here, I have to say that certain types of ‘green’ behavior or ‘green’ blogs drive me quietly but absolutely crazy. (Note the Quotes of Scorn.) Regular programming will continue after I’ve gotten the snark out of my system.

Let’s talk about green blogs. I have one. If you’re reading this, you might have one, too. Everything we do has an impact, including blogging, and including green blogging. Does the amount of planet-saving mojo we create balance out the impact? Or are our green blogs quietly wrecking the planet along with everything else we do as first world citizens? 

Here, for your pleasure and enlightenment, is a totally unscientific and unapologetically snarky quiz to find out what kind of impact your green blog has on the earth. 

1. How much time do you spend on your blog, promoting your blog, or schmoozing with other bloggers so they’ll become your faithful readers?
a) 0-2 hours a week. I blog when I remember to.
b) 2-5 hours a week. I put some time and effort into promoting my blog.
c) 5-10 hours a week. I might be slightly obsessed in getting my page rank up.
d) 10+ hours a week. Whatever it takes to get companies to contact me for reviews.

2. Where does the electricity that powers your computer come from?
a) 100% renewable energy. I live off the grid and rigged my laptop to run on solar panels.
b) 50-99% renewable energy. I tried hooking my computer to a turbine, but it didn’t work out.
c) Less than 50% renewable energy (but my energy provider gets a little juice from solar or wind).
d) I have no idea, and don’t really care.

3. How many product reviews do you do each month?
a) 0-1. But mostly 0.
b) 2-3 on an average month (less than 1 per week).
c) 4-5 (at least 1 per week).
d) 5+ or as many as I’m given the opportunity to do. I heart stuff!

4. How many of them are for products you genuinely need and can’t find a local, lower impact solution for?
a) All of them (or n/a, since I don’t do any product reviews).
b) Most of them, with the occasional fun, green-ish one thrown in.
c) A few. But I’d review an eco-cupcake holder made from recycled plastic if I were given the chance.
d) I’ve never thought about the products I review that way.

5. Would you get green blogger business cards and/or stationery?
a) No way. Think about all the dead trees that went into those things.
b) They’re cute, but I don’t think they’re necessary.
c) I have the sweetest blogger cards printed in soy ink on 100% recycled paper.
d) Have you seen my laminated glitter business cards?

6) How do you feel about green blogger conventions?
a) The whole phrase is an oxymoron. Flying out to promote my blog and have ‘green’ products sold to me is not low impact.
b) I wouldn’t go to one unless it were in my town or within a short drive.
c) They’re OK. I picked up some great swag at the last one.
d) If a company sponsors me to go, I’m there. If it has green in the title, it must be eco-friendly, right?

Mostly As: you officially have a low impact green blog. You might also be just a little on the self-righteous and curmudgeonly side. Oh well — sustainability first!

Mostly Bs: your blog is pretty low impact, although you don’t have a do-or-die approach when it comes to reducing your footprint. Depending on how many people read your blog and take something away from it, it’s possible that the beneficial impact of your blog outweighs its use of resources.

Mostly Cs: You’re heading into the territory of the quotation marks, as in the ‘green’ blogger. You may have other motives for blogging, such as generating income or getting cool free stuff. You still think you can achieve greenness through buying stuff.

Mostly Ds: You think green is a nice color. But your blog is not low impact by any stretch of the imagination.

How’d you do? I’m mostly As and Bs with the occasional C. (By the way, if you’re not sure what percentage of your power comes from renewable energy, it’s easy to find out through a quick web search. My provider gets about 30% from renewable sources.)

It’s completely impossible to quantify how much good my blog does in educating or reaching out, but it is easy to see what kind of resources go into it. Is it worth it? I have no idea. But I do think that a green revolution starts with consciousness, conversation, and real, meaningful change, and our blogs are one place to begin.

Do you think about the impact of your green blog? What are some ways to improve it?

That pretty little red orb hides a lot of dirty secrets. I just finished reading Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland: How Modern Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, and am profoundly unsettled. If you’ve bought a supermarket tomato in the dead of winter, odds are that it came from Florida. (But don’t worry — if it came from Mexico, it has its own host of problems.) The conditions that produced it are so appalling that I am never buying another out of state, out of season tomato. Here’s why.

1. They’re tasteless. Pretty and red, yes. But also mealy with, at most, a slight watery tartness to them. Compared to the full glory of a summer ripened tomato that explodes with flavor and juice when you bite, winter tomatoes are so disappointing that they hardly merit the name. Why are they tasteless? Tomatoes that have been bred for travel are picked green and gassed with ethylene until they turn a beautiful, uniform red. They are bred for toughness and uniformity, not taste. Apparently you can drop kick one across the room without bruising one. You could probably give someone a concussion if you lobbed one of these.
2. They are less nutritious. Not just tomatoes, but many conventionally grown crops have lower vitamin levels than they used to 50 years ago —  due to both selective breeding and the heavy use of chemicals. Modern tomatoes, which have been bred for looks and hardiness, have lost iron, calcium, and vitamin A — but have 14 times more sodium.
3. Florida tomatoes are doused with  five times as much fungicide and six times as much pesticide as California tomatoes. Florida is a crappy place to grow tomatoes, yet it produces 1/3 of all tomatoes available in the US, and most of the off-season ones. Tomatoes like warm, fairly dry weather. Florida is warm, but it’s also humid. The soil is essentially sand, so nutrition has to be pumped in, and the humidity gives rise to lots of nematodes, insects, and weeds that aren’t killed off every winter. Because it’s so far from being an ideal place to grow tomatoes, farmers end up spraying their crops with some of the deadliest pesticides known to man — and lots of them.
4. They travel far. There are so many good reasons to buy local: you’re supporting your local economy, you get to develop relationships with your local growers, you don’t rack up the carbon footprint of food from far away, and locally grown food generally tastes better. Whether your winter tomatoes are coming from Canadian hothouses, Mexican hydroponic plantations, or Floridan fields, they’re using up a lot of oil to get to you. And they don’t even taste good.
5. If your winter tomato comes from Florida, it leaves behind a long trail of human rights abuses. Being a farm laborer is crappy wherever you are in this country, but Florida seems to be one of the worst places, with the fewest protections and support for laborers. In some cases, the tomato industry has become outright slavery. The heavy and poorly regulated use of pesticides on tomato fields has caused chronic illness and debilitating birth defects among the children of laborers.
6. If your winter tomato comes from Mexico, you might want to read this article on how organic tomatoes raised for export in Mexico are sucking wells dry and preventing small farmers from raising the crops they need in order to eat. Sound familiar? Oh yeah, similar story with bananas, coffee, chocolate…
7. It’s not hard to grow or preserve your bounty of  summer tomatoes. My mom literally just sticks extra tomatoes in the freezer. Freezing does change the texture, but in the winter, tomatoes go into soups and sauces and recipes that don’t require the crispness of fresh tomatoes. I also freezer-canned a few jars of roasted tomato and garlic sauce (definitely should have made more of that), and of course, you can do real water bath or pressure canning.
8. There’s a steep price for being able to eat the same foods year round. The cost is tallied in oil, pesticides, social justice, and taste. Is it really worth it for that bland supermarket tomato?

Unfortunately, it’s not just about refusing to buy tomatoes in the winter. Restaurants and fast food joints continue to use them, and I admit that one of my occasional indulgences is an In-N-Out grilled cheese (animal style!), with its requisite slice of tomato. Now that I know the story behind the tomato in my sandwich, will I stop going? Request that they leave it out? I haven’t decided yet.

If you’re interested in the story of tomatoes, I suggest you check out Tomatoland for yourself. Prepare to be appalled.

Do you buy tomatoes in the winter? Will you stop?

As a citizen of the developed world, I’m likely to live to my late 70s, and given my gender, probably a little longer than that. Even without kids, that’s a high impact on the planet for almost eight decades. Not just that, I’ve seen what it looks like to outlive your health, happiness, and mind, and the prospect terrifies me. My grandfather: dead at age 102 after twenty years (!) of worsening health, mind, and temper. My great aunt: a victim of Alzheimer’s so severe that she could no longer carry on a conversation. My neighbor: 94 years old, housebound, wondering why she’s still alive.

No, thank you. I’d rather my life ended with a definitive period than a long series of ellipses. I’d like to die before I become a burden on anyone else, before I get so cranky that even the cat won’t put up with me. I’d like a dignified, tidy end in which I get to turn off the lights and lock the door behind me. And in this country, it’s very unlikely to happen.

I’m talking about euthanasia options for the elderly who no longer enjoy their lives and have no prospect of ever doing so again. We offer our suffering, aging animal companions a quick and relatively painless death, yet don’t have that option for ourselves. I’ve had to put exactly one animal to sleep, and it took so much out of me that I was a mess for months afterward, but what haunted me was not having to do it, but knowing when to do it. How can you gauge whether a cat still has any quality of life? I think I’d have far less trouble knowing when I’d had enough.

I wouldn’t expect or want anyone to end a life for environmental concerns, but since we do seem to be facing a future of increasingly scarce resources, it would make sense to offer a way out of a prolonged and unhappy death, or at least have a rational and open conversation about euthanasia. Whenever overpopulation comes up, it’s almost inevitable that someone will bring up the downside of a lower birth rate: a society disproportionately made up of older people.  Japan and Taiwan are already experiencing some of these issues. However, they’re worth finding solutions for, because an ever-growing human pyramid scheme population really isn’t the solution. I’d take an aging population over a dead planet any day. Could legalizing euthanasia in more countries and under more circumstances be a small part of using our resources better as a society? Maybe.

I am not religious, romantic, or sentimental. I do not believe in souls or consider life a holy gift; I think quality of life is as or more important than life. And speaking just for myself, I wouldn’t want to use up resources on a life I was no longer able to enjoy. Actually, let me just be selfish and say that I don’t want to live a life that isn’t enjoyable, and I’d rather not muck things up trying to end my life with oleander leaves filched from the nursing home garden.

Given the frenzy over ‘death panels,’ I doubt this is a national conversation we’ll be able to have any time soon. But it will be interesting to see if resource pressures force us to revise some of our attitudes about death or just polarize us further into secular/religious camps.

What are your thoughts on euthanasia and dying greener?

We caught it before it could make good on its threat, but it’s true: we have too much stuff in our freezer, and if that weren’t enough, we have plenty of food in the cupboard and fridge, too. Everything we really like gets eaten and replaced. Everything else, which includes:

• Food that we bought because we know we should eat more of it but don’t really like very much
• Convenience foods like cooking sauces that I always think I will be happy to fall back on in a pinch (and never do)
• Food that was given to us
• Food that looked good at the store but wasn’t that enjoyable
• Food that I bought for a particular recipe that I never ended up making

Coming up later this week (possibly):

• Matzo ball soup with onions, celery, carrots, lentils, and freezer vegetables
• Pesto with whole wheat pasta, canned artichokes in the fridge,white beans, and whatever other vegetables I can dig up
• Home made pizza using frozen tomato sauce and porcini and shiitake mushrooms
• Potstickers with the wonton skins and seitan I stuck in the freezer months ago, plus shiitake mushrooms

A little good news to start the year with: as of January 1, 2012, my hometown (not so much a town as a sprawling, amoeba-shaped suburb south of San Francisco) has banned virtually all retailers from giving out plastic shopping bags. You can’t even buy them anymore. If you forget to bring your own bag, your only options are to 1) carry it out without one (this means you, Mrs. Can-I-Get-This-Laundry-Detergent-Double-Bagged), 2) buy a reusable at the store, or 3) pay 10 cents for a paper bag. My own little San Jose now has one of the strictest bag bans in the nation.

I want people to make educated, rational, and voluntary choices. I do, I really do. But I also recognize that regulation works better (much better) than education in some things, especially when it comes to making us give up an immediate convenience for longterm sustainability. Plastic bags aren’t the most important environmental issue we face, not by a long shot. But they do show how effective regulation can be. Within a few weeks of Ireland’s new plastic bag policy (people can still choose to buy plastic bags at checkout if they want, but they cost about 33 cents each), bag usage dropped 94%. Everyone bought (or finally started to use) reusables. Plastic bags became a social taboo. In Washington, DC, the 5 cent plastic bag tax caused the number of plastic bags given out to plummet from 22.5 million per month to 3 million.

That’s huge. Charging for plastic bags made more of a difference than giving out free reusables or educating people on the reasons to avoid disposable bags. I dunno, maybe we should just accept that, as a species, humans are not going to act wisely, rationally, and thoughtfully unless we have an incentive to — or a disincentive to act badly. Government? You listening?

San Jose’s reaction to the new bag ban is, not surprisingly, mixed. There is plenty of libertarian howling about the evils of more government and less choice. Plastic lobbyists are displeased. And lots of people are complaining about the cost of paper bags (.10) or reusables (.99-2.99). I’m not really sure why. Many stores in my area have given away reusables on Earth Day or when they opened, and Target and probably other retailers were giving reusable bags away for free yesterday. At this point, I feel like everyone who wants reusable bags already has a closet full. I certainly do.

I think the roar will die down pretty quickly once people settle into new habits. The only bags I tend to use are my handy roll-up Envirosax that fit perfectly into a purse and hold everything, so I’m planning to bring some of my extra reusable bags to the store with me to give away to anyone who needs one. It’s a good way to start a new year of environmental awareness and activism.

Here’s to progress and hope in 2012!

Time for a confession: I don’t actually hug trees. I’m not a big hugger to start with, and trees are scratchy and unyielding. Many have ants trailing up the grooves, baby snails hatching in knots, sap dripping down in slow motion. I may not be a literal tree hugger, but I am a tree lover and an enthusiastic tree watcher.

My tree book collection has exploded in the past year with natural histories, field guides, and photography books. In the space of a year, I have started to look — really look — at trees for the first time. I was originally going to write this post in the fall, when trees still had leaves. But winter is actually a very good time to start looking at trees. Leaves can be so distracting. Without them, you can see the bones underneath and appreciate the architecture.

Precise tree identification is probably best left to the experts, but it’s actually not very hard to get started with the basics. I’d like to share a little of what I know in hopes that the boring old tree outside your window will suddenly become a lot more interesting. My earliest tree lessons came from my mother, who gave me the names to eucalyptus, liquidambar, and mulberry trees early in my childhood. I’m grateful. (Incidentally, this post is only about broad leafed trees. I’m just not that into conifers yet, other than the wonderful coastal redwoods I grew up with. Sorry.)

Looking at Branches: Opposite vs. Alternate

If you can categorize a tree as having opposite branches, you can rule out a whole lot of other possibilities. Only a few tree families have opposite branches, and there’s a handy little mnemonic to help you remember which: Damp Horse (dogwood, ash, maple, paulownia, and horse chestnut). Winter is a good time to check out whether your neighborhood trees have opposite or alternate branches. Be careful, though. While black ashes form clear, dark crosses across the sky, you’ll have to look closer with most other trees. Also, alternate trees will have the odd opposite pair, and vice  versa. If you see many pairs of opposite branches, however, you’re probably on to something.

See the way the branches grow out opposite each other to form Vs or crosses? This is an ash tree.

Looking at Fruit/Seeds

Botanists have lots of different names for different types of fruit (drupes, pomes, arils…). I don’t know all of them yet, and you really don’t need to in order to pick out several of the major tree families.

Acorns = Oak (Quercus)

Only oaks bear acorns, so if you see green acorns on a tree or brown acorns beneath one, you’re looking at an oak. Oaks are a crazily diverse family of trees. This photo shows an oak with smooth, deeply lobed leaves, but there are also oaks with sharp lobes (black oak), small spiny leaves (coast live oak), and even smooth, elongated oval leaves (holly oak). Most oaks lose their leaves in the fall, but live oaks stay green year round.

As a very rough generalization, most mature oaks are stout trees with irregular (non-symmetrical) crowns and gnarled branches and trunks.

Paired Samaras = Maple (Acer)

I probably don’t have to tell you what a maple leaf looks like, but not every tree that has maple-like leaves is actually a maple (see plane trees, next), and if that wasn’t enough, there are also maples with leaves that look like ash leaves (box elder). However, all true maples have paired sets of winged seeds, which are called samaras. They spin like helicopters when you drop them, and I’ve always thought they were an instance of awesome design by nature.

Maples include sugar, silver, and Japanese varieties. Many maples turn beautiful colors in the fall, especially on the east coast. Branches are opposite, and as far as I know, all maples are deciduous.

Soft Seed Balls = Plane Trees / Sycamores (Platanus)

 If you see a bare winter tree with camouflage like bark (big gray, white, tan, and/or orange splotches) and 1″ seed balls hanging down, especially near the top of the tree, you’re looking at some sort of plane tree (sycamores in American English). The seedballs are a little spongy and surprisingly light for their size. If you pull one open, you’ll find that it’s filled with white fluff, and the brown outside is actually formed of lots of tiny seeds packed together. They’re kind of like inside-out dandelion puffs.

Plane trees have big maple-like leaves, but good luck trying to tap one for syrup. At least in my area, they are one of the most common street trees.

Wicked Spiky Seed Balls = Sweetgum / Liquidambar (Styrax)

There are probably other trees that produce round, brown seed balls. But the sweetgum is so common and distinctive that I thought I’d point it out to you. The sweetgum has star-shaped, vaguely maple-like leaves that turn brilliant colors even in mild California autumns, and after they’re all gone, spiky seedballs hang down from the bare branches like ornaments. Unlike the plane tree’s seed balls, these are spiked all over and very hard. The seeds are dispersed through holes in the ball, leaving the spiky structure intact. These things decompose very slowly — amid the brown ones of this year, you can often see grayer, smaller seed balls of previous years.

Whew! I could go on for a while, but I don’t want to be a bore. I noticed today that some of our street trees (Bradford pears) are already putting out new buds. California trees live in a state of perpetual confusion about when they’re supposed to do what. In the spring proper, I’ll bombard you with information about flowers and leaves.

Have you ever taken a close look at your hardworking and underappreciated street trees? What kind of trees are around you?

But given how many headlines from my Twitter feed scream about carcinogens, infertility, asthma, and other diseases, I have to wonder: are we being rational in how we look at chemicals and evaluate our risk from them? Or is this some kind of knee-jerk reaction?

I recently read (and reviewed) an eye-opening book on toxicology called The Dose Makes the Poison by Patricia Frank and M. Alice Ottoboni. It’s no page turner, but it offers a perspective on toxins that squarely contradicts the more usual alarmist headlines that show up in my environmental Twitter feed. Its conclusion: public perception of chemicals and risk have very little correlation with what the scientific data show. Although I do feel like the book downplays potential risk, especially from combined chemical exposure, it also exposes the press and public’s tendency to consider chemicals in a black/white dichotomy.

I felt very defensive while reading this book, but after that first reaction, have come to recognize that it made valid points and shook up some assumptions I didn’t even know I was making. Are you looking for some food for thought? Here are some of the myths the book takes pains to point out and disprove.

1. Natural = safe. In fact, many of the most toxic substances on this planet are entirely natural. From death cap mushrooms and oleanders to hemlock, arsenic to radon, nature’s pharmacy is much, much bigger than man’s. And frequently bad for us. Humans have been poisoning themselves (accidentally) and others (not accidentally) for our entire history as a species, long before we were able to create synthetics.
2. Chemicals are bad. Even if you’re only talking about synthetic chemicals, this is a pretty broad generalization. Manmade chemicals include pesticides, poisons, and life-saving medicines.
3. Substances are inherently safe or unsafe. You can die from drinking too much water, eating too much spinach, drinking too much coffee, or taking too much Tylenol. Hell, the chemical acrylamide, produced by frying, baking, or roasting starches, is carcinogenic. Granted, you’d have to drink or eat a lot of these substances, but the point is: there’s a threshold after which they stop being harmless or therapeutic and become dangerous. With relatively few exceptions, chemicals have measurable thresholds. It’s the dose that makes the poison. 
4. Correlation equals causation. In one case study, a new hospital was experiencing a spike in the rate of newborn jaundice. Everyone suspected the culprit was pesticides sprayed on the farms outside. However, nearby hospitals exposed to similar levels of the same pesticides didn’t have increased jaundice cases. Eventually, they figured out that babies at the new hospital, which had fewer windows, were less exposed to light. Phototherapy is now effectively used to treat jaundice.  It’s both easy and tempting to jump to conclusions, but correlation does not always equal causation, certainly not to the extent the press makes it seem. The next time you read an article about how x substance causes x disease, it might be worth considering whether the article is really about a correlation, not a proven cause.
5. Banning a chemical is the safest way to go. Well…sometimes. And then sometimes it just makes manufacturers switch to a less well tested substitute, and we’re faced with choosing between the known risk (e.g. BPA) and the unknown one that we have much less information on (BPS). Joy.
6. Anyone who doesn’t condemn synthetic chemicals is an industry apologist. Dismissing anyone who disagrees with your beliefs as incompetent or corrupt is a devastatingly effective way to stop making rational evaluations. There are certainly industry apologists. However, there are also studies — lots of them — that simply don’t yield conclusive results, show that a chemical used at its recommended level is safe, or that its benefits outweigh its risks (as with many medicines).
7. Studies can give us definite yes or no answers about how safe chemicals are. Sometimes, but not very often.  Toxicological testing often requires so much time and resources  in order to draw statistically valid conclusions that the amount of funding provided just isn’t enough. So we end up with plenty of studies that suggest possible conclusions without being statistically valid, yet are interpreted by the press to be a definite conclusion.
8. Looking at one source can give us definitive answers about how much risk we face. It’s hard to get a balanced perspective by looking at just one website or one study, even if you haven’t leaped to any of the above conclusions. Did you know that 79% of the Society of Toxicologists surveyed consider the EWG (home of the Skin Deep database) to overstate the health risks of chemicals? I didn’t either. But knowing that will help me evaluate how much risk I think my shampoo is putting me in. I recommend also checking out Personal Care Truth for another perspective on cosmetics safety.
9. Organic farming does not involve pesticides. Some small farms do use crop rotation and other pesticide-free ways to manage pests, but most larger scale organic farms use pesticides. The main difference is that they are required to use organic pesticides rather than synthetic ones. (Mostly.) However, there’s some evidence to suggest that organic pesticides are not necessarily safer for humans or ecosystems than their conventional counterparts, and some biodegrade into other chemicals that are harmful. Dammit, why can’t things be straightforward for once?

I’ve read that the human bias is to believe that we are in peril, which back in the good old days was less likely to get us killed than dismissing a potential threat. I also think we have a lot more information at our disposal now and should use it to make rational, well-considered judgments instead of just reacting. Life would be so much simpler if buying organic was always better for the planet, or if all synthetic chemicals were dangerous. Instead, it’s about a whole bunch of case-by-case decisions, like having to judge people as individuals instead of lumping them into stereotypes. No one said it was going to be easy.

What’s your attitude towards chemicals? Have you found yourself falling into any of these assumptions?

I’m actually pretty hurt about this. I shouldn’t be. I was never neglected or abused, but I was the kid whose parents refused to buy any crappy school fundraisers on the grounds that they weren’t a good deal. As a teenager, my closest emotional relationship was with the cat. My friend’s mother basically adopted me in high school. My father bitterly opposed my marriage. And so, not surprisingly, it was my friends who came to my pottery show and supported my studio. I am so grateful to have people in my life who fill in the gaps that my parents left. Even so, I think I’m sufficiently emotionally dysfunctional to make it a very, very good thing that I won’t be having kids.

Most of my blog is about considering the impact of my actions, but this incident made it painfully obvious that what we don’t do also has an impact. Often unseen, and sometimes hard to see. This week  I find myself wondering: what is the impact of not acting more forcefully to mitigate climate change right now? What is the impact of not going out to join the Occupy forces? What is the impact of not coming to any meaningful conclusions at the Durban climate change conference?

It’s probably not good to get too hung up on this question. Obviously, there isn’t much I could have done to change the outcome of Durban and plenty of other factors in our continuing headlong rush towards climate change. But if you need some motivation to keep pushing yourself to do more, taking a look at the probable results of inaction seems like a pretty effective way to go.

Part of my giftwrap stash

As a non-exuberant, non-religious, non-sociable sort of person, I don’t really do holidays. As always, not doing anything is agreeably low impact.  I cringe at the thought of chopping down a perfectly good tree just to prop it up in my house for a month, and I don’t need the symbolism of a fake tree, so I don’t have a Christmas tree. I can’t be bothered to decorate, so I don’t have lights, ornaments, statues, or vaguely sinister inflatable Santas. I don’t like my relatives, so I don’t travel to see them.  I hate malls, so presents tend to be locally handmade (ideal) and selectively given.

But then there’s my not-s0-secret giftwrap obsession. I love paper, always have. I grew up buried in books, went through prolonged origami and stationery phases, and still rhapsodize over the buttery softness of cotton fibre laid paper. Even knowing the environmental impact, I look forward to the new crop of giftwrap every year. I’m picky and rarely get more than two rolls a year, but over the years, I’ve accumulated more than my fair share of vintage-y penguins, elegant deer, woodland animals, swirly motifs, and wintry botanical prints.

Rhonda at Good Green Witch ranted about the wastefulness of wrapping paper earlier this week.  She’s absolutely right that wrapping paper is a stupid expenditure of resources. My rational side won’t attempt to deny it. But getting that roll or two every December makes me happy — I really love good design, and being able to afford and make use of good design is even better. And wrapping presents makes me happy. My old origami habits kick in, and soon I’m making elaborate pleat folds around the top of a cylinder, pinching crisp mitred corners, tucking, angling, valley-folding — until I have a small pile of tidy, even artsy, wrapped parcels. It’s surprisingly meditative and calming.

It’s not a green habit, but I’ve tried to make it less…brown. Large pieces of wrapping paper get saved and reused the following year. Everything is either 100% recyclable or recycled. And as I’ve said, I don’t buy a lot of presents, so I don’t go through very much of it.

I noticed I was getting a little defensive while reading Rhonda’s post. I don’t have many cherished holiday traditions and have done away with all the ones that I didn’t enjoy. Wrapping paper is one of the ones I’m not ready to let go of yet. Maybe never. Should I feel guilty about it?

I often come to the conclusion that being green shouldn’t be some form of self-flagellation. I didn’t sacrifice anything when I gave up the tree, the ham, or the lights — they were things I didn’t need or want in my life. But maybe they’re important to you, and you’ve made a conscious decision to keep just the holiday traditions that really matter to you. Fine. Everything we do has an impact. It’s my goal to choose wisely — just the stuff that genuinely makes me happy — and accept that other people will choose differently.

Happy winter holiday of choice.

This is what I’ve been busy with:

I’m going to be selling at my first pottery show this Friday and Saturday at the Sunnyvale Community Center. If you’re in the San Jose Bay Area, please come by and check it out!

Especially when it comes to cheesecake. I’ve made this raw vegan cheesecake several times now, and although it doesn’t really taste like dairy cheesecake, it is omnivore-approved for its smooth texture and creamy sweetness. No tofu, no vegan cream cheese substitutes, just whole, minimally processed ingredients. (Note: it is not low in fat or sugar.)

My recipe is based on Bon Bon Mini’s raw vegan cheesecake. I can rarely avoid the temptation to fiddle with a recipe, and I’m not a precise cook (everything is ‘to taste’ in my world), so if in doubt, check hers out first. However, this is a pretty forgiving recipe. I used honey and graham crackers in this particular batch (my best ever), so that’s why they’re only mostly raw and mostly vegan.

[Mostly] Vegan Raw Lime Cheesecake
Yield: about 24 mini cupcake sized cheesecakes

Filling:

• 1 1/4 c raw cashews, soaked for 2 hours and drained
• 5 TB unrefined coconut oil (melted is easier to measure)
• 1 TB coconut butter (for more flavor; you can substitute another TB of coconut oil)
• seeds of 1 vanilla bean
• 1/3 c fresh lime juice (to taste, about 3 medium limes)
• grated zest of 2 limes
• 1/8 c  - 1/4 c light agave or mild honey (I prefer honey; start with 1/8 c and add 1TB at a time to taste)
• 6 TB water or almond/coconut milk
• pinch of salt