Let’s look at our Carbon Footprint
The NLC thinks we should address driving fossil fuel based transportation. We are extremely aware of the fact that it is not necessarily possible to just ditch your old car and get a new electric/hybrid/biodiesel vehicle at the drop of the hat (some of the collective still has to rely on fossil fuel based transportation). We don’t even have much proof as of yet, that any of those are a much better alternative to fossil fuel based transportation. What we hope to encourage you to do in your journey to more sustainability, is to bring awareness to how much you drive, how much you don’t actually need to drive, and what you can do to change your approach to a very ingrained behavior of easy access to traveling to whatever destination you want.
First: take a week and write down all the places you hop in the car and drive to. Grocery store, miscellaneous errands, work, play, kid related, etc… Write down every single instance you get into your car and go somewhere. After you have written it all down for a week, look at and decide what things you can consciously and actively combine. For example; Can you get all your groceries for the week on the way home from work? Can you do your dry cleaning, grocery shopping, bank and clothes shopping all in one fell swoop instead of going to do each errand separately? Map and plan out making all your vehicle trips condensed as much as possible! Why you ask? What we need to do as a collective is try to get to hour/hours/day/days that we don’t get into our cars at all. Gulp, seems like an impossible task right?! We are so used to thinking “I need to get this right now! I’ll just jump in my car and go get it!”… and therein lies the problem. That instant gratification mind mode gets an awful lot of us into fossil fuel vehicles (usually on solo trips) and creates the obscene traffic issues we experience. If we collectively tried to cut down on how often we jump into said vehicles to do an errand, that could very likely be combined at another time, we could very quickly take the amount of cars on the road, significantly down.
Second; let’s discuss the work element, especially now, on the heels of so many of us being able to work from home due to the pandemic. For those of you who can’t work from home, we feel you and that’s cool! But for those of you who have been able to work from home for at least 2–3 months, this is for you! We want you to be honest with yourself first, and your employer second, about what your commute needs to look like in the future. Discuss very seriously with yourself if you REALLY must go into the office 5 days out of every week? Figure out if you can work remotely 1,2,3,4 or all days of the work week, and talk to your employer about making that into a reality. The NLC has a big issue with rush hour traffic. Honestly, everyone should. The fact that so many companies require people to come into the office in the US between the hours of 8–9am, and everyone leaves between 5–6pm, is simply ludicrous. It’s a big reason that “rush hour” traffic even exists. When a collective group of people has a very dated expectation of work hours, then a very dated and incredibly wasteful carbon footprint commuter hours cluster F of epic proportions is created. For FIVE DAYS A WEEK. We need to collectively make this different. In a capitalist society such as this one, doesn’t it make A LOT more sense to have staggered work hours? Why is the antiquated 9–5 ideal still a thing in this country? Think about how profound a change would occur if not only we were able to come in to the office anytime between 7am-noon and leave after our allotted 8 hours were done. Much less, if we were able to negotiate not coming into the office at all, at least a couple of days a week?! We know it’s kind of freaky to approach businesses/employers about working remotely, but, if there are enough people collectively insisting that this change occurs, the businesses are going to have to shift their approach and expectations of what an employee looks like going into the future. So many businesses were able to function just fine throughout this pandemic and no one was stuck in rush hour.
This is all we are going to cover this week, because the reality is, it’s A LOT to think about. Just remember, be gentle and non judg-y with yourselves! This whole process has more to do with awareness first and small changes second! We are so glad you are reading this and trying to make these shifts in your life! Every step you take, big or small, will shift things to collective sustainability, one action at a time. We can do this!
Baby steps turn into big steps eventually!
-The NLC
