Welcome!
From sustainability influencer to suburban mom with two cars.
There was a period in my life when I spent just about every waking and non-working hour thinking about and doing things under the broad umbrella of environmental sustainability. In any given week, I may be attending an evening community meeting about adding bus lanes to our neighborhood, learning how to make tofu with non-GMO soybeans from a small farm, teaching a “zero waste” workshop for a local corporate office, and dedicating the entire weekend researching and writing a post on my blog. Every experience, no matter how minuscule, was a potential teachable moment worth documenting and reflecting: having to fly for a conference is a chance to rant about the lack of high-speed rail in this country; getting takeout is an opportunity to remind people that black plastic is NOT recyclable blah blah blah; even applying dry shampoo to tame my after-biking hair leads to a selfie in the office bathroom on Instagram with the encouraging message of “you too can bike to work and look like a civilized person!” You get the idea: this stuff was my whole personality.
Then COVID happened, and I had a kid.
Posting about how to reduce your plastic use while people are dying around you felt both trivial and tone deaf. (In fact, environmentalists who mused about “the end of zero waste” and complained about more single use everything during COVID enraged me: you have the privilege to order grocery – delivered and packed by fellow humans who risked their lives going to work –and complaining about extra plastic is how you choose to use your time and energy?!) Casually picking up some $28/lb locally-raised pasture-fed pork felt financially irresponsible when half of my monthly salary went to daycare. Meanwhile, I lost the most essential element of my work and activism: time. Even with a supportive partner, keeping myself and a newborn fed and clean felt like an impossible task. Forget about spending endless hours researching, writing, and engaging with people online; finding the time to bike to a refill store 30 minutes away to restock castile soap felt like a logistical feat and rare luxury.
Addressing the climate crisis still felt urgent as ever. “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.” Rarely a day went by that I didn’t think about these words in those early days of parenthood. I spent the first night of a heatwave waking up in fits and checking that our baby hadn’t overheated. When the summer skies were hazy from the wildfires out west, I was brought back to the memory of wearing a mask as a child during seasonal dust storms in Northwest China and wished that my child didn’t have to do the same. I cried nursing and holding her on my chest for a mind boggling number of hours because it was the only way she would nap, while dreading for the days when my body can no longer provide everything she needs: Will the air she breaths be clean? Will she always have enough safe drinking water? Where will she shelter during future disasters?
Of course, parenthood was full of joy and exciting firsts too: the sense of wonder in her eyes pulling a carrot out of our raised bed garden, the freedom I felt after finally finding the courage to put her on a bike seat, her laughter interspersed with the request to go “faster! faster! faster!”, and most recently: the unexplained pride seeing a pair of ripped pants laid out on my desk because “mommy can patch.”
I withdrew further and further from the sustainability community I had built largely online, even as some of those relationships had turned into real life friendship (I called Renate to ask for EV advice while I was pregnant and doing research to replace our old car; Jillian mailed us her old baby carrier and hand-me-down toys). I had no time to read, research, post, or show up, but more importantly: who was I to be writing and teaching about this stuff? We have enough baby stuff to fill up an entire closet the size of a NYC apartment bedroom. We buy all the processed foods and snacks wrapped in plastic. And we now have two cars (to bring my child to daycare when the weather doesn’t allow biking and my partner uses the other car for work). It all felt so imperfect, shameful, and defeating.
But I desperately missed having a community. Moving to a new neighborhood during the pandemic meant losing our community garden plot and neighbors along the way. More and more college and grad-school friends are leaving our increasingly unaffordable state. Work became remote, then hybrid. All while parenthood serves as a daily, gut punching reminder of just how important community is and how little of it that we have.
I also increasingly feel the writing itch, as the new parenthood haze begins to lift. So what we have two cars and buy bulk dino nuggets wrapped in plastic?! The climate crisis continues and worsens while we all wallow in guilt and self-pity! My past self would have been the first to note that this work is not, and has never been a competition about who can be the most perfect environmentalist with the smallest carbon footprint.
So here I am! Scratching the writing itch with unpolished thoughts on sustainability, parenthood, and community-building, likely written hastily after the epic battles of bedtime. Unlike my old blog (which I might still keep), there will probably be very little research. Imperfection, speed, and spontaneity are the name of the game.
Thank you for being here.