Low Impact

Green Resolutions for 2009

Normally, I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions.  I figure that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing now – why wait till some arbitrary date like January 1?

Still, there are a few things that I plan to accomplish over the next 365 days to help lower my impact on the environment, and 1/1/2009 is a good a day as any to start!

Become a (sort of) vegetarian

This year, I’ll be what’s called a “pesco-vegetarian”.  This is a fancy word for someone who doesn’t eat meat (like beef and chicken), but will eat seafood.  The two main rationales I have are:

• Environmental impact -  The environmental impact of growing a kilogram of beef is far, far higher than growing a kilogram of grain

• Ethical considerations – It’s too big a topic to cover in this brief post, but in brief: what justification is there for taking a life for food…when there’s no real reason to?

I don’t eat that much meat anyway – maybe once or twice a week – so hopefully this won’t be too much of a stretch.  And like so many environmental options, this should save a bit of money too!

Limit our car use

This isn’t rocket science, but is complicated a bit this year by our move to a new house.  The new house is going to let us explore a range of new environmental options that weren’t open to us in our townhouse, but is a touch further away from work and shopping.  There is going to be a strong temptation to use the car more!

Being a fan of measurement and hard numbers, I’m going to set a limit of 10,000 kilometres for 2009 – that’s around 60-70% of the average car usage in Australia.  To add to the difficulty level, we are already committed to taking a 3000km drive in January, so we’ll use up 30% of our allotment in the first month!

As a feeble justification for those who (rightly) think 10,000 kilometres is still way to much for the ecosystem to handle, I should point out that our car is a Prius and so will emit around 1.1 tonnes of CO2 travelling that distance, rather than the 2.5 – 3.5 tonnes that an average car would do under the same conditions.

(For what its worth, we start the year off with our car odometer reading 61415)

Riding my bicycle more

Hand in hand with the last resolution, if I’m going to drive less, I’d like to pick up that slack on my bike.  I have big plans to get a bike trailer and panniers this year to make the bicycle a solid contender for a wider variety of trips – commuting to work, visiting friends as well as going shopping.

For even more incentive, I’m going to set myself a target of doing 1500km on my bike in 2009 – so around 30km a week.

Being able to get around town without emitting climate changing CO2 and other pollutants, getting fitter, as well as saving money on petrol and parking – it’s a no-brainer!

Of course, that’s not the only green items on the agenda for next year.  We’ve got plenty of plans to green our new house, as well as getting into growing our own vegetables in the garden.  But there’s a few solid targets for me to judge my efforts on this time next year.

What about everyone else?  Thought up some interesting green targets for 2009?  Share them with us in the comments below!

(Photo in the public domain from Jon Sullivan and PDPhoto.org)

Categories: DIY, environment, green, reduce, transport, vegetarian

Tags: cycle, nye, resolution, transport, vegetarian