Hi folks, it has been far too long. Please pardon my unanounced absense from writing posts this past month. My husband and I have been in the middle of moving, for what seems like ages. However, we are finally done minus sorting through a few remaining boxes.

This has been a big move for us on a lot of different levels; most of which I will not go into. I will tell you that the closing of this chapter of our lives does have us very appropriately and symbolically moving out of our home and living in a state of tranistion for a few months as we are between homes. Knowing that we were going to have to put most of our belongings in storage; Kendall and I took the past month to sift through ALL of our belongings. We wanted to donate and recycle as much as we could and after some research we were able to find a “home” for almost everything. We also wanted to make our move as “green” as possible.

This is some of what I found:

• Hybrid moving trucks either (a) do not exist or (b) are difficult to track down (or, possibly, (c) they are easy to find and this is just one more example of how I suck at using search engines).
  Two solutions: (1) Buy a terra pass for the moving truck you rented to offset its emissions. (2) If your vehical has low emissions, good gas mileage, and has a hitch, it might be a good idea to rent a trailer instead.
• Buy boxes from Used Carboard Boxes. When you are done, it they are still in pretty good shape, you can sell them back. They didn’t have a location near me so I wasn’t able to get boxes from them, so, I can’t give a first hand report. You can also call around to various stores and ask them to save the boxes their shipments came in. However, be picky about where you get your boxes from so that you don’t end up infesting your belongings with with cockroaches or other creepy crawlers.
• Sort through your belongings and give away or recycle what you decide not to hold on to. It takes time, but it is well worth it. Do a little research online to find a place near you to donate and recycle your things. We took a little extra time and picked a specific organization that we wanted to support and brought a truck load of goodies to Twice is Nice, part of Outreach Community Ministries, which puts the resale store profits back into the community. They even took old computers so we didn’t have to haul those to an electronic recycling center
• Finally, when doing the final cleaning of your home use environmentally friendly products.

Darfur is Dying is a free online simulation of Darfurians living in a refugee camp and the regular threats that are made to their saftey. The simulation attempts to convey the daily risks a Darfurian faces of being murdered, tortured, and raped by the Janjaweed militias when they need to leave the saftey of the camp in order to forage for water. Darfur Is Dying was developed with hopes of bringing more awareness to the genocide that is taking place in western Sudan. Although the crisis has been public information since it began over 3 years ago, little has been done by the international community to stop this genocide.

Over 70,000 people are estimated to have died in Darfur, western Sudan since the conflict erupted in February 2003. More than 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and 200,000 have sought refuge in neighboring Chad. Another 800,000 people are said to be beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies.

However, recently the crisis in Darfur has been receiving much needed attention and many activists, politicians, and celebrities have been rallying around the country to urge the U.S. government to take action in the Darfur Crisis.

To read a brief history of the Darfur Crisis click here.

Take Action.

Thank you to Maggie Mac who through her suggestion, pushed me a little further in my actions, or lack of action, against Starbucks. I took her up on her comment and called Starbucks and let my voice be heard. I started by sending an e-mail to their company comments department and requested a response to my e-mail and will let you know when I get it.

I also called their customer service number 1.800.235.2883 and spoke with Sean (who, by the way, was very nice). I have never called about something like this before and felt very much out of my element. I stumbled over my wording throughout the conversation and felt very not persuasive. I told him what I told you in my previous post. I asked him why Starbucks doesn’t only use fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee. His response was that it was too costly to use only fair trade coffee and to become fair trade certified. He said that it would raise the price of drinks drastically, but that they were slowly taking action to make the switch to only using fair trade coffee. I said “ok” and then told him that I was going to stop going to Starbucks until they started only using fair trade coffee. Before hanging up I asked if there was someone else that I could talk to because I wanted to make sure that the message got passed along. Sean told me that I called exactly the right person because it was his job to make sure that messages like this got passed along. After the whole conversation I felt like I should have been more bold, like I lost my Boston Tea Party pizzazz, and that I should have been more pursuasive with kind Sean. However, though it didn’t come out the way I practiced it in my head, I did call and I did make my voice heard. Our actions don’t always have to be perfect, but it is important to take action. I will continue making these types of calls and to make my voice heard and I hope that you will too. Thank you again Maggie for spurring me into new territory.

*I will also be writting a letter to Starbucks Headquarters. For those of you who would like to join me, their address is:

2401 Utah Avenue South
Seattle, WA 98134

This morning I decided to boycott Starbucks. I love Starbucks coffee (I hate using the word “love” for such meaningless things but I need to convey that this is more than just “like”). It is hard to beat a decaf-no-whip-non-fat-mocha. Infact, I think one of the few things that can beat it is a decaf, no whip, bring on the fat because come on what’s the point on healthifing a mocha, mocha. Man those are so good…and…I am boycotting it. I made the decision as I was driving my husband and myself to Starbucks to get a morning treat (and whether we have it once every three months or 4 times a week, I always considered it a treat). This was no rash taken-by-the-moment decision. I’ve known for a long time that I was one day going to do it. I just didn’t know that it was going to be today. I made my declaration out loud in the car to my husband. I gave him all the reasons why and I talked with the passion and spunk of the Boston Tea Party (I’m pretty sure they had spunk). I told him that it wasn’t just an attack on big business, that it was because this big HUGE worldwide business was not using organic, shade-grown, fair trade coffee and I could not support the use of something that caused so much damage. I know that they sell (very limited amounts of) organic, shade grown, and fair trade coffee in their stores, but unfortunately that is not what they have chosen to use in their regular brewing of coffee or drink concoctions.

While emoting, I continued to drive my husband to Starbucks where he picked up a V-latte for himself and Mike and where I sat in my car in the parking with my seatbelt tightly fastened so that I wouldn’t be tempted to go get one last mocha treat. Instead I will finish off the decaf organic Starbucks coffee beans that I have at home and when finished, replace them with decaf-fair-trade-shade-grown-coffee with maybe the occasional mix-in of fair trade organic chocolate.

In talking about the environment, global warming, and actions we can all take to reverse our negative impact on the environment, the term “energy” comes up frequently. However, when we learned about energy in fourth grade we probably were not thinking about how our use of certain sources of energy was causing devastation to our planet and we probably were not taught this by our teachers. Many of us were born into a world where non-renewable sources of energy are consumed as mindlessly as breathing; with no thought to what we did or did not learn in elementary school on the subject. I believe that we need to be educated about these things, which begins with having a basic understanding, so that when the topic of energy comes up in discussion we won’t just tune what is being said out and when the time comes to making a decision about what source of energy we are going to choose, we can’t just play dumb because we DO know that it matters. So, listen up class! Here is a lesson/review on the basics of energy for those of us who need it. (Thank you to Wikipedia (and it’s contributors) and to Energy Information Administration for providing most of the content for this post.)

Definition of energy: The potential for causing a change.

There are two types of energy: Kinetic and Potential.
Kinetic: is energy that a body possesses as a result of its motion. EX: The kinetic energy a river possesses as a result of the movement of water.
Potential: is energy stored in matter or the energy in matter due to its position against a specific force. EX: Potential energy is created when a river is damned and the water and the force of the river and the force of the damn are working against each other.

Potential energy can be turned into kinetic energy. EX: The potential energy of the damned river is turned into kinetic energy when the damned in removed and the water begins again to move.

5 types of kinetic energy
Electrical: the movement of electrical charges (applying force to make electons move). Electrical charges moving through a wire is called electricity.
Radiant: electromagnetic energy that travels in transverse waves. Radiant energy includes visible light, x-rays, gamma rays and radio waves.
Thermal: (heat) is the internal energy in substances––the vibration and movement of the atoms and molecules within substances.
Movement: the movement of objects and substances from one place to another.
Sound: the movement of energy through substances in longitudinal (compression/rarefaction) waves. Sound is produced when a force causes an object or substance to vibrate––the energy is transferred through the substance in a wave.

4 types of Potential energy
Chemical: energy stored in the bonds of atoms and molecules. It is the energy that holds these particles together. Biomass, petroleum, natural gas, and propane are examples of stored chemical energy.
Stored Mechanical: is energy stored in objects by the application of a force. Compressed springs and stretched rubber bands are examples of stored mechanical energy.
Nuclear: is energy stored in the nucleus of an atom––the energy that holds the nucleus together. The energy can be released when the nuclei are combined or split apart. Nuclear power plants split the nuclei of uranium atoms in a process called fission.
Gravitational: is the energy of position or place. A rock resting at the top of a hill contains gravitational potential energy.

There are many different sources of energy and those sources can either be renewable(comes from an energy resource that is replaced rapidly by a natural process) or non-renewable (which comes from an energy resource that cannot be replaced rapidly by a natural process).

renewable sources of energy
Wind: is created by the sun heating up the earth unevenly. Wind turbines collect the energy created by wind so that it can be transformed into electricity.
Water/Hydropower: Energy in water can be harnessed and used, in the form of motive energy or temperature differences. Since water is about a thousand times heavier than air, even a slow flowing stream of water can yield great amounts of energy that can be used for electricity.
Solar: Energy directly collected from sunlight. Solar panels are used to collect the energy from sunlight and transform it into energy for lighting, heating, and electricity.
Geothermal: Energy that comes from comes from radioactive decay in the core of the Earth, which heats the Earth from the inside out, and from the sun, which heats the surface. This energy is collected and used for heating and electricity.
Biomass: Energy from organic non-fossil material (hemp, peat, rice hulls, etc.). This energy is transformed through various methods to use for heating, electricity, and transportation.

non-renewable sources of energy
Petroleum: Is formed from the decayed remains of prehistoric marine animals and terrestrial plants. Over many centuries this organic matter, mixed with mud, is buried under thick sedimentary layers of material. The resulting high levels of heat and pressure cause the remains to metamorphose, first into a waxy material known as kerogen, and then into liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons in a process known as catagenesis. These then migrate through adjacent rock layers until they become trapped underground in porous rocks called reservoirs, forming an oil field, from which the liquid can be extracted by drilling and pumping. 150 m is generally considered the “oil window”. We use this source of energy for transportation and manufacturing.
Coal: A fossil fuel extracted from the ground by underground mining or open-pit mining and is the largest single source of electricity world-wide and is also used in manufacturing.
Natural Gas: a gaseous fossil fuel consisting primarily of methane (an extremely efficient greenhouse gas which contributes to enhanced global warming when free in the atmosphere). Natural gas is used for heating, manufacturing, and electricity.
Uranium: Is a chemical element used for nuclear power plants which supply electricity and nuclear weapons. It is heavy, silvery-white, metallic, naturally radioactive, pyrophoric, toxic and teratogenic. Uranium is commonly found in very small amounts in rocks, soil, water, plants, and animals (including humans).
Propane: A three-carbon alkane, is derived from other petroleum products during oil or natural gas processing and is used for manufacturing and heating.

Now you should have a better understanding of where the energy we use comes from, I know that I now do, and be able to make better choices regarding the source of that energy.