Earth Week Challenge 2020: Transportation Tuesday

The second in the Earth Week series of challenges is Transportation Tuesday. Normally, this challenge would simply involve reducing your carbon footprint from transportation by a variety of methods: walking, biking, carpooling, car sharing, and public transportation. However, on account of the pandemic, the last three options have been discarded as too risky. This year's challenge is to "bike, walk, run, and move around without generating emissions."

Well, this one ought to be a gimme, right? I mean, during this lockdown, we basically aren't going anywhere anyway. We're both working from home, and we only leave the house for a daily walk and, every week or two, to get groceries. So in theory, this should be no challenge at all.

But once again, we've managed to arrange our lives so that what would normally be easy for us just happens to be hard today. See, Brian and I are regular blood donors, and right now the need is greater than ever due to the pandemic. Normally, we schedule our appointments at the same time, with me giving whole blood and him doing apheresis (which I don't qualify for). But because the blood donor room has reduced appointments due to the pandemic, we couldn't quite manage that this time. The best we could do was a 10 am appointment for him and one at noon for me...and the only date we could get was today. Which makes this the one day in the week we actually have to drive somewhere.

In theory, we could have walked to the blood room, since it's only two miles away. But two miles is a much harder walk than usual after losing a pint of blood, and it's time-consuming under the best of circumstances. We're already losing three hours out of our work days, and going on foot would add an extra hour and a quarter to that.

So we're taking advantage of a loophole. Since the original version of this challenge included carpooling as an option, we've decided to count this trip under that heading. After all, we did go out of our way to schedule our appointments together, so we're making only one trip instead of two. If we would get credit for that in a normal year with no global pandemic, I certainly think we should now.