Ecofrugality

It occurred to me that there ought to be a term--"ecofrugal"--for people who routinely do things that both save money and help the environment. Some folks may be doing these things primarily to be green, while others want chiefly to keep more green stuff in their pockets, but the result is the same in both cases: a healthier planet and a healthier bank balance.

I Googled the term to see if anyone else was using it this way, and I got a few hits, but they seemed kind of scattered. For example, Frugal Village has an article on "Eco Frugality" (two words), which cites some well-known thrifty practices that "run parallel with green living." An article on reusing household items from a site called Gomestic uses the term "eco-frugal" with a hyphen, and someone calling herself grrlscout224 has posted a photo set on Flickr with the title "ecofrugal." And there is also a recently created blog titled "The EcoFrugal," which as yet has a grand total of one entry. But so far, the use of the term seems fairly haphazard. It doesn't seem to have gained much popular currency.

The only source I found that offered anything like a definition of the term was an article on "Eco-Bounty" at trendwatching.com, which noted that many manufacturers are seeking to shift the image of their products "from ‘worthy but expensive’ to ‘cheap and, oh yes, worthy’" in order to attract both "cash-strapped consumers...going out of their way to save money" and "consumers [who] are still primarily interested in sustainable consumption, but no longer willing or able to pay the usual premiums." It cited as examples the new Zoe and Zac line at Payless and the Mini, which is now being marketed as a planet-friendly car that's cheap to run.

Which is all well and good, but a bit incomplete as a philosophy. The products you buy can be a part of an ecofrugal lifestyle, but they're not the only part, nor even necessarily the most important part. In fact, I'd venture to suggest that ecofrugality has more to do with not buying stuff. It's about thinking before you make a purchase: "Do I need this? Will it really make me happier? Could I repair the old one instead of replacing it? Could I make do with something else I already have? Could I borrow it from a friend, take it out of the library, get a secondhand one on Freecyle or Craigslist?" Only after thinking through these questions do the ecofrugal start balancing considerations of price and pollution.

The point I'd like to make about ecofrugality is that it's really a single ideal, not just two unrelated ideals that sometimes go together. A sustainable lifestyle isn't really sustainable if you have to go into debt to maintain it; a frugal lifestyle isn't really frugal if it wastes natural resources. And in most cases, the eco-conscious choice is also the wallet-conscious one. Most of the money-saving trends I cited in my April 11 entry are green trends as well. More people may be adopting these measures now as a way to save money, but as they become more mindful about how they live, they may discover they value the environmental benefits just as much as the financial ones. In the end, this recession might just turn out to be the dawning of the age of ecofrugality.

Credit Crackdown?

This week the New York Times ran two contradictory articles about the current crackdown on credit card issuers. Monday's article, "Credit Card Industry Aims to Profit From Sterling Payers," suggests that since Congress intends to limit the ways in which card issuers have long made money off high-risk cardholders (e.g., slapping them with massive late fees and jacking interest rates way up after a single late payment), the poor banks will have no choice but to start going after "deadbeats"--that is, the 40 percent of cardholders who pay their balances in full and on time every month. According to the article, people like me who have been getting a free ride should expect to start paying annual fees or maybe being charged interest on each purchase immediately after it's made, with no grace period for paying off the bill. But Tuesday's "Your Money" column, "Consumers Are Dealt a New Hand in Credit Cards," dismisses these ideas as "just so much saber-rattling," since credit card issuers don't want to lose customers--even "deadbeat" customers--if they can help it. After all, the card issuer does make money from the merchants on every transaction, so it's definitely in the banks' interest for people to continue charging as much as possible to their cards, even if they don't do the issuer the additional favor of carrying an interest-laden balance.

The second idea seems more plausible to me. After all, card issuers have to realize that if they start making their terms too onerous, people like me will simply jump ship. Ten years ago, it might have been difficult to get by without at least one credit card, but nowadays there are more options--PayPal for online transactions, debit cards for in-store purchases, reloadable prepaid cards, gift cards. And moreover, if there's even one card out there that still has no annual fee and a reasonable grace period, then all the deadbeats can switch to that card, and whoever issues it will get a whole 40 percent of the market overnight. So unless all the banks get together and make a deal not to make such a card available (which I'm pretty sure would be illegal), I don't see how there wouldn't be at least one of them eager to be the only no-fee card on the block.

I'm willing to live with having my rewards dialed back. The main reason I used the card was for convenience, anyway; the rewards were just a nice bonus. And if they want to lower my credit limit, oh well, it's not like I was using it all anyway. But the minute they try to stick me with an annual fee, it's arrivederci Visa.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Haphazardly, in our case. So far, we've planted five crops, with extremely mixed results:

• The snap peas are coming up splendidly--in fact, they're growing so fast that I'm a little concerned we won't have time to erect a trellis for them before they climb past the tops of the beds.
• The spring onions, which never grew at all last year, seem to be coming up as well, though it's hard to be sure at this stage that they're not weeds posing as onions.
• Three out of four parsley plants didn't survive transplanting, and I ended up buying new seedlings at the annual plant sale at the university to supplement them.
• The spinach, just like last year's shows no signs of sprouting at all.
• The lettuce is the oddest of all: there's no sign of it in any of the squares where I actually planted it, yet in other parts of the beds, little lettuces seem to be popping their heads up more or less at random. I can't figure out whether the seeds I planted somehow got washed out of their places in a heavy rain, or whether the lettuce I planted last year, which bolted in the summer, has re-seeded itself and is somehow coming up through all that dirt we turned over in the new raised beds and the compost we piled in on top of that.

I'm a bit nervous to see how our tomato, pepper, and basil seedlings survive the move, which is scheduled for next week. They all grew all right last year, but things are so weird this year, I don't know what to expect.

Driving the bandwagon

According to an article in yesterday's New York Times, frugality is actually a hot new trend. Here are a few of the radical steps the article mentions that people are taking to save money:

• borrowing movies from the library
• planting gardens
• canceling cable service
• composting (to avoid trash disposal fees)
• having clothing swaps with friends
• trash picking
• darning socks
• drying clothes on a line

In short, people across the country have started doing all the stuff I've been doing for years. How about that--I'm trendy. Who knew?

Living La Vida Local

Lately I've become fascinated with stories about people who, for whatever reason, challenge themselves to spend some period of time--typically a year--doing something that most Americans would never think of doing. The most recent work I've read in this genre was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (the primary author's husband and older daughter, respectively). The "Hoppsolver" family resolved to spend one full year eating locally. With a few exceptions (such as grains, olive oil, coffee, and spices), everything they ate came from their own county in rural Virginia. Much of it was grown on their own small "farm," which, though zoned for agricultural use, offered less than 4,000 square feet of tillable space thanks to the steepness of the surrounding hills. Over the course of a year, the family grew everything from early spring chard to enormous blue pumpkins, not to mention more zucchini than any four people could eat or give away. They also raised their own free-range turkeys for meat, and Lily, the younger daughter of the family, raised a flock of chickens and started her own business selling multicolored, free-range eggs at $2.50 a dozen. Everything they couldn't grow themselves came from their local farmers' market or from other area growers they knew personally.

I can relate to the reasons that inspired the Hoppsolvers to move across the country from Tuscon to Virginia just so that they could live off their own land (or at least the land of their immediate area). I've been known to shake my head bitterly in supermarket produce sections over bins of nectarines on sale for $1.99 a pound in the middle of February. Nectarines are a summer fruit, and to me, it seems just plain wrong that it's possible to buy them so cheaply in the middle of winter--shipped all the way up from the southern hemisphere, burning up petroleum and belching out greenhouse gases every mile of the journey. It's probably akin to the frustration I feel when stores start putting out their Christmas decorations before Halloween has even come. It feels disrespectful to the season to push it out of the way to make room for something else that's supposed to be more important. I like to honor the cycle of the seasons, enjoying each thing in its proper time--like strawberries, which around here come in around May. I appreciate strawberries more when I have to wait for May to enjoy them--and conversely, I appreciate May that much more because it brings the strawberries.

So I can see the benefits of eating the way Barbara Kingsolver and her family did (and, to a large extent, still do). Yet at the same time, I can't really imagine myself ever undertaking this challenge. I'm too fond of too many foods that the Garden State just can't provide. Sure, I could do as the Hoppsolvers did and make exceptions for bread flour, pasta, olive oil, chocolate, raisins...but how long could this list get before I'd have to draw the line, or else admit that I wasn't truly eating locally?

The thing is, before I read this book, I thought I was actually doing pretty well in the areas of buy-local and do-it-yourself. Maybe I don't routinely make my own cheese like Barbara Kingsolver (we tried it once, but it's a messy process, and it ends up costing more per pound than the supermarket stuff), but we do bake our own bread, grow our own tomatoes, hang out our wash on the line. We're certainly doing better than the majority of Americans at treading lightly on the earth, and also at living with appreciation for what the earth gives us. We don't buy the $1.99 nectarines in February; we wait until they show up at the farmers' market in July. So do I really need to feel guilty about the fact that, while waiting for the fruits of summer, I enjoy winter oranges shipped up from Florida?

Truthfully, naah. I don't really need my life to be 99 and 44/100 percent pure. If I can even get the percentage above 50, I'll be fairly pleased with myself. After all, if the perfect really is the enemy of the good, then I need to allow myself some imperfections if I hope to succeed in approaching my ideals. I can accept that I'll never truly reach them, but at the same time, I can admit that it's getting better, a little better all the time.

How Do I Love Thee, Trader Joe?

Let me count the ways:

1. Organic raisins at $2.79 a pound.
2. Crumpets in both plain and cinnamon.
3. Humanely farmed bacon.
3. Pesto-filled tortellini.
4. Free samples of excellent coffee and whatever unusual treat has been cooked up for the day (yesterday's was macaroni and cheese with fresh edamame).
5. Bunches of daffodils for a buck fifty.
6. Honey-oatmeal soap.
7. A toothpaste with natural peppermint, baking soda, and fluoride, and without sodium lauryl sulfate, which gives the Troll canker sores.
8. Chocolate sold by the half kilo.
9. The Fearless Flier, which, with its purple prose and vintage artwork, presents the month's specials with style.
10. Lots of perfectly unremarkable staples--like toilet paper and frozen peas--at far better prices than the big supermarkets can offer.

The only part I hate is the crowds. We've given up on trying to park in the store parking lot--you can spend fifteen minutes trying to get to a spot ten feet away. So now we go only on Sundays, when parking is free in town, and park in the lot next door. But there's no way to avoid the crowds in the store itself--people and carts clogging the aisles like the arteries of a middle-aged couch potato who lives on McDonald's fries. If anything, the crowds seem to have grown worse since the recession came down on us in earnest--which seems odd, since most of the stuff you buy at Trader Joe's strikes me as the sort of luxury items that consumers are reported to be cutting back on. Could it be that all the folks we keep bumping into (literally) in the aisles at Trader Joe's used to shop at Whole Foods and have changed their allegiance in search of better bargains? Or are these folks still piling their carts with Joe's merchandise because it's the one luxury they still can afford?

The Perfect Storm

The snowdrops and crocuses have been out this past week, poking their little white and yellow heads out into the brownish desolation of late February as if to assure us that spring is indeed on its way. On my daily walks, I gathered fallen twigs with their little red leaf-buds showing, swelling with the tiny green leaves inside ready to uncurl. And then suddenly, last night, winter came back down on us with a vengeance, dumping seven inches of snow on us before daybreak.

The ironic part is, this is the sort of perfect snowfall that we haven't had all winter long. It's mostly been a dull sort of winter, with plenty of raw cold and biting wind, but very little snow to brighten up the bleak grey landscape. The few significant snowfalls we've had were of the nasty, wet variety that clings grimly to the shovel and leaves behind a slick film on the sidewalk that congeals almost immediately into ice, making you wonder whether you haven't made matters worse by attempting to shovel it at all. And now, just as spring seemed to be just around the corner, we get more than half a foot of clean, fluffy white snow, completely covering up the dead grass and leaves and turning the whole neighborhood into a winter wonderland. We never seem to get this sort of beautiful snow at Christmas time, or in the grimness of late January and early February when it seems like there's nothing good to be said for winter. A month ago, I'd much have preferred a blanket of beautiful white snow to the mucky brown of bare ground with nothing growing out of it, but now, when things were just starting to bloom, it all feels somehow wrong.

Of course, this is most likely just winter's last hurrah--although the weather here in New Jersey is unpredictable enough that you can't be truly sure of anything. Back in kindergarten, I learned the old saw about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb, and I expect this March will do just that. By this weekend, according to the weather report, the temperatures will climb back up into the 40s and 50s; a more seasonable rain will come in and wash away the snow. The remaining crocuses will come up, followed by daffodils, violets, forsythias. The little buds on the trees will uncurl their leaves, and by the time April arrives, we'll have springtime for real, instead of just the teasing glimpse of it we got last week before winter reasserted itself. So perhaps it's just as well to have this one (probably) last snowfall to give us a chance to appreciate winter at its best--winter as it should be--before it melts away into nothing for another year.