Crunchy Granola...

It's a grey and dreary day here in Chicago, and I am sitting around waiting for the Ice Mountain truck to come and pick up some water coolers my roomate rented last year for a frisbee tournament and never returned so I figure there's no better time to do a little blogging.

First, I realize that I do not have up to date email addresses for everyone and I was thinking that it would be nice to have a mass email list that we could all use, so if you read this would you mind sending your email address to the sauvageau mail box attached to this blog (sauvageaublog@gmail.com)? I will make a contact group and we can email eachother through that address.

Seeing as though I have yet to find a full time job and enter into the "real world" I have been teaching in an after school program on the Northwest side of Chicago since last summer. The program is geared toward bringing environmentalism and local activism to high school kids in Chicago Public Schools. I am friends with the woman who started the program and got the job through her (meaning I did NOT earn it with any kind of experience or credentials and therefore have more to learn than I have to teach). That being said, I have certainly learned quite a bit, from my students, from my coworkers, and from the field trips and guest speakers we have brought to speak to the kids. Environmentalsim is a real hot topic these days, and I was baffled by how much I didn't know (once it had occurred to me that all my knowledge of the environment was from what I was taught in fifth grade- circa 1995- the realization was less profound).

One of the first activities we did as a group was calculate our ecological footprint. We used an online survey that asks you questions regarding your energy usage, size of your home, etc. and then gives you an approximate calculation of how many earths we would need if everyone lived like you. I scored somewhere in the 4.3x earths range. Here is the link to the website we used: http://www.earthday.net/footprint/info.asp. There are also lists of averages so you can compare your score to the rest of the world (http://www.ecologicalfootprint.org). This is a very cool way to put into perspective your own energy usage and come up with specific ways to improve it.

I was surprised at how many things matter here. Perhaps most surprising was the distance food travels to get me and the pollution it costs to get things like grapes to me from Chile in the winter. All of a sudden my mother's quest to reduce her family's intake of processed food seems more relevant.

So here is my next challenge for you sauvageaus out there: do you own eco-footprint and post your results. Then tell us what you think of the environmental issues that have arose in the last few years (e.g. global warming, alternative energies, water conservation, etc.). Is there anything you do that you would like to share or promote? Is there anything you want to know more about? GO!!

-Colyn