welcome my name is attached to sherman and i am your host and my guest today is a resident of princeton stephen helter stephen is a writer musician naturalist actor with degrees in botany and water quality so there are a lot of things we can discuss but today we're going to focus on what can we as individuals do to help the environment and to sustain and save our planet so welcome  big subject right yes so you do a lot of writing and blogs and ideas and i really appreciated it and a lot of it was kind of what we can do in little small ways  most of us i think most of us feel a little sense of impact powerlessness so you know i go to my you know i do my recycling bin and then i think have i done this right and yeah important is that and one of my throat in the wrong place so why not tell me so what well i approach it as what one wants to do is realize that it's a huge problem and that we're very small and we like we have minds who want to think that we're very large and bright and smart and and so the little things seem like beneath us but actually i'm very incremental in the way i do things and so every little bit if you start thinking about what you can do there's all kinds of little things you could do actually some rather large things in your life that can make a difference and just slowly start moving towards reducing your negative impact and that's you know i think people have trouble dealing with guilty you know caring guilt because you know we hear we're doing bad things to the earth but you know my sense is i'm a very optimistic person but i also look at what we're doing and i'm horrified  so so but i know that i only i have limited control so i do some things in my life i try to change things like that i mean well ok so well one thing i got you know we're kept in the dark about a lot of things because the electricity comes into our houses were it's like an umbilical cord we're still in the womb in some ways because all this energy is piped into our houses whether it's natural gas or electricity we're we're completely unaware of it the furnace is very quiet it's just goes on and off it's almost like reassuring because it's you know keeping us warm and air conditioner and then the water all comes in so it's all effortless for us and and and all the meters that are telling us how much we're consuming are on the outside of the house or in the basement where we can't see them so we're kept completely in the dark about what our impact is and that we're living comfortable lives so you know oh yeah and let's you actually scrutinize your energy bill every month which i haven't looked at mine in my you know but you don't know so one thing i got was an energy meter a whole house energy meter from my house so it's on the kitchen counter no one else in the family looks at it but i do and it will say how many kilowatt hours i have we have the house is used during the day how big or small a piece of equipment well this is an old one it's about like that so it's not it's just like a can get one yeah monitor so even if it's not you're not doing it directly for the environment per se like that's a nice thought and you're interested in that you could also use it just to save money and make decisions right well yeah i mean that's a big part of this is that we spend a lot of money on energy and that is a lot of negative a lot of money going to something negative  mean ok little things so what i learned from the whole house energy monitor is when the electric dryer kicked on instead of like two hundred watts the house was only using three hundred thirty two hundred watts so that's an extra three it was you know maybe seven times larger how amount of energy just when the electric dryer went on so i thought well i could get racks i could just get drawing  racks and and use those and you know just have this kind of hand mind motion a very calming kind of sort of like washing dishes you know you can think about things while your hands are doing stuff and this is as ancient as as time you know is as we are it's it goes way back to when we used to do small repetitive things and be thinking at the same time and so just like hanging up the clothes on the dresser on the rack it what takes maybe ten minutes more but but you know i just make it part of my routine and i save a lot of energy from that electric dryer which i had no idea until i got a whole house energy monitor that was sucking three thousand was on  song you know ok so another thing well clothing i'd like to have sustainability fashion show in which you you know things like patagonia they have these those wonderful light  coats now that breathes really well so you can wear i'm inside you can what you can just walk outside in the winter and these things are warm enough but you can also keep it on inside and then you can knock down your service dead like five or you know you have to negotiate that with the family of course but just the clothing you know long underwear that's really comfortable these is very light so you can take advantage of all these breakthroughs and in clothing which don't seem momentous but there are little things you can do and that you're comfortable and and you you become less dependent on all that natural gas is going to being burned in your furnace right all right so on a larger scale so i want to read something that you wrote in one of you i invite people to check out your blogs and the things that you write because they're very diverse and well written and meaningful so you said in a strange world where helping to save the planet is completely optional and then you talk about how we pretend that good people with good intentions and most people are couldn't possibly do harm and besides what could our little big town possibly contribute to solving environmental problems that are global in scope so we do think it's optional i think i don't think people have a sense of urgency yeah and it's something to think about in the future so what do you have to say about that to us to wake us up oh well i mean the amazing thing is i mean princeton is a very high profile town so it has an opportunity ok so you think well you know this climate change should really be solved at the national and international level ok so we're waiting on i guess they're doing it so where else can we start well we can start right here i mean can start in your house you can start by you know trying to get things going in the community it's been pretty tough here because i think people are very happy very satisfied with their lives and you know they've worked hard and they deserve a good lifestyle and and they you know but i go to lectures over the university on climate change so and these are climate scientists and they're they're constantly saying you know this problem is huge it's very urgent and we have to do something now rather than later and then you walk across nassau street and it's like well everything's kind of pretty much the same as it was like five years ago you know maybe a few solar panels have gone up i don't know it's i mean we have a chance to really show the world what you can do and what would you suggest for princeton well i long time ago i tried to get from p s e and g our power company the data on how much does how much energy does princeton use how much natural gas and so forth interesting the i mean it turns out that to incinerate r s sewage sludge they were spending a million dollars on natural gas in a year back before prices came down but you know you don't you know about wow sure how much  that stuff that burning that stuff is seems like one of the biggest draws of energy and and then the commercial the business district uses a big amount of energy but then you know just getting around you know everybody drives their kids to school and i think you know because i have daughters i have to negotiate with them you know i love driving them to school but it's not such a great thing they could walk they could ride their bikes and if there was some strong message coming from the superintendent or from the city council town council or some that it makes a difference all these little drives here and there make a difference you know you know when now when i go out to route that would help us in the house make decisions you know just skew things a little bit towards walking riding our bikes and  and so now when i go up to route one my thinking has evolved incrementally to the point where when i got to really want to psych well i have to have like five different things to do because it's like a big journey  everything's relative you know so when i mostly write my bike around town and i thought about what am i going to ride my bike up here why i'm a little late and it looks like it might rain but it's not raining and maybe five minutes on they could do different so i ended up riding my bike but it's a matter of habit and just keeping thinking about it and and i think if we had strong you know leadership from the top to that would bring you know it be trickle down there'd be a lot of things that people would start doing in their lives that they've been thinking about doing i think you know i think you're right i think it starts from the top and again it's really just consciousness raising i mean most people do care in some way they would like to do better but it's not kind of in the foreground of their lives and i think that may be the place to start is if you start with the town council and you start with promoting a level of awareness and educating creating a level of awareness because otherwise it's just kind of piecemeal you did this article at some point about  the flooring got flooded in the princeton school so yeah yeah talk about that because it was something about that that you know after a while could have been prevented if there was forethought yeah but it kind of the mistake was repeated so you know that sort of thing drives me crazy because if you can see what's what the you know oprah climate scientists that they must i don't know how they keep from just tearing their hair out because they know very clearly what's going to happen you know all the past they don't know exactly what's going to happen but they know all the possibilities and it's all pointing in that direction and yet they see the world just not reacting and it was like that with the  so what happened is we converted a detention base and that's at the high school into a wetland and it's a wonderful thing there's frauds crayfish and and like i planted all these native plants in there that are flourishing because there's lots of sunlight lots of water the sump pump from the high school pumps into this weapon and so it's very steady it's like old faithful every fifteen minutes the water kicks on and so when you have a stable hydrology you can get all these wonderful native plants to grow so we had that going and then there was this big flood and and they had and it got into the school and they had to replace the performing arts stage the wooden stage got all kind of wrinkled from the flood and they tried to blame it on all these plants in the detention basin and i really and we looked at it we the environmental science teacher we you know we did us we surveyed everything we  we were out there during the flood and i saw that the water was not it was coming in from the street because the architect for the height the new part of the high school haven't gotten the right the height correct and so when you get a whole lot of water the the the walnut street turns into a river and it flows towards a school and so what we needed is an outlet to to get the water on on this river of walnut  a trench you know so so that the water has someplace to go and they didn't react and then five years later you know this past summer i think it's july thirty first or something huge storm very sudden and boom you know and i i was coming from the west so i was coming from the west so i knew it was coming and i drove right over the school and i saw the whole thing happen again and they had to replace the stage again and my daughter's in the choir so they had to have her concert over it at the middle school because the stakes was so again it was so if we look at that scenario where you would have interrupted that because clearly  you saw that the problem was not resolved yet nobody made a change right so how do you then mobilize well ok so after you know after the first time i emailed the engineers at the  emailed the superintendent i emailed the facilities director you only have so it's called personal horsepower i kind of like the term i heard about you know for how much push you can give to any particular initiative and so i did those things didn't get much of a response i was happy just to prove that it wasn't the wetlands far right you know  and they blame the wetlands a second time around i think they tried some people try so it's hard to get people to see where water goes because it costs a township a lot of money right i think they had to pay a ten thousand ten thousand no it's not the township schools are completely different budget ok so i think the school had to pay ten thousand dollars on insurance right but insurance covered the rest but you know they could use the facility for right four months or something and it and it is preventable preventable and would have made a lovely wetland in the other place where the water should have gone right so had you given up this battle i actually yesterday i was thinking of e mailing because they had a meeting they didn't invite me because i'm not one of the stakeholders and i just you know my daughter i'm a parent so and i never found out what had also known as a stakeholder oh actually the water needed to go into westminster ok so and westminster is completely up for grabs now they don't i don't know if they're going to sell it or what so that must of put a couple shiny changing things for the moment for the meantime ok so what that what else do you want  from again you know so we give this example and somebody else can take up that that fight or not you know what is it again that people need to hear that kind of creates the impetus for some kind of action some kind of change well i mean it goes back to something you read there which is and it took me a it's been a lot of evolution of my thinking to realise that you know we try to focus we try to think of you know what really dominates the news is when somebody intentionally destroy something or kill somebody or that sort of thing but the real danger to the world is just good people doing things that they aren't even aware of so it's the it's what we it's the what we do unintentionally i mean we drive we you know we drive to pick up our friend of the train station or at the at the airport or something and all the while we're adding to the c o two that's up in the atmosphere which is going to drive global which is driving global warming but we're doing a good deed where we're you know right you know it's we're visiting grandmother or something and it's all good stuff running errands but but the what is it called collateral damage it's a collateral damage that we don't mean that is really driving the destroyed decide to destroy our planet by using good people to do it you know and so then i think it changes your relationship to guilt and it makes you feel like i'm i'm being made to do this stuff i mean i could for go visit grandma but why should i have to deal with this this ambivalence you know and so i i think that's where people can start to get some sense of outrage at at what we're being you know we don't have a whole bunch of options to to be to live a decent life a normal life and and not do all this damage i mean i'm trying to trim down as much as possible incrementally but but why are the leaders why isn't there outrage at the people who can the leaders of the businesses technology why isn't all that been power being brought to bear so that we don't have to feel this terrible ambivalence and sense of foreboding and i think again you know it's just education making people aware consciousness raising but i think this whole concept  of you know good people basically good people and for me as you describe your lifestyle it occurs to me like every day we make plans based on the weather and we decide what we're going to wear and  know based on train schedules whatever so we're daily making life's life's plans and maybe the idea is just to start integrating that consciousness into it you know not only what am i going to wear but asking yourself is this the best way to get there what is it that i could do today that would you know believe a smaller footprint even just in tiny and integrating it into our daily life as you clearly have yeah and i think the whole thing there was something else that you wrote about this idea of you know on a national level it's not going to happen on  national level if we haven't raised our own you know questions and he you said something about the victims are distant in time and space they like names and faces some forms of environmental pollution are temporary in impact but the climate change we feed is for ever what's missing is a deep sense of awareness and caring about the physical world that serves as a foundation for our lives yeah and you talk about how if if if this was something a problem like races and we would be more engaged if what was said i mean i do think more i mean it's in this kind of goes it comes from my acting  and writing climate change you know i write climate we have a climate cabaret and we do comic climate sketches but the whole idea of earth as a character  and you know in future people as as a legal entity which is totally on their own represented the animals aren't represented the earth isn't represented the earth is totally taken for granted because it gives everything for free and so things that are given for free have you know people discount as you know well you know so so i like we don't owe the earth anything yeah and so i do think of it as as we raise our consciousness about how we treat people you know people of different genders or races or whatever you know how do we treat the earth i mean is the earth a character also and of the there that and so you know something along those lines yeah so what do you what would you suggest again why aren't our leaders doing something so what do individuals do in terms of having our leaders more mobilized yeah well that's that's tough i haven't cracked that one  yet i i do think there's a i i have i feel like i have not reached out enough to my to the leaders you know do i really know who my legislator is you know in trenton or have a really major developed a relationship with these people and call them and told them what i feel you know because if you don't if you don't speak out you know if you don't just communicate with these people how are they supposed to know and it doesn't end up on their radar screen do you have children do you think their generation is going to is more aware and going to be more involved now i know your children are growing up  an environment where you know they're very conscious and this but do you think that in the world at large in schools or whatever that their generation we'll be more concerned  i don't know how many kids are taking environmental science in high school that was a big that has had a big impact on my daughters i mean i have not actually taught them a lot about you know this is this an oak tree or something right they've just been around me but in an environmental science class they really learn about how you know like you mention the physical aspects of the world how does all that work what does carbon dioxide you know what does it come from and and why is the part why is carbon underground why should we not be taking the carbon stored underground it's stored there for a reason we should not be pulling that oil and natural gas and coal out of the ground because it is changing the whole priest grip ssion of that highly medicinal c o two that's that's up in the air protecting is keeping us just the right keeping the earth just the right temperature which changing that whole prescription it's like it's like we're changing the drugs we take into our bodies you know it's very hard yours is very much like a body we are changing the whole chemistry we are chemists really we should be walking around in white coats because we're changing the chemistry every time you step into a car you know so it's and riffling around with this stuff and i think people need to understand the physical nature of you know just some sense of and also learn from science the skepticism because people are not skeptical of their own points of view you know you see this there is supposedly climate skeptics you know they well i don't think the scientists really know what they're talking about but you know where does that come from and where has this person been skeptical about any of their points of you know they're directing it all out words and you have to you know as a scientist you have to be skeptical about what you think as well and that's a real important lesson the everybody really needs to learn you know i think the thing that you just said about the idea of a chemist changing the chemistry and the scary piece is that if you take it in the world of medicine and prescriptions people just don't really research the prescriptions they take even yeah and or pay attention to them  so it's really kind of asking people to be responsible for all their choices but i love the description of we are changing the chemistry of the planet of our bodies and you want to start paying attention to what you're doing stephen we're at the end of our time unfortunately but i'm so happy you were here because i think people need to hear on an individual level what they can do what they need to think about the even to activate some inquiry or looking for a next steps so thank you thank you my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us