What I’m personally doing matters less, far less, than what we collectively do. Per the How to Save a Planet podcast (by one of the editors of All We Can Save), the percentage of vegetarians in the USA hasn’t changed in thirty-some years. Better would be for 95 percent of people to eat a little less meat.

Still, it is helpful when both efforts align.

Since I like talking about what I do as I learn and grow alongside my toddler, here you go:
- No alcohol, coffee, or chocolate, because of mental health reasons and they are expensive to make. A stronger-willed person might enjoy these as the rare luxuries they are, but zero is what I find least stressful.

- Cold water for everything but some laundry and the dishwasher. Cold showers feel wonderful, afterwards, and use a lot less water.

- Meat maybe once a week, and then mostly for our child. I like beans, tofu, tempeh, nuts and seeds, sourdough flatbread (I don’t scrap any, I just set aside and feed a little for next time, and make a dough with the rest, letting it sit a day or so, then adding some baking soda or nixtamalized corn to cut the acid a bit, then heating it in a pan until it holds together enough) for protein. We eat eggs from neighbor farms and splurge on cheese because my spouse loves it. I know those are luxuries, too. We’re not completely ascetic.

- We have a garden for food and are converting the yard (which we never water anyway) to native-ish prairie. We compost all our scraps (we don’t have any meat waste, and I crush all the eggshells), along with cardboard and yard/garden waste. I add nearly all of my urine to the invasive-weed compost to help kill those plants and add nitrogen for when the pile is ready for the garden. Not yet ready to compost poop.

- Transportation by car (50-60mpg) for medical appointments for our child, and I pick up food in the same trip. Spouse works from home most of the year, and I’m parent/homemaker. This limited interaction with others is a privilege I am thankful for. Being able to make time to respond to you is a luxury in its own way. I didn’t own a vehicle until my late 20s, preferring a bicycle.

- We’re against owning more than one home. We don’t own more than one. For most of our lives we’ve owned zero. Housing would be better considered a human right, and cultural adjustments made to accommodate this.

- Heating and cooling: no air conditioning, and we keep the house 16-17 Celsius in the winter, with a mix of electric and wood heat. I keep warm by moving and breathing, and cool with shade and not moving so much.

- Buying things is a tough one, since we have a child and I’m one of two parents. I buy most of my clothes second-hand, and for kid, too. I prefer to buy quality tools and maintain them. My self-worth is less and less tied to spending money on things.

That about covers the big stuff? I’m kinda stuck with some things because I want to stay in my current relationship with my spouse and our child. I got a vasectomy to decrease the risk of making another human, since we’re almost entirely responsible for environmental damage over the last hundreds of years, and Americans tend to have large carbon footprints.

I’m an asshole about lights on in unoccupied rooms, and I accept that’s a distraction from the big draws in family residences: heating/cooling, transportation, and food.

Again, I acknowledge (to the extent I’m aware) my many privileges in all this, and am thankful to so many people, and I want our culture to shift so that so many more might live in greater harmony and reciprocity with the land.