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Hello

I just wanted to send you a message. I read your Tasks, and you have been extremely busy ! I hope the tedious tech-work is done soon? :)

I also noticed some of your comments on how you view climate-sceptics!

I personally are down to about one fifth of the average american citizens carbon footprint. (half of the average swedish citizen) And I am still very comfortably and casually living in my apartment, doing normal things. So I guess more people would need to find out that it is possible to carry on living city life and still be very green.

The prejudice and misconceptions is still out there among average people that we "green radicals" will try to force all human beings in giving up their lives and move them all into caves in a forest. That is not at all true! we can all continue to live, but just get everyone to try to cut out some percents of the top of their wasteful behaviour.

I just mean : do we really need diamonds and champagne in our lives ? (methaphorically speaking) And if you could have champagne and lobster for every single future meal of your life, wouldn't it become boring and depriving you from the few occasions when you really get to taste something wonderful?

Thanks to our centralized systems of recycling and collection of waste in swedish cities, i am able to sort exactly 100% of all my households trash into different material recycling bins, so I contribute with nothing at all to the landfills or incineration of garbage. This leads to positive side-effects, much less odour in my kitchen, much less number of times i need to take out the trash.

My results is a much more relaxed life with less daily chores, and less expenses. And most people do not realize that, they see being green = being more involved, buying more expensive food and needing to work much more with small domestic details.

(feel free to delete this after you read it, or I will appreciate if you like to comment on any of it?)

Oh, by the way, the first results are in on my electric bill thanks to "Updated cooking methods..." http://www.appropedia.org/index.php?title=Talk:Updated_cooking_methods_in_modern_kitchens&section=4#Electricity_consumption

Yeahvle 02:26, 27 February 2011 (PST)

I agree with your points. It is possible to live a modern life on a fraction of the fossil fuel burn of the average modern person. We don't have to go all the way back to the Stone Age - but if we did, we could do a better job than our ancestors did the first time, because now we know a lot more. Eventually I will write a user subpage to document everything I have done to cut my carbon footprint and other aspects of my ecological footprint, and what I have left to work on. I have a page on my personal wikiW with tables of my monthly home utility bills since 1999. I have cut my annual natural gas burn by 95% and my electricity use by 66% since then. I buy green electricity to cover the remainder that I still use. Recycling is not as good here as your arrangement, but with composting and recycling I only generate one small bag of trash every two months. And our local recycling options are gradually improving. I compost all my food waste, so my kitchen trash is odorless now. The bag can take two or three months to fill up, with no stench. I also collect yard waste from several of my neighbors and compost that too.
The thinking of many people suffers from the endowment effect.W That is the tendency to perceive a loss as greater than a gain. For example, the lost pleasure of giving up air travel can easily be offset by the gained pleasure of volunteering at a community garden. But people don't like to give up what they know, even if they replace it with something as good or better. They just focus on what they lost.
There is a lot of wiki technical work to do here. Unless many more people will do some of it, I could be doing it for a long time. That is typical for a small wikiW like Appropedia. We don't have the millions of users that Wikipedia does, from which a few thousand users can specialize in technical issues instead of content editing. The technical contributors can greatly facilitate the work of the content editors. This is plainly evident on Wikipedia, where there is a help page, a template, or some sort of tool to help with almost any task. Only a handful of users on Appropedia are available to do that kind of infrastructure work, so Appropedia is not as well developed internally as Wikipedia. But the same is true of every small wiki I have seen. This problem has no easy solution. Someone just has to dive in and do the work. --Teratornis 18:15, 27 February 2011 (PST)
The best solution is more people :-). I'm doing some proselytizing, and have been planning a much bigger effort via email. Getting close to starting it now - maybe this month.
What helps those new people to stick around is finding that Appropedia is a useful and enjoyable site. Thank you, both of you, for helping make Appropedia what it is. --Chriswaterguy 21:55, 27 February 2011 (PST)
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