Yes, my green travel mission was a true success and learning experience. Did you expect otherwise? I succeeded in confusing the cashiers at Whole Foods by bringing my own food containers and telling them to “Take 10 off”. One cashier said, “Do we sell those here?”. Haha! My cloth napkin and reusable fork were super easy to carry in my bag and helped me realize how many paper napkins I often use in a meal, a day, a trip. I kept all my recycling with me and have a bag of stuff to recycle including all my receipts and paper plates from eating slices of pizza. A city as amazing as New York City doesn’t really have recycling everywhere which I never really noticed before. I’ll likely be bringing it back with me to SLO. The only stuff I really ended up throwing away was uneaten food. My travel mug was great in the airport, they filled it with hot water at Starbucks and on the plane. Having tea was enough of a treat so I resisted the call of the free can of soda. I didn’t feel uncomfortable doing any of these things, it was all easy with just a little forethought. It didn’t cramp my style or make me stand out in a crowd. It really makes me wonder what change we could all affect with just a little effort. And I mean LITTLE effort. I worked 9-10 hours a day, attended yoga a few times, and was still able to fit this in.

My last event with MINDBODY was a lesson in patience and presence. Try teaching 90 people about internet based software without the internet for 3 days! I have to say that my students were mostly gracious and understanding, which is kind of a surprise in New York City. Alright NYC, maybe you’re not as grumpy and aggressive as some might say. My friend SJ said something interesting, that what passes in our culture for control is really just routine. When our routine gets rocked, we get freaked out and can’t handle it. But we can’t control what the universe hands us every moment of every day. We can do the best with what we’ve been dealt, but it makes me wonder how much we control and how much we don’t in our lives.

Off to one more class at Laughing Lotus in NYC. It’s one of my favorite studios in NYC and I look forward to taking a training with them soon and bringing some of the lotus energy to the Dog.

I’m on a mission which begins this Sunday-Friday. My goal is to have “0% waste” during a trip to NYC. My inspiration? Mother Earth? Lets see how far we can take this!  Yesterday I attended the SLO green awards, a yearly event in San Luis Obispo, CA where the city Chamber of Commerce recognizes businesses, organizations or individuals who have voluntarily undertaken effective efforts, projects or operational improvements to reduce pollution, improve resource conservation and sustainability or improve air and water quality. This years winners were the Paso Robles Recycling and Waste Processing facility, A building company, a hair and skin care company, and Mr. Eco, whose video is pretty funny if you want a chuckle.  It was super inspiring to see what can be done on a large scale with the right intention and reasonable effort.

Have you noticed how much trash and waste is part of traveling? And how normal it is for people to travel by car and air these days?  I’ve been traveling often for the last five years and although I’ve made some simple changes I feel good about, it’s always a challenge minimizing waste when you’re outside your comfort zone. Lets see. I can’t bring food or water through security, so I guess I’ll buy some crappy airport food, if I’m lucky I’ll find a bean burrito with a bell pepper in it. You often end up buying some water and a smutty magazine. Breakfasts and lunches are often grabbed to go. The plane trip itself uses tons of fuel.

So, I already have some pretty awesome travel routines and I will outline my plan below to take it to the next level. It’s great to do the things that are easy, but eventually you’ve got to kick it up a notch and do the things that aren’t.

1. Airport food.  This is always the hardest.  Once I brought a kale salad and tofu in glass tuperware through security and it wasn’t a problem.  So I’m going to bring food from home for my departure trip.  Energy bars, nuts, fruit, a sandwich or burrito or something.  The SLO airport even said I could bring food in a thermos as long as it’s mostly solid food.  Maybe I’ll try that, but I’m afraid of causing a ruckus and losing my awesome thermos.
2. Water bottle.  I’m going to bring two this time because I often lose one.  I’m bringing the small one with a wide mouth for the airport.  I can often find a way to fill it with a drinking fountain or the water button at the soda fountains at fast food restaurants.  I’m bringing the 32 ounce bottle for my work event so I can stay hydrated while I teach all day.
3. Tea and Emergen-C.  I bring these on the plane so when they are serving the soda to everyone else, I can have some tea.  This would be another good opportunity to use my thermos so I don’t use a styrofoam cup.  Yes, I’m going this far!
4. Breakfast in my hotel room.  This is a no brainer which I do every time I travel already.  I bring “Roxy’s Oatmeal Special”.  It kind of tastes like pie.  It’s rolled oats, raisins, walnuts, vanilla soy protein powder made with the hotel coffee maker.
5. Lunches.  This will be a challenge.  I often only get 45 minutes in Manhattan for this.  I often get to go food from Whole Foods or a cafe which comes in to-go containers with bags and utensils that get thrown away.  My ideas:  I’ll try to eat in rather than take it to-go.  I could reuse my whole foods container for the week or bring my owner containers.  I could bring my own utensils and cloth napkins too.  I will try to avoid whole foods and stick to the local cafes too.
6. Dinners.  We often eat at restaurants but sometimes I get it to-go so I can have a hotel room picnic and relax.  Same ideas as lunch.
7. I’m going to offset my flight for the trip.  I figure the savings I’ll make by bringing my own food for my departure flight, eating breakfast on my own each day, can be applied to offsetting the carbon footprint of my flight.

I’ll let you know how I do!

Everywhere I turn people are chatting about their eating philosophies and sharing their stories and thoughts. It got me to thinking about my reasons for going veggie and here I shall share them with the ether.

I don’t really like cooking meat. It’s slimy and takes planning to prepare and can be expensive. I would always thaw it out and forget about it and have to throw it away. I actually really like vegetables. I know, I know, that’s freakish in and of itself. But, seriously, after years of being afraid of tofu and any vegetable that wasn’t coated in cheese sauce, I now know you can prepare veggies to have great flavor and to be satisfying with just a little effort, and not more effort than it takes to cook a meal with meat. Legumes are such efficient, nutritious morsels. I really don’t like the way that “Corporate America” influences what we eat. From the overly processed, infinite shelf life, boxed flour and salt concoctions to terrible factory farming practices, why should some company’s profit influence what I nourish myself with? I’m not saying it doesn’t taste good, a lot of it tastes pretty fantastic. I’m also not saying I never eat it. Have you ever found yourself doing something only because that’s the way you’ve always done it and you never thought to consider it could be different? That’s how I think many of us are about food.

Have you ever noticed how your appetite expands after Thanksgiving dinner? When I started to give up “cheeseburgers” I realized that I didn’t really need them. Occasionally I craved them, especially if I was hungover, but I didn’t really need them. Then I went to a yoga training where the food was mostly vegan. The first few days I ate two huge plates of food per meal and by the end of the week, my appetite did something miraculous, it shrank. It did so even while I was exercising insane amounts each day. And so I started questioning my relationship with the bounty of our earth.

All that being said, I realize it does take initiative to learn how to nourish yourself well and that many people might not ever find the time or the spark to question it or change it. Many will probably go their whole lives doing a variation of what their parents did, or what their friends do, and won’t mind it, and won’t suffer terribly bad for doing so. I also realize that some people seem to need more protien and some have such an emotional attachment to meat, to them I say more power to ya. I only know that I don’t want to support corporate b.s., I don’t want to support treating animals like crap, I don’t want to create more negative karma in the world, and I want to live a long healthful life, and for me, eating more veggies than animal products seems like an easy way to start.

Happy Monday. May your food nourish your body and mind today.  In case your curious, some books that have influenced my diet include Diet for a New America, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Ayurveda: A Life of Balance, and Eat Right 4 Your Type.

Yesterday I attended the SLO Green Awards where MINDBODY was one of six organizations recognized for efforts in making voluntary environmental contribution by SLO Commerce. The MINDBODY offices use 1/4 the electricity of our former space and our new office was built with LEED certification practices including carpet, flooring, counter tops, and other recycled materials, motion sensors for our lights, and without sacrificing a beautiful space to work in. During the meeting we heard speeches from the other award winners and also Hewlett Packard which is one of the largest green companies around.

One of the recurring themes of the luncheon was that consumer practices drive the market more than anything. In the last few years I’ve become more and more aware of my impact on the environment around me. From food choices, to lifestyle and transportation, we all interact with our environment differently. I like the idea of efficient compromises. I’m not going to live in seclusion off the grid and eat only homegrown food every day. Yet, getting my vegetables from a local farm isn’t so difficult, and it supports my community and tastes good, rather than only buying my veggies when I go to the grocery store. That’s a good compromise to me.

This year I continued my personal commute challenge which started in May 2008 and rode my bike to commute to work and around town as much as I could (I used mycyclinglog.com). When it rains, I drive, but how often does it rain in SLO? Every other week I do a driving grocery run as well. I have commuted 1213 miles on my bike this year, which has saved .5 tons of CO2 (or 1000 lbs). This was about 50,000 calories burned, which translates to 11 pounds of fat not gained in 2009. I also calculated my overall footprint with an online calculator (epa.gov and terra pass have great tools). My home usage was about 2800 lbs per year, transportation was about 3000 lbs driving and 8500 lbs flying (gulp).  My electricity usage was 1/7 the average single person household, and my total carbon footprint minus flights for work was 30% of the average American household.  Yes, I love numbers and spreadsheets. I think it’s all interesting to say the least. I found I could decrease my footprint further by washing my clothes in cold water (1 load per week saves 49 lbs per year), line drying my clothes (330 lbs per year), replacing light bulbs in my house (70 lbs per lightbulb per year), and composting (I just like the feeling of that one, not sure how much it really saves). I already minimize travel, commute by bike, recycle, and have a energy saving refrigerator and washer in my apartment (among other things). How green are you? Have you ever thought about this? Are there any efficient compromises you can make that wouldn’t terribly impact your life? Do you think making a green effort is worth it?