Ian Lewis' Blog

I've decided that I want to get more involved in Ecology at a local level. I'm facinated by using the internet to organize people at a local level. Websites like Meetup.com, while I don't like how and how much they charge for the service, do well for organizing people with similar interests. Today I'm reading about Ecology and looking at a number of ways of helping out within the local area. The Sierra club has a local Virginia Chapter which looks interesting.


I think I'd like to start by really seriously changing my lifestyle to incorporate as much reuse/recycling/conservation as possible. This means making organizing recycled materials and making regular trips to the nearby waste drop off point for stuff they don't pick up on the curb. It also means recycling every piece of recyclable material. I think by doing this I'll learn a lot more about how to make it easier for people to do this. I think it would go a long way towards helping the environment if recycling was easier to do. Maybe I can help somehow in this regard.


Another issue I'd like to learn more about are using locally grown (reduces transportation waste/pollution) and organic food. While I am able to buy organic food easily in Fairfax, it's quite expensive and inconvenient. I think I'd like to figure out better ways for me to store food, and how to make food using ingredients that keep for a long time so that I make less trips to the supermarket.


I really believe that if people were more inclined to reduce/reuse/recycle, due to social pressure, and it was easier to do so, that people would do it and society would be a much more sustainable place for it. I suppose that improving conservation would be the most difficult change to enact since it requires social change that doesn't benefit people in terms of time/money. I suppose the only way to get people to conserve more would be to make it harder for them to buy things (by driving up the prices through stiffer government regulation perhaps). I don't know. I suppose if these were easy questions to answer or solve then they may have been solved already.