Deconsumption: What is it and why am I doing it?

Yea - I know, it's not a real word. I googled it and found a website dedicated to "deconsumption." And it appeared that the author had the same idea as me. Which is that the world that we live in is not sustainable. In other words - think of our accessible energy resources as water in a big bucket. In the bottom of the bucket is a hole that constantly lets the water out. Some water is coming into the bucket - but, the amount of water leaving the bucket is greater than the water entering the bucket. This is our current situation in the world.

Now, to be fair, this is a pretty huge bucket. But, the obvious conclusion of the above situation is that eventually the bucket will empty unless one of two things happen. Either the water entering the bucket needs to increase or the water leaving the bucket needs to decrease. New technology could help in both areas - and pretty much everyone alive today is used to the idea of technology bailing us out. But, there is no law that states technology must save us.

Most people think that we have a long time to come up with a solution. But, the truth is that this energy problem will most likely have a huge effect on how I live the second half of my life. If the only problem was that we need to come up with a solution before all the water ran out in the barrel then it might be doable. However, life will start to become uncomfortable because we will get to the point (we might even be past the point) where we can't make the hole at the bottom of the bucket any bigger.

Over the last hundred years we have become very good at finding oil. Although energy can come in many forms (coal, sunlight, tidal, wind, nuclear etc) I single out oil because no other commodity is responsible for our standard of living than oil. 1) It contains an incredible amount of energy 2) It is relatively easy to transport 3) It can become almost anything (plastic, medication, fertilizer etc). No other form of energy comes close to oil in these key areas.

Oil has what people call a high energy return on energy invested (EROEI). Back when Judd could shoot at a squirrel and black gold came bubblin out of the ground we only had to expend 1 unit of energy to get 50 in return. These days it's more like 10 returned to every one invested. The reason is that we have found all the easy stuff. Now we have to do things like dig five miles below the ocean floor or melt oil shale (basically rock) into oil. The quality and accessibility of oil products is rapidly decreasing. Add to that many oil producing nations that have been traditional exporters are becoming importers because their oil fields are emptying and their populations are using more oil.

I wasn't intending to go into that much detail about our energy problems - but, it does provide a fair amount of the motivation for me in this quest for deconsumption. The other motivation is my curiosity of the psychological effects of these experiments. We all have areas of our life where we depend on people or things much more heavily than we realize. As an old psych grad, I'm interested in my reaction to the removal of certain "stimuli." I also think it will help me to simplify my life, become more connected to my community, and break me of some bad habits.

So, here is the plan. Each month I will remove something from my life that I treat as a necessity, but is probably more of a luxury. As I go through the month I'll write on this blog why it's important, how it affects me, and whether I might make it a part of my life instead of just a month long experiment.

September 2009: Alcohol - Yes, "the cause of and solution to all of life's problems." Before I thought up this idea of sacrificing something every month for a year I had already decided to give up alcohol for the month of September. I have a big race coming up at the beginning of October and I decided that I might be relying a little too much on alcohol for stress relief.

October 2009: Clutter - This was originally scheduled for June 2010 - but, my wife strongly suggested that I move it up ; ) Most of us have a lot of crap that we have in our house, carry around in our cars, or store somewhere else. This has always been a weakness of mine. I hate cleaning up. I've heard the saying - "a place for everything and everything in it's place" - but, I haven't exactly put it into practice during any of my 32 years. This is important because the more stuff you have the more space you need - and the more space you have the more energy you use. Also, I think that it might actually make me feel good to live in a clutter free space. We'll see.

November 2009: TV & movies (exception for sports) - I've actually lived without a TV during a few brief periods in my life. But, I think it's worth doing again. I know - the exception for sports is kind of weak - but, come on this is right at the most important time in the football season!

December 2009: The internet (exception for e-mail, work related stuff, and this blog) - This might be the hardest of the first four months for me. I am addicted to information - and of course the internet has more information than any "place" in history.

January 2010: All animal products: I've never gone without meat for more than a few days, so this will be an experiment. The challenge will be to get enough protein for training. For the 2008 Olympics they did a study on nutrition habits of all the male and female marathoners. The one thing they had in common is that there weren't any vegetarians. However, I acknowledge that there are a lot of energy related and even moral reasons to abstain from meat.

February 2010: Eating food prepared by others: Pretty much this means no restaurants and a lot of cooking. I am pretty good about cooking - but, we probably do go out to restaurants a little too much. This might be the hardest sell for Kendra. So, I might need some people to go out to dinner with her a few nights ; )

March 2010: No purchases other than food/housing/clothes - I'm not a big shopper - but, I do like my toys. I'm not sure how I should define this - would my cell phone bill count?

April 2010: Trash - I don't know if this is possible at all, but I'm going to try to not produce any trash for a month. That means only using recyclable or reusable products and taking food waste to a compost. This is going to be rough.

May 2010: No transportation that uses oil - This means I can only go where I can walk or ride my bike. Working from home and living in the city makes this relatively easy. But, I'm sure that I'll have to make sacrifices at some point.

June 2010: Time (Volunteer once each day) - I hate to admit it but, I've never done much volunteer work. I do work with a guy from the South Baltimore Learning Center at least once a week. But, as the amount of available energy constricts it will very important for communities to become more cooperative. If we're going to survive we're going to have to depend on each other a lot more than we do currently.

July 2010: Processed food - I grew up on hamburger helper, rice-a-roni, campbell's soup etc. Although I would say that I've gotten a little better in this area I still have room for improvement. Processed food is very dependent on oil and it's really bad for you - even the "healthy" stuff.

August 2010: No food made from more than 100mi away - This is kind of a trendy one - some people have even done this for an entire year. Obviously August is a relatively easy time of the year for this challenge - but, if I've made it this far it will be a little reward.

September 2010: All of the above (except for meat) - As I go along there might be other things that fall out of this month. But, that's the goal. This will be the month before I run the Chicago marathon - so, living like a monk might be a good idea.