The Great Interview Experiment 2009, Featuring Midwest Green!

At the end of NaBloPoMo, I signed up to do The Great Interview Experiment 2009 (GIE), led by blogger Neil Kramer of Citizen of the Month. This experiment seeks to bring bloggers together: young and old, liberal and conservative, straight and gay, single and married, widowed and divorced, parents and child free, and so on. The point is that all bloggers are, first and foremost, people. Participants (and as far as I know it isn’t too late to do this, so go be a joiner like me) simply leave a comment on the GIE blog post. Neil will e-mail you the contact information for 2 bloggers: the one you will interview and the one who will interview you.

As I half expected, I was to interview someone with whom I have absolutely nothing in common: Wendy of Midwest Green. Wendy and her family live a green and eco-friendly lifestyle. *sigh* The greenest that my household gets is that we use reusable shopping bags, we don’t litter, and Brian takes the El to work. OK, that’s because it’s faster and a whole lot cheaper than driving downtown and paying to park. As for recycling, well, if we’re out and happen to pass a blue bin and happen to have an empty plastic bottle of whatever we’re drinking with us, into the bin it goes. Most apartments in the City do not have blue recyclable bins in the alley with the regular dumpsters.

Still, I wanted to do the project so I visited Wendy’s blog and surprised myself by being able to come up with, what I think, are interesting rather than generic interview questions. So, here goes:

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1. How and when did you decide to live a green, eco-friendly lifestyle?
I’m nearly 51 years old — I was alive back when environmentalism was called ecology — and I think I’ve been “green” (it wasn’t called that back then) since I was a tween (it wasn’t called that back then either). Life kind of got in the way for awhile — it is hard to be green when you are just making ends meet — but especially over the past several years I have been increasingly focusing on greener and greener alternatives for our food and then our clothes and now our energy.

2. How did your children take to the idea, or is this something you and your husband have been doing since before the kids were born?
My husband is a dear who will go along with just about any cockamamie plan I come up with — not that going green is cockamamie. The kids are flexible. My 14-year-old seems oblivious, and my 10-year-old is a budding environmentalist herself.

3. Currently, your family is taking part in the Dark Days Challenge. Please tell us a bit about that and how it’s going so far.
The Dark Days Challenge involves committing to one SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, and ethical) meal per week from early November until mid-March. This seemed like something that my husband and I could kind of do together. I am one of the lucky ones — I married a man who loves to cook and is willing to experiment. We have a large vegetable garden (organic, of course) and have access to a year-round farmer’s market and a decent natural food store. I just found another store that also seems to stock a great deal of local foods so our options are expanding. Without these options, though, we could probably get by on a weekly meal of stewed tomatoes and potatoes or baked sweet potatoes — or some other equally dull combination from the tomatoes and potatoes and carrots we have from our own garden (the onions and garlic are all gone).

The Dark Days Challenge does allow for exceptions — you can’t get locally grown coffee in Central Illinois (but you can get locally roasted coffee) and there aren’t many local spices. One of our great finds was local whole wheat flour — yum, yum, it seems to make great bread.

4. The posts you wrote about the Dark Days Challenge sound challenging, indeed, particularly in seeking out the proper ingredients for your meals, but especially in the preparation time. How do you and your husband find the time to make these meals?
As for preparing the foods. We often plan the meal a few days ahead of time so we can get the ingredients. As for preparation time — usually the meal is planned for a weekend or at least a week night without running around to basketball games and dance classes. My husband finds cooking relaxing, while I find it anxiety-provoking — so needless to say he does most of the cooking and with some planning ahead of time he seems to be able to work the meal prep into his schedule.

5. Based on your posts, I inferred that your family doesn’t live in an urban area. If you lived in a large city, do you think you’d still be able to live an eco-friendly lifestyle?
We live in a small farming community in Central Illinois. We have 4½ acres on the North edge of town so we have a great combination of rural and town living. My husband and I, however, did live in a city before we moved to our present home (we’ve been here for 13½ years). While there we walked to work most days, we composted our table scraps, grew tomatoes, and recycled. So I think we probably would be able to live a fairly eco-friendly lifestyle in the city.

6. Recently, you participated in the No Impact Experiment. How did that go and what, if anything, did you learn?
I did not go into the No Impact Experiment with a very positive attitude. No Impact is not a possibility — even for No Impact Man — but I wanted to see where my weak spots are. What I learned — or had reinforced — is that the commutes to work are our weak spot and we don’t have any readily available alternatives short of quitting our jobs or moving — neither of which we are interested in doing.

7. Have you participated in other experiments that challenge your green lifestyle? If so, please describe them and what you found challenging or not so challenging.
I can’t think of any other formalized challenges I have participated in. Part of my attraction to challenges has been related to blogging — it has been a way to get more out of my blogging, maybe provide me with more fodder. I think I’m starting to get less inspired by blogging challenges now that I’ve blogged for nearly a year.

8. What made you decide to blog about your family’s way of life?
I used to write a fairly regular column for my local weekly newspaper — it was just about our family life — but it was a lot of fun to write. Unfortunately, my schedule just got too packed and the column writing got dropped.

Meanwhile, I was emerging from a midlife career and interest crisis and had realized that environmentalism had been a lifelong interest — as close to a passion as I was ever likely to see (I’m not really the “passion” type).

Last spring I was taking a sabbatical from my teaching job at a university to learn about Environmental Psychology. My schedule was once again my own and it seemed like a natural fit to write about my personal green endeavors. I also wanted to get a bit more into the 21st century — so I started blogging (but I still don’t do Facebook or MySpace or Twitter — old dogs have only so many new tricks in them at a time).

9. In addition to blogging, you occasionally write for a local newspaper, the latest of which you posted on your blog. Is there a difference between the two?
The columns for the paper are a lot more polished (honest). I put much greater thought into organization, word choice, sentence structure, and content. My aim with the column is to be entertaining and that takes considerable effort — and inspiration. My aim with the blog is to be more informative/chatty — that’s pretty easy for a teacher.

10. Is there anything you miss about “non-green, non-eco-friendly” living?
OK, it would be really easy to say “No, green living gives me everything I ever wanted and more — I never feel deprived.” Not true. What I miss is buying things without considering the source, the material, the carbon footprint. I also miss just buying as much as I used to. I like things. But I’m really beginning to internalize a desire to own less. It makes for a bit of a conflict.

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And there you have it. I have to admit that when I went to pay a visit to Midwest Green, it was reluctantly. The last thing I wanted to read about was someone espousing how great and wonderful the green lifestyle is and how we should all be living it — but that wasn’t what I found at all. What I discovered is a woman who has a charming and witty writing style — the type of blogger any reader would like regardless of the blogger’s topic. So go check out her blog!

I also learned, and especially through this interview, that Wendy and I have a lot more in common than I thought: that we both like blog challenges ; we both have husbands who love to cook, thankfully; but more importantly, that we both realize we aren’t perfect but continue to live our lives — however that may be — the best we can.