What impresses me is if men tell me they clean baseboards and scrub out the kitchen trash can and wipe out that disgusting place behind the faucets where the mold grows. That is impressive.

See, I am desperate to make doing the right thing (composting, sorting) dead stupid moron-proof easy.

I have a weird house (who doesn’t?), wherein the kitchen is on the SECOND FLOOR in the FRONT! (don’t ask, I don’t understand it either. We chose it because it’s roomy and in many other respects quite flexible living space). If I could, I would put in a CHUTE to a compost bin outside the house, on the ground floor because I find the trip to the backyard to empty the compost bin to be such an insuperable inconvenience.

If it’s harder to do things the right way than the wrong way, the right way is permanently screwed. We need to make it so that doing things the right way is easy and obvious. That is the mission of design. We don’t need future-friendly living to be an all-day hair shirt exercise.

This whole exercise in awareness is part of a larger effort that I am undertaking to “rethink” the kitchen in order to make it serve a “whole systems” approach to our relationship with food (which of course must include “waste”). I realized that as a kitchen designer I design from a vocabulary of patterns and forms that are so familiar that we design kitchens in many ways without thinking about why. My goal is to seek ways in which doing the “right” things (like composting) are also the easiest and most convenient.

I like the challenge you’ve issued Lori. In my design thinking I may tend to design for “the person who cares” – and provide stools(out of the way) for those who don’t participate. Now I’m going to have to work on drawing them in to the “workflow”. I think what we’re after is not cooperation but collaboration.

…and on the gender issue (I’m male and the cook in my home) I just want to say one thing that always drives me crazy when I’m shopping is to see a man shopping with his partner and just standing there staring stupidly while she makes all the selections (and even pushes the cart). I just think to myself “you are so lame!”

You know why I have given up on composting? Because I am the only person who will touch icky food bits. If I had a weapon I could not compel cooperation on this point from other household members.

Ecological living is a job, and it’s a job that falls on the person who cares about the issue and cares for the house. And that person is a ….. WOMAN the vast majority of the time. And I don’t WANT more work in the kitchen. You are crazy if you think you can thin out the trash stream that much without making work for someone who doesn’t want it or need it.

Breaking the trash habit will also take some serious gender re-education, a battle that I do ok on most days, but which I don’t really want to make harder.

Any thoughts, enviro purists?

Here’s what else I notice my house lacks for this way of living:

1) A place to hang a jacket, leave dirty shoes, store a towel for a wet dog, have handy a garden clipper or basket for picking right at the back door to facilitate these trips to the compost or to the garden.

2) Counter space – not only for the unruly mail that you already mentioned (as if you could see my counter when you were writing), but for the compost bucket which feels rather large in relation to my limited counter space.

Here’s to continuing the conversation to develop a life that works – mind, body, soul and environment.

Terry