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Nesting: What’s your carbon footprint?

2•29•2008

To prove just about anything, you must first measure the thing at hand. How much energy do you use at home? At the Redwood Coast Energy Authority on Fifth Street in Eureka, they'll let you borrow monitors at no charge from their “Tool Bank,” so you can find out which appliances in your home cost you the most in energy dollars (http://www.redwoodenergy. com). How many miles per gallon does your car get? To measure go to http://www.calculatenow.biz. How do you convert ounces to cups in a recipe? Go to the USDA's Web site, http://www.nal.usda. gov, and find out. Yes, there is a way to measure just about everything we humans do on this planet. Which brings me to my next question: How big of a carbon footprint do you make on the Earth? Not familiar with the term yet? Not too worry: Here's a “Carbon Footprint 101” from http://www.carbonfootprint.com: A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact our human activities have on our environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. Simple. Say you're planning a road trip across the country, and you'd like to find out just what kind of damage you'll be making to the environment in driving that motorhome from sunny California to the rocky shores of Maine. At http://www.carbonfootprint.com, you can find out just what kind of impact you personally make via your ZIP code.

Recently, I received an e-mail from the promotions guys of a band called Perpetual Groove that was in town a few days ago at the Red Fox Tavern. Now, when you think of a band touring the country, huge tour buses come to mind, and following the buses, huge big rigs with all their equipment. On an average 20-city tour, the carbon footprint made can be astounding. Not so for this band, as it is following a new trend by making up the difference in other ways. I liken it to a “Friends” episode in which the pregnant vegetarian Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) is craving meat and the carnivore, Joey (Matt LaBlanc), offers to make her difference for her by sustaining from anything that was once alive. Perpetual Groove has signed up with the Green Mountain Energy Co. and has offset its emissions with renewable energy credits. In 2007, the band purchased enough energy credits to offset 100 percent of the calculated carbon emissions associated with last year's tour (16 metric tons), which they say is likened to not driving your car for more than 39,000 miles, or the annual carbon absorption of 2,000 trees. Making your difference. That's really what it's all about. Just for tickles and giggles, I found the carbon footprint for Christmas in the United Kingdom online, as follows:

* Christmas food: 26 kg
* Christmas car travel: 96 kg
* Extravagant lighting displays: 218 kg
* Christmas shopping: 310 kg

What does this mean? Well, first off, it's sad to me that most of the work done in measuring these amounts is being done in the United Kingdom, not the United States. Hopefully, that will change with time and we can get on board as a country in the near future. The other thing these numbers tell us is that the total amount of carbon dioxide produced by Christmas activities in the U.K. checks in at 650 kg per person -- equal to 5.5 percent of the U.K.s annual carbon footprint. Imagine that! Five percent of their total for the year is derived in just a few weeks, and I think we can safely assume the U.S. is no different. Now, for those of us who are at a loss and hated statistics in college, the whole idea of measuring may seem overwhelming. A simpler gauge day to day may just have to suffice. Rather than tout the overused word “environmental,” how about the good, old-fashioned word “conservation”? Back in the day, that's just what this was all about. Don't be wasteful, plain and simple. As my good, old-fashioned mom would have said, “Waste not, want not.” Still good advice, Mom. Sharon Letts is a staff writer in the Times-Standard's Lifestyle section. Her Nesting column appears every Thursday in the Home and Garden section. Contact her at 441-0512.

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This ain’t your grand-daddy’s hippie jam band

2•29•2008

This is Perpetual Groove and they're nothing short of the divinely-inspired deliverers of both enlightenment and endarkenment that is promised by their moniker. Think M.C. Escher spawning with Bob Dylan and one might get an inkling. Perpetual Groove began their first of two sets Monday at 11:30 p.m. at the Red Fox Tavern. The four members appeared on stage as smoothly and quietly as water over moss: It took their warm-up sounds to draw the crowd. The band warmed up like an orchestra, their notes and beats emanating out from the front of the newly-raised stage and through the mellow ferocity that is the Red Fox Tavern, like the appreciative hum the forest must make when it is finally bereft of humanity. The sound built slowly, magnetizing the audience to to the stagefront as irrevocably and steadily as raindrops running down a window pane: No deluge of star-crossed fanatics there. We all kind of just ... gravitated. But tha's what PGroove can do to a person. This group of four quietly blazing, musically gifted men from Athens, Georgia, imparts what can only be described as a love affair between the beauty of the solitary soul and the spontaneous combustion which occurs in a particle accelerator: A supremely interesting, wholehearted union, that at rides the quark between piercing melancholia and lightness of being that winds out into the aural equivalent of floating. And tight? You bet.

From the first precursor to sound these gentlemen are together. One can only imagine how they prepare themselves, it's as if they've been playing for hours instead of seconds. No stiff fingers or hesitant vibe from this crew. What followed thereafter was approximately two hours of mind-bending, soul-rending, heart-upending true music that took strands of blues, funk, soul, folk and techno and wound them into a gorgeous web that can only be described as PGroove. Just what is it that makes Perpetual Groove so special, that sets them apart from the myriad other bands careening through the tour scene? Is it perhaps that, in a world seemingly overrun with flash and dogma, there still exist those who are, what, brave enough? Reckless enough? Inspired enough? To say what's on their minds without dramatizing or seeking to capitalize on it? Could it be that when one listens to Perpetual Groove one is actually getting close to some section of the overall truth and in getting closer to that truth is calmed rather than incensed by it? (How many truths have come out recently that are nothing short of incensing: WMDs anyone? The troubling fact that for every pasty, old, white and dashing young politician in Washinton there are some 30 or 40 lobbyists buzzing around them like fruit flies picnicing in the People's breadbasket?) Verifiable that, all in all, truth, like art and music, is a subjective concept but between the crowd, the music and a lovely conversation with the band's frontman, Brock, when everyone else was packing up to go, one gets the impression that Perpetual Groove may be that rare manifestation of being who, although they find themselves in a position to do so, refuse to lie to us. Check them out on the Web: http://www.pgroove.com

Listen to some of what they have to say and close your eyes to drink in the eloquence of how they convey it. You might just be glad you did. Mary Masucci can't be reached; she's way too far out there. However, if you have a band you'd like her to review, you can contact the Entertainment Editor at the Times-Standard, Chris Durant. cdurant@times-standard.com. Complaints not accepted: If you can't say anything nice, keep it to yourself.

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