Every year on my blog, I post new Earth Day resolutions to do my part in conserving resources, reusing, recycling, reducing, buying organic and buying local.
With our new life in Santa Fe, I am happy to report that Mr. SBQ and I have significantly reduced our fossil fuel use by walking to work. After living in car-dependent Atlanta for so long, it is wonderful that Mr. SBQ walks to work everyday and I walk when I do not have to work until the store closes (I still don't feel safe walking alone late at night even though Santa Fe is much much safer than metro-Atlanta.)
We also walk to downtown, the post office, the pharmacy, the library, out to dinner, to the farmer's market, and many other errands. It's wonderful and good exercise and a money saver too. Hooray for walkable cities!
Another one of my favorite things about living here is the Santa Fe Farmer's Market. A highlight of my week is walking to the market on Saturday morning and buying the freshest seasonal produce directly from local farmers. Trying new foods, supporting family farms, buying local, buying organic, eating seasonal foods--all of this makes me happy happy happy.
This year, like many cities and communities around the country, the city of Santa Fe enacted a plastic-bag ban. We already use our own reusable bags for shopping, and I think I'll start make some more fold-up fabric bags for out-of-town guests to use out of my fabric stash. Cloud 9 Fabrics has a wonderful tutorial for fabric bags with matching small zippered pouch (and a giveaway) on their blog today.
My new goal is to learn more and do more with water conservation. Water is a precious and scarce resource in New Mexico and I want to do my part with water conservation. I'll report back next year and let you know what I learned and how I incorporated it into our daily life.
4 comments:
I would love living in a walkable city! Hope you're feeling better!
I am so envious of your new walkable location.
Would love to live in a place where I could walk to work.
My state, South Australia, has a plastic bag ban too. I don't even notice it anymore, but it was unusual to get used to, about eight years ago now. Is Santa Fe a big city? It sounds quite contained and small to be able to walk so much. Maybe it's just well serviced in many sections?! I've seen pictures or read about Atlanta traffic before. That seems a nightmare!
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