A Blur

The next week was exactly that. Each day was a process just getting to work. Most days this involved a (1) 15 min bike or 40 min walk, (2) a 30-40 min ferry ride, and (3) another 10 min bike or 30 min walk or 10 min bus. At least there were choices? On the plus side, it became completely unnecessary to exercise because by the end of the day, I was beat. I also got to know the roads in Larkspur and Kentfield very well.

The long rides, as well as my desire to live in the actual city, led me to ramp up my craigslist search. Again, doing this in a city like SF where craigslist is the one and only way to find housing is, at the very least, difficult. Later in the week, I looked at one place about five blocks from work on Haight Street. It happened to be an old youth hostel in the process of being converted into apartments, and actually had a beautiful view of the city. However, the apartment was not even close to being completed; the kitchen was a mess (including dried plaster all over new marble countertops?) and the place was littered with construction equipment. My search continued.

On Monday, I began my job at ForestEthics, an environmental nonprofit that attempts to save forests my changing corporations' paper policies. In the past, they've had real success with companies such as Limited Brands (Victoria's Secret), Williams-Sonoma, Dell, Staples, and Office Depot. They're currently campaigning against Sears, the oldest and most proliferative (425 million catalogs per year) catalog producer in the world.

Their other major endeavor deals with junk mail. No one likes junk mail -- that's a simple fact. Junk mail touches on a variety of issues that directly affect contemporary American society, including destruction of the environment, loss of biodiversity, global warming, waste management, and identity theft. A couple startling facts:

• Junk mail accounts for over 100 billion pieces of mail annually (30% of mail worldwide)
• About 44% of junk mail goes to landfills unopened
• It takes more than 100 million trees a year to produce the total volume of junk mail in the United States, equivalent to clear cutting the Rocky Mountain National Park (~265,000 acres) three times a year
• 6.5 million tons of junk mail entered the solid waste systems of the United States in 2006
• A response rate of less than 0.25% is considered acceptable for the 500 million credit card solicitations mailed monthly

This is all despite the fact that polls consistently show that between 80-90% of people dislike junk mail and would do something about it if they knew how.

Anyone reading this is more than welcome to sign the online petition to stop junk mail and create a Do Not Mail Registry similar to the Do Not Call Registry. 

Anyways, I've pretty much been doing whatever needs to be done around the office, which has ranged from looking up phone numbers and organizations online to calling supporters to creating stencils for Halloween pumpkin in Photoshop. We were also setting up for a big gala event that was happening the following week, which involved stuffing lots of envelopes and gift bags. Not really much to elaborate on here -- I spend most of my time on the computer, and whether or not I'm productive really depends on the day. I tend to get things done a bit faster than they anticipate, but since I have plenty of other things that I need to do, I'm always doing something. The people at work are very cool, and not nearly as outwardly treehuggerish as I thought they would be (or perhaps I'm just more of a treehugger than I think I am). One of the guys that I work with closely was actually in Chile last year doing the same program that I will be doing in the spring. 

I got to walk through a bunch of San Francisco that week, including the Embarcadero Center (the ferries leave from here), where I often enjoyed a freshly baked roll with some (iced) coffee from Peet's. The center also offers a ton of really cool shops, including one that sells only olive oil, another that sells just mushrooms, a couple little grocery stores with local, organic produce, and a great little bookstore.

Oh, and I also fell off my bike one day on Market Street, one of the main streets going through downtown San Francisco. That was pretty awesome. It just so happens that my bike tire fits perfectly in those cable car wheel paths built into the pavement. Who'da thought.