Let’s look at what went wrong in my tent.<\/strong><\/p>\nI had the misfortune of undertaking tent-dwelling during a particularly wet spring and summer. Unlike memorable years of drought, Pittsburgh has experienced rainshowers and thunderstorms once every 36 hours on average, it seems. Purely dry, sunny days arrive only once or twice a week! Thus, any little hole or weakness in my tent seams spells water pools. And water pools–next to bedding, fabric, and clothing–spells a mold invasion.<\/p>\n
A mold invasion<\/strong> is an appropriate term for what happened in my tent. Mold spores travel through the air, and \u00a0when you inhale that distinctly musty smell, you are inhaling some of those spores. If something becomes moldy, you must immediately increase the area’s ventilation, remove the item, or lay it out in the sun. Failure to do so will mean mold will quickly appear on all<\/em> of your belongings.<\/p>\nProper ventilation, in a basic tent with a rain cover, is laughable. So is laying clothes out to dry in the sun (sun? What sun?! That was the rainiest May I can remember!) My situation wasn’t helped by living in a forest. Forest’s canopies are known for keeping in cool temperatures and moist air. Not to mention… my morning and nightly ritual of returning to my tent involved, in the more recent months, running full speed into and out of the forest, in an attempt to avoid the vicious descent of mosquito hordes. No time for dilly-dallying, or laying one’s clothes out for hours. This is a matter of survival!<\/p>\n
As you can see, many conditions conspired to make the tent less and less of a home to me. Dampness within my tent, moldy air, mosquitoes, cramped quarters, encroaching poison ivy… one day, I simply hit the natural breaking point. Just like many other times during the Sust Enable experiment, I tested a hypothesis and it was proven wrong.<\/p>\n
It’s difficult to remind myself <\/strong>that successfully testing a hypothesis is a victory. I cannot help by feel that I failed sometimes. I cried last night, fed up with playing “musical couches” and tired and frustrated, I chided myself for being “so stupid” about making choices like living in a tent, which ended up turning out so badly. \u00a0<\/p>\nEventually I relented, but not before I uttered the famously succinct phrase that leads this blog post. Now, I am satisfied that my rough experience will provide other people guidance and insight into how they can improve their own double-bottom-line (personal and environmental) sustainability. In this way, a patent failure of theory can indeed be a success.<\/p>\n
In some ways, trying to live sustainably for three months is too short. In other ways, it is too long. No matter what, I decided I should either have tried to live 100% sustainably OR take on the total production of the Sust Enable episode series. The two are, to some extent, mutually exclusive. They are both full time jobs.<\/p>\n
That does NOT mean it’s a full time job to become 100% sustainable!<\/strong> How you can do it–and please learn from my mistakes<\/em>–is to take your time with it. Make a commitment to do it, but slowly incorporate it into your life. It may take two years… five years… twenty years! But one day you will have the answers, with the information that is available to you over time. And you can teach your children how to live with the utmost in environmental, self and community stewardship.<\/p>\nThis is the outcome that matters. Our society encourages competition–don’t compete with your green-minded neighbor for who can achieve self-sustaining systems first. Slow is beautiful. Slow is accurate. Slow is sustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“F*** sustainability. I just want a bed.” — Dear Readers, The Mili-Tent is a bust. On May 1, 2008, I moved into a tent in the woods within Pittsburgh, PA. [ … ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":17555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,24,13],"tags":[974,975,976,450,8514,977,978,979,8512,446,980,981],"yoast_head":"\n
Hard Lessons in Sustainable Living: The Tent Trauma • Sustainablog<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n