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And what the heck to do with used paper towels.
Jamie Kageleiry is Bluedot Living’s director of publications. She’s had the great fortune to be able to assemble a design and editorial team that includes her very good friends.
“Can I come sit on your porch?” Victoria Riskin asked me, one fall day in 2020. “I have an idea I want to talk to you about.”
It was chilly but because of Covid, we met outside. We sat with tea or hot cider (maybe wine, come to think of it) and blankets.
“I want to start a magazine about sustainable living,” she said. “ I’m tired of all the doom and gloom in climate news reporting.”
Wow. I said.
Then YES.
I’d met Vicki a few years before, after she had fled Montecito, California, when mudslides flattened her home (and those of all her neighbors). I had just told another friend that I wanted to work in climate reporting. But, like Vicki, I couldn’t see any place to go that wasn’t featuring just one piece of bad news after another.
“Plus, I’d just really like it if someone would just tell me what to do,” Vicki said to me. “Like, do you know whether you can compost a paper towel? Or recycle it? Who knows, right? I want to do the right thing, but I can’t find good advice, all in one place.”
We decided we would make that place. A magazine on Martha’s Vineyard, then in more locations after that, and then newsletters, all of which would give handy advice, and celebrate the wins in local communities that we weren’t hearing about in the national news.
All around us, on our little island seven miles out to sea, there were lots of positive things happening. I should say, lots of people doing innovative things, enlisting their neighbors, making a difference. One of these groups, a bunch of elementary and middle school kids who became known as “Plastic-Free MV,” had stood up at a town meeting in West Tisbury to convince their neighbors to ban single-use plastic bottles; the town voted pretty much unanimously after the 7th graders’ speech. Then the kids went to each of the other five towns and did the same thing. This story had inspired Vicki and it inspired me. We could tell the stories and give people a road map: look at what your neighbors did, and how they did it! And they’re only 12 years old!
Did you know that people pay better attention to information when it comes wrapped in a story? That your brain shuts down if someone just gives you advice, or a list of facts? That you will stay with information longer (20 times longer!) if someone like you is describing how they saw a problem, tried something, maybe failed, then tried again, then got it to work? There’s brain science behind that. And it’s also fun to make magazines from stories.
There’s also brain science behind the idea that people are more motivated to make positive changes (from reading solutions-focused stories) if they aren’t terrified and in paralysis mode (from reading the “doom and gloom” climate news reporting that, while necessary, leaves a void for those people wanting to know how to address problems).
That’s what we wanted: stories and solutions. Simple, smart, sustainable stories. We decided to call it Bluedot Living because we wanted to invoke Carl Sagan’s lovely video about the view astronauts had looking back on Earth: “To me,” he says, “it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
We launched barely six months later. (Here’s a link to our first digital issue.) Our first issue featured a story about a family that saved a rare ecosystem on Martha’s Vineyard’s south shore by buying the property before golf course developers could, moving an old house off it to another site, and building a modest net-zero house. We had a column we called Cruising With Currier, where our reporter rode along in various electric vehicles (including the local electric bus transportation network), a story about the nuances of nitrogen, and an essay Laura Roosevelt wrote about how her mom, frugal and thrifty (to the point of saving hair clippings for compost), was really an early environmentalist. Plus, recipes, and lots of easy advice about how to compost, where to recycle, where to volunteer. And of course, a story celebrating our climate heroes: The Plastic-Free MV kids.
Five years later, we’re still telling stories full of solutions.
By the way, paper towels? If they are unbleached, and have food (no cleaning supplies) on them, compost them. Otherwise, toss them.
