Alhamdolillah, the effects of the chemo have worn off and I’m puttering about on a gray SF Saturday doing laundry, writing a grocery list and being a good homemaker (for once).

I’m also thinking about how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can cause (or prevent) a tornado in Kansas. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by or helpless in the face of global environmental changes, but what I consume here in San Francisco impacts lives around the world.

What our butterfly wings look like this year:

We’ve switched our bulbs to compact fluorescents and use rechargeable batteries.

We’re trying to eat locally, organic, and in season. (Halal grocers gotta get some TAQWA!)

We’re composting now, courtesy of the city.

We’re eating meat no more than two meals per week.

I’ve called/e-mailed catalog companies and sent letters to junk mail providers to stop mailing me instead of simply recycling it when it comes in.

I walk everywhere that I can and take the bus when I have to.

I refuse to buy plastic water bottles – I’m filling a Kleen Kanteen with pristine SF water instead. We just don’t need another continent-sized stew of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean.

We keep canvas bags and stainless steel cups in the car trunk for groceries and coffee pitstops. And I go out of my way to Tully’s because in SF they only serve organic, fair-trade coffee in compostable cups (for those times when I don’t have my own handy). If they don’t yet in your city, tell them you want them to!

Most importantly though, we’re trying to remember that buying organic, fair trade products is not enough – we must also simply consume less. Because a little less for me can mean a little more for us all locally and globally.

But I like living more simply, and I don’t do it out of a sense of guilt – rather, I do it because I gain an enormous sense of pleasure in sharing. I like to look for ways to share resources and to have more time and money to give back to people and causes I support and believe in.

Having visited some fair-trade coffee farmers in Mexico, I love that I can help support them by buying a cup of fair trade coffee up the road from my home. It’s an instant gratification that goes beyond anything I could every gain by buying a tchotchke at the mall.

Basil and I still have a long way to go and it’s taken us a long time to even get this far. After four car-less years, we bought one last May and Basil commutes to work solo every workday. And, we both still travel by plane far too much to visit family in Boston and Islamabad.

SF is easier than many other cities to be green in, but here are some basic suggestions for our homes and offices that most of us can start with.

If you haven’t yet, do tune in to watch the extraordinary “Planet Earth” on Discovery every Sunday at 8 pm e/p. It’ll show you a beautiful world worth striving for.

>>What do your wings look like?<<

—

A woman holds her new grandson, Cyclone, who entered the world as a massive storm packing 140-mph winds hit Bangladesh’s coast. Behind her is the family’s house in the village of Barishal, which was flattened by the storm. Some 650,000 villagers fled their homes; over 1,500 who didn’t were killed.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a report warning that global changes are occurring at a quickening pace and may soon be irreversible:

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages, residents of Asia’s megacities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

The International Forum on Globalization’s 2001 report “Blue Gold” quoted the World Bank as saying the the wars of the 21st century would be over water – even if we cast them in terms of religion, ethnicity or race. We’ve already seen that happening between India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine.

I also read about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault today, scheduled for completion in late 2008.

A feasibility study determined that the vault could preserve seeds from most major food crops for hundreds of years. The goal is to prevent important agricultural and wild plants from becoming rare or extinct in the event of a global disaster such as global warming, a meteorite strike, nuclear or biological warfare, or gene pollution from transgenic plants.

Aside from the meteorite strike, everything else is in our hands.

Under floodlights, construction workers toil in the bitter cold of Norway’s Svalbard Islands to finish the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a doomsday cache to protect the world’s seeds from such threats as war and global warming.

[Photo credit: San Francisco Chronicle: Day in Pictures]