Thoughts from Our Lawrence-KC Play Day
Robert and I took a much-needed day off this week and spent it together in Kansas City and Lawrence. We weren’t trying to think about sustainability, but sustainability is everywhere! So below are a few tidbits and reflections from what was still a pretty eco-focused day.
(1) First stop: Union Station, where we saw an IMAX film about trains. I’m no train expert, but I like riding them and love them conceptually. Trains are almost "supernaturally" efficient, as the film pointed out. A freight train can move a ton of cargo 500 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel! That’s at least three times as efficient as a truck. And passenger trains are incredible as well—roughly twice as efficient as cars. The fact that we have not maintained and invested in more rail infrastructure in the U.S. is a shame. I look at Europe, Asia, and the American past wistfully and try to remain hopeful that an increase in eco-consciousness will cause train travel to capture the country as it did in the 1940s, when the Super Chief shuttled celebrities from Chicago to Los Angeles and was nicknamed the “Train of the Stars.”
(2) While we were learning about trains, our car was fueling up at one of the public EV charging stations nearby. Getting "free" parking for the cost of a charge is always a win! We’ve had our Kia Niro EV for a year now, and while EV travel does require some planning, the car has proven to be perfect for trips to Kansas City. It can often handle the round trip on one full charge, but if we have an opportunity to give it a boost somewhere along the way, we take advantage of it. There are a couple “cheap” chargers at gas stations along I-70, so sometimes we’ll stop to get a faster charge for the same price as we can get a slow charge on the regular outlet at home.
(3) Next on our Kansas City agenda: paw paw hunting! Paw paws are little mango/banana-like fruits that are native to Kansas. Somehow, I had never heard of them until a few years ago, and I’ve wanted to try them ever since. Our attempt in Kessler Park was a failure in the fruit-foraging realm. But we did see a really neat goat-grazing operation, with goats munching on invasive honeysuckle and other brush to keep the growth at bay!
The goats were tended by Jerusalem Farm, which also operates a bike-powered curbside compost service in the northeast area of Kansas City. Jerusalem Farm will always hold a special place my heart for letting me drop off my food scraps there for free when I was new to town and living in an apartment with no access to a compost pile. In the 10 years since that time, multiple compost pickup and drop-off services have started up in the Kansas City area. Some are even city-funded and free to residents, so apartment-dwellers now have a number of options. But big props to Jerusalem Farm for being a pioneer!
(4) After a considerable amount of walking and spotting numerous paw paw trees bearing no fruit, we decided to make the foraging easier on ourselves. We set the GPS for the Lawrence Community Orchard, a hidden gem in East Lawrence featuring a wide variety of fruit trees tended by a group of dedicated volunteers. The produce is freely available to members of the community, with donations accepted to cover the costs. There we found a small paw paw grove with a few fruits that were ready to be harvested. We also picked up a couple jujubes and persimmons, which rounded out our native-fruit sampler platter later in the evening. Learn more about the orchard and check it out the next time you're in town. If you find something tasty to try, drop a donation in the box to support this model of small-scale ag.
(5) The café inside Sunflower Bike Shop has become an occasional lunch stop for Robert while he's doing farm pickups in Lawrence. He’s been wanting to take me, so we spent some time enjoying a drink and air conditioning while fantasizing about what a future "Full Circle Café" could look like. (How great would it be for Topeka to have its own local-food, zero-waste, eco-friendly community hangout space?!) As we left the café, Robert excitedly showed me the "trash" area...notable for the lack of a trash can. With a bin for the real dishware and a trash-can-sized compost bin for food scraps and napkins, we can't think of any reason you'd need to throw something away. It makes us happy that the restaurant staff agree!
(6) An extra bonus of the stop in Lawrence: we snagged a spot at another public charger, so we gained a few more miles of range!
(7) And of course, any trip wouldn't be complete without a few Full Circle errands. We returned our empty soap buckets and picked up full ones from our soap refill partners in Kansas City, dropped off donations for Scraps KC, and exchanged our 5-gallon bucket of honey from T. Creek Bees on the way home.
So, what's the takeaway from our Lawrence-Kansas City play day? Sustainability touches so much of what each of us do every day, even when we're not trying to think about it. It's in transportation (using efficient vehicles, combining errands, carpooling). It's in food (eating seasonally, supporting native plants, growing food on a small scale) and restaurants (sourcing locally when possible, composting, using washable dishware). And it's in all sorts of community systems (managing brush with goats, providing composting services, adding public charging stations to parking lots and along highways).
Since sustainability touches everything, our lives are full of opportunities to learn, to educate others, to try a new way of doing something. Even traveling just an hour away gives us the chance to observe what other communities are doing and think about using those models to improve systems here. Thanks for joining us on our virtual vacation-day journey so that we can all keep thinking about building more sustainable communities together.
-Justine
Train Cover Photo Credit: Train Time Film
Goat Photo Credit: Jerusalem Farm
