Riot For Austerity - 2 years on

I've spent the last few days being a living book at the Victorian Arts Centre, and happily they allowed me to tell the story of the Riot for Austerity: the changes I've made in order to reduce my environmental footprint to 10% of the average - the reduction we all need to make if we are to leave the planet in a good state for our kids and grandkids to inherit.

Welcome to all the people who have found my blog as a result of the Living Library. And thank you to everyone who listened so enthusiastically to my story and told me you would go home and plant out your garden.

For some gardening tips - tips on how to REALLY produce food for your family, see this post I made last year. I'll write a new, updated one soon.

In the meantime, It's exactly two years since I started the Riot for Austerity. With the riot, the first year is supposed to be a time for working out all the changes needed to reduce your family's use of resources to ten percent of the average. Then after that, we are supposed to keep it there for the rest of our lives. Eek!  
For this second year, I didn't track my use of everything throughout the year. I just wrote down what our odometer was at the start of the year, our electricity meter and so on. So I had no idea if we were still on track until today, when I sat down to calculate it all. And I've been a bit nervous, since I've definitely bought more stuff this year - after about 5 years of not buying new clothes, I seriously needed a few things I couldn't get in op shops. And after about 5 years of serious consumer restraint, I broke the barriers and bought a few items that weren't strictly necessary. Anyway, happily it turns out we haven't totally blown the Riot - in fact we are still right on track. Here's the results for this past year:

Transport - 7.3% for petrol, and a bit more for public transport but I didn't track it.
Electricity - 7.7% (half wind and half solar).
Rubbish - 1.5% (rough guess, maybe not even that much).
Water - 0% since we have our own tank and are self-sufficient in water.
Gas - 22% - for cooking.
Consumer goods - 20%
Food - I didn't track but I'm guessing 70% local/homegrown/scavenged, 10% bulk goods and 20% conventional food (packaged/non-organic/from far away).

Overall our footprint averages at 10%. Just on target! And I used this calculator.

I must clarify at this point, that the above figures only include my personal life. I haven't counted my work, and the Riot rules say that I should - but I don't know how to, I feel too daunted by it, and so I'm doing what I can, which is changing my home life.

These days, rather than focussing on reducing the numbers calculated above, I'm looking in a more general way for what my next steps will be. This summer I plan to raise a batch of my own chickens for the table. Scary stuff. But I've found someone who promises to help me and show me how to do the grisly bits (thanks Roderick). At some point I'm still hoping to find ways to reduce our gas use such as by making a solar oven that actually works, and trying a haybox slow-cooker for stock.

I'm not going to try to get my consumer goods below 20%. Frankly I feel this is a figure I probably CAN live with for the rest of my life, while 10% is just too tight. But I'll balance this by doing better in other areas, such as water.