I’m Jason Kaiser, a degreed meteorologist, Vermont State Colleges Information Technology Learning Spaces Technology Specialist, a musician, a Christian, and a climate activist. I am passionate about making meaningful steps towards mitigating the effects of climate change. I have been a member of the Climate Consensus group on the Lyndon campus since 2016. I have participated in rallies and non-violent direct action in Burlington, VT (2012), Montpelier, VT (2015), Rutland, VT (2015), Washington, D.C. (2014 and 2017), and Lyndonville, VT (2019). Castleton Associate Professor Brendan Lalor and I facilitated a Fossil Free VSC group, which worked with the Vermont State Colleges Facility and Finance Committee and the VSCS Board of Trustees to shift a portion of the VSCS endowment funds to fossil-free investments. The Board also agreed to provide low- and no-carbon retirement investment options for all VSCS employees.
I created this website to chronicle, on Sundays, the lifestyle choices I make to live more sustainably — in a way that avoids the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance.
I agree with Naomi Klein, when she said: “I don’t think anybody is exempt from scrutinizing their own decisions and behaviors but I think it is possible to overemphasize the individual choices. In terms of the carbon, the individual decisions that we make are not going to add up to anything like the kind of scale of change that we need. And I do believe that the fact that for so many people it’s so much more comfortable to talk about our own personal consumption, than to talk about systemic change, is a product of neoliberalism, that we have been trained to see ourselves as consumers first. To me that’s the benefit of bringing up these historical analogies, like the New Deal or the Marshall Plan – it brings our minds back to a time when we were able to think of change on that scale. I make these decisions in my own life but I’m under no illusion that these decisions are going to make the difference.”
A 2015 study showed that solar panel installations exhibit “a strong relationship between adoption and the number of nearby previously installed systems.” I’ve seen this in my own life: after solar panels were installed in 2013 at my mom’s house, two of her neighbors also installed solar panels. My hope is that just like the solar panels, by sharing the choices I make, you might be spurred to make changes in your own life.