Grocery Bags and Good Intentions

I have consolidated all our cloth grocery bag holdings, which have maintained their size and number despite the shrinking stock market. Seven, all told, with rumors of others floating around--acquired by various family members with good intentions to stem the flow of disposable plastic bags through our hands and into the landfill. Next step is to redistribute the bags to strategic locations--the back seat of the car, the hallway closet--where they stand half a chance of being remembered for the next trip to the grocery store.

They work great, I must say, accommodating the groceries nicely, and it feels good to be holding something of quality on the walk back to the car, rather than a flimsy plastic bag that begins its useful life with one foot in the landfill.

Funny, though. I've used them only once, otherwise managing to think of them only when I arrive at the checkout counter, when it's too late.

It's an appealing idea for the world's greatest consumer nation: save the world by buying more stuff. But the world will only be saved when we change our behavior, and despite our reputation as a highly adaptable species, that seems the hardest task of all.

One alternative approach: Stick a few disposable plastic bags in your pocket before going to the grocery store, not to recycle but to reuse, with their final use being as a liner for the trash can under the kitchen sink.

Minimizing A/C Use

In the summer heat, there are many ways a house conspires to make itself even hotter. Here are some ways to cut back on the house's heat production and reduce the need for the A/C. Most of these are minor, but their effect can add up, and they include savings of their own. I claim no expertise, only some experience and a willingness to experiment.

• Lower the temperature of your water heater (see 1/13/08 post) to a temperature that, when you turn on the hot water for a shower, there isn't any need to dilute it with water from the cold tap. This simplifies showering as well as reduces the work your water heater needs to do.
• Turn off the heating element in your refrigerator that heats the door (supposedly to reduce condensation on the door). If your frig has one, the button should be inside near the back, where the light bulb is.
  
• Use as low-wattage a light bulb in the frig as you can. Our older frig had an incandescent bulb inside that gets searing hot during prolonged open door meditations on what to eat. This is a perfect spot for a LED light, which would not emit much heat, but they aren't available as far as I can tell.
• Minimize the use of incandescent and halogen light bulbs, which get very hot. Many of these can be replaced with fluorescents (see 1/2/08 post) without sacrificing the quality of light.
  
• When boiling water for tea, boil only as much water as you need, so that less heating is needed and unused hot water doesn't sit on the stove, heating the room. Or heat the water in a microwave with the bag inside. (Hope microwaving isn't insulting to tea afficionados.)
  
• We usually associate attic insulation with keeping heat in during the winter, but attics can turn into cauldrons in the summer, and abundant insulation helps keep that heat from seeping into living spaces.
• What does your yard's topography have to do with energy bills? Basement dehumidifiers use 600 watts when running, and often run the majority of the time in the summer. If the ground is sloping towards your house, rain is more likely to seep in next to your foundation and add humidity to the basement, causing the dehumidifier to run longer. Within four to six feet of the foundation, the ground should slope away. My house inspector told me it's okay to pile dirt against bricks, but not against wood siding.
  
• Whole house fans: Very helpful, but ours is overpowered, which means it overwhelms the vents in the attic. The resultant high pressure actually pushes attic air down into 2nd story rooms. Not good, so having attic ventilation and fan power balanced is important. One thing that has worked well is to have a window fan that runs overnight, progressively cooling the house. Closing up in the morning as the day starts to heat up keeps the cool air inside.
• I can't explain why, but we wash our dishes by hand. Maybe a bit of hand labor is relaxing; maybe the older dishwasher's noise and slowness is bothersome; maybe it's stubborn habit. It's been reported that handwashing can be more wasteful than using a newer model dishwasher, but so much depends on style. My wife uses the Niagra Falls method, in which hot water streams out of the faucet constantly until she's done. I use cold water in bursts, soaking the dishes first to soften the dirt and minimize the work. No outbreaks of the plague have been reported due to my cold water method. Even if a little more water is used in handwashing, bypassing a dishwasher saves a lot of energy and heat production.
  
• Air dry clothes.
  

Biking in the Mist

One of my moments of environmental awakening came as I found myself driving my car four blocks to a town meeting on sustainability. The irony of the situation struck two blocks into the drive. Why was I using a car to transport myself four blocks to a meeting whose main purpose is to figure out how we can become less dependent on fossil fuels? As it happened, I was running late, and there was a light mist that could turn into rain--two factors that make me instinctively grab the car keys. I immediately parked the car and walked the rest of the way. To my surprise, the precipitation did not penetrate my clothes.

Since then, I have gradually expanded my tolerance for biking in mist, or drizzle, or even sometimes rain. This morning, for instance, a misty moisty morning, I taxied my daughter to school on the trailer bike, and found the mist to be even enjoyable. Another time, when the mist turned to rain while heading home, we experienced an unexpected euphoria. There can be a certain laboriousness to riding a bike, but it can also bring a sense of awakening, of being more alive.

Global Warming and the Silent Scream

I'm always amazed at those who study climate change. How congenial and patient they are as they tell us of the catastrophic direction we are taking the earth. They are messengers who, like most messengers through history, are being roundly ignored by most of humanity. They must go home at night, after yet another long day of throwing compelling data at the global wall of indifference, and scream into the dark.

The Scream is a famous painting by Edvard Munch. I think of it now, and learn from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream) that its inspiration came one evening when the sky suddenly turned blood red, and he "sensed an infinite scream passing through nature." "The person in the foreground may be the artist himself, not screaming but protecting himself or itself from the scream of Nature."

That is the scream that some of us hear right now, as humanity goes about its business of slurping and shoveling fossil carbon out of the ground and spewing it from tailpipes and chimneys. How fitting that, as industrialization gained speed in the late 1800s, the source of Munch's scream was the sky, whose disturbing color may have been caused by the eruption of Krakatoa a half a world away.

Munch wrote that he was walking with two friends at the time, and that they "walked on", apparently unaffected by the scene whose visual power left Munch physically stricken. And so today we are left to ask, why do so few see and react to the emergency we face? Why do so few of us hear the scream?

Notes From a David Suzuki Talk

For those who missed the talk by David Suzuki at Princeton University on Feb. 12, here's a writeup. Suzuki is the eminent Canadian scientist perhaps best known for his many television documentaries.

Dr. Suzuki described humanity's long arc, beginning 150,000 years ago, when we were a minor species in Africa, our numbers dwarfed by the spectacular fauna that dominated the world at that time. What was it about us back then that would eventually make us the most numerous mammalian species on the planet, more common than rats, rabbits or mice, dominating the planet as no other species has ever done? We were equipped with a brain able to process and hold more information than any other species. With that extraordinary mind, we invented the future. Our foresight allowed us to anticipate future circumstances in ways no other species could.

Suzuki sees this as the defining characteristic that allowed us incomparable success as a species--and yet we are now ignoring those who offer the best insight into the future. In 1992, half of all nobel prize winners signed a document warning that humanity had only one or a few decades to act before our future as a species would be irreparably diminished. He read some compelling excerpts from the document, which was ignored by the news media. You'd think, he said, that if half of the most celebrated scientists in the world speak out in unison on a pressing problem, the world would take notice, but no.

As an example of what happens when society ignores scientists, he offered up Hurricane Katrina, whose catastrophic consequences confirmed everything scientists had been saying for 30 years.

After 8 years studying at U.S. universities, Suzuki returned to Canada to begin his professional career in 1962. As chance would have it, that was the year that Silent Spring was published. He described the huge impact that book had on him and on the world. Silent Spring showed him that what he could learn from test tube experiments in a lab was only a minute part of reality, since anything being studied in a lab enters into tremendously complex interactions when put back into the environment.

He was in Vancouver, involved in various early environmental battles, when Greenpeace was born, in a fight to stop nuclear underground testing off the coast of Canada. Human beings, he realized, were "taking too much stuff out of the natural world, and putting too many toxics back in." And those toxics accumulate at each trophic level, as they move up the food chain. There is no place in the world that is free of manmade pollutants. Some scientists studying toxics in breastmilk in urban Canada needed a control group of mothers who had not been exposed to PCBs. They tested eskimos in the far north, and to their horror found the highest concentrations of PCBs ever recorded.

In the 1970, Suzuki felt despair at how little we knew about the environment and what we were doing to it. He sought out the ancient wisdom of what he calls the "1st nations", the tribal cultures, from whom he learned that humans are composed of the four sacred elements: earth, air, water and fire. He believes science has confirmed this view, that we essentially are the environment--there is no separation.

He then described each element, beginning with air. With each breath, we draw air into extraordinary intimacy with the interior of our bodies. He described the special membranes in our lungs that allow the air to become essentially one with our tissues, as the gases become attached to blood cells and carried throughout our circulatory system. He told a magnificent story of how the inert argon atoms we breath in each breath, some 30,000,000,000,000,000,000, include atoms that were breathed, let me say without too much exageration, by everyone and everything that ever lived. (The full story can be found at http://www.sacredbalance.com/web/arg.html.) In other words, he said, there is no line between the inner and outer worlds. We ARE air. "I am you. You are me."

That 15% of Canadians have asthma speaks to the consequences that all we put into the environment has on the inside environment of people.

He then suggested that with each of the other sacred elements there is a similar intimacy and universal sharing. Fire is the solar energy that we take in through our food to power our systems.

Other notes from the talk:

Reductionism--the study of pieces to understand the whole--doesn't work.

Emulate nature (biomimicry) rather than try to overwhelm it.

There is too much information today, which people use to defend any position. The dilemma is how to navigate through the information.

"News shatters the world" into two minute segments devoid of context, that fail to tell us why we should care about this or that happening in the world.

From 1900 to 2000, we went from being farming animals to city dwellers, in the process losing touch with the world that sustains us. He has found that many kids don't know where their food, water and other basic things come from. Many don't know that hamburgers and hotdogs come from animals.

If we don't know what nature provides, then we think the economy is the source of all things. We've elevated economy above ecology. He quoted someone as saying that "conventional economics is a form of brain damage," in which basic ecological services are categorized as "externalities". Conventional economics externalizes the world that keeps us alive. All the services provided by a living tree, for instance, are viewed as externalities. It only gains economic value when someone either buys it or cuts it down.
GDP, or gross domestic product, is a strange concept. It only adds, never subtracts. It views any exchange of money as good. Ice storms, car crashes--all increase GDP.

Fundamental questions to ask: "Am I happier?", "How much is enough?"

Clinging to steady economic growth is suicidal.

Suzuki described the efforts he's been involved in to bring about change. He collaborated with the Union of Concerned Scientists to come up with ten things people could do to improve the planetary situation, centering around what we eat, how we move, and where we live. It's difficult, because "people don't want to be fundamentally deflected towards a different way of doing things." But he sees the slow food movement as promising, a good place to start.

One thing that has worked for him is to create a vision--a target to reach in a generation. If one creates a vision, he finds that most people will be drawn in, will agree it's a worthy goal. Then it becomes a positive discussion of how do we get there.

One such vision is "Sustainability Within a Generation", which can be found at davidsuzuki.org.

The Human Generator

For those who are of a practical sort, not apt to suffer unnecessary effort gladly, the concept of venturing onto a treadmill or a stairmaster remains an alien one. Perhaps there are primordial ancestors whispering through our genes, telling us to rest up for the big hunt, saying that exercise must have meaning and purpose beyond achieving a lively heart rate.

Needing motivation beyond simple longevity, I seek exercise in riding a bike to get where I need to go, or chopping wood, or cutting down invasive shrubs. This is all well and good, as far as it goes, but it rarely gives the sense of having tested the limit, of cleansing the pores, of flushing out the stagnant byways of the circulatory system.

To that end, I propose that someone of a mechanical bent devise an exercise bike that generates electricity. Domestic heroes, ready to take on global warming feet first, will trod down into the basement and spend a half hour generating an evening's worth of electricity for the family, and at the same time get that dose of intense exercise that a practical nature would otherwise deprive them of.

Of course, someone already has, as a "bike generator" web search will instantly show. One fellow produced 90 watt hours this very morning on his homemade bike generator, enough to run a laptop for three hours.

In this vein, below is an article encountered in the NY Times, about a way to generate electricity simply by taking a walk around the block. It attaches to the knee, and generates a steady flow of 5 watts. The article also mentions an invention that utilizes the jiggling of a backpack to generate 20 watts, more than enough to power whatever gizmos are standard equipment for hikes into the wild these days.

Embedded in the text is a stunning statistic: A person's body fat stores as much energy as a ton of batteries. Hope turns up in the most unlikely quarters. Given its reputation, the nation may be sitting on the key to its energy independence. No matter how dazzling the mechanical skin we wrap ourselves in, the solar-powered self remains the greatest marvel, now apparently with sophisticated battery power second to none.

Taking People Power to a New Level (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/us/08knees.html?ref=science)

Curious NY Times article on Fluorescent Lights

A NY Times article entitled "Any Other Bright Ideas?", on the pros and cons of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), appeared in their House&Home section on 1/10. It had a lot of useful information, and provided interesting perspectives by various families that have tried the bulbs. Unfortunately, the article gave greatest prominence to the negative aspects of some bulbs, and at one point was completely contradictory. What the consumer needs is information on which bulbs produce pleasing light, yet this information was buried deep in the article, likely to be missed by all but the most thorough readers.

The kind of bulb that lights my workspace, a n:vision TCP, is described as harsh and hospital-like in one spot in the article, then as warm and pleasant in another. CFLs I've purchased in recent years don't buzz, flicker, or delay in turning on, so it was surprising to see these qualities given a high profile in the article. The stated price of the bulbs, too, was much higher than what they are being sold for locally. (see post on 1/2/08)

The n:vision bulbs are available at Home Depot, and perhaps other locations. They come in different warmths of light, so look for the color-coding on the package to find a bulb with more yellow and less of that "daylight" blue. Those with the green-colored packaging are the most pleasant indoors.

As I found out while helping a friend convert her office to fluorescents, the compact variety still take a minute or so to reach full brightness. When first turning on a 100 watt equivalent CFL, you're likely to think you got a raw deal, since it appears considerably dimmer than the 100 watt incandescent bulb it's supposed to replace. Give it a minute, though, and it will glow as brightly as the incandescent did, and use only a quarter of the energy. The 60 watt n:vision, however, instantly generates a bright light, so essentially imitates an incandescent bulb.

Some people are hesitant to use fluorescents, citing the dangers of the mercury they contain. There are various arguments against letting such a concern rule your decision: The amount of mercury they contain is minute and is sequestered in the bulb. Trace amounts of mercury are already present in our environment. Using fluorescents reduces the amount of mercury released from power plants. Anyone who has a manual thermostat or a non-digital thermometer in the house is already sequestering far more mercury than a household's worth of CFLs.
For more detail on mercury in CFLs, try http://www.slate.com/id/2183606/ and http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf.

Compost Bucket Recommendation

When I was looking for a compost bucket to buy, I was glad for a friend's recommendation of a comparatively inexpensive, stainless steel model available from www.leevalley.com. They still have it, in two sizes, for around $17. (http://www.leevalley.com/garden/page.aspx?c=2&p=10025&cat=2,33140)

Can-Do Water Heater Adjustment

Of all the houses I've lived in, this is the first in which it occurred to me to change the temperature control on the hot water heater. They're so quiet and unassuming, tucked away somewhere in a closet or the basement. If by rare chance you encounter it during daily domestic ramblings, it's not likely to give off that "Come and adjust me" kind of vibe.

Turning the water heater back on after a long vacation, I happened to adjust the temperature control so that the hot water for the shower was consistently just right. No cold water needed. Just turn on the hot.

Through this chance discovery, the hot water heater now burns less gas, and there's no longer a need to fiddle with the cold and hot water knobs before and during the shower.

Not to say this will work in all homes. Serendipity may be playing a role here, involving the rhythm of hot water use in the house, but for the sake of some simplicity and economy, it's worth a try.

Partial Retrofits with Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

Compact fluorescents have come a long way, but they work better in some spots than others.

Start with outdoor lighting that is on for long periods, and utility areas. I've been impressed with the fluorescent spotlights (though less advantageous for motion sensor lights, since the light is only on for brief periods), and have put the regular CFLs (Compact fluorescent lights) in enclosed outdoor fixtures without problems.

For indoors, the light they give off is much improved, and can be softened further by using them in lamps, where the glass or lampshade will add yellow to their glow.

For rooms with recessed or track lighting, or where dimmer switches make fluorescents problematic, it may work better to simply create a fluorescent alternative in those rooms rather than replacing the more wasteful bulbs. That way, when the room isn't being used but one wants some sort of light on, a lamp or overhead with a florescent can be turned on, with the other lighting reserved for times when you want additional or more ornate light.

Some people wait until an incandescent bulb burns out before replacing it with a compact florescent. My thinking is: Don't wait. Start reducing energy consumption now, and if you don't want to throw out a still-functional incandescent, then store it away, as a backup for those few spots where incandescents are more appropriate, for instance where a light is only used for a few minutes at a time.

Compact fluorescents are cheaper than most articles say. Recently, I found both 60 and 75 watt equivalents selling individually for 75 cents each at Walmart (strangely, packages of multiple bulbs in another display in the same store were more expensive per bulb) (On a subsequent visit, the bargain display had disappeared--a "one time deal" according to one of the employees). The big box hardware stores usually have 60 watt equivalents for $1 each these days (As of 1/16, they are more like 3 for $5).