« June 2006 | Main | August 2006 »
July 31, 2006
Turning down the A/C
I was in Washington DC recently and will be there again soon. It's a wonderful city. There's much talk about the subjects I care about, excellent ethnic food, and people are remarkably friendly: everywhere I went I got into conversation with someone, even in the reception area at the Brookings Institute. But it is a city of air-conditioning. In the Berkshires, where I live, only stores and restaurants and new mansions have A/C.
Why, I wonder, do people want to live in buildings colder in the summer than in the winter? I have learned to carry a sweater or shawl in the summer because buildings are so cold. Cold. Not just pleasantly cool, the way an old farmhouse, shaded by huge oaks, is cool, or the way our house, with an attic fan going at night, and the windows and shades closed during the heat of the day, is cool. These buildings are downright cold, the way our house is cold in the winter, so chilly that my sister-in-law shivers until we turn the heat to 70. But in the summer, the same people think that temperature is okay, and even desirable.
What does this mean? What does it tell us about ourselves? Do we fear nature and need to control it? Have we been persuaded by advertising and social pressure that this makes sense, in spite of its being completely against our evolutionary history. It's expensive and wasteful.
But people are deeply resistant to the idea of turning the A/C up or the heat down. I need to figure out the motivation behind this wacky behavior, because I know I'll never convince people to try something else until I do.
In my books I've written about this in terms of "comfort zones." I'll post some sections, and would love to have feedback.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 5:55 AM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2006
Why don't we change our ways?
I have never been a professional environmental, paid a salary to do something to save the planet. I've made a little money writing about it and that's about it. I am still very much a pleb, an amateur. And I have always intended to stay that way, because that's the only way to understand the perspective of all the regular people whose efforts are needed to change things, really. It won't be the professionals (though they can help) and it won't be the politicians (till they're pushed). It will be ordinary people, mobilized to save their communities and ways of life, and perhaps their species, too.
So here's the big question. Why don't we change our ways? Why do we keep going straight ahead when there are warning signs everywhere, and when the wall we're going to run into is getting easier and easier to see?
Professional environmentalists focus on what we should do, and they're great at it. I'm astonished at how many solutions there, already being tried and proven. But what I focus on is motivation: why don't we do what we should? Until that question gets enough attention, all the wonderful solutions in the world won't save the planet.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 8, 2006
Hang your clothes out (or in) to dry
The energy crisis has become such a prominent subject in our house that I've had to ask that it not be brought up at meals--though this evening Tom did start talking about it over dessert (a cream cheese tart, by the way, topped with white currants from our garden and black raspberries from Taft Farms). Tom often makes me think afresh. "If you think about it, oil is a kind of soil. So we're pumping another country's soil into our cars." He said that China was well aware of the importance of oil, moving to buy rights in Africa and to maintain control in Central Asia. I think about these things in simpler terms, about how we can shift our way of life away from fossil fuels. One important way is to cut our dependence on domestic electricity, and this time of year it's easy to dry clothes outside. One website with lots about this is Laundry List, and here's a photo showing how we dry clothes indoors, right above the washer-dryer. You don't have to have lines outside; inside works well, too, and I love being able to hang small things as I take them out of the dryer.
Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:49 PM | Comments (0)