environment | The Practical Dilettante

Analyze This: On Not Giving Stuff Up

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Seonaid

This post comes with a caveat: It is an exploration of systems, the limits of agency, and the social constructs that preclude giving up my car… yet. I am not looking for sympathy, nor am I beating myself up over my limitations in the face of the myths of Western civilization. I recognize that I lead a profoundly charmed life, full of privilege and the leisure to consider these things. It doesn’t escape my awareness that I can only think about this because of the same education that leads to the rest of it all… it’s complicated.

The problem with giving stuff up is that we don’t want to. I mean we may want to, sort of, but it’s often more that we think it’s a good idea, or we think that we will be better people if we do it, or we think that we should (in all the various interpretations of that loaded word.) But to truly give something up, to stop doing something we enjoy merely for the greater good, without getting any benefit back for it… we don’t really want to do that. At least I don’t.

For me, my ideals keep running up against the car/house problem. My house is too far from the things we do. Or the things we do are too far from my house. Since “the things we do” include the work that pays for the house, I’m going to go with the first interpretation in this case. On a daily basis, we travel more than is justifiable, given the things that we know about the effects of that travel. But once I get to that conclusion, I am unable to take the next logical step…

The benefits of our house, even the environmental ones, are enormous. We have a huge food garden, soon to be updated with nearly year-round greenhouse production. We have chickens, and bees, and fruit trees, and berries, and asparagus (I’m still waiting for the first harvest, so the asparagus is surprisingly prominent on the list of things keeping me here.) At the end of our driveway, we have swimming, canoeing, kayaking, or skating, depending on the season. We can go fishing (which means standing on the end of the dock talking about fish, since no fish are silly enough to come in that close to shore.) It’s like being on vacation whenever we get home, or like living at the cottage. Actually, it’s exactly like living at the cottage, since our house is a winterized, converted cottage. This leads to a couple of quirks, like the fact that the master bedroom is in the basement, and the second bathroom is tucked behind the chimney and has no ceiling.

Back to the pluses of this property: We heat with wood, and we have a huge bank of south-facing windows. We have available wind in abundance and flowing water, so could probably be energy independent on this property with a smaller-than-average investment in renewables… There is also a second garage with apartment above it, and two sheds, one of which contains chickens, and one of which has my writing studio, at least in the summer. This place is awesome (which is why we bought it two hours after we saw it, the day the sign went up.)

But we keep coming back to the cars. There are currently three of them sitting in my parking space. Three! This is awful! (Now, it happens that we just haven’t managed to sell the van, so it’s not that we intend to continue to have three cars for two drivers. That would be silly.) When we get despondent about the house, and the driving, and the repairs, and entropy, and how all this work we are doing is for naught if we just do the opposite of carbon offsetting by driving back and forth to all our environmental and community events… we come around, eventually, to the cars and how else we could solve the transportation problem.

Can we switch to bikes? Well, for about half the days during the one third of the year it is not below freezing on a regular basis. For short trips not involving the 4-lane highway that is the only route to the aforementioned job, that pays the bills. So, not really.

Additionally, I looked at a couple of pedaled cars, since we usually have to take a couple of kids with us, and I’ve come to a conclusion: I am not willing to give up the enclosed roof. It’s not the time it takes me to get somewhere, or the effort involved that stops me. I would adapt, and change my habits to match up. It is the lack of seclusion from the elements that these vehicles provide. I need my stuff (children, car seats, groceries, towels, clothing) not to get wet, and my body not to get frozen. That’s the main thing that I require from my transportation device. It must protect me from the weather, which we get in abundance.

I think there is something more that underlies that, though. I’m not willing to give up the control over my schedule that would come from having to adapt so much more to the weather. As it is, our lives are much more weather-dependent than typical North American expectations. We change the way we heat and cool our house depending on the cloud cover and wind conditions. We must plant, harvest, and do laundry when the sun shines. It is only warm enough to sit outside of an evening occasionally, and I don’t bother to put away my mittens for July and August, in case I want to go for a walk after dark. I live with all of those things. I don’t even mind them. They add a certain… spontaneity to it all. I’m just not ready to start calling our friends and say, “Sorry, we can’t come over this evening. It’s raining.” So if we’re going to replace our cars with bikes, we’ve got to figure out ways to make our bikes drier and warmer.

It isn’t exactly a transportation problem. It’s a social problem. We don’t say, “Oh, my life would be so complete if only I could go those 30 km in the next half hour!” We say, “Stephanie invited us over for dinner. What should we bring?” It’s an entertainment problem: “Did you see that there’s a drama festival on all this week at the university?” It’s an education problem: “The tutor wants to meet us at the library this evening.” It’s a logistics problem: “We’ve got music lessons at 4 and rehearsal at 6, and they are 14 km apart.” It’s a work problem: “I’ve got to stay 45 minutes late to meet with a student who wasn’t able to make it to the exam and the kids have taekwondo before I’ll be home.” It’s a taking-advantage-of-the-weather problem: “It’s not raining! Who wants to go to the beach?!” At the end of it all, it’s a middle-class problem: “I have to. There are all these things I need to do. And what about the children?”

There’s something there to do with expectations. I don’t feel bad that I can’t provide a private jet or regular skiing trips to Europe; those things are so far out of my purview, they don’t even register. I also don’t feel bad about denying my kids access to the skidoos, jetskis, power boats, and ATV’s that are such common weekend activities for the other kids around here: those things are so obviously outside our value system that they exceed my compromise capacity. Also… expensive! Same reasons we have no lawn to speak of. But these activities on the boundary, when I have the ability to provide them, and the activity itself is something I value… they’re gateway activities. Gateway into the car, into the car culture, into fast food, (which I sometimes resort to when desperate for calories when logistics break down) into consumption. The events, the birthday parties, the obligatory gift giving, are all parts of participation in the broader culture, participation in the culture the children are immersed in by going to school. They already don’t get television, elaborate birthday parties, cell-phones, laptops of their own, or the newest gadget from Future Shop. The least I can do (so I reason) is take them to drama classes, taekwondo, and swimming lessons. And the library. And the theatre. And the farmer’s market. And the wildlife park. And the playground. And their friends houses. And… you see how this goes. It’s a good-mother myth, tied up in the package of a successful life, and topped with a bow of synthesized freedom. For the bargain price of $169 (bi-weekly), plus taxes, maintenance, and gasoline. Phew.

And I can analyze it. And I can realize it, and think it, and know it intellectually. But when it comes right down to finally saying, No? I can’t quite give it up.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: discipline, environment, PostADay2011, self, social commentary | 9 Comments »

Greenwashing of the Week

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Seonaid

I am hereby bestowing my illustrious “Greenwashing” award, which will be noted by at least 50 people, to the company Future Shop, for their not-quite-stated Earth Day flyer.

It is hard for me to write this, because they have pulled off the most creative and effective form of greenwashing, namely, making a significant financial contribution to one of my preferred environmental organizations. This is a get-out-of-responsibility free card, of sorts, since I find myself reluctant to criticize as a result. Nonetheless…

This is the most literal example of greenwashing I’ve ever seen; each page of the flyer has an actual wash of green in the background, even the pages with plain old consumer electronics. The cover features the statement, “It’s easy being green. (See inside for energy-saving tips and savings.)” This example of greenwashing is audacious, bold, daring! The BlackBerry PlayBook right next to energy saving tips? Genius! Completely unrelated, yet reassuring.

It does get better on later pages, with genuinely useful tips like:

Use a front loading washing machine, wash in cold and hang to dry whenever possible. This one I was surprised to see, since they don’t sell clotheslines. Although, since washers and dryers are usually sold in pairs, it probably wouldn’t significantly affect their sales. I might hang my clothes whenever possible, but in a damp cold climate, I’m reluctant to give up the dryer.
Also, if you are going to use your dryer, make sure that you run the spin cycle on the washer as high as possible to minimize drying time.
Turn off the power to your electronics when they are not in use. (They are kind enough to sell a power bar that will do it for you.)
Buy Energy Star appliances and TV’s.
Use a rechargeable Universal remote… only $229.99. Let’s you stop using expensive and environmentally unfriendly disposable batteries, apparently. I’m pretty sure that the remote for my 10 year old DVD player has only gone through two changes of rechargeables, actually, so this seems to be an expensive solution to a problem I don’t have.

Which brings me to my real point… green consumerism, and the idea that we can buy our way to sustainability. Don’t get me wrong: if you are planning to buy a new appliance or television, you should consider its power consumption. Keep in mind, however, that the Energy Star designation means that the item is more efficient than a target set for comparable items, not necessarily that it is a low power consumer in absolute terms. If you really want to make a difference, you should choose a smaller TV and watch it less. Or buy a smaller refrigerator.

More important, though, is not trading in those electronics that are still perfectly serviceable to get something newer with a couple more features. Yes, if you have a gas-guzzler, a power-sucking 15 year old fridge, or a computer that looks a lot like a 1980′s space ship, you might reduce your fuel or power consumption by trading in/up. But if you are replacing a working phone, you need to consider the embodied energy, and whether you actually need the new phone.

Need. Hard one, that. What does it mean to “need” when your job might hinge on having that BlackBerry? You might need it. We have expectations. Other people have expectations of us. During the discussion of the Wall Street Salary cap, I read a non-satirical article on how expensive it is to live in New York as an executive. The place of consumer spending was highlighted as a key to maintaining social status, and by extension, continued access to employment. “Each Brooks Brothers suit costs about $1,000. If you run a bank, you can’t look like a slob.” (Apparently they also “need” two $8000 vacations per year, and possibly a $4 million summer home. This is an extreme example, but we are all prey to it in our own ways.) “Going green is good,” says Future Shop. I’m the last one who is going to disagree with that. But I will say that in the face of all the social pressures to the contrary, it isn’t actually easy.

This is how the Future Shop flyer is a greenwashing campaign, no matter how well-intentioned or useful the tips may be. We need to keep in mind the order of these three-R’s: First Reduce. Then Reuse. Then Recycle. The electronics industry, of which the company is a retail arm, has a business model based on stoking/stroking our unknown wants: Make new(ish) technologies (Does the iPhone 4 really change everything. Again?), advertise them so that they become so pervasive that participation is part of the cost of entry to society (or is at least perceived to be). Turn wants into needs, and then sell people the same thing they already bought in a different form, rendering the previous solution that they bought from you obsolete, and therefore garbage. Don’t believe me? How many times have you replaced your movie collection? Was it because you hated your DVD player? Or your VHS? Or your BetaMax? Or your laser disc player? Or was it because somebody told you that they were no longer good enough? Or stopped making that format? On a related note, let me also ask, how much larger is your television than it was 20 years ago? Why is that, do you think? Were you sitting in your living room thinking, “This would be so much better on a TV the size of the wall?” Or was that idea planted in your mind, all unawares?

Before I sign off, I’m going to come back around to the original statement by Future Shop: I suppose that it can be easy being green, if we consider reducing our desires and expectations easy. There are a lot of green choices that are green by default, by inaction. Don’t go on that car trip. Don’t buy that new phone. Don’t buy more clothes than you can actually wear. Pass on the giant TV. (For the cost of the giant TV, you could get a smaller one, AND the solar panels to run it!) Make do with less stuff. Repair, pass things along, buy used if you can. All green choices.But remarkably difficult when a stack of flyers arrives at the end of my driveway every week reminding us how hopelessly out of date all of our stuff is.

Filed under: Essays and Musings, Science, WorldView | Tagged: discipline, environment, PostADay2011, social commentary | 3 Comments »

Sunk Costs – More About Nuclear Power

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Seonaid

Edit: It occurs to me that I neglected to mention that I used to work in the nuclear field. Just in case that might be relevant to whether you are going to write me off as a crank, or something. Not that I’m not cranky. But I’m an informed crank.

***

Also known as, “Throwing Good Money After Bad”

Also known as, “Why we can’t get off fossil fuels”

Also known as, “The Biggest Problem with Nuclear Power”

The biggest problem with nuclear power isn’t the possibility of meltdown and fallout, although that is a problem worth considering and worrying about. Nor is the biggest problem with nuclear power the spent fuel, which concentrates a nasty mixture of incredibly toxic materials in a small space, requiring thousands of years of containment and protection, both from the nefarious and the naive. Nor is it the fact that nuclear power is not carbon-neutral, having fairly intense inputs of non-electric power at the construction, mining, transport, and decommission stages. The worst part about nuclear power isn’t even the fact that uranium is an extraordinarily non-renewable resource, subject to depletion in a matter of 10s to 100s of years (depending on which projections bear out).

The biggest problem with nuclear power is the future reality of the sunk costs that will go into this system, keeping us, once again, from doing the right thing until no other options are available. A switch to sustainable power is inevitable, as in… unavoidable, as in… we’re going to have to do it eventually, as in… we are going to run out of non-sustainable things to deplete… deep breath!

Right this moment, we have the potential to use the tail end of this cheap concentrated form of fuel to carry us over the hump to a new strategy for meeting our needs. But instead of taking advantage of forward thinking, looking at this as an opportunity to make substantial change, we are dragging our heels, clinging to the vestiges of existing power structures, and remaining tied up in existing infrastructure.

Let me be very clear in my language here. When I say that something is unsustainable, I do not mean that it isn’t nice, or kind, or morally defensible. I mean that there is a limiting factor that must necessarily lead to an end, either because we will run out of the resource, or because it leads to a society that tends to cause revolutions, or because it leads to an environmental system that is incompatible with life. You can only pour so many toxins into a pond before the fish start to die. You can only catch so many fish before the population collapses. You can only make a field so large before the bees can’t find their way to the middle of it. You can only pull so much of an element out of the ground before no more remains. There are real, concrete, physical constraints on systems. Technologies allow us to do end-runs around the constraints, increasing our catches (for example) even as the fish population is depleting to the point of collapse, but in the end this cleverness is our undoing. We have bought into the very seductive claims of hardcore economics, that the price of a resource (what it trades for on the market) in some way reflects how much remains. No, no. The “price” of a resource in our economic system primarily reflects the sophistication of our extraction methods, the demand, and how well we have concentrated the power to externalize costs. The price does not accurately reflect the cost, and the cost is where those constraints are hidden.

That, however, is a problem for another day.

What the price does reflect is the costs that companies have not managed to externalize. These can be broadly divided into operating expenses and capital. (As in Capital-ism… as in the ones with the capital have the power…) I don’t think that I will be surprising anybody by pointing out that the voices most vehemently opposed to doing anything to transition away from fossil fuels are those with the most capital invested in them. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that fossil fuels are a) jeopardizing the ability of the planet to regulate its climate systems, b) possibly endangering the future of human civilization, and c) probably running out, the fossil fuel industry has mounted the most astonishing campaign of disinformation conceivable. Why? Because it needs to recoup the costs of the capital it has already invested. Those costs are sunk. They are unrecoverable without continuing down the path that was projected for them. We’ve already invested billions of dollars in coal mines, coal plants, and the towns that are dependent on those for their survival. We cannot stop mining coal; in fact we will pursue more aggressive techniques, like blowing tops off entire mountains. We cannot stop drilling for natural gas; we have entire cities hooked up for it. So we will inject high pressure water into shale formations, effectively removing the water from the water cycle, releasing methane, and potentially poisoning the surrounding water supply. And we cannot get off oil, because our entire transportation, food, and technology sectors depend on it, so we will mine more and more difficult sources, spend more and more on the military “protection” of oil rich land, and drill deeper and deeper, regardless of the risks.

This is the nature of sunk costs. It is a cycle of dependency that exceeds the worst nightmare stories of “The Right”, because it is not one (vilified, disenfranchised, gendered, racialized, easily attacked) group of people-over-there. It is all of us, our entire culture, our entire society, our entire world, constrained to worse and worse future choices by those of the past.

What it means for nuclear power is this: The IAEA report in 2000 was asked to project the world supply of Uranium to 2050. Under a number of different scenarios, they considered at what point it would become economic to mine various sources. The possibility that they should not mine particular locations is never discussed. Once we build the plants, we are committed to continue to supply them until all the uranium is gone. That is why they are already considering mining uranium in the Grand Canyon.

So. While I have chapters in the works on all of those issues I mentioned in the first paragraph, what I really want to ask of fellow environmentalists is this: Do we really want to go down this path? We’ve done it once already, and we know where it ends. Disruption, pollution, toxic waste sites, social upheaval, company towns, strip mining, budget overruns, unanticipated retrofit expenses, and above all, the inability to step off the path once we are fully committed.

And that, my friends, is the biggest risk of nuclear power.

Filed under: Science, WorldView | Tagged: economics, environment, peak oil, PostADay2011 | 10 Comments »

Paying Attention for $$$!

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Seonaid

(I’m going to tell you how much I spend on utilities, in real dollars! Eventually.)

This is a part of my daily life that has been growing for years, so I think it deserves a mention. It’s partially frugal, partially environmental, and partially an exercise in testing limits – how little can we use? It probably started with reading Your Money or Your Life, which I have never managed to implement for the simple reason that I can’t do the necessary accounting. Nonetheless, I took the message to heart that you give up your life energy for the things that you buy, so you should make sure that you are getting your life energy’s worth. In more typical language, this means: don’t spend your life earning money to buy things that you don’t value. After years of reflection, I can say that I resent every single penny I spend on non-sustainable electricity and fossil fuels, no matter how much pleasure or convenience I get from the heat, light, and travel they provide. I. Hate. Those. Bills.

One of my great points of pride is that while we lived in a gas-heated house during the ’90′s, we put so much insulation into it each year that the heating bill never went up in 9 years, while the retail price of gas nearly doubled. (Hey – we take our accomplishments where we find them.) To put that another way, we cut our use of heating gas by nearly 50% over that 9 year period, primarily by insulating and weather proofing. We also made the house significantly more comfortable in the process, but it was starting at an appalling state, with no insulation in some walls, and curtains that blew in the breeze. Fortunately, our current house doesn’t have those problems, but that makes the savings less immediately apparent. Being fiercely stubborn (and cheap), I have continued on the path of energy savings for my pocketbook (OK, imagine one of those cheesy superhero voices…) and the world!

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that my life has been partially deautomated. By that neologism, I mean that in our quest for power savings, we actively manage the temperature of the house. This is usually accomplished automatically through set-back thermostats and the like, but we want more! (Actually, eventually I want to eliminate those bills completely, but that is a much larger project. So far my computer, camera, cell phone, and MP3 player are solar. The fridge is next!)

We have a fairly large house with a wide bank of south-facing windows, which, when appropriately covered and uncovered, can provide a significant amount of our heating, even on very cold days. However, the key fact here is that they must manually be covered and uncovered, opened and closed. There is an art to managing the temperature of the house, because the heating “system” (and I use the word loosely) includes the solar gain, baseboard heating, and two woodstoves.

As anybody with a hint of interest in saving money or power knows, baseboard heating sucks. It costs a fortune, it is an energy nightmare, and the heaters themselves get so hot that they burn things… like wayward blankets, pillows that fall off the bed, lego that gets dropped and bounces into the heater, stuffed animals… I hate the baseboard heaters, and I think that they are so dangerous that it isn’t clear to me why they are still legal. However, ahem… it is what we have. Retrofitting for forced air or hot water is probably more difficult than just tearing down and building a new house, since we would have to live in the house while renovating, and I’ve Been There Done That. Unwilling. Besides that, the natural gas all goes through Nova Scotia on its way to somewhere else, so we can’t even get gas. This is the system we have to work with: Windows, wood stove, baseboard heaters.

I was going to claim that keeping the baseboard heaters from coming on is the highest priority, but in fact, the first priority is keeping ourselves warm. We live in a grey, windy, damp climate, so getting cold can be depressing. (This is not a clinical statement about the causes of SAD. It is just that when I get cold, I fall asleep, drag myself around, and become lethargic and mopey. My mammalian status is sometimes in question.) Keeping the house warm enough to keep me functional matters, especially since I’m home all day most of the time.

The second priority is keeping the baseboard heaters from coming on. We do this by keeping the thermostats set to 15 degrees (in rooms we aren’t using) and 17 – 18 in rooms that we are in. The intent is not to keep the rooms that cold; it is to make sure that we bother to keep doing the other things necessary to keep the house warmer than that. It is warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and warm enough that it doesn’t take several hours to reheat the thermal mass in the walls, but cool enough that we notice.

I realized the other day that there was an art form, or at least a craft, to managing the house’s temperature. The actions are different on a sunny day than they are on a cloudy one. When it is windy, we need to keep the woodstove running all day. On clear cold days, we need to make sure that the woodstove is lit about an hour before sunset, or the bedrooms will get too cold. During the cold seasons, we cover the largest windows with rigid panels of insulation at night, because they lose so much heat that it is uncomfortable to sit next to them. On hot days, we cover the windows in the day time and open them in the evening. A couple of times a day, I wander the house turning off lights and unplugging neglected vampires. It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get used to it, it amounts to a couple of minutes here and there, and I think it saves us money. Let’s put it this way: our annual power bill is about $1650 (heat, hot water, cooking, lighting, computers and all, for 6 people in a 2400 square foot house) and we spend another $700 on wood. I did an extensive search trying to find out how much it costs to heat a Canadian house (which usually results in “varies widely”), but our total bill is comparable to what CMHC lists for NS, excluding space heating. So I think it’s worth the effort.

What do you do to keep your energy consumption down? Does it work? Is it worth it? How do you know?

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Home Skills | Tagged: environment, frugal, PostADay2011, power, SolarPowered | 1 Comment »

Beauty All the Way Down

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Seonaid

This is a post about structures. It is a post about illusions. It is a post about what lies beneath the apparent beauty of our privileged culture, and what else might be possible. It is a post about beauty as a way out of our current crises.

By Hamachidori (Own work) via Wikimedia commons

What is in a rose? This flower that we give as a sign of our love is now grown in hothouses all around the world, sprayed with toxic chemicals, and flown in for Valentine’s day through a vast network of night-flights. There is beauty in the action, there is beauty in the flower, but the beauty is tainted by the structure it rests on. Beneath the rose, there is something not-beautiful.

In the society we live in today, this is the nature of beauty: it is on the surface, and we have been taught to look away, not to consider what lies beneath. Consider the traditional family dinner: the roast on the table, potatoes, a starchy vegetable of some sort, and a lovely rich dessert. What could be a more pure offering of love? Except that over the years in the pursuit of efficiency, all the paths to our table have become contaminated with compromises made on our behalf that add up to a situation we would not have chosen. Did we choose cows standing shoulder to shoulder, fed grain instead of grass, leading to zoonotic diseases, antibiotic resistance, and e-coli 0157? Did we choose salmonella in our greens, persistent organic pollutants in our breast milk, early puberty, and poverty-stricken migrant labourers kept in locked compounds between shifts? Or are we just trying to feed our families, have a good dinner conversation, and enjoy something wonderful for dessert, possibly with a nice glass of wine or cup of coffee?

It shouldn’t be this hard. We shouldn’t have to look away from reality to be comfortable with our lives. And we shouldn’t have to bow out of society to be able to do the right thing.

Now and again (a couple of times a week) I see somebody triumphantly mocking a blogger or writer who is trying to live a more ethical or greener lifestyle: “Ha! Do you still drive a car? Did you purchase your shoes? Then you’re entirely enmeshed in this structure, you hypocrite! Give up, there is no other way. Plastics rule the world! Bow to our corporate overlords!” (or something to that effect… the most recent one was a relatively mild explanation of how litterers provide employment for the people who have to clean up after them, so they shouldn’t be considered a problem.)

And I find myself thinking, “That. Right there. That’s the problem.” It is not whether we should eat vegan or omnivore, or whether we should dress in new organic cotton (which displaced food crops in a food-insecure part of the world) or recycled synthetics (which are plastic). It is not that we have to choose between organic and local, stainless steel or glass, low VOC or milk paint. It is that the very idea of “choice” that is supposed to be part of this imaginary free market is ludicrous: in so many cases, we have nothing to choose amongst but “less bad” offerings. The system itself is the problem, not the individual components of it, and certainly not the choices we make in good conscience, trying to do the best we can. We need a new system. And the new system has to include a different aesthetic. It has to hold up to scrutiny. It has to be something that we wouldn’t be embarrassed to explain to our children.

Make no mistake: efficiency is an aesthetic choice. We have made efficiency our highest priority, and have allowed it to trump kindness, adequate nutrition, meaningful work, clean air and water, peace, and beauty. It is the foundation of our system, and it leads logically to exactly the crises we are in. We do not have economies of scale; we passed those long ago, probably around the time that our fields became so big that the bees couldn’t fly to the middle of them. What we have instead are economies of externalization. Things are not affordable (for us) because they are cheap to produce in such massive quantities. They are affordable because somebody else is picking up the tab. Whether it is the farmer who takes all the risk and barely squeaks out a profit from 500 dairy cows, or the dead zone off the coast from the river runoff, and the fishers who can no longer fish there, the urban peasant who moved to a slum for a better life because their land was sold off to grow cash crops, or the species of orchid that went extinct when that towering giant in the rainforest was cut: the costs are there. We just aren’t paying them. Except in the dis-ease that we must live with every moment of our lives, because we know that we must never, never look beneath the covers, for fear of what we must find there.

So. I call for a new aesthetic. One in which our decisions are checked against their consequences by the system as a whole, not by each of us struggling to make good choices in the face of impossible, misleading, or absent information. One in which I can put things on my table, and on my walls, without having to lie to my children about who suffered to bring it to us. One in which I can point to beauty, all the way down.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: ecofeminism, environment, feminism, philosophy, PostADay2011, storytelling | 7 Comments »

The Economics of the Laundry Line

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Seonaid

If you are a dedicated environmentalist, but you still find yourself buying back your own time by using convenience foods and labour-saving devices, this is an article for you. I find myself making these choices almost every day: I currently have a frozen lasagna in the oven so that I can have back the 2 hours of not-cooking for writing and a swimming lesson. (A swimming lesson for me, not my children!) I also have a soup stock on the back burner, and a homemade squash and sweet potato soup waiting for the stock, so I’m not a purist either way. It’s a calculus of convenience. Today, the question is, “Is it worth it to hang out that load of laundry?”

I hear “saving money” as an argument for hanging out the clothes, but I don’t think that it is particularly convincing. Even if I hung a load every day, it would only save me about $240 over the course of the year. It would take me about 120 hours to save that money, working out to approximately $2 an hour. “Oho!” you may say, “But if you were completely faithful, you could give up the dryer entirely, and subtract that expense from your savings!” I know people who do that, even around here. So let us subtract the dryer as well… After my old cheap dryer destroyed about $400 worth of clothes by burning them, I decided to go for a fancy-schmancy set, so we can knock off $800 for the dryer. Spread that over 10 years, and add in a couple of hundred dollars for repairs. Now we can claim an extra $100 a year, bringing our hourly rate for hanging laundry to $2.67. This is after tax money, so it is the equivalent of “earning” about $4 an hour. It’s not completely ridiculous, since I do lots of other things “for free”, but it would make more economic sense to just ante up for the electricity and spend that time “making money”.

What is worse, I can only hang things out for fewer than half the days in the year… which means that one of the rooms inside my house would have to be converted to laundry hanging, since laundry is a daily task around here. I’m not even going to bother with the economics of adding in part of the house as an expense, because that just gets ridiculous. Suffice it to say, I don’t save enough money by hanging out my laundry for that to be the primary justification: I am doing this to give back to the earth, and I happen to enjoy hanging laundry, but the way things are currently priced makes it one of those tasks that I doubt, especially when my fingers go numb from the cold. I’m trying to find scalable solutions… that is, if something is actually the right thing to do, I’d like other people to do it too.

If the “saving money” argument is not going to convince most people, let me try the “saving carbon” argument instead. I hear that I generate an extra 1.7 kg of CO2 every time I run the dryer. At my house (where we share the laundry facilities with the family who lives next door) we are doing laundry for 9, which means at least one load every day. Let’s say 1-1/2 loads per day. If we could dry all of them on the line (which we can’t), we would save 930 kg of CO2 emissions in a year. My own calculations are a little different: The dryer is 5400 watts, and runs for just under an hour, using approximately 5.1 kWh. Since our electricity in NS is essentially coal, we generate close to a kg of CO2 for each kWh, or something like… 2800 kg per year. I don’t even know how to begin to figure out emissions made on behalf of the neighbours, so lets just discount those and say that my family’s emissions could be reduced by 2 tonnes just by hanging out the clothes. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s something like 1/6 th of our total household power consumption, and we heat with electricity. That is starting to sound convincing.

And then, after I write a post about hanging out the laundry, I come home and see this:

Sigh.

On the plus side, the line was back up within 20 minutes. Nobody had to call a repair guy, and the only spare part we needed was a piece of rope from the garage.

BTW, the SolarPowered tag is an indication that the post was written on a laptop powered by the sun, not that the post itself is about solar power.

Filed under: Day-to-Day, Home Skills | Tagged: convenience, economics, environment, PostADay2011, self-sufficiency, SolarPowered | 7 Comments »

A Litany for Agnostics

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Seonaid

In the beginning…

We start as a DNA blueprint, a set of instructions for how to construct the magic of consciousness from nothing more than the molecules that surround us.

The environment is not just a soup that we swim in. It’s what we are made of. We are built entirely from materials that we eat, drink, and breathe. There is no world Out There, and In Here, because we are entirely permeable. The environment flows through us, day after day, for as long as we live.

***

Once upon a time, there were not so many people. There were… oh… tens of millions of us. And when our communities were small and local, we could get away with things. If we overfished in a particular place, we could move somewhere else. The rivers carried our wastes away, and we never had to worry about it again. If the soil became depleted we could till new soil; hard work, but feasible. And our impact was limited by the hours in the day, the years in a lifetime, and the muscles on our backs. Life may have been nasty, brutish, and short (although there is still some debate about that), but we lived in the world as a part of it. And when we didn’t, or when the world around us was no longer able to support us for reasons of its own, there was resilience, migration, and hard work. Or extirpation.

Eventually, we grew, and we grew, and we covered most of the surface of the earth. And there were, for a long time, hundreds of millions of us. And our communities were still small (ish) and local (ish), and we could still get away with things, but not as much. If we overfished, or depleted our soil, or rendered our drinking water unsafe, there weren’t so many options. To move somewhere else, we had to displace or conquer somebody who was there already. And it didn’t always work. And sometimes civilizations collapsed under the weight of their own effluent, and sometimes they simply lost out to a change in the weather that didn’t leave them an escape path, and sometimes they expanded and expanded and expanded until they took over vast swathes of the world that had already been in use by other civilizations. And the process was horrific, and innumerable lives were lost in the pursuit of this goal, and stories were erased, and libraries were burned, and species vanished before they were even described.

And still we grew. And as we grew, we became clever in the ways of making life more comfortable. We learned to burn things, and mine things, and build things, and more things, and cheaper things, and things that didn’t need hands to touch them at all. We didn’t want to go back to nasty, brutish, and short, and we didn’t want our civilization to be overrun by another, and we (who had expanded and expanded and expanded) built technologies to ensure that we would never again have to contract, and we considered contraction a mark of failure, and we have been breathing in and growing and growing for generations…

And now, there is nowhere to go. There is no downriver to send things, because there is somebody upriver, and there are somebodies downriver, and there is an ocean and even the ocean cannot absorb the river of toxins we have learned to loose upon the world. And still we grow. And even though the message has been floating around as an undercurrent in the culture for generations, now… we don’t know how to stop.

***

In the Norse legends, there is a wolf named Fenrir. The Fenris wolf of prophesy is destined to consume the world. Because of this, and for the safety of all, the wolf was bound, through trickery and sacrifice of the gods.

In my nightmares, I fear that this prophesy, as all prophecies in all stories through time, cannot be escaped… that this myth, like all others, contains seeds of truth, wisdom cloaked in metaphor and mystery, but lost in translation. I fear (in my dark times) that he has slipped his bounds, unnoticed, and wanders the world whispering of want, of hopelessness, of personal misery. That his great accomplishment is to keep us separate from the world around us, to maintain the illusion that we can keep ourselves safe while destroying the very fabric of life itself.

And then I think, “Poor wolf, in a cattle culture, to be forced to bear our fears of appetite and hunger.”

***

We, who are caught up in the dominant narrative, need to tell a different story. We need to learn new ways of being in the world, ways that allow us to be a part of, not separate from. Each of us individually has our part to play, but it is the story itself that needs retelling. Some things need to become inconceivable, unfathomable, products of a bygone age when we were able to think of ourselves as purely mechanical, as baffling as raw sewage in the streets of London. Some other things need to become second nature, relearned after generations of forgetting, reintegrated into our practices: Keep an eye on the weather, and the light, and the seasons. Don’t poison the water source. Save the best seed for planting. Clean up after yourself. Don’t take more than your share. Be kind to your neighbours, even the green ones, even the ones with scales, and even the creepy-crawlies. They are part of the great making.

But this, most of all, we need to remember: We are made of the earth, and the air, and the water. We are the stuff of stars, and will someday rejoin them. Oh, pattern of consciousness, preserve this gift for the future. It is billions of years in the making, and not ours to throw away in fear.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: environment, philosophy, PostADay2011, science and religion, storytelling | 7 Comments »

What Are You Reading

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Seonaid

This time, I *am* resorting to Plinky because otherwise I won’t get my post done. Also, I only have 23 minutes! Go!

Since I recently did a post about what was on my end table (which included my children’s reading and things that have been sitting there for years), I must now own up to what I am actually reading. I also glanced into my laptop case earlier this evening, and thought, “Well, now that combination is blog worthy.” How fortuitous.

Currently in the laptop case:

God is Not One
Postmodernism: A very short introduction
My particle physics textbook, because somebody asked me a question about the Standard Model on a previous blog post, and I have a response brewing.
A ringbound notebook to get me to write for longer periods without checking twitter.
Two pieces from The Vagina Monologues which I am preparing for Tuesday’s performance.

I also discovered that I had started Schopenhauer’s Essay on the Freedom of the Will a few weeks ago, but it had been eaten by my endtable. I got hung up on the definition of “necessary,” (which word I now fear I have been using incorrectly my entire life,) and therefore failed to complete the essay. I will now scold myself roundly and get back down to brass tacks.

And because I’m not a complete academic snob, somewhere around here there is a fun little diversion called the Dim Sum of All Things. It’s Asian-American chick lit, I think.

Phew. Three minutes left, even with links.

Filed under: Library | Tagged: books, environment, PostADay2011 | 4 Comments »

The Price Of Gas!

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Seonaid

Oh! It is time to run in circles and flap our hands! Gas is going up! Food will cost more! Who could ever have predicted this???

Here is one of the places where the division between structural analysis and the personal impact becomes glaring. It has become apparent to me over the last few years that I cannot actually afford to run a car. I certainly can’t afford to run two cars. And I really can’t afford to run a minivan which now costs $8 in gas alone every time we decide to go to town. Just to clarify the costs, gas is now (as of this morning) around $1.29 per litre, or about $4.87 per gallon. The van runs about 12 L per 100 km on average, but the starting, warming, and going up hills that we do around here takes a little more, so we basically go through 6 L every time we start her up (the round trip to town is about 30 km, so as soon as we do any scooting we’re up to 50 km by leaving the driveway). Then the two vehicles ran through about $4000 in repairs between December and February.

No. I cannot afford to keep doing this. We cannot afford to keep doing this. And by “we” I mean, “our entire culture,” not just my immediate family.

The price of gas is a shake up: we are not going to spend or subsidize our way out of peak oil, international conflict, and suburban sprawl (in which I am participating.) Even we in North America, even in the ostensible middle class, are going to have to spend a higher fraction of our budget on food. We will not be able to buy stuff, because we will need to feed ourselves. Our houses are too big; we will not be able to afford to keep them as warm/cool as we are used to. Our ability to isolate ourselves from the environment, and manipulate the world around us through the liberal application of fossil fuels is coming to a close. Probably. A miracle may occur. But we cannot bank our futures upon technologies that don’t yet exist. We must work sideways towards solutions, change our ways or perish. (I got that from a comedy routine(1), not a sign on a street corner.)

I look at my own situation, and the car problem in particular, and I come up with these possible solutions:

Move to town. Give up chickens, gardens, greenhouse, land, swimming, canoeing, apartment, garage, writing studio, and dreams. Break my children’s hearts (and my own) to be more fiscally responsible in the short term. Abandon hope for sustainability, buy back into the rat race. Give up… Wait. That doesn’t sound like a solution. (Yes, I know about Urban Homesteading. To get within walking distance of the university would cost me the same amount as we can sell the current house for, and would result in a reduction of about 3.25 acres of land.)
Strictly ration driving for “necessary” trips. Give up swimming lessons, meditation, tae kwon do, orchestra, drama, and social life. Resort to a utilitarian life and hope for redemption in the afterlife. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that I’m getting a reward at the end of all of this, so it doesn’t give me a lot to go on, other than a vague sense of moral superiority, which is just not enough to run a life on. I’m going to need more payoff than, “My life sucks, but at least I’m not fucking it up for everybody else.” Also, that’s not a solution that has much to sell it, and what I’m really looking for is scalability.
Get rid of van. Give up cargo space and the ability to spontaneously take other people places. Still need to purchase a replacement, because otherwise we will be giving up everything in number 2 as well. Also requires us to take two vehicles if we want to take our entire family somewhere. Probably can get $7000 for it, which could be rolled over to “new” smaller vehicle. Would need to replace the functions of the van by renting truck from time to time. The van was supposed to be a temporary solution, to be disposed of when we no longer required 3 car seats. We’ve been down to two car seats for about 2 years, but now the kids are starting to get big. Just last week I had to put my oldest in the front seat for the first time, since he no longer fits between the two seats in the back of the Echo. Can a family of 6 get around with a Honda Civic and a Smart Car? (Three adults, three kids, one about to go through his first teenage growth spurt.)
Get our friends to move closer so that we can still do everything in #2, or replace with equally fun activities. Ha ha ha. Rural village full of interesting, intelligent, and healthy people: good idea. Intentional community with people we already know? Pipe dream. But not one that I am alone in. Maybe it is the goal we secretly all yearn for. It is probably the solution for what ails us, culturally. Urban villages, probably, with walkability thrown in and a reinvention of The Commons. Transition towns for the Long Descent. (I haven’t read it. Have you?) But how to get there? How to get there? There’s the rub.It’s not going to work this way, one house at a time, one family (or two) at a time, with all of us tied to the places we happened upon. It certainly isn’t going to work with temporary jobs, no stability, and a constant threat of layoff hanging over our heads. We’re part way there, but of the four adults who live on our property, only one has been able to parlay his skills and knowledge into a paying full-time job. The rest of us patch things together, start micro-businesses which lose money (but only a couple of hundred dollars at a time), and pick up part-time teaching gigs when possible. We can’t save the world, or even ourselves, running scared.
Ah: here’s a bit of my own structural analysis. (Remember, structure does not imply intent or conspiracy.) It happens to have been beneficial for a large group of people/organizations to keep us “running scared,” making sure that we never feel like our “needs” are met. Keep up with those Jonses: if you let them get too far ahead, you will be so ostracized that your very survival will be on the line! This is a tremendously powerful message. We are tribe animals, we need belonging the same way that we need air and food, albeit on a slower scale. A solitary human being is actually in jeopardy, isolated from access to basic support systems for food and shelter. There is no such thing as true self-sufficiency, there is only interdependence.

But a truly functioning community of interdependence, working to meet its needs and trade the excess? One that includes a sense of personhood for its youngest and its eldest? One that values the life-supporting work that is traditionally done by women, and expects its men to contribute to the private sphere so that the women have enough space in their days and intellectual life to participate fully in the public sphere? There is a foundation from which we can start to rebuild a society that can deal with the price of gas… without flapping our hands and running in circles.