Sometimes It's Cold

It's cold.

It's freakishly cold, and what is worse are the people who keep saying "It's cold!" as though this is something that they can't fathom happening in February in Iowa.

"No kidding?" I say as I go out for a run, or clean a barn in the sub zero weather. "Well, we had better get used to it.  And while we are getting used to the cold, we better be good with draughts, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis as well."

I think my patience for people is running very thin right now.  I have moments when I can see how people completely snap and feel the need to cause a scene, if only to have their message finally get out there.  Individually, most people seem to get it, but collectively we are a bunch of dunces when it comes to figuring out how to make a change.

An example that pops into my head this morning came from a client of mine.  He and his wife run a small business in our local town and are two very wonderful people, kind, and well versed in supporting the community. Myself, being the veterinarian for their pets, gave them a recommendation for a medication that can drastically help their pet and the offer to have that medication filled immediately at my office, they opt instead to go shopping on-line.  Now don't get me wrong, I understand the desire to save a few bucks as much as the next guy, but here's the thing….when faced with small business owners struggling to make ends meet (which, you will remember, these clients are as well) or big box stores that undercut us in costs and monopolize all the product so that we end up having it back ordered for months at a time….which one is likely going to help the local economy more?  Seems pretty simple right? You go with the small business owner.  But time and time again, people know what needs to be done on a larger scale, but when it boils down to the individual they think, 'I'm sure there are others buying locally so if I save a few dollars, it won't be a problem'.

It's a problem.
It's a big problem and it is only getting bigger.

Every dollar spent is a vote for how we want the world to be….every dollar.

The increase in farmer's markets, healthy food, and small cooperative grocery stores has been a bright spot, but the blow back from the large food companies has been huge - the advertising and marketing campaigns alone have been enough to boggle the minds of the average consumer to the point of throwing up their hands and saying, "Oh, what the heck! I don't know what to eat anymore so I will just go get a McRib and a shamrock shake!" …..game, set, and match for big agriculture right there and quietly another organic farmer goes bankrupt.  People vote with their forks three times every day, and every meal counts….every meal.

Is it that people understand it, but just don't think it applies to them?  Or are they so easily confused and mesmerized by fancy advertising? Or maybe they are just too tired from working their three part time jobs to make ends meet that they just don't have the time to do the necessary research to understand the issues.

I spent the evening last night watching Brooklyn Castle with my kids.  A documentary about kids in a 'below the poverty line' school learning chess and winning national championships.  Sounds crazy, but it was impressive and such a fantastic way to keep these kids engaged and learning in all of their subjects.  But like so many schools these days, their funding is being cut. Why? Where does this funding go? ….to pay off wars?, to cover for the many bad decisions of bankers?  Cutting educational funding is the most ridiculous thing a country could possibly do. It is like having the makings of a star athlete and then cutting off his legs.  Children are the investment in all of our futures, and we can't stand idly by with our hands in our pockets and say, "but I don't want to pay taxes anymore! We need a tax break!" What we need is an equitable tax that helps support education to its fullest degree. And please don't hit me up with the "charter and private school" theory or we are right back to the top paragraph with the "big box stores/ controlled by corporations" discussion because eventually, that is where a lot of those schools end up - funding coming from large corporations or sponsors that can foot the bill and control what the kids ultimately end up learning.  Public school - as in sponsored by all of us, for the education of all our children is still the best and most broad base start we can give them.  Every kid will one day have a say in how this country runs…..every kid.

Okay, so my little rant is over, call it cabin fever, call it my pressure valve so I don't go out and completely loose it with the population at large.

When it comes to this weather, we get what we asked for, in my opinion.  I know I can send off any number of letters to Congress and the President, I can shut off any unnecessary lights in my house, I can contact the utility company and opt to pay more for the renewable energy, but until
every single person stands up and says, "No more coal and oil! No more fossil fuels! Renewable energy only!" - until that point, there will be enough muddying of the water by the coal/oil/gas industries to keep people confused and questioning, there will continue to be lobbyist money that gets passed across (or under) the table to our "elected leaders" and there will continue to be environmental changes that we are not equipped to handle.  Who knows, before long maybe Hell really will freeze over.

Until then….bundle up and stop complaining.

The Loneliest Appliance

We have a very lonely appliance in our house, it really doesn't see much use any more other than for the odd emergency and as a nice flat place to set things.  It has been relegated to the same useful level as the iron and the hair dryer - almost completely unnecessary.  Instead, it has been replaced by string....well, clothesline, to be more exact, and clothespins. The dryer has been laid off and is looking at permanent unemployment.

I originally set out trying to figure out just how much energy and money  this might save us - it isn't too tough of an equation really (how many kilowatts a drier uses) x (price per kilowatt hour) x (number of hours of use per week), in other words, information that can be readily found on the manual and electric bill.  But then it came to me that it doesn't really matter if it saves me 5 cents or $500, it is simply the right thing to do.  Convenient? - no, not really.  Good for the world in general?- Absolutely!  Last I checked, sunlight and air were both free, and any coal that I can save from being mined, hauled and burned for my mere convenience....so much the better.   It does definitely take more time to hang out clothes and it can get to be a little dicey when it is cold outside, but even below freezing, hanging clothes out to dry works.

I have heard any number of stories for why people don't want to hang out clothes. My favorites are the stories I hear from people that live in a housing development that won't allow clothes lines because they are unsightly.  Unsightly!  Clean clothes, bedding, towels and yes....God forbid.....underwear!  Seriously, have we become so prudish that we don't like the sight of clothes that everyone wears?  Or is it that we are so focused on appearances that we wouldn't want our neighbors to know that we actually have to wash our clothes rather than just constantly buying new?   Personally, I love seeing clothes on the line.  It shows a certain amount of dedication, thriftiness, cleanliness and care.  The other day, while driving around the Amish farms, I saw a place where they had rigged up a pulley line that stretched from the house to the silo - that clothes was flapping in the breeze 20 feet in the air!

Hanging clothes out can also be a rather meditative task.  It doesn't take a lot of skill - although if you have to fit three loads of laundry on a line that typically can only hold two, it takes a little planning.  I find myself talking with the cats that come to see what I am doing, or planning what to plant in my flower beds, or watching deer cross the field north of our house, or watching the birds chirp and flit around and, before I realize it, all the clothes are hung up and drying nicely in the sun.

"But", you say,.... and I totally get this because I have a hard time with this also..."it is just so convenient to go from the washer to the dryer - I mean, they are right there next to each other!  Hanging them out will involve a basket, clothes pins and hauling them to the line and then hanging them up and then taking them down again.....ugh!"  I know, it can seem like just too much.  This is where I invoke Nike's ad campaign...."Just do it!"  The hardest part of any job is starting it.  Once the ball is rolling, it is really very easy and surprisingly enjoyable.  I often realize that my family is one in about 100 that actually hang clothes out, but I like to imagine a day when it becomes the standard rather than the exception, and when you think about it, it was the standard less than 70 years ago.  That was the way that clothes got dry....period!  In fact, I still have some clothes pins that were my grandmother's and I will often think of her when I reach into the bag and pull out one of the pink ones that she used to have and it is something of a comfort, in a weird way, that we are sharing some of life's tasks - I try to imagine what the world was like when she was hanging out her clothes - that alone makes the time fly.

The other thing that people will say is, "I just don't have the room for a clothes line."  They live in an apartment, or have some other living arrangement that inhibits them from having a line, and to this I say, "Be creative"  I really don't like hanging clothes up outside when it is frigid - I like my fingers too much to freeze them off.  So, in order to appease the clothesline god of the house (my husband) and save my fingers, I rigged up a clothesline in the basement of the house.  I tied up a few stray pieces of line between the stairs and my treadmill (those things can be good for more than just running) and viola' - dry clothes and no frozen fingers.  It also worked out well that the wood burning stove is in the basement, so the warm air being given off by that helped to dry the clothes in record time.  The point of it is, clotheslines don't need to take up a lot of room and they can be taken down easily.  There are also wooden clothes drying racks that dry an amazing amount of clothes in a very small space - these are especially handy for socks and undies...or in the case of my kids playing outside in the winter....mittens.

Just out of curiosity, I did run some numbers to see what it costs us to dry our clothes. The US has roughly 115,000,000 households that all have laundry to wash.   Using some average dryer specifications of 5kW per load, and an average energy bill of $0.10/kWh we come up with 5kW x $0.10 x 115,000,000 million households = $57,5000,000 for one load of laundry per household per week. Granted, that isn't really all that much per household, but it does start to add up.

I went a little further and checked into how much coal it takes to produce 1 kWh and there were ranges cited from 0.8 pound per kWh to 2.1 pounds per kWh. I averaged the amounts cited and came up with 1.3 pounds of coal per kWh. Assuming that a dryer uses approximately 5 kW, that ends up being about 6.5 pounds of coal for each dryer load of clothes. Now, when you figure in the number of households....we are talking 747,500,000 pounds of coal per week for each household to dry one load of clothes. Even if only 1 out of 10 households dries their clothes per week, we are still talking about 74,750,000 pounds of coal! 

I couldn't even picture that much coal unless it was in a rail car that I see fly by me while stopped at a railroad crossing.  Figuring that rail cars can carry roughly 244,300 pounds of coal (and that was the largest capacity I could find) - that is roughly 305 railroad cars full of coal for one tenth of the households just to dry their clothes once weekly.  Please, someone tell me I figured these numbers wrong, because that is really kind of disturbing.  Now, when I see a coal trains, I think of it more in the number of dryer loads.....dryer loads that could be free - free of energy cost and pollution.

 It is hard, sometimes, to feel like we make any difference at all just being one person trying to do something good for the environment, but if we all do small things and we all encourage others to do small things....it starts to make a difference.  And maybe, if we are very lucky, there will be housing developments eventually that won't allow dryers and will insist upon there being only clothes lines instead.