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Altar Call for True Believers
Janisse Ray, Orion magazine
Are we being change, or are we just talking about change?
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…At risk of appearing a fraud, I want to admit my own culpability right up front. I live in a comfortable house in the small city of Brattleboro, Vermont. My husband and I cut trees to heat our home, and some of them are alive when we fell them. On the coldest days we turn to fossil fuels to keep the house above sixty degrees. We drive vehicles that consume fossil fuels, and we have raised a son who also now drives a gasoline-powered vehicle. We even own a motorboat. Our home uses electricity that, in part, is produced by the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. I fly regularly. Never having been to Europe, I’d like to take my family there someday, and chances are we’ll fly.
…Yet many times a day, I move ever toward a more sustainable life, learning to weigh the implications of my actions. To measure sustainability, I often refer to Jim Merkel’s definition, which is human consumption based on biospheric production or, using the Earth’s resources at a rate slower than they regenerate. Step by step I creep toward a life that is easier on the planet, eating locally as much as possible, buying secondhand goods, using manual technology instead of electric. For over a year my husband and I saved to buy a hybrid car before purchasing a used one at list price from a friend. A state grant allowed us to exchange every incandescent bulb in our home for a compact florescent. Each spring our vegetable garden expands.
These conversions toward sustainability may be easier for me than for some. I was raised very poor-on a junkyard, in fact. I learned almost from infancy to recycle, to make do or do without, to keep needs separate from desires, to waste not. Living within our means taught me to live within the Earth’s means. Growing up in a fanatically religious family, too, I learned early that “putting your money where your mouth is” was more than an adage. My family practiced what my father preached.
Still, I am far from saved. My footprint is surely too large for me to enter the kingdom of sustainability heaven. If sustainable living is a continuum, from excessive waste to zero waste, then I too am not where I want to be on it.
…We also need to recognize that others in the choir may not look the way we expect them to. My father the junkman belongs in the choir, although he would never call himself an environmentalist. He’s never flown in a passenger jet and rarely travels by car beyond his home county. He lives simply, makes do. That he never went to college, never read Aldo Leopold, and may not have heard of carrying capacity matters not. Now is as good a time as any to shed our preconceptions about what an environmentalist looks like, and to recognize that the most unlikely people are going to be allies in the quest for sustainability.
…I want to hear of an organization that decides, because of the climate crisis, to cancel its annual conference. I want to see us relying on the mail and conference calls and e-mail for corresponding with distant colleagues, and engaging more deliberately with our neighbors. I want to see us using petroleum as if it were precious, which is to say sparingly and wisely, driving shorter distances and less often; in fact, I want getting in a single-occupancy vehicle to be a last resort.
I want us to get radical. I want us choir members to make even the hardest decisions while holding the Earth in mind.
I want us to raise the bar for ourselves.
Janisse Ray is a community activist, gardener, and homemaker in the Green Mountains of Vermont. She recently received an honorary degree from Unity College in Maine.
(September/October 2007 issue)
Janisse Ray is author of “Ecology of a Cracker Childhood”. Biographical sketch from New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Recommended by Erik Hoffner at Gristmill.
As an energy-saver, the clothesline makes a comeback
Caitlin Carpenter, The Christian Science Monitor
A ‘Right to Dry’ movement is growing, with some states introducing legislation to override clothesline bans.
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It started out innocently enough. Concerned about global warming and her family’s energy consumption, Michelle Baker wanted to hang her wash outside. She scoured stores for a clothesline durable enough to withstand Vermont winters and classy enough for her Waterbury backyard. She came back empty-handed every time.
So Ms. Baker and her husband made their own: a few lines of pristine white rope hung between two Vermont cedar poles. Soon, friends and neighbors were enviously asking where they got it. Born of enterprise, enthusiasm, and wet shirts flapping in the breeze, the Vermont Clothesline Co. debuted in April.
And just in time, as a national clothesline – or “Right to Dry” – movement escalates. In fact, Vermont is the latest state to introduce a bill that would override clothesline bans, which are often instituted by community associations loath to air laundry even when it’s clean. Now, clothesline restrictions may be headed the way of bans on parking pickup trucks in front of homes, or growing grass too long – all vestiges of trim and tidy hopes that may not fit with the renewed emphasis on going green.
“This trend … is about people making a little change to help the environment as opposed to something like solar panels which is much more of an investment,” Baker says.
(24 August 2007)
52 Weeks Down – Week 16 – Cut Your Laundry Energy
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Let us start with the clotheline. If you don’t have one, get one. If you live in a subdivision that doesn’t permit them, hang one in your attic, porch or use a drying rack inside, or do a little agitating and get the rules changed, but lose the dryer.
I had a friend from Indonesia who said that of all the funny things she’d learned about Americans, the idea that we used machines to dry our clothes, which the air and the sun did for free was absolutely the weirdest. She couldn’t get over the idea that we were that crazy. And she has a point. The average dryer costs most families $80 per year. That’s a lot of money for something free. And the greenhouse gas emissions are signficant.
Now I don’t find hanging laundry to be a hardship at all. I can get a load up on the line in 4 minutes, the laundry smells better, and while I’m doing it, the kids can help, I can watch the birds in the trees – frankly, I find it to be one of the most pleasant chores I do.
Now it is true that things are softer when they come out of the dryer – and some things, like towels, can end up on the crunchy side if you have hard water. A little vinegar in the rinse, and hanging on windy days helps. But the thing that helps the most is simply getting used to it – it won’t take very long before you’ll stop expecting everything to be soft. And everything smells better on the line, and many things come off the line nicely crisp – oxford shirts, sheets and tablecloths are much nicer off the line.
(14 August 2007)
