Relearning old tricks

Since the start of the 90 Percent Project, I’ve been thinking that we really are a culture of people who have become dependent on pushing a button or flicking a switch to make a convenience happen. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, necessarily, though it seems to me that we’ve become overly dependent on buttons and switches. There were many generations before us who didn’t have those buttons and switches and somehow they managed. There’s a lot of knowledge that died with our past generations.

Being a part of this project has made me realize more than ever that every button we push or switch that we flick comes with an energy cost. There is nothing related to those two little gadgets that doesn’t come with an energy cost. My electric meter says so. We so take it for granted. When a power outage occurs (or when one participates in a 90% energy reduction project) we tend to be quite flummoxed.

This project has reminded me that there are ways to make things happen without pushing a button or flicking a switch. Sometimes. I’m as much a resident of the 21st century as anyone else in this country. And I don’t want to live an ascetic existence devoid of creature comforts. But. I’m beginning to realize that there are ways to have some creature comforts that don’t spend as much energy. The trouble is, for many of us, they seem rather odd and primitive and...well...too much trouble when you can push a button or flick a switch. That is, after all, what convenience is all about.

Except...our convenience is costing us the earth.

Yesterday, when it was as hot as blue blazes and I SO wanted to turn on the air conditioner, I recalled that my parents never had an air conditioner. My mother simply refused to have one in the house even when my father suggested it might be a nice thing to have, sometime in the mid-1980s. My mother was a little funny that way.

Both of my parents were raised with the Roaring Twenties excesses and came of age during the Great Depression. It made an impact on both of them. Their experiences were different, however. My father was a townie, an only child, who experienced the luxuries of electricity, a flushing toilet and the local market for food. My mother, the youngest of 9 children, lived on a dairy farm out in the sticks where electricity and an indoor bathroom didn’t arrive until shortly before World War II.

I was raised on stories about my mother’s childhood adventures and experiences. During her growing up years, her weekly chores included trimming the wicks on the kerosene lanterns, cleaning chamber pots (guaranteed to keep you humble), and scrubbing down the stairs with a bucket of water and rags. As far as I know, she wasn’t much involved with food preparation, though food gardening was a huge factor and activity in the household that everyone shared.

During the Depression, my mother’s family never wanted for much. They had instant milk faucets out in the barn (cows) and enough preserved garden produce to feed an army (which they fairly represented with 11 of them in the household along with friends and neighbors and, eventually, daughters and sons-in-law who arrived to dine). They even had cold drinks in the summer because of the ice house down by the barn where the winter’s harvest of ice was stored. They also had the yearly slaughter of a couple of pigs. Along with the Sunday chickens and the occasional wild turkey that roamed the place.

When my father was introduced to the family, they had a great deal of fun with him and his townie ‘ignorance’. He rose to the challenge and fit in well, fortunately. He also learned a lot about frugality in terms of not wasting what you have and re-using and recycling. Or...doing without. This was a lifestyle that they never completely eschewed, even as they added conveniences to their lives. My brother and I were certainly not raised in a household that lacked for creature comforts, but we didn’t get away with wasting anything, either.

Waste didn’t become a regular feature of my lifestyle until I was out on my own. How easy it was to learn the joys of excess and disposables.

Anyway. As I was trying to figure out ways to stay cool(er) yesterday, without turning on the AC, I remembered my mother’s absolute refusal to have an air conditioner. She didn’t need it, she said. It was a waste of electricity, she said. And this wasn’t a woman who liked to sweat...or ‘wear a dew’ as she preferred to call it.

Sometimes she’d grab a bag of ice from the freezer, wrap it in a dish towel, and place it on the back of her neck while she read the paper or watched television. Other times she’d dunk her wrists in a basin of cold water for a quick pick-me-up. (When I’d complain of being hot, she tell me to go soak my wrists.) Other times she’d fill a pan with cold water and let her feet soak in it while she sat doing whatever it was she was doing. Good for her dainty toes and it kept her cool. A quick cool shower before bed was a summer time ritual. These activities didn’t seem odd to her. Or primitive. They were just common sense.

I also recall her saying that drying a rack of wet laundry in front of the fan will make the surrounding air feel cooler.

I don’t know how many of us would consider those measure acceptable in this day and age. Seems like a lot of trouble when you can just push a button or flick a switch. But you know something? I tried those measures yesterday and they worked pretty darned well. In fact, putting a rack of wet towels in front of the fan reduced the room temperature by one degree. It felt noticeably cooler. As my mother used to say, “I was as cool as a cucumber.” I enjoyed employing some of this so-called common sense, too. But it made me consider that my instinct to defend it as ‘not extreme’ or ‘not nuts’ says much about the culture I live in.

Clearly, there are days when air conditioning is preferred or even necessary. Fortunately, I don’t live in a region (yet) where extreme heat is a regular feature. Even so, practicing some of these alternatives to refrigeration-temp air conditioning would significantly reduce the load on the electric grid. I suspect that they would help save some lives in areas where extreme heat and power outages occur. They could be lifesavers for some folks who don’t have the means to have or run air conditioners (thinking of Europe’s current heatwave).

When we’re accustomed to pushing a button or flicking a switch, it’s easy to forget other ways of doing things. That’s sort of built into our culture now. One of the benefits of this 90% Project thing is learning to find alternatives that at least mitigate consumption if not totally replace the buttons and switches. It calls for some creativity, but it feels really good to learn how to do some things that mean I can manage with less harm to the earth and less strain on the grid. While still maintaining a comfortable lifestyle.