As a university student, I did my fair share of protesting. I remember feeling so free, marching in Washington DC, for the homeless or to get the US out of El Salvador. When I was an exchange student in London we were told, explicitly, by the program organizers, not to get involved in any kind of political rallies. So what did I do? While walking around the streets of London one day, I see a huge mob of people marching in protest of the first Gulf War. I thought about what the program organizers said for about five seconds and then I stepped off the sidewalk and joined the crowd with fists raised. I couldn't resist. At that age anything the "man" was for, I was against.
Now my protests are far less public. They are mostly me occasionally yelling at the radio in my car over some story I heard on NPR. I guess I just don't want to get so angry about things any more.
In the classroom I've always encouraged my students to be aware of the issues surrounding them. I told them that we are living at such an amazing time. We are faced with issues like global warming, peak oil production, and a global financial crisis. Things are converging in such a way that we are being forced to think more creatively about solutions. Our education system in the US is still based on the old Industrial Revolution model of producing cogs for the wheel, basically workers. British Educator, Sir Ken Robinson, said that creativity needs to be the new literacy for the 21st Century. He said the world is moving so fast that we don't really know what the world is going to look like five years from now. And yet, our schools are attempting to prepare young people for this world. He suggests that creativity will help these students to navigate the challenges ahead more effectively.
I must confess that although I wholeheartedly believe in thinking creatively to face the environmental issues surrounding us, I am hardly a model of conservation. Kim and I drive a Volvo XC90 SUV that gets about 17 mpg, my Volvo wagon gets a little better mileage. When we lived in Honolulu we never recycled. We'd leave lights on all over the house and the computer would be on all day. If there was a dripping faucet, I would let it go on for weeks before fixing it. I would open the refrigerator door and stare and stare and stare trying to decide what I wanted for a snack. Now we could argue about the car thing and say that we need something with all wheel drive to get on our land, but really we just like it. It has a certain cool factor for us. We are, however, gaining awareness.
We recently bought a Dyson Hand Vac. We really liked it. It had a very nice sleek design and was said to have the best sucking power of all the other hand vacs on the market. When we opened the box and looked at the directions it told us that we could get six minutes of use from three hours of charge. That's not a great use to charge ratio for us. I think for most people that can leave it plugged in all day and use it whenever they need a quick clean up, it's highly convenient. But for us to have to charge it off of our solar panels or in our car when we are driving, it is not convenient at all. We decided to return it to Macy's.
That incident got us really thinking about our consumption. Kim pointed out to me that here at Karen's we have our Sonic Care toothbrushes plugged in 24 hours a day for only four minutes of use a day. We have a power strip set up with all of of phone chargers and laptop charger that for most of the day are not in use. I walk out of the kitchen and forget to turn off the light.
We are excited about this awareness and how we will live when we move out to the land full time next week. We just won't be able to consume as much. We'll have our 100 gallon water tank, a small set of solar panels, and a 30 pound propane tank to use for cooking. It's fun to think about how creative we'll have to be to make it all work. But perhaps, that is giving too much credit to Kim and I. It will be more about simply changing habits.
Yesterday, we were up on the land getting things ready at the cabin. I went up to the roof and hooked up a black hose to our water tank and put up some shelves and blinds around the place. Kim worked on getting the mold off of our teak table and chairs. After Kim had finished cleaning the mold on the table she felt she needed to wash up. She got out our wash tub and went to the hose I set up and filled the tub with rain water we collected. Because the hose is black and was out in the sun the water got warmed up to a perfect bathing temperature. In the middle of the field that surrounds the cabin, Kim got undressed and washed herself clean as our hand cranked/solar powered radio played classical music from our local NPR station.
We're beginning to tip toe around this planet and it feels nice.
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