10 Alternative Ways to Cool Off, Part II

5. Use an Evaporative Cooler

These machines cost less and use less energy than traditional air conditioning units. They work by evaporating hot air and transferring it outside your home. These machines don’t work so well in the humid area where I live, but people who live in drier climates might find that they do just the trick.

4. Use a Single Unit

Single unit air conditioning uses a lot less energy than ones used for whole homes. Just use one for the room you’re in the most. My parents used to do this when we were kids, and they would put up sheets to block off the rest of the house during the summertime to keep the main rooms nice and cool. You could also use erika’s suggestion and try turning your thermostat up just five degrees for a major energy saving impact.

3. Bum Off Someone Else’s Air Conditioning

Here’s the thing—the restaurant, mall, movie theater, or wherever you might go is going to have their air conditioning on whether you want them to or not—and whether you visit or not—so why not just use theirs? It’s like car pooling, only with energy! Take your children to a bounce zone or other indoor play place when it’s too hot to play outside. See if there are any free movies playing (all of our local theaters have some on select days of the week during the summer months). If nothing else, people watch at the mall. You don’t have to spend anything; just window shop, check out the stores, or practice going up and down the stairs (the mall is where we took our daughter to practice using her orthotic inserts, since they have a ton of stairs in nice, manageable segments). You could even eat lunch if you want to—though you don’t have to. Just enjoy the cool air.

2. Keep Ice Water and Ice Cubes Handy

Another thing we often take for granted is our access to water—not only clean water, but cold water! We can keep ourselves cool by continuously drinking cold iced water without using any energy other than our own bodies. (As a bonus, our bodies also burn a few calories while it warms the cold water—though not many.) Some say that keeping your pulse points, such as your wrists, cool with ice cubes or cool washcloths can also help eliminate the need for artificial cooling.

1. Take a Siesta

I like this option! By taking a nap, we can cool off a bit and get some much needed rest—in our house where the adults work nights, rest can be hard to come by. We really love our family naps around here, and the fan alone is good enough during these precious few hours.

10 Alternative Ways to Cool Off

As environmentally conscious as I try to be, I’ve definitely got my faults. One is using too much air conditioning in the hot weather. We’ve been having heat advisories for the past few days, and I’m not sure if our air has kicked off at all. Sure, I have to keep my little girl cool, and being hot makes me super uncomfortable, but there are alternatives to use whenever the weather isn’t this unbearable every day. Here are ten alternatives that we all could try to cut down on our energy use this summer.

10. Open the Windows

This one is easy enough to do, if there is a nice breeze going on. Unfortunately for us, the only room that cools off if we do this is the living room; the rest of the windows don’t receive much of any breeze. So if we’re having a rare family evening, we can pretty much do this. If not, well, we’ll have to look toward another option!

9. Strategically Place Your Fans

If you can’t get a breeze going the way you’d like, perhaps you can make one with some electric fans. Place small fans all around your work station, at your desk, or at your bed, and use larger fans near windows. Ceiling fans can also help circulate air. Unfortunately, this is still using energy; though it is an improvement, at only 30% of the power of the air conditioning. There are some other ways to cool off without using power.

8. Shut Out the Sun

How our ancestors would shudder at this suggestion! They relied on the sun for everything and mourned it when it was gone during the cold winter months. Of course, the world has gotten hotter now—not to mention we live in an age of convenience—so we often take it for granted. By keeping our homes shut, the curtains drawn, and making sure everything is well insulated, after it’s been cooled off we can often keep that coolness in without having the sun replace it with heat. This works especially well at night, when it typically gets colder.

7. Get Wet

Wear wet clothes, take a cool shower, or simply dunk your head in the sink every now and then to keep your hair wet if you can. (This one is especially helpful to people with short hair.)

6. Paint Your Home a Lighter Color

Lighter colors reflect the heat, making sure that your home doesn’t absorb unnecessary amounts of heat. You can also put up reflective shades to deflect some of the heat as well.

WTF, National Parks Conservation Association?

I just received an email asking me to “Like” Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water on Facebook. Are you flipping kidding me? Fan bottled water? No, thanks. From the environmental implications of the plastic bottles themselves (up to 1.5 million tons of plastic from the things wasted annually) to the production of the bottles (which uses enough oil to run 100,000 cars for an entire year) to the gross effects of corporatization the bottled water industry has on communities all over the world (think Tank Girl, but for reals), it’s one of the things that everyone should be buying less of.

Scratch that. It’s one of the things that no one who has access to clean drinking water should buy. And for those of us who worry about our tap water, water purifiers solve the issue much more cheaply, with a lower cost to the environment as well.

So why is the National Parks Conservation Association pairing up with a bottled water company to—what, exactly? Let’s look at their goals:

  1. “To advocate for increased funding for our national parks
  2. To educate the public about the parks’ history and conservation
  3. To protect the wildlife that depend on parks for their survival
  4. To preserve both historical and natural areas for the enjoyment and education of our children and grandchildren”

Call me crazy, but doesn’t the entire concept of bottled water refute all of these goals? Does the NPCA just think that it’s dandy for a company to exploit people, resources, and the environment to help—people, resources, and the environment? It just doesn’t add up.

Of course, there is money involved. Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water is apparently donating 50 cents per person who “Likes” their page. That’s actually a pretty decent contribution, especially when no purchase is involved; I wonder if you could just “Like” them until the fundraiser is over, and then “Un-Like” them?

I’ve seen this dozens of times: a nonprofit organization teams up with a seedy company—or at least a company that doesn’t encompass their own values—to gain some limelight and some coin. Guess what ensues? In some of my experiences, pure disaster. In others, perhaps there is some money and a bit of visibility—but there’s also a lack of integrity, a loss of support from activists, and general contempt from folks like yours truly.

This reeks of the Susan G. Komen/ KFC team-up earlier this year. Like I said then, when companies set out to improve the world, they should do so with partnerships that make sense! Why not pair up with, say, Patagonia, NPCA?

After checking out the company’s website, I am even more convinced that this is pure greenwashing. The company squeals over its thinner bottles (only select types, that is) that use less plastic! and less paper! on the labels, as well as its kiddie-marketed chubby bottles, but at the end of the day, it’s still bottled water, in plastic containers, sold by a corporation.

The World Is Your Clothes Dryer

This time of year is the brief period when we in the Pacific Northwest can actually take advantage of a clothesline.  The rest of the year it's too cold, or too damp, or both.  (Ever tried drying your clothes on a clothesline when it's 48 degrees with 98% humidity?  I have.  It doesn't work.)

Clothes dryers of course use a ridiculous amount of electricity.  Fifty cents of electricity a load, or $193 a year according to this calculator.  (Which presupposes 15 cents per kilowatt hour.)  Aside from the cost, that electricity looks tidy coming out of your electrical outlets, but there's probably some messy environmental consequences on the other side. 

Does your electricity come from nuclear plants, coal-fired plants, hydroelectric plants?  There are down sides to all of these.  The less you use of it, the better.  (When isn't that the case, really?)

Of course, saving electricity and money and carbon footprint is all well and good.  But the undisputed best thing about drying your clothes outside is the amazing wonderful smell.  Many detergent and fabric softener manufacturers have tried to imitate this smell with their "Outdoor Fresh" scent.  They all fail.  There is nothing like the smell of sheets that have been dried outside.  Nothing!

Some people object to the way that clothes dried outside feel stiff to the touch.  This is most noticeable for people who habitually use dryer sheets.  First of all, I object to dryer sheets in the strongest possible terms.  They are not regulated by the FDA, but consider all the chemicals in a dryer sheet, and consider also that your skin is permeable.  Surely everything in the dryer sheet can seep through your skin into your bloodstream.

Second of all, dryer sheets actually work by laying down a film over your clothes.  When you use a dryer sheet, your clothes are not actually getting clean.  They're getting clean, and then covered in weird chemicals.  

Useless chemicals, too!  Why risk the exposure, not to mention the expense?

Okay.  Rant over.

Anyway, the stiffness wears off as soon as you use the item in question.  A few minutes after you put on your jeans, or as soon as you start toweling yourself dry, the clothes will start softening right up.  It's really not an issue.

Another objection is to people seeing all of your unmentionables.  Back In The Day, the strategy here was to have either three parallel clothes lines, or one spoke-shaped clothesline with several concentric circles of line.  You hung your underwear on the inside, and hung larger items on the outside, to shield your shorts from view.

This isn't an option for everyone, particularly those of us who live in small spaces with only room for a single line.  When this is the case, you can either dry your underwear inside (it dries quickly, more quickly than many other clothing items), or mass all of the underwear into a single, brief clothes drying cycle.  If you end up running only one load through the dryer instead of your usual three (or four, or five!) that's definitely a win.

A little bit of strategy, a lot of good weather, and that amazing clothesline smell can be yours!

Photo credit: Flickr/tizzie

Houses made from Plants or Meat

In the interest of sustainability, Urban Planner Mitchell Joachim has some simple advice: Don't build your home, grow it. In this short TED Talk, Mitchell Joachim talks about building houses from plants and even the possiblity of making houses from actual MEAT without harming any living animals.

My Grey Water Adventure

Last night, while my daughter had a bath, I was once again dipping into one of my favorite books, Above All, Be Kind. Though I still don’t allow her to be alone in the tub at age four, I also respect her desire to play alone in the water, so I usually bring a book or some writing to work on while she’s playing with her bath toys.

As I was reading again about Gandhi’s lovely quote—“My life is my message”—and Weil’s sage advice on leading by example, I was thinking about how I always drain my daughter’s water out as she exits the bathtub. It’s just an unconscious, automatic response to what I’ve done my whole life. But how could I waste so much water?

I’ve been teaching my daughter about how precious water is—how the world experiences shortages of water all over the globe, and how we just take it for granted that we have so much of it available. (In kid terms, of course: “Some people don’t have much water. We are very lucky! How can we save the water we use?” Her favorite answers are to turn off the sink and to give the cats water from our glasses before bed instead of dumping it out.)

How can I teach her this, though, when I’m constantly wasting our bath water—a valuable resource—right in front of her eyes? It’s not bad water, either; though a kid, she doesn’t get that dirty (well, she actually had sawdust in her hair on this particular occasion…!), and like my bath products, hers are eco-friendly. So I made a quick decision to try a hand at using grey water, or recycled water.

I’m glad I did it, but it wasn’t that easy! I don’t really have any great containers for getting water out of a bathtub, after all, so I ended up using one of the big bins we use to store our yarn and other craft supplies. I had to dip it in and make several trips—more than a dozen, I’m sure!—and there was still some water left when I drained it. It was tiring, too, carrying the heavy bin out first the back door, then the front, to water various flowers, the compost, and eventually just the grass.

My daughter watched me with round eyes. “What are you doing, Mommy?” I smiled, though strained, with sweat dripping in my glasses. “I’m recycling your bath water, sweetie. Just giving the flowers a drink!”

She smiled. “Can I help you?”

I eyed her nightgown and the clock, in that order. “Hmm. It’s getting late. Maybe next time, okay?”

“Okay.”

Next time, I will have to find something small for her to carry some water with—maybe her beach pail she uses for gardening?—because I know she’s going to love doing this. Of course, a siphoning device would be nice, too…

The Greenest Gadget Is The One You Already Own

I wish I could pretend that the following statistic surprised me, but it didn't.  77% of people who bought the new iPhone last week were upgrading the iPhone they already had.  Apple has done the unimaginable: convinced people to throw away a perfectly good thing, in order to get a slightly newer version of that same thing.

This is an ode to my old cell phone, and to old cell phones everywhere.  

My cell phone is the Motorola RAZR, a.k.a. The "It" Phone of 2004.  I bought mine in 2005, and it was a refurb then, to boot.  I use it to make phone calls, send the occasional text message, and take the occasional cameraphone picture.  It does all of these things reliably.

Once in a while, someone tries to convince me to get something new.  It's true that I've lingered over the idea of getting a Blackberry.  I wouldn't get the data plan, obviously.  (Why pay an additional $600 a year just for the privilege of owning a Blackberry?)  But I'm intrigued by the idea of having a better camera, and of using a proper keyboard for my texts and tweets.  Poking out an SMS with the multi-function keys does get tedious.

But you know what?  My RAZR works fine.  

I like my RAZR.  I like its shape and weight, and the way it fits into my pockets just so.  I like the feel of the hinge when you snap it shut.  I like the flat keypad, which prevents crud from building up between the keys.  

By my estimation, I have saved at least $400 by keeping this RAZR, compared to what most people would have spent to upgrade their cell phone over the same time frame.  The average American upgrades their phone every 18 months, and pays an average of $100 for each upgrade.  And that's just for regular phones.  I've saved a whopping $4,500 in that time versus becoming an iPhone fan!

Best of all, I've saved the materials cost of all those new phones.  Minerals like selenium, copper, and titanium don't just grow on trees.  They are mined out of the earth at a significant cost to human lives, pollution, and the immediate surroundings.  Add the carbon footprint of shipping all those raw materials, the toxic waste produced by the surprisingly messy electronics manufacturing industry, and the carbon footprint of shipping them out.  It's not good!

From an ideological perspective, I think it's good to stick with what you've got.  Buying the latest and greatest is a habit we need to break ourselves of, if we really want to change our impact on the planet.  The short documentary "The Story of Stuff" lays this out better than I ever could.

In poking around this morning I ran across a great website that supports this effort.  Created by blogger celebrity Anil Dash, Last Year's Model celebrates the practice of holding on to perfectly good older gadgets.  This is a movement that I can really get behind!

Green My Parents

Do you ever wish you could just turn your parents green?

I don’t mean, of course, to change them into the color green, like Irish Smurfs or leprechauns, but green in deed—that is, an eco friendly lifestyle. Every time I visit my own parents and witness the paper plates and packaging tossed away, my little heart frowns a little. Of course, it’s easy for me to recycle since my city happily comes to pick it up from my house and makes money off of it; it’s harder for my parents, who live in a more rural area.

Still, maybe Green My Parents could help all of us. According to the Green My Parents blog, the program is a “revolutionary, nationwide program to help young people teach their peers and parents how to work together to help the economy, earn money at home, and save the planet through simple, everyday actions.” In short, it’s letting children do what they do best—use their own innovative ideas and imaginations—to help us change the world.

When I worked at YouthNoise.org, that was our fundamental belief—that the youth of the world would be the ones to heal it. I still fervently believe in this concept. Without the constraints, prejudices, and overall hopelessness that so many adults develop throughout their lifetimes—which often lead to “That’s a stupid idea!” and “That won’t work!” ways of thought—kids dream up the most amazing things.

I met a young man who developed a very simple and cheap system to treat water in Africa to make it safe for drinking. Another young woman created a program to get toilets to people who had none. Hundreds of youth are doing things every day that just don’t get much media attention; without it, we tend to lump kids together as lazy bums who don’t care about anything, when the truth is anything but. In fact, every time I hear a person on a talk show or television program talking about efforts being done for this or that cause, it’s almost always got youth at the center.

So it’s no surprise that Green My Parents exists to help get peers, parents, and other adults to really take a look at their environment and how their economy supports its destruction by none other than the help of their own children. A very new movement—launched just this year—it builds upon something already in existence: young people who want to change the world and save their planet.

The movement works in conjunction with several well-known publications and campaigns—such as Ranger Rick, Slow Food, and Donors Choose—as well as via several social media outlets (such as Twitter and Facebook). By hosting workshops and training youth how to turn their passion into action, Green My Parents hopes to help people reduce their energy use and overall consumption, save money, and help the planet in the process.

Angry At BP? 4 Things You Can Do!

As you watch the BP oil spill unfurl like a sticky black flag in the ocean, do you feel helpless?  Like you just wish you could DO SOMETHING?  Well, there IS something you can do.

BP only drilled in the gulf because we - you and I - want to consume it.  I hear a lot of people calling for a boycott of BP.  But that's just a silly superficial understanding of the situation.  If you don't want a spill like this to happen again, there's an easy answer: stop buying oil, and things made of oil.  

Easier said than done, right?  Not at all!  This is the time to develop a more nuanced understanding of your petroleum footprint, and start making deep cuts in your own oil budget.

1. The first thing you can do is drive less.  This year I started a rule that if I wanted to go to the store one day, I would schedule a trip to the store tomorrow.  (Unless it's an emergency involving something on the Critical Items list: 1. toilet paper, 2. tampons, 3. cat food, 4. coffee.)  Just delaying a trip by one day can save me up to four round trips a month.  

Every time you find yourself reaching for the car keys ask yourself, can this wait a little longer?  Can I bundle this errand with another one later in the week?  Is there a way I can accomplish this task online, on foot, or with public transportation?  And the big question for me is always, do I really need to do this, or am I just looking for an excuse to get out of the house and/or avoid some task on my to-do list?  If the latter, I give myself permission to find another way to get out of that task - a way that doesn't involve driving the car.

2.  Next on your list: plastic.  It's made of oil.  Buy less of it!  

3.  Buy local.  Locally-produced goods didn't travel as far - burning oil all the way - to get to you.

4.  And finally, buy fewer things that are made with oil.  For example, most conventional shampoos, laundry detergents, soaps, conditioners, and toiletries of all sorts are made with ingredients that are sourced from petroleum.  Crazy, right?  

I was going to write up a list of common ingredients which are made from petroleum.  But that list would be ridiculously long.  It starts with mineral oil and propylene glycol, and ends with fragrances, and is about a hundred items long!  Suffice it to say that unless the label states "no petroleum-derived ingredients," it contains lots of petroleum-derived ingredients.  

Shop for green cosmetics, toiletries, and cleaning products.  Or better yet, make your own!  Baking soda isn't a petroleum product, and it doesn't ship in plastic.  Dr. Bronner's doesn't contain petroleum-derived ingredients, and although the bottles are made of plastic, it's from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic.  And there are a lot of places where you can buy it in bulk, with a reusable container.

Every time you think a sad thought about an oily pelican or the underwater plume, every time you read another news story about the wretched destruction, look around you and count all the things made of plastic. And pick one of them to resolve never to buy again.  It's something you can do, and it makes a tangible difference in the world.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user leeno

Are Hair Booms A Scam?

I assume you've heard about the hair booms by now.  Hair and other natural fibers like feathers and animal fleece are excellent at sopping up spilled oil.  After the Deep Water Horizon spill, a non-profit organization called Matter Of Trust began collecting hair clippings to stuff into nylons, to make floating booms that would soak up the oil.  But is it even happening?  The information is conflicting, to say the least!

On May 24th, the Huffington Post reported that "hundreds of thousands of pounds of hair" was piling up in warehouses across the gulf, and that "BP and the U.S. Coast Guard say they are not using hair to sop up the oil, and don't plan to."  The report added that Matter of Trust had released a statement that "there had been a misunderstanding with BP."

Furthermore, engineers for the Coast Guard had done studies that showed that "using the hair was not feasible, and the organizations collecting the hair were asked to stop doing so."  The Coast Guard is sopping up the spill with a material called "sorbent," which works better than nylons stuffed with hair.  And there is no shortage of sorbent, thus no need for a nation-wide hair trimmings drive.

Despite all this, the Matter of Trust website continues to tout the hair booms, and to solicit donations.  What's going on?  

According to the FAQ on their website, although BP and the Coast Guard have rejected the hair boom donations, "Gulf municipalities and harbors are taking the donated natural fiber boom to protect their shores whereever they can."  Although Matter of Trust is soliciting sign-ups on their website, buried deep within their FAQ is a mumbled request not to send any more hair right now.  

Matter of Trust reports that their volunteers have stuffed 10 miles of booms already, and they estimate that there is another 15 miles' worth of boom stored up in their warehouses.  However, they will continue to collect locally in the event of another spill.

And at the same time, at other points in their website and FAQ they continue to solicit donations.

I struggle against my own cynical side, which points out that you can make money selling hair and animal fibers.  Manufacturers buy them up by the bale in order to serve as stuffing and other raw materials.  There's not enough money in it to make it worthwhile to buy hair clippings just in order to resell them, of course.  But enough that if an outpouring of public sentiment results in dozens of warehouses full of fibers, that the proceeds could certainly help carry your charity through some hard times.

The past few years have been rough on non-profits of all stripes.  And keep in mind that Matter of Trust's main charter is not to protect the oceans, but to redistribute wealth and surplus.   

I definitely don't want to believe that the hair boom thing is a scam.  But I have to admit, I harbor some serious doubts.

Image copyright Matter of Trust

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