A retroactive Earth Hour, all year long

Oops! I missed it! Completely, this year. Usually I put in a good word in these moodlings for the World Wildlife Fund's efforts toward Earth Hour every year, and participate myself, but somehow, it escaped my notice until Friday afternoon, when someone posted a little ad somewhere and I said, aloud, "Oh, it's Earth Hour tomorrow night!" Unfortunately, that was the extent of my observance this year, sigh. During said hour, I was actually sitting in a darkened theatre, watching a play (that referenced the law of thermodynamics, of all things)! So much for Earth Hour 2015.

Did you miss it? Have you missed it in the past? I'm not sure how to make up for my failure to participate. But here's a list of possibilities:

1. I could give up hot drinks for a week. The electricity it takes to boil water is fairly significant.

2. I'll dry my laundry outside. An electric dryer can account for up to 15% of household electricity usage.

3. Do I really need to eat toast for breakfast every day? Toasters consume energy, too. Maybe I'll have fruit instead.

4. I've been getting a bit lazy about turning off power bars for the electricity vampires (computers/TV/microwave and other small appliances) in my house. I'll get back on that bandwagon.

5. I can have my own Earth Hour sometime this week, and enjoy an evening in quiet darkness, maybe with a candle, playing Boggle with Julia.

The thing about Earth Hour is that it's a great tool for building public awareness of humanity's overuse of the earth's energy resources, but if it's only one hour a year, what difference does it really make? Sure, it might be fun to see the lights lowered where I live and participate in that, but it's supposed to carry into our daily lives, too.

This was the ninth Earth Hour, and it's no longer a new idea for most of the planet's human inhabitants. The novelty has worn off to the point that electricity companies are reporting a decline in the amount of energy saved during that hour in comparison to earlier years. I don't think Earth Hour is collapsing by any means, but maybe it's time to take it to a new level for the tenth anniversary Earth Hour on March 26th, 2016.

Any ideas for the tenth anniversary? Something that will really engrave the importance of saving energy on everyone's conscience for another ten years? If you have an idea, leave it in the comments below, or better yet, send it to the World Wildlife Fund, and your own political representatives, to let them know that saving the planet is important in your books.

In the meantime, how are you living Earth Hour 2015 every day of the year?

You don't know what you've got til it's gone

Tomorrow evening between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. is Earth Hour, a time when many people make an effort to live without electricity, to give some consideration to our dependence on energy and come up with ways we can conserve it. Spending an hour in the dark is an interesting exercise in simple living. Not only does it foster a deeper appreciation for the electrical devices we take for granted, but conversation and relationship become more important than our gadgets and gizmos, as they should be.

If you watch Earth Hour coverage or commercials, you'll see that many places and people have turned it into another reason to party, but with a slightly higher consciousness of their energy use. Earth Hour has a high energy, feel good tone, saying, If you can do this, imagine what else we can achieve! That's great, but just IMAGINING isn't enough.

So what can we DO, to not only use less energy, but to save the earth's resources for future generations? Here's a basic list, in no particular order:

1. Shop at thrift stores rather than buying new. If everyone does this, all fashions will be in style, and no one will feel pressured to buy the newest line of clothing.

2. Use recycled products. If everyone does this, we will save a lot of trees in particular, but also a lot of other resources.

3. Avoid highly advertized products and seek simpler solutions. If everyone does this, we will cut down on chemical and resource use, not to mention advertizing energy and materials.

4. Reduce, reuse, recycle, recover: compost organic kitchen scraps, repair the broken, give away the good, share, and lend. If everyone does these things, we can stop extracting important elements from Earth's fragile ecosphere.

5. Dry clothes in sun and wind, or on a clothes rack/line. If everyone does this, we can get by with fewer nuclear facilities, hydro installations and coal burning power plants.

6. Grow food wherever possible, and buy local. If everyone does this, we'll be eating healthier foods and ingesting fewer chemical preservatives.

7. Eat lower on the foodchain. If everyone does this, we'll save the huge environmental costs of raising so much livestock.

8. Use rainbarrels, water-saving fixtures, and don't let clean water flow down the drain. If everyone does this, we also save energy because our water treatment plants aren't working needlessly.

9. Walk, bike, use public transit. If everyone does this, air quality will improve, as will our overall cardiovascular health.

10. Remember that every choice made matters, and that there are always earth-friendlier possibilities that might require a little sacrifice or inconvenience. And yes, imagine what else we can achieve! If everyone makes positive choices for the earth, that haunting line from Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi won't apply to the planet's limited resources -- or our existence as human beings.

Here's young Joni herself in 1970. Have a good Earth Hour!

Simple pleasures... and laundry

I'll never forget the laundry room of a family I lived with in Belgium. It was a small, dark space with a washing machine... and no dryer. Instead, there were wooden racks near the furnace, on which clothing and bedding and everything was hung to dry. I thought it strange at the time, but now I see how smart it is.

We have both washer and dryer at our house, but in the past two years, haven't used our dryer much at all. In the summer, everything goes out on the clothesline, and in the winter, we use our laundry room space to the max.

It started a few summers ago, when I hung all our laundry outside each week. When our electricity bills arrived, we noticed a 15% decrease in our electricity use. Clothes dryers are incredibly inefficient, and clothes don't seem to last as well when they're thrown around in the heat of a dryer drum on a regular basis. So my husband and I talked about it, and determined that it wouldn't be difficult to turn our laundry room into a place for drying clothes during the 7 or 8 months of the year when the weather outside is uncooperative. Lee found four wonderful retractable clotheslines to string across the room, and now our dryer sits idle most of the time. Our electricity bills are also easier on our finances.

True, it takes a little more time and effort to do the laundry this way, but we don't really mind. I love to see things hung up in order on the line, and feel some sort of spiritual connection with my grandmothers, who hung their clothes to dry before the advent of labour-saving devices. As I spread a tea towel over the line and fasten it with a clothespin, I often think of Amy from one of my Simplicity Study Circles, who talked about "Zenning" her laundry: handling each piece with an appreciation for its texture and colour, and being grateful for the fact that she could own such things at all. Being mindful of our clothing, giving thought to where it comes from and who might have made it, its weight and warmth, is not something that a lot of us have time to do. But perhaps if we did, our garments would become more precious and less disposable. Maybe we would care for them more and wear them longer, rather than spending our lives shopping for new things.

Or maybe I'm all wet, and should be hung out to dry!

See also, http://simplemoodlings.blogspot.com/2010/10/ode-to-clothesline.html