Hey, Seven Billion Folks, Look, Behind That Fence, Some Nature!

I heard on the radio this morning that there will be, as of today, seven billion of us living on this planet; that is over four billion more people on this planet than when I was born in the fifties.

            A lot of the talk surrounding this milestone concerns the effect our ever increasing population will have on the environment, more people using more resources, more land, more water, etc. I am curious as to how our increasing numbers are changing the environment, but I’m also wondering how we are changing our relationship with the natural world as well.

            Back in 1800, when only one billion humans populated the world, there were still great expanses where humans had little or no effect on the forests, streams, or open land. Ecosystems functioned as they had for thousands of years; even in the United States there were forests that had not been felled by the ax. If you look at paintings of Thomas Cole or other American painters of this time, the presence of humans is pastoral with little effect on the natural landscape. Nature was depicted as powerful and magnificent.

The Oxbow Thomas Cole 1830s

Today an artist who might set up his easel at the same vantage points that Cole used would have more houses and roads to paint. There may be housing developments and factories as well. With more people, paving over more land and using more land for crops and livestock, there is less and less area for forests, wetlands, and other wild areas.

Open spaces exist, but increasingly they are being fenced off into preserves. The birds still nest and flowers still bloom, but they do so in enclosed areas. If Thomas Cole were to depict our relationship with nature today, the wilderness would be behind a fence and the power magnificence would be absent from his canvasses.

Californians, Even Those Environmentalists, Love Those Weeds!

I just ran across this environmentally friendly life-style magazine from the San Francisco Bay area. Here is its link: http://www.eucalyptusmagazine.com/

I haven’t read much of it, but what I have seen I like. What gives me pause, but also leaves me unsurprised, is that the magazine is called Eucalyptus. As the magazine says in its “About Us” section “This magazine is named Eucalyptus because we admire the tree’s healing properties. Its leaves and bark have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. We also appreciate its adaptability and hardiness, as evidenced by its ability to thrive despite being transplanted far across the globe from its native home of Australia.”

            Eucalyptus are certainly amazing. In San Diego’s Balboa Park, just south of where I live, Eucalyptus trees loom like giants over the park’s historic buildings. A block from my house one grows over a hundred feet tall, and the trunk at its base must be more than five feet in diameter.

            These wonderful trees, however, are not eco-friendly for California. They are invasive, pushing out and replacing our native flora.[i] There are open canyons in San Diego that have been taken over by eucalyptus. Beneath their canopy nothing grows except other nonnative plants. I work with local organizations; part of our conservation work is removing these trees from parkland and open spaces.

            It is unsettling, but unsurprising that when folks wanted a symbol for their health oriented and eco-friendly magazine, they chose the eucalyptus instead of a plant or animal native to the Golden State. As the climate here is mild, we Californians are outdoorsy folks, and we feel ourselves to be in touch with nature. But when we landscape or try to beautify our yards or parks, almost invariably we pick and choose plants from elsewhere. We intersperse eucalyptus with Canary Island date palms and stands of bird of paradise, pretending that we live in a Pacific Island/Australian/South African wonderland—anywhere but southern California.

In suburban landscapes, many of our parks, and along our highways native flora are the exception rather than the rule. Where I live it’s about a five or six block walk to the grocery store from my house. Along the street palms grow, Mexican fan palms and black palms. There are also pepper trees and eucalyptus. Shrubs and other greenery line the lawns along my way. Farther along I walk over a footbridge that passes over an open space about the size of two or three football fields. Looking down to the open space, except for a couple laurel sumac bushes, which are native, the entire open space is overrun with iceplant, eucalyptus, and other nonnative weeds. In my entire walk there are only three or four plants native to San Diego.

            Among the 48 contiguous states California shares with Florida the distinction of hosting the greatest number of nonnative and invasive plants. Of the approximately 7500 plants in California, 1500 of them are nonnatives.[ii] We have entire hillsides that have been taken over with nonnative and invasive plants.

            So you see that we Californians have remade the world around us. And we are out of touch with our natural surroundings to such a degree that even people who may think of themselves as environmentalists embrace an invasive plant as a symbol for their magazine.

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[i] California Invasive Plant Council: http://www.cal-ipc.org/ip/management/plant_profiles/Eucalyptus_globulus.php

[ii] Zedler, P.H., Gautier, C.R., McMaster, G.S., 1983. Vegetation change in response to

extreme events: the effects of a short interval between fires in California

chaparral and coastal scrub. Ecology 64, 809–818.

Occupy San Diego: Get Out the Middle-Aged White Women

“THINGS MUST BE REALLY BAD WHEN MIDDLE-AGED WHITE WOMEN MARCH” That was one of the signs I saw at the Occupy San Diego, and I think that to a large extent that one sign sums up a lot of the flavor of the demonstration. I’ve been to other rallies and demonstrations. You tend to see the same folks there, the ones you run into at the organic grocery store. They can usually be broken down into age groups: Lots of college aged kids and the ones with lots of grey in their hair now, the baby boomer Woodstock generation who are old hands at the demonstration thing.

This crowd was different. There were the college kids and the aging hippies, and even the obligatory drum circle and a guy sort of singing and sort of playing a guitar, but the majority of folks there were the one in the middle, in their thirties and forties, giving a normal curve of adult ages. As I said, the sign about the middle-aged white women sort of summed up the crowd. Also, San Diego has a most varied ethnic mix, yet it can remain quite segregated. Rabble rousing rallies are normally populated by white students and those white aging hippies, but this time around I saw a slightly more diverse crowd, more black, Mexican, Filipino folks.

I was there as a participant, believing that big moneyed interests control too much of our politics and that the divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, the 99% figure that has become a buzz word of this campaign, is sinfully widening and is exacerbated by a tax system that taxes them at a rate far lower than the rest of us.

But I am at heart an observer. So I walked up to a lot of folks and asked them why they were there. College age folks universally said that affording school was a big issue with them. The responses I got from older folks centered around corporate greed and its effects on our government. Two folks quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

I didn’t do a head count, but figure the crowd was about 2000, pretty large considering that this is San Diego and the event was held during work hours.

Is this a growing viable movement? I hope so. It has a big uphill battle, though. The T party gets candidates elected to offices and is able to stymie legislation. That is because they have the financial backing of the Koch brothers and support from the Fox network. They also get a lot of support from talk radio.

            The Occupy movement will get none of that. But it may succeed because it is, as for the little that I saw of it in San Diego, broad based and diverse. Like they say, we are the 99%.

I Put My Laundry On Line

I grab four or five clothespins in my left hand as I bend down to pick a shirt out of the laundry bucket. After a few months, I’ve gotten used to this routine. Holding a few extra pins keeps me from having to reach into the clothespin bag every time I hang a shirt or pair of pants, speeding the process along. This is part of my routine two or three times a week now, hanging our laundry out to dry on a clothesline.

Growing concerned about global warming and my contribution with my car, refrigerator, computer, and any other modern device that plugs in, moves, or shakes, I put up a clothesline a couple years ago outside the house that my wife and I live in. There are 80 million clothes dryers in the United States, and it’s estimated that each one throws from 1500 to 2000 pounds of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every year. Of course that estimate is just that, an estimate. A dryer owned and used by a single person, particularly a frugal one, will not produce the CO2 that is produced by a dryer used by a family of four, but the overall numbers can give an idea of how much we’re warming the planet due to our reliance on dryers.

At the most, we are throwing 80 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with the clothes dryers. It’s a fraction of the 314 million tons of CO2 that our cars and trucks produce in the same year and another fraction of the CO2 produced from industrial production. It is nonetheless a lot of carbon thrown in the air that would not be there otherwise. Also, those statistics are just the United States. There are plenty of clothes dryers in Argentina, Ukraine, and anywhere else that you have people, a power source, and laundry.

When I first started hanging our clothes out, I thought that this would be a sacrifice, that I would dislike the extra labor involved or the change of routine. I was wrong. It’s a chore that forces you to take your time, like almost all the chores that sustained our ancestors for millennia – milking goats or cows, planting crops – the chores that became part of our DNA as human beings, the work that brings quietude and a feeling of well-being.

Some of my earliest and most pleasant memories are of being in the backyard with my mother as she hung laundry out to dry. I remember when she washed our bed sheets and put them on the line. I would run between the brilliant white billowing walls. It seemed magical to me how, in summer, the air seemed so cool as I raced the length between the clothesline poles.

            I hang up a pair of my pants. I’ve learned that it’s best to hang pants legs down. They dry quicker this way. I haven’t read up on this, but I suppose it has something to do with the way water flows from around the waist and pockets and the way water flows through the clothing as it dries. If I hang pants ankles up, it can take a real long time for the waist and pockets to dry. Long sleeved shirts dry best upside down, with the sleeves dangling.

The wind picks up a little from the east. This is good. Easterly winds come in from the desert. The humidity will be low, and these shirts and pants will dry quickly. I’ve always been as aware of the weather as the next person, bundling up when it’s cold and carrying an umbrella for rainy days. But since I’ve started hanging our clothes out, I’m a bit more aware of what is going on in my environment. Is it humid today? Windy? The weather can make all the difference between getting one or two loads done in a day.

            Dry lined clothes enforce a routine on doing laundry. Before I put up the clothesline, I’d throw laundry in the washer any time of day, morning, afternoon, evening. Now, on a laundry day, I know exactly what I’m going to do after breakfast. The clothes go in the washer, and within the hour I have the line and clothespins all set to go. I get the laundry up by a little after nine or ten.

            There are some disadvantages, chief among them the added ironing that I wind up doing from time to time. I have dress shirts that are “iron free.” When they get tossed in the dryer, they come out looking crisp and rarely need a touch up with an iron. It’s a different story when they’re put on a line. They can wind up as wrinkled as a prune.

            On the other hand, I save some money. I’m not spending a dime on electricity or gas to power my dryer. I don’t have any direct proof of this, but my clothes are supposed to last longer when they’re dried outside. It makes sense. Every time they’re dried on a line they are not being par boiled while they tumble against each other. Best of all our clothes smell fresh and clean now. The freshness stays with the shirts, sock, and bed sheets, so that our closets smell fresher.

            I’ve remarked that I’ve installed a wind powered clothes dryer at my house, and it’s interesting to note that older folks, the ones like me who remember their mothers and grandmothers in the backyard with their laundry baskets, are the ones to get the joke. Some of the younger folks get a vague look in their eyes when they hear me say “wind powered clothes dryer.” Perhaps they imagine that I went online and bought a contraption with a windmill and a generator that I hammered to the roof of my house and connected all of its wires to a sleek looking machine in my laundry room.

            There probably is a company that makes such a dingus. And it is probably marketed as a green product. I would guess that such a device would be a good move, and it would lead to less CO2 in the air. There is nonetheless the question of all the metals used in making the generator and motor, not to mention all the wires needed to move all the electricity around.

            Winston Churchill once said “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Along with buildings, Churchill could well have included ballpoint pens, space shuttles, clothes dryers, and everything else that we manufacture. Not only our buildings, but all the things that we shape and form into being also shape and form us as well. In a hunter-gatherer society everyone thinks like a hunter-gatherer. In an industrial society we all think industrially. And so for us, if there is a problem, there has to be something that engineers can figure out an answer to, a new dingus or product that does things better, faster, and more efficiently, that will be the answer. Global warming? Introducing the new wind powered Dryomatic, with computer controlled thingamabobs!

            We environmentalists see ourselves in opposition to industrialists and developers. They would pave over the wetlands we see as essential and wreck even more havoc on the mountaintops of West Virginia. We need to recognize, however, that on a very fundamental level we think as they do. We can’t help it. It’s in our DNA. Inside every tree hugging environmental activist beats the heart of a techno-frenzied consumerist eager for the next eco friendly device. Look at any environmental magazine. There will be ads and product reviews for dozens of newfangled compost enhancers, hybrid cars, solar panels, and anything else that gives us a warm, environmental fuzzy.

            Please don’t get me wrong. Our lights should be a low-watt and our cars should not be gas-guzzlers. But we should realize that we are still part of the social machinery of our industrial society, and we are still nonetheless switching on lights and driving cars. Driving a hybrid is greener than driving any SUV, yet you’re still driving something—using resources and putting CO2 in the air—when you zip down the interstate in your Prius. “Green technology” may not be a full bore oxymoron, but it does have a twinge of doublethink to it.

            We need technological advances to better our situation. But there are other solutions as well—when the lights, though they are low watt, are not turned on, when the car, despite its being a hybrid, is not driven, when the high efficiency clothes dryer is not turned on and the clothes go up on the line instead—that require us to consider things differently, nontechnically, nonindustrially. What I’m suggesting is we need to think outside the Prius.

            My clothesline, I’ve reduced my carbon footprint by putting it up and using it. It has also opened up a new area of life for me. Besides the benefits of saving money and fresher smelling clothes, it has given me an unhurried quiet time of day when I am more attuned to my surroundings, a nontechnical and nonindustrial experience that would be unavailable to me had I put up an all new, green, wind powered Dryomatic clothes dryer.