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A Sensible (Yet Humorous) Approach to Climate Control

Striving to live green can get to be deadly serious at times. Sometimes a humorous approach is the most effective way to wake people up to common sense.

The other day, as Daytona Beach started getting its first long-sleeve days and quilt-sleeping nights, with lows forecasted in the 40s, a friend of a friend posted this photo on Facebook, showing a thermostat with a big orange note stuck onto it, basically saying there’s no need for heat unless you can see your breath. If you’re cold, you’re not wearing enough clothes.

This note summarizes my approach to a T. I haven’t used heat in over a decade (living in FL for past 8 yrs, Austin before that). But I never thought of writing a fun sassy note like this! Great idea.

(Now to make a similar note for air conditioning, which I do not use either; have rarely used voluntarily in my life.)

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Deadly Pest Control: When the Remedy Is Worse Than the Problem

I don’t know if it’s like this in other states, but here in Florida, pest control can be SEVERE. I’m talking, putting a tent over an ENTIRE HOUSE and spraying poison all inside the house and tent. The tent stays up for a day or so, with signs warning DEADLY POISON, DO NOT ENTER. After the tent is removed, the house is allowed to air out for a day or so before humans and animals are allowed back inside.

I never saw such a thing til I moved to Florida 8 years ago. I didn’t even see this back in Texas, a state which certainly has its share of critters also. The first time I saw one of the garish green-and-yellow tents billowing in the wind, with DEADLY POISON signs all around, I was horrified. The horror never wears off no matter how many times I see this.

A close neighbor’s place was just tented for pests, mainly termites and bedbugs. It’s a rental property, occupied by four tenants plus the landlord who lives on site. Bedbugs are a hideous problem that can turn a person’s life upside-down. And termites, well, they eat wood, so we don’t really want them in our houses either. Still, the tent and “deadly poison” seems like a bad idea to me. It also seems to me that pest problems just get worse and worse the more we try to eradicate everything.

Insects — tiny creatures at the base of the food chain — are being combated with DEADLY POISON. The thing about the base of the food chain is, it’s robust. It isn’t going anywhere. Nature designed it that way. Because, think about it, if the base of the food chain goes, what happens to the rest of the food chain, right on up to us humans?

By the way, all the plant life around the perimeter of the tent, to about 3 feet out, gets killed also. Grass and flowering ground-cover before; crisp brown field of shriveled death a day after.

What did we used to do before such drastic treatments? How did we deal with termites, bedbugs, roaches? Have our present-day drastic methods cut down on the numbers of pests? Are modern-day methods a deal with the devil?

Ask the pest-control guys, they’ll tell you it’s all safe and harmless. That chemicals have gotten less dangerous over the years. At the end of the day, I have to believe my own observations.

And, one thing for sure: I have yet to see or hear of a situation where fighting nature produces a good outcome. Unless we wise up and get beyond our compulsion to eradicate, nature will bat last on this one, I have no doubt.

My dear friend Charlie B, who talks with a lot of Florida old-timers in the course of his work on golf-course irrigation systems, knows an old cracker George J who swears by this termite-control method: Set up a barrier by burying logs or planks along a perimeter line a few feet from the house, say six feet. Inspect periodically, and as the wood gets termite-riddled, replace it. My understanding of this method is that it keeps the termites away from the house, preoccupied with a wood source further out.

In her autobiographical book Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (author of The Yearling among other iconic fiction books) gives a rich chronicle of her life as a back-woods Florida homesteader. She mentions that once a house would reach a certain point of being overrun by roaches, rats, and other pests, the owner would abandon it, let it melt back into the land, and build a new one in a location slightly removed (a few yards away, if I remember correctly). This works well when houses are of modest size, and where building codes don’t bar people from building their own houses out of abundant, locally available materials.

My dear friend CB, who talks with a lot of Florida old-timers in the course of his work on golf-course irrigation systems, had a client who swears by this termite-control method: Set up a barrier by burying logs or planks along a perimeter line a few feet from the house, say six feet. Inspect periodically, and as the wood gets termite-riddled, replace it. My understanding of this method is that it keeps the termites away from the house, preoccupied with a wood source further out.

A tip I thought of, not just for termites but for pests in general: Make sure someone is living in your house year-round, so pests are less likely to develop and thrive unchecked. And live in a house that isn’t so large you can’t inspect it regularly and catch damage before it gets too far gone, necessitating a deadly toxic “solution.”

Perhaps one of the saddest visible casualties of the tenting incident was a bay laurel tree. Bay laurel trees in recent years have been hit by a blight that turns their leaves brown and kills them. One rarely sees a bay laurel tree at all here anymore. But somehow, in the shelter of my neighbor’s backyard, this bay laurel, after finally being hit by the blight maybe four years back, managed to recover and grow back bigger than ever.

The other day, at the instruction of the pest-control guy (who said it was necessary to make room for the tent), the apartment manager cut that tree down along with all the other vegetation. The trunk was a good 8 inches in diameter.

It gets sadder. Subsequently, the apartment manager heard from a different pest-control company that they wouldn’t have required him to trim back that tree, or most of the other vegetation. When I hear things like this, all I can do is take solace in the knowledge that plants, like other wildlife, will eventually bounce back.

But will we humans survive our own short-sightedness? That’s the real question.

Further Reading:

• Supposedly harmless treatments can cause severe health problems, and the contractor may not issue adequate precautions to the resident: “Last winter, despite a low-level warning beacon in my gut, I hired a company to apply a chemical flea treatment in our house. … I made this decision even though I’d been a ‘ban lawn-care pesticides from our campus’ activist in college …”

• Pesticides can backfire and make infestations even worse. Read NRDC’s tips on how to control household pests without scary poisons.

• Fumigating? Four easy steps to take before you tent: “Chances are, at least one house in your ‘hood is being treated for termites right now. And despite the festive clown-and-circus themed tent, the chemicals that go into the fumigation process simply aren’t funny. …”

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A “Society of Distracted Drivers”

“If we were indeed paying attention, what would we do differently? We would make sustainability — real sustainability, not just eco-groovy gestures — our first priority. … What’s so hard about that? Really, the most difficult aspect of this shift is the initial decision to make it. And once that decision has been made, plenty of improvements to daily life would likely accompany any sacrifices we’d have to make. For example, imagine how a more mindful economy would allow people to pursue their callings instead of just chasing jobs. Or consider how leading less busy lives would allow more time to spend with loved ones.”

Wise words from Richard Heinberg of Post Carbon Institute, in an article posted on resilience.org (originally published by Common Dreams).

If you really want to get motivated to reduce your footprint, focus on the “quality of life” aspect!

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Confession: This blog may be an eco-fail!

I’ve made it a mission to live a low-footprint life and motivate others to do so. But alas, sometimes it turns out that the best advice I have to offer is, DON’T do as I do!

As one example, I’m learning that my blog and website may have a large eco-footprint. Yikes! Awkward and embarrassing, given that I’ve set myself up as a source of information on green living and in fact had just written a post about online footprint!

The fact is, it’s something that’s happened more than I care to admit: I come to find out that something I’m doing isn’t eco-friendly. But, learning and improving is what life is all about, right? So when I find out I’m doing something destructive, I set about changing it as best I can. (Of course this applies to life in general, not just eco-footprint. More times than I can count, I’ve been faced with the unpleasant realization that something I’m saying or doing is having a negative impact on other people and the world. It’s a hard realization but is the first step to effecting necessary change.)

Regarding the eco-footprint of this website, I’m learning that I may be consuming a huge amount of bandwidth unnecessarily. I’ve just opened up a conversation with my hosting service, Dreamhost, to find out how I can reduce the footprint of this site while still effectively conveying the content I’m setting out to share with you.

By the way, Dreamhost are great folks, and I’m going to take this opportunity to put in a plug for them. I recommend Dreamhost for three main reasons:

1) Trouble-free operations: I have never, in the 10+ years I’ve used Dreamhost for web hosting and domain name service, had a problem that was caused on their end.

2) Excellent customer service: And for the problems on my end, I recommend Dreamhost because of their highly responsive and expert customer service. The articles on Dreamhost’s website on how to reduce bandwidth go way over my head; they’re written for users who actually know about things like Java and CSS and PHP, as opposed to merely knowing the words which is the level I’m at. But the Dreamhost tech support people are very skilled at adapting their advice to a person’s level of expertise. It may take some back-and-forth for me to get a handle on my bandwidth problem, but with the help of tech support, I’m confident I’ll be able to resolve it.

3) Green operations, green attitude: I’ve just found out that Dreamhost does a lot to maintain green operations at its offices and server centers. This extends not only to buildings and equipment but also to the work environment itself. They’ve got extensive recycling, and they even have composting onsite. They use ceramic cups, plates, and “real silverware” only; no disposables. They have a generous work-from-home policy, and offer financial incentives for employees to use public transport.

It’s reassuring to know that, while my blog and website may need some major eco-remediation, at least my web-hosting company is green! I’ll let you know as I find out more about the scope of the problem (it may be as simple as deleting unnecessary photos and resizing some others), and will keep you informed of my progress.

(And, if you’re looking for a web-hosting service, be sure and check out Dreamhost! Even if you’re not currently looking for a web-hosting service, their site contains a lot of valuable information for anyone who’s sharing content online. And it’s a pleasure to read.)

On a more general note, part of my point in this post is that if you learn that some aspect of your life isn’t very eco-friendly, please don’t despair, even if you can’t address it right away. No one is perfect; it’s a journey rather than a destination; and we can all learn from each other.

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The Value of Reducing Your Overhead

Good, down-to-earth advice based on wisdom and experience is something I always appreciate. When I hear such advice from two very different sources, I’m even more inclined to sit up and take notice.

A piece of advice that made a big impression on me was, “Reduce your need to earn.” I heard this back in 2005 from Scott Pittman, of the U.S. Permaculture Institute, who taught the two-week course in Santa Fe, NM, where I earned my first Permaculture Design Certificate.

I just loved that phrase! And often over the years I’ve encountered the same advice worded differently from a variety of sources, including successful corporate executives. The other day, reading a business leadership book (I read a lot of those — they’re great reading not just for business but for life!), I came across the following:

Many young leaders are tempted to take high-salaried jobs to pay off loans or build their savings, even if they have no interest in the work and do not intend to stay. They believe that after ten years they can move on to do the work they love. Yet many become so dependent on maintaining a certain lifestyle that they get trapped in jobs where they are demotivated and unhappy. Locked into the high-income/high-expense life, they cannot afford to do work they love. Ironically, not one of the leaders interviewed would up taking a position predicated upon establishing wealth early so they they could later pursue roles they would enjoy.

Excellent advice, from TRUE NORTH – Discover Your Authentic Leadership, by Bill George with Peter Sims.

I’d actually been practicing this principle for years without fully realizing what I was doing. Long before I took that life-changing Permaculture Design Certificate course, I had reduced my financial overhead to the point where I only had to work a few hours a week to cover my expenses. The rest of the time was free to develop business ideas, make art, connect with friends, ponder solutions to world problems, get out in nature. And, perhaps most importantly, have ample time and headspace to tune in to my inner voice.

Anytime I hear of someone who “can’t afford” to do the work they really want to do; can’t afford to travel; can’t afford to take courses; can’t afford to live the way they want to live; or just plain can’t figure out what they want in life … my first advice is always, “Reduce your overhead. Reduce your need to earn.”

This advice applies doubly to people who are passionate about the environment. Reducing our overhead not only helps us personally; it helps the planet. People with low overhead and simple needs tend to have a much lower eco-footprint. And, they have more free time and headspace to ponder solutions to our collective problems.

Want to improve your life and reduce your footprint in short order? Reduce your need to earn! Note, this is different from saying “Cut your earnings. Deprive yourself. Embrace poverty, be poor, live on the edge.”

No, what I’m talking about is reducing your NEED to earn.

Or, in other words: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” Those words are from Henry David Thoreau (a real master of low-footprint living large!).

A really far-out example of this principle is Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher who supposedly dwelt in an urn. Now THAT would reduce a person’s housing costs! A very low-footprint life, with few possessions other than his drinking cup. But one day, Diogenes came upon a young boy who didn’t even have a cup, and simply drank water out of his hands. Seeing this, Diogenes tossed his own cup away.

Most of us prefer to own cups, and at least a bit of other stuff besides. But almost all of us can benefit ourselves, and help the planet, by reducing our need to earn.

For your further encouragement, I give you two present-day real-life examples of highly successful small businesses that were started by people who’d just had the seemingly disastrous experience of losing their steady, high-paying jobs:

• The Soup Peddler, Austin TX: started out as a one-man bicycle-based business delivering jars of homemade soup; grew into multiple storefront locations

• Kale Café Juice Bar & Vegan Cuisine, Daytona Beach FL: started out as a booth at a farmers’ market; now has multiple storefronts

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Electronic Decluttering: Online Footprint (Part 2)

(Part 2 of a 2-part post; read Part 1 here)

Internet use has a very large energy footprint. Most of that energy is consumed by remote servers and other equipment, making it complicated for everyday people to calculate their personal internet footprint. In this post I share some simple tips for reducing your online footprint, without having to perform any calculations or track down any numbers.

***IMPORTANT NOTE: Online footprint is a work in progress for me, and I’m finding out I may be one of the worst offenders! I’m learning that this blog and website may have a huge footprint, which of course is unintended. I am now looking into the scope of the problem, and how to address it.*** UPDATE 11/3/18: My tentative conclusion is that this website does not have a particularly large footprint. I’m still awaiting more information from my webhosting service. That said, I was immediately able to cut the bandwidth of my site in half just by reducing the size of the uploaded photos to match their display size. HUGE reductions in bandwidth and storage space can be achieved by reducing the size of photos.

According to some experts, internet use now accounts for as large a share of the world’s carbon footprint as airline flight! As I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, the internet infrastructure industry can reduce its footprint considerably by eliminating inefficiencies; for example, servers running when they don’t need to.

But the real power lies in our personal everyday choices. So how can we as everyday people do our part to reduce the internet’s footprint? How do we even calculate our share of it? The electricity used to power our household computers and devices is a tiny drop in the bucket. Most of the energy cost of the uploading, downloading, streaming, and cloud storage we do is external and invisible to us.

One Riot for Austerity member suggested that we use online time (hours per day) as a measure of our internet footprint. For a starting point, I googled and found:

• The average American spends 24 hours a week online, says Technology Review. This is up from 9.4 hours a week in 2000. 17.6 of those hours are at home, up from just 3.3 hours a week in 2000.

• Americans devote more than 10 hours a day to screen time, according to CNN. But this includes non-internet devices such as TVs too.

I spend an average of 5 to 8 hours a day on the internet. Probably 95% of that time is related to my work. Since I don’t have a TV or DVD player, all of my screen time is laptop or smartphone.

In the past few days, since starting to focus on the topic of online footprint, I’ve cut my actual internet-connected time to about 3-4 hours a day just by being more deliberate: I disconnect the wireless connection unless I’m actually doing something such as uploading a blog post, or interacting on Facebook. I’m experimenting with composing blog posts offline. I really notice how much online time I was using just gazing and surfing idly, or hitting the refresh button.

Another possible measure of internet footprint is how much cloud storage we are using. KOOFR, a cloud-storage company, posted an article on how much cloud storage an average person might want. KOOFR says 10GB will be enough for about a year — assuming you only want to back up the photos you’re taking with your phone, and that you upload an average of just 3 photos per day and one 1-minute video per week. Obviously some of us do a lot more than that! The KOOFR article also has a handy chart showing the storage requirements of various kinds of files including movies, music files, documents, and ebooks.

I don’t have any of my devices backed up to the cloud (I use memory sticks to back up crucial files), but of course my blog and YouTube channel live on the cloud, as does my Facebook and other social-media presence, and some email messages. I’m currently in the process of calculating the cloud storage used by this blog, and by my YouTube channel.

And yet another measure of our internet footprint is the bandwidth we are using. If you have a data plan on your smartphone, and that data plan has a limit, it should be pretty easy to know roughly how much bandwidth is being consumed by your uploading, downloading, and streaming activities. I haven’t yet determined whether there’s a similar way to find the total for a laptop or other computer.

As for how much electricity our online habits are using, this paper from ACEEE reports that “the Internet uses an average of about 5 kWh to support the utilization of every GB of data.”

It’s hard to know exactly how many gigs we’re consuming, since most of the consumption is externalized. The paper goes on to say, “Only 38% of those costs are borne by the end-user, while the remaining costs are thinly spread over the global Internet through which the data travels; in switches, routers, signal repeaters, servers, and data centers … This creates a societal ‘tragedy of the commons,’ where end users have little incentive to consider the other 62% of costs and associated resources.”

Powerful stuff, literally! Huge potential for footprint reduction.

Based on my research so far, here are a few suggestions for reducing your internet footprint:

– Set out to cut the number of hours you spend online per day. Think about what you would most like MORE of in your life: more time, feeling more focused and less distracted, being more present with others, spending less time sitting down and more time moving around — and with those goals in mind, you’ll find it easier to reduce online time.
– Close browser tabs when you’re not actively using a site (this affected my computer RAM usage, and affects streaming bandwidth as well).
– Be very deliberate and selective about your consumption of videos and other high-bandwidth media. Even in the case of content that you consider really worthwhile, try just reading the transcript (if available) rather than watching the video. Some people actually find this faster and retain the information better.
– Invite others to watch media with you – spread the footprint over more people! This also helps alleviate another major problem associated with our long hours in front of electronic screens, namely, loneliness and isolation.
– Some apps and sites, such as YouTube, allow users to set video viewing quality. Choose the lowest possible resolution.
– Have an “Internet Sabbath” day. I’ve been doing this on Sundays for awhile and the world hasn’t come crashing down.
– Turn off router and modem at night, or whenever you usually sleep. I’ve found this helpful because I used to be one of those people who would reach for her smartphone as soon as she woke up in the morning, or couldn’t sleep at night, etc. Nowadays, I go outside and look at the moon til I get sleepy again. Or count sheep or whatever. Or sometimes enjoy a realtime chat with one of my night-owl friends who I wouldn’t usually get to talk with!
– Decide to refrain from taking your smartphone or other device with you to certain places, such as church, restaurants, social evenings at friends’ houses, etc. Or if you have to take it with you, keep it turned off.
– Cut the data plan from your smartphone. I sharply reduced my internet use a few years back when I did this to save money. I used to check email and social-media sites constantly; now I can only do it when I have a wifi connection. It felt strange at first but I soon got used to it and enjoyed suddenly having hours of free time (as well as saving about $40 a month).
– Whatever reductions you pursue, take care that they don’t end up increasing your overall footprint and defeating the purpose. For example, if you start to take a lot more long-distance trips to visit friends and family as a result of quitting Facebook, or if you end up missing out on work opportunities because you dropped off the radar of your online communities, that’d be something to look at.

A final suggestion: If you’re using the internet for work, social activism, civic engagement, connecting with loved ones, and other beneficial purposes, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Do what you reasonably can to reduce your footprint, but also recognize that the internet is a tool of modern life, and it’s done a lot of good to spread social movements and help people stay connected. And it’s expanded the possibilities for teleworking! Rather than quit Facebook, stop blogging, and so on, we’d do better to boost the QUALITY of our online time in terms of emotional wellbeing, beneficial impact on other people, and so on.

A couple of examples from my own life:

• Not having an internet connection at home could be an option for me someday, but I’d have to write a lot offline and then go to a public wireless network to upload a batch of material all at once. That would take discipline and might improve the quality of my work — or it might just make life inconvenient and I’d end up posting less, thus limiting my ability to support people in their efforts to reduce their footprint.

• I may delete my YouTube channel. For the moment, pending further research, I’m simply suspending new uploads to my channel. The videos take a lot of energy (my personal energy, not just fossil), and the quality is less than professional. I suspect that my writing and my in-person education services are reaching people more effectively. But I could find out that I’m mistaken.

The Riot for Austerity sets targets for reducing one’s consumption by 90% of the U.S. average in various categories such as electricity, water, gasoline, and consumer purchases. No Riot category exists for internet usage. Calculating the U.S. average and setting targets for online footprint will be new terrain.

I’ll let you know what else I find out about my internet footprint, and how my reduction experiments go. Research I still need to do: Calculate the footprint of this blog, and also of my YouTube channel. My blog webhosting service, Dreamhost, has first-rate tech support, and I’ll let you know what I hear back from them after I email them with my various questions.

Also, I invite you to keep me posted on your journey! I apologize for the inconvenience of not allowing comments on this blog, but comment-spam takes so much time and energy to deal with (even with a spam filter), I’ve decided to keep comments turned off at least for now. I look forward to your emails though.

Further Reading:
• Internet Energy Consumption Report from ACEEE: “This paper is a thought-piece on the how’s and why’s of end-to-end, IT energy use. It will pursue questions like: What type of equipment is used to get a MB from the data-center to your desktop? Is multi-tabbed browsing the IT equivalent of leaving the refrigerator door open? How much energy does it use? How much does it cost; and who pays for it?”

• Greenpeace article on how much energy the various video-streaming services use, and the percentages of renewable energy that power them.

• Article on bandwidth of video-streaming services vs. audio: video-streaming takes up much more bandwidth than audio-only music-streaming. This article shares ways for users to control their bandwidth consumption (which, depending on your data plan, can help save your wallet as well as the planet!)

• Why your internet habits are not as clean as you think (bbc.com): Lots of info here. No surprise that watching videos accounts for the biggest share of internet traffic, 60%, and that online video-watching alone accounts for 1% of total annual carbon emissions worldwide. Also: Emojis have a greater footprint than plain text (never thought about it, but it makes sense). And, an email with one photo attachment can have nearly 170 times the carbon emissions of one without. And this: “By simply stopping unnecessary niceties such as “thank you” emails we could collectively save a lot of carbon emissions. If every adult in the UK sent one less “thank you” email, it could save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year – the equivalent to taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road…”

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Electronic Decluttering: Online Footprint

(Part 1 of a 2-part post)

One of the more knowledgeable, longtime participants in the Riot for Austerity recently brought up the topic of online footprint. She pointed out that the energy cost of video streaming, cloud storage, high-data-usage platforms like Facebook, and so on is far more than people realize.

She rightfully questioned why we were sitting around, ONLINE, discussing the pros and cons of replacing old refrigerators, while ignoring the footprint of our internet use.

The electricity required to charge and power our laptop computers and mobile devices is just a drop in the bucket. Most of the footprint of our internet usage is invisible to us as end-users. For example, there’s the constant maintenance and replacement of server equipment, the air-conditioning required to cool those vast banks of servers, and of course the electricity used by the equipment itself. Calculating one’s individual contribution to the total footprint of the internet is a bit tricky, but surely not impossible.

And, from an environmental standpoint, the matter is quite urgent: Data-center web servers, such as those used by Google and Facebook, contribute just about as much to greenhouse-gas emissions as air travel, the Guardian reports. The data-center sector and air travel each generate about 2% of the total volume of greenhouse gases.

And, IT as a whole now accounts for 10% of electricity use worldwide, according to this article in the Register. “Although charging up a single tablet or smart phone requires a negligible amount of electricity, using either to watch an hour of video weekly consumes annually more electricity in the remote networks than two new refrigerators use in a year.”

Yikes! Can it really be true that my one-hour video chat with a friend in faraway Tokyo consumed as much electricity as two refrigerators use in a year? Sounds crazy but it could be true. What’s not in dispute is that we ordinary people have, as the article puts it, “very little idea of the exact footprint our habit for lolcats, frequent emails, brand new fondleslabs and streaming video takes up.”

Since the data-center industry as a whole has such a large footprint, any reductions that sector can make would obviously be very helpful. Data Center Knowledge published this article offering suggestions for greening the industry. The suggestions include identifying inefficiencies in existing power and cooling systems; utilizing free outside air and water sources for cooling whenever possible; and targeting “zombie servers” — servers that run even when it’s not required. These zombie servers are a little-known source of waste, which can account for up to 30% of all servers! Data Center Knowledge also suggests the industry take various steps to optimize usage of network assets.

Now, what about us as individuals? How can we get a handle on that “habit for lolcats, frequent emails, brand new fondleslabs and streaming video”? It actually might not be as hard as it seems, since a lot of people these days are noticing the personal costs of online addiction and are voluntarily limiting their usage via “internet Sabbaths,” self-imposed hour-per-day limits, and so on.

In Part 2 of this 2-part post, I’ll share some options for measuring one’s personal online footprint, and reducing it.

Further Exploration:

• (Added March 1, 2022) “What I Learned During My Three Days Offline” (David at Raptitude). One of my favorite bloggers recounts his experiment that brought great benefits and led to some lasting changes.