Fire and Knowledge

Lots of great ideas on how to live greener, from turning off your computer at night to taking a shower with your spouse.

One thing they neglected to mention, which I’ve done for years now, is use handkerchiefs instead of tissues. I used to think handkerchiefs were gross. Now I think tissues are gross. Anyway, by my calculation, I’ve saved about 4,000 tissues from nose death in the last two years. That’s 30 fewer boxes of tissues.

For some reason that makes me happy.

Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.

A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square mile, that is industrial progress.

—Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 50.

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence.

—Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 200.

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who’ve ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 54.

Lamp lit by gravity wins Greener Gadget award

Concept illustrations of Gravia depict an acrylic column a little over four feet high. The entire column glows when activated. The electricity is generated by the slow fall of a mass that spins a rotor. The resulting energy powers 10 high-output LEDs that fire into the acrylic lens, creating a diffuse light. The operation is silent and the housing is elegant and cord free — completely independent of electrical infrastructure.

The light output will be 600-800 lumens - roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours.

To “turn on” the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour glass-like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gentle glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp, Moulton said. “It’s more complicated than flipping a switch but can be an acceptable, even enjoyable routine, like winding a beautiful clock or making good coffee,” he said.

Moulton estimates that Gravia’s mechanisms will last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year. “The LEDs, which are generally considered long-life devices, become short-life components in comparison to the drive mechanisms,” he said.

I know of no good reason why these containers and all other forms of manufactured “waste”—solid, liquid, toxic, or whatever—should not be outlawed. There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

—Wendell Berry, “Waste” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 127.

The organized church makes peace with a destructive economy and divorces itself from economic issues because it is economically compelled to do so. Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on “the economy”; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct.

If it comes to a choice between the extermination of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of the building fund, the organized church will elect—indeed, has already elected—to save the building fund. The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved only by true religion, by the practice of a proper love and respect for them as the creatures of God. No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to “spiritual” subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history’s most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.

–Wendell Berry, “God and Country” in What Are People For? (1990), p. 96.

Like most companies, my local garbage company is getting on the “green” bandwagon. So much so that their website logo now reads “Think Green. Think Waste Management.” And they have an entire major site section called “Environmental Stewardship.” Impressive — they seem serious.

But the other day, when I drove beside a large dump truck, I had to laugh. The side of the truck read, “Our landfills provide over 6,000 acres of refuge for animals.”