good to see that you still check my blog even after my fanatical environmental project has begun.
it's all good.
so this last week has been interesting.
I guess you saw the research sheet i made up for myself to record everything in everyday life. Well it proved to not be enough. I still had missed vital aspects that previously i had just taken for granted. For instance the need for electricity to even get the water pumped into the house.
All you people with houses...(sigh now and say ahh that young and naive girl...tell us something we don't know:))
Then just the energy to heat up the water for say a 5min shower.
I took a shower the other day for 10 minutes and that alone used 64liter of water. Then add the electricity to get pressure 125W and warm it up(not sure how to calculate this yet), plus light in the room 7W.
Each and every activity has it's consequences. I guess the consequences would be worse if i decided not to have any showers at all. Losing friends, work etc etc.
Still this lesson showed the importance to me(If australia didn't drive the point home with it's water shortage)to get in,get clean and get out without time for lingering and daydreaming.
I have also started an interesting little experiment to see how much of hygienic products i actually do need and what they consist of.
I have been trying to do without shampoo this last week and my hair feels shinier and healthier than it has the last 5 years. perhaps a little bit greasy but i figure it will stabilize itself when the hair gets used to having to regulate itself.
I am still not ready to give up on conditioner...on the lookout for a local brand with no toxins added.
The little cleaning i have done this past week has been done relying solely on vinegar and baking soda. I tell you that stuff really works. besides i can buy it in bulk at work so i don't even need to get plastic containers.
one thing that was an eyeopener this last week was how much water the toilet takes each time you flush 16liters approx each time if you have an old toilet like the one i do.
So to combat this there are a few ideas floating around. one is to add a bag of pebbles to the canister that holds the water so that it doesn't fill full each time and in this way conserve water.
since i am lazy i employed the method of not flushing each time (if i only had a wee,let's just have ideas floating around) but instead i just threw in a litre or so of water to dilute the piss to make it less smelly.
this seemed to help to get my water usage down by at least half.
I remember living in dalarna in a little house where i had a compost toilet instead. the wee was separated from the poo to eliminate odour. then the poo and sawdust was put in a pile in the garden and covered with leaf and clippings from the garden. it disappeared in no time. Far better than washing our excrement away with perfectly fine drinking water.
vernon is on a high plateau and is very low on water, it is almost classified as a desert here so in the summer this water-squandering makes no sense.
completely irrelevant pix from oz speaking of shit.did you know that cows emit huge amounts of methane gas from their dung and constant burping(you would too if you had eight? stomachs).
me in my get-up as a milkmaid in bunbury.
So for those of you who thought i could not possibly get any grubbier, i have decided to not wash my clothes as often as i now do. just one load of laundry used 180 litres of water. i intend to see how much longer use i can get out of my clothes if i air them between uses instead of automatically throw them in the dirty washbag.
within reason of course...i still want to employed and be allowed to take part in classes at school.
i believe that the clothes in themselves would last longer if they were washed less often and less warm.
i am trying to use a warm wash with cold rinse. if i can get away with cold wash and a cold rinse i will do that. This would all depend on the situation of course. i remember when me and Holly tried to carry a dead dolphin ashore in bunbury australia. I had it's fishy smell covering my clothes for days on end. two hot washes later and the clothes still smelled like blubber.
Enough about water.
The trickiest to figure out actual numbers for has been groceries and where they come from.
here in canada they don't specify as much where a product is grown. it's easy enough to know where a company is based but where they in turn get their products from is very hard indeed to find out.The local aspect is one of the points that i grade my groceries on, the other being if it is organic and how much wrapping it has around it.
So the other day i walked into one of the food stores here with intention to buy some fresh produce. I came straight from work and was sufficiently tired. i saw a box of organic mandarins with only a paper box around them and some paper and thought great!when i got home, to my horror i realised that these very same mandarins had been flown here to canada from china. can you imagine the co2 emissions from their transport to me.
i am still trying to find local suppliers for my food.
listen to this:
some fish from BC gets fished here, then they get transported to korea to get packaged, then sent back here to be sold in the supermarkets as local fish from canada.Doesn't this sound like madness to you?
being in a country in the northern hemisphere in the winter if i want local products i will have to be satisfied with things like apples, potatoes and cabbage. Can i get all the nutrients i need with a local diet?How much am i willing to give up? How much can i do without and still feel content? I guess this is the question we all have to ask ourselves. If we are not willing to give up even a little we might lose it all, what risk am i willing to take,do i dare gamble, that the environmental scare about global warming isn't true after all. I don't know which i think is the scarier prospect...to live without tropical fruit and jet travels or to wake up one day on a destroyed planet.The first one is so directly affecting my life right now and putting restrictions on it, the other is so hard to grasp. The massive implications it would have. Crazy as it may sound,the globes health feels more impersonal. I guess it will not feel personal until that day when we run out of all our resources and war and famine take over.
I hope that it will not come to that.If i can take small steps to live more sustainable now, perhaps in the near future i can make larger strides once i get used to another way of living. I'd like to look at it, not so much as something i am giving up as something i am gaining.
Of course this past week has given me a lot of facts but i will not add them all here today. little by little i will let you in on how i go.
tomorrow university courses start for me so i will also have to make time for studies,work and relationships.
i will be back with further updates in the next few weeks.
me and ruth out skiing at sovereign lake
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