Less is Best is Good Medicine

Somehow I got on the email list of an anti-vaccine physician named Mayer Eisenstein, whose newsletter often includes really interesting stuff about H1N1, the benefits of vitamin D, vaccines. I like this little clip about his philosophy of care, which echoes that of every family doctor we've had over the years: doctors' visits only as necessary (and they rarely are), vaccines and antibiotics as little as possible. I would add that hearing quarterly reportage regarding what percentile your kid falls in for head size is nothing short of bizarre.

Practicing medicine with a light touch is good for the planet and its people in innumerable ways. Think of the reduction of medical waste, plastic packaging waste, drugs entering bloodstreams and waterways, monetary outlays—oops—that's right, somebody's going to make less money. But if we all do less, it'll be okay to make less.

This is your party OFF plastic, and it's supergroovelastic!

You've seen them. Pictures of the plastic continent, dead baby albatrosses decomposing to expose bits of human detritus, miles wide and deep of water bottles...

We have to stop using plastic completely. My resolution for the year is to turn my attention to this problem in our household—despite the amount of cutting back we've done, I'm still seeing too much plastic. I'm sick of reuse—it doesn't keep things out of the ground. Recycling is good as far as it goes (which means as far as glass). With plastic it just doesn't cut it.

What can we do about this leaching, toxic, non-decomposable, ubiquitous material?

We have to learn to live without it. We need more zero-waste initiatives, maybe even legislation to ban plastic, though when I googled I didn't come up with any.

At the domestic level, here are some good links for plastic-free living...

Plastic-Free Products

To-Go Ware: Personal favorite; we keep these in our car and use them for take-home leftovers all the time. There's other great stuff at To-Go Ware, too. "Lower Your Forkprint!"

Sanctus Mundo: Some great stuff—stainless-steel sippy cups for kids, stainless-steel freezer storage, water bottles w/o plastic touching water, etc.

Skoy Cloth: Plastic-free dish rags.

Kids Konserve: Waste-free lunch kits.

Biobag: Bags that decompose (though from what I read, you don't want these going to a landfill).

Fake Plastic Fish: a blogger's journey to remove plastic from her life. Chock-full of immediately useful information.

Less With Leaves

Fall...it's exhausting, raking all those leaves into giant piles and then stuffing them all into bags and hauling the bags to the curb, not because you want to, mind you, but because your neighbors are doing it and will give you dirty looks if you don't.

We all know that the best place for leaves is right where they land, or in a garden, enriching the earth right?

Anybody who doesn't know this will soon, thanks to efforts like this one in my town of Kingston, New York, Leave it on the Lawn. The idea rose in response to a proposal by the city that prisoners provide free labor by picking up the city's bagged leaves.

I heartily endorse this measure to help the planet by doing less and leaving it on the lawn.

Now about mulching with a reel mower...looks like you can't. Maybe our cities could have a cheap or free rental program of battery-powered mulching mowers, charged up by solar panels? I hate the sound and smell of gas mowers, and they foul the air for everybody, so let's look at some alternatives.

No Power Hour, Day, Week, the Less the Better

Saturday, March 28, 8:30 pm, show your commitment to climate change by joining millions of people in turning off your power for an hour. Now approaching its third annual event, Earth Hour is garnering increasing attention from Scouts to C40, as people organizing for this hour of no-power spread the word around a globe. A simple action with a bold message: switch off and vote for Earth.

Go them one better and go for Power Day Off all day the following day. You may find yourself enjoying your Power Day Off that you continue to do it once a week. Think of all the energy that would be saved if we brought back Sunday, or any day, of rest.

My Other Hubby is a Hot Water Bottle

Cheap Winter Heat:

If you don't already forgo the electric blanket, know that it is an unnecessary energy hog. This little rubber baby right here is the key to survival at our house this year. With the thermostadt lowered to 50F every night, getting under the freezing sheets would be no fun at all if it weren't for our trusty hot water bottle. Our only problem is that one isn't enough for a family of four. Either you get the bottle, or you try to grab it, or you plaster yourself against the enterprising soul who filled it first. Hot water bottle + feather bed = hot sleepytime; I sometimes have to throw off covers.

There are other options for warming the bed though, from ceramic crocks to old-fashioned copper bedpans to a hot brick wrapped in your grammy's shawl to this cool soapstone bed warmer from Vermont Soapstone.

This is one of those ancient folkways that everybody should be reviving. Of course, there are lots of electric bed warmers out there. You can even microwave a hot water bottle, though we don't have a microwave and the whole idea of doing that gives me the heebie jeebies. But seriously, an electric bed warmer? That's just dopey! Anybody who's tried a hot water bottle and an electric heating pad knows that not only does hot water bottle get the Energy Star rating, it has a personality. It's fun to cuddle up with.

The best Energy Star warmers, of course, are loved ones, whether people or pets, in our case a cat. I imagine people who live with St. Bernards stay pretty warm this time of year.

Think Nothing, Buy Nothing

That's what the badge on my hat said this past Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskill's Buy Nothing Day, where hundreds of people came and brought, or took away, gift-quality items without any money changing hands. It has become an annual tradition for my family to participate in Buy Nothing Day the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

This event allows people to recycle, give presents even if they can't afford to, and hang around talking to people from their community. It's the Anti-Black Friday—no stampedes, no credit card bill at the end of it.

My kids and I work in the café area, replenishing the by-donation snacks and managing the video/DVD viewing: The Story of Stuff, The End of Suburbia, Kilowatt Ours. (This year we would have shown Reverend Billy & the Church of Stop Shopping, but Netflix failed to deliver on time. Boo! Coming in May 2008, watch for What Would Jesus Buy?)



Have a Buy Nothing Christmas or Hannukah, or buy only from nonprofits whose work you support by purchasing goods or services from them.

In Praise of Darkness

A book that affected me, when I was in my early 20s, was In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, a meditation on the Japanese aesthetics of darkness.

My family has come to experience our power-off Sundays as an aesthetic necessity. If we go out, we grow anxious for the unlit house we know awaits us at the end of the day. No email to be answered. The statue of Quan Yin by the flicker of candlelight on the bedroom mantelpiece. Our cat, a black blob on the feather bed. Quiet, as long as my husband can resist the temptation to surf the net on his Iphone.

Related reading:

National Geographic on our addiction to light.

Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch