Less

Some years back laundry soap makers started putting their product in large plastic jugs with a cup on the lid – and like many people, I simply measured the amount by filling the cup. It wasn’t long before I realized, though, that cup was many times larger than the recommended amount on the label, which itself was many times the amount I needed to get my clothes clean. I had been using up laundry soap about ten times faster than I needed to, and it didn’t make my clothes any cleaner.

The same is true for many of the products we use – the amount of toothpaste used in commercials, or the amount of shampoo the instructions say to use, is often designed to make you use more than you need and buy more quickly.

Each of these things seem like small examples – it’s my shampoo, you think, it cost a few euros, and it only takes a small amount of space in landfills, and it only puts a few drops of toxic material into the soil or oceans. And you’d be right – it’s just that a billion other people in the world are all also thinking the same thing right now.

Cutting down is the simplest way we can deal with a number of problems at once – fuel use, climate change, pollution, money management – even, often, our health. It lacks the drama of the grand solutions that fill the business magazines and political debates. But since most of the world’s problems stem from people using too much stuff, cutting back will almost always be an improvement, and is something we can all do rather than feeling powerless. As Sharon Astyk recently wrote, “the reality is all those dollars operate like votes - they say ‘make another one, and make more packaging for it, and run the factory a little longer.’ Not buying stuff is one of the most powerful tools we've got.”

Rubbish

A UK study found that people throw away seven times their own body weight each year, except none of it ever goes away. Some of it builds up in landfills, creating methane that worsens climate change. Some of it washes into the sea and kills ocean life, or collects at the centre of currents, like the Texas-sized patch of floating rubbish in the Pacific. Almost all of it is unnecessary.

Of course, waste is hard to avoid – we all buy things from the store, and most of them have packaging or wrapping that must be disposed of. You can cut your rubbish fees and environmental damage, though, by turning your rubbish a new life as something else. For example:

Paper: This accounts for 33 percent of our rubbish, and all of it is unnecessary. Use it again by giving it to children to draw on, and when they are done with it, you can tear it up and mix it in your compost. Newspaper or cardboard can be spread over an area where you plan to plant to keep weeds away; just cut holes in it to plant seedlings, and weight it down with stones if necessary.

Food waste: Edible leftovers can be made into quiche, mixed with eggs and milk and baked as a pie. Overripe but not rotten fruit can be juiced, frozen or made into jam. Make a compost bin in your back garden or on your land, or buy worms and put them in a box with your raw food waste – vegetable trimmings, old fruit and so on. Raw or cooked food can be given to chickens or pigs.

Plastic containers: If they are small and transparent, make them into sprouting containers. An Indian restaurant near us gives out its food in clear tubs, and once the box is empty, I clean it and punch two holes on each side near the top. Then I fill them with 50 grams of mung beans, which over the next few days turns into 200 grams of nutritious sprout salad that I can eat for lunch. Since a 500g bag of mung beans costs 1.80 euros at the health food store, that is ten lunches for 18 cents each.

If they are large and transparent, turn them upside down and make them into coldframes for seedlings. You might want to raise them slightly so that just a crack of air can get underneath, enough for the plants to breathe but not enough to let frost in.

Bottles: The top of a plastic soda bottle – say, a two-litre Pepsi bottle -- can be cut off and used as a funnel, if you are changing your oil or pouring liquid into containers. The bottom can be turned upside-down and put over seedlings, as with the plastic boxes. You could cut the funnel off, turn it upside down and place it pointing into the bottom half, and create a rainwater collector. Or you can leave the bottle intact, punch a few holes in the bottom and stick it in the soil next to your vegetables, and pour water into it – the water will soak more slowly into the earth, go straight to the roots and not evaporate as quickly.

Ashes: Excellent for soil, and you can make washing liquid or soap out of it. I have not done this myself, but hope to try in the next few weeks.

Clothes: Old socks are ideal cleaning rags, pants with tears can be made into patches, and most old clothes can be stuffed into attics or walls for insulation.

Furniture: Can usually be repaired or re-used, or donated to people who can use it. When I lived in a college town, May 15 and August 15 were Scavenging Day, the day to upgrade one's belongings by digging through dumpsters -- Sorority Row had the best stock. Old refrigerators can become coldframes or sunken cold boxes, wooden furniture can become firewood, mattresses can be insulation. Use your imagination.

Of course, even better than not throwing things away is not buying them. More on that later.

Photo: Eight tubs of takeout food from last year, now four days of lunches.

Monument in Dublin

The Girl and I passed this during our expedition to Dublin, sitting in someone's front yard on a busy street. I wondered what "deaging" was -- thinking DEE-ging -- until it occured to me it probably reads "de-aging."

Ireland is full of little mysteries like this. If someone in this ordinary brick house discovered eternal life, shouldn't I have heard about it? And if it's a secret, why put up a monument?

From the pulpit

I delivered three homilies this weekend – Saturday night Mass and two Sunday morning – on climate change, and priests and parishioners alike seemed pleased with them.

I was there because Catholic leaders are donating some of their still-considerable weight to the fight against climate change. Pope Benedict gave an address on the environment on New Year’s Day, and late last year the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference released a statement called “The Cry of the Earth” calling for each parish to host speakers on climate change.

Our group, FADA, have had a strong relationship to local churches since we formed four years ago -- our members have spoken during Masses, addressed church groups and Catholic schools, and written articles on the Long Emergency for the church bulletins. We even have a nun among our core members, and it was she, Sister Maureen, who approached the churches. While another FADA member spoke at another church nearby, I spoke in in Ballymaney, at the church of Chill Mhuire (pronounced Kill Weera – no, seriously).

I had to try to cram into seven minutes a course in climatology, a response to climate sceptics, examples of how we can cut our usage, and some inspirational words at the end – but in the end it was as good as it would get, and many in the congregation spoke approvingly on the way out. We passed out fliers for more information, and perhaps we can draw more people into our various projects – gardens, elder interviews, food-sharing clubs and so on.

The longer I work at this, the more I see the advantages of working through existing institutions. When we simply advertise a talk on, say, climate change, perhaps five people show up. When we have spoken to schools, clubs or churches, we reach hundreds of people at once.

Update

If anyone lives in County Kildare and is interested, I will be giving a talk from the pulpit of the Chill Muire church, tomorrow evening at 7 pm and Sunday morning at 10 am and 11:30 am.

Update

Now that the snow has melted, we are seeing our land for almost the first time since moving in, and is it ever a mess. In front of and behind the house the former trees or gardens are now fields of muck peppered with builders’ rubble, and we have to turn it back into a garden.

The cardboard from moving boxes, spread across the land, will keep out weeds, and the chest of drawers can be made into a coldframe. The evergreens have spread far beyond their bounds, and need some severe pruning.

The pruned boughs have made a trail over the mud, and more of them might make good bedding for underneath the soil – forming a barrier at the base of the garden bed, drainage for our frequent rain and gradually composting away. They are acidic, though, so they might not make a good bed for things like brassicas.

We have mixed feelings about the evergreens – they are an invasive species that must be hacked back frequently, but they are also a good windbreak in this flat and whistling bog-land. One idea was to cut back the branches and weave them into a fence, and plant seedlings of something more desirable on the fence’s sunny side. In theory, the branches would collapse and the trees die over a few years, by which time the native trees would be strong enough to thrive.

Suggestions?

The road

The view from our front gate yesterday. Compare with this photo taken from the same spot a couple of months ago.

Cold snap

We are settling into our new home, but we chose to move in at an interesting time, and not just because it was Christmas. Ireland is experiencing something of a national emergency – temperatures have dropped to some of the lowest on record, and it has snowed, sleeted and hailed for weeks now. The roads are iced over, and the cities run out of their salt supply tonight.

At the same time, we moved into our new home, where the underfloor heating was not at first set properly, the hot water was not very warm and the gas kept freezing. We have a fireplace and many piles of wood, but not all are of suitable size, and while we have a hatchet, it is not very sharp. So we stayed well stocked with turf – the main fuel here – and kept well huddled around the fire.

Even worse, I also had to work at my day job the final week of December, when I was one of the only people in the unheated building. This week the buses have been so delayed by the ice and snow that my usual three hours a day on the bus has stretched into more like six hours, and I am spending almost as much time on the bus to and from work as I am at work.

Luckily, our home heating situation has much improved – we boosted the underfloor heating, so it is now more like 13 degrees inside (55 F) rather than five degrees (40 F). I’m all for living on less, but I want to get there in stages.

We are, however, learning that many of the household practices of 19th-century England or America were time-tested to help people live in such temperatures. Tea cosies were not just a quaint affectation of Jane Austen’s time --- they keep your liquids hot in a cold house, and hot liquids keep the body warm. I associate bed-robes with Ebeneezer Scrooge or Sherlock Holmes, and long undergarments with cowboys in old Westerns -- but they conserve the body’s heat. Hot water bottles in bed, poking the fire – all eminently functional details, now dimly remembered from old novels and films made in the foothills of history’s energy needle.

On the evening news in our new home, we watch Irish newscasters and political leaders speak in increasingly strident tones about the urgency of this crisis. Towns have not enough salt reserves and few ploughs, and businesses are not likely to allow for working from home. People do not always know to drive more slowly, keep more distance between their car and the next, or to allow for more time in their schedules for commuting. Thus, the country is slowed to a crawl by weather that would not be unusual by the standards of Minnesota, or even Missouri.

It is not that the Irish are not hardy. When I am coming to work in a coat and scarf, many Irish around me are wearing much less, and a co-worker of mine is perennially wearing a T-shirt. As I mentioned, many people here keep their homes at temperatures Americans would find frigid, or work in long stretches of rain I find oppressive. But they are no more prepared for a Midwestern summer or winter than they are for snakes.

As we face stranger weather, more expensive energy and less money in the future, we would do well to remember this --- that hardship is what we are not accustomed to. Adapting is difficult, especially when it is unexpected – but we can adapt to much more than we imagined.

Photo: a thatched house near us, taken today.

The Girl

The Girl’s wobbly tooth had been threatening to make a bid for freedom since before Christmas, and we joked that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy would bump into each other in the dark. But it waited until last night, and she placed it in aside while she diligently picked up her toys downstairs, cleaned her room upstairs, brushed her teeth and got into her jammies. At length, though, she could no longer resist proudly dancing around with her tooth – accidentally flinging it somewhere in her room.

We searched every inch of her room, it seemed, but no tooth – a catastrophe as far as she was concerned, for it meant no Tooth Fairy and no coins under the pillow.

Finally, while she was searching under her bed, I ran downstairs and took down from a high shelf a tin of sentimental things – including her first lost tooth. I slipped it between my fingers, went up to her room and slipped it onto the floor.

Look, honey, here it is, I said.

“You are the best, Papa!” she said.

Update

I'm about a week late in announcing this, but the Dallas Morning News published an article of mine recently -- it was a condensed version of the one that apppeared in Front Porch Republic a few weeks ago. My sincere thanks to the DMN editors and to the departing Rod Dreher, whose blog is one of the few I check daily.

I'm taking a break for a few days while we try to get proper Internet out here. See you in the new year. Have good holidays.