there's no ism like environmentalism
Like no ism I know:
Central to that project is realizing that we have to learn to live with less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize that living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything -- except meaning. The people who have the most in material terms seem to spend the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their own alienation. This “blessed lifestyle” -- a term Bush’s spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president’s view of U.S. affluence -- perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.
Let’s return to CFCs and air-conditioning. To someone who lives in Texas, with its miserable heat half the year, it’s reasonable to ask: If not air-conditioning, then what? One possible reasonable response is, of course, to vacate Texas, a strategy I ponder often. More realistic: The “cracker house,” a term from Florida and Georgia to describe houses built before air-conditioning that utilize shade, cross-ventilation, and various building techniques to create a livable space even in the summer in the deep South. Of course, even with all that, there are times when it’s hot in a cracker house -- so hot that one doesn’t want to do much of anything but drink iced tea and sit on the porch. That raises a question: What’s so bad about sitting on the porch drinking iced tea instead of sitting inside in an air-conditioned house?
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