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With the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day approaching, this seemed like a good time discover what there is to feel guilty about regarding my many failures to tread lightly upon the planet.
I considered an everyday load of laundry, some of it of synthetic petrochemical origin. In buying those shirts, I supported industries that give us oil spills, refinery fires and toxic wastes. There is also plain old cotton, grown with pesticides and herbicides which run off fields and pollute watersheds.
The clothes are in the washing machine, where another decision looms.
Old-fashioned tallow soap is quite biodegradable and certainly within the capability of the local sewer plant. But tallow soap needs hot water, produced here by the combustion of natural gas, a contribution to the Greenhouse Effect.
Cold-water detergents come from the aforementioned evil petrochemical industry, and they probably cause more trouble for the sewage plant. But my sewer bill is the same, no matter which laundry detergent I use, and my gas bill will rise with natural soap. There's an easy decision, though I don't have a week for research to learn whether it is the right decision.
The manufacture of the washing machine consumed iron ore, coal and limestone -- all nonrenewable resources. The mining industry that extracted those resources doesn't always clean up its mess, and the steel industry, especially in 1971 when this inherited washing machine was made, generated plenty of dirty air and water.
I could worry more about the electricity that runs the washer, but I console myself that my kilowatts were produced by my next-door neighbor, who manages two small nearby hydro-electric plants. Clean renewable energy, but it also requires minor dams and diversions, which can't be good for the South Arkansas River, which is also the source of some of Salida's water. How many trout never lived, just for this load of wash?
Drying the clothes is another easy decision, since the electric dryer is barely working and we have a wholesome solar-powered clothesline. But clotheslines require yards, which require watering, which causes all manner of environmental trouble in this state. With yards, housing developments chew up more precious open space and increase the distance to where people shop and work, which means more driving.
Maybe the best thing to come from the first Earth Day was the discovery of John Muir's observation that you can't tip over a rock without discovering that it is connected to the entire universe. Meanwhile, Dave Foreman of Earth First! can jet around the continent explaining how to live in harmony with the planet, and perhaps someday he'll find time to stop by and tell us how to do a load of household wash.
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