At 21:17 5/06/99 -0700, Eric wrote: >I'd love to hear about how you live. [David, earlier: ] >>"vital needs": That minimum required to stay alive as a functioning human.>> [It is: ] food necessities, to which need be added: clothes plus sufficient shelter to avoid becoming moribund through exposure (and this does not include heated houses), companionship sufficient to lead away from suicide (we're talking of minimum or vital needs, here), and sufficient activity that one's body and spirit doesn't atrophy and succumb to entropy.
>[Eric: ] >That may be the minimum all right; kind of bleak. > ...** This would be easier to write if the sun was shining and I was cheerful.
** First, I must distinguish between what I'm doing now, and what I've done earlier and what some others are doing now. This is strictly an experiment to find/prove what are vital needs, while living in a city (as most will be soon, if not now), in a shared paid-for house in not-too-high a latitude and a maritime climate. These conditions apply to probably a majority of the world's people, though are less common in North America (and don't apply to Canada).
** It is not intended as more than proving that continued functioning as a human is possible at this level, though as you say, it's bleak. Betsy Barnum says that beauty, art, music, ritual and celebration must be added, and that there has to be flexibility, not drawing a rigid line. Since most people wouldn't voluntarily live the way I do {actually, that may not be true, now that a majority are living on less that my US$900 pa}, something probably has to be added, but here you get into variations between people, with only a few adding nothing. Betsy's criterion: "would .. make life pretty close to not worth living", isn't the end of the argument for me. I believe the world would be much better off if suicide was far more common, particularly within the top 10-15% of income-earners (& spenders) on the planet, so I don't agree with her criterion. (Note: it's cloudy and cold, here.)
** Anyway, to provide you with some answer to your question
(I wouldn't normally do this, but you repeated the question) :-
** Before I go into my daily/weekly routine, I'll give you a little background.
** I've been solitary all my life since my eyes were opened to the untrustworthiness of people I thought were friends, in a bullying event in Grade 4 (1945) in eastern Ontario. So I rely on no-one (even my wife of 31 years) in supplying my basic needs. (She's always had a job, sometimes cutting-edge research.) When I was asked to leave my teaching job at age 53 (consequent on concussion: bicycle accident), I applied for several others, including with the NZ Government's newly-set-up Department for The Environment, but withdrew when I realised I was no longer capable of doing full-time work. That was at the beginning of ~8 years of depression. As indicated, "seeking help" (e.g. from a doctor) wasn't considered, and I had only $24,000 (from a joint employer-teacher pension plan) to invest to bring in an income; so I reduced and reduced until finally was able to live within my means: the interest paid by the Notes/bonds I chose (NZ Natural Gas Corp). I am glad I chose to use only the interest, since the Government, under the then-new "new right economics" control, moved the goal-posts: I had expected to live frugally only until age 60 when I'd be eligible for NZ Superannuation (at a luxurious {to me} $10,300 p.a.), but when I was only 5 years away, they shifted it to 10 years away.
** My routine (very!) :
- Up in the pre-dawn darkness to (light the fire, before we stopped having one, and) make a pot of tea for me and my wife before she goes to catch the first bus (a 45-min trip) in to Auckland to her office in Physics at the University. She does a 1-hr fast walk every morning, to help deal with hypertension. She stopped using a car regularly about 10 years ago, for resource-use and CO2-production reasons.
- Before and after listening to the 6 AM (pbs-type) radio news, I upload a date-updated copy of my webpages to my 3 websites and check e-mail the first of 6-10 times that day. For the next several hours, and usually throughout the morning, I (sometimes) create new webpage(s) and write e-mails such as this and to our 21yo daughter somewhere in the world. Occasionally, taking a few days but sometimes over a week or two, I write submissions on local or national government Plans and Bills. I'm still a little proud of what I've done over the years since 1989 to help create and now defend the NZ Resource Management Act (1991), and its consequent local Plans.
What I describe is as it is now, mid-morning with only two of us in the house, and 2 computers. When the daughter was home as well as our youngest son, I'd leave this (second-best) computer to her when she got up, getting back to it after she'd left for her university courses, on the days she had them. She'd often spend hours on it if she was home: I'd minimise my e-mailing then.
- Although I take tea-breaks about once an hour, the next time I leave the computer is for lunch starting at a quarter to 12 and lasting until 12:35 when I've heard the 5-day forecast for the Auckland area. That lunch is very welcome and appreciated, even though it's only what I describe on my dsmenu.html "diet" page. I realised yesterday how much I value the flavour of the full-cream organic milk, and flavours in general, since I've been on my limited-foods regime.
- Often there are more e-mails to deal with or write (I've got 3 waiting to be filled out and sent to one of my two lists, right now) for an hour or two in the early afternoon, but sometime before or soon after 3 PM I switch over to playing computer games, to get in enough time for some satisfaction before Bera gets home about 5:35 PM and I leave the computer for the day. Right through my depression, I've valued Sid Meiers' "Civilization": I used to play it in 1992 (starting at 4:30 in the morning when more of the family was home) on a Mac Powerbook 100 in black-&-white; some months ago (after also playing "Caesar III") I was still playing it, at the top level (greater chance the other "nations" would wipe out mine - I was totally averse to being the underdog when I was depressed), though it was getting slightly boring! Currently I'm on his "Alpha Centauri", though either it is or I am different: I find it less absorbing than Civ.
- Then 'tea', our evening meal. Identical with lunch for me, except I have peanut butter instead of a handful of peanuts. And listening to the main current-events radio programme of the day, from about 5:25 PM to 6:20 PM - the end of the re-broadcast of items from the BBC etc. giving background to events and changes around the world.
- From whenever the third person comes home until my bedtime at about 9:20 PM, I read a library book, virtually always science fiction (recently David Brin's Uplift trilogy starting with "Brightness Reef").
- Saturday morning is different. That's when Bera and I walk for one and half hours to the nearest supermarket to buy our weekly groceries. Which we back-pack up the hill to the bus (now we're older - used to walk back carrying the 25-33 kg) and home. If we start at 6:30 AM we get there when the shop opens at 8, and get back about 9:30 AM, leaving most of the morning free (in my case, often for doing a clothes-wash).
- On (very) odd occasions, I might fit in some household maintenance. Yesterday I put a patch on a sheet (that had already been 'turned': edges-to-middle); starting in early March and finishing in the first week of May (mid-Autumn here), I painted our roof, after wire-brushing and priming the rusty bits (corrugated iron); and a year ago I put in half an hour on sequential days removing 'wild ginger': a noxious weed in this climate.
- Generally, moment-by-moment, I feel free to do exactly what I wish (within the limits I've set for myself), including nothing at all. A highly valued freedom.
> >I would object to some of the things you listed as "sustainable >activities". How something is done is often more important than what .. >> ... >> ** I have more than a vision of it, I remember it. > ... >Can you elaborate? I have been searching for examples ... >I will answer this other bit later, but since it's lunch-time I'll post this now.
David.
At 21:17 5/06/99 -0700, you wrote: > ... I would object to some of the things you listed as "sustainable >activities". How something is done is often more important than what is >done, so I suppose you could describe some of these in ways that would be >sustainable. But, assuming I understand what you are referring to, here >are my some of my objections: > >- teaching and learning; This would depend on the materials and facilities >used.** True; _I_ don't see why you called this an objection. Are you so young that you 'had to' have large amounts of (or expensive) equipment to learn? An exercise book, pen, and usually a textbook, were all I had to learn with - in senior secondary school and University we got the excitement of using actual equipment, in learning Physics. And that equipment was really very simple. When I started teaching Physics in the mid-'60s, the PSSC course had just been developed; one if its aims was for the teacher to make most of the equipment from locally-available objects etc. And for many Arts subjects, books and writing materials are sufficient.
>- the theater and 'acoustic' music-making; Same here. ** Same comment.
>- walking/hiking; Good, except possible clothing (boots?) and getting >there (car?)** Once again, boots don't have to be made of artificial/exotic materials; wood-framed back-packs (for over-nighting and long trips) were common, and tubular aluminum frames is a good use for an energy-expensive material. I'm glad you said "car?". My first choice for walking is to start where I am (home or whoever I'm visiting with). And going by train/bus to some location for a week-long hike would be just routine. We caught the train from central Auckland to the nearest station (2 hours walk away) to the Waitakere Ranges, on my first hike/tramp with a group (the Auckland University College Tramping Club). What's this "rush, rush"?
>- sailing clinker-built boats (made using steam-box and copper nails); >Copper, to my knowledge, is rarely if ever mined in a nice way these days.** Who's talking about virgin material? So easily recycled even the cave-men were doing it! May not be the best for electronics, but just right for copper nails.
>- horse-riding; Possibly okay, but some people use horse trailers and >trucks and buy hay and feed from distant sources using questionable growing >practices.** Again, why should what some people do now in an unsustainable way, be used to judge whether a certain activity is one that you can look forward to doing in a sustainable world of (a possible) future?
** I'll deal with the last one in a moment, but you seem to me to have fallen into a political view of things (I'm guessing many on the list have), namely to give the response (to a proposed change): "Oh, but people wouldn't go for it!", as if the only things worth discussing are those that ordinary people on Main Street, America would seriously consider as they are right now. No education as to what the real world is like outside the small-town America ghetto, no appealing to their social instincts, just the common business dictum: "If it won't run with the buying public, don't bother me with it!".
** I do get uptight about the blinkered view so many on e-mail lists have, of how _much_ change is needed. I even find Betsy Barnum's posts somewhat saccharine, though she may be right as far as USA and Canada are concerned. That is, the OECD countries are likely to create their own world-within-a-world, with barriers against the 'ravening hordes' outside, but needing military-protected supply-lines from the 'colonies'.
** I have no doubt about the amount of change coming, though I recognise that the details will be different from what I foresee - (in a word:) we have lots of experience with sustainable living, so we can and should use improved versions of these historical ideas. The common response "Why go back to the dark ages?!" is utter crap. One could reasonably talk of 'progress' up until somewhere between 1965 and 1985, but since the late '70s there's been none, overall.
>- antique glider-flying (bungee-launched from a ridge); Again, how was it >made and what transportation was involved? >** The frames were made of wood (including the wings), covered with thin linen 'doped' with something like varnish to tighten and smooth it. High-performance planes were smoothed further by filling in the hollows with bonded micro-balloons - microscopic glass spheres, used originally (I believe) on microscope slides to give the scale:- they were easily made to a standard diameter. Bungees are very simple: a 25m 2-rubber catapult, though you do need to do it into a breeze, from the top of a ridge.
** I can understand and even applaud people having a love for their huge old finned Cadillac - just so long as they don't use more than a few dozen gallons of gas a year in them. There _is_ a place for cars, just not for everyday transportation. If you want a particular kind of work, you should go and live near it.
** Do I sound just like a crabby old man? Well, that's because I am.
David.
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