Working With Rather Than Fighting Against Nature

Cold nights and sunny days bring memories of the wonderful passive solar homes I've been in, warmed passively in winter by the sunlight streaming in through a bank of south-facing windows. From its low angle in the winter sky, the sun's power pours in to fill a welcoming house with its radiance and warmth.

Most homes, including ours, turn a cold shoulder to the sun's winter radiance. To get a sense of how much energy is traveling all the way from the sun only to bounce futilely off the siding, stand in front of a window and feel the sun's heat on your skin.

Even with most of the solar energy bouncing off the house unused, there's still canned solar energy in the form of wood foraged locally for the stove. Along with the solar energy streaming through the windows, and one of those really comfortable, lightweight Patagonia coats, it's possible to give the gas furnace a break, and thereby contribute a little less to the radicalization of weather.

A wood stove and a sunny south-facing window are like the Victory Gardens of the Second World War. Back then, people became producers, e.g. of food, and minimized their consumption of energy in order to make more available for the war effort. Now, the aim is simply to use less of the unethical energy that permeates our economy--unethical in the sense that present comfort contributes to future discomfort. It sometimes feels like another war needs to be fought, this time against climate change, a self-produced enemy, perhaps the most dangerous of them all. As wars go, it has the advantage that no one need die to win it. But wars aren't as galvanizing as they used to be. Maybe it's time not to make war but to end it, to end the largely inadvertent war on nature. The Third World War, it turns out, is a war not on other nations but on the world itself, waged everyday as collateral damage from our seemingly peaceful lifestyles. We end it by working with nature rather than against it.

Our dog is responding to the frigid weather not with worldly thoughts but by opting out of walks, and going out each morning to bark at the cold, as if it were intruding on his territory.

Several days later, the barking seems to have worked all too well. Strange cold is replaced by strange heat, much as the drought-enhanced wildfires in Californian have segued to downpour and mudslides. Weather is stretched to extremes, and calls to work with nature seem to arise from a strangely peripheral AsIf world--a dreamed of realm where people think and act as if the future mattered.