One of my biggest fears about living in CA are the
rolling blackouts. The threat of a massive quake dropping the state into the pacific ocean doesn't scare me, but threat of a lack of hot shower sure does!!
Now, a solution! It's actually quite an old solution, but new to me:
pedal power! Here's an excerpt from the lengthier Jan. 8, 2001 article, courtesy of Hugh Bris:
" If you want to watch TV or run the blender in the funky old eco-house overlooking the campus here, you'd better be ready to ride. A bicycle, that is.
Going nowhere.
Unless, of course, you call riding to lunch "somewhere" -- which is where Sean Dockery pedaled himself to the other day when he got a hankering for salad dressing. He plucked herbs from the garden, dumped them in the Osterizer with oil and tahini, then jumped on his souped-up bike.
The pedals spun the wheel that spun the rod that twirled the blender blades,
and in a minute, voila! Salad dressing. The machine was homemade low-tech like most everything else in this house, from the solar-paneled light fixture overhead to the next-door greenhouse that pumped in hot air to keep Dockery toasty on his quick ride to lunch.
That's how things are in what may be the most energy-efficient home of its kind in the nation -- a 1930s-era, 10-room wooden house that uses so little energy, its power bill typically is about $10 a month.
The house, officially called the Humboldt State University Campus Center for Appropriate Technology (CCAT), was lovingly converted by students on a shoestring budget 21 years ago to be a living experiment in energy conservation. It's still run by students, and everything is still shoestring and invented on the spot.
And although the pedal gizmos can come off a bit wacky, this continuing research project has a lot to show more conventional residents about how to conserve energy -- especially when power prices are shooting through the roof, whether you've insulated it or not.
"The goal here is to use as little nonrenewable energy and resources as humanly possible and to educate people while we're doing it," said Dockery, a 22-year-old environmental science senior who is one of the three students living at the house. "Some people might get a laugh out of the bike thing or the dry compost toilet, but this is very serious stuff going on here. We're not kidding around. The house is vibrant proof that sometimes the best way to look forward is to reach backward."
So now that we've got a solution to my rolling blackouts issue, what about my water quality issue (my other huge fear of living in CA):
CONTAMINATED CA BEACHES IMPACT ENVIRONMENT"An environmental study conducted by researchers at UCLA and Stanford has found that nearly 1.5 million beach visitors in southern California get sick every year from bacterial pollution, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The study analyzed the number of cases of gastrointestinal illnesses of beachgoers along a 100-mile stretch of coastline between Los Angeles County and Orange County. Cases of illness were between 627,800 and 1,479,200 higher than baseline levels. Typical symptoms included stomach cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting in addition to ear, eye, nose, and throat infections. Those illnesses have been associated to high levels of bacterial pollution in the water. The study found that water quality tests indicated that levels of the Enterococci bacteria surpassed state safety levels one third of the time for the beaches at Doheny, Malibu, Marina del Rey, Cabrillo, and Las Tunas."
I don't think any amount of pedaling is going to fix this. This angers me -- not because I am a citizen with enviromental concerns -- it angers me because I'm an avid beach-goer who spends an
inordinate amount of time upside-down in seawater, being pummeled to near death as I attempt in vain (yet again) to learn to stand on a surfboard. I just didn't think that I would
ever need to worry about contracting water-borne dysentery-like diseases WITHIN the US. But maybe that's just me. >:0
Hey southern Californians, are your health insurance premiums paid up??
