Starting From Scratch

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last blog because I’ve been feverishly working on my first piece of furniture. In January I started taking a woodworking class, and the pressure to get a piece built in 10 weeks has been intense, but it’s done. Not great, but not too shabby for my first foray into fine furniture-making.

I get gently teased on a regular basis for my consuming penchant for class-taking. Besides eight years of college and dance classes, in the last 2 or 3 years I’ve also taken classes on sewing, painting, drawing, gardening, and crocheting. It’s been nice living in a city where all of these skills are taught at the community colleges and specialty stores. I still feel like there’s so much more for me to learn, but there is no time or money to take even one more class here.

Part of this obsession can be blamed on my inherent desire to want to learn how to do everything. But there is a slightly darker edge to my class-taking, which I blame on Ray Bradbury. In 2002 Fahrenheit 451 was chosen as Los Angeles’ “One Book, One City” program selection. Having never read this classic tome, the free copy the local library provided me was good incentive for delving into it. Most people know that it is a futuristic story about the evils of book-burning and intolerance without even having to read it, but it hit home in a much harder way for me.

Fahrenheit 451 is about a society that has become so reliant on technology to control every aspect of its existence, that mankind has no idea how to function without it. When the protagonist is discovered to be hiding illegal books, he must flee the city and he finds himself in a land completely foreign to him—the countryside. I started thinking, “What if something happened and we had to resort to living as they did in the 1800s? What if we had to become completely self-reliant?” I know that sounds a bit apocalyptic, but it’s not really a far-fetched question.

As a society, we have become completely reliant on major corporations to provide all of our needs. They provide our clothing, shelter, food, transportation, wages, and energy. Within the last 50 years we have lost our knowledge of how to take care of ourselves. Should something happen—should there be a full-blown energy crisis or mainframe meltdown—people in so-called “undeveloped” countries will be far more likely to survive a crisis then anyone here in the States. As I see it, they are actually ahead of the learning curve, while we are so far behind we don’t even know there’s learning to be done.

The corporations know this, and they are taking us for a ride. They are not people—they’re entities, and they’re greedy and ruthless and oh-so-willing to take advantage of our child-like dependence on them. There is no such thing as appealing to a corporation’s “morality” or “heart.” I highly recommend renting The Corporation. You’ll get a good look at how corporations behave and it might just scare you. Enron is the most notorious example, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The big pink elephant in the room, however, is oil. We love oil, and I’m just as guilty of it as anybody. We love going anywhere we please, anytime we want. But at $2.50/gallon, I’ve started planning my errands and driving routes more carefully. I’ve already decided that my next car will be a hybrid. And it’s not just the United States that’s burning through oil—China and India are slurping it up, too.

Then there’s the fact that oil does not exist in just liquid form. Plastic is made from petroleum. Think you can get through a day without using plastic? Not a chance. Your phone, your computer, your food packaging, your drink bottles, your furniture, your wire coverings, your prescription and shampoo bottles, your toothbrush, your remote control, your car interior, your pens, your CD cases are all made from plastic. Just recently San Francisco proposed a 17¢ charge for each bag that consumers request from supermarkets. I totally support that. I don’t know what to do about plastic. I try to only get paper bags (or no bags) from stores, and I try to reuse plastic cups and containers, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

While I ponder the plastic dilemma, at least I’ve learned how to make my own clothes and furniture and grow my own food. I hope using those skills never has to become a necessity, but at least I’ve got a jumpstart on them if it does. And what I’d like to ask of you, on this day dedicated to celebrating the Earth, is to take a look at Kelpie Wilson’s article “The Green Dream Is Alive.” He’s got a great list of small things we can do to help out both the Earth and ourselves, and a list of website links for more detailed information. And maybe, just maybe, there'll be a class for me in Telluride on how to make snow angels.