Keeping Cool
I usually carpool but I have the car this week. On the way to work this morning it was pretty humid so I flicked on the aircon. And it wasn’t even 9am!
I got to thinking about how we’re so dependent on air-conditioning now. How did our grandparents survive a lengthy car or train trip? Are we just fencing ourselves into an ever narrower comfort zone? Ever seen people bickering over a difference of two degrees on the office thermostat? Why do natives of hot desert countries actually swaddle themselves in heavy clothing and long sleeves? What are we doing to our bodies, those wonderfully dynamic biological machines, keeping them in such sterile, unchanging, perfect-t-shirt-and-jeans conditions? Can we believe the figures that claim the earth is getting warmer, and it’s not part of some millenia-long planetary cycle? Does the use of a billion air conditioners wreck the climate, making it hotter, making us install more airconditioners, making it hotter again?
So I flicked the air con off. I opened the window and let the wind in. It wasn’t enough to overcome the humidity, and I still felt vaguely uncomfortable. But at least I was giving my body a chance to stretch, to fend for itself, at the cost of some short term discomfort. And as my engine revs dropped, I gave the planet a tiny, microscopic respite.
Today, Darren touched on similar thoughts about our use of climate control. Obesity, global warming, failure of immune systems, species extinction… are they all related? or is it merely due to the brain’s tendency to draw patterns and relationships between things?