LATITUDES AND ATTITUDES

I just returned from Gaeta, Italy, roughly the same latitude as Monterey. Different attitudes, though. Virtually everyone uses a solar clothes dryer/outdoor clothesline, saving the five pounds of coal per dryer load typically preferred by most Americans, even in mild Monterey County. On rainy days there, plastic sheeting is spread above clotheslines. (In the U.S., coal accounts for over 30 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.) 

Seeing lingerie hanging freely in Gaeta made me smile, remembering Australian pediatrician Helen Caldecott (co-founder, Physicians for Social Responsibility) and American physician J. Matthew Sleeth (Serve God, Save the Planet.org). Speaking at the Monterey Conference Center, Caldecott admonished “you Carmel ladies” to “stop being so worried that your neighbors might see your panties on the line.”  And Sleeth, at First Presbyterian Church in Monterey, said he’d been momentarily embarrassed when businessmen arrived at his home one rainy afternoon to see his boxers hanging across the living room. When he considered that he had once been unembarrassed by his formerly heavily polluting lifestyle, he decided his boxers were far less an embarrassment.
The Gaeta landscape had another difference from MoCo too: an abundance of locally owned restaurants, and not one chain. Thank you for the Weekly’s support of locally owned businesses (Erik Cushman’s “Multiplication Tables: Building an economic stimulus package from the ground up,” Nov. 20-25.) Once we had three locally owned office supply stores in downtown Monterey; now there are none. Let’s end the trend of local businesses losing out to chains! Instead, let’s wow ‘em in these challenging times by keeping our Monterey County economy lively and well as we patronize and otherwise invest in the multitude of worthy local businesses. It’s a great time to recycle a ’70s maxim shared by the late Bob Rowe, founder of Friends of the Farm: “We hear there is a recession, but we’ve decided not to participate.” 

ICE FOLLIES?

I read the story about the woman learning to ice skate at the Monterey on ice rink downtown.  Am I the only one sickened by the huge carbon footprint for such frivolous entertainment, not to mention the noise pollution from “a large humming machine”?  It’s more like a jet engine, the size of a semi trailer and runs 24 hours a day on electricity provided through seven huge power cords hooked in to the hotel; electricians had to completely rewire the circuit boxes to handle the power load.  How many energy saving bulbs will have to be installed to make up for such wastefulness just so they can make a frozen pond outside in coastal California? Apparently these things are being installed all up and down the coast.  The biggest one in the world is in Mexico City.  I guess we have already given up on fighting global warming.  Tell the kids to enjoy the ice now since there will be no glaciers or polar bears or dancing penguins by the time they grow up.