Carbon neutral and CO2 emissions, etc

bennty
Thu, 09 Sep 2021 03:11:06 +0000

sushiritto:

Lots of “former” this’s and that’s. I’m a “former” this and that too.

What counts is the RIGHT NOW. Today! Not years past. What are people doing tomorrow?

Au contraire, mon frere! Whaddaya think education’s for? You plant the seed, you water it, you see it sprout, and ten years later the student comes back and says, "Remember when you said – " and of course the answer is “No,” but then they tell you what they remember and what it’s meant.

I just did that last night, actually. A guy who was here a decade ago gave a very weird Rosh Hashana sermon-ish light rant about light bulbs. He just urged us for what felt like an hour to go get rid of our incandescents. I’d never heard this guy talk about environmental anything before. But it made an impression, and I went home and changed out my light bulbs, even though I had no freaking money and it was before there were these wonderful “green for poor” programs around here. And that was really what got me moving on energy conservation here. I went from that to monitoring house usage with a near-real-time indoor meter to a first pass at looking at solar, deciding it was too expensive and that I’d see what I could do through conservation first, and many experiments later, here I am. And I thought he ought to know what his talk did – the talk and his unexpected urgency.

Every day grows a whole string of tomorrows. There, stitch that on a sampler.

You have got me thinking, though, about what I was teaching when I taught aerobics way back in leg-warmer days. Some of it was actually about music – I tried to introduce people to many kinds of music. (Some of those tapes got good. “Tipitina”, then an acapella band I can’t remember the name of, and the Communards in there, too, and then some trashy Europop stuff – Samantha Fox, like that. And Motown. If I’d known “Sing, Sing, Sing” at the time it for sure would’ve been in there.) But when it came to exercise, it wasn’t about GO GOALS MORE HIT THE NUMBERS or anything like that. It was about trying to help frightened 30something people feel comfortable enough to come in and join in, and trying to calm down people who were going to hurt themselves if they went at exercise the way they were doing. I didn’t talk about nutrition unless people asked, and I definitely was not about weight loss, though of course there were many fewer obese people at the time. After a certain point, when classes started getting formulaic and these class-in-a-box things started showing up, I wanted to show people that a good workout didn’t have to mean a frenetic workout, so I introduced slow motion to the routines. Can’t remember what song but I think there was something of Linda Ronstadt’s on that tape. In the end, I suppose, it was all about “have fun, you’re normal and fine, move your body and get all sweaty, know and love your body, listen to something terrific, come back again.” We had a good aerobics director; she was all about education, and the certification at the time taught a good bit of anatomy and sports medicine, which you could then use in helping club members.

Later on, I was more about noticing barriers to exercise for girls and women and trying to get something better – where were the big girls’ sports bras that were worth anything, what is this nonsense with $70 sports bras that stop at a 40DD? Where were poor women supposed to work out, and how does that girl get to be allowed to go for a run? What about that mom with the stroller, how dare you shoo her off your track, where else was she supposed to walk in the middle of winter?

I’d forgotten. A lot’s changed; not enough.