I picture myself standing in front of a burning hoop of fire and I imagine the fear I have of diving through it and being burned.  I run and dive through it, and on the other side I find that I am wearing one of those flying suits that some brave folks have used to glide, the ones with wings built into the suit between the arms and torso, and between the legs.

I then glide around a bit, releasing the fear and feeling joy as I glide over a tropical island or snow-capped mountains, or wherever.

Recently our DirecTV signal disappeared. I went through the troubleshooting procedures and didn’t fix the problem so I called DirecTV and asked for a service person to be sent out. The operator informed me that the service call would cost $79, but, if I signed up for their service plan the call would only be $19.95. After a little verbal dance, I found out that this was contingent on paying an additional fee of $6 per month.

The numbers don’t make sense. Even if you keep your plan for only one year, if you have one service call during that time it will cost you $92. In our case, we have had our receiver for over 4 years and had only one problem that was not fixable by me. Say I had bought this service plan from them 4 years ago, my service call would have cost me the $20 plus $288 in monthly fees for a total of $308 .

Buyer beware, and take some care first to think about that “good” deal.

Over the last few years, in researching my own health problems, one of the themes that seemed to me to be a likely common underlying factor is Inflammation. The medical community has made some steps in the direction of recognizing inflammation as a risk factor in some previously unrecognized areas such as heart disease, but overall my gut feeling is that there is much more to learn.

http://2relight.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/sharing-some-remediessharing-as-remedy/

I recently picked up the January ’08 issue of The Wellness Letter, from the University of California, Berkeley. The lead story is entitled “Is Inflammation the root of all disease?

Acute inflammation is characterized by the redness, heat swelling, and pain that is the immune systems normal response to infection or injury. Immune cells congregate at the site so that they can overwhelm and dispose of infectious organisms or debris from injury. Thus healing takes place. But there’s another kind of inflammation, low-grade, chronic, and “systemic.” It’s been getting a lot of attention lately.

The reason you hear so much about this kind of inflammation (systemic) is that it may underlie a kind of u”unified field” explanation of disease. That is, some researchers now believe that low-grade inflammation is associated with everything from heart disease to Alzheimer’s and arthritis, and may even be the cause of most chronic diseases.

I recently stopped drinking my turmeric-cherry juice-psyllium tonic for several weeks and began feeling a twinge of pain in one of my knuckles. After starting to drink it again once a day the condition disappeared after about a week, and I am back to drinking it 3-4 times a week. This level seems to keep my joints in good shape.

Why the psyllium, you may ask? Toxins in the body may be at least part of the reason for low-grade inflammation. Psyllium absorbs toxins in the intestines and keeps them moving out on a “regular” basis.

As we prepare to celebrate the New Year, my resolution is to hold George Bush and Dick Cheney accountable for their abuses of power.

In the last days, we have made real progress:

The mainstream media has awakened to this movement and to the extraordinary support you have given it. Your calls, letters, and emails have clearly made a difference. Already 140,000 people have joined us in demanding impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney by signing up at WexlerWantsHearings.com.

The power of these combined voices are already shaking up the established order on Capitol Hill and throughout the mainstream media:

This week, the Miami Herald printed an article on our efforts that was syndicated in papers across the country, including the Detroit Free Press, Philadelphia Inquirer, Fort Worth Telegram, Contra Costa Times, Sacramento Bee, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, NC News & Observer, and others. (Click HERE to read the article.)

In addition, CBS4 in Miami became the first station we know of to run a television segment about the call for hearings. Video of that can be found HERE.)

Perhaps most importantly, just this morning the Philadelphia Inquirer courageously ran the full editorial I drafted along with my fellow Judiciary Committee members Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Rep. Tammy Baldwin (R-WI). (View it HERE .) Congratulations to the Inquirer for their willingness to publish a viewpoint that is so widely held by Americans – yet one that other leading national newspapers refused to publish.

We have come so far in just a few weeks. No longer can the mainstream media ignore our efforts and dismiss this cause as only part of the fringe left.

Already we are seeing tangible results from our combined effort. As you already know, Congress is well behind the American people on this issue. This is an uphill battle, but it’s one that has to be fought. It should not be the whole agenda, but it needs be *on* the agenda.

When Congress reconvenes in January, I plan to present a list to my Judiciary Committee colleagues of every single person that signed up at WexlerWantsHearings.com. I will go to more of my colleagues and ask them to join a letter in support of hearings. We will build on the momentum you have given us.

Last week, I spent an hour on Blog Talk Radio outlining thoughts and answering questions in regards to this work. So many people hit their site that their servers temporarily went down. If you’d like to hear the archived audio, please click HERE.

Let’s do our best to further spread the message so that list will be up to a quarter million. Please continue to blog, email friends, and insist that your family and friends sign up!

Thanks for your commitment.

Congressman Robert Wexler

P.S. I have been running online ads to make more people aware of our impeachment campaign. If you are interested in making a contribution to this effort you can click here.

If you believe that the executive branch has blatantly overstepped it’s Constitutional bounds, please show your support for the three Senate Judiciary committee members who are pushing for impeachment hearings for Cheney. Sign up, and then fax or call your national legislators as personal direct contact tends to hold more weight with politicians.

Each CFL contains about five milligrams of mercury, about equal to the amount of ink on the tip of a ballpoint pen. Of course mercury does not pose the same kind of risk as, for instance mercury in fish (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sets a limit of 0.17 milligram in a six-ounce can of tuna). But it can leach out of landfills into water supplies or become airborne if incinerated).

For now at least, most of these bulbs are being thrown into the trash. Limited amounts have started to be recycled, and recycling appears to be the prudent approach for the long run. The Scientific American article quoted above cites a program started in Vermont by True Value Hardware and one in California, by Wal-Mart. One should inquire to the store from which they buy CFL’s, if they take them back for recycling.

For now, it is arguable that CFL usage overall has a reducing effect with respect to mercury output into the environment. At present, discarded CFL’s are projected to yield about 10 tons of Mercury waste annually (Scientific American, “Toxic Bulbs”, Oct. ’07). However, widespread household use of CFL’s could theoretically save as much as 7% of current U.S. electrical usage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp

Coal fired power plants currently put out about 48 tons of airborne mercury each year. As a result, according to the EPA:

(when coal power is used) the mercury released from powering an incandescent lamp for five years exceeds the total of (a) the mercury released by powering a comparably luminous CFL for the same period and (b) the mercury contained in the lamp”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp

In otherwords, they calculate that CFL’s, even without recycling, cut down on mercury emissions into the environment by offsetting output from power plants. Additionally, usage of CFL’s will have a large impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, so overall it still looks like a big positive to switch from traditional incandescent bulbs to CFL’s.

And finally, Scientific American says “And if you break a CFL”:

………Open windows to dissipate mercury vapor. Then While wearing gloves, use sticky tape to pick up the small pieces and powdery residue from the bulb’s interior. Place the tape and large pieces in a plastic bag. After Vacuuming the area, place the vacuum bag inside doubly sealed plastic bags before discarding.

………To find a CFL recycling program in your area, go to www. lamprecycle.org.

Those immortal words by FDR in the title have suddenly become very important to me.

I hope this gets to people that need it as fast as possible. You are not crazy. Do not let fear engulf your life for it may be fertilizing and feeding something ugly. It may be a matter of life or death. Pull back from the fear signals that the world is sending you. They are not real if you don’t let them be. Embrace love, trust, courage, hope, forgiveness (mostly for yourself) in whatever manner is most powerful for you. Work on recognizing the flavor of negative thought loops and simply say STOP when you feel them coming on! Read uplifting stories of human love, forgiveness, kindness, compassion, passion, empathy and bravery and dive into the emotions that they provide then remember them and hold them over and over and realize that these are the ones that are really part of you. Dive into a light cloud of love and feel yourself floating beautifully and safely into it, as far as you want to go. Don’t stop striving for lightness of being, if you get down pull yourself up. Love is greater than fear. Just do it!

See the tree of your own crisis, that only you can solve, instead of the forest of all the conflicting signals coming into your life that are feeding your fears through guilt. These vectors can be from all places, family, friends, religious figures, television, internet. Seek out and focus on uplifting sources that you know are resonant with your true self and focus on these. Again, they can be the same types of sources as the negative ones. Single sources often give mixed messages, trying to fool you that they are good, when really they are trying to send you on a wild goose chase of guilt, energy loss and fear. Good sources often give off a little bit of mixed signal so that they are not so obvious. Learn discernment. Don’t fall for grail quest type ruses, they will only run you ragged, you know, Da Vinci Code type stuff.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE, YOU ARE NOT ALONE, YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Here are some links from Tim Boucher’s Blog that I hope are helpful:

Lost In The Immense Suffering

What The Hell Happened To Me?

I want to share a couple of “home-baked” remedies that apparently have been very helpful in clearing up some chronic health problems that I have had.

Over the last few years, in researching my own health problems, one of the themes that seemed to me to be a likely common underlying factor is Inflammation. The medical community has made some steps in the direction of recognizing inflammation as a risk factor in some previously unrecognized areas such as heart disease, but overall my gut feeling is that there is much more to learn.

I suffered psoriasis on my toes for years. It probably first was triggered by a case of athletes foot that kept recurring and eventually stopped responding to anti-fungals. The next step was to use steroidal cream. This helped for awhile but it came back again and would not go away completely, roaring back to life whenever my feet were hottest and sweatiest. After a lot of research I decided to try a multi-pronged approach. In the morning I would take a dab of steroidal cream and mix it with a dab of anti-fungal cream and spread it on the affected area. At night I miixed a half cap full of hydrogen peroxide with a half cap full of apple cider vinegar and dabbed it on with cotton-swab sticks. I used the raw unfiltered vinegar from Braggs. The psoriasis cleared up after about a month and has not come back.

My dad had quite bad rheumatoid arthritis in his fingers and back for much his life, so when I started to develop some swelling and stiffness in a couple of finger joints I became concerned and went into research mode once again. I came up with the following-

1/2 to 1 ounce of cherry juice concentrate. Knudsen’s also has a tart cherry juice in non-concentrate form that I have also used (you don’t use water with this, just juice).

1 tablespoon virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon liquid lecithin

2 shakes of Turmeric powder
1 heaping tablespoon of psyllium husks

Mix in 9-10 ounces of water and drink twice a day for 4- 5 weeks. Taking this tonic seems to correlate perfectly with the disappearance of my joint pain and swelling and hemorhoids. After a month, I cut down to a maintenance dose of 1 serving, 3-4 days per week. This has held me in good stead now for 6 months.

The cherry juice and turmeric are known anti-inflammatories. I include the olive oil for general heart health and the lecithin is mostly for it’s emulsifying effects but it is also a good source of choline. The inclusion of psyllium husks is a little bit more theoretical on my part. For years I had suffered from hemorrhoids, even though I am very active physically, as well as having irregular bowl movements. I suspected a connection between my apparent bowel inflammation and my arthritis, so decided it might be good to try and clean out my plumbing. If nothing else, it has brought back regularity, if not also involved in taming my arthritis and hemorrhoids.

Another aspect of my health regimen could have also had a hand in the above results. I have taken fish oil capsules for years now for cardiovascular and brain health. The arthritis came on whileI was taking 1 1000 mg capsule each day. I upped this to 3 capsules at the time of taking the first “tonic” treatment, and I have continued at that level as the science just keeps piling up in favor of Omega 3 fatty acid supplementation.

Here’s to your health!

Mutual Aid Revisited

Anya Kamenetz

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the city where I went to high school and where my parents still live, I was a continent away in San Francisco. It was impossible to get any clear picture of what was happening from the news media. They depicted full societal breakdown, the war of all against all: looting, arson, withdrawal-crazed addicts roaming the streets. The chief of police was forced to step down after he went on national television and repeated hysterical, unfounded and since-debunked rumors of small children being raped inside the Superdome.

There couldn’t be a bigger contrast with the stories I got later from those who were actually there. While mayhem and fear certainly existed, so did an amazing collective will towards cooperation. An acquaintance told of the excitement and camaraderie among a group of friends and neighbors stranded by floodwaters on the second floor of an apartment complex. They rescued dogs and made sorties by makeshift raft to local supermarkets to bring food, water, medicine and diapers to people awaiting rescue. “It was the best days of my life,” he told me with no irony.

In the two years since the storm, recovery has been agonizingly slow. The failures of government are endless. The strength of people banding together to help each other, however, has been the one bright spot. I have seen it in the city’s 70-odd neighborhoods, where dozens of new neighborhood organizations have started up – people helping each other with rebuilding, planning, and expressing their political voice. I’ve seen it in the efforts of hundreds of newcomers – dubbed Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals – who have come or returned South to clean up, educate, feed, offer health care, create job opportunities, and organize people to help themselves. And I’ve seen it on the block where my parents live, where neighbors have become friends.

Community is a neutered word nowadays. In the stale intellectual landscape of contemporary politics, there are two opposing loci of control from which large-scale solutions to social problems are thought to flow. Liberals idolize the government and conservatives, individual interest (as pursued through the market). Neither side has much to say about cooperative power beyond the utterly platitudinous.

But human societies have always nurtured, and been nurtured by, a third type of institution. In New Orleans, for over a hundred years they have called them Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. These are the neighborhood meeting places, burial societies, and musical marching clubs that strut their stuff on Mardi Gras, St. Joseph’s Day, and whenever it’s time for a party.

Whether guild or labor union, religious or ethnic society, producer or consumer cooperative, crew or brotherhood or club, these are the people’s bastions of power. Over the past three decades they’ve played a vanishing role in the life of the average American. Now is the time for that to change.

Mutual aid societies prefigure most functions of the modern state. They’re at least as old as armies, but their mission is life, not death. For millennia, people have banded together to provide each other with health care, pensions, unemployment aid, investment capital, buying power, aid to the poor, disaster relief, old age care, child care, culture, entertainment, political efficacy, education, food, shelter and livelihoods. They have also leveraged their numbers to elicit some of these same benefits from those other two institutions, business and the government. Mutual aid extends the bonds of kinship and makes individuals into citizens.

Beginning in southern India around 800 AD, a network of merchants’ societies known as the Ayyavole 500 spread as far as Sri Lanka, Burma and Sumatra. The merchants agreed to cooperate and abide by a dharma, or code of conduct, ensuring honor both within the group and with outsiders. They sponsored trade fairs and maintained good relations with their local communities through philanthropic activities and tribute. The Ayyavole name was adopted far and wide for over 500 years; it became a “brand” associated with high quality products and fair dealings.

In the 1891 history Two Thousand Years of Gild Life, the social reformer Rev. Joseph Malet Lambert described the rules of guilds in ancient Rome, Anglo-Saxon England, and medieval Persia. Many of these societies united people by livelihood, some were religious cults, and others were locality-based, but they had common characteristics: regular contributions by members; bonds of fellowship confirmed by an oath or promise and reinforced by regular feasts and drinking parties; rules for preserving courtesy and order; and interestingly, most often, burial assistance. Beyond these basic attributes, the “gilds” were flexible, allowing for “the application of the fellowship or association to the most pressing need of the society of the day, whether mutual insurance against theft or fire, facilitation of trade, or in an imperfectly organized society, for purposes of police.”

In American society, these ultimately flexible institutions found a new place and purpose. The rise of America’s unprecedented multicultural democracy, middle class, and global economic power is directly tied to the rise of intermediary institutions, most famously but not only the labor union. The first labor action in America was a strike among Maine fishermen in 1636. In Northeastern cities during colonial times, master craftsmen and journeymen of many different trades formed “friendly societies,” which became politically active in the fight for independence. During the Jeffersonian era these organizations grew and provided a full range of social benefits to their members, including death benefits to widows, assistance to the ill and unemployed, loans and credits, and libraries. They also helped establish a high standard of craftsmanship, a minimum wage for their work, and settle disputes among members.

As America industrialized and urbanized, mutual aid helped maintain our humanity. Historian Richard Morris writes, “Workers created a wide variety of institutions, all of them infused with a spirit of mutuality. Through their fraternal orders, cooperatives, reform clubs, political parties, and trade unions, American workers shaped a collectivist counter-culture in the midst of the growing factory system.”

The phrase “labor history” invokes sepia-toned images of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – sitdown strikes, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and the successful fights against child labor and for the eight-hour day. If we hold up a vanished past as the paragon of what can be accomplished by mutual aid institutions, it will prevent us from seeing what is possible in the future. In fact, the heroic image is true to a point, but the facts are far from an unbroken march to victory. Three separate times in the 19th century, national unions built hundreds of thousands of members only to be quashed by economic panics and political repression. Two of the most significant national organizations, the Knights of Labor (which claimed as many members as all of America’s churches in the 1880s) and the Industrial Workers of the World, were put down with the help of federal action. Just as they are today, the haves were always ready to scorn the “levellers, mob, dirty-shirt party, tag, rag, and bobtail, and ringstreaked speckled rabble.”

Ironically, the collectivist counterculture met its match for good in the New Deal. The leaders of the biggest unions, representing mainly skilled, industrial, white, native-born, male workers, agreed to establishment status in exchange for pulling up the ladder for all who came after then. The “tuxedo unionist” was born along with the corrupt image that dogs unions to this day. More fundamentally, the New Deal transferred many large social functions from the old mutual aid institutions to the federal government, usurping power from the grassroots. The War on Poverty with the creation of Medicare in the 1960s accelerated the process, the closest that America has ever come to a true social welfare state. Overnight, America’s workers, poor and elderly received more money and assistance, but in exchange they became clients of the government rather than true agents of their own and their fellows’ destinies.

For a variety of well-documented reasons, participation in mutual social institutions of all types has been in a slide since the 1960s, and union memberships’ slide has been uninterrupted. However, it was not until the Reagan years that labor began to be methodically forced away from the policy table. By no means coincidentally, our social safety net has also disintegrated since then. The health care system and private pensions; Social Security and Medicare; K-12 and higher education; even infrastructure and credit; if it’s a social benefit it’s in an economic and political crisis right now. With the collapse of labor as a wielder of meaningful power, our economy has reverted to a model not seen since the Gilded Age. The only type of mutual benefit association currently enjoying decided government favor, the corporation, is the winner that takes all.

Clearly, the time is ripe to restore the power of intermediaries to create social good. What’s been less recognized even among self-professed radicals is how much of the power is in our own hands to do so. The idea is not to turn our backs on government, nor even the market, for what they can do to supply human needs, but to ask what we can also contribute as people cooperating together.

By many measures today, we are living in a golden age of collective energy and power thanks to the Internet. The values of association, fellowship, and participation are all flourishing here online. Livelihoods are generated collectively on the Internet too: eBay is the second largest employer in the country, with nearly a million people making their living as independent online merchants.

The cutting edge of New Economy business theory is all about how companies can capture this awesome power of collective participation for their own profit. Networks of people acting over the Internet for no reason other than to express themselves, amuse themselves or connect with others create value as an emergent property. As consultant Don Tapscott, a top advisor to Fortune 50 companies, describes in his recent book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, “social media” are becoming a crucial source of innovation, new products and improved services for a whole range of companies; indeed, he says, every company needs a strategy for harnessing this kind of human capital power .

But the value of online networks have only rarely been tapped in a similar way by individuals themselves for the exchange of practical, immediate benefits – other than the very valuable and important one of information.

Similarly, the social entrepreneurship movement offers a new avenue for social change by conceiving organizations that are run as efficiently and innovatively as businesses, perhaps at a profit, but with social missions. Some social entrepreneurship organizations, like the Nobel Peace Prize-winning microlending program the Grameen Bank, fit the model of mutual aid societies and have found success as a result. But too many are conceived like welfare programs, run on a client-based, not member-participation, model from the top down. So they fail to empower people beyond their own employees.

For the past year I have been working with an organization that points the way toward a new future of mutual benefit. Sara Horowitz was raised in the traditional left – her grandfather was vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and she and her father were both labor lawyers. But she grew impatient with the old categories and old ways of thinking. In 1995 she founded Working Today, now known as the Freelancers Union. She won a 1999 MacArthur Genius Grant for her work with the organization, which was conceived as the first step toward a “New New Deal,” or new social safety net, that fits the way Americans live and work today. They currently have 52,000 members and provide health care at group rates to 17,000 freelancers in New York City. Freelancers Union members are also eligible for life, dental, and disability insurance, discounts, and connect online to exchange referrals, tricks of the trade and job opportunities. They are beginning to have meet-ups nationwide to encourage political participation and the all-important value of fellowship. Currently the Freelancers Union is expanding health insurance to members in 30 states. Plans for providing more benefits like unemployment and retirement are underway.

Right now a turn of the political wheel gives us an opening to grow and strengthen a new type of institution: networks formed by social entrepreneurs and maintained by members, using technology, for mutual aid. The Freelancers Union example shows what’s already possible. Long term, Horowitz and I envision a new social safety net to replace the one that is disintegrating, delivered by a new breed of intermediaries. New unions or other types of nonprofit affinity groups can band together to deliver services such as pensions, unemployment insurance, and group health insurance. Unlike employers, membership-supported nonprofits have a bigger chance of having a long-term stake in their members’ wellbeing – and 30% of the workforce and growing doesn’t have a traditional employer relationship anyway. These new groups will have some characteristics of the old institutions, but will be more flexible and adapted to our less rooted way of life. They may unite people by type of work, neighborhood, heritage, or family status. They have a chance to move beyond old political debates and strengthen democracy by channeling people’s energy into participation and efficacy.

What should the government’s role be? Encouraging the growth of these institutions requires halting the political war on organizing and organizers fomented by business conservatives and waged through the courts. Financially, the investment would be modest: perhaps a program of tax breaks and incentives for providing benefits similar to that now given to corporations, as well as access to low-cost capital for organizations providing a social benefit. Mutual aid is not a political cure-all or even a policy program – it’s a means of delivering solutions.

For individuals, the benefits are much richer, and they can start today. If you read this site, you probably already participate in some form of mutual aid, like a dumpster-dived salvaged food potluck, a benefit party to help a friend with a health care expense, a clothing swap, or a community supported agriculture program. A growing movement of people are getting together to provide themselves with space and resources to work and make art. They are lending money to each other at mutually-agreed upon rates, rather than use banks. They are forming educational and fun business networks. The Burning Man community in many cities provides a form of the old Social Aid and Pleasure club. You don’t need to wait for political action; you can work within or outside the existing system, just like Indian merchants or Roman craftsmen a thousand years ago.

The idea of fostering the growth of mutual aid satisfies many political and cultural yearnings at once. Conservatives have sought to strengthen churches as social institutions, and centers of worship do have an important place in the panoply of mutual aid societies. But they don’t satisfy the full range of needs for organization and political efficacy in a multicultural, non-theocratic democracy. Liberals are very vocal about the need to foster community, but too often we form organizations under duress around political grievance or “resistance,” and we don’t sustain them. Without rewarding self-interest through providing benefits, long-term continuity goes missing. And with a charity-based model of simply delivering benefits across class lines, populism is an empty, not an empowering, message.

Unlike the prescription of government welfare benefits, which Americans seem to be hardwired against anyway and which seem further out of reach than ever in the current atmosphere of fear and scarcity, mutual aid fosters competition, and strengthens democracy by building civic involvement and political constituencies. Unlike winner-take-all capitalism, labor market intermediaries create more winners than before. The old solutions are dead, and we have a chance to get it right this time if we join together.

http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/482

We are generally quite mechanical beings, as we go through our day, largely governed by muscle memory and thought loops that serve as practical time-savers in order to get the “job” done. Routine tasks would be much more time consuming if we had to think about every little step. The downside is that we tend not to exercise the spontaneous, more creative parts of ourselves. Try sometime to pull back your thoughts and stop your motions and just observe the state of your mind and body during your daily routine. You will find that even remembering to do this is very difficult to do. You might do it once or twice as a novelty, but then the magnetic pull of the hum drum beat of everyday life pulls our thoughts and actions back into routine, and we are lost again in the task at hand.

As old habits are hard to break, new habits can be equally hard to instill in our-selves.

There has been a lot of buzz lately about building conservation into our lives. I think this is a positive trend as conservation, for example of petroleum, has the potential to have a much bigger impact in the short, and even mid-term as opposed to technological upgrades and breakthroughs.

Here is a list of some of the habits that I have built up over the last few years in the name of conservation, some obvious ones that have been widely advertised, and some more obscure and idiosyncratic.

- replacing incandescent bulbs with cfl’s.

- not using lights during the daytime in the bathroom (this obviously depends on your window situation)

- turning off the water during tooth brushing.

- Sponge washing the car with a gallon of water in a bucket using organic soap (my favorite is Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castile soap) and then a very quick rinse, the minimum needed to get most of the soap off. I don’t care that my car is not spotless, my image is in no way tied into my car as is many’s.

- I turn off the light while brushing my teeth at night.

- Unplugging my toothbrush charger two days out of every three (more or less).

- Shorter, cooler showers.

- Relentless turning off of lights in unoccupied rooms.

- Instead of wrapping uneaten food like ½ avocados, or melons, etc in plastic wrap, I use permanent plastic containers.

One change that can cumulatively make a huge difference, but for which I have not yet developed consistent habit yet, is keeping vehicle tires at optimum air pressure. I really need to apply some pressure into this little matter of my life.

Thinking of other ways to save is a good exercise in creativity, helping to break us out of our mechanistic lives.