7 sustainable wonders

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1995 by Alan Thein Durning

Common items we take for granted--such as bicycles and clotheslines--do wonders to protect the environment.

I NEVER HAVE SEEN any of the Seven Wonders of the World, and to tell you the truth, I wouldn't really want to. If I ever got to the pyramids, I'm sure I'd only think about how many slaves must have died cubing boulders and shoving them about. I once came close to seeing the Taj Mahal, which, though it came too late to register as an original wonder, surely would qualify on a new ranking. Everyone we met in India said we had to go see it, but my wife and I balked when we figured out how early we would have to arise to do so. Who wants to get up before dawn for a hell ride through traffic (Hindus are especially bad drivers because they believe in reincarnation) to see a tomb built by a long-dead imperialist? We slept in, then spent the day riding bicycle rickshaws and smelling th jasmine in Delhi.

To me, the real wonders are all the little things that work, especially when they do it without hurting the Earth. here's my list simple thing that, though they are taken for granted, are absolute wonders. These implements solve everyday problems so elegantly that everyone in the world today--and everyone who is likely to live in it in the next century--could have and use them without Mother Nature ever noticing.

The bicycle. The most thermodynamically efficient transportation device ever created and the most widely used private vehicle in the world, the bicycle merits first place on the list of the sustainable wonders of the world. Invented just a little over a century ago, bikes let individuals travel three times as far on a plateful of calories as a person could walking. Moreover, they are 53 times more energy efficient--comparing food calories with gasoline calories--than the typical car. They don't pollute the air, lead to oil spills (and oil wars), change the climate, send cities sprawling over the countryside, lock up half of urban space in roads and parking lots, or kill a quarter-million people in traffic accidents each year.

Bikes also are cheaper than any other vehicle, costing less than $100 new in most of the Third World. Mine, a zippier model, still ran less than $400. (Fluorescent spandex tights, of course, are extra. Bicycles do take steel, aluminum, and rubber to manufacture, and making these has an environmental cost, as a glance at any iron mine or rubber factory will demonstrate. However, they are lightweight of necessity, so they require small amounts of materials compared to other vehicles. Their simplicity makes repair relatively easy. Where bicycles are prevalent, repair is a large, decentralized industry Pedal a couple of blocks on any thorough fare in India and you likely will pass a least one bike-fixer sitting on a mat, hi tools spread around him.

The world doesn't have enough bikes yet for everybody to ride, but it is getting there quickly. Best estimates put the planet's expanding fleet of two-wheelers at 850,000,000--double its auto population. Americans have no excuses on this count: We have more bikes per person than China, where they are the principal vehicle. We just don't ride them much.

The ceiling fan. Appropriate technology's answer to air conditioning, ceiling fans cool tens of millions of people in Asia and Africa. A fan over the bed works like a charm in sweltering climes, as I've had plenty of time to reflect on during episodes of digestive turmoil in cheap hotels in the tropics.

With Americans moving to the Sunbelt and most of the Earth's people concentrated near the equator, air conditioning is a surging sector of the global economy. In 1960, 12% of U.S. homes were air conditioned; now, two-thirds are. Air conditioning, though, consumes disproportionate amounts of energy and is the bane of the stratospheric ozone layer, because of its chlorofluorocarbon coolants. Ceiling fans are simple, durable, repairable, and take little energy to run.

The clothesline. A few years ago, I read about an engineering laboratory that claimed it had all but perfected a microwave clothes dryer. The machine, the story went, would get the moisture out of the wash with one-third the energy of a conventional unit and cause less wear and tear on the fabric.

I don't know if they ever got it on the market, but it struck me at the time that, if simple wonders had a public relations agent, there might have been a news story instead about the perfection of a solar clothes dryer.

It takes few materials to manufacture, requires absolutely no electricity or fuel, and even gets people outdoors where they can talk to their neighbors. "A tem of government scientists," I imagined the article reporting, "have found such a technology in an all-but-abandoned device called the clothesline." The apartment building I lived in for four years had a ban on clotheslines, as do many apartment buildings. Apparently, laundry flapping in the breeze grates on people's sensibilities. "Looks like Appalachia," I've overheard folks say, and "Reminds me of a tenement." This aversion to frugality is strange. It's as if using the sun to dry clothes is a retrograde step, a betrayal of the American Dream.