Recreeping Normalcy

I still haven't been able to muster my response to the response to last Sunday's Lysistrata post.  My time's been too fragmented to tackle what's becoming a rather involved thing.  In the meantime, here's a brief dealio I was thinking about whilst driving in my Ford Escape hybrid.

Jared Diamond discussed something called 'creeping normalcy' in Collapse, which is all about how we often miss little important subtle changes around us and that can prevent us from acting to avert catastrophe.  So as I was driving and looking at my Fuel Economy and Energy Flow computer displays, I wondered if we can reverse such trends by creeping incrementally in the other direction.

It was little things that have added up over time to cause our current issues with oil dependency, climate change and the like.  To Ordinary People, trying to fix the problems can seem to be an overwhelming task, particularly on an individual level.  Yet I've discovered that by paying attention to a few new things now that I have information about my car's performance, I've been able to change teeny things about my driving behavior (e.g., accelerating more smoothly to prevent the gas engine from kicking in) that have resulted in 3 to 4 MPG better efficiency. 

That might not sound like much, but that's more than 10% savings so far, which is fairly significant I think.  So if you look at the larger task and just think about simple things you can easily change about yourself, you'll be going a long way to helping save the environment, stop the war, etc.

Jas was right that it's all about baby steps, baby steps.  And as Mr Dryden says in Lawrence of Arabia: big things have small beginnings.

ntodd

Comments

[Ruth]

I shall dedicate myself to accelerating much more smoothly if that will keep our troops from (as Boehner just said on the floor) dying for the sake of making Iraq free. If the troops came home instead of dying, of course, Iraq would be free. See me accelerating not at all jerkily?