Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Nature Cuts Our Energy Use


The front page news (besides plans for the Victory Parade for the World Series Champions “We’re No. 1—let’s party” and the ongoing shunning of Ross Mirkarimi) is “Monstrous storm ravages the northeast/Deluge hits New York City hard with record 13-foot seawater surge.”  This of course is the month we’re focusing on water in our environmental science class and I’m making water one of the major focuses (won’t say foci) of my Life Style Project.  (Once again, I skipped my bath today.)  The news report says that the surge of seawater flooded the tunnels, subway stations, and electrical system that powers Wall Street.  I called my son Jonathan, who lives on 84th Street near Central Park, and he reassured me that it hadn’t affected him. He’d even had electricity.  I have a former student who still writes to me, and she and her husband live on Fulton Street, near the southern tip of Manhattan, so I sent her an e-mail to be sure she’s okay.  But here’s the environmental science angle:  To lessen damage from saltwater to the subway system and the electrical network, NYC’s main utility cut power to about 6500 customers in Lower Manhattan, so here’s how nature is taking care of itself.  It’s making it necessary for us to cut our energy use.  It’s giving us no choice.  (And  this is the first time since 1888 that the stock market has been closed because of weather.  Nature is having to resort to extreme measures.

And now back to the past weekend.  

As I said in an earlier post, we managed to find a strictly vegetarian restaurant, but we found only one.  The following morning, I took a gigantic Trader Joe's bag into the restaurant the Bay Park Hotel has and I explained to the man who greeted us, "I have a special diet."  But when I saw that the breakfast was totally vegetarian--not even any bacon or sausage--I explained my project to the greeter/server.  (I must remember too that part of the project is to let people know what I'm doing so it will occur to them that there's a connection between the environment and what we eat.)  I could eat!  Of course, another reason that it was okay for me to eat there was that it was a complimentary breakfast; there was no way of having our room and not having the breakfast.  So by eating in the Crazy Horse Restaurant, which isn't strictly vegetarian, I'm not supporting them; I'm actually depleting them--not that I want to be mean.  I just want vegetarian restaurants to have a fair chance.

I had leftovers instead of ordering at noon, when Kathy and Javier had vegetarian dishes at the not strictly vegetarian Forge in the Forest in Carmel.  

1 comment:

  1. Good for you for educating others on your choices and why!

    ReplyDelete

I don't think this is the kind of community-provided bench the SF Chronicle was talking about today in its article https://www.sfchronic...