Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 24

In the shower, we get in hot water when we forget where the hot water comes from, because both water and heat come to us from nature. A toilet is basically a small pond in the bathroom, while the shower is a waterfall positioned for our convenience. While they definitely depend on plumbing and human ingenuity, they rely more basically on precipitation and the recharge of groundwater and aquifers—natural phenomena. And because water in nature is seldom warm enough for a satisfying shower, Joe and Jo College use nature to heat nature, warming water by burning fossil fuels or causing chain reactions in uranium. While we luxuriate in the shower, we also suck up the world’s fresh water and generate more greenhouse gases.¹⁸

If a normal shower delivers three gallons of water a minute, then a ten-minute shower requires thirty gallons of water. With just one shower a day for a nine-month school year, most students will use about 8,100 gallons of water; if the average university has ten thousand students, that’s more than eighty million gallons. Simple updates like low-flow showerheads could allow the university to save four million gallons of water, plus the fuels needed to warm that much water. Students would still be clean, with hair that would still glisten, but the school could easily be conserving resources.¹⁹

The American shower has a deeper effect, though, by impressing the planet’s other people, who often emulate U.S. standards of cleanliness. “The British bath,” notes Elizabeth Shove, “is in danger of being abandoned in favour of showering on a daily or twice daily basis.” By itself, this English adjustment might be no big deal, but it’s a small part of an energy-intensive shift in international comfort standards, and that is huge. This also suggests that standards of cleanliness are never universal or permanent. American students now expect free and unlimited water for showers in their residence halls. At one time, however, a trustee at a college in the prairies of the Midwest thought that the purchase of a single tin bathtub was an unnecessary luxury for students. The extravagance only seemed justified when he discovered that the college could charge students a nickel a bath. If today’s colleges charged students for water by the gallon, it might help teach the costs incurred by lingering luxuriously in the shower, and it might be a first step toward full-cost accounting (and accountability) for all the resources in students’ lives.²⁰

We shower ourselves with water, in an artificial waterfall created by culture. Though our morning shower never seems like “getting back to nature,” it’s one place where we could wake up to nature, a place where we could practice mindfulness about our “ordinary consumption.” Usually when we think about consumption, we think about buying stuff or going out to restaurants, movies, or concerts. “Ordinary consumption,” on the other hand, is so routine and repetitive—like water and heat, electricity and embodied energy—that we don’t normally consider it a part of our consumer behavior. In the shower, then, we can fully enjoy the comforts and convenience of the steamy stream, but we can also begin to immerse ourselves in the paradigm shift of conservation that will characterize the coming culture of permanence.