The light bulb police visited this morning and replaced most of my incandescent light bulbs with compact flourescents. They also replaced the spouts on my faucets, and my shower head.

It was something called "Energy Trust of Oregon" and they made a deal with the landlord to do all of this for free. I'm not just sure what the deal was with the water, though. I was afraid they were going to be "low-flow", but they aren't.

Most of the bulbs they replaced were ones I never use, so the whole thing has a feel of silliness and futility about it.

I wonder if this is my share of last year's stimulus money?

UPDATE: Actually, the bathroom faucet was changed to "low flow".

Of all the stupid ideas, "water conservation" in this area is one of the stupidest. Back in the late 1960's, when the "Ecology" movement (as it was known then) was just getting started, one time my sister attended some sort of consciousness raising (i.e. indoctrination) meeting, and came back full of wonderful ideas for how we could use less. One of the things she wanted to do was to put a brick in each of our toilet tanks so that we used less water when we flushed.

Now, in southern California conserving water makes a whole lot of sense. The area is arid and most of its water has to be imported (from the state of Colorado). But this is the Willamette valley, land of rain, rain, and more rain. We get 50 inches of rain per year here, and it comes slow and easy over many, many days, so there's plenty of time for the water to sink through the soil. Here in Beaverton, our water comes from wells. But there's no danger to the water table; the rains replenish the ground water that we take. It ain't fossil water like in Oklahoma.

Where we were living back then, our water came from the Bull Run watershed east of Portland. The water we didn't use ran down the Bull Run river into the Columbia, and out to sea.

"Conserving" something usually means "saving it for later" -- but there isn't anything here to save. We here in western Oregon are not short of fresh water, and we won't be for the forseeable future. And excess water here runs off into the ocean; there's no way to "save it for later".

I haven't used it yet, but if that new shower head also turns out to be "low flow", I'm going to buy my own. (grumble)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 10:35 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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