Q. Dear Umbra,

I've taken to washing my hair less and less often to keep it from drying out. Since I've switched to the "no-'poo" method (baking soda followed by a vinegar rinse) it stays cleaner longer. However, I still take a shower (brief and lukewarm) most days. To keep my curly hair from becoming totally frizzy in the humidity of the shower, I typically cover it with a shower cap. My current cap is wearing out and I'm going to need a new one soon -- but your simple rule of "no vinyl and that's final!" keeps resounding in my head. Every shower cap I've seen is made of vinyl, except for those cheap plastic ones in hotel rooms. What's a girl to do?

Curly Girl
Pittsburgh, Penn.

A. Dearest Curly Girl,

Or a nice felt hat always does the trick.Have you ever noticed that the hair is always greener on the other side of the fence? I know straight-haired gals who would kill to have your tress-related troubles, and I imagine there are days when you wouldn't mind a mane that's a bit more manageable.

I commend you on your shift away from conventional beauty products, which are so often toxic, and on your commitment to a vinyl-free lifestyle. How cockle-warming to see my message sinking in!

I've done a bit of scouring on your behalf, and I think I've found a couple of possible solutions, though they may be difficult to track down. You're certainly right that vinyl is the most common, but I also came across caps made from other, marginally better materials, including nylon and polypropylene. But here is my big discovery: cotton and silk! It seems counterintuitive, but according to reliable sources, these are lovely materials for shower caps. You can buy cute patterned varieties from various places online, with a little looking. Of course, cotton and silk have their own eco-impacts -- so, dearest readers, one of you should create an organic-cotton shower-cap business, stat.

I suppose your other option might be to ... wear a plastic grocery bag over your hair, securing it with clips or a headband? An ingenious reuse for a pesky object.

Tangly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I started a green team at my office and one of our initiatives is reducing energy consumption. The team had recommended turning off the computers at night and when not in use. Seems logical, right? Well, the IT department denied our efforts and recommends keeping computers on 24/7. I'm horrified! The rationale is that turning on and off your computer changes the internal temperature of the equipment and adds to the wear and tear. I need some data to back up our green claim that it is better and safe to shut down the computers. Can you please help?

Nervously awaiting,
Jennifer

A. Dearest Jennifer,

Little-known fact: I actually keep my computer turned off 24 hours a day. I just peek at my inbox over my editor's shoulder, scribble my answers on recycled paper, and make her type them in. Saves boatloads of energy.

Congratulations on the formation of your green team, and condolences on the fact that you have already been strongarmed. I suspect it will not be the last time, as earnest eco-efforts are not always welcomed by those whose habits and patterns they affect.

There are two answers to your question, as far as I see it: a factual one and a philosophical one. The factual answer is, reputable sources including the U.S. Department of Energy say it is A-OK to turn your computer off at night, and that the various "wear and tear" arguments are no longer accurate. (Here is a fact sheet from the Oregon DEQ that, while a bit dated, cites many useful resources you might peruse.) The philosophical answer is, don't ever, ever, ever alienate your IT department. Even for the sake of saving the planet.

I think there may be some middle ground here: more and more computers have a "hibernate" function, which is similar to a sleep function but even, well, sleepier. Talk to your IT people to find out if there's a way to send all the computers happily into hibernation at the end of the day. Yes, they will still use a bit of energy, but far less than if they were left in full on mode, humming along. Other key things to do: turn off your monitor whenever you won't be using it for 15 to 20 minutes. And remember that a screen saver is not an energy-saver; in fact, most screen savers are energy hogs.

Now go buy the IT guys some cookies, and keep up the good work.

RAMly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am so utterly sick of getting junk mail, is there anything we can do to stop it? In the age of the internet spam, is it really so impossible to just outlaw it? I can swallow deleting junkmail, but I can't swallow how much of it has to be tossed.

Carey S.
Missoula, Mont.

A. Dearest Carey,

In a sense, old-fashioned junk mail is less offensive than spam. After all, when was the last time an envelope arrived at your house promising to enlarge your manhood or sell you cheap Rolex watches?

On the other hand, the sheer mass of junk mail is offensive indeed: each of us in the U.S. receives about 560 pieces a year, according to Co-op America, and all that "direct mail" (that's the nice name for it) adds up to the equivalent of more than 100 million trees. While the bad economy has led to a steep decline in junk mail sent this year, "they" predict a comeback; real mail is still considered more effective for advertising than e-mail, which is too easy to delete.

The good news is, there are steps you can take to slow the stream of junk mail to your home. First of all, avoid entering contests, filling out warranties, and giving your address on forms -- if you must do so, write "do not rent or sell my information" alongside. Go to the Direct Marketing Assocation site to register your preferences, or use a service such as 41pounds.org (which charges $41 for five years of mail stoppage, but promises a more thorough excavation than DMA). To reduce the catalogues that come (and 'tis the season, 'tisn't it?), visit Catalog Choice or contact merchandisers directly. To be removed from the list for credit card offers, call 888-5-OPTOUT. And if you're a business, see this list of tips for junk-mail reduction from our friends here in King County, Washington.

As for outlawing junk mail entirely, it seems unlikely to happen. And various efforts to create a federal "Do Not Mail" list along the lines of the "Do Not Call" list haven't led to much (except for a suspicious industry-led imitation). If you're feeling feisty, and you believe in online petitions, you can sign this petition urging Congress to take action. Otherwise, take the steps above -- and recycle, recycle, recycle.

Papercutly,
Umbra

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Turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo

This interview is part of a series on people who are making their communities smarter, greener places to live. Got a nomination? Leave it in the comments section or send it along to us.

Winner of Project Laundry List’s 2009 “Art on the Line” competition. Daisey BinghamAlexander Lee founded Project Laundry List as a Middlebury College undergrad in 1995, after hearing Dr. Helen Caldicott say we could shut down the nuclear industry if we all did things like hang out our clothes. He’s been true to the cause ever since, pushing for clotheslines across the land—even at the White House. Grist caught up with him to find out how hanging out can make for better neighborhoods, what clotheslines have to do with climate change, and why laundry stigmas are as persistent as wine stains.

Q. You created and run Project Laundry List—why, and what are its goals?

A. Growing up, my mother had always referred to herself as Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (the prickly laundress in Beatrix Potter’s series) and the clothesline was much less a pennant of the eco-chic, as it is becoming today through our work, than a flag of New England Yankee frugality. Helen’s idea resonated with me and we started a subgroup of the environmental club. We asked people to put themselves on the line and come hang out with us, and the puns haven’t stopped.

Our mission has evolved to focus on “making air-drying and cold-water washing laundry acceptable and desirable as a simple and effective way to save energy.” This really only became my day job in 2007, after years as a teacher, law student, public utilities commission staffer, and political campaigner. I get paid roughly minimum wage, mostly raised through selling clotheslines and drying racks. I work a bazillion hours. We have never really written grants. There is no time for that nonsense when the house is burning down. This is a work of love and passion, motivated by an abiding sense that we are in planetary crisis. Not much sense in working for Lehman Brothers and laying up treasure, like many of my classmates did, when ain’t none of it gunna matter if we don’t get ahold of the climate monster. I am just not the type to drink martinis and listen to Mozart as the Titanic is sinking.

Raise your hand if you believe in the right to dry!Couresty Project Laundry ListI am inspired by people like Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, to live and work as I do, but I fall way short. Furthermore, I am too irreverent and incorrigible to be as good a Catholic as she. An editor for my forthcoming book (More Time to Hang) likened me, somewhat admiringly, to a monk. I grunted and then chuckled, remembering Dorothy’s rebuke to somebody calling her a saint: “I won’t be dismissed so easily.” In July 2008, ABC World News, in their story on the right to dry, referred to me as “a 33 year-old bachelor lawyer from Concord, NH.” That conjures up another image, entirely. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Q. The clothesline issue seems to have gotten a lot of press in the last year or two—to what do you attribute that? Does it surprise you?

A. No surprise. People love to talk about laundry and everybody, everybody is an expert. Laundry is a universal human experience that is tactile, olfactory, and sentimental. Nearly everybody of a certain age has their own story of twirling among the bedsheets pinned on a clothesline with a grandmother or parent. Consumers like the smell so much that Yankee Candle has four scents meant to remind us of clothes drying on the line. (Forget that they mostly smell like dryer sheets.)

We have received mention in the WSJ twice, ABC World News and the CBS Sunday Morning Show, and NPR and The New York Times (seven times!). We have a meme that works, but the clothesline is just a “gateway drug” to better environmental living. It is a jumping off point to talk about the failure of the fourth layer of government (“community” associations); to talk about clothing care issues more generally, like we are doing with the Permacouture Institute through our New Again Coalition; to talk about why taxpayers foot the bill to wash prison uniforms in hot water; and to think about so much else.

Q. I’m always taken aback when I hear about places that don’t allow clotheslines, and then I assume they’re gated communities in sprawling places. Is that generally true? And are the bans are a reflection of some sort of stigma?

Lee (left) with Canadian folk singer and children’s TV personality Fred Penner, sporting a clothesline tie. Courtesy Project Laundry ListA. Truth is, clotheslines are banned or severely restricted by landlords and mobile home parks, too. It is not just the super-wealthy who are afraid of some mythic property value decrease if a neighbor shows some thong on the line.

The Italians—only 3 to 4 percent of them own a dryer—think we are crazy. They are a fashion-conscious, industrialized nation. We could take a page from their book. By contrast, about 80 percent of American households own a dryer, but good news: for the first time last year, we did see a drastic decrease in the number of Americans who see the dryer as essential.

There are five major objections to the clothesline that I confront all of the time: Prudery, snobbery, liability/safety, convenience, and feminism. I could write a book (I am writing a book) full of anecdotes that paint a picture of an America looking for any reason not to use a clothesline. The excuses range from the absurd to the comical. In both Connecticut and New Hampshire, shills for the local chapters of the Community Association Institute testified against Right to Dry legislation, claiming that the clothesline is a liability. Somebody might walk into one in the common area of a condominium and sue the association, they claimed. Never mind that, according to the National Fire Prevention Association, dryers cause 15,000 fires every year, resulting in 10-15 deaths and $200 million in property damage.

Michelle Obama put in that garden at the White House and I said, on Facebook, “Maybe a clothesline will be next.” Within minutes someone asked me if I was being racist or snarky. He was surprised to learn we had been pushing for a White House clothesline since 2007 on www.right2dry.org. That is what we are up against here. Stigma.

In response to the Times debate I wrote a piece for, a woman proclaimed, “You’ll pry my clothes dryer out of my cold dead hands.” Project Laundry List is not telling her she cannot have a dryer. Feminism is about choices. We are telling her that if she has a dryer, the oceans may rise and her front porch will get wet. Tough choices for some.

We are not anti-dryer; we are pro-clothesline. If you cannot get up out of your wheelchair or you have debilitating allergies for part of the year, the dryer makes sense and is a marvelous invention, but the real problem is not the millions of Americans disallowed from hanging clothes, it is the hundreds of millions of Americans who refuse to get up, go outside for some fresh air and sunshine, talk over the fence with their neighbors, and mindfully take time to do an essential human task. By my estimate five billion plus people in the world manage fine without a dryer. It may not be “easy living,” but it beats having the ocean lapping at your door.

Q. What promise do better laundry habits hold for individuals? What about for climate?

A. Life is about choices. We should sweat the small stuff, because small is beautiful; however, we can ill afford not to sweat the big stuff. A report that just came out concluded that if Americans would hang their laundry out to dry, along with 16 other small steps, they could slash U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 7.4 per cent by 2019. This is a studiously conservative study. We can do more, faster. I know we can, in my unscientific gut.

As far as laundry itself, we do a terrible job of measuring its true national energy impact. It is okay to look at the average household energy used by a fridge, but when you have over 2 million households doing fifteen loads or more per week and others skewing the average by doing laundry down the hall or at a Laundromat, the 5.9 percent figure, which is the average American residential electric use for the tumble dryer, tells you almost nothing. There are 2 million people in jail in this country and millions spent last night in a hotel, hospital, or nursing home. We do not submeter commercial or industrial laundry facilities to see how much they are using. All that laundry done for restaurants, universities, fish piers, etc., goes unaccounted for.

Q. You spent the summer on a “Clotheslines Across America” tour—what are the most memorable things you saw and heard?

World’s largest—and solar-powered to boot!Courtesy Alex LeeA. The tour started on my 35th birthday in New York City. The purpose was to have fun and meet some of our supporters. I wanted to see this country, see the holy ground that people like my uncle, a Marine lieutenant in Korea, died to protect. I met somebody at the giant clothespin sculpture in Philadelphia who had supported us for over a decade!

Another primary purpose was to provide material for a movie that is being made called Drying for Freedom—watch the trailer. The interviews that we did in Kentucky, visiting the World’s Largest Laundromat (solar hot water!) just outside Chicago, standing beneath the Arch in St. Louis on the Saturday morning of Parkapalooza, and watching a baseball game with Gov Pat Quinn of Illinois (we want a major league team to do a “Line Dry” event next year) were a couple of the highlights. I had the most fun doing a photo shoot with a pin-up girl in Philly so that we can make a poster that asks, “Why Don’t More Men Hang Out the Laundry?!” She was watching as I did the dirty work… and don’t worry, it was tasteful! Maybe every Hollywood couple can do a similar photo shoot with Celeste Giuliano (the awesome photographer) and we can produce a whole calendar on this theme.

Q. What will it take to get every U.S. municipality to give its citizens the “right to dry”?

A. What will it take to get every utility company in the country to give away clotheslines to its customers, like Toronto Hydro and BC Hydro have done in Canada? Couldn’t they give away racks, too? What will it take to get these places you are asking about to allow xeriscaping, compost piles, window AC units and screen windows (so people don’t get central air), and gardens? Maybe some really good designer drugs from Aldous Huxley. Maybe the Community Association Institute making this an organizational priority.

Q. What eco-worry keeps you up at night?

A. Environmentalists have this fascination with carbon dioxide. It is time for them to start paying attention to methane, before the proverbial cow pie hits the electric fan.  To understand why methane is 72 times worse than carbon dioxide over a twenty year period, read Wikipedia. Particularly, I am worried that New England governors are about to encourage Hydro-Quebec to build more dams when nobody can show me any peer-reviewed evidence that rotting vegetation in temperate hydroelectric reservoirs are not a major producer of greenhouse gases. I have been working with the Cree since the early 1990s on this and have paddled the Rupert River—just dammed this year—five times.

Q. Anything else you want people to know about your work?

A. Without throwing about academic terms like Jevons Paradox and the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate, I just want to say that heroes of mine, like Amory Lovins, who have asked us to invest with religious fervor in the concept of energy efficiency, have forgotten that we need to focus on what happens with all that leftover cash saved through efficiency. If the individual takes that cash and flies to a conference in Copenhagen or buys one of these new drying cabinets that Maytag thinks we need to have next to our dryer, then we have not gained a thing. In fact, it is a setback.

Read More Work for Mother by Ruth Schwartz Cowan and Elizabeth Shove’s book Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience (Berg 2003). Stop putting your faith in sweeping political reforms, like the “clean” nuclear and America is the Saudi Arabia of clean coal mumbo jumbo coming out of our Congress, and start taking some personal responsibility. Congressman Brian Baird is on the right track with his behavior change research bill. New technology is important, but not the silver bullet.

The biggest crisis facing humanity is not campaign finance reform, climate change, nuclear waste and proliferation, or endocrine disruption and our poisoned food, air, or water, but rather how we do our laundry. What if every one of the five billion people without access to a dryer now suddenly had not only a dryer, but a refrigerator, washing machine, and hot water heater in their mud hut? And what’s up with all the wooden clothespins we buy now being “Made in China”? I was made in America and think conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, that you should put on your sweater and turn down the thermostat. It is almost winter, for Pete’s sake.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I know it's a little early, but I had this great idea for a New Year's resolution. Every month in 2010, I pick a certain eco-area of my life and focus on that for a whole month. So far I have: reduce energy consumption; reduce water consumption; reduce material waste; reuse; recycle; volunteerism/activism; eating local. Finally, I think December will be trying to use everything I've learned and put it all together cohesively. However, my list isn't full, and I'm out of ideas. Do you have any suggestions?

Happy Hippie
Alexandria, Va.

A. Dearest HH,

It's never too early to make good resolutions! I bet you are also stocking up on organic, fair-trade chocolate for Valentine's Day. Three cheers for organization.

Personally, I think a better resolution might be to try to spend the year really, seriously improving on one or two of these areas, rather than flitting about from topic to topic. As you well know, you cannot just "reuse" for a month and be done with it. However, I admire the somewhat wackadoodle structure of your list, and I think you've made a great start on it. You have seven good categories, plus your December free-for-all. So here are four more ideas from me to round out your year: go carless for a month; serve as a public information officer on climate change for a month, helping your friends and family and perhaps strangers understand the issue; spend a month weatherizing your house; and spend a month without the TV on. This last step will help you not only reduce your energy consumption, it will help you reconnect with the real world. You could use the time instead to read deeply on the eco-topic of your choice, or to brush up on green classics.

Readers, any other ideas for HH? Or resolutions of your own? Please share in the comments section below.

Resolvedly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I was recently appalled when my 9-year-old son came home from school and related that his teacher had denounced human-caused climate change to the class. I immediately searched for the Grist link I once saw that listed scientists (and academic institutions) who believe otherwise. Unfortunately that link appears to be missing. If not for Grist, where can I find such a list? How should I deal with this situation?

A very worried mother stewing in the climate change pot,

Cate J.
Whitefish, Mont.

A. Dearest Cate,

Just the facts ... please?This really boils my butter. Let me direct you and others to our thorough series on "How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," which refutes various attempts to debunk the science -- it includes a list of some of the scientific organizations that agree about anthropogenic climate change. I'm not sure if it's the list you had in mind, but it should help. And here is a letter sent in late October to every U.S. senator from the country's leading scientific organizations, confirming that research has shown climate change is primarily human caused.

You might also point your child's teacher to the U.S. EPA's resource page for students and educators, or print out the agency's climate FAQ. It is called, notably, "Back to Basics." Because at this point in time, this is basic information: our current climate problem is caused by human activity.

Does this teacher also suggest that gravity may be false and the moon is made of cheese? If he or she insists on continuing to plant seeds of doubt in young minds about scientifically solid information, I would not hesitate to take your concerns to a higher authority.

Factily,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am looking for advice about purchasing the best low-flow and/or dual-flush toilet to replace my current one, which I've been told needs a complete replacement due to its age and inability to flush sufficiently. I've heard some use a very low amount of water, but that can often translate into a lack of, well, doing their duty. I'm having a hard time navigating all the brands and claims to fame. Help me wash it all away!

Erica
Portland, Ore.

A. Dearest Erica,

This notion that low-flow toilets are somehow not powerful enough to do their duty lingers on, despite being largely false. It's true that the first generation of low-flows lacked a little oomph, but at this point the major manufacturers have figured out how to keep things moving. And it's worth making the switch: toilets can use up to 30 percent of all our household water. A low-flow toilet uses just 1.6 gallons per flush compared to an older model's three or more gallons, while a high-efficiency model uses a measly 1.28 gpf. Dual-flush toilets, which are my favorite option but tend to be more expensive, usually use less than a gallon for liquid waste and about 1.6 for solid waste.

To be honest, I think if you identify your price range and go with one of the major manufacturers, you'll be fine. But if you are really in the mood to dork out, the California Urban Water Conservation Council has done some extremely thorough "maximum performance" testing, and makes various PDFs available that sort the results by performance, by manufacturer, and so forth. The EPA also offers a list of high-efficiency toilets that have earned its WaterSense seal, as good an endorsement as we currently have. Good luck.

Whooshily,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

In your last column, you talked about what people can do in the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen summit. I wanted to share a site called www.hopenhagen.org that is working on that very issue. There is a useful Facebook application that is associated that has a myriad of actions for just that audience: change out a lightbulb, turn down your water heater, etc.! Is there any way you can write a bit about it in the next post in response to the question? Thanks!

Mary
Santa Cruz, Calif.

A. Dearest Mary,

I think you just have. Thank you for adding to our resources.

Hopily,
Umbra

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This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

Pink snow is turning red in Colorado. Here on the Great American Desert -- specifically Utah's slickrock portion of it where I live -- hot 'n' dry means dust. When frequent high winds sweep across our increasingly arid landscape, redrock powder is lifted up and carried hundreds of miles eastward until it settles on the broad shoulders of Colorado's majestic mountains, giving the snowpack there a pink hue.

Some call it watermelon snow. Friends who ski into the backcountry of the San Juan and La Plata mountain ranges in western Colorado tell me that the pink-snow phenomenon has lately been giving way to redder hues, so thick and frequent are the dust storms that roll in these days. A cross-section of a typical Colorado snowbank last winter revealed alternating dirt and snow layers that looked like a weird wilderness version of our flag, red and white stripes alternating against the sky's blue field.

The Forecast: Dust Followed by Mud

Here in the lowlands, we, too, are experiencing the drying of the West in new dusty ways. Our landscapes are often covered with what we jokingly refer to as "adobe rain" -- when rain falls through dust, spattering windows or laundry hung out to dry with brown stains. After a dust "event" this past spring, I wandered through the lot of a car dealership in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the only color seemingly available was light tan. All those previously shiny, brightly painted cars had turned drab. I had to squint to read price stickers under opaque windows.

All of this is more than a mere smudge on our postcard-pretty scenery: Colorado's red snow is a warning that the climatological dynamic in the arid West is changing dramatically. Think of it as a harbinger -- and of more than simply a continuing version of the epic drought we've been experiencing these past several years.

The West is as dry as the East is wet, a vast and arid landscape of high plains and deserts broken by abrupt mountain ranges and deep canyons. Unlike eastern and midwestern America, where there are myriad rivers, streams, lakes, and giant underground lakes, or aquifers, to draw on, we depend on snowpack for about 90 percent of our fresh water. The Colorado River, running from its headwaters in the snow-loaded mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, is the principal water source for those states, and downstream for Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and southern California as well.

While being developed into a crucial water resource, the Colorado became the most dammed, piped, legislated, and litigated river in America. Its development spawned a major federal bureaucracy, the Bureau of Reclamation, as well as a hundred state agencies, water districts, and private contractors to keep it plumbed and distributed. Taken altogether, this complex infrastructure of dams, pipelines, and reservoirs proved to be the most expensive and ambitious public works project in the nation's history, but it enabled the Southwest states and southern California to boom and bloom.

The downside is that we are now dangerously close to the limits of what the Colorado River can provide, even in the very best of weather scenarios, and the weather is being neither so friendly nor cooperative these days. If Portland soon becomes as warm as Los Angeles and Seattle as warm as Sacramento, as some forecasters now predict, expect Las Vegas and Phoenix to be more like Death Valley.

If the Colorado River shut down tomorrow, there might be two, at most three, years of stored water in its massive reservoirs to keep Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and dozens of other cities that depend on it alive. That margin for survival gets thinner with each passing year and with each rise in the average temperature. Imagine a day in the not so distant future when the water finally runs out in one of those cities -- a kind of slow-motion Katrina in reverse, a city not flooded but parched, baked, blistered, and abandoned. If the Colorado River system failed to deliver, the impact on the nation's agriculture and economy would be comparable to an asteroid strike.

Too Much Too Soon, Then Too Little Too Late

Hot and dry is bad enough; chaotic weather only adds to our problems. As we practice it today, agriculture depends on cheap energy, a stable climate, and abundant water. Those last two are intimately mixed. Water has to be not just abundant, but predictable and reliable in its flow. And the words "predictable," "reliable," and "water" go together ever less comfortably in our neck of the woods.

Here's the problem. Despite the existence of the Colorado River's famous monster-dams like Hoover in Nevada and Glen Canyon in Utah and the mega-reservoirs -- Lake Mead and Lake Powell -- that gather behind them, we really count on the vast snowfields that store fresh water in our mountains to melt and trickle down to us slowly enough that our water lasts from the first spring runoff until the end of the fall growing season. Dust-covered snowpack, however, absorbs more heat, melts sooner, and often runs down into streams and rivers before our farmers can use it. In addition, as the temperature rises, spring storms that once brought storable snow are now more likely to come to us as rain, which only makes the situation worse.

This shift in the way our water reaches us is crucial in the West. Not only is snowpack shrinking as much as 25 percent in the Cascades of the Northwest and 15 percent in the snowfields of the Rocky Mountains, but it's arriving in the lowlands as much as a month earlier than usual. Farmers can't just tell their crops to adjust to the new pattern. Even California's rich food basket, the Central Valley, fed by one of the most complex and effective irrigation infrastructures in the country, is ultimately dependent on Sierra snowpack and predictable runoff.

We need a new term for what's happening -- perhaps "perturbulence" would describe the new helter-skelter weather pattern. In my Utah backyard, for example, this past May was unusually hot and unusually cold. At one point, we went from freezing to 80 degrees and back again in three short days. Not so long ago, seasonal changes came on here as if controlled by a dimmer switch, the shift from one season to the next being gradual. Now it's more like a toggle switch being abruptly shut on and off.

To add to the confusion, our summer monsoon season arrived six weeks early this year. A surprisingly wet spring seemed like good news amid the bigger picture of drought, but it turned out to mean that farmers had a hard time getting into their muddy fields to plant. Then when spring showers were so quickly followed by summer storms, some crops were actually suppressed, according to local gardeners and farmers.

The West at Your Doorstep?

Our soggy spring and summer, however, masked an epic drought that has touched almost every corner of the nation west of the Mississippi at one time or another over the past decade. Southern Texas right now is blazingly bone-dry. Seattle had a turn with record-breaking temperatures earlier this summer. In New Mexico, the drought has been less dramatic -- more like a steady drumbeat year after year.

A trip to the edge of Lake Powell in the canyon country of southern Utah in June revealed the bigger picture. A ten-story-high "bathtub ring" -- the band of white mineral deposits left behind on the reservoir's walls as the waterline dropped -- stretches the almost 200-mile length of the reservoir.

Recreational boat users, hoping against hope that the reservoir will refill, have regularly been issuing predictions about a return to "normal" levels, but it just hasn't happened. Side canyons, once submerged under 100 feet of water, have now been under the sun long enough to have turned into lush, mature habitats filled with willows and brush, birds and pack rats. A view from a cliff high above the once bustling, now ghostlike Hite Marina on the receding eastern side of Lake Powell shows the futility of chasing the retreating shoreline with cement: the water's edge and a much-extended boat-launching ramp now have 100 acres of dried mud, grass, and fresh shrubs between them.

After decades of frantic urban development and suburban sprawl across the states that draw water from the Colorado, demand has simply outstripped supply and it's only getting worse as the heat builds. Not surprisingly, a debate is building over what to do if there isn't enough water to fill both Lakes Powell and Mead, the principal reservoirs along the Colorado. Should the seven states that depend on the river live with two half-full reservoirs or a single full one, and if only one, which one? River managers have now realized that both massive "lakes" were always giant evaporation ponds in the middle of a desert and only more so as average temperatures climb. There is no sense in having twice as much water surface as necessary, which means twice as much evaporation, too.

Given the stakes, the debate over what to do if there isn't enough water is playing out like the preview to the all-out water war to come when the reality actually hits. Westerners are well aware that, as always, there will be winners and losers. The constituency for Lake Mead will no doubt prevail because of its proximity to Las Vegas and Phoenix, two cities that grew bloated on cheap but, as it has turned out, temporary water from the dammed Colorado. Already desperate to make up for their lost liquid, they will surely muster all their power and influence to keep the water flowing.

Las Vegas is now aiming to tap into an aquifer under the Snake Valley that straddles eastern Nevada and western Utah. Recently, a rancher friend who ekes out a precarious living there mentioned the obvious to me: the dusty surface of that arid high desert is barely held in place by a thin covering of brush, sage, and grass. Drop the water table even a few more inches and it all dies. The dust storms that would be generated by a future parched landscape like that might make it all the way to the Midwest or even farther. After decades in which Easterners ritualistically visited the American West, the West may be traveling east.

Those we pay to look ahead are now jockeying like mad for position in a future water-short West. A new era of ever more pipelines, wells, and dams is being dreamed up by the private contractors and bureaucrats swelling up like so many ticks on the construction and maintenance budgets of the West's heavily subsidized water-delivery infrastructure. It is unlikely, however, that their dreams will be fully realized. The low-hanging fruit -- the river canyons that could easily be dammed -- were picked decades ago and, unlike in the good ol' days when water simply ran towards money, citizens of our western states are now far more aware of the ecological costs of big dams and ever more awake to the unfolding consequences of dependence on unreliable water sources.

Making more water available never led to prudent use. Instead, cheap and easy water led to such foolishness as putting a golf course with expanses of irrigated green in every desert community, not to speak of rice and cotton farming in the Arizona desert.

Rip Your Strip

All of this is now changing. Fast. The airways across the Southwest are loaded these days with public service announcements urging us to conserve our water. "Rip your strip" may be a phrase unknown in much of the country, but everyone here knows exactly what it means: tear out the lawn between your front yard and the street and put in drought-resistant native plants instead.

Everyone is increasingly expected to do their part. In my little town of Torrey, Utah, we voluntarily ration our domestic water on weekends when the tourists are in town, taking long showers and spraying the dust and mud off their tires. Xeriscaping -- landscaping with drought-resistant native plants instead of thirsty grasses and ornamental shrubs -- is now fashionable as well as necessary, even required, in some western towns, a clear sign that at long last we get it. Yes, we live in a desert.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that this sort of thing, useful as it is, will be nearly enough. Our challenge is only marginally to take shorter showers. After all, 80 percent of Utah's water goes into agriculture, mostly to grow alfalfa to feed beef cows raised by ranchers heavily subsidized by federal grants and tax write-offs. They graze their cows almost for free on public lands and have successfully resisted even modest increases in fees to cover the costs of maintaining the allotments they use.

Utah legislators passed a law last session that gives agriculture precedence when there's not enough water to go around. Consider that a clear signal that the agricultural interests in the state don't have any intention of changing their water-profligate ways without a fight.

Sure, everyone agrees that we have to change, but we in the West are fond of focusing blame on personal bad habits that waste water -- and they couldn't be more real -- rather than corporate habits that waste so much more. The fact is that we Westerners have never paid anything like what our water truly costs and we lack disincentives to waste water and incentives to conserve it. Behind all that fuss you hear from us about the damn government and how independent-minded we Westerners are, is a long history of massive dam and pipeline projects financed by the American taxpayer, featuring artificially low prices and not a few crony-run boondoggles. Call it welfare water.

The Ruins in Our Future

A visit this summer to the most famous ruins in the West, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park and hollowed out palaces at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, proved a striking, if grim, reminder that we weren't the first to pass this way -- or to face possibly civilization-challenging aridity problems. The pre-Colombian Anasazi culture flourished between 900 and 1150 A.D., culminating in a city in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that until the nineteenth century contained the largest buildings in the Americas, now uncovered from centuries of drifting sands. Mesa Verde with its "skyscraper" cliffside dwellings, also flourished in the twelfth century and was similarly abandoned and forgotten for hundreds of years.

The mysteries of these deserted cities -- their purpose and the reasons they were abandoned -- may never be fully plumbed. This much is undeniable though, as one walks through cobbled plazas and toppled towers, and past sun-blasted walls: cities, dazzling in their day, arose suddenly in the desert, prospered, and then collapsed. Tree-ring data confirm that an epic drought, one lasting at least 50 years, coincided with their demise. Broken and battle-scarred bones unearthed in the charred ruins indicate that warfare followed drought. What the Anasazi experienced -- scarcity, the need to leave homes, and a struggle for whatever remained -- is getting easier to imagine in a water-short West. Only this time at stake will be Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Archaeologists at Chaco recently uncovered a sophisticated cistern system under the city. Anasazi builders, they now believe, learned how to harvest the runoff from the summer rains that poured down and spilled over the sandstone cliffs behind the ruins. Think of these as the Lake Meads and Powells of their time, capturing the torrential monsoon rains just as those reservoirs do the Colorado River's flash floods.

The cistern system provided temporary water security, but eventually it clearly proved inadequate. In the long run, Chaco couldn't be sustained because turbulent, unreliable flows of water are hard to tame. The descendants of those who left it behind settled the mesa-top villages of the Hopis in Arizona and of the Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. They learned to live on a smaller scale, with scant rain, and after many hundreds of years, they (unlike their once living and magnificent cities) remain. There is hope in that. It is no less possible now to understand limits, to practice precaution, and to build resilient communities.

Smoke Season

When it comes to the perturbed weather regime we are now entering, it's not just our agriculture and our sprawling cities that are having trouble adapting. The vitality of whole ecosystems is at stake. Native vegetation suffers, too. When critical moisture arrives before temperatures are warm enough for seeds to germinate, they don't. The native grasses on my land didn't thrive despite our cold, wet spring. Invasive cheat grass, however, blooms early, grows quickly, then dies and dries. It ignites easily and burns hot.

When higher temperatures evaporate the moisture in soils, they become drier in late summer and fall. Plants wither and are vulnerable to insect infestations. The vast expanse of mountains I can see out my window may seem like a classic alpine vista to the tourists who flock here every summer. A closer look, however, reveals expanding patches of gray and brown as beetle infestations kill off entire dried-out mountainsides. More than 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain woodlands have been destroyed by bark beetles so far. The once deep-green top of Grand Mesa in western Colorado is becoming a gray, grim dead zone, a ghostly forest waiting for lightning or some careless human to ignite it.

Dead forests, of course, are fuel for the dramatic, massive wildfires you now see so regularly on the TV news. We had quite a few of those wildfires this summer in Utah, but -- what with southern California burning -- they didn't make the evening news anywhere but here. That statement can be made all over the West. Both the frequency and size of fires are on the rise in our region. Early in the summer of 2008, while more than 2,000 separate wildfires raged across his state, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made a point that many Western governors might soon be making. He claimed that California's fire season is now 365 days long. The infernos that licked the edges of the Los Angeles basin this August were at once catastrophic and routine.

Smoke is dust's inevitable twin in a West beset by climate chaos, and the lousy air quality we suffer when fires are raging is part of the new normal. A few years ago we could check the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website to see when winds might shift and bring relief. This summer, like last, there were so many fires and they were so widely distributed that it hardly mattered which way the wind blew: smoke was in our lungs and eyes one way or the other.

All of this adds up to a kind of habitat holocaust for wild species, from the tiniest micro-organisms in the soil to the largest mammals at the top of the food chain like elk and bears. Nobody makes it in a dead zone, whether it's a dust bowl or a desiccated forest.

Changes start at the bottom, as is usually true in ecosystems. When soil dries and the microbial dynamic changes, native plants either die or move uphill towards cooler temperatures and more moisture. The creatures that depend on their seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follow the plants -- if they can. Animals normally adapt to slow change, but an avalanche of challenges is another matter. When species begin living at the precarious edge of their ability to tolerate the stress of it all, you have to expect wildlife populations to shift and dwindle. Then invasive species move in and a far different and diminished landscape emerges.

Human populations in the West will also shift and dwindle, with jarring consequences for all of America, if we do not learn quickly that watersheds have limits, especially within arid and unpredictable climates. The land also needs water. And such problems aren't just "Western." Dust storms and smoke won't just stay here.

There are, of course, enlightened and engaged citizens who are doing their best to address the growing challenge of a heated-up, chaotic climate. Conservation groups like the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance are working hard to protect critical habitat for stressed species and urging government land management agencies to include global warming in their plans and projections. The Glen Canyon Institute has raised the specter of a diminished Colorado River and is challenging water managers to get innovative and adopt policies that reward water conservation and punish waste. Across the West, people are waking up and learning about their own watersheds -- where their water comes from and where it goes. This, too, is hopeful. Time, unfortunately, is not on their side.

So, come see the beautiful West, our shining mountains, blue skies, and fabled canyons. It's all still here right now. Take pictures. Enjoy. But hurry...

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Islam is green by nature, and Ramadan offers a chance to make a big impact.Shawna AyoubAfter my grandfather had a stroke, the doctor said he might not walk again. He also said that getting him to challenge himself -- to give walking a true try -- was critical to his physical and emotional recovery. My grandfather took his first steps only a week after the near total paralysis of his left side.

While he never regained his easy gait, he also never let his slow, strained shuffle hinder him. Mornings, he made ten laps back and forth on the Lebanese mountain road outside the gates of his house. When I visited Lebanon, I walked with him, helping him stoop and clear the trash -- plastic bags, Pepsi bottles, paper, cigarette butts -- that passersby had tossed out their windows onto the road. It was close to the time Jiddo died that I learned clearing the roads wasn't so much a physical exercise as a spiritual one.

The responsibility Muslims hold in man's divinely bestowed role as the world's vicegerents extends to the planet's health. We know that removing litter from the road is considered an Islamic charity (Sahih AlJumea). We also know that God loves those who do not waste (Qur'an 7:31). In fact, Muslims are specifically commanded to eat fruit in its season and refrain from wasting the goods from this earth (6:141). Multiple examples from the life of the Prophet Muhammad (ahadith), peace and blessings be on him, instruct us to conserve water, avoid overeating, and care for animals and plants in need.

Islam is by its nature a "green" religion -- and Ramadan, the Islamic month during which fasting is prescribed for all able Muslims, offers a chance for the 1.2 billion of us worldwide to make a huge and hugely positive environmental impact.

There is more to a Ramadan fast than abstention from food, drink, and sex during the daylight hours. An Islamic fast also requires the participant to refrain from angry activities and discourse, and good deeds are strongly encouraged. The standard for good deeds is that they be charitable in nature, such as feeding the poor and taking care of orphans. Ramadan is capped off with a community-oriented feasting day called Eid al Fitr during which an obligatory tax (zakat) is collected that is redistributed to the needy.

While there is no disputing the social and economic value of feeding the hungry and nursing the sick during this holy month, it is just as important that we remember to take care of the world for which we are the inheritors.

Simply by not overeating before or after our fast, we can contribute to global health -- and our own. In a recent article for the Washington Post, Zafar Nomani, professor emeritus of human nutrition and foods at West Virginia University, noted that, "During Ramadan, research has shown that the basal metabolism of fasting subjects slows down. A person can stay healthy and active during Ramadan consuming a diet that is less than the normal amount of calories or food intake but balanced in nutrients."

Even if only 50 percent of the estimated 7 million Muslims living in the United States fast during Ramadan, if that fast eliminates our weekly cheeseburger (or meat and rice equivalent) and we do not over consume to compensate for a missed meal, that means the American Muslim community could reduce U.S. CO2 output by 60,900 metric tons during Ramadan alone. That's the equivalent annual CO2 output of 6,090 SUVs!

Further, we often pay attention to how our meat is slaughtered with little or no regard to how it was raised. Many local farms allow us to do our own slaughtering on their premises. This gives us a choice come Eid, when ritual animal sacrifices are made and the meat shared out to our neighbors and the poor. We can elect to purchase our animals (and vegetables) from farms that use sustainable agricultural methods. We may pay a slight premium, but isn't it worth it if, when we go before God on the Last Day, among our deeds it will be recorded that we chose from the animals that were responsibly and compassionately raised to offer as our sacrifice?

Go ahead -- start small.Shawna AyoubWhat else can you do? Begin with the next fast-breaking dinner (iftaar) you host or attend. Collect recyclables such as soda cans and plastic bottles and drop them off at your local recycling center. Choose reusable dishes instead of disposables. If you're attending a nightly community dinner at a mosque, set up a dishwashing schedule that will let your Muslim brothers and sisters rake in the blessings by pitching in once a week.

While you're at it, set up a Freecycle-style program for Eid gifts that allows community members to exchange goods or gently used toys. Not only will you save money that can later be donated to the poor, you will avoid buying new items that can be toxic for the planet and for your health. Encourage your community to get educated and organized in order to contribute, perhaps by planting an organic vegetable garden on the mosque lawn.

If you aren't fasting or have no local community, you can still chip in. Walk to the mosque for prayers (and gain rewards) or carpool when you travel. Consider putting in some time at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter. You could even donate some of your time to the Humane Society. You can join groups such as Green Ramadan that have popped up online with the goal of a global green effort for one month each year.

Like my grandfather, we can all do our part in a small way. Each individual act is like a pebble in a pond that sends out ten ripples. Who knows how far those miniature waves will reach or what good they may carry?

Ramadan is a month of hyperawareness achieved through the challenges of the body in order to strengthen the soul. Every good deed is one that contributes to this renewal. And each one can contribute to the renewal of our planet, too, whether your efforts are individual or communal.

There are still plenty of blessed days left this Ramadan. Challenge yourself and strengthen your soul, and by doing so, earn the rewards of the next life. Make this Ramadan your greenest ever.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

Why is it eating less beef can save water? In addition, if we skip meat to save water, will that affect our health? Besides beef, what other food or drinks use a lot of water to produce and process?

Thanks!
Jocey

A. Dearest Jocey,

Wow, you meat-eaters sure are hungry for information -- check out my colleague Lou Bendrick's recent exploration of beef and methane.

Drink to me only with thine tasty thighs.USDA.govAs for your question: It takes a lot of water to grow and feed a large mammal, and yet more water to cut it up into small pieces and clean up the mess. Water use in beef production includes the water the cattle drink, the water used to clean their housing, the water used to grow their grain, water evapo-transpired from any grass they eat, and water used in the slaughter process. Water impacted by beef production is any water affected by the runoff from beef farms -- runoff that can include pathogens, heavy metals, and nutrient contaminants such as nitrogen.

Agriculture worldwide uses 70 percent of the world's fresh water. Obviously we have to eat, and beef is not the only agricultural product to use water. It's just that beef, particularly industrial beef, represents a double hit: it's fed grain that's grown and watered just to produce the meat. That cropland could have feasibly produced a protein crop that wouldn't have the total final water use (and water contamination) of beef.

How much water is needed to raise a certain piece of beef is a little hard to parse. Reports sponsored by the California Beef Council come in at 3,682 liters per kilogram; the President of the Pacific Institute estimates 15,000 to 70,000 liters per kilogram. Other than beef, other meats would be the main users of water. Many processed items use a surprising amount of water, including nuclear power, plastic bottles, and Coca-Cola.

Skipping conventionally raised beef will indeed affect your health -- in a positive way.

Water availability is a growing issue worldwide, but water use is not yet as quantified for consumer items or daily activities -- or beef production -- as are climate change impacts. I think if you focus your eating preferences based on climate change impacts (eating lower on the food chain, not eating heavy things shipped from far away, eating fewer processed foods ...), you'll be doing well by the world's water supply.

Moistly,
Umbra

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Dearest Readers,

Today brings news -- oh, and wildly spreading it is -- of an ad campaign in Brazil aimed at convincing people to save water by peeing in the shower. Here is the video, and here is the website, if you are seeking extra credit for your Portuguese skills (beware, it starts with a series of yes-or-no questions).

Great minds think alike: Just two weeks ago, I made a video advising shower-peeing as a water-saving, money-saving step (see below). And my whiz-dom extends even further back: it was a bit more than two years ago that I first addressed this trickly topic in my column.

So you see, dearest readers, the international impact of my gentle advice is untold. More to the point: Pee is the universal language! So don't be afraid to go with the flow.

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Greenovations at “The Big Willie,” nee Sears Tower.First the Empire State Building, now Sears Tower: America’s iconic buildings are going green! The press is all abuzz about yesterday’s announcement by the owners of Chicago’s 110-story landmark—North America’s tallest, and the third-tallest in the world—that they will cut energy use 80 percent and water use 40 percent. The $350 million project will include replacing 16,000 single-pane windows; adding green roofs, wind turbines, and solar panels; relandscaping the plazas around the building’s base; and installing energy-saving fixtures in restrooms, elevators, and other bits of the building’s guts. It is expected to create 3,600 jobs, and an educational center on the ground floor will clue the public in to what’s going on.

All of which is very exciting! Except that two years ago, Richard Daley and Bill Clinton announced that they were ... greening the Sears Tower! So what happened to that undertaking? I’ve contacted the Clinaton Climate Initiative and Sears Tower folks to find out.

Meanwhile, back to the latest announcement: the owners are also floating the idea of building a luxury hotel adjacent to the tower, which would be powered by the juice created next door. However, they dispelled an earlier notion that they would paint the tower silver or sheath it in a silver skin for energy efficiency and zippiness.

“Our plans are very ambitious,” John Huston of American Landmark Properties told the press. “Our plans to modernize and transform this icon will re-establish Sears Tower as a leader, a pioneer.”

By the time the five-year project is finished, I should note, the tower won’t go by that name—in fact, it’s getting rechristened this summer as the Willis Tower, a nod to new (and apparently beyond-mega-wealthy-and-influential) tenant Willis Group Holdings, a global insurance broker. Already, locals have dubbed the structure “The Big Willie.” Heh heh.

Still, regardless of the name (and the dismantling of yet another piece of my elementary-school education—yeah, Pluto, I’m looking at you), the building will still be whoppin’ big, and its retrofit a model for others.

Architect Adrian Smith, whose firm AS+GG is leading the eco-renovation, told the New York Times, “If we can take care of one building that size, it has a huge impact on society. It is a village in and of itself.”

And Smith’s partner in the firm, Gordon Gill, emphasized the importance of retrofits (yay!): “Sustainable architecture in new buildings is important but not enough to address the climate and energy crises facing our world. We have to apply what we’ve learned to our existing stock of commercial buildings—especially iconic structures such as Sears Tower, which we hope will inspire similar initiatives around the globe.”

Fingers crossed.

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for Sears Tower tells me that building management took steps toward an energy audit after the Clinton announcement in 2007 but did not make any other progress. This time around, they’re committed—and their energy cuts will help the Chicago Climate Action Plan reach its goals.

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Q. Dearest Umbra,

We and our colleagues use sparkling water as our substitute for cokes, coffee, beer, etc. We have heard some really bad things about bottled water, and are of course aware of the fact that it is up to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. But oh those sparkles ... can you share your astute opinion and a comparison of the brands of sparkling waters with us? (Our favorite happens to be La Croix.) We're pro-rivers and clean water, but we don't want to steal other people's.

Cheers,
Liz and Cindy
Alabama

A. Dearest Liz and Cindy,

The associated problems with bottled water are -- no, let's start with the positive aspects of bottled water, both still and sparkling. It comes in an easy-to-carry package, often perfectly shaped to fit the human hand. It is readily available, chilled, at a store near you. Um -- well, bottled sparkling water is much easier to obtain than tap sparkling water. Plus, it tickles your nose.

Scam I am.fhemerick via flickrBottled water in general is nothing more than a massive marketing success. (And how about 'vitamin' water? What a brilliant scam.) It is water, in a bottle, sucked out of the 1 percent of the planet's water that is drinkable, processed by some global subsidiary, trucked to your town and sold to you at a hilarious markup. These people are raking it in. If we read, in a 1907 novel, about some guy standing on the sidewalk hawking water in bottles, the character would be depicted as a charlatan. Today a bottle of water is an unremarkable accessory and no one is laughing.

The broad issues covering all bottled water certainly apply to your sparkly bevvie. To start with the immediately scary: both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group have studied bottled waters and found, among other things, that they are unregulated, are often just packaged tap water (label images to the contrary), and often violate safe drinking water standards and/or contain chemicals used in plastics manufacture. And yes, you are taking someone else's water, and causing it to be shipped to you at the climate's expense.

As for the bottles themselves, a tidbit via previous Gristy post indicates that manufacturing a plastic water bottle necessitates using three times as much water as the actual capacity of the bottle. After all these years, can I simply remind us that disposable plastic is not so good, without reiterating why?

Processed beverages make big money. They are mostly water, oft mixed with sugar, carbon, and flavor. Cheap to make, great to sell. Large corporations are very interested in owning any bottled water label that succeeds in the marketplace. So, to answer your specific question, all you need to do is find out what corporation owns a brand, then look it up on a site such as Coop America. I also found a water list on Ethical Consumer.

This amazingly helpful advice doesn't really work with LaCroix, which is owned by the National Beverage Company, a second-tier company that gets less attention than Nestle and PepsiCo. But we don't really need to rank brands, because we know this: all bottled-water brands are silly, overpriced, and hurting the planet.

All that said, I must admit that I too love the sparkly water on occasion, and I do not blame youse for your habit. Try drinking less of the bottled stuff, and consider getting a tap-water carbonating device for your office.

Effervescently,
Umbra

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Q. Dearest Umbra,

While pleased as pie to have a new super-efficient dishwasher, I remain curious as to the chemical composition of the required rinse aid. This dishwasher relies on a hot water rinse and its stainless steel tub to somehow dry the dishes -- there is no energy-sucking, plastic-melting heating element to accomplish dryness. However, this dishwasher will not run unless its rinse aid receptacle is filled. While I could probably trick it by filling the rinse aid reservoir with water ... that would seem likely to promote unsightly spotting. While I enjoy the energy efficiency and quietude of this dishwasher, I am concerned that I may be slowly killing my family through hydrophobic rinse aid ingestion. What is this stuff anyway?

Spotless But Concerned
Louisville, Colo.

A. Dearest Spotless,

There is an easy answer to this issue, but in researching it I discovered yet another of those depressing unknown household hazards that deflate my sense of humor.

Rinse charming?Conventional rinse aid is one of the mystery products wherein manufacturers only need disclose active ingredients. We can find Material Safety Data Sheets for these products on line, which say reassuring things such as "The manufacturer's MSDS does not state whether the ingredients are considered carcinogens or potential carcinogens." Rumor has it that conventional rinse aids do contain phosphates, the chemical compounds that can lead to marine dead zones. By "rumor," I mean that the "eco" rinse aids claim a lack of phosphates.

All sorts of ecologically preferable companies offer rinse aids in which all ingredients are disclosed. Various promises to love fish and plants and hate landfills are pledged upon the labels. But here is an even better option: reading online (as I often do, don't you know), I encountered chatty dishwasher-loving people who are using our old friend white vinegar as a rinse aid. I was especially interested in this because where I am currently living the water is hard like a rock, so our glasses ("glassware" I believe is the proper term) come out cloudy like Seattle, and gross and embarrassing to hostliness. Oh my heavens, my life has changed. Put white vinegar in the rinse aid dispenser, or put a cup filled with it upright in the bottom rack when you run the wash. Come on over for a drink -- our glassware is no longer embarrassing.

The bad news can be delivered through more good news. The new site GoodGuide seems to be what many of you want and need: decent, in-depth ratings of products. I hope they make millions of dollars. Unfortunately, while I was looking up rinse aids (check out the rankings), I learned that the dishwasher is considered, by some, to be an incredibly toxic appliance. In 1999, researchers at the University of Texas-Austin released data on the ability of dishwashers to "strip" chemicals out of water and release them in air. This is of course why we smell chlorine when we are using a chlorine-based dishwashing detergent. Other, less stinky but also harmful pollutants may be removed from the water and let loose in your home: chlorine from water treatment, radon, chloroform, perhaps other volatile organic compounds.

We're not going to stop using our very efficient dishwashers, so perhaps this tidbit of information will simply further encourage our use of less-toxic rinse agents (and detergents), and help us remember to run dishwasher loads at night. You see, if we leave the washer door shut for a while after the load finishes, less of the potentially toxic steam will waft out toward us. And of course, it's best if we run appliances at night anyway, to lessen the business-hours load on the electric grid.

Humorlessly,
Umbra

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Q. Dear Umbra,

What, in your opinion, is proper flushing etiquette when using public lavatories? Or, indeed, those belonging to your friends? At home we follow the if-it's-yellow rule, but only occasionally am I bold enough to do this in a public restroom; in general it feels rather antisocial unless I am so fantastically hydrated that you can barely tell I've peed. Any thoughts?

Urines truly,
Ms. Peebody

A. Dearest Ms. Peebody,

It's not polite to leave your urine unflushed in a public lav, nor is it polite to do so at the house of a friend, unless the friend also regularly follows the if-it's-yellow rule. Urine is a bodily excretion, and none of us should be made to suffer too much viewing (or potential splashing) of other people's bodily excretions. It's one thing among immediate family, if all the family members are in agreement. Non-related housemates might also agree to a general low-flush rule.

In reflecting on this question, contemplate other excretions, and the general public politenesses that should surround them. For instance, it's not considered OK to exercise until one is drenched with sweat and then go directly to a coffee shop, still dripping. It's not OK to repeatedly blow a very boogery nose into a cloth hanky when out and about, so that others must think about the sopping wet cotton. Ear wax is not for public view. I could go on, but I think we all have active imaginations, or even memories of times when a fellow human has been less than polite.

At home, we are often living with people whose bodily excretions are more pleasant to us, and we can amongst ourselves set our own rules for what is and is not OK. (Young children, I have learned, carry their own set of rules, which other people are oft forced to follow. One such rule: it is perfectly acceptable to barf on others.) Do whatever is appropriate in your own home -- and make sure that you have either a low-flow toilet or some water-saving devices installed, so that when you do flush you're using as little water as possible.

The good news in this sort of icky situation is that some public places are starting to use dual-option toilets, in which you can choose how much water your particular excretion requires in order to be whisked away. Sightings of such smart potties have been reported in airports, hotels, and of course Europe.

One final note: I always support peeing outside if, again, the location does not bother anyone else -- and is not, say, a treasured national landmark. Pee is good for plants.

Conservationaly,
Umbra

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He would have needed a stage name
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Splish splash, I was takin' a bath
Long about a Saturday night
A-rub-dub, just relaxin' in the tub
Thinkin' everything was all right.

Poor Bobby Darin -- there he was, thinking everything was all right, when he really should have been taking a four-minute shower under his low-flow showerhead. Of course, rewriting his movin' and groovin' ditty would be a musical crime. But water and energy waste (and their associated punch to the pocketbook) are also a crime of sorts. Luckily, they're avoidable.

It's tempting to think that what happens in the bathroom, like nudity, steamy affairs, and showerhead karaoke, should stay in the bathroom. But when it comes to, er, "going green," we're all in favor of sharing our habits. A few small changes will leave you clean of both body and conscience, while leaving enough water for the rest of us.

Here's how to start.

Sink to green levels. Seriously, turn the faucet off while you brush your teeth -- the EPA says this can save eight gallons of water every day. And drop two George Washingtons on a faucet aerator. Popping on with an easy twist, it'll mix air into the water flow while maintaining pressure. Fix leaks too, since they can annually waste 2,700 gallons of H2O, as well as pouring money down the drain.

Raze the bar. While it may save water to pee in the shower (as long as you're also lathering, urine luck!), shaving there is a no-no unless the water's off. Depending on your shower's flow -- and it should be only about two gallons a minute -- the time you spend gettin' un-stubbly can waste a lot of water, not to mention the electricity used to heat it.

Dry your best. If "moist" is the most cringe-inducing word in the English language, towels are the solution. But conventional cotton production is heavy on pesticides, fertilizers, and bleach, as well as using huge amounts of water. Bamboo has recently hit the big time for being fast-growing, renewable, and anti-microbial; bamboo towel retailer Soft Forest also claims it's softer and more absorbent than cotton. Bamboo towels -- or organic cotton ones -- ain't always cheap, but here's a rundown of organic cotton towels for any budget, and retailer Shirts of Bamboo is holding a timely "customer economic bailout sale." For the cheapest eco-friendly drying of all, air-dry your locks -- or at least wait 10 to 15 minutes before turning on the hair dryer. It's better for your tresses and saves electricity.

Shower power. A bath can use up to seven times more water than a five-minute shower, so pull the plug. While you're in the shower, try shutting off the water while you soap up (the "navy shower"). Less brutal options include taking a shorter shower (waterproof timers can help), turning your water heater down to 120 degrees F, and installing a low-flow showerhead (you'll use half as much water as before). This popular low-flow showerhead is plastic-free, won't break the bank, and has a valve for pausing water flow. Or for more desperate measures, this shower monitor displays the amount of hot water left and then beeps persistently till the shower goes off. And remember, when it comes to your shower curtain: no vinyl, and that's final!

Elect to change your cabinet. Don't dash out and buy a ton of new stuff, but when you need a replacement for something, consider organic and cruelty-free versions of your bathroom staples, like eco-friendly shaving cream, deodorant, and nail polish. Or opt for reusable and recycled options: Recycline makes toothbrushes and razors out of old yogurt cups; they even provide a postage-paid envelope to return the razor when you're done with it. When you're getting ready for your close-up, ditch disposable face wipes or puffs in favor of a trusty washcloth or makeup brush. And for all the ladies, choose alternatives to those chlorine-bleached, disposable pads and tampons.

Feeling industrious? Make your own toothpaste, soap, or lotion; or try body sugaring instead of shaving -- each requires only a few ingredients.

Go bowling. A leaky toilet can waste 90,000 gallons of water monthly, so squirt some dark food coloring into the tank to check for leakage. If you have an old-school toilet that uses 3.5 gallons of water per flush (most pre-1992 models), it could be responsible for nearly a third of household water use, so by all means invest in a low-flush 1.6-gallon model. The EPA estimates a family of four will annually save $90 by using a high-efficiency toilet (and has a list of models [PDF]).

Other options include retrofitting your porcelain throne to give it different flush options for No. 1 and No. 2 (that is, if you ain't fond of letting it mellow) or, least optimally, diverting tank water with something like a pebble-filled plastic bottle -- just don't use a brick, as it'll break down over time. Better yet, flush your toilet with water collected from the shower and sink, called graywater. To go totally waterless, get a composting toilet -- no one will ever call you a party pooper again.

Water conservation
U.S. EPA's WaterSense
American Water Works Association
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Toilet info
U.S. EPA's list of high-efficiency toilets [PDF]
Two-flush toilet retrofit
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The Humanure Handbook
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