Berlin Scholars is a Yahoo Group for North Americans visiting or living in Berlin, Germany. I joined May 2007. Through it I found a gorgeous four-room apartment that cost less than one room in a Brooklyn ghetto. Berlin Scholars posts will often concern sublets, restaurants, bicycle shops, yoga studios, package shipping, etc. And because list members are supposed to be in Berlin for “serious research and artistic activity” – not just cheap rents and all-night MDMA parties (some clubs have half-mile entrance lines at 7 a.m.) – occasional posts deal with lectures, libraries, museums.

Below I’ve pasted a Berlin Scholars exchange from earlier this week. It explains why you’ll rarely, perhaps never, see an electric clothes dryer in German cities.

Can someone please enlighten me as to why apartments have washing machines but still no dryers? I thought by 2010, Europeans would have decided to give in and get a dryer, especially since they are now so readily available. How do you dry your clothes when you have a few kids and many loads? Am I ignorant for asking this question? Or maybe too American?

Thanks! Courtney

***

Most Germans consider electric dryers umweltverachtend, since they accomplish a task that can also be achieved through the combination of time + air.  Of course, much of German society was originally based on the assumption that all women are stay-at-home moms with plenty of time to hang up each little sock on a line or laundry rack (which is also why it was not until well into the 1990s that it became legally possible for supermarkets to remain open past 6:30 p.m.); things are changing, but a passionate commitment to the environment even at the expense of human convenience remains.  Germans (even families) wash their clothes one load at a time and then set the laundry to dry on racks somewhere in the apartment.

Susan

Umweltverachtend = Environmentally contemptible.

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The classic refrigerator experience involves heavy, hinged doors. You open these doors to browse your food assortment and close these doors once you have made a selection. Like all traditional things though, this experience is deeply flawed.

Enter: THE SODGE. An innovative, environmentally-friendly refrigerator with translucent, plastic covers.

How does the Sodge work? The translucent sheet saves energy (and the environment) by letting you choose your food before even opening the door. Thus supposedly: less energy lost, less environmental impact.

Except not. As one commentator put it:

To think some thick film plastic is going to have better insulation efficient than a door with several inches of more/better insulation is just plain wrong. The whole concept is a marketing gimick. If you you figure out the energy you lose openning the door and stare for minutes trying to figure out what to eat versus the other 23 1/2 hours the fridge has to operate with a crappy plastic film door your energy star rating is going to be pretty poor.

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James J. Lee mug shot from 2008

Montgomery County police

At 1pm James Lee, described by police as an “Asian male”, stormed the main entrance of the Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Springs, Maryland.  He had metal canisters strapped to his chest and was brandishing a hand gun.  He rampaged through the building taking three people hostage and holding them at gunpoint.  Police negotiated with Lee  for 4 hours, then fatally shot him.  No one else was hurt.

Lee wasn’t a disgruntled employee and he wasn’t a religious radical.  His beliefs are tough to categorize but he had very strange and twisted motivation.  He has been called an environmentalist militant by CNN but Lee’s philosophy was not that simple.  This guy wasn’t just pro-environment.  He was anti-human, anti-civilization and anti-babies.

Lee’s myspace  account was called “worldguardian”.  He was devising a plan to save the planet from the evil humans:

About me:
The idea I had to save the planet is here. Go to SaveThePlanetProtest.com to see what it is.

This document will be printed in the newspaper calling for protest against the networks. This is it, it’s happening.

Children:
I don’t want kids

Television:
The Shield, South Park, Family Guy, The Simpsons, and the Discovery channel

On his website, Savetheplanetprotest.com, is his “manifesto” and a list of demands directly addressed to the Discovery Channel.  He had been protesting outside the building frequently since February.

The first demand references Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael, specifically pages 207-212.  I haven’t read it but apparently it’s about a gorilla named Ishmael that communicates telepathically to a 12 year old girl and then returns to Africa to live in the wild.

I’m not sure what this has to do with taking hostages but apparently Lee was demanding that My Ishmael be broadcast daily on the Discovery Channel and its affiliates. In primetime.

He also demanded that programming  seek solutions to save the planet.  One suggestion is that humanity permanently stop breeding:

Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution… MAKE IT INTERESTING SO PEOPLE WATCH AND APPLY SOLUTIONS

He was most likely pissed at shows like Jon and Kate plus 8 because of all the little human children running and playing.  He demanded that Discovery health and TLC “stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants.” Lee wanted the network to instead advocate sterilization and infertility.

His next demand was about war, something he is also against. Lee laments:

WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!

Then, he demands civilization be exposed for the filth it is.  He must of never seen Hoarders: Buried Alive on TLC.  That entire show is devoted to human filth and is more convincing than a telepathic gorilla.

Lee continues to ramble about immigration, global warming, saving the “non-human wildlife”, finding solutions for the economy, stopping unemployment and fixing the housing crisis.  Lee blames all these problems solely on the Discovery Channel:

“You’re the media… it’s your responsibility because you reach so many minds!!!”
“FIND SOLUTIONS JUST LIKE THE BOOK SAYS!”
“INVENT, DAMN YOU!”
“NO MORE BABIES!”

The Discovery Channel hasn’t commented on his demands.  Dude should of just robbed the cash cab.

NASA

So apparently a shit-load of oil has been spilling into the Gulf of Mexico (courtesy of BP). Now NASA reports the oil will soon colonize the Louisiana wetlands:

The left-hand image contains data from MISR’s vertical-viewing camera. It is shown in near-true color, except that data from the instrument’s near-infrared band, where vegetation appears bright, have been blended with the instrument’s green band to enhance the appearance of vegetation.

The Mississippi River delta is located below the image center. The slick is seen approaching the delta from the lower right, and filaments of oil are also apparent farther to the north (towards the top). The oil is made visible by sun reflecting off the sea surface at the same angle from which the instrument is viewing it, a phenomenon known as sunglint. Oil makes the surface look brighter under these viewing conditions than it would if no oil were present. However, other factors can also cause enhanced glint, such as reduced surface wind speed. To separate glint patterns due to oil from these other factors, additional information from MISR’s cameras is used in the right-hand image.

What shall we do now? What shall we do? What shall we ever do? Feel like BP should turn the Gulf and the Mississippi River into “organic gas stations.” Just let people pull up to the beach and riverfront with their cars, go-carts, what have you – and let em’ fill up! They could spin it as a green initiative, an innovative undertaking. Shantih shantih shantih!

Until I was in my late twenties, I didn’t know how to answer the question that strangers often ask one another in this land of nomads: Where are you from? I could say that I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but my family moved away from there before I started school. I could say that I spent my school years in the country outside of Ravenna, Ohio, but my family left there before I started college. I could say that I went to college in Providence, Rhode Island, and to graduate school in Cambridge, England, but every time I completed a degree I moved on. So I really wasn’t from Memphis, despite the accident of birth, nor was I from Ravenna, Providence, or Cambridge, much as those places had influenced me.

When I finished the last of my degrees at the age of twenty-five, I couldn’t name a place or point to a spot on the map and say, “That’s my home.” Not having acquired a hometown in childhood, I imagined I never would.

From England, my wife and I moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where I took up my first real job, teaching at Indiana University. When Ruth and I arrived there in the summer of 1971, our furniture, books, bicycles, and clothes only half filled a panel truck. Scattered about the second-floor apartment we rented in a house near campus, our few possessions made the place look less like a home than a campsite. Ruth began foraging at yard sales to fill out our meager belongings. I was reluctant to buy anything more just yet. It would only be a matter of time, I figured, before we moved again, not merely to another house but to another town, another state, even another country.

Up to that point in my life, I thought it was normal to uproot every few years and go somewhere new, if only for more excitement or more pay. During the Great Depression, my father had left his parents’ farm in Mississippi to seek work in Chicago, where he found not only a job but also a wife. The Second World War carried him back down south, newly married, to work in a munitions plant. After the war he landed a job with a tire company, which moved him and his family all over the country, from Tennessee to Ohio, then to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Ontario, then back again to Mississippi. My mother wept at every move, yet she threw herself into each new place, joining a church, running for the school board, planting perennial flowers that would keep blooming long after she had moved on once more.

I took such moving about to be the American way. While growing up, I had read countless stories about pilgrims, voyageurs, explorers, cowboys, and pioneers. These were the venturesome souls, the pathfinders. By contrast, the people who stayed put—whom I read about in stories by Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Mark Twain, and others—were bigoted, listless, and dull. At our most lively, I came to believe, Americans were a footloose people, always striking out for new territory.

So instead of breaking down the crates we had used to ship our things from England to Indiana, I stored them in the attic where they would be handy for our next move. I worked hard at my job, but I didn’t pay much attention to where I was actually living. I knew little about the city government, the schools, the parks and museums, the local economy, the sources of our food or water or electricity. I didn’t know what social problems afflicted our city nor what efforts were being made to solve them. A few of the local trees, birds, and flowers were familiar to me from my childhood years in the Midwest, but otherwise I didn’t know anything about the southern Indiana landscape.

After a year in Bloomington, however, Ruth became pregnant, and the following winter she gave birth to our first child. From the moment I heard baby Eva draw breath, the alchemy of fatherhood began to work a change in me. I began to look around our apartment, around the neighborhood, around the town and countryside with a fresh awareness. How clean was the air that our daughter was breathing? How pure was the water she would drink? How safe were the streets? Was the library well stocked with children’s books? Were there parks where she could play, museums where she could explore? If we stayed in Bloomington even half a dozen years, Eva would attend one or another of the public schools. How good were they? How large were the classes? Were the teachers well trained and well paid? And who took responsibility, inside or outside of government, for making sure these needs were being met?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking:

To suggest that we are somehow harming the Earth, that we have a responsibility to the planet as we are its stewards, is really the same thing as saying: We are privileged on this planet, distinct from it, and hence are free to exhaust and consume all of its many splendored bounty. These are two sides of the same coin.

I’d like to change the coin, if I may.

The Earth, I believe, is indifferent. Absolutely, mercilessly indifferent. The Earth doesn’t care what the ozone is, whether there’s more or less carbon dioxide or plastic. Certain plants and animals might, of course, but the Earth per se? Nope. It doesn’t give a flying fuck.

To imagine that humans are somehow special, and distinct, is (partially) what breeds our contempt for our environs.

What if we shift the very terms of how we think about ourselves, collectively, on this planet? What if we no longer express a concern for this or that species or for this thing we call the environment and, instead, focus on our own living?

The problems I, for one, have with our food industry is not that it pillages the planet. It’s that it makes my life sucky: shitty food that makes me feel shitty is shitty.

The problems I have with rampant global capitalism is multifold and has nothing whatsoever to do with my concern over the spotted owl or the dolphin. My problem is that I hate being served by some bored, indifferent 18 year old making minimum wage. I want to exchange money and services with my neighbors; I want to feel I’m giving to someone good who, in turn, is giving me something good. The anonymity of the global market translated into the anonymity of the so-called local Sears is bone chilling.

The problem, then, is not with how we treat the Earth. It’s with how we treat ourselves. We work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. And thanks to microcomputing, we work all the time. All the time. There is no leisure, there is no pleasure.

And rage — and, of course, impotence (why are there ads for Viagra during prime time?) — runs rampant. Every time I’m out driving — every time — I have to negotiate a plethora of deranged assholes rushing here and there, speeding up to tailgate me, honking, running lights. This is not a sign of a healthy life.

And this — these day to day exchanges for coffee, groceries, driving — is the environment. Literally. I don’t want to give my money to save the Amazon rain forest. I want to not have to work 70 hours a week just to break even.

And if everyone were just to slow down, well then, perhaps we’d stop raping the trees and the ground. Perhaps then we would have less need for the oil we are so concerned about.

But as is, the very terms of environmentalism are constitutive of the precise problem said movement nominally serves. To focus on oil is to focus on the wrong thing; it is to focus on what the oil companies focus on, what the car companies focus on, what Amazon and UPS and Boeing focus on.

The environmental drive to conserve and preserve resources is misguided. It is to be duped by the CEOs and Wall Street.

The focus should not be oil or plants or dolphins but the day to day pleasure of human beings. And then everything else will fall into place.

Imagine all the money and resources and policy that are dumped into the so-called environmental movement all of sudden going to making day to day life for human beings more pleasurable. Imagine that rather than saving the whales, we save computer programmers, marketers, sales people from having their lives exhausted by the inane, insane, demands to work all the time. Imagine that we make medicine actually driven by concern for health and not how Pfizer’s stock performs.

Imagine that we put all our collective resources — our architects and economists, our do-gooders and our legislators — towards making life a pleasurable undertaking ripe with delicious, fresh food; with slow sex; with happy children who are not stressed out by standardized tests; with doctors who take the time to listen and heal; with roads filled with courteous, safe drivers; with movie theaters where popcorn eating is verboten.

Now that’s an environmental movement I could get behind.