8/6/2019 AC: Not All It's Cranked Up To Be

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/ac-not-all-its-cranked-up-to-be 1/2

Tomorrow’s AC: Not All It’s Cranked Up To Be

Growing up in the Deep South meant dealing with the heat in summer 

(well actually, from March through October in Alabama.) When we

moved north to Virginia in 1974, I thought surely we had left 90-90 temp-

humidities behind. But it’s feeling a lot like ‘bama in the Commonwealth

this summer, and this has led me to consider that, once upon a time,Americans of Southern persuasion once employed evasive measures

against the heat, and coped admirably with less grumbling and in greater 

relative comfort than today—even in the years before conditioned air.

Back then, austral-Americans drank iced tea (pronounced as a single

word, “ahstee”) often holding the sweaty drink to our jugulars or temples

to cool our brains. We sat on the ubiquitous screened front porches along

elm-shaded streets to enjoy the relative coolness of an evening. The

motion of the glider, porch swing or rocking chair often created the only

stir in the thick, watermelon-and-zoyzia grass-scented air. As a floor-

dwelling toddler, I remember a single oscillating fan, black, with whirlingmetal blades barely shielded by a sparse grillwork, its animal-like and

 perpetual looking right-left-right motion a source of amazement and one

of my first memories.

The vents in the dashboards of our cars

worked only when the car was moving and

those little side windows deflected tepid air 

onto our moist skin. Once, taking personal

thermoregulation into our own hands on a

vacation to Florida from Birmingham, we

stopped at the Ice House in Woodlawn for atwenty-pound block of ice. It melted for 

hours right under the vent, cooling us as it

 puddled into a galvanized tub at my

mother’s feet on the passenger side.

We had a roaring fan in the ceiling that, when you turned it on, sucked

doors closed and lifted my hair and the shirt on my back gently towards

the attic. My brother and I delighted in watching balloons bump along the

hardwood floors into the hallway and rise suddenly to be sucked tight

against the louvers. We slept April til October with the cool night air 

filling the house the next morning, when the oscillator came on duty to blow the coolness around during breakfast.

We were far more thermally resilient in hot weather in those benighted

days before humankind’s technological mastery collapsed our thermal

tolerance to a mere few degrees of the “ideal” 72 on which we now insist,

24/7.

8/6/2019 AC: Not All It's Cranked Up To Be

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/ac-not-all-its-cranked-up-to-be 2/2

Stan Cox, Senior Scientist with the Land Institute in Kansas, in his June

2010 book entitled Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our 

Air-conditioned World, offers a host of facts to support the notion that we

should rely less on the AC in coming decades. He tells the reader some

surprising ways indoor climate control has changed American culture,

 politics, and even frequency of sex, and suggests that we can adopt more

adaptive, less consumptive ways of beating the heat.

In a half century, our relationship to AC has come to resemble the

dependencies of an addiction. Cox doesn’t argue that it’s immoral to be

comfortable, but our shrinking comfort zone does have costs we should

consider.

Today, 92% of new American homes are air-conditioned, and most of the

electricity to produce our cool air comes at the expense of Appalachian

mountaintop coal, hence the paradox: greater indoor climate control

contributes to an outdoor climate out of control. Many of our politicians

have the distorted notion that simply turning up the air-conditioning is the

answer to global warming.

Our thermal tolerance has shrunk and adult and child alike have flocked to

the Great Indoors, and our health is suffering. Kids are little exposed to

friendly soil bacteria and nematodes that apparently “train” the immune

system, and “nature deficit disorder” afflicts our denatured, thermally-

intolerant young people. Even the obesity epidemic is compounded by our 

sedentary encampment inside in our Goldilocks, “just right” thermal

 bubbles.

Living in a less refrigerated society in coming decades may be both

desirable and necessary, but for now, air conditioning is the water we

swim in. It’s all around us, and we rarely think about it. Maybe we should,

and I think I will—from the front porch swing, with a folded newspaper 

fan and a big sweaty glass of ahstee.

~ Fred First / Floyd Press / Summer 2007