Going Green
By Jim Bona
(Hamilton, NY – Feb. 2013
) I have been in a funk the past few months and, in the process, kinda lost my muse. I have read here and in a few other places articles written about having writer’s block and what to do to get rid of it. I thought that I wouldn’t want to go there, and decided that when a story presented itself to me for me to write about, I would know it. Yesterday, that is exactly what happened.
I had to video record (it used to be video tape but there isn’t any tape anymore) a job talk for one of the academic departments up on the hill. A job talk is what a prospective faculty member will do to introduce himself to his possible future colleagues. It is basically a classroom style lecture so that the professors in the department and some invited students can see how the job seeker handles himself in the classroom environment.
This is the third one I have done in the past few weeks. The other two were for the philosophy department and dealt with Indian and Chinese philosophy. Although I understood the lectures, it was hard to wrap my mind around the concepts and take anything away from the talks.
On the other hand, yesterday the talk was about indoor air quality and from the second that the presenter started, there popped into my mind the following: “there’s a story! That’s a story!” And I realized that the drought was over….finally; a very good talk with tons of take-away information and food for thought.
Some of the ideas presented were tangible. Some of the information was of a more scientific nature, dealing with the research the lecturer was doing. But some of the ideas that I was able to grasp were: indoor air pollution is far more serious to us than outdoor air pollution as we spend approximately 87 percent of our day indoors. If you add the 6 percent that we spend in our cars every day, you can see that the time we spend outside is very little.
Things inside your house that can affect your air quality range from the furniture and rugs you have, the way you cook your food and heat your house, and whether or not you use air fresheners, incense, candles and the usual variety of household cleaning chemicals. All of these things can create a potentially very unhealthy situation for the people (and animals) that live inside your house. Add to this the fact that new style windows do not allow much outside air to leak into your house, causing a virtually airtight space, and you can see that indoor air quality is something that we should examine, be aware of and try to adjust so that the air we breathe inside is safer and more healthy.
I could go on, but it would be best to just go to your favorite search engine and put in something like indoor air quality or indoor air pollution and you can find a wealth of knowledge and some good suggestions for how to improve indoor air quality.
A couple of very easy and effective ones are: opening your windows a little to let in fresh air and growing a bunch of house plants, which work as clean air producers and air filters.
Jim Bona is a technician at Colgate and passionate about all things green. He can be reached at jbona@mail.colgate.edu.