Green Cleaning- Part I (Our Inside and Outside Homes)

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced its Fourth Assessment Report on February 2nd, global warming finally made significant headlines in the American press. Global warming was considered a fact of life six years ago when I moved to Italy. I was in Turin for the 2003 European heat wave, one of many climactic crises brought on by global warming. I spent the agonizingly hot days, like many Europeans, with no air conditioning. I lay on the sofa in a half-conscious daze, occasionally remembering to eat gelato. 20,000 Italians who weren't as young and strong as I was died.

The next summer, still in Turin, my husband and I bought an air conditioner. The torture of the past summer overrode knowledge that air conditioning units would only make the heat problems worse in the future.

And isn't that where we all are, those of us with the means to choose whether or not to buy the new A/C, the new car, the next can of furniture polish? See, human beings are wired to survive the day- which is why I bought that A/C, and human beings are also wired to care for themselves and their loved ones. Parents change diapers, people clean their toilets, wash their windows, use wads of paper towels when the cat spits up a hairball. So we're faced with a situation where the products we use to make our inside homes inhabitable are making our outside home uninhabitable. What can we do? More importantly, what will we do?

I think this is a fantastic discussion for people who are writing about the future. Not only will global warming change the fabric of our future world, but the things we do to try to prevent drastic environmental consequences (whether they work, or not) will color our everyday lives. Having lived overseas, I've seen that local climate and culture play a huge role in the way people keep house. I'm talking things that sound insignificant: how people do the laundry, how people clean the bathroom, how people take out trash. We're learning that all these "insignificant" daily acts have a huge impact on the environment.

So this week I'm going to share some of my experiences of the seemingly small differences in how Italians go about their daily lives, and do a little research to learn how things are done in a variety of places. I'll examine why some of these foreign practices are only suited to certain climates and cultures, and discuss the possible impacts of what might happen if selected local practices were implemented on a global basis. How might the typical American house be changed? And to conclude the series, I'll discuss what I learned about green cleaning when I went cold turkey last November, and how green cleaning (which comes from a previous generation, not a foreign culture) could change the touch, the taste, the smell, the experience of living in future homes.