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In the meantime, independent thinkers are busy hatching schemes to beat the system. "A great learning process is going on," says Madison Draftsman Dan Greco, who describes himself as a "lay expert" in conservation. On Block Island, R.I., where the last sizable stands of trees were cut and sent up the chimney decades ago, some residents are experimenting with drying and burning peat. Mantle kerosene lamps are in fashion through the Northeast: not only is their light soft and pleasant, but the heat they radiate is equal to almost half that of a small electric space heater.
In Minnesota, farmers sometimes stack bales of straw or garbage bags full of leaves against the outside of drafty house foundations. Cora Lee McKnight, 68, a Decatur, Mich., grandmother tells of Depression-era schemes to beat the cold: smearing a paste of flour and water into cracks, stuffing thickly folded newspapers between window and screen. "And we usually put hot-water bottles into our beds to keep our feet warm," she says. Other sug gestions: wrapping water heaters in blankets, insulating windows with corrugated cardboard and placing old carpets under new ones.
In Alaska, where thinking hard to stay warm can be a requirement for survival, 258 residents—one out of every 2,000 souls, a rate higher than anywhere else in the U.S.—submitted ideas to a Department of Energy small grants program. Elizabeth Hart of Galena won $13,800 to build a solar greenhouse that will use the body heat of chickens as a source of warmth. R. Charles Vowell of Unalaska got $12,000 for a 10,000-gal. bio-gas generator that uses crab wastes from canneries to produce a burnable methane. Craig Anderson of Kenny Lake received $400 to build a passive solar system that features collectors made of used beer and soft drink bottles. Kyle Green of Wasilla got $49,300 to build a demon- stration solar house suitable for northern latitudes.
It is easy to dismiss such tiny projects as tinkering—as it is easy to dismiss the wood-stove phenomenon. Crab wastes and the body heat of chickens are not going to save postindustrial America (though Ecologist Barry Com- moner believes that methane, generated from a wide variety of wastes and especially grown crops, could stretch declining natural gas supplies and help the U.S. bridge the 50-year period before it can achieve what he thinks possible: a completely solar-powered society). But the Department of Energy does not dismiss such ideas—and there may be wisdom here. What the woodburners and the backyard inventors are expressing is more than flabby "life-style" preening; it is an exceedingly determined kind of self-reliance: "I am going to stay warm, damn the Arabs, and damn the oil companies, and damn the damned Government!"