The Body Electric

摘要

DURING THE SUMMER OF 2006. BACK WHEN RJ Scaringe was working through a degree in automotive engineering at MIT, he began to wonder how difficult it might be to live within strict environmental boundaries. How much would you have to change—and how fast, for how long—if you desired to wipe away the carbon traces of your everyday life? Scaringe decided to conduct an experiment, using himself as the subject. For months, he walked, biked, or used public transportation wherever he went. He took cold showers, washed his laundry by hand, and traded his dryer for a clothesline. When he ate out, he brought his own spoon, to cut down on plastic waste. "I was tracking the data really closely," Scaringe, a soft-spoken, genial sort with Clark Kentish glasses and short dark hair, told me recently. By summer's end he had reached two conclusions. The first was that he still had a meaningful carbon footprint. The second was that he was disheveled and uncomfortable. "I said, holy smokes, no one will sign up for this, and if this is our plan to address climate change, we're going to lose," he recalled. Asking billions of people to don an unwashed hair shirt wouldn't work; the solution would have to be rapid technological innovation.