Washing Up

7/25/23

Washing Up

Take that, Maytag Repairman! [Source]

Our distant past may be someone else’s present somewhere in the world right now.

Robert Bryce recently introduced his Power Hungry Podcast listeners to Kenyan farmer and Substack author Jusper Machogu. The podcast episode was about Jusper’s perspective on life and politics, including his thoughts on energy. It blended the familiar with the exotic. The familiar included talk of books, articles, and arguments from our own modern American world and the political scene we know. The exotic delved into a way of living that most of us have abandoned a generation or three ago where possible: a way of living deprived of the everyday conveniences stemming from the cheap, abundant energy that we now take for granted.

Today’s post is not so much about the interview with Bryce (linked above), but instead about Jusper’s Substack article where he posted video of how he and people in his area wash their clothes. The article consists mainly of two short videos Jusper took of himself, as he explains:

I have taken the two videos showing you what it is like to wash clothes in the developing world.

Of course, you might say that modern technologies creep into this activity, too, for instance in the form of a handy plastic “20-liter” bucket and a convenient bar of soap. Even a century-and-a-half ago in the now industrialized world, no one had cheap, mass-produced plastic buckets. Instead there were galvanized tin buckets that rusted—themselves an improvement over heavy, handmade wooden ones that cracked and broke. And making soap was a lengthy affair where caustic ingredients were cooked in large vats over an open flame.

At any rate—as Bryce has noted elsewhere—in the modern, westernized, industrial world, we tend to imagine everyone else already lives like we do. Right now, the average American consumes as much energy in a week as a person in a developing country uses in a year. Very low energy consumption may look thrifty and cause some environmentalists to grow envious. Instead, low energy consumption is a sign of abject poverty.

We can safely assume that the millions of people worldwide who today still live in our impoverished past would gladly abandon that way of life as soon as they have the opportunity. They would prefer to have reliable abundant energy (and indoor plumbing) if given the chance. This would be a more sensible assumption than the one saying we can all move back to a simpler way of life, pre-industrially, off the grid, closer to nature. That does not seem feasible—if it were desirable at all.