Energy Efficiency, in an Apartment

I confess, I live in an apartment.  There it is.  I don't own the place, so home energy efficiency is something I don't have to worry about, right? Wrong.

A lot of people live in apartments, and a lot of us, unless we're real lucky, have to pay utilities.  Which means: heat, electricity, water.  Out of our pockets.  That's home energy straight up.  So it really hit home this morning when I came across a post by Cali Duncan on The Sietch Blog, A Tale of an Apartment Dwelling Eco-Enthusiast.  Now, I'm a bit of an eco-enthusiast myself.  But more than that I'm a country music enthusiast, and a humanist to boot.  So when I think of biology (from the Greek bio+logia: "life words") I usually think George Strait: "there's a difference in living and living well."  Thence arises the economic and philosophic question of how best to distribute resources so as to live the good life while maintaining a good eco-conscience.  There have been times - I cringe - that I have chosen the "Breakfast Blend" over the "Fair-Trade, Organic, Sumatran Reserve Blend" so as to save a couple bucks, to be distributed elsewhere.  I'm not saying it's okay, I'm just telling it like it is.

Inclined as I am, then, more toward the social than the natural sciences, a sphere where I consider myself particularly fortunate is in my new downtown pad.  Because it's in this, my dwelling place, where ecology and economics are most visibly reduced to their roots, which happen to be the same root, "eco," from the Greek oikos, which incidentally means "dwelling place."  I don't plan on having an energy audit in my apartment, or retrofitting the insulation, or replacing the windows.  There's nowhere to install a wind turbine.  This apartment will never be off the grid.  What I am doing is replacing the overhead lights with dimmable CFL's, replacing the showerhead with a low-flow model, putting an insulating film on the windows and plugging my electronics into a smart powerstrip.  Because all these eco-friendly improvements will save me money on my utility bills, which means I'll be left with a couple extra bucks to spend on really good fair-trade coffee and organic spinach, which all adds up to what George Strait and the Greeks would call "living well."