Allergy season is upon us. Many of us will be taking antihistamines to suppress puffy eyes, runny noses, and itchy throats, all which come from the foreign invaders - pollen - which will soon fill the air. Sounds great! Thank goodness we don't have to deal with allergies like any other human before the 1930s.
Wait. Doesn't that sound a little strange? Did allergies only become a problem for people recently? Or is this problem a man-made (and man-"solved") one?
A large segment of the OTC drug market is devoted to medications that reduce fevers, suppress coughs, and eliminate histamines. As such a large population of consumers are taking these drugs to reduce their bodies' responses to disease and contaminants. These "treatments" are touted as a necessary and good thing, yet very possibly extend or worsen illnesses.
Take, for example, a fever. Your body's way of killing diseases by providing a less hospitable environment for the bad biology and allowing your immune system to do it's work. Fevers' mechanisms are brilliant, no doubt. Yet we willingly - no, eagerly - give kids and adults alike a drug to stop their bodies' natural immune response?
Luckily, many professional medical sources realize that fevers are a necessary and beneficial symption of the body's response to illness, not a disease itself. (Although they often do recommend fever suppressanats at above a certain body temperature which begs the question - if a fever above, say 102 degress is dangerous, why suggest an at-home drug treatment which only hides a serious symptom rather than serious medical intervention?)
I might seem to care deeply about fevers. And while I am interested in the biology behind fevers, I care more about our irrational fear of symptoms in general.
Modern humans wield extraordinary power to shape the world - and ourselves. We can make water move hundreds and thousands of miles to irrigate farmland. We can sustain plant and animal life which otherwise would not survive, in fact not even exist, without us.
We can also use our power to solve problems.
Farmlands need more water? We will literally move rivers to hydrate them. Crops are failing and lacking nutrients? We can eradicate "harmful" plant and insect life and create almost magically the nutrients to sustain the good life.
Are those solutions really solving the problem though? Just because we have the power to seemingly solve a problem doesn't mean we have in fact solved it, and we should certainly ponder whether we should intervene in the first place.
Can we avoid the effects of droughts more effectively than moving rivers? We already see that rivers and aquifers are drying up at an unsustainable rate. And can we grow healthier, hardier food without resorting to needing chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and, herbicides? Of course the simple (but not necessarily easier) solution is to use our power over nature to make it work for us. That, I believe, is not the easiest solution, and it won't be available for much longer. We need to take a different approach.
The different approach we must take is seeing problems not because of their symptoms, but for the problem itself. We need to consider how to become more resilient to droughts - and question why we have in many ways become more susceptible. We need to question why the farmland of the midwest, which used to have several inches or even feet of rich topsoil before industrial farming, now barely have the nutrients to sustain crops.
We need to change and see fevers for what they are - not a disease, but a vitally important sign of and defense against illness.
I believe it is healthy to constantly question the status quo which we might accept as normal. Doing so can reveal our follies. One example is our historical use of lead in plumbing, which continues to poison people to this day.
Modern construction techniques are a norm which also need to be reexamined. To be clear, this is not an attack on anyone involved in the construction or housing industries, although some in those fields are certainly propogating what I believe to be a problematic paradigm in building. This blurb is only to point out what I see as a problem, and which many people in general might recognize but either ignore or rationalize away.
The problem is that homes don't - or won't - last as long as they used to. The cause is more complex. Decades of simplification of the construction process to the point of diminished quality, durability, and as an aside, health, of our homes.
Think of the house/apartment/condo/hut you are living in. Will it still be here in 50 years? Maybe.
100? No, not likely.
I haven't found empirical data, but think of the homes of 80+ years ago, particularly those from before World War II. How many of those are still standing? Homes (those which survived the spread of suburban sprawl) dating back to American expansion in the west are not unheard of. Entire streets of original townhomes in Georgetown and Alexandria survive from 150+ years ago.
Certainly those homes are not in absolutely pristine condition. Floors and walls sag, roofs fail and are replaced; some homes even undergo whole-home renovations to replace the out-of-date decor or repair damage. But still these houses' primary structure remain intact, if not repaired.
Yet take a look around a modern home. It is very common to see cracking walls and ceilings, floors which wave as much as those 150 year-old ones, and rotting or cracking wooden trim. I had a short experience working in home renovations professionally, yet I saw plenty of just that. Homes today are often in worse shape than their great-great-grandhomes. Many of these new disintegrating houses are not even 10 or 20 years old, and sell for millions of dollars.
Why is this?
There are, in my experience and opinion, many factors. Foremost is the simplification of building to the point of eroding the craftsmanship which building used to require. The developments in building science have allowed for work to be done faster, cheaper, and dumber. Compared to the craftsmen of old, we do not need much skill today to hang and mud drywall, run plumbing lines, or install trim and doors. Speaking from my experience, even a singleton homegamer could become quite effective at the fundamentals of nearly all of the trades with today's developments aimed at easing the involved efforts and processes, i.e. efficiency. This would not be problematic if tradesmen retained the same expertise and specialization as their predecesors. Instead speed has, in many instances, become the primary metric of skill. Get it done quick, because we need to sell quick.
Second is the cheapening of materials. In order to maximize profit margins, materials have been developed to be as fast and cheap to produce as possible, with little regard for the quality of said materials. The best example is dimensional lumber, e.g. wooden studs or "2-bys." Superficially, modern studs differ little from those in old buildings. Look closely, however, and you'll see the grown rings - the light and dark-colored striations in the wood - are far more spaced out than older ones. Each ring is caused by one cycle of the tree's annual growth cycle, and has a consistent strength no matter its width. So, wood with denser growth rings are stronger for the same size. Again, this difference - and weakening - is due to the cheapening of wood. Modern lumber comes by and large from plantations, where many acres of tree saplings are planted on a clear-cut piece of land to grow together. Once the trees reach a particular size, the area is again clear-cut. The problem is that those trees have a great deal of sunlight, being surrounded by equally-sized trees, and therefore grow very quickly. Hence the large spacing between growth rings and weaker wood. But hey, the faster growth makes lumber cheaper, right? Well, it still isn't cheap.
Again I must note none of what I've written is a not knock on anyone in the trades or those who develop building materials. I do believe that many modern building techniques and materials can make long-lasting homes if used and installed properly. But doing so will require at least a partial return to the attention to detail in one's craft which has been lost.
Nobody is intentionally causing this degradation. Our economic market and drive for efficiency, without regarding its costs, is responsible. However, we (anyone who does or hopes to own a home) are our best resource for correcting this negative trend.
I don't know what the economic effects of such a change will be. But I know that drastic changes in how we live and how our economy functions might follow.
P.S. A note on houses' health. As much as I appreciate the positive aspects of modern building science, one cannot ignore the shift from more natural materials in the 19th century to synthetic ones in the 21st. I think it's pretty clear that materials like vinyl-based paint, synthetic waterproofing compounds in grout, and plastic in so many applications (like carpeting and engineered flooring) are not benefiting our health.