Yes, there is a blog 13. As someone who has to pound the streets delivering party political bits of paper, allow me to say that all those streets without a number 13 drive me nuts – it messes up the order of the envelopes I have to stuff through people’s doors. How can we hope to be perceived, or perceive ourselves, as an intelligent species when we refuse to buy houses with a one and a three stuck on the wall? And the numbers even have to be in that order, first 1 and then 3, for goodness sake. It’s straight out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. | "the fact that they keep on building streets without a number 13 in sight tells us a huge amount about ourselves and our capacity to imagine" | |
OK, it is the builders and the developers who decide that ‘Lilac Avenue’ or ‘York Road’ sound great but ‘13’ won’t sell. And maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong, but the fact that they keep on building estates and streets without a number 13 in sight tells us a huge amount about ourselves and our capacity to imagine. It goes to the heart of our ability to tackle Climate Change because, beneath our conscious intelligent selves there is a second self who is controlled by stories, myths and a whole heap of other baggage. This matters because the ecoDepot cannot by itself change the world, its power lies primarily in the example it presents to the city, to all of us. To work it needs to reach past the other baggage that clutters our minds and persuades us to do things differently. Most people in Europe have now heard the words Climate Change. All the major political parties, academic institutions and media publications accept that the world is hotting up and that we are playing some part in that process. But the key word is change. We hate change. It is as deep down as the number 13. It’s in our proverbs, our folktales… everywhere. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, ie: hold on to what you have. Don’t change. So what did I see at my last visit to the ecoDepot, before this blog becomes a post-structuralist analysis of subconscious myth and the human psyche?
 | | Will meetings there be efficient too? |
To join me on a virtual visit you now have to put on the very hippest hyper-fashionable elasticated blue plastic shoe covers because … THE CARPETS ARE DOWN! Even the furniture has to wear covers [see photo]. Now imagine a labrador lying on the grass in a park on a hot summer’s day. Its panting mouth is wide open, its pink tongue flaps about like Piglet’s ears on windy days in ‘Winnie the Pooh’ stories. The dog is controlling its internal temperature by opening an aperture. The ecoDepot does the same thing with small metal rods fixed to the lower edge of the windows. The blog photo isn’t exactly the most exciting I’ve ever taken (it won’t appear on the front page of a newspaper) but it’s as sexy as a solar cell covered roof or a straw stuffed wall. When fitted to the frame, the rod will push the window in and out to control air-flow and temperature automatically. During the day the moving rods will ensure the building is properly cooled and ventilated. They will also move at night, controlled by a computer that tracks the weather forecast for the next day, adjusting the temperature in the small hours, in readiness for the day ahead. This intelligent climate control removes the need for air-conditioning by ensuring that, in the morning, when staff arrive for work, the starting temperature of the building is such that it will not get too hot in the middle of the day. When someone working in the building decides to open the window nearest their desk, to get a gulp of air, the computer will wait fifteen minutes before quietly returning the window to its overall control of ventilation. Instead of relying on all the staff within the building to be thinking about air-flow, the ecoDepot just gets on with controlling its own internal heat, like the Labrador in the park.
 | | Window rod |
On a larger scale, the vehicle wash was being tested. As you will know from previous blogs, we have invested in a rain harvesting tank to free us from the silliness of cleaning trucks in drinking water, a move that will save the council tens of thousands of pounds. The photo shows one of our recycling trucks going through the vehicle wash; a check to see that everyone had got their sums right and that there wasn’t going to be an embarrassing screech as a lorry got jammed under a metal beam that wasn’t quite high enough. No red faces, the test went perfectly. Now the building is almost complete, the second phase of the ecoDepot is about to begin. The link between the ecoDepot and our battle to tackle Climate Change has to be communicated. I see it like this. Who among us can stand on a cliff top overlooking the ocean and see not the vast eternal powers of the sea … but its fragility? Which is, of course, why we are busy emptying the seas of fish. Our senses are ill-equipped to help us understand the profound impact that we are having on our world. It is the same with Climate Change. Most of us do not know that it is odd to see a hummingbird hawk moth in York in late October. We rely on statistics and specialists who often bore us to death. So we must reinvent ourselves and our stories. We must turn ourselves upside down until all our superstitions, like the number 13, and our unconscious obstacles to understanding tumble out of our pockets like loose change. We must fire up our sense of vision and imagination. We have to get supermarkets and schools to use pre-fabricated straw cladding. We have to ensure the new council offices in Hungate are as energy efficient as the ecoDepot. We have to … and … and … Oh hell, it’s plain I should stop scribbling and get back to work! Christian, Energy Champion, City of York Council, 01/12/06 | 
