Word: backing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...guarding against subtle hazards. Perhaps the surest sign that the admonitory mood is taking a toll is the fact that Americans have begun to write advice columnists about the problems that all the cautions cause. Warnings about cholesterol in eggs, nitrate in bacon, caffeine in coffee (and, a while back, risky chemicals in even the decaffeinated variety) have sapped the fun out of eating breakfast for some people, it seems. Wrote one such: "I'd try bread and water, but I'm pretty sure that as soon as I begin to enjoy it, I'll find...
Such hangdog pathos is enough to provoke wistful dreams of returning to the vanished day when a person was guided only by folk wisdom: an apple a day would keep the doctor away. But there is no going back. Today the apple must be checked for sprayed-on toxins. The alarm system is here to stay. It would be foolhardy as well as foolish to suggest that it be shut down; it is, in truth, indispensable for guiding those who wish guidance. What is needed is a strategy for getting through life passably happy de spite all the ominous background...
...city man has been working out side, and his feet are cold. He takes off his boots, leans back in his chair, and props up his feet on the Glenwood's footrest. Yeast works in the bread and in the city man's mind. He decides to build a solar house. He's going to out-Dubin Dubin. Out-Butler Butler. When he's a very old man, too creaky to cut and split eight cords of wood a year, he's going to stay warm. Damn them all! ?John Skow
...student women's college burned 360,000 gal. of oil to heat its 29 buildings. By last year, as the result of installing 900 storm windows at a cost of $41,000, the figure was down to 290,000 gal. Muller calculates that the college got back $20,000 of its storm-window expenditure last year, and that at 1979 oil prices it should have saved the rest by midwinter. Not all of his conservation problems are so easy to solve. A handsome arts complex, designed when oil cost less than $2 per bbl., turns out to be a stubborn...
...there are indications in this cold season that Americans are beginning to believe that conservation offers the only way to fight back. Newly built homes everywhere are generally more energy efficient than the houses of a decade ago. Some public utilities across the country are offering (along with bill-stuffer assurances that nuclear energy is a good thing) free or low-cost energy audits of ratepayers' houses. The offers are being accepted by the hundreds of thousands. "There are frenzied people out there," says Austin Randolph, who handles such audits in Westchester County, N.Y., for Consolidated Edison. For a nominal...