Our home was built in the 1950's, a two story, brick split level. I would take a home built fifty years ago over today's stick-and-plywood construction, since in general they were built to last.
What's advantageous about our home is various thought-out little details that make good use of the natural environment in its orientation and layout that minimize energy costs. For one, the front of the house is oriented due-south with a huge south-facing bay window in the living room and two large south-facing skylights over the master bedroom. There is also a protruded roof overhand in the front of the house. In the winter time, the solar gain from this orientation allows over 10kw of heat into the home during the day when the sun is low in the sky. In the summer, we cover these windows and skylights to keep the heat out, and the roof overhang helps shield some of that sun as well since it is higher in the sky that time of year. Additionally, the lower level of our home is built half below-grade, so it stays a more-or-less constant temperature: cooler in summer and warmer in winter than the rest of the house due to the thermal mass of the surrounding earth. This is just low-tech, common sense stuff that sadly has been left by the wayside in modern cost-cutting construction.
What I have found that with these various details, when paid attention to and taken advantage of, is that we burned only one hundred gallons of oil this winter for heating, and we can avoid running our central AC most of the summer, except on the hottest of days (which is good, because it's almost thirty years old at this point and probably on its last legs). One thing we do to minimize the use of AC is utilizing a modified "whole house fan." The idea is that when the nighttime temps are lower than the inside temperature, you crack the windows on the ground floor (where it is cooler), and run a 4,000cfm fan in the upstairs bedroom that points out the window (usually these fans are in an attic, but because we our attic is a walkup rather than a hatch, this won't work). This creates a vacuum effect that exhausts hot air from the upstairs and draws the cool nighttime air up from the ground floor and throughout the house. Then in the morning, when you get up, you shut the windows and seal in all that cooler air and keep the hot daytime air out. This works best in the shoulder seasons when it's not super humid and not sweltering at night. But combined with blocking the solar radiation at the windows from entering and heating the home, it can still work well in the summer to reduce, if not eliminate, your need for AC. I do have a window AC unit for our bedroom in those hottest parts of the summer when the whole house fan is less effective.
Living this way (my wife is a real sport) requires a bit of a shift in how one thinks about and approaches the idea of comfort. Is the goal to live in an hermetically sealed environment at a constant 72 degrees using mechanical means? Can one tolerate a degree of slight discomfort at certain periods of the year? And why am I writing about all this eco-weenie stuff, and what does it have to do with birth control, as alluded to in the title of this post?
Well, it got me thinking about how we approach what we see as "problems" in our lives. In the summer, in the Northeast where I live, that "problem" is how to stay cool inside when it's blazing hot outside. For the vast majority of people, the "solution" is the tap the thermostat and blast their central air. Since I'm not normal, I like the approach we take that isn't so artificial/mechanical and divorced from the seasons, and which also conditions our bodies for cold and heat tolerance so that we are more adaptable and less...well, soft.
It also occurred to me that this approach we take mimicks how we approach the "problem" (although it's not really a problem, of course) of the regulation of births. As Catholics, we live by the teachings of Christ as revealed to us through Scripture, the Magisterium, and the Natural Law. One must understand the Natural Law to make sense of WHY the Church condemns the use of artificial contraception as mortally sinful. This is not rocket science and does not require a degree in Philosophy or Theology, but simply that we are to use our faculties for their intended purpose. The intended purpose of the female reproductive cycle is to give rise to life. But we reverse this in the modern world by seeing pregnancy as the "problem", that something went wrong and haywire. This is in large part due to the acceptance and mainstreaming of artificial contraception which takes a healthy reproductive system and renders it infertile.
Now, life is a great gift and blessing, but that does not mean the Church expects people to maximize the number of births in their lifetimes. She respects the judicious employment of our faculty of reason and free-will within the confines of the moral law, so that the discernment of the the number of children a couple has rests with them. Now, one can argue that this "planning" is itself contra to the will of God--that to be truly aligned with the divine will one cedes any and all control of how many children they have to God and let the chips fall where they will. Perhaps it is for the sake of human weakness in this way that the Church allows this concession of the moral means of the regulation of births by way of Natural Family Planning (NFP). That is debatable depending on which circles you run in. Nevertheless, a couple can always morally choose when to engage and when to abstain in the act of sexual intimacy so as to achieve the end of either avoiding or achieving pregnancy. What they cannot do is separate the means and the ends--that is, to have sexual intimacy without openness to life--through artificial means or coitus interruptus--in a way that is morally justifiable.
This approach to the regulation of births by "natural" (basal body temperature monitoring, observing cervical fluid, cervix position, etc) means certainly takes a shift in mindset away from the modern mentality of '100% control-on-demand' in popping a pill or slipping on a condom. Because as any Catholic couple knows, NFP, while largely effective, is not foolproof in terms of preventing pregnancy. You have to think and communicate, adjust your behavior around your cycles, and work in tandem with the natural rhythms of the wife's body. You also have to accept that you are not 100% in control here. Kind of like when you have to crack the windows at night and turn on the upstairs fan, remember to shut it off in the morning and shut the windows, and deal with some slight discomfort when it gets a little warm. When one employs artificial contraception, you don't think about this stuff, you just take your pill every day and get your IUD implanted like setting your thermostat to 72 and not thinking about it. What is also disconcerting is that many grown women on the pill do not even know how their natural cycles work, or have any cogent understanding of their reproductive biology as a result.
The naturalist Wendell Berry, although not a Christian, wrote about how artificial contraception is out of step with the natural environment. From the Public Discourse:
In The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry states that “birth control is a serious matter, both culturally and biologically,” but what is really “horrifying is not that we are relying so exclusively on a technology of birth control that is still experimental, but that we are using it casually, in utter cultural nakedness, unceremoniously, without sufficient understanding, and as a substitute for cultural solutions . . . and to promote these means without cultural insight.” In other words, a serious matter requiring careful deliberation and sound judgment has been handled carelessly and thoughtlessly—we have been forgetful.
Berry continues by noting that such thoughtless neglect is made possible, and subsequently exploited, by specialists; in this case the separation of sexuality from fertility has resulted in two groups of specialists, “the sexual clinicians and the pornographers, both of whom subsist on the increasing possibility of sex between people who neither know nor care about each other.” Both groups separate sexuality from fertility in the name of freedom and “thrive in a profound cultural rift” where sex is free “from thought, responsibility, and the issue of quality.”
As Catholics, we are not Luddites--we utilize and celebrate technological advancements when they are in accordance with the moral law. Air conditioning is one of those that is; artificial contraception is not. It can be argued that AC made residing in desert environments like Las Vegas and Phoenix possible, and made us all more comfortable; it can also be argued that the Pill made commonplace abortion, infidelity, promiscuity, and a greater proportion of women in the workforce. These are arguably not good things, but as moderns we are so far removed from being in tune with both our natural environment and our bodies that we can "afford" to not pay attention to these things and can gloss over them as the inevitable cost of comfort and control--our modern day golden calves.
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