I wouldn't mind some of the good ol' days.

Hey Mr. Green - Sierra Club:

"It's clear that the 'need' for air-conditioning is largely a culturally conditioned phenomenon. (Call it the Big Mindless Chill.) I'm old enough to have grown up in the Midwest when there were {I}no{/I} air conditioners. We had a dozen or so days each summer when people would bitch about the weather, itself a nearly lost art form. Then we would proceed to find various pleasurable ways of beating the heat, like taking siestas, making Kool-Aid, and lounging under shade trees.

At night, we relished the excuse to lie out on the lawn while peering into the depths of the galaxy or discussing the meaning of the universe--or at least the location of constellations and the distance to an airplane blinking on the horizon. Watching meteors was a welcome part of the ritual too. Folks who had flat roofs could sleep on them; the really lucky ones had those old-fashioned sleeping porches. (There's little room for such amenities now that space is squandered on multi-car garages and other follies of modern domestic architecture.)

Then, thanks to the blessings of postwar consumerism, a few of the wealthier folks acquired air conditioners, around the same time they started snapping up TVs. More and more time was spent sitting inside, listening to a mechanical hum instead of meadowlarks by day and whip-poor-wills by night. (In the beginning was the Word. In the end was Television.) As the technology became more affordable, just about everybody acquired air-conditioning.

Then the only thing left to prove was that yours was better than the other guy's. Thus began the era of hyper-cooling, wherein a superfluous creature comfort morphed into something downright uncomfortable. Across the United States, there are millions of living rooms where you have to wear a sweater in the middle of a heat wave.

But there might be more to this than mere status-seeking. Many a dwelling that is overcooled in the summer becomes suffocatingly overheated in the winter. The warmer it gets outside, the colder we make it inside, and vice versa. Instead of getting used to the seasonal changes (an idea as quaint these days as the folk wisdom of letting the blood thin out in summer and thicken in winter), it's as if we're one-upping nature itself, cranking up the air conditioner or furnace just to show the weather that, by God, we're the ones in control."