The Thousand Year Old House

Why do we make and build so much of the things in our lives to be disposable? Our clothes, cars, appliances, furniture and even our houses? In 2011 the average age of a house in the US was 35 years. In Nevada it was only 19 years. The oldest average by state is in New York at 57 years. This doesn't mean that half of the houses of these ages will be torn down and replaced tomorrow, but it does indicate that a large portion of the houses in the US don't make it to their centennial birthday. The very oldest houses still standing were built in the middle to late 1600's making them about 350 years old. In contrast, there are houses in Europe that have been continually inhabited for the last 700 years. Now, part of this is due to the history of the European conquest of the Americas. But the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico has been continuously inhabited since the twelfth century making it almost 900 years old.

Why is this important? Because building and making stuff consumes limited resources. This is important because we are quickly reaching the limits where these resources are being consumed faster than they can be replenished (have you bought anything made of mahogany lately?). Most things, like clothing, are impractical to make durable enough to last a lifetime (or several). But it turns out, a well built house that can last centuries, does not have to cost all that much more than one built to last only decades (they can, but it is not a requirement). The only question is why don't we bother?

Usually the answer is, it costs too much. But look at the oldest continuously inhabited building in the US in the picture above. It is essentially made of mud (adobe) and has lasted almost a millennium. Now, most of us don't aspire to live in mud huts, but it turns out you can make a very comfortable house that requires almost no energy to heat or cool out of mud, straw and sand for a fraction of the cost of a 'traditional' wood frame house. These materials shaped into bricks and baked in the sun are called adobe. Molded into a free standing wall that cures in place and it is called 'cob' (an old English term which means loaf, as in bread, about the size of each piece that is added to the wall one at a time).

So why don't we make all of our houses out of these materials? No wood to rot over time, get eaten by termites or that needs to be painted, scraped or stained every few years. OK, a cob or adobe house does have wood frames for the windows and doors, but those can be replaced if needed with little or no affect on the structural integrity of the structure. And some designs like the one above have wooden framed roofs. But some designs (domes and half-cylinders to name two) use the same material for the roof so have no shingles, roof repairs, leaks or replacement for the lifetime of the structure. And what is that lifetime again? Oh yeah, one thousand years. What was that reason why we don't make all our houses to last a thousand years?

Rethinking Garbage

Do you know where your local garbage dump is located? Have you ever been there? Few people have, but it is both informative and insightful to visit yours and see what happens to all the stuff you put in the can that gets picked up on your curbside each week.

Most municipal solid waste facilities (let's just call 'em dumps, 'cause that's what they really are) operate (accept garbage) from 30 to 50 years. My local dump opened a new facility in 2005 designed to accept 100 tons of garbage a day for the next 20 years. This is in a county of less than 30,000 residents. That's approximately six and a half pounds of garbage per person per day. The current fill rate indicates we may even be exceeding that amount. Why do we produce so much garbage? I've discussed this topic in a previous post, but have gained some new insights since then.

Recently, I moved just outside the city limits and no longer have the privilege of paying to have my garbage picked up by the city. Which means I either have to take it to the dump myself or pay a private firm to do it for me. I found it an eye opening experience to witness the dump firsthand. Of course there is the smell. But the overwhelming sensation was more like watching a family member being mugged, violated or beaten. The savage destruction of nature that takes place in a 'waste management facility' is visceral, disgusting and shameful. And we all bear responsibility.

Thankfully, my community has a pretty good recycling program, taking everything from cardboard to paper to plastics and glass. And if you separate out the glass, they will take everything else in a single stream. So I have three containers in my kitchen; one for all recycling (I remove the glass before the run to the dump), one for kitchen scraps that goes into the compost (more on that below) and one for everything else. The interesting aspect of this system is I find that the smallest volume ends up being the 'everything else' container, which is mostly plastic film (Saran Wrap), Ziploc bags and chip bags. I would guess that three-quarters by volume of what I take to the dump goes into the recycle bin.

The compost bucket collects all kitchen scraps except meat or bones (I'm a vegetarian, so that is not an issue), soft paper products such as used Kleenex and paper towels, fruit and vegetable skins and rinds, seeds, peels, coffee grounds and anything else that was recently alive (thus avoiding the classification issue with plastics, which are mostly petroleum products which technically were alive millions of years ago). I am amazed at the volume and weight of product that used to go to the landfill that now provides free (and organic) fertilizer for my garden. Of course, sending any kind of yard waste to the dump makes no sense whatsoever, so please stop putting grass clippings in bags for the garbage man unless your community has a specific composting program.

This is not the utopia I imagined in another post, but I think it is a big step in the right direction.

The Earth does not belong to us...

... we belong to the Earth. Yeah, I know it's a bumper sticker slogan, but is there a better way to describe how our actions are connected to and affect all the other life on the planet? Or put another way, can one better describe how our survival is dependent upon the survival of all the other life with which we share this precious Earth? I believe the acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of all life on earth, especially how it affects human beings, is the most important factor in our long term survival. Are you not concerned about the survival of the human race in the future? How about your own survival or that of your children?

Think about it. Where did the food you ate for breakfast come from? What will happen to that food source if we continue to waste, degrade and plunder the natural environment in which it was harvested? What would happen if all (or even most) of the bees in the US disappeared next year? No bees, no fruit, vegetables, nuts or grains. Think this sounds like a sci-fi apocalyptic doomsday scenario? Since 2006 in the US, commercial honey bee operators started reporting the loss of 30-90% of their hives. The bees simply disappeared and did not return to the hives, leaving the queen to starve to death. If you think this only affects honey production, you are in for a surprise. According to the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA, "About one mouthful in three in our diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination."

Now known as colony collapse disorder, to date there is no definitive explanation for this continued honey bee die off. Some leading contenders:

• Overuse of new pesticides developed in the 1990's
• Several invasive parasites introduced to the US in the 1990's
• Higher virus and bacterial infection due to lowered bee immune systems (from unknown causes)
• Lack of pollen diversity (large monoculture plantings)
• Environmental stressors due to climate change, water pollution and habitat destruction
• Some combination of all of the above

The alarming fact is that all of those causes are from human activity (either intentional or otherwise). This is simply one example of how we are sowing the seeds of our own destruction because we are not acknowledging our dependence and interconnectedness with all other life.

If we continue to consume, degrade and destroy the resources of the earth with such reckless abandon, we will be the ones to suffer. As a dear friend of mine likes to say, "Nature bats last." If there is a massive die off of humanity, the rest of life on the planet will recover, take over and eventually restore the wastelands we will leave behind. The only suffering will be our own, of our own making. Fortunately, we can make conscious changes now to avert the worst disasters. Unfortunately, it is too late to avert them all (like global climate change which is already occurring).

Beyond the apocalyptic, fear mongering message (which I dislike, but is sometimes necessary to raise awareness), I think the hopeful message is that the alternative is not painful. Yes, we have to change our attitudes and behaviors, but for what? How about a more beautiful world filled with more plants and animals and less concrete and asphalt? More responsible use of the earth's precious resources and less waste and garbage? More healthy living environments and less pollution? More healthy people and less famine? Living in harmony with each other and the environment instead of conquering, consuming and destroying it? That doesn't sound like a sacrifice, but a world in which we would all be more happy and content. How can we turn our backs on that future?

Change Someone's Life in a Profound Way

Most of us donate money, used clothing or other items to charities in order to help those in need. While I encourage this behavior, I have realized how putting in a little extra effort can sometimes make a much larger impact in the lives of those who need a helping hand.

Recently, I had the opportunity to chaperone a group of high school students on a trip to Costa Rica to build two homes for two needy families. The challenges were large, particularly since most of us had little or no building experience and we had two days to completely finish two houses. To put that in perspective, these houses were sixteen by twenty feet, contained two rooms and were wired for electricity but had no plumbing. Fortunately, the charity with whom we were working had an ambitious yet efficient plan to turn 30 construction newbies into two teams of hard working construction pros.

Beyond the challenges of language, living in a foreign country with different customs and morals and adjusting to different living standards (like open sewers in the streets) we had to contend with heat and humidity, the burning equatorial sun and a timeline that would make any project manager sweat. I was very proud of the work ethic of the whole team, especially the kids whom we shook out of bed each morning at 5am (these are teenagers, remember) and worked all day long in the hot Costa Rican sun.

Most importantly, and the reason all of us decided to give up our Spring Break for the opposite of a vacation was seeing the impact our efforts had on the families and the community. The first morning when we were faced with a pile of raw lumber and the empty slabs of concrete, we met each family who would receive the completed houses we set out to build. Both were young couples (18-19 years old) with young children (less than 2 years old). Both were currently living with a parent in houses we would barely deem big enough to store a lawn mower and our gardening tools. They spoke no English so our translator relayed to us their profound gratitude for our generosity in our money, time, effort and labor. We raised nearly $20,000 through fund raising activities to pay for the lumber and household furnishings. That's right, each fully furnished house cost $10,000.

It is hard to describe the emotions between our team members and these two families when we handed over the keys to their new homes. Homes that had doors that not only closed but could be locked, windows that had glass in them covered by curtains. A dining room with table and chairs set with dishes and tableware, glasses and serving dishes. A bedroom with bunk beds for their children and a queen sized bed for the parents all with pillows, sheets and comforters. And the house warming gifts we all brought with us: dish towels, clothes, jewelry and toys for the kids. All of these things we take for granted each day as we roam around our 2000+ square feet homes. Nothing compares to the experience of seeing the emotion on the faces of those families for whom these common items were like riches. That the 350 square foot homes we built were mansions by their standards. That having four solid walls and a roof that doesn't leak was a luxury in the community where we built them.

I'm not recommending that all of us have to travel to foreign countries to make a significant impact in someone's life. But it is both much more rewarding and much more helpful for the people you are helping when you put in that little extra effort, make that extra sacrifice, to change someone's life in a profound way.

Why Food Security Matters to You

I believe there are two aspects to food security, both of which should concern all of us. The first and probably less familiar aspect is that of security from contamination. Contamination can take many forms, from E. coli and other biological agents to pesticides to heavy metals to animal hormones to discarded pharmaceuticals. The reason I add this as a factor of food security is because contaminated food is as good as no food at all. The second aspect is simple access to fresh, healthy food. Some inner cities of our large metropolises like Chicago and Detroit contain food deserts where no grocery stores exist for many miles. The only options people in these areas have for sustenance are fast food restaurants and convenience stores that sell highly processed and packaged food products.

For those of use fortunate enough to not live in a food desert we also need to be concerned about the availability of healthy, fresh food. A quick look at how our food is produced and distributed will outline some areas for concern. In the US the average super market travel distance for fresh fruit and vegetables is between 1500 to 2500 miles. Think about this for a moment. That lettuce you are eating in your salad tonight probably traveled farther to get to your refrigerator than you did on your last vacation. So what does this have to do with food security? Since our food network is stretched so long and is so reliant on cheap fuel, the interstate highway system and an enormous fleet of trucks, it is susceptible to many kinds of disruptions.

This is most apparent during natural disasters such as hurricanes. Under normal circumstances the stock in most grocery stores becomes depleted in three days. This means three days without any truck deliveries and your local store has no more food for you to purchase. Fortunately, natural disasters are not normal circumstances. We have all seen footage of empty store shelves hours before a large hurricane is scheduled to make landfall in an area. Luckily, most truck service is restored only hours after a hurricane has passed and the stores can be restocked. Sometimes, however, that is not the case.

As most of us can remember, after hurricane Katrina, the city of New Orleans descended into anarchy and chaos within a few days without drinkable water, electricity or food supplies from the outside world. Shocked that a city in the US could fail so quickly (and appalled at the apparent lack of federal response), I drove from Chicago down to Baton Rouge, the largest nearby city where a relief effort was being staged, to help. Inside the gymnasium and sports arena at LSU the Red Cross (with no help from FEMA or any other federal agency) was staffing a small city of cots, medical services and a cafeteria to house and feed five to six thousand refugees from the flooded city 50 miles to the south. The biggest impression I took away from my experience is how fragile is our modern lifestyle.

So what does this have to do with food security? Unfortunately, hurricanes are not the only threats to our thin and delicate web of food production and distribution. Drought, spikes in fuel prices, labor disputes and strikes, failing infrastructure, economic panic (e.g. fall of 2008), resource shortages, terrorism and severe weather events can all disrupt our steady supply of fresh, healthy food. But even if none of these calamities occur, we still have to contend with the other aspect of food security, contamination.

I've been considering all of these issues for several years and the simple conclusion I can't escape is the best way to improve one's food security is to grow more of it yourself. And growing your own food has the added benefit of reducing green house gases due to current energy intensive, factory farming practices and long travel distance by truck. And can you get more fresh than eating something five minutes after it is picked from the ground?

Every home owner has some kind of yard with some amount of ornamental vegetation, depending in which area of the country you live. Most of us own a swath of grass, the stereotypical American lawn, upon which we spend an inordinate amount of our summer months to maintain. Wouldn't it be a better use of our time and resources if we replaced some of that grass to grow something we can actually eat? Now that's food for thought.

Private Land Ownership

If you think about if for a second, the concept of private land ownership is a strange one. Each of us is born into this world, one that has existed for billions of years before any of us show up on the scene, and at some point in our lives we draw an arbitrary boundary around an area on the landscape and say, "This is mine." I can't think of a better example of human conceit and self importance. Yet to consider all of the cruelties inflicted, rivers of blood spilled and whole societies destroyed throughout the ages over land disputes simply boggles the mind.

I understand that land ownership is all about control of what can be done on a particular parcel and who can do it. Usually it boils down to the use of resources contained within whatever arbitrary boundary seems relevant to the parties in control. All of our conventions of law and legal transfer of ownership are simply processes we have put in place to reduce the amount of conflict related to determining who gets to decide what happens within what arbitrary boundaries. But over most of human history, the deciding factor has been who has the most lethal weapons and the biggest army.

But the issue always comes back to the use (or in most cases misuse) of natural resources. Our society, and almost all societies in the world today, are based on the concept of land ownership, either private or public. Every square inch of the surface of the earth is owned by someone. Notable exceptions are Antarctica (the only landmass on Earth that has no native human populations and is protected by international treaty) and the world's oceans, twelve nautical miles beyond shore, although there are many international treaties, disagreements and exceptions even to this simple rule.

My main observation is that even within all the rules, regulations and practices imposed on a landowner by local, regional and even international laws, overuse and sometimes outright abuse of natural resources occur across the globe. The problem is that landowners no longer are the only ones to suffer from mismanagement of their land. Most environmental problems, such as deforestation, pollution and resource depletion have regional and sometimes global consequences.

So this post is more food for thought than a recommendation for specific action. How do we raise global awareness for the consequences of resource depletion? Or maybe more to the point, how do each of us become better stewards of the land that we do own? (I touched on this issue in a previous post). No matter if that is a condo in a densely populated urban area, a 1/4 acre in a suburban sub-division or a 50 acre homestead, I'm convinced all of us can do a better job as sustainable land owners.

As a soon-to-be steward of about 5 acres in rural New Mexico, here are a few questions I will be asking myself which I think we should all consider. How can I utilize native, less resource intensive (water, fertilizer, labor) plants? What can I do to encourage more native wildlife on my property? How can I accomplish the same benefit (enjoying a beautiful landscape) with less labor and resources? For example, gas powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers are not only noisy and polluting but very inefficient compared to gas powered cars. Reducing or eliminating their use is a huge step towards sustainability.

In order to accomplish meaningful change we need to throw out old assumptions. For example, why do we assume that every house in America should be landscaped with sod (even in desert regions like Las Vegas)? Break the mold, challenge convention and replace that ocean of bland grass with more interesting and native landscaping that requires less water and maintenance. What else can you do to become a better steward of the land you own?

The Problem with Fusion

Although there are many technical challenges that still remain in order to make fusion energy a viable source of electrical power generation, the main reason humans will never harness fusion energy is one of economics. By the very nature of a fusion reaction, pressures and temperatures only experienced within stars, fusion reactors are necessarily the most complex and technologically sophisticated machines built by man (the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is another candidate). As such, fusion reactors are also among the most expensive. No amount of technologic breakthrough will make fusion generation a cheap enterprise. In order to recoup that expense, massive economies of scale have to be achieved in order to make fusion energy a viable source of electrical power generation. But massive economies of scale can only be achieved with massive installations which bring about a whole host of other problems like local environmental impact, vulnerability to local weather and geologic phenomenon (earthquakes, tsunami, etc.) not to mention human caused events such as accidents, sabotage and military action. Finally, massive installations have huge price tags.

First let’s look at the order of magnitude kind of cost we can expect. Nuclear fission technology is about 80 years old and by all standards a fairly mature technology, even considering the latest reactor designs like advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR). The largest nuclear power plant in the world is Japan’s Kashiwazaki–Kariwa NPP which as seven reactors for a total generating capacity of 8 GW (8,000 MW). From ground breaking to first power generation took more than four years. The last reactor did not come online until 12 years after the first one requiring huge capital outlays before revenue could be collected by selling the generated power. The average cost per kW of electricity generated is about $5,000 or a total of $40 billion to build the entire complex.

Here is a list for cost comparison to other relevantly complex machines:

• Trident nuclear missile submarine – $3 billion
• Nimitz class nuclear powered aircraft carrier – $6.2 billion
• Lifetime cost of Space Shuttle program – $200 billion ($1.5 billion / flight)

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the only commercial fusion reactor program currently funded has an estimated price of $18 billion. (The US National Ignition Facility, the only fusion project in the US, is changing priorities after failing to meet the goal of "ignition" when the latest round of funding ended this last September.) It’s designed net power generation is 450 MW. This is only 5% of the power generated by Kashiwazaki–Kariwa NPP for almost half the cost. So even assuming ITER is a complete success, which is doubtful considering the immature state of the technology, it will not be economically viable. But it is a demonstration of the technology, so economics are not the primary objective.
However, the outlook for fusion gets worse. The economies of scale required for a large fusion reactor demand generation on the order of 5 – 10 GW. This falls out of a complex analysis of cost for power generation that ranges from $2000 / kW for state-of-the art pulverized coal plants to $10,000 / kW for the latest ABWR nuclear fission power plants. In order to be economically viable, a fusion power plant has to deliver power within this price band. For maximum economies of scale, at $10,000 / kW for a total of 10 GW power generation, this equates to a total lifetime cost (capital, operating, fuel and financing) of less than $100 billion. For a 20 year lifetime, this would approximate to $80 billion to build and $1 billion annual costs. And this would make the electricity one of the most expensive sources. To come down to the $2000 / kW of coal fired plants, the build cost would have to come down to about $16 billion. That’s already less than the projected ITER cost for only 450 MW of generation.

There are few aspects of the technology required to fuse hydrogen atoms that indicate orders of magnitude cost reduction over time. Compare the costs of the largest partical colliders as they have grown in size over the last 20 years. The closest parallel technology on the electric power generation front is the evolution of nuclear fission power plants. Even at the enormous economies of scale afforded by Kashiwazaki–Kariwa NPP its cost per kW is still in the middle of the cost band for electrical generation sources. Most of the worlds nuclear power plants fall in the upper reaches of this price band. So even under the very best of technological circumstances, fusion power will never be a viable source of electrical power generation purely for economic reasons.

In the name of Progress?

I live in a suburb of Chicago far enough away from the city that there are still a few farms that have yet to be paved over, an abundance of green spaces, stretches of forest and a fairly unspoiled, picturesque river valley. Recently, in the name of progress, the city purchased several developed pieces of land, one containing an abandoned warehouse which was burned to the ground by vandals, in order to build a road bypass to improve traffic on a congested major artery. The only problem is about ten acres of land smack in the middle of the developed parcels that is covered in forest, is bordered by a popular bike path on one side, one of the oldest parks in the city on the other and split by a winding stream that feeds the nearby river.

This is a problem because in order to complete the bypass, every last tree, bush and blade of grass on the ten acres will have to be "removed" and several small hills up to twenty feet high will have to be leveled. I think most commuters stuck in the daily traffic jams on this major artery are willing to sacrifice a few trees to improve their commute time. For them and the city planners who approved this project I would like to offer a perspective on what we are giving up for our commuting convenience.

I ride my bike on the bike path passed this piece of land on a regular basis. During the hot summer months I appreciate the shade from the trees that provide a soft canopy dappled in sunlight, the cool breezes that filter down the hillside and the sight of any number of animals from deer to raccoons to hawks to squirrels and opossums, not to mention the dozens of song birds who make their home in this little patch of forest.

The bike path is built on an old railway line and there is a 100 year old stone bridge crossing the little creek in the woods. I stop occasionally to marvel at the large limestone blocks chipped out of a nearby quarry by men who have been dead longer than I have been alive. There is a dirt path that leads down from the height of the bridge to the stream bank and follows it through the wood until it emerges out into the park. I walked this path once and was amazed how after only a few twists and turns I felt like I was deep in a forest far from modern life. Although only a few hundred yards from the bike path, I could sit on a log by the stream bank, listen to the bird calls, the water gurgling over the round stones and at least pretend I was deep in the wilderness.

Yesterday I walked down the bike path knowing that my forest was gone. The bulldozers and road graders were parked on the black earth like giant, yellow insects waiting to devour their next meal. The bile rose in my throat as I walked closer. I was having a hard time recognizing where I was since all my familiar landmarks had been obliterated. The landscape reminded me of battlefield films and pictures. The trees had all been cut inches from the soil, their limbs and trunks gone, already hauled away. The churned up soil was littered with shredded plant debris, tree limbs broken into fibers as if separated by a bomb blast. I couldn't help but think of all the animals. I picture a moment like in the movie Avatar when the giant machines tear through the forest devastating everything in their path and the animals all running in the opposite direction to avoid annihilation.

 

But I want to get beyond the Bambi moment of denouncing the hunters who shoot his mother. The perspective I want all of us to consider is with what are we replacing these natural habits that we destroy in the name of progress? Steel and concrete? A sterile sheet of sod laid on top of a bulldozer sculpted landscape? The incredibly diverse forest ecosystem with all its plants and animals is lost. In this case it is only ten acres, but it is a microcosm of what we are doing all over the country, all over the world. We need to remember that we live in the natural systems around us, not outside of them. The more harm we continue to inflict on these systems, the more harm we ultimately are inflicting upon ourselves.

We are all stewards of the Earth

By this I refer to the meaning of stewardship as "the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care". When we think of land ownership, I believe the main responsibility is the careful management of the resources of that land. Ideally, to do everything possible to make the land richer and more productive than when you acquired it.

Sadly, this is often not how land owners, especially corporate ones, view their roles as owners. The concentrated effort is usually more on exploiting those resources for the benefit of the stockholders through increased short-term profits than in any way being good stewards. If my land becomes unprofitable over time (usually due to mismanagement) then I will simply sell it and buy another parcel that is more productive.

Not only does this view of land as an exploitable resource cause a destructive cycle of resource consumption (and unnecessary waste), but it encourages the exploitation of wilderness lands that are quickly disappearing as a consequence.

Beyond the question of private land owners being good stewards, I am continually appalled at how the rest of us treat the lands which we do not own. People still throw fast food wrappers or whole bags of half eaten food out their car windows (didn't we address this back in the 60's & 70's?). I've seen creeks and rivers around the Chicago area despoiled with all manner of discarded items from tires to cinder blocks, from mattresses and lawn chairs to old Weber grills, not to mention the ubiquitous beer bottles and cans.

Why is it so hard to realize that we are all poisoning ourselves through these careless actions? The chemicals in our garbage thrown into our water ways are leaching into our groundwater and the river ecosystems. Not only does this make our environment less beautiful (who wants to live in a garbage dump) but it ultimately affects our health and well being.

One of my favorite quotes, originally attributed to Chief Seattle but actually more recent, "The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth". As stewards of the earth, a role into which we have thrust ourselves, we have to start doing a better job. The quote continues, "All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself".

Regardless of the source of this wisdom, isn't it time we started seeing the web of life that we live in and stopped exploiting its resources, polluting it with our garbage and poisoning it with our chemicals?

Wasting the Abundance

How much food have you thrown away today? Didn't quite finish that second or third bowl of cereal and dumped it down the garbage disposal? Tossed the last two bites of that sandwich? Scraped the remains of dinner into the kitchen garbage? Did you go shopping today and clean out your refrigerator by throwing away all that food from last week that had gone bad? How about those leftovers from the restaurant three nights ago that you never ate? We all do it. I did all these things in the last week. We usually don't even think about it.

So let's stop for a second and do a little bit of that thinking. My cereal was mostly corn, wheat and sugar. All are grown, harvested and processed many miles from the store in which I purchased the cereal. Taking into account the production of the packaging of all the ingredients before they arrive at the cereal plant and all the packaging to get the cereal to my kitchen, not to mention the production of the cereal itself and we can quickly see that there are many very complicated processes involved. Each of them consumes energy which usually comes from some fossil fuel like diesel for the trucks and coal to generate the electricity.

When I pour that last bowl, eat only half of it and dump the rest, I'm also wasting some of that energy that went into getting that cereal into my bowl. It doesn't seem like much when considering a bowl of cereal. However, recent studies have indicated that in industrialized nations like the US 30 - 50% of all food produced is thrown away before it can be eaten. This means that up to 50% of the carbon emissions related to food production and transportation are causing global climate change for no benefit. I don't know how you feel, but that sounds really stupid to me.

The irony, or perhaps the underlying cause, of all this waste is that we do it because our food supply is so abundant. We grow and produce so much food in the US that we can throw away half of it and still suffer an epidemic of obesity caused mainly by eating too much (or at least too much of the wrong kinds of food). The true tragedy is not the cost of the waste or even the distasteful moral issue of so much waste in the face of so many struggling with food security or even starvation in other parts of the world. No, the tragedy is that while we are wasting this colossal abundance we are lulled into believing it will continue forever.

The belief in never ending abundance causes us as a society to be wasteful of all the limited resources that are consumed daily to produce this amazing bounty which we discard without a second thought. Our modern farming practices are heavily reliant on the consumption of water for irrigation, diesel for production and transportation, petroleum for pesticides, other fossil fuels like natural gas to produce fertilizer and the land on which to grow it all. Supply of all of these resources are beginning to be challenged and will be more so in the near future as world-wide demand for food continues to increase partly due to population increase and partly to the rest of the world wanting to eat what we do.

Before a crisis looms caused by a shortage of any of these resources upon which our farming practices rely, we need to supplement our food supply with crops grown in ways that are not reliant on these limited resources. Many organic farming practices can produce the same yield per acre with no chemical fertilizers or pesticides and a fraction of the petroleum. The problem is that all of these practices are only successful on a small scale so that more people have to practice them to support the same sized population.

We won't get there overnight, but we can each make a small contribution by being more mindful of how much food we buy, eat and throw out. We can also support local farmers who practice organic techniques which have a lower impact on the environment, our bodies and our limited resources. If we don't we may be staring into the first of many crises regarding our food production sooner than we want to admit.

The Cost of Mordern Farming

Current farming practices allow humans to produce more food per acre than was even imaginable 50 years ago. However, this huge gain in food production has a tremendous cost. Not only are these practices incredibly energy intensive but they rely on many toxic herbicides and pesticides which find their way into both our food chain as well as the environment at large.

Why is this a problem? In addition to the obvious issues with ingesting toxic substances, some of these chemicals are indicated as hormone mimics which can contribute to a whole host of issues from infertility to obesity to some forms of cancer. Moreover, the amount of fossil fuels required to grow a pound of food accounts for almost half of all costs considering the production, transportation and distribution of everything from the pesticides, to fertilizer to seed applied to an acre of a crop. Add in the tilling, plowing, seeding, watering, harvesting, processing, packaging and transporting of the crop itself and you can see that humans pay a very heavy price in energy consumption to achieve the fantastic levels of food production we currently enjoy.

But that is not the only cost incurred by our factory farming and mass food production practices. Most agriculture in the U.S. is now irrigated, and a significant amount by non-renewable aquifers like the Ogallala in the central plains. This one aquifer irrigates 30% of all irrigated land in the U.S. By the latest estimates, the deepest wells will start running dry in 25 - 30 years at current pumping rates. This is in an area that is already semi-arid and supported only a fraction of the amount of current agriculture before the massive pumping and irrigation from the aquifer.

Another hidden cost is the effect of both fertilizer and livestock excrement runoff into our nation's waterways. The excess nitrogen and other nutrients in this runoff causes excessive algae and bacterial blooms in rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. These blooms deprive the waterways of oxygen resulting in the die-off of whole ecosystems, from the micro-organisms all the way up the food chain to the fish and the mammal and bird predators who eat the fish.

Finally, in return for this incredible production of food, we have given up the two most important aspects of the food itself; its taste and nutritional value. Almost all fruits and vegetable hybrids sold in grocery stores today are bred for neither their taste nor their nutrient value but for their shelf life, color and hardiness for shipping and transport from the field to the store aisle. Unfortunately, taste and nutritional value are usually sacrificed for these other attributes. Like the large, beautiful rose hybird that has not even a hint of fragrance left, our fresh fruit and vegetables pale in taste and nutritional value compared to that which our grandparent's generation were accustomed.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with all of these practices is that they are not sustainable. Not just because we are using up all the water in the aquifers or all the oil to power the farm machinery and trucks, but the arable land whose topsoil is eroding away due to the very practices that squeeze so much food out of each and every acre. We have to try something different before we are forced to do so by the constraint of our limited resources.

The No Garbage Life

What would a life without garbage look like? What if you could wake up in the morning and go out into your yard to pick an apple, orange or plum to start your day? Walking back to the house you check and see some of your strawberries are ripe so you pick a few and take them inside too. No packaging or plastic bags, just a quick rinse in the sink.

How about some freshly baked granola with milk? Good thing you cooked up a batch last night with those fresh oats you bought at the farmer's market last weekend. You filled up your canvas bag with a whole pound of them and purchased some canola oil in a glass bottle that you can resuse when it is empty. The milk is fresh from the dairy down the road which also sells in glass reusable bottles.

As you are cleaning up the dishes, you remember to throw that ball of dough into the oven to bake a loaf for lunch. You bought the flour in bulk also and topped off your five pound flour jar right at the store, paying for the difference in weight. That fresh bread sure will make a nice sandwich for lunch. After you scrape your scraps into the compost bucket under the sink, you wash your dishes and think about how the dish water contributes to watering your garden vegetables since you rerouted the drains for all grey water.

A few hours later for lunch you slice up some of that fresh bread you baked earlier and cut a few pieces of the goat cheese you made last month. Topped off with some fresh lettuce from your garden and mustard seed you ground yourself, it tastes better than anything you have ever bought in a store.

Your friends from down the road are coming by for dinner and bringing a whole chicken raised on their farm that they killed and cleaned that day. You roast the chicken in your outdoor wood burning oven while you serve some of that fresh bread, butter from your own goat's milk and roasted garlic you dug out of your garden the day before. Potatoes, asparagus and fresh dill all from your garden round out your dinner.

You go to bed that night without having created even one scrap of garbage that couldn't be recycled, composted or resused in some way.

Now this vision might seem utopic to some, but why not make it the goal for which we are striving? Why do we accept the energy intensive, garbage producing, wasteful lifestyles that define 'modern' living? This is the vision of a self-sufficient lifestyle, one that can be sustained indefinitely. The lifestyle of our modern society cannot. Which one would you rather live?

Why Live Without Garbage?

How can we live our lives without creating any garbage? Or why should we want to? Because when we live the way we do, creating so much garbage, we are living unsustainably. The activities we pursue, the products we consume, the food that we eat, are all processes consuming resources faster than those resources are being replenished. This is true of the energy intensive agriculture required to fertilize, plant, harvest, process and tranport our food as well as the energy and resource intense processes to make and ship our consumer goods.

Garbage isn't the main problem (in itself it can be, and in some places is, a major issue) but garbage is a symptom. It is a symptom of the inefficiency of unsustainable processes. Whether we like it or not, the inescapable reality is that we all live on a world with limited resources. With 7 billion of us (and counting) we cannot continue to use resources as if they are unlimited. Besides possibly sunlight (see my post 'Sustainable Means What?') there are no unlimited resources. OK, maybe seawater is vast enough to be considered unlimited, but for what? Turning it into potable water takes enengy, and besides sunlight, we don't have an unlimited source of energy (a discussion of the problems with fusion energy has to wait for a future post).

More to the point, we need to improve the efficiency of all human activities to the point where they will all be sustainable. One way to do this is to minimize waste (i.e. garbage). Sometimes even this is not good enough because some other part of the process is consuming non-renewable resources such as petroleum. In this case we need to find alternative renewable resources.

But petroleum and other fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, etc.) have another strike against them. Not only will we soon (20 years for oil, 150 years for coal) have extracted and burned the easiest to reach reserves, but they contribute to global climate change. We simply cannot keep burning the same amount of fossil fuels for the next 150 years that we do today. The good news is we can't keep burning petroleum at that rate because we will run out of it soon. The bad news is humanity shows no signs of reducing the amount of coal we burn each year. In fact, we burn more coal each year than we did the previous one.

All the more reason to find alternatives. But since there is neither a simple alternative energy source nor an easy way to convert our energy infrastructure, one of the most effective interim solutions is to consume less fossil fuels. But as a whole humanity has been pretty bad at accomplishing this task. That is why I am not very hopeful that the human race will change its behavior enough to ward off environmental disaster.

So what does that mean for those of us who want to make a difference? The best answer I've come up with so far is learning how to live a sustainable, self-sufficient life. Live responsibly, live sustainably but most importantly, learn to live so that you are not dependant on any of the non-sustainable processes which will suffer crisis and ultimately break-down as the resources upon which they depend are consumed to an extent where those processes can no longer function.

My next post will be a preview of what life without garbage might look like and what that has to do with living a self-sufficent life.

Why Do We Have Garbage?

How many garbage cans do you have in your house? By average American standards I live in a modest sized house and have four (one in the kitchen, one in each of two bathrooms and on in the laundry room, mostly to collect lint from the drier). Why do we accept without question that almost every room in a house should have a garbage can? If someone told you “I have no garbage cans in my house” you would question their cleaning habits before you might question their lack of need for any.

Why is it so ingrained in our culture, in our daily activities, that we are always producing garbage? It makes sense that if you accept that fact (and simple observation confirms it) that we either live with mounds of the stuff all around us or we place receptacles everywhere (work, home, restaurants, public places) to collect the stuff and get rid of it.

But why don’t we set a goal to not create it in the first place? If I buy a product from a manufacturer that is packaged in cardboard to protect it during shipping, I can recycle the box. But what about the shrink-wrap plastic around the outside? Or the packing materials inside? Or the instructions five minutes after I read them for the one and only time that I ever will? What can I do with those? Maybe a better question to ask is why do I have them in the first place? I don’t want or need those things (this may be an over-simplification, but I think most products these days either don’t really require instructions or the manufacturer can post them online). Hey, how about a product that is so easy to use or so automated that it just works when I turn it on? But that sounds like a topic for a future blog post.

Let’s examine our food. A typical day for me might start with cereal (cardboard box with a wax bag), milk (plastic jug) and blueberries (clear plastic pint container) with a tub of yogurt (plastic tub) for breakfast. For lunch, ham sandwich (ham from plastic deli bag, bread from plastic bag) with mustard (plastic bottle), lettuce (plastic bag) and tomato (usually plastic bag, but not required, one of the few such store bought items), potato chips (plastic-aluminized bag) and an apple (like the tomato, usually from a plastic bag). Finally, for dinner a baked chicken breast (Styrofoam tray with self-stick plastic wrap), steamed broccoli (plastic bag), rice (cardboard box with internal plastic bag) and ice cream (cardboard tub).

Whew, that’s exhausting. But look at all the garbage I throw away each day just to eat my food. And I’m not even getting into table scraps, leftovers that get thrown out or that tomato that went bad in the fridge before I got around to eating it. And the amount of garbage goes up exponentially if I eat out, especially at a fast food restaurant (not only the containers I see, but those used to package and prepare the food before I get it).

I have two issues with so much garbage. One is the obvious one of running out of room to put the stuff and the resources consumed to manage it all. This includes the cost of collecting it, shipping it and finally burying it somewhere. The less obvious problem is that I’m paying money for all that packaging simply to throw it away. Now I imagine you’re saying, “But you are getting use out of the packaging before it gets disposed.” This is true, but I think we could get much more value out of our packaging than we are. In other words, as a consumer I could receive the same benefit from less packaging, which would cost me less, if the manufacturer made it a priority to minimize their packaging. “But they have financial incentive to do so,” you counter. Yes, but this is sometimes out-weighed by other incentives such as prominence on shelf displays, theft-prevention and simply misleading the customer into thinking they are purchasing more of the product than they are (case in point, cereal boxes).

Here's another question. What product do you purchase (with your hard earned money) with the express purpose of throwing it away (and in true irony, its packaging also)? Garbage can liners/bags. Does this make any sense? I expend resources (time, energy, money) to drive to the store, purchase this product and bring it home only to throw it away. Then I pay someone to pick it up from my house and drive it to a big hole in the ground and bury it. There must be a better way.

And that topic will be my next blog post.

Sustainable Means What?

Sustainable, carbon-neutral, self-sufficient and similar terms get thrown around and used somewhat interchangeably in the press and on the internet. For the purposes of this blog, I will use the term sustainable to refer to a process that can be carried out indefinitely. This can only happen when that process consumes resources slower than those resources are replenished (or at the same rate).

A simple example is collecting dead fall from the forest floor to make a camp fire to roast marshmellows. As long as you collect the wood that falls from the trees to make your fire and don't cut any live trees, you can do this for a very long time (generations, centuries, etc.) The trees will continue to grow and produce wood for your camp fires indefintely. But as soon as you collect all the deadwood and decide to start cutting down trees to burn, you have started a non-sustainable process because you are consuming the wood faster than it is being replenished.

All human activity can be examined through the lens of sustainability similar to this method. The complexity arises in the many different inputs required for most of our activities and analyzing whether each one of its resources are being consumed slower than they are being replenished.

There is one extreme example that I want to get out of the way for any critics who find issue with my definition of sustainable processes. Sunlight is for all intents and purposes a sustainable energy source even though we all know that the sun is slowly consuming its vast store of hydrogen and fusing it into helium in a non-sustainable process. I think any resonable person will agree that 4-5 billion years is such a vast amount of time beore this resource runs out that it is effectively infinite.

On the other hand, fossil fuels are not infinite in supply. We are close (10-50 years depending on who you ask) to consuming 50% of all of the easily accessible petroleum on the planet. That is a timeframe that most of us alive today will live to see. After that point (called peak oil) the demand to consume oil each year will exceed the supply, likely resulting in wild price flucuations (remember the price of oil in the summer of 2008?). This is a common response in complex systems to restricted supply of resources.

So why is all this important? If a process is not sustainable, at some point it will stop (because there will be no more resources to keep it going). In our campfire example, no more trees (think Easter Island), no more roasted marshmellows.

For all of human history our resources have been effectively infinite (like the sun's supply of hydrogen). At the end of the 20th century I belive human beings entered a new era where on a global scale we are starting to exhaust the resources upon which we depend for everything from growing our food, to generating our electricity to building our cities. History is littered with the ruins of civilizations that collapsed because of the over-consumption of local resources. For the first time in history we are going to have to contend with the consequences of over-consumption of our resources on a global scale.