Trailer Park Girl

You may have heard me talk about tiny houses (also known as pocket pads). Now I hear there’s at least one person out there designing pocket neighborhoods.

The development of tiny homes sold out quickly. This reminds me of a quote I’ve heard, to the effect that people who say that some venture is impossible should get out of the way of those who are doing it!

My dream home is about 8 by 12, and has a sleeping loft and a porch. It’s built on wheels or skids for easy transport.

An interesting trend has hit our South Austin neighborhood. Seems that some super-wealthy, eccentric, and very GREEN old geezer has been buying up one big, boxy mega-mansion after another, as fast as they can build ‘em. You know the mansions I’m talking about: the massive, shiny cubes that have been replacing modest old bungalows. They scrape the bungalow off the land as easily and carelessly as if they were flicking a cockroach off a kitchen counter. They scrape the plants and the soil and everything away, leaving bare ground. You can’t even call it “soil” – every microbe that gave it life has been scraped away along with the offending old house. Then, over the course of a few weeks, a huge steel-and-concrete box, which extends right up to the edges of the lot, goes up. The gleaming structure could adorn the cover of Tres Chic Moderne Architecture Journal. And given the target market, the utter lack of space for declasse’ activities such as growing vegetables, sitting outdoors with the family, and so on is not seen as a problem. The ratty old bungalow occupied by some family of modest means has been replaced by a property-tax-revenue-generating palace for one post-industrial mogul and his wife, and maybe an obscenely large dog or two.

Well, enter this eccentric Grandpa Moneybags, who has started buying up these concrete megamansions and then – are you ready for this? – demolishing them. Sometimes he puts up a little cottage in their place, but the past four lots he’s purchased, he’s left the lot free of all manmade structures save for a garden shed. The rest of the lot is occupied by a food garden. As you can imagine, the old Austin neighbors are delighted, while the yuppie arriviste neighbors are up in arms about property values. Well, at least they’re up in arms until the old man visits them with a luscious home-grown tomato or a bunch of tangy arugula. The fresh veggies lure them over to the dark side.

And, in the latest twist, some of the occupants of neighboring mega-mansions have been spotted tearing down parts of their houses to make room for gardens.

Local scroungers have been delighted by the infusion of practically-new building materials that have begun appearing at curbs alongside the trash and recycling.

Naturally the city is worried about how the decline in property values will affect its property-tax revenue. But since the mayor himself has hoisted the banner of making Austin the #1 city in terms of conquering global warming, it doesn’t really look good for city officials to be seen speaking out against making more room for gardens. So lately, they haven’t been speaking out against it. Lately, they just shut up and savor the wagonloads of fresh-grown veggies that somehow find their way to City Hall.

If you’re thinking, “This is major news! Why haven’t I heard about it?” … Well, that’s because I just made it up. Sorry! But anything the human mind can imagine, we can create. So let’s get busy!

(Written on my student’s take-out cup from Starbucks): “So called ‘global warming’ is just a secret ploy by wacko tree-huggers to make America energy-independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, kick-start 21st-century industries, and make our cities safer and more livable. Don’t let them get away with it.” — Chip Gillee[???sorry, name spelling unsure - can’t read my own handwriting], founder of <a href=’http://www.grist.org’>Grist.org</a>, a website where environmentally inclined folks gather.

JewishFarmer (of Casaubon’s Book) and Miranda over at Simply Living have launched a “riot for austerity” (a phrase borrowed from George Monbiot, author of Heat — How To Stop the Planet from Burning). In a nutshell, JewishFarmer and Miranda have challenged themselves, and anyone else who’s interested, to make drastic cuts in their emissions and energy consumption. Read about the genesis of this project here and check out the carefully-thought-out guidelines here. If you take up the challenge, JewishFarmer invites you to weigh in with your baseline assessment and with periodic progress reports. It’s really interesting to see the variations in where people stand in each category.

Naturally I can’t resist taking up the challenge. It turns out that my emissions and consumption are actually already at or below the target levels in some categories, such as Electricity and Water. But JewishFarmer has identified many categories (Food, Gasoline, etc.) and I still have quite a bit of work to do in some of them, most notably Food and, ironically enough, Gasoline. Some of the figures she cites as the U.S. averages surprise me a bit. For example, average gasoline consumption is supposedly 500 gallons a year. Before selling my truck this past January, I drove 7,000 miles in a typical year, and I’d read somewhere that the national average is 12,000 miles. Let’s say your vehicle gets 20mpg overall average highway+city — well, then that’s 600 gallons right there! And if you have a big monster truck or motorhome that gets, say, 10mpg (some have even worse mileage), then that would be 1,200 gallons. 10% of the average would be 50 gallons. Think about it: How many trips do you take and how often do you carpool? This category will be a challenge for me. Even though I no longer have a motor vehicle, I still ride in cars, and take quite a few trips. This Wednesday, for instance, I’ll be traveling with a friend to the Kerrville Folk Music Festival, a distance of about 120 miles. Of course, the gasoline consumption will be divided between two people, and that helps.

On that subject, I figure that when I catch a ride with an 18-wheeler (who doesn’t take me out of his/her way), I don’t need to count the gallons of gas in my total, because it’s gasoline that would have been consumed anyway. In fact, I would say I’m reducing the energy footprint of the food or furniture or paper or whatever that’s being transported. (By the way, in JF’s guidelines, public transportation is assigned a mileage rating of 100mpg).

Another mode of transport that presumably would not increase one’s emissions quotient is riding the rails (which I’ve never tried). (Ah, riding the rails … how romantic it appears, at least from the depths of my armchair.)

Even if you question some of the figures, this is a valuable exercise. Although austerity gets kind of a bad rap, I find VOLUNTARY austerity quite exhilarating. It’s been my weird little hobby for years, and now come to find out I’ve got serious hardcore company all over blogland!

Note that the challenge is not to reduce your emissions/consumption by 90% from where you’re at right now, but to reduce your levels to 10% of the American average figures. So if you’ve been practicing simple, eco-wise living for a while, you may already have made a lot of progress toward the targets.

I’ll publish my baseline summary soon.

Overall, the Causaubon’s Book blog is chock-full of phenomenally well-written, sensible yet radical advice (from how to cut back in order to keep a roof over your head when times are tough, to how to maintain a happy relationship when your significant other isn’t quite as rabid about Peak Oil and such as you are). JewishFarmer puts her advanced degree in English literature and her concern about Peak Oil to extremely good use. If you’re serious about wanting to get onto, or move further along, the “green path,” then I urge you to add that blog to your bookmarks!!! Her latest entry is titled, Pandemic Flu, Meet Peak Oil. You might think this would be a depressing subject (and you’d be right), but JF always has something constructive to say along with the grim news. I end up feeling uplifted after reading her blog. After all, the future’s coming anyway. By preparing ourselves, we increase our odds of meeting it gracefully.

Hey Austin Area “listeners”: Got plans tomorrow? Yes, you do! You’re coming to the Sustainable Shoppers Ball. It’s at the Toney Burger Center (near intersection of Westgate and Jones) from 9:00 am to sometime in the afternoon. (1 pm, 2 pm, or 3 pm, depending on who you ask.) It’s alongside the Sunset Valley Farmers Market, so you can shop for groceries and pastries and get a cuppa joe and such while you’re at it. The theme of this Sustain-a-Ball is water resources, and there’s a great lineup of speakers:

10:00am Jeremy Walther, Designer, BioGardener: “How To: Landscape Sustainably” — Techniques for Yard Lovers

10:45am Mark Wieland, City Planner, Austin Water Conservation: “How To: Rebates!” — Make the Most of Austin’s Water Rebate Programs; Save money, save water!

11:30am Bill Bunch, Leading Activist, SOS Alliance: “Seriously, Folks” — Preserving Austin’s Water Treasures — for our own good.

12:00pm Richard Heinichen, Inventor, Richard’s Rainwater: “Rainwater” — Cleaner, Safer, Tastier, Healthier, More Plentiful, and … yes, Less Expensive

Along with all these speakers, there will be, yes, shopping. Vendors of green products from brooms to solar panels. Also, educational booths (including the bicycle-transported permaculture booth) will be disseminating their various brands of status-quo-altering mischief. And as a bonus, Matt Oliver of Sound Team will be performing on a solar stage powered by Meridian Energy. (The schedule on the Sustain-a-ball website says he’s supposed to go on at 1:00.)

See you there tomorrow!

Today in the solar oven I’m cooking pinto beans with onion and spices. I don’t bother pre-soaking the beans; just throw them in the pot with water. In the solar oven, they won’t reach a rollicking boil but will simmer gently for hours. No boiling over, no supervision needed — it’s like a crock pot that uses no electricity! (After taking this photo for you, I put the lid on the pot.) I’ll go about my chores and business, and open the oven this evening to find a tasty pot of beans.

Yesterday and the day before, I took the solar oven with me to the Mother Earth Day Festival at Barton Springs, where I set up the permaculture booth. There, on the sunny hillside of Zilker Theater, I baked sweet potatoes, yucca root, onions, and garlic. In keeping with a core permaculture principle, that every element should serve multiple purposes, the oven (1) attracted people to the permaculture booth; (2) served as an excellent example of the use of renewable energy; and (3) cooked my lunch.

Solar ovens can be purchased for about $200 (I got mine from Sun Ovens International) or homemade (you can download many different plans and a lot of related information from the truly encyclopedic Solar Cooking Archive). Whether you buy one or make one, all solar ovens consist of the same basic elements: (1) a box, black on the inside; (2) some shiny medium to catch the sun’s rays and bounce them into the box; and (3) glass or other transparent material to create a greenhouse effect, trapping heat in the box.

Solar cooking is a low-tech, fault-tolerant cooking method with huge environmental and social benefits. Environmentally, solar cooking addresses deforestation and global warming. Socially, in the developing world, the use of solar ovens is helping to ease violence arising from competition for scarce fuelwood. In the industrialized world, where we consume by far the bulk of the planet’s resources, we would do well to latch onto solar cooking, as countries like India and Nepal have in a big way.

Besides all that, solar ovens are practical. They can be quite portable, and therefore convenient for camping and roadtrips. (My oven weighs about 15 pounds and comes with a carrying handle. I will of course be taking it with me to the Kerrville Folk Music Festival.) And in the summer, they let you cook without heating up your house!