Trailer Park Girl

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!

My first permaculture teacher, Scott Pittman, has started a blog, Scott’s Permaculture Travel (also see permalink in sidebar). Scott founded the Permaculture Institute near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1997 as the sister organization to the Permaculture Institute of Australia. Right now Scott’s traveling in Argentina, promoting permaculture solutions to problems from land degradation to hard-to-heat homes. I can see that I’ll be checking Scott’s blog for updates often. Here’s a snippet:

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The bus station is huge, pretty seedy and full of people waiting to begin their journey. Distances are huge in this country and airports few so the bus is a common form of transportation. The buses come in all sizes and various states of repair, ours is a double decker with seats that fully recline into cot sized beds. There are curtains between each passenger if one wants privacy. Headsets are available for listening to Tango or the dialog of Hollywood’s latest offering which is displayed on a large screen overhead. Each seat is provided with a blanket, pillow, and access to all the coffee you can drink. It is not long until I am fully prone and snoring happily in my little mobile cocoon.

We spend the night crossing the bread basket of Argentina, what was once endless pampas (grasslands) has suffered the indignity of the moldboard plow and like our great plains is covered in commodity crops that are pampered by petrochemical products while the soil rapidly erodes away. When I later suggested that we take a day bus back in order to see the countryside, a room full of listeners looked at me incredulously. Diana’s brother said “why would you want to witness the destruction of the land?” Why indeed.

The U.S. top salesman for biofuels, Al Gore arrives in Buenos Aires next week to flog his solution to peak oil and global warming – plant more corn and soy! And who better to fuel our automobiles than the third world. Argentina has all of this fertile soil and has fully embraced Monsanto’s mad agenda of GMOs coupled with glycophosphate herbicide. It is so convenient to have someone else’s back yard to play in now that we have trashed our own. Of course North American farmers will also subscribe to the wall to wall commodity crop program since it is a guaranteed money maker with all of the government subsidies. I hear that farm land in the Midwest has doubled since Bush and Gore have started the church of biofuels. Though I wouldn’t rush to invest!

The prickly pear in my garden hit its bloomin’ peak a couple of weeks ago. It put out over 20 flowers in all. From just a few lobes last year, the plant has really taken off this year. (Some pesky little black aphid-thingees almost sucked it dry last year while I was away in New Mexico, but my friends Gia and Gregory rescued it with vigilance and care. Thanks guys!)

Prickly pear lobes are a highly nutritious vegetable (the Mexicans call it nopalito), an excellent example of a low-maintenance edible perennial in the wide region where they grow. The dusty-magenta-colored fruits (known as “tunas”) make good jelly, juice, and wine. The juice or wine comes out a fluorescent magenta color.

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!

My neighbors are quite the gardeners. C., whose trailer is on the left-hand side of the photo, is cultivating a “Three Sisters” guild of corn, beans, and squash in a cluster of those five-gallon orange utility buckets that they sell at Home Depot. A guild is a group of plants that support and complement one another. In the case of the “Three Sisters” guild, a traditional Native American grouping, the corn forms a “pole” for the beans to climb; the beans are nitrogen fixers (they draw nitrogen, an essential nutrient, up from the soil and make it available to neighboring plants); and the squash, with their prickly stems and leaves, are said to repel raccoons and other varmints. It’s hard to see in the photo, but the squash have several huge orange blossoms and the beginnings of some fruit. The corn plants are taller than I am and are crowned with tassels.

On the right, my neighbor G. has several tomato plants, as well as peppers and chives, growing in tubs that he scrounges from thrift shops, dumpsters, job sites, etc. Later in the summer he will have more tomatoes and peppers and onions than he can possibly eat by himself, and we’ll all spend many nights gathered around the chili pot. Beyond the right-hand edge of the photo are an herb patch and several tubs of seed starts. A container garden like this could just as easily be planted on an apartment balcony.

If you think you might want to try container gardening, The Edible Container Garden — Growing Fresh Food in Small Spaces by Michael Guerra is a good resource. Packed with color photos, the book includes advice on low-fuss irrigation setups, composting, and how to grow specific types of vegetables and fruits in limited space.

Web-based resources on container gardening, and small-scale urban agriculture in general, abound as well. One good site is Shirley’s Wellness Cafe, which showcases the author’s award-winning rooftop container garden and offers many useful and informative links.

Also check out City Farmer’s Urban Agriculture Notes, with its motherlode of links to urban agriculture projects from Australia to Zimbabwe.