Top Ten Things You Can Do for the Environment

It's the time of year for top-ten lists.  Here's mine:

1. Grow a garden.  Yes, you.  This has finally started to turn up on a few lists, long overdue, but it's usually way too far down the list.  Don't have a bit of land?  (Are you sure?  Think small, even a planter or a window box.)  Help a friend.  Get a community garden plot, and again, maybe go together with a friend on this.  The most important tip for a beginning gardener: start small.  It might seem insignificant, but you will be surprised at what you can produce.  And transportation of fresh produce is a big part of our ecological footprint, so a successful small beginning at gardening may have just as much impact as any other green project you could do. 
2. Take up hunting or fishing.  Yes, you.  Yes, kill something.  Do it close to home, and you will have to learn about the natural habitats of your own area, where they are, what sustains them, and what threatens them.  They need you.
3. Eat what you kill.
4. Eat smaller portions of meat: a piece about the size of your palm and the thickness of your pinkie finger is plenty, even with all that vigorous gardening and hunting you will be doing.
5. If your hunting and fishing doesn't fill your reduced meat needs, look for domestic meats that are grown locally in harmony with the natural habitats you learned about in #2.  In my area, that means range-fed beef, which uses self-guided cow-power to harvest and fertilize natural grassland instead of plowing it up and using fossil fuels to cultivate and fertilize grain crops.
6. If, after all this new recharge time you are spending in your garden, on the trail of a deer, or on the water with your fishing rod, you still feel the need for a holiday from your life, take it close to home.  Check out nearby parks, festivals, galleries - try your local tourism agency if you need ideas.  Try something different: a bike tour, or paddling lessons; a retreat to learn about the enneagram; a music camp where you can learn to play an instrument.
7. Buy less, but when you do buy, spend more.  Buy quality, to last a lifetime.  Help the economy shrink back so it fits within the biosphere instead of mining the Earth.
8. When giving gifts, show your caring through the time and thought you put in, instead of the dollars.  In my family, for the last couple of years, CHRISTMAS stands for Consumeable (or Cookies), Homemade, Recycled (if you're not using it much but someone else would, why not?)... and I have been trying to extend the acronym to include Indirect (a gift to charity), and then the rest of the letters make an excuse for buying something Specific to that person and Terrifically Magically Awesomely Spectacular... such as the lightweight plastic trombone we found for my Mom to help her continue marching in parades well into her 70s.
9. Don't have time for all this?  Do it anyway, and with the money you save, quit working.  Give up that second income, or the overtime.  Change jobs if you need to.  Take back your life.
10. Tell your local political representatives what you are doing, and why.  Destroy their argument that we can't make changes because the public won't change.  Change, and show them.

Shirtsleeve Weather

We're just coming off a few days of the kind of cold that makes me think about survival. It was a bit unusual because there was wind as well as cold, with wind chill values around -40 to -50ºC. Today I was out running errands around noon, and it was only about -20º, and by late afternoon it was maybe -10.

Working in the sunroom this afternoon, Dad and I took off our jackets because it got too warm. There is some heat that leaks into that space from the rest of the house, but we keep the doors closed, and the one heating duct that feeds into it is closed off. Mostly the space is heated by the sun through the windows. Even during the extreme cold over the past few days, the sunroom has been cooling to only a couple of degrees below freezing over night, and warming nicely during the days. Today the heat flow was reversed: Garth opened up the doors into the rest of the house and turned the furnace off for a couple of hours.

The thermal performance of the new space has been improving bit by bit as we insulated the outside walls, closed in the gaps where warm air could rise right into the attic and away (big improvement there!), and finally started sealing all the walls up with vapour barrier. Today we were applying the last big sheets of poly and finishing the seams around windows. As we got down to the last little details, I noticed the sound of a big truck, engine braking somewhere nearby, and realized that the sound was much fainter than usual. With that thought, I also realized that the room had been feeling different over the last few hours. If someone had asked me, I might have said that I sensed it becoming more airtight, but in reality, what I sensed was probably just the gradual reduction in sound.

We are very pleased with the sunroom so far. Over the next couple of years, I hope to add a rock wall or perhaps water containers as thermal mass, to smooth out the heating and cooling cycle a bit. Insulated blinds or shutters are a big priority, too. If we can slow the heat loss overnight, I am hoping the room may become a significant heat source for the rest of the house.

And if you're wondering what it will be like in July, check out my post from 2006 about designing window overhangs. From what I saw of the rafter shadows on the window framing last summer, it looks like this is going to work, folks!

Non-negotiables

CG and Madcap Mum have taken up a meme, to list ten things that are non-negotiable for you. I have been mulling it over, but like MCM, I'm not coming up with much. I think that might have something to do with the couple of non-negotiables that I did come up with.

1. Never give up on anyone.

I think I might be able to shorten this one to "Never give up," which is good too, but it might miss the point. If somebody else has as one of their non-negotiables something like "the American way of life," well, I disagree, but I still can't give up on that person. And that makes it difficult for me to say that anything is non-negotiable, because I want to leave myself room to negotiate.

2. Reality.

You know, things like gravity and friction and weather. I won't plan my life on the assumption that there's some fabulous breakthrough energy source to be found, if only I will just be a good consumer and stimulate our energy-guzzling economy to race even faster to fill the R&D coffers to bring on that breakthrough before there's nothing left to consume. I won't daydream about climate change expanding agriculture northward onto thin forest soils, peatland, and bare rock. It doesn't matter what I declare to be non-negotiable in my life, if reality won't negotiate either. Reality wins.

Rolling Stone on How to Keep Rolling

Read this first.
Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles : Rolling Stone

Then browse the links here, and tell me - does it not sound a bit like a celebration of the many benefits of starvation as compared to poisoning and heatstroke?

Ah, but the money is in the answer to the question: who starves?

Illich and My Garden

I found an archive of writing by Ivan Illich. I love his analysis of the number of hours put into owning and operating a car in a year, and the mileage gotten out of it. Divide the miles by the hours and you get about five miles per hour. Might as well walk!

This summer I have been resorting to a lot of powered and packaged conveniences in hopes of completing a renovation project quickly, before winter comes swirling in through the gaping hole that will soon be cut in the house wall. Ultimately that hole should let in a lot of sunlight and help keep the house warm, but only after a lot of framing and roofing and installing of windows and such. I'm in a hurry, and Dad has the tools, so I'm using them.

But I couldn't give up my garden, not even for one season. This winter I tried out the Ecological Footprint Calculator and realized that the environmental impact of food transportation is even larger than I thought. So I garden, stubbornly. There are some pictures over at my garden blog. I used to call it The Daily Bed, but now it's The Occasional Bed - still just as many beds, but less time talking.

A Letter to Our MP

Dear Sir,
We drive a 1996 Geo Metro. We decided to buy a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle, and then found out that there is no such thing. The hybrids might get slightly better gas mileage, but not enough to offset the energy used in manufacturing a new car. We are appalled.
Sincerely,
Laura Herman

ReLent: New Life Instead of Guilt

Upcoming: Ash Wednesday Worship, Feb. 21st, 7:30 p.m. at St. Andrew's United Church in Arcola.

From our church bulletin:

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Its roots lie in the ancient Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Atonement means "at-one-ment." If we are to be at one with God, with creation, with each other, we must face honestly who we are, make our confession, and open ourselves to the supportive power of God and our faith community in the Lenten struggle for new life. So Ash Wednesday is a day of honest confession and of commitment to the Lenten journey.

In the service on Sunday, Anita reminded us of a Mission and Service fundraiser our congregation did during Lent a couple of years ago. We had a calendar of the days of Lent, and for each day, we would make a contribution as specified on the calendar. One day might specify counting the number of light bulbs in your home, and paying so many cents per light bulb. Another day might ask how many pairs of shoes in your closet, and so on.

Anita wondered if we might try that fundraiser again, or if there were other ideas.

Here's mine.

Instead of feeling guilty about our stuff and our energy use and so on, why not find out what we can do about it, and what would do the most good? We'd save money at the same time, and then we could put some of that money towards the M&S fund.

I tried the Ecological Footprint calculator, mostly so that I would know what to tell others to expect, but I myself was surprised at the results. Here in the cold, sparsely populated northern prairies, we tend to think that a large part of our footprint comes from heating and travel - things that are difficult to change much (without moving south). Surprise: according to the quiz, a large part of my footprint comes from food. This was not entirely news to me, but the magnitude was a shock. Of my total footprint of 5.3 hectares, food contributed 3.5 hectares. Shelter came out at only 0.7 hectares, and travel at 0.3. Goods and services made up the remaining 0.8 hectares of my footprint.

On with garden planning! Next year, grass-fed beef, or venison, and maybe some chickens! And for a more immediate impact, how about porridge or cold cereal made from local grains, instead of breakfast cereal shipped in from Ontario?

This year, instead of a time of guilty brooding on the darkness of this world, Lent could be about learning a better way.

Best Snowmobile Rally Yet

Prairie Place Hall was packed when I left around 4 p.m. More tables were being squeezed in for riders coming in off the trail. I heard that there were 500 riders registered - the largest turnout yet. Grace told me the snow was good and deep, even out on the fields where some has blown off, and the sloughs have nice deep powder. All in all, the Arcola Optimists' Snowmobile Rally looked like a great success compared to last year.

I was at the hall to clear tables on behalf of the Girl Guides (since my daughter is a Pathfinder). We parents donate our time clearing tables, and the Girl Guide organization gets bags and bags of empty beer cans to turn in for the refund money. It's their biggest fundraiser, and it also looks good for the Girl Guides to be doing a recycling project.

But for me, it always rankles a bit. This time I was determined to enjoy it as best I could, so I looked for familiar faces and went visiting in between my rounds of the tables. Having some fun helped me ignore the loud music and the great show of consumption in all those shiny helmets on the tables and gaudy single-purpose jackets draped on the chairs.

When I got home though, I went looking for information about snowmobile fuel consumption. I learned something: those figures are hard to find. Of the four major manufacturers, only one bothered to back up their claims of "solid" or "excellent" fuel economy with an actual figure. Bombardier (Ski-Doo), headquartered in Canada, offered a comparison chart showing its 600 cc class engines (the smallest engines offered) on par with a Yamaha model at about 22 or 23 mpg, while Arctic Cat and Polaris models in the same class trailed behind at 18 mpg or less. Of course, for the larger engines, there were no numbers given, just claims of "outstanding" or "incredible" fuel economy. The general silence is not surprising, I suppose; when your smallest, newest, most fuel-efficient snow machine carries a single rider less than half as many miles per gallon as our ten-year-old four-passenger car, you don't have much to brag about.

Now for some rough estimates. Five hundred riders - I wonder if that means 500 sleds, or were some people riding double? Sixty-eight miles of trail - did they all do the full 68 miles, or were there shorter loops as options? Well, I'll be friendly and assume that 400 sleds travelled an average of 50 miles each. That's - gulp - 20,000 sled miles. Even with a ridiculously friendly estimate of 20 miles per gallon on average, that's 1000 gallons of gas. And then there's all the fuel used hauling those sleds and riders into Arcola from far and wide.

Well, if they're buying some of that gas at the Co-op, it means membership dividend money in my own pocket. The event brings in funds for the hall, and the local grocery stores get to supply food for it, and I suppose business picks up around town over the weekend. Do I dare complain?

On the other hand, isn't it a bit ironic that the Arcola Girl Guides pride themselves on the environmental benefits of their recycling program, when this gas-guzzling event is such a big part of it?

I wonder. Could we take all the effort that goes into this event, and spread it over the year, providing small entertainment events to help keep Arcola residents here in town, weekend after weekend? As it is, dozens of people go off to the cities for entertainment every weekend, and do their shopping while they're there. Then our service clubs and businesses get together and try to draw a big crowd out here for one weekend to compensate. Is this the best we can do for our town, and for our world?

Solving the World's Problems

James and I have been spending one half day a week with my parents, learning from their life experience. The first week, we looked at slides from their trip to Mexico, where they had visited Mayan ruins and floated down an underground river through the limestone landscape. Then Dad took James out to the workshop to examine a removable stair railing that Dad was designing for the curling rink. There was a problem with the initial design, and James came up with a solution. Last week Dad brought his transit to town and helped James measure angles from our house to trees and other sun obstacles around the yard, so that we can estimate how much solar gain we would get from a greenhouse addition.

Today we had a lengthy discussion about energy in our lives: food energy and where it comes from; electricity and the whole chain back through coal and plants to the sun again; kinetic and potential energy and how the water gets up there behind the hydroelectric dams; heat energy and all the different ways it moves; renewable and non-renewable energy sources, and the way that distinction blurs when you consider different time scales and rates of use. James and Dad toured around my parents' house and examined the many different energy sources and forms in play there (active and passive solar, wood stove, propane backup heater, and the recently added ground-source heat pump - just to name a few) while Mom and I sat reading MacLean's and Jared Diamond's Collapse, respectively. Not surprisingly, when James and Dad returned from their explorations, we got talking about solving the world's problems.

We got wondering about the lack of individual action, and speculated that many people just don't want to face the realities. Why?

• They are afraid that the world situation is terrible, and rather than face that fear, they just turn their attention somewhere else.
• They don't want to know how much their own lifestyle would have to change to make a difference.
• They are afraid that changing their own lifestyle would have little or no influence on others and on the overall picture, so rather than risking that disappointment, they just carry on as they are.

Some of these were hitting close to home; "they" was turning into "we." Mom thinks their house is too big; Dad notes that Mom doesn't want to leave part of it unheated. We got talking about how easily they could do that, and how easily I could save more energy around our own house here without going into the whole greenhouse renovation project.

Then we took in some food energy together, and James and I drove the four-wheel-drive pickup back to town.

*****

Later I got to thinking that all three of the above probably apply to me to some extent, and maybe there are some other categories that fit me too.

• I am afraid that political action can do very little unless the public support is there (at which point individual action should suffice), and rather than risking that disappointment, I retreat to my own little lifestyle improvements.
• I am afraid that calling for change would bring criticism of my own imperfect life, so I keep quiet.

Now the lights are burning and the computer is churning late into the night. If only I could offset that energy use by capturing some of the wind energy that's making things rattle. Come to think of it, what is that creaking sound - so familiar that it's beneath my usual notice - and is there heat energy flowing out where the sound is coming in?

Bicycles, Energy Cycles, Life Cycles

I was startled by a comment by Eleutheros, that if you walked everywhere you went, for your whole life, you would still not use as much energy as it takes to make a bicycle.

I got wondering whether this would be true when the energy of walking comes from a conventional Canadian diet, with far more calories used to produce a plate of food than the body gets out of it.

I went looking for a measurement of energy used in bike manufacturing, and came across an intriguing article(pdf) about energy use associated with electric bikes. It didn't answer my question about energy in manufacturing, since it focussed on differences between the electric bike and the human-powered bike, but it clearly illustrated the problem I was wondering about.

Despite the intuitive sense that electric bikes would require more resources than regular bikes, life-cycle analysis shows that they actually consume 2-4 times less primary energy than human riders eating a conventional diet. This conclusion is largely due to the considerable amount of transportation and processing energy that is associated with our western food system.

When the analysis considered a cyclist eating local food, and electricity coming from hydro-power, the electric bike and the human-powered bike were about on par.

It's a sad commentary on our society, when you are better off letting a coal-fired plant push your bicycle than eating the food you need to spin those pedals yourself. Yet when you look at lists of "things you can do to conserve energy," how often do you see the suggestion that you plant a garden?

Too Good

A drawback to our efficient little fridge: it's very difficult to thaw anything in it. I've yet to do it successfully, except when I happened to be running the defrost on the freezer compartment at the same time. I think the defrost works by simply shutting down the compressor and letting the frost thaw. The phase change draws heat from the rest of the refrigerator and thus keeps the food cool. When all the frost has melted, the temperature in the refrigerator begins to rise, and a sensor switches the compressor on again.

So I guess the trick is to take the turkey out of the deep freeze, put all the food from the freezer compartment into the new space in the deep freeze, wedge the turkey into the freezer compartment, hit the defrost button, and pay attention, because as soon as the thaw is finished, the compressor will kick back in and freeze that bird all over again. Of course, if there's room for the bird in the fridge part, you're okay, and the sound of the compressor kicking in is just a handy signal that the thaw is complete.

I'll have to try that.

And then I'll have to cook the thing. Never cooked a turkey in my life.

Learn to do by doing, they say...

Let the Sun Shine In

There's a new house in Arcola. Remember that vacant lot I wrote about last winter? Well, it's not vacant anymore.


It almost makes me wonder if somebody got worried that I would find some rare plant in there with the native grasses, and so they rushed to develop it. Seriously, folks, I'm not that concerned about rare plants (even though I do accept pay to go look for them sometimes).

I'm much more concerned about greenhouse gas emissions, and here we have a problem. They put this house in backwards! Those big windows are facing north. Not only that, but the two biggest windows are being expanded into even larger window bays.

Now, I'm happy to see an old house salvaged for a few more decades of use. This house was moved in from South Arcola, saving a lot of energy and material that would have been needed to build a new one. But just because it's old doesn't mean you have to live with high energy use. All they had to do was to face those windows south into the yard (which is a better view anyway, with grass and trees instead of a street), and they could have had some good solar gain to cut their winter heating costs.

Maybe they were worried about appearances, having the "front" door facing the back yard. I'd say nobody uses the front door anyway, so why worry about it? If the house were turned around, that side door would be right up close to the front. I think the house would have looked welcoming enough with a little deck at that side, steps down to the front yard, and some foundation plantings to soften the north wall.

But maybe they actually thought about the sun on those windows, and worried that the house would get too hot in summer. Maybe they heard the rumour about another house in Arcola, with a big sunroom, and how hot it gets.


If that house is turning people off passive solar heating, it's a sad thing. At this latitude, it's really very simple to have sun streaming in your windows in winter, and still keep the house shady and cool in summer. The solution is built right into the structure of the house, in the form of a long overhang. Here's how it works:




I've seen this work at my parents' house, with windows nearly floor to ceiling. In summer there is just a little strip of sunlight on the floor by the windows, and in winter, the rays fall all the way to the back wall of the room.

But so many houses get built backwards, just to have the picture window facing the front yard. My own house is backwards, and I keep plotting to turn its insides back to front. I have a plan. Now if I could just convince myself that it is a better plan than moving to a farm, I'd get on with it.

A Food Shortage for Thought

Lester Brown looks at the accelerating contest between cars and people for food.

I'm not sure I share his optimism about wind electric alternatives.

And I notice he doesn't mention the option of leaving the car parked.

But it's one more wake-up call, anyway.

EnergyStar as a non-tariff barrier

As you've heard, I'm not impressed with "EnergyStar" labels on appliances. EnerGuide, on the other hand, tells me what I need to know.

It sounds like energy efficiency labelling is being challenged at the WTO. What isn't clear to me is the breadth of the challenge. If they're only going after EnergyStar and similar programs, I'd have to wonder: maybe this challenge is a good thing. If they're going after EnerGuide and other programs that simply disclose facts about energy use, that's another story. If your product is inferior, don't blame the label, and try to call it a "non-tariff barrier." The inferiority is the barrier, as it should be.