Check out these photos of last weekend’s house
hunting.
I’ll take this little place with great ventilation and beach views. I think it’s LEED Platinum.
In 2002 or so, architect Malcolm Wells (the illustrator of Liquid Gold as well as many books on underground homes) mailed to his friends color copies of his alternative vision for a Twin Towers memorial.
Mac was unimpressed by Liebskind’s and others’ proposals for a tower that thrust into the sky tauntingly.
Mac’s vision was for a bowl planted on every other level with plantings that insulated and oxygenated the site. Offices would be built into the earth.
A theme of healing, not aggression.
(I hope to find Mac’s original text soon.)
View from Hermit Island (from Unofficial Hermit Island website)
Thanks to the hermit, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 will be memorable to me even without the catastrophe that branded the date—”Nine Eleven”—into history.
The weekend leading up to Nine Eleven started in the dashing fashion typical of that eventful 2001 for me. Anja Brüll and I left Concord, Mass. early Friday evening, driving through the dark to the Harvard Forest center in central Mass. to meet my friend Bob, Harvard Design School’s landscape-ecology professor, and his class of 25 landscape-architecture students. We showed slides illustrating our version of Design with Nature: Me on landscape-based wastewater-cleaning methods and Anja on her Bio-Dome atrium that sheltered an Eden that could clean water and soil. Anja’s presentation proved far more popular. Who could blame these students? They, like most, were entranced by this tall, lean 31-year-old German with wavy blonde hair and form-fitting pants and jacket who planned to clean the world’s polluted industrial sites with her cooling tower-shaped greenhouses.
Bob thought we were staying the night there, but we left late, driving for hours down dark country roads to the highway and more dark roads to Brunswick, Maine, passing a brightly lit subsection of a 9-floor steel ship under construction at the Bath shipworks, turning at the “chocolate church” landmark, and pulling up to a charming 18th-century house to meet up with my friend Abe Collins and his friend Mike. We found them in the kitchen at 2 a.m. nibbling grapes and cheese, and giggling. Abe and Mike were either inebriated or high or both, but Mike sobered up to give us a tour of the charming sea captain’s house in which he grew up. In the morning, we piled into Abe’s beat-up Isuzu truck, stopped for blueberry scones and drove on to our destination and Mike’s inheritance: Hermit Island.
Hermit Island is a spit of land connected by a causeway to one of Maine’s Continue reading ‘Eco-Amazons on Hermit Island (another Sept. 11 story)’
In the 1970s and ’80s, British brothers Lorne and Lawrence Blair chronicled their journeys in Borneo and the Spice Islands in the dazzling and memorable documentary, “Ring of Fire.”
The jovial, monocle-wearing Lawrence led the adventures, accompanied by his lanky, handsome brother, Lorne. I watched a re-issue of the documentary on public television in the ’90s. So much of it has stayed with me, including the epilogue, which begins with Lawrence’s early death after breaking a leg. Here, Lorne describes how the family prepared Lawrence’s body to be “dissolved by the sea he so loved”…”there’s none of this morbid intoning from the pulpit ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes,’ there they are. You’re not saved from it. You have to touch it. So in a way it’s purifying, actually. You know by the end of it… they’re gone.” (story begins around 4:00):
Remember the New Alchemy Institute? Perhaps you heard of it. It was a thinktank/do-tank on Cape Cod where baby boomer idealists gathered to model the green future, with experiments in fish farming, using composting to warm a greenhouse, and so forth. That was mostly in the 1970s. When I journeyed there in 1989, it was pretty quiet. One finding of the aquaculture (fish farming) tanks was that adding floating plants helped clean the water by transforming nitrogen from fish poop into plants like basil, water hyacinth, and watercress. That observation inspired my co-author David Del Porto to note that this applied to the wastewater field. The observation was converted by John Todd into his now-famous Living Machines wastewater treatment system. The fate of that will be the topic of a future blog post.
There experiments took place in New Alchemy’s big greenhouse, dubbed “The Ark.” The Ark is now attached to the home of Hilde Maingay and Earle Barnhart, the organizers of Saturday’s “Eco-Toilet Summit” in Falmouth. Above are some photos from a walk around the outside of the home of Hilde and Earle’s delightful home (which uses composting toilets) and its grounds. One wonders if New Alchemy, which ran out of grant funding in the 1990s, is now better served as Hilde and Earle’s home, where they hatch ideas like The Eco-Toilet Summit.
I know many envision me answering customer questions via cell phone while lying in a hammock (produced by local women’s cooperatives) hanging from palm trees (in a sustainably managed grove) overlooking a powdery sand beach.
While that is true, the reality of running a small business selling water innovations no one else was willing to risk supplying involves a lot of headbanging details. Today’s: A customer could not find 3-inch Schedule 20 (thin wall) PVC pipe with which to make a vent chimney for his Swedish Separett Villa toilet, which has metric vent connections. Some, though few, customers have complained about this. I called one store, met him there, found out they didn’t have it, went to another, and then we settled for Schedule 40 3″, which is actually 3.5″ outer diameter, requiring a special coupling. Which I had to explain to the salesman, who clearly did not believe me. Fortunately, customer John Crowell was a good sport. He’s actually a former wastewater testing center technician. He plans to divert urine to tanks, the dilute it 8:1 with water and use it to irrigate his landscape.
I take my magic where I can get it.
Ciarrai Walsh passed on this Time Magazine article about Bill Gates seeing the light of improving sanitation as one of the most effective ways to save lives in the world: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2082509,00.html?artId=2082509?contType=article?chn=world
Ten years ago, I wrote to the Gates Foundation to suggest it focus on sanitation as a cheaper and effective way to reduce child mortality, especially as compared to vaccines. I’m certainly not saying I’m responsible for the Foundation’s new focus, but it does bring a smile. Alas, Gates seems to think sanitation is about designing a better toilet—a technology challenge. Yet better toilets exist worldwide (including some for which his Foundation is devoting research funding as if they are new technologies). The real need is better decisionmaking processes, laws, and implementation programs. Or in Microsoft language: Software, not hardware. I hope Gates catches up with best practices in the sanitation and water transformation space and leaves behind its “better mousetrap” focus.
I returned to Hilde and Earle’s house around midnight. They were still up. Hilde noted the peeping coming from the vast greenhouse attached to their house, the last remnant of the New Alchemy Institute. “It’s a great big bullfrog. It eats bugs for us. And when it rains, it’s so happy, it just sings.”
I didn’t really know Jaime Barajas, brother of environmental transformer/activist Babak Tondre. I met him briefly when Nik Bertulis and I visited Babak’s home in 2003 to view his back-yard micro-eden, with its chickens, gardens, and fruit trees. (Photos from that day are in my two later books.) Jaime, who was living in an art-filled loft over a utility shed, seemed to me a shy, lighter version of Babak. Babak worried a bit about his brother; after all, he was a Pisces.
Last week, just 10 days after spending an afternoon with Babak and his daughter visiting an eco-wastewater system and musing about the “public lore vs. reality” of the eco-activist scene in the Bay area, Babak told me by email his brother was hit by a car and killed in San Jose. Here is his obituary. On Sunday, he buried his brother in this Marin County cemetery providing “natural burial” options: Forever Fernwood.
Fernwood, according to its Web site, “uses no toxic embalming fluids, no vault, and only a biodegradable casket or a Continue reading ‘Natural burial: Jaime Barajas goes back to the earth’
A mallard duck and her six chicks appeared Thursday in our cellar stairwell. Here’s a link to photos.
They were darling. Mother duck and two of the chicks were able to hop up the stairs to a tray of water and bowls of oats and spinach seed heads I left at the head of the stairs. Our neighbors threw pieces of bread to them, although this isn’t recommended due to the chicks’ delicate digestion. Worried about raccoons preying on them, I called the Humane Society’s wildlife agent, who told me it was best for the ducks to find their own way out and over to the creek. I placed a wood plank over the steps, hoping they’d use it as a ramp. But it was too slippery: I watched from the balcony as one duckling hopped up 2 steps then onto the ramp, only to slide to the ground.
This would have been amusing if I didn’t go down later and see that 2 of Continue reading ‘City ducks as sitting ducks’
I’m putting a Caribbean composting toilet on the back burner. Why? The problem started when my well-meaning North American contact for this project told me she read the book, Three Cups of Tea. It’s the story of Greg Mortensen, who worked to build 55 schools in Pakistan. Here’s what I wrote on the blog, Not My Tribe:
This book has created headaches for me, as several readers have decided they are going to plop down some kind of improvement in the beautiful second-world locales at which they spent their vacations. These mostly well-meaning folks believe they do not have to do any initial planning or input gathering with the community. Or ask them what they want and are willing to maintain. They really just want me to help them design, fund and build an improvement, in this case a composting toilet, that will allow them to brag about this. They assume that the improvement will so impress the locals and, more importantly, funders, that the solution will be replicated. The NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, notable for his sometimes lack of deeper investigation, will note it in his column and perhaps write a book about it. And another heartwarming NY Times bestseller will be born.
Ah, the glamorous life of an eco-entrepreneur. Today, I argued with my shipper, DSV Air & Sea via email about a $200 storage fee I incurred because they claim they didn’t received by bank-issued check in time. Yet a dated cancelled check suggests they are wrong. Apparently I must eat this one. As well as the substantial time to handle it.
Last night, PayPal informed me that a customer, who definitely received her order, got a successful chargeback on her card. Cost to me: $30 + $20 “fee” + cost of goods + time lost. PayPal’s surprisingly cogent customer service guy says this is what credit card consumer protection looks like.
And I spent Tuesday researching and writing text for a special permit for my customer to install two EcoFlush urine-diverting toilets I sold at cost. Six hours gone. And the customer suggested I should pick up the cost of the permit, $343.
At conferences, I hear academics rant about how we need to implement X solution and Y practice. Then I go home and encounter the hurdles to actual implementation, which are mostly about regulations, liability, market education, time and money. It’s those of us who try to make them real by making them available and installing them who are in the trenches and getting no grants, profits, or glory.
Canadian writer Douglas Coupland reminds us that the current torrent of change means there’s no going back—at least not to the U.S. middle class tableau of the past 50 years. Goodbye middle class. Rural suburbs. Technology emerging at a digestible pace. Assured economic upswings.
What will the next 10 years look like? This question reminds me of an NSF-sponsored city visioning project, Sustainable Lowell 2020, for which I was hired to write 4 scenarios for the future, ranging from ultra-high-tech to urban homesteading. (More on that later.) (*A Nantucket sleighride, in case you haven’t heard it, was a term used by whalers when their boat was pulled through the waves by a harpooned whale, sometimes for miles, before it tired and could be further hooked and taken to the ship.)
Douglas Coupland’s Guide to the next 10 years
The iconic writer reveals the shape of things to come, with 45 tips for survival and a matching glossary of the new words you’ll need to talk about your messed-up future. 1) It’s going to get worse
No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.
2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic
It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
Continue reading ‘Get ready for an economic and technological Nantucket sleigh ride*’
Continue reading ‘Get ready for an economic and technological Nantucket sleigh ride*’
A PBS show about asthma reported that kids exposed to animal manure have lower incidences of asthma. The key agent appears to be “endotoxins” in manure. It might be that microbes like fecal coliform, which in certain volumes and types can cause illness, actually either result in boosted immunity.
A study shows that kids who get sunshine (vitamin D), play in the dirt, play with other children, and are exposed to pets or other animals from birth tend to have lower asthma and allergy incidence. Early ongoing exposure to pigs are associated with the lowest incidence of asthma, the study concluded. This is interesting because pig excreta is close to human excetra in its constitution. Could using and maintaining a composting toilet actually reduce risk of illness?
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