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 several archipelagos that extend into Casco Bay. The 255-acre private island is owned by Mike’s family, and he and his cousin will one day inherit it. For now, it is open for visitors who camp there. We dropped our gear in a sunny, spacious loft above the island’s camp store and office. A huge ship model hung on the wall over a couch. Mike said a relative had used this as a bachelor pad and had plans to turn it into a restaurant but never did. Mike was only visiting; he lived in Nevada on an Indian reservation where he helped native Americans protect their land and water from expanding mining operations. Abe had met him when he lived on a Navajo reservation promoting permaculture practices. Abe returned to his Vermont hometown in 1999 in hopes of finding better luck promoting his grass-fed agriculture principles. That’s where I met him at a solar-energy festival.

The Snorri, now in Newfoundland

Hermit Island is a microcosm of Maine. With its piney hills, traditional maritime industry, and sandy beaches, there’s almost no reason to drive further north; it’s all there. We walked past campsites and over to a lobster farm (lobster pound) where the owner showed us how they grow thousands of lobsters in a series of pools to ship to for markets all over the U.S. From there, we walked to a wooden boatbuilder shop which a few years before had constructed the Snorri, a replica of the ship Vikings were thought to use to cross the Atlantic to Nova Scotia. Hodding Carter and a crew sailed the Snorri on a challenging and bumbling trans-Atlantic voyage about which he wrote a book.

We brought lobsters back to the loft, and Abe discovered he had no tonic water to mix with the gin he brought, so he picked some fuzzy clusters of sumac blossoms and soaked them in water to make a tart mixer. I was impressed. It was around this time I became certain I was outclassed by Hermit Island, its industries, and my companions. Abe was as notable as Anja: loquacious, intense, bright and well spoken, all in a 28-year-old solid young man who often sang and manically spun ideas (we called him “manic expressive”). Mike was darker, more somber, with long dark hair to match. Sometime in the evening when we were talking about popular songs, Mike learned I was 36, a full 7 years older than him. This seemed to rankle him nearly to the point of disgust. And although I found this amusing on the surface, my thoughts thereafter were dominated by my mortality and ragingly advancing age. Hermit Island suddenly seemed like a panorama of the last 300 years of civilization in which I had to justify my place. Gin and sumac cocktails did nothing to lift my spirits, and I conked out on the couch, looking up at the huge ship model that hovered over me on the wall shelf, knowing I would awake and hit my head on it when I arose.

(Which I did the next morning.) We packed food and continued the hike around the island’s coastline, stopping in pocket beaches where shallow water warmed in the sun made swimming the usually-frigid Atlantic inviting. Anja vigorously swam a half mile from shore, as we watched. We hiked up the hill at the center of the island and picked gnarled apples from stunted trees Mike said were planted by the island’s namesake, the hermit who fished and farmed there in the late 1600s. I looked around and tried to imagine surviving on fish, sheep, and apples in winters with just a fireplace to keep warm. I felt awe and admiration for the hermit, who managed to stay alive in ways I did not know how. Mike kicked at wood shards, perhaps remnants of the hermit’s house. He planned to build a cabin there one day, he reported uncertainly. It occurred to me that Mike, too, was considering his next steps and what would be his legacy here at his inheritance and the pieces of the hermit’s home. We cooked over a fire that night and unrolled our sleeping bags outside to watch the stars that filled a third of the sky. Abe, Mike, and Anja poked at the flames, as Abe ebulliently detailed the methods humans could use to repair ecosystems by changing their ways of farming food and energy. Mike countered each point with examples of how humans were too extractive, incapable of changing their ways to deploy Abe’s vision, and generally doomed. Anja interjected to correct both men’s scientific points, then posited that climate change was the result of interrupting water cycles that cool the planet. Their discussion was a cross between a Carl Sagan narrative and the film “My Dinner with Andre.” I lay on my sleeping bag listening, while watching the sky for shooting stars.

The next day we walked, grilled fish, and swam some more. Mike had me check out the island’s public toilet facilities, which were conventional toilets that flushed to large septic systems. He said his uncle had tried several types of alternative toilet systems, from “Sky Toilets” (more on that another time) to oil-flush toilets. We agreed to conduct a composting toilet workshop on Hermit Island the following summer. I was already selling a few composting toilets to the nearby town of Phippsburg, where pit latrines were legal. Anja and I had planned to drive back to Concord that night so we could be at the office the next morning, but we assured each other we would stay that night and leave promptly at 6 a.m. the next day, just in time to arrive when the office opened.

At 6 the next morning, Anja turned off her travel alarm, turned to look at me, and we both plopped back on our pillows, dozing to the sound of waves as the white Maine sun burned through fog and lit the room. About 9 a.m. that Tuesday, Sept. 11, we finally stuffed all our gear into the back of my old Mazda hatchback and reluctantly drove off.

Two or three hours later, around the North Shore of Massachusetts, traffic suddenly slowed to a crawl on Route 95, a 4-lane highway. A backup like this was far too late to be rush hour, I told Anja. It must be an accident—drivers seemed to be looking out their windows at other drivers, puzzled. They must hear about an accident on the radio, I thought, but we couldn’t confirm that with my broken car radio. Anja worried her employer would be angry at her late arrival, so she found my road atlas and charted a course off the highway and on to small roads to Concord. Two hours later, we parked at the office. As we walked to the door, Lori and Varuni, two young engineering assistants, ran out the open doorway. “We’ve been attacked!” Lori nearly shouted, wide-eyed. Varuni clarified: “Planes bombed New York City.” Anja looked at me, brows furrowed, as if I should explain this on behalf of the United States. We went in and sat by the radio. My only thoughts were “amazing this hasn’t happened before, interesting it happened on my shift.” I also assumed the U.S. financial markets would plunge, zipping my small retirement and bank accounts to zero. And I felt guilty, like somehow our time on Hermit Island had been a deceptive vacation from the realities we had to reconcile.

For the week after that, we went on as always, but the radio stayed on all day. The young folks in the office would opine that Osama bin Laden didn’t exist; he was a made-up target. Seeking ideas for next steps, Varuni and Lori attended a Noam Chomsky rally at which he only asked the audience what they were going to do in the wake of this event. (Great leadership, Noam.)  Dave installed a U.S. flag windsock on the roof, and the rest of us discussed what exactly the U.S. flag meant in this context, with the German-born Anja warning against getting overly jingoistic as a response. The intensive mourning for the lives lost seemed odd to me only in light ofs the thousands of lives lost every day meaninglessly. But in this case, they were Americans in the wrong place at the wrong as any of us could have been. We could no longer be hermits snug in safety amid the world’s angst.

Postscripts:
The following month, I was to fly to Kwajalein atoll in the Pacific (with a layover in Hawaii) to attend a SOPAC meeting to discuss water and sanitation solutions for the islands. I anguished over whether to cancel my flight as so many people were doing back then. I decided the risk was relatively low, and boarded a plane half full of Pacific islanders and black-clad government employees with Halliburton briefcases. On my return trip, I spent two days in Oahu which was quiet, with many hotels and guest houses empty.

Anja returned to Germany to her shambling candlelit castle, flew back to Concord to work for a year making a Solar Aquatics system, and then settled back in her hometown of Aachen where she recently gave birth to a son. She is pictured in my book, Liquid Gold.

I don’t know where Mike is. (I’m not absolutely sure “Mike” was his name.) Every year, I aim to go back to Hermit Island, but I have not.

Abe put his farming practice philosophies to work at a northern Vermont dairy farm. He lectures worldwide about how farming can effectively sequester carbon. Here’s a recent video.

Bob is a professor at Nova Scotia Agricultural College. He travels around the world much of the year following ancient pilgrimages and old canal routes. Lori is an engineer in Boston and Varuni is a schoolteacher in New York City.

I suspect I have photos of this trip, but they are not showing up in my photo boxes today. But in researching this post, I found several useful old photos, great Web sites about the Snorri and Hermit Island, and some intriguing books by Hodding Carter (who, it turns out, is a friend of Richard, the bird guy, about whom I’ll write later).
I guess it’s all about the journey.

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.

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.

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.”

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 burial shroud. Natural rocks, wildflowers, shrubs, and trees serve as markers, and each grave is locatable via Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates.” A caring treatment that reflected what I imagine Jaime valued.

Many “green burials” forego the metal caskets and concrete casings common to conventional U.S. burial and instead employ cremation (burning–and remember it takes a lot of fuel to burn off the gallons of water a human body comprises) and sometimes drying via dry ice (a relatively new approach detailed in Mary Roach’s book, Stiff). All of this is to avoid groundwater contamination by pathogens and nutrients in a body. One can also compost a body, a faster decomposition process, but this process hasn’t been offered for humans in any formal way yet.

David Del Porto, my coauthor, has long beseeched his wife, sons, and friends to take his body post-mortem and bury it on a high hill (far from ground or surface water), in a shallow grave next to an oak tree. He wants his embodied nutrients to feed an oak tree.

My mother’s ashes are in a container in a cabinet in the kitchen. This really feels just right to me and apparently my father, so there is no rush to do anything else with them, although taking them to Strawberry Banke’s gardens has been discussed.

I’ve often wondered if fast composting could take place in a contained way, so that our bodies’ nutrients could directly nourish trees more immediately. I have some ideas about this I’ll detail later.

I first heard of these options when I was 17 and watching a documentary about the folk music group, The Weavers, which my mother liked. Pete Seeger was a member. The group’s founder Lee Weaver wrote a song about where he would like his body to go after his death. Indeed, he was cremated and added to the compost pile:

In Dead Earnest

If I should die before I wake
All my bone and sinew take
Put them in the compost pile
To decompose a little while
Sun, rain and worms will have their way
Reducing me to common clay
All that I am will feed the trees
And little fishes in the seas
When corn and radishes you munch
You may be having me for lunch
Then excrete me with a grin
Chortling, There goes Lee again
‘Twill be my happiest destiny
To die and live eternally

Lee Hays, 1981

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 the ducklings had died overnight, their little bodies in each corner.

I feared they died of dehydration, so I placed the tray of water down next to the ducks.

Later that day, we saw a cat scaling the fence with two ducklings in its mouth. Mother duck ran out squawking and 1 duckling hopped up the steps and followed, but the remaining duckling couldn’t ascend stairs or ramp. This went on for awhile; I could see mom duck and duckling were ready to vacate but waited for the small one to hop up the steps. It frantically peeped and scurried about but couldn’t manage to hop up onto the step.

I considered picking up the duckling and setting it next to mom, but I feared it would be rejected or the chick would die of fright. So I called the wildlife rescue agent, Olivia. She came out with a big net and some cardboard crates. As she descended the stairs, mother duck made an impressive squawking and flew up and out, marching away to draw the agent away from her chicks. Olivia followed, and the duck flew off. The agent picked up the 2 ducklings, placed them in the box. She assured me that the sight of dead ducks at the foot of the stairs “lays it all out. The ducklings will probably die if they stay here.” She said the two she picked up would be put in an incubator at the shelter and then brought to a wildlife refuge. “This way they will make it to adulthood.”

Twenty minutes after she left, mother duck flew back and began searching for her brood with questioning clucking. This broke my heart. I left a message with the humane society.

The next day, they let me know the ducks are hybrids–half mallard and half domestic–so will not be re-introduced to the wild. They’ll likely go to a farm. I’m unsure what this means—will they be offered to a farm that wants cute ducks around, as one often sees in Massachusetts?

This whole saga reported by me on my Facebook page drew several sympathetic comments. I decided I should have put the ducklings in a basket and walked slowly to the creek, allowing mother duck to follow me. But they likely would have fallen prey to the same cat or the raccoon. Perhaps that was a risk worth taking. Obviously some ducks dodge predation in our creekside neighborhood–the mother duck is proof–but it’s hard to know when to let nature have its way and when to try to engineer the outcome. As Mary Shimp commented, “with nature, there’s a fine line between ‘helping’ and ‘interfering.’”