sustainability

Last night we attended a mini-workshop presented by students from Oberlin College participating in the One Big Bike Movement. These students are biking from Oberlin, OH to San Francisco this summer, stopping along the way to present strategies for living more sustainably.

Their first stop happened to be here in Yellow Springs, hosted by Living Green (a store about which I’ll be talking quite a bit here in the future) which provided wine, cheese, and fruit for refreshments. They spoke about techniques for using passive solar and cooling, including placement of vegetation, windows, and heatsinks. The students also gave an overview of vermicomposting, including a display of a working bin full of red wrigglers. They even left the bin with C.J. of Living Green to use in the store!

I encourage you to check out their site (onebigbike.blogspot.com) and see if they are heading your way.

Wow, moving is hard enough as it is, but for the sustainably-minded it can be torture! The past three months were very fortunate for us -- I got a new job, we moved back to the Midwest, and we sold our house -- yet extremely stressful.

I know I’ve lost quite a few regular readers and I hope to earn them back now that we’re getting settled. So, I’ll get right back into sustainability topics starting with the one at hand, which is the eco-crappy process of moving states! In October, I learned that I was selected for a job with the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- a dream job for me both in terms of the working environment and the location. But first the big news -- the house we found to rent is in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, which many of you may know from the Community Solutions Conference held every year on Peak Oil! The village is by far the closest thing I’ve seen to a sustainable community, and is far better able to weather some of the challenges ahead than anywhere we’ve ever seen. I’ll have much, much more on Yellow Springs as time goes on, but for now I’ll get back to our moving story.

On a recent trip home to Iowa, a minor basement flood at my parents’ in-town house presented the opportunity to stay at their newly completed off-grid home out in the country. As living on a self-sufficient acreage is of course our dream, we took this as a chance for a taste of sustainable living (well, minus the homesteading aspect).

This picture shows the solar array, wind tower, propane tank, and top of the septic system. If you look in the background you’ll see the line of semis waiting to accept their load of industry-intensive corn being harvested that day. I felt it was a nice contrast between viable sustainable practices…and modern farming techniques.

There has been a lot of talk recently -- some unsavory -- regarding the issues of population and sustainability. Many come from the standpoint that in order to have the greatest impact on sustainability, you must personally ensure you contribute zero or negative population growth. Anyone who is serious about sustainability, they claim, is an utter hypocrite if they don’t advocate population control or (gasp!) have more than the 2.1 children per couple necessary for population growth.

Sustainability heroines Miranda Edel and Sharon Astyk have come under ruthless attack from “holier-than-thou environmentalists” claiming that these women have had more than their “fair share” of children. Some commenters at the LATOC Forum advocate authoritarian population measures as extreme as culling our neighbors. Now, assuming we can look past the emotional response to these positions, the argument suffers from a number of logical failures.

The staff at the Energy Bulletin put together a great article today examining the peak production rate of phosphorus. By applying the same methods used by Dr. M. King Hubbert (the man who accurately described Peak Oil in the 1950s) to phosphorus production, the authors discovered that not only had the U.S. reached its peak production in 1988, but the world had peaked in 1989!

Why is phosphorus important, you might wonder? From the Energy Bulletin article:

The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.

and

Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture.

Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

The problem of phosphorus depletion is just one more example of the imminent crunch in resource reserves we face. I wrote about a similar concern in my Peak Salt article nearly a year ago. The difference there is that we don’t actually face a salt shortage until we face an oil shortage -- an example of a subtle but critical interaction between resources. What we in the Peak Oil community are discovering is a complex system of feedbacks and tipping points, just as the world is discovering in the issue of global warming.

Why the similarity? Because the resource extraction/consumption system is of the same type as the global climate system: chaotic. Despite the name, chaotic systems have a certain elegance and structure; however, they present severe problems when we attempt to model them.

In the next post, I will discuss the true nature of the chaotic Global Resource Crunch we’re already experiencing.

It appears we will soon have another (low-cost) choice in selecting sustainable building materials for insulating buildings, beyond strawbale and cellulose. Two RPI graduates recently developed a mushroom-based insulation panel with an R-value of 2.9/inch.

From the article:

An essential requirement for sustainable lifestyles is locally composting as much waste as possible. This can be as sophisticated as a complex methane digester or as simple as burying the scraps underground. Most solutions, as is often the case, fall somewhere in between. In this post I will describe how I made the below composter in just a couple of hours last weekend.

Our recent experiments with baking soda inspired some humor. Here are the top 8 reasons to use baking soda and vinegar for all your cleaning needs:

1) You get to see the looks on people’s faces when you tell them you brush your teeth with the same stuff you use to scrub your toilet.

2) If you get bored in the shower, you can scrub the tub with your shampoo.

3) Always have a science experiment on hand: instant volcano!

4) If interrupted when brushing your teeth, you can scare away door-to-door salespeople with that “foaming at the mouth” look.

5) Two words: edible shampoo. Never shower hungry again!

6) You can get even more strange looks by telling guests you used your deodorant to bake the cake they’re eating.

7) You can buy baking soda and vinegar by the boatload for around the price of a single bottle of “Eau de Snooty” shampoo.

8) It cuts out about 17 aisles at the supermarket.

Learning to live sustainably is about making small changes, gradually adjusting to a different lifestyle. As I consider what might not be available after Peak Oil, I start to worry about the dizzying array of items we frequently use for which I have no ready alternative.

One possible solution for many of these is to re-examine whether we actually need them at all. Along those lines, Emme at Simple Living posted an interesting article about alternatives to using shampoo. From the article:

Here are some basic instructions on living without shampoo.

* Rinse your hair daily with hot water and brush with a natural bristle brush. However, if you have curly hair, do not brush. Use your fingernails to clean your scalp in the shower.
* As often as needed (for some people, this is every few days, for some once a week is enough), scrub scalp with a baking soda paste and rinse well.
* Rinse hair with diluted vinegar. Apple cider vinegar or essential oils added to white vinegar smells great.

If the baking-soda-and-vinegar routine doesn’t seem to work for you, here are some variations:

* Add a honey scalp massage to help with dry hair or itchy scalp
* Use lime or lemon juice instead of vinegar.
* Use some oil on the very ends of hair to cut down on frizz and dry ends. I use olive oil.

I'm going to give this a try and see if it works for dudes as well as women :) I will let you know the results and if I have indeed found one more item to cut from my shopping cart.

Exciting news! Zachrey is a resident of a sustainable community located near Taos, NM called Greater World. Every home there is an EarthShip and it is one of the greenest communities around. Zachrey has agreed to share his experience and insight here at PeakOilDesign in the Community Organization Forums. Please feel free to post any comments or questions for Zachrey there.

I would like to give a big thanks to Zachrey for sharing his time and I look forward to learning about how one sustainable community is making it happen!

(For more information on Greater World, please visit Zachrey's website.)