Sustainability from the Ground Up.

 Today is Earth Day, and I always have mixed feelings about that. When I was younger - a high-school student, starry-eyed and idealistic - each year was a new chance to rally people to the cause. A few years on cynicism and it's a day of green-washing, lip service, and singular feel-good activities. How does an activist spread the ethos of care into the other 364 days of the year?

Pictures from the first Earth Day, 1970

If I had the perfect answer to that I would be out on the streets, leading the charge. Instead, I am here to encourage the makers, the creative types, to think sustainably in their creations. Here's the simple, easy things to think of for sustainable design.

 1.)What is it made from?
        Obviously, this is where it starts. Let's say you have a great product idea, and it's gonna help people save water/conserve energy/not waste food etc... but it's made out of plastic and packaged in styrofoam. New materials are helping to solve this problem, but I opine that returning to simple natural materials is always the best choice!

2.)What happens when it breaks?
        Is the item made to last? Can it be fixed? Can it be repurposed? Seed paper cards are an example of an item that has an explicit second life.

3.)Where does it go to?
         This is where that nasty plastic causes problems, but any material can be a problem if there's nothing to do with a broken or worn-out item but throw it away! Can it be reused or recycled? Composted? Cradle to Grave is the ethos of designing an "afterlife" for an item.

4.)Does it work?
     This can be overlooked by a greenwashing company. Story time - back in the late 90s when the first bioplastic were appearing on the market my mother bought a few packs of corn plastic pens and permanent markers. How proud we were! Early adopters who are reducing our impact! Of course, the pen part didn't work for crap. So concerned, was that company, with making and marketing the bioplastic outers, that the insides of the pen were shoddy and non-functioning. If the product doesn't work very well or breaks right away, then no matter what it is made from it is not sustainable!

5.)How is it made?
     The other downside of those early bioplastics (see why I prefer natural materials?), was the manufacture. It involved toxic chemicals, those chemicals were not always handled properly, the energy required to manufacture was much higher than petroplastics. Problems like this lead to the idea of sustainability as a complex system! If an item pollutes when it is made, that's the same as if it pollutes when it is thrown away!

6.)Who makes it?
     Here's the tough part for many big companies, we handcrafters got this down pretty well. If an item is not socially responsible then it is not sustainable. This is not simply a matter of morality - oppressive systems are not stable or sustainable. And pushing people into poverty often forces them to make choices that are environmentally harmful and destructive to their culture and society. But handmakers must also be responsible about this! What are we outsourcing? What processes are they using? Are we charging enough for our time and talents?

7.) How is it used?
     Let us not forget the most important aspect of design - is it useful? What do we use it for? It drives me crazy to see the piles of "recycling" ideas that turn a throwaway item into a nominally decorative piece of bric-a-brac. I mean, sure, a few decorative vases is fine, and a pen cup or two made from old containers covered in pretty paper or such... but how many can you have in your house? And the item that is only decorative? That's like a garbage denial system, we store it on the walls and shelves awaiting it's inevitable doom. Good sustainable design make useful items that we want to use in environmentally responsible ways!

Happy Earth Day everyone! From a crabby environmentalist, and Crafty Bitch.

Firestarters How-to

 It's winter, but at our house that does NOT mean that we aren't hanging outside! It does mean that our supplies of dry tinder are dwindling, and fire starting is getting trickier. (I rarely have piles of waste paper around, first world Druid problems.)

I do, however, have a box of old candle stubs and half empty tea-lights. ( Double boiler of course, with an old pan you aren't fond of.)

I also have a box of dryer lint, saved for just such an occasion. Some notes on that - the suitability of dryer lint for burning is dependent on the fiber content. Wool does not burn well, synthetics smoulder and melt. Fortunately, most American wardrobes have a high percentage of cotton, which makes rather flammable lint. To test your lint, pinch off a bit and try lighting it ( don't hold it in your fingers directly!) If you get a smouldering melting mass, it will not serve as good firestarters. To be clear, even a "pure" cotton lint will not burn clean and bright, as it likely has lots of dyes, dirt and foreign bits in it, but it will burn fine when covered in wax.

 I created a "mold" with a waxy advertisement paper, and filled it with a layer of lint. It's not terribly tall, it's easier to work with relatively narrow strips of firestarter.

 Wax is poured over, and a stick was used to ensure that all the fiber was covered in wax. When the block had cooled enough to solidify, but was still warm and pliable, I used a knife to divvy it up into blocks.

It takes a moment with a lighter to get each block going, but it then burns like a candle covered in wicks, and will light even damp or stubborn fuel!
Happy Bonfires!

Climate and Peaches

See this? It's a Colorado Peach. It's juicy, sweet, and delicate. It travels about 75 miles to get to my house, so when I eat one it is tree-ripened and fresh. No other can compare, I do not buy peaches out of season shipped from South America. There is nothing quite like a Colorado Peach, accept no substitutions.

You have a local favorite, a fruit or veggie that is special to the region, best enjoyed right off the farmer's truck. Rocky Ford Cantaloupes. Wild picked raspberries. Fresh crisp arugula. Every place has a food which is best enjoyed close to the source and fresh as you can.

So What?

In 2003 a paper appeared in Science detailing a compilation of 180 years worth of layman's records. Bird watching observations, fish catches, an English manor which recorded the first sounds of frogs every year. The results? Species were moving, towords the poles (northward in North America and Europe) and to higher elevations. Furthermore, events that marked the dawn of spring - the songs of frogs and insects, the blooming of flowers and appearance of shoots - were coming earlier and earlier. An average move of 2.3 days per decade.

So What?

This spring we had lots of warm weather early on. The tulips appeared startlingly soon. The fruit trees in my yard burst into bloom alarmingly early. Here in Colorado, a late snowstorm is likely to freeze and ruin a crop that gets rolling too early. Luckly we had only a mild snowstorm. Unluckly, it was mild and dropped very little water on a parched state.
Our agricultural system is very cycle driven. Major food crops were developed for different climates, on the assumption that the yearly weather patterns would not deviate much. Early blooms can suffer from too much water, not enough, wrong temperature, lack of pollinators, susceptibility to disease, and other problems. Climate change is not just melting ice caps.

Consider the fragility of our food systems. It may not seem that way, we have long used chemicals, technology, and the care of thoughtful farmers to provide for us despite the challenges of shifting weather. But continued warming may lead to failures in the Orchards of the Western Slope, and a season without peaches.
Think about that every time you get into your car. When you switch on the lights, or the heat. Remember the cost of fossil fuels is not just in your pockets, it's also in your pantry.

What's you favorite local food? Have you had sparse years of it due to droughts, freezes, or flooding?

Wheels a' Turnin'

The last few weeks have been wild around here, so sorry for the lack of updates! I've been traveling and having family and friends visit, I saw three new states, met lots of new family (there was a wedding!) and have been frantically putting up the last of the harvest.
So to tide you over until I return to normal activity here's some lovely wind turbines in a corn field in Iowa. The Midwest seems to be replete with fields of wind farms, turning slowly in the wind. Is there any better way to capture the energy? The fields here are not diminished by the occasional break for a base, and the spinning arms give a serene touch to the rolling landscape. I am thrilled to see the embrace of sustainable electricity sprawling across the plains!

Energy in the West

My drive home through Wyoming was long, cold, and oddly interesting. Yes, it is rather flat, and has long stretches without much of note to break the never ending view of sagebrush. But often what is out there is what's fueling our nation...
Sinclair is a small town on I-80, home and origin of the Sinclair oil company (yaknow, the green dinosaurs?) It has a large oil refinery, "company" housing for the workers there, and a gas station. There you can buy unleaded fresh from the pipes and without added ethanol (with no large urban centers in the state there are no rules about ethanol to reduce smog) which gets 3-5% higher MPG. This refinery is fueling most of the cars which drive by as the gas is trucked and piped all over the state and the west.

Then there is coal, along I-80 there is a stretch of open coal mining, where thick seams sit right below the surface. A huge dredge crane scrapes up piles of the stuff. With it's remote location, and the less than stellar quality of the coal it is not trucked nor trained off to big city plants. A plant near Rock Springs burns it and high tension lines transport it to the grids of Utah and Idaho. Electricity is much lighter to move than coal after all. Wyoming accounts for almost %40 of the nations coal production, and coal is still the major source of electricity for Americans.

The other big source is Natural gas. Now in many places natural gas production is simply part of oil drilling, but our demand has exceeded those easy supplies and so we have turned to coal seams and fractured underground rock layers. The geology of the state is actually fascinating, and makes for the importance of fossil fuels here. Sadly however, as the BLM has been offering up leases in areas that were formerly wild, they have relaxed rules on environmental impacts and the clean up of sites. Many areas that are important game and stock range and being crisscrossed with dirt roads large enough for heavy equipment and ponds of contaminated liquids related to drilling and pumping. The burning of natural gas is relatively quite clean, but with lax regulation the drilling has not been.

And a sight that brings me great joy! Ridges dotted with lines of wind generators spinning wildly in the almost constant wind. The power from these joins the I-25 corridor grid, and when you buy "renewable credits" you are funding the utilities investments in wind and solar farms. These are not without any impact on the area, a road must be built to construct the pylons, but after they're running they need only occasional maintenance. There has been concerns about birds, but the small number who are broadsided by a spinning blade is comparable to number who drown in contaminated ponds related to oil and gas drilling, or suffer the effects of pollution. Around the base of these wild animals and stock graze unmolested, and many are built on private land offering an important source of income to farmers and ranchers.
The future of energy in this country can be seen in a trip across the windy state of Wyoming, it will be a mix of sources, and work must be done to see that they get always cleaner and more responsible!