Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Let Us Now Praise Fall Squash.


I just finished steaming another plump butternut after the zen ritual of peeling it and tossing the seeds for squirrels and Janet's hens. I only put a quarter inch of water and some sea salt in the kettle, put the lid on and wait for the steam to do its work.

When it has a nice consistency like slightly thick batter, I whisk things in like Parmesan, although any number of other cheeses from manchego to feta will work as well, some Bells seasoning, butter, sour cream, pimenton la vera, white pepper and Old Bay seasoning. Whee! Blue Hubbard is another squash variety that would work well. Those smaller acorn squash things work better cut in half and baked with say, honey, butter and cinnamon or nutmeg.

When I was a kid growing up in Reading MA, my ancient great grandmother and I would grow blue hubbards and lay them in a cardboard box in the basement, a natural root cellar and damn if they didn't stay in good shape until Easter. We were doing a form of permaculture then, we just didn't know it.

I realized it is just an elaborate euphemism for working with the given. Squash growing is an old New England thing. I have a feeling it will be a core crop here as the region finds its sustainable way.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Sense of Place: Vashon Sustainability.


I had the good fortune to live on Vashon Island from April 2000 til April 2001. It is the rarest of places, an utterly rural island at the doorstep of a large metro area connected by threads of ferry schedules from several points. It might be an interesting study in how a place might evolve if it escapes digestion by sprawl.

I decide to do a few searches to see how its doing and it should be examined carefully as it is evolving into a model of sustainable adaptability at every applicable level it can identify.

It is fairly self contained and has its own charming newspaper, a historical society, a parks commission for its array of nature preserves, an art scene, book stores , thrift shops and all the basics. There is a substantial deer herd and a winery. It even has a couple of bus routes while being nearly perfect for bicycles.

The island's most pressing limitation is water availability, seemingly a contradiction for a wet climate, but groundwater resources are finite and Vashon protects its residents from the added cost of tyeing into the metro water system by careful resource husbandry.

Sustainable Vashon is a good place to begin as it gives you a valuable overview of the fabric of activity. And the levels and variety of activity. Building Circles provides innovative Hobbit-like home design ideas deftly fitted to place, there are biodeisel groups, footprint reduction projects and a ramp up in sustainable farming. They even have a sustainable logging mill work operation that takes downed trees to mill various dimension stock for local trades.

One purpose of this series will be a constant search for models to describe to provide examples of how people are making their sustainability adaptations in their unique places, in this case a second growth Northwest Doug fir biome. The Vashon approach is particularly notable in that all facets are grassroots community based entities. It appears that different residents tackled aspects that held their interests and just had at it. Nearly all of this activity has ramped up in the years since 2001 and the thoroughness is stunning.



Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Free Flowing St. Louis to the Sea.


I think of Lincoln's remark after the Civil War Victory at Vicksburg, (now a likely hydrokinetic turbine site). "And the waters rolled unvexed to the sea.."

I'm fascinated by the potential of hydrokinetics as one of the core solutions for moving past the Oil Era. I particularly like how the application does away with a need for more dams given what we have learned about dam downsides over the years.

Free Flow Power Corporation in Gloucester MA is one of the emerging leaders in this exciting field.

It was founded to produce cheap, clean, reliable, renewable energy from moving water without building dams.

Here are their basic design parameters.

Our FFP Turbine Generator is designed to produce electricity

  • at a cost that competes with conventional forms of generation,
  • without building new dams or diversions,
  • without disrupting the aquatic or marine environment,
  • without interfering with recreational and navigational uses of water resources, and
  • without being seen above the surface of the water.

There are many optimum areas in New England such as the Great Bay in New Hampshire, the Merrimac Mouth, the major river outlets of Maine or the Cobscook Bay area.

There are yield estimates for a full application of the technology to the overall power grid.

"The company, Free Flow Power Corp., is pursuing a $3 billion plan to install thousands of small electric turbines in the river bed, reaching from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico that would collectively generate 1,600 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 1.5 million homes."

"Free Flow Power chose the Mississippi River following a nationwide search in which it reviewed government data for 80,000 potential sites, looking for minimum average river flows of about 6.5 miles per hour. The sites between St. Louis and New Orleans were among the best they found and also are near electricity markets in the Midwest and Southeast, (CEO) Daniel Irvin said."

What's not to like about using water motion without the hazards and wreckage that often attends Dam construction. Somewhere, the ghosts of John Muir and John Wesley Powell can look on and be proud to see us finally figure it out.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Merits of Carlessness.


I have always organized my life around a pre-fossil fuel human scale. I live in cities whenever possible as all other environs in most of America are geared to auto ownership. To me, the advantages of a carless life greatly outweigh the transient inconveniences. For example, there are a suite of expenses from insurance, car loan payments, fuel and repair costs and depreciation that do not impact me at all.

Then I also lose stress from attempting to drive around the area's horribly congested roadways.
It might surprise you to know how many friends I have who also opt for no car or minimal use of the things. And yet they all live fairly productive lives and will be well equipped to handle any challenges ahead as the oil era winds down.

I am also reminded of McLuhan's admonitions in "Understanding Media" on how the introduction of an invention alters how we use our bodies and minds. "The wheel is an extension of the foot and yet the pace of the thing undermines a sense of space and distance. Seeing the world whir by at 60mph is a real affront to primeval perception and attention must focus on exquisitely narrow things to avoid a collision.

And what's to like about rush hour and road rage?

There are a growing number of game plans to shift away from oil but none offer the elegance of simply abandoning personal motor vehicles until some significant oil less mode takes hold. The biodeisel option may not work to produce the real quantities of fuel needed to run the planetary vehicle fleet without causing even more catastrophic problems.


The utter configuration of land use patterns, such as vast car dependent suburbs may well be one of the biggest dislocation hazards staring at us if the Oil era tanks.
More efficient public transit infrastructure will eventually salvage environs like the droll little suburb that once housed me but the real remote places will be left in the lurch.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

The Emerging Massachusetts Sustainability Model.



The Commonwealth is an interesting place to see through the prism of sustainability. The densely populated East is home to the emerging players in the Eco-Tech Field with Spire in Bedford and Konarka in Lowell making strides in photovoltaics. Framingham is home to Ameresco which could play a very valuable role here in waste water treatment conversion I'll describe in more detail below. Gloucester faces the sea well with hydrokinetic turbines at Free Flow and organic soil enhancement from Neptune's Harvest.

And as for wind, there are clusters of wind works in the South Coast and Cape including Aerostar in Plymouth, Aeronautica in Westport and Turning Mill Energy in Sandwich. Two others are in the Boston urban core, Second Wind, in Somerville and the brand new Wind Pole in Lexington.

There are many more in a growing array of fields and it looks to be the earliest break of a new manufacturing wave that well fits the area's legacy infrastructure. And this reborn manufacturing base should be here to stay as the cost of container shipment from the Far East rises with the cost of fuel.

The Eastern Half is correspondingly more problematic and Massachusetts Smart Growth published some findings for major improvement areas in conjunction with a report by the Brookings Institute.The following italicized segments are from that paper by Smart Growth Executive Director Andre Leroux.

"The Brookings report quantifies the most significant sources of carbon emitted by the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2005. Those sources are fuels burned by vehicles (personal and freight) and the energy used in residential buildings. The per capita figures for metro residents do not include emissions from commercial buildings and industry."

"In recent years, state and local governments have taken steps to improve energy efficiency and curb carbon emissions. The federal government, however, has been slower-moving, the Brookings report contends. Federal funding formulas favor highway construction over rapid transit and federal policy fails to promote energy efficiency in its housing policies."

“While many metro areas are taking the lead on climate action, they will be hard pressed to shrink their carbon footprints in the absence of supportive federal policies,” added Mark Muro, policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program and the co-author of a forthcoming Brookings policy agenda to be issued as part of the institution’s Blueprint for American Prosperity, a multi-year initiative to promote metro-friendly federal policy stances."

“Metros can’t go it alone in solving as vast a problem as global climate change,” Muro said.

The more rural West is home to the more advanced inroads to sustainability and grassroots sustainability organizing. It will increasingly see the rebirth of farming and food production and its housing stock has less of a footprint than the vast urban messes of the East. There is substantially more room to decentralize waste and energy streams and also it has sleeping potential to see its own manufacturing restoration.


Housing Stock Retrofitting.


This may well be the most urgent and rewarding endeavor to get the Commonwealth in condition to minimize exposure to peak oil impacts and it is long overdue. The vast inventory of urban legacy rental property, the hundreds of triple deckers and multi unit residences built before World War Two, are often major energy burners.

Because the heating and cooling costs are traditionally passed along to tenants, the property owners rarely have the inclination or incentive to make sufficient efficiency upgrades, The long standing depreciation allowance elements of the tax codes probably further exacerbate the situation. The recent spate of condo conversion during the housing bubble had a useful role in upgrading the impacted properties so some efficiency churning is underway.

But with the collapse of the housing market, the rental sector rises in importance without any corresponding improvement in quality.

"Making our homes more energy efficient, André added, can also have a huge positive impact. Our older housing stock and long winters put Massachusetts cities near the bottom in terms of carbon emissions from residential fuel use."

"The Legislature should complete its work on comprehensive energy legislation before the end of the session and include strong provisions to help homeowners make the state’s older housing stock more energy efficient."

I haven't yet discovered any Eastern Mass. equivalent to the Center for Ecological Technology with offices in Pittsfield and Northampton. It also maintains affiliation with the ReStore in Springfield.

Transportation.

The Boston Metro area within the 495 donut is poorly served by a transit system focused on Boston while seemingly oblivious to the vast population, fully half of the Commonwealth, that doesn't live or work in Boston. It is a wheel without a rim. And within the urban core there has been a significant increase in bicycle use that will only continue without much corresponding accommodation for this bike load on menacing motor congested streets.

The city of Cambridge has taken some baby steps toward addressing the bike load. Certain arterial streets are marked with white lined bike lanes that put bicyclists in across fire between street traffic and the ever present hazard of the parked car door openers. And, from repeated direct observation, it is fairly clear that significant numbers of motorists are fairly oblivious or indifferent to the presence of these white lines.

It could be noted that few of the emerging manufacturers mentioned above are located in the urban core. Few of the conventional manufacturers, retail centers and service sector employers that drive the Commonwealths economy are located in the urban core. Some of the high potential South Coast cities such as Fall River and New Bedford utterly lack robust and cost effective public transportation links to Boston despite an avid interest in promoting these areas for future development.

"According to the Boston Indicators Project coordinated by the Boston Foundation in partnership with the City of Boston and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (www.tbf.org/indicators2004), the number of registered cars rose by 29.7% in Metro Boston, and by 37.4% in Massachusetts between 1990 and 2004. Furthermore, growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) in Metro Boston and statewide has continued to increase faster than the growth in population."

"We need to maintain existing transportation infrastructure and increase investment in expanding transportation choices. The goal is to improve mobility, not restrict it, and increase our options for getting around, such as walking to a park or a school, making it possible to take a bike to work, and offering bus and rail service that is pleasant, clean and reliable."


Source Reduction and Biomethane.

The high public infrastructure costs of the Metro Region form a significant barrier to entry for many start ups. The MWRA is a substantial cost element of locating within its jurisdiction. While significant strides have been made in water use efficiency and source reduction there is room for improvement. Perhaps a reason why water efficiency exceeds energy efficiency in legacy rental property is that property owners traditionally pay the water bill and they are impacted by cost spikes.

The MWRA could readily become a net energy producer by making its sprawl of water treatment facilities into biomethane production facilities. This could be a significant cost offset and contribute to source reduction.


Food and Farming.

This element of the Commonwealth's sustainability potential finds its principle home in Western Massachusetts where bottom up grass roots ventures have much lower barriers to entry and where some of the very finest soil rests on a vast glacial lake bed that extends from Northern Connecticut to Southern Vermont and New Hampshire. The regions many other watersheds often hold extensive pockets of quality farm soil.

The region also has reliable water from seasonal weather patterns that are unlikely to change to arid as climate change drifts where it will. This is a valuable contrast from many regions of the country with depleting water resources.

The Local Harvest Massachusetts search page cites 419 listed entities with a significant grouping in Western and Central Mass. The Berkshires have a dedicated entity in Berkshire Grown.

NESAWG and The New England Small Farm Institute both have a robust presence in the Connecticut Valley and the Central Connecticut River Valley Institute in Shelburne Falls has the proliferation of sustainable farming as its core mission. Touchstone Eco Village is an example of a sustainable farm community in Easthampton.

Eastern Massachusetts hasn't as much room for sustainable farming but Essex County and the South Coast are significant growth areas. The glacial lake soil that first supported farming in the Concord River watershed still carries a few farms and they are likely to be increasingly valuable community assets in days ahead.

This concludes an introductory overview of some of the salient elements that contribute to the Green sector of the Commonwealths economy. Over time I will provide research in detail for a number of these facets and they will become themes in the ongoing run of scribblings.

May it also be a useful exercise in other biomes as much of the transformation to sustainability will see displacement of ponderous fossil fuel Multi Nationals with the more subtle place specific mosiac of Multi Locals.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Slob Chic.




This is an old manifesto of mine that has circulated for a few years but is a useful outlook. I am surprised at how many people under 50 love making their worlds out of found stuff even when they could easily afford to be consumers. And it seems to be growing into an increasingly critical skill in the post fossil fuel world.


With steamrolling consumption bearing down, avid anti consumers will do well to live like Henry Thoreau. From Walden we get this gem, “I’d rather sit on a pumpkin and have it to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion”.

Of course, a bit more grace and vivacity than the priggish Concord Curmudgeon makes the run more fun but his basic premises are sound and increasingly essential to ward off encroaching affluenza.

We aren’t likely to be crowded on velvet cushions but the search for pumpkin options well rewards the effort.

.Henry is Slob Chic’s grandpa but it was a common feature of life as recently as the material starved home lives during World War Two when people just made more of their household stuff because they couldn’t buy it due to strict rationing of nearly anything needed for the war effort.

The aesthetic is grounded in enhanced utilitarianism. A free object from the nations bloated avalanche of castoff stuff is MORE valuable than a store bought object sold to serve the same purpose.

Why give Ikea a dime for shelving when the land provides milk crates, produce boxes, wine cases, boards and such in overwhelming abundance?

A wary look at curbside trash will often reward the searcher with all kinds of usable furniture up to and including a couch. Upgrades are always possible and the rejects can finally resume their trek to the landfill Valhalla or recycle rebirth.

The castaway stuff of our complex and demented material is, by itself, unimaginable wealth to impoverished peoples of the Sahel who make most of their usable stuff from sticks and baling wire.

Consider the plastic milk jug. This thing can be by turns a plant pot, a funnel, lamp shade or furnish good stock for guitar picks or any other purpose suggested by need for the plastic.

With a little imagination and appreciation for a materials intrinsic utility potential as it careens through the trash stream, one can eliminate entire categories of costly consumer clutter and its bite on the wallet.

And, when you move, you can always send it back on its journey to the landfill knowing you gave it a temporary reprieve.


And the best part is the reverse snob gloating one can apply to guests. “Hey, check it out, we just tricked this whole dump out and it did'nt cost a dime, have a glass of the great Syrah we bought with the money while we wait for the steak to come out of the broiler.”

There’s the rub. The best way to rein the heartless corporate world is to stop giving them so much money. Here’s a fun hierarchy.

When you need some consumer thing run this string. 1. Can I scrounge it? 2. Is it in a thrift shop, yard sale or second hand source? 3. Can I get it from a small family owned business or wholesaler?

A thorough Thoreau run down this chain may be the only real power of direct choice we can bring to bear on laissez faire run amok.

You may well discover that the number of things you need to feed the mega hogs maw are few and comfortably far between. That, in turn, lets you save more or work less and reduce your exposure to the other side of the merciless laissez faire coin, that shabby travesty called ‘the workplace’.

And if it catches on we may one day see the pests shrink back from their drive to make little profit centers of us all.

Welcome Canyonlands People.



I'm quite sincere about wanting this space to be as useful as possible so I did a check of Google sustainability groups and a vivacious group based near the Utah Canyonlands graciously welcomed me into their midst if puzzled by why I'd want to.

An important aspect of my idea of sustainability turns on wise adaptation to the sense of place a biome defines. To this end I am looking at elements of a sustainability shift in a moist continental climate comprised mainly of mixed deciduous, mainly, oak forests. It also meets the ocean where it is part of the very southern edge of the boreal littoral, (north of Cape Cod).

Among the elements I identified that would be part of the mix I'd include sustainable farming/permaculture, Biogas production from the huge metro waste water systems or hydrokinetic potential in the currents of the Great Bay, New Hampshire and the region near Cobscook Bay Maine and the Fundy tides.

The absolutely shabby greater Boston public transit system would be another core priority as well as its relations to the region. The large lingering number of shabby legacy structures in the urban core make for a bloated carbon footprint and suggest the critical need for retrofitting.

An urban region that pumps an avalanche of trash needs to move beyond recycling to source reduction of nearly every consumable.

The Canyonlands will have significantly different elements such as water conservation and many potential applications for geo-thermal heating and cooling. The role of wind and solar will be far more prominent. Farming and Permaculture will have different potentials.

Despite the differences in the two biomes, the gathered array of resources here are of value to parties in both areas and so it would go for any discrete biome within the reach of the web.

So Canyonlands visitors, Make yourselves at home and questions are welcome.


Monday, September 15, 2008

The Slow Food Applesauce of Autumn.


Every year at this time, I like to make a ceremonial batch of elevated applesauce. I call it Yankee Ambrosia. It has little resemblance to that one finds in conventional supermarkets. I pick a random batch of apples for flavor add local sweeteners like maple syrup or honey, some raisins and walnuts for complement flavor and plenty of cinnamon and nutmeg. I usually don't peel the apples, I just core them and cut them into fairly good sized chunks.

Then I add a quarter inch or so of water to the bottom of the kettle and let the steam gradually reduce the whole thing to a point where there is still some solid texture to the apple chunks. It is a scratch recipe I learned from my great grandmother and strikes me as quintessence of the slow food concept, a cuisine based on the realities of place.


The NYT recently covered a Slow Food event in San Francisco and I thought it would be a good time to invite my old colleague, Todd Preston to weigh in on his sense of Slow Food and how it changes when filtered through the American outlook.

"It is difficult to describe the "right" way that food production should go. Given world population it is simply implausible to go "organic". Massive tractors and chemical fertilizers have their place.....have you put ketchup on anything lately? Most folks would love to live in a world where the calloused hand of the farmer hands you each onion....this is nice but largely a magazine page dream....I love the farmers market too and this is important....but we love our avocados in January just as much....South America comes through as the planet tilts...at huge expense...Slow Food basically says rediscover your love of pickles and forget about asparagus in November... the dim have hi-jacked this noble effort of course...turned it into their normal yuppie one-upmanship tard parade instead of a bunch of folks recognizing something wrong and coming together in honest grass root partnership and then getting to taste and be nourished by the delicious results..."

"
"Canning....a once home based necessity for survival...has become corporate...a loss of fundamental knowledge....I'm just starting to deal in barrels of tomatoes...but my old school Grandpa tomato jockey knows the scene...Ed Flemming...and we are on the cusp of the San Fernando valley....he has had his thumb on Heinz and others for a generation or two...it just becomes fun after a while....but anyways...with specialization comes knowledge loss...we are not equipped to suffer a large scale power loss....India or China could figure things out in a way we could never fathom...they are closer to shit...if you catch my drift...get hip to the 3rd world vibe."

Slow Food International and Slow Food USA are good start points to learn about a word of heirloom food restoration, agricultural diversity and a sense of place.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Seaweed Sustainability.

I'll use my local area whenever possible to identify sustainable adaptations and one will surely be seeking post fossil fuel fertilizer options. Seaweed harvest has a long history in the coastal regions of Ireland and Scandinavia and the practice is well adopted in Canada.

"Rock Weed" is a very common species found at the lower tide zones from Greenland to the edge of the Mangrove swamps of the South. It has value properties as a compost and as a barnyard feed due to the many trace minerals.

Here in Massachusetts there is probably room for some growth in the harvest of seaweed to supplement CSA farms through out the commonwealth.

It may even become a growth industry supplement to job losses from other fishery declines. As petro-fertilizer increases in price the presence of a valuable option at our doorstep can only become more valuable to make the transition out of the Oil Era. May the Commonwealth one day have something like this as a resource to promote the potential.

Neptune's Harvest is a ready for market range of seaweed and fish emulsion fertilizers made by a division of the Gloucester based Ocean Crest Seafoods. And for those seeking examples of other Irish Seaweed products, Dolphin Sea Vegetable Company might be a fun place to start.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Inelasticity Meets Home Retrofitting.

The Oil Drum featured an essential paper on the relations between gasoline and heating oil prices and the role that demand destruction plays in each.

Gasoline prices can be impacted by use reduction by motorists as they cut back on driving. This is called 'elastic' demand.

A significant part of oil demand is 'inelastic'. Essential operations of oil fueled power plants or home heating have less room for demand reduction and need to be offset by efficiency enhancements or alternative fuel swaps.

In the colder populous old regions of the US such as New England, there is still a vast energy loss from legacy housing stock, particularly in urban areas where thousands of structures remain uninsulated.

This suggests an urgent need to identify housing stock that still isn't up to 21st century potentials and follow with a crash program of subsidy and tax incentive to reach readily attainable efficiencies.

The other side of addressing inelastic demand turns on swap outs and switch overs to post fossil fuels. The city of San Antonio, Texas is an early adopter of using methane capture technology to substantially augment it's fuel mix in a closed loop utilization of its waste water plant.

The movement out of the fossil fuel past wants a mosaic of coordinated efficiencies swap outs to substitute for the expedience of running systems on an unrenewable and increasingly costly option.


Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Welcome to the Sustainability Umbrella.

I've been following the various strands of the growing Green world for years now and concluded a useful hub for all the elements is long overdue. This is a study in enhanced utility and it will have very intensive link resources from the vast growing sprawl of a transformative period in our lives.

The core role model will be James Howard Kunstler.

His essay, The Long Emergency, is to me, astonishingly prescient and should be viewed as an essential blueprint for the most challenging transition of our lifetime.

I fully agree with him that the fossil fuel sprawl mess is at the core of our problem and much of the solution rides on our adaptability and readiness to move beyond the structural underpinning of the fossil fuel assumptions.

It's about accepting a less bloated life and seeking ways to have fun without depending on the toxic toys foisted on us over the years as the bloat world we now embrace will soon pass forever.

We can either be nimble about the transition or kick and scream and suffer. My intent here is to make all interested parties as well equipped as possible to make the transition.