Thoughts on the Season

I've been collecting thoughts on the season that have been accumulating around the edges of my consciousness for the past few weeks.

Here are a few of them:

"Last year, Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas. Clean water for the whole world, including every poor person on the planet, would cost about $20 billion. Let’s just call that what it is: A material blasphemy of the Christmas season."

~Jim Wallace from "The Real War on Christmas," Sojourners

"But I can’t escape this: we have cut ancient trees to give the children big houses. We poison the fields to give them bread. We manufacture toxins to give them plastic toys. We kill village children to give our children world peace. For the sake of the children, we amass wealth by ransacking the world where they will have to live. What kind of love is this?"

~Kathleen Dean Moore from a beautiful and moving reflection in Orion, "What Kind of Love is This?"

And.

In spite of all this, we still celebrate the return of the sun, the passage of the darkest days of winter and the hope that exists in dark, sad times for the return of light and life:

"Hope is not a prognostication — it's an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can't delegate that to anyone else. Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It's not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope."

~Vaclav Havel, from an essay I have returned to several times over the years, including on the occasion of Havel's recent death, "Never Hope Against Hope."

I've returned too to my ruminations on the solstice from two years ago ... a time to notice and know darkness, a time to honor the dark, a time to honor the dead. It is a time to sit with the painful and the difficult things, with loss, with despair. It's the dead of winter.

And: it is the birthday of the sun--the birthday of light in the midst of the darkest time of year. A turning point, the return of the light, a time of transformation, a time of hope, and a time of rebirth.

In many ancient traditions, Winter Solstice is a time to honor the way that life emerges from death, light emerges from dark in the cycles of the natural world. A time to look forward to Spring and Summer and the bright, hot months when everything will be in fruit and flower, imagining what will come to be.

And finally, my favorite recent variation on the theme of pagan origins of modern seasonal traditions, "Santa is a Wildman" by Jeffrey Vallance.

Happy Christmas, happy Solstice, sweet bright blessings for these dark days.

The NEXT C2C revolution: Compost to Compost

I was reading Grit magazine the other day, and came across an article about food waste. I haven't really thought about food waste in a long time. I've composted my kitchen scraps ever since I've had a kitchen of my own, and not wasting food has always been both an economic and an environmental imperative for me.

And through many years of growing, preparing, and savoring food, I've developed what is really an intimate connection with food. When you're intimate with something, throwing it in the landfill doesn't really seem right. So it's been years since I've thought much about why composting is good and wasting food is bad. It just seems like a given. But it's good to revisit the givens from time to time.

According to a study by the Department of Agriculture, a quarter of all edible food in the United States goes to waste. Another study by the EPA found that 30 million tons of food is thrown away every year, with 98% of that ending up in landfills.



Food thrown away by a typical American family each month. Click on the image to see details...

We waste about $100 billion worth of food every year, and we spend about a billion dollars a year to dispose of food waste. Think what we could do with $101 billion! Solar roofs! Health care! Organic food in school cafeterias!

Thinking about all of this reminded me of Pete Seeger's classic rendition of Bill Steele’s Garbage. I probably listened to the version Pete did with Oscar the Grouch hundreds of times with my siblings on the Pete Seeger & Brother Kirk Visit Sesame Street LP back in the day. This is exactly what the album cover looked like. Now I call that successful indoctrination.



Since the days when Pete sang about Mr. Thompson's steak and mashed potatoes heading off to the landfill, things have only gotten worse. The amount of trash buried in landfills has doubled since 1960.

And there's more. I came across a great article by Jonathan Bloom with a lot more information on the environmental, economic, and cultural consequences of our national food-wasting habit. Here's a snip:

"Wasting food squanders the time, energy, and resources — both money and oil — used to produce that food. Increasingly, great amounts of fossil fuel are used to fertilize, apply pesticides to, harvest, and process food. Still more gas is spent transporting food from farm to processor, wholesaler to restaurant, store to households, and finally to the landfill."

Bloom also points out:

"Food rotting in landfills contributes to global warming. Landfills are America’s primary source of methane emissions, and the second-largest component of landfills are organic materials. When food decomposes in a landfill, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. Furthermore, wet food waste is the main threat to groundwater or stream pollution in the event of a liner leak or large storm."

And it can take years for food to biodegrade in a landfill, while it takes weeks or months in the compost bin. And compost is such a precious resource! I hate the thought of perfectly good compost ingredients languishing in the landfill.

So.

With all of the buzz about Cradle to Cradle design, we need to think of a similarly catchy phrase for eliminating food waste and all of the related problems that come from thinking of food as a cheap and disposable commodity. I propose Compost to Compost or maybe Dirt to Dirt (D2D?).

For further reading....

Here's the Grit article.

Here's the Jonathan Bloom article: The Food Not Eaten.

And here's info about public composting programs in North Carolina.

Water catchment, consumer culture, and living systems

AT LEFT: Our 2,500 gallon cistern arriving at its new home!

This tank will hold rainwater for all of our household and garden needs. Every 1,000 square feet of roof catches more than 600 gallons of water per every inch of rainfall.

In this time of drought, more people are thinking about water conservation. But what if local governments, neighborhoods, and individuals looked at water as a whole system? Thinking of water as a "resource" implies that it is a scarce consumer product--a hot commodity--in our economic system. A lot of people pay for drinking and household water, in a paradigm that makes water a consumer product like most everything else.

In the meantime, we treat other water (which is just the same water at a different point in the natural cycle) as "waste" -- runoff, stormwater, and grey/black household water. This water is thought of as something we have to get rid of.

In other words: even if you're doing all of the usual things like turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth, most water systems are based on using energy to move water from place to place, either as a product or as waste. This is part of the whole way of thinking that informs our economic system and our culture: extract resources, create products, transport and distribute them, consume them, and dispose of the (abundant) waste --otherwise known as "the materials economy," otherwise known as predatory capitalism. More on the materials economy at The Story of Stuff and more on alternatives to this model at The Story of Stuff: Another Way.

Anyhow, back to water. In thinking about water systems for our land, we wanted to replace the cycle of extraction, distribution, consumption, production of waste, and disposal with one of conservation and reuse. In our river valley/wetland home, we wanted to shift from thinking of water as a troublesome problem to be battled to thinking of it as a valued life-sustaining ally. We also liked the permaculture idea of producing more resources than we consumed. While we are not technically PRODUCING water, we are capturing it and using it on our site, rather than just thinking of it as something we have to get rid of or bring in from off-site. The water is part of living systems on our land -- and by retaining it, we can use it to support life rather than treating it as either waste or consumer product.

Part of how we're doing this is by making ponds and rain gardens to retain and recycle water back into biomass, or plant life. More on that later.

Once the monster-sized cistern above is hooked up to gutters, we'll be catching all of the water from our metal roof and using it for drinking, watering gardens, bathing, washing dishes, and etc. By supplying household and drinking water from a low-impact collection system on our own home site, we'll be responsible for meeting our own needs in a sustainable way.

By catching water in ponds, rain gardens, and our cistern, we'll drastically reduce runoff, ameliorating stormwater issues and at the same time retaining water to support living systems on our land --gardens, wild areas, human habitat, animal habitat.

VIVA LA CISTERN!

More information:

Harvest H2O.com - the online water harvesting community

Urban Permaculture Guild

Permaculture Principles