Category Archives: Eco-stuff

The Good Life

Carol and I went up to visit Jack and Abbie — Jack is my dad’s cousin. Abbie gave us a little tour of that stretch of coastal Maine. Carol said she had seen a sign pointing to the “Good Life Center,” and asked if we could go there. Abbie said that was only a few miles from their house, and we drove over there.

We drove down the well-maintained but narrow gravel road until we saw a big mailbox that said “Nearing” on it. Back in 1954, Helen and Scott Nearing published a book called Living the Good Life: How To Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, a book which some credit with being a major impetus for the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Nearings had first homesteaded in Vermont, but later in life they had moved to Maine. The “Good Life Center” now occupies what was once their house.

We pulled into the driveway. Carol asked a hirsute young man if we could look around, and he said of course. He even gave us a plastic-laminated sheet of paper with a short walking tour, and then peddled off on his bicycle.

We admired the house the Nearings had built from stone, in a sort of Swiss-chalet style. We looked at the garden, enclosed by a wall built of stone and mortar. The vegetables looked healthy but not spectacular. The small greenhouse, also made of stone, was pleasant to walk through. We looked at the stone outhouse (according to the laminated plastic card, it was the very first structure built on the land).

At the back of the clearing in the woods, we found a round yurt-like structure built entirely of wood, with round porthole-windows, and a strange round cupola. It sort of looked like a flying saucer from a 1950’s science fiction film. The laminated plastic card noted that this structure, called “The Gathering Place,” had been built by someone else after Scott Nearing had died. Inside, it was pleasantly cool, and all the unfinished wood was soothing. We sat and talked about this and that for quite a while.

At last we left. We had spent a pleasant half hour there, but the place didn’t carry the magic of the Nearings’s books. The house was just another house, the garden just another garden. Only “The Gathering Place” had held our attention for very long, and that hadn’t even been a project of the Nearings.

Willie sez…

Biodiesel is a big deal in our household. Carol bought her used VW Beetle because it has one of Volkwagen’s excellent little TDI diesel engine powering it. When she first got the car four years ago, she had to drive to southern Maine or to Chelsea, Mass., to find biodiesel. Slowly, it has become more readily available, and now she can get it at Bursaw’s in Acton, Mass., not far from her co-author’s office.

But now biodiesel has really hit it big. Today’s New York Times reports that long-haul truckers are starting to buy biodiesel because of one very influential man.

[Mike Frybarger] filled up his truck’s 300-gallon tank at Carl’s Corner, a Texas truck stop that is the center of the nation’s growing biodiesel industry.

“I heard about biodiesel on XM Radio,” Mr. Frybarger said. “Bill Mack has Willie come on his show and actually talk to truckers. Before Willie got involved, biodiesel wasn’t well known. But once Willie got behind it, he brought biodiesel to the forefront.”

“Willie,” of course, is Willie Nelson. Seems that Willi’es wife, Annie, bought a VW Jetta with a TDI diesel engine for the same reason Carol bought her Beetle: so she could use biodiesel. The Nelsons live on Maui, where biodiesel has been more readily available than on the mainland, thanks to the efforts of Pacific Biodiesel, one of the earliest successful marketers of the fuel.

Biodiesel pollutes less than petrochemical-based fuels, it does not release carbon that’s been stored for eons, it supports agriculture, and best of all it now has the .

Never too late…

If you missed Pee on Earth Day on Wednesday (as I did), don’t despair! My partner Carol says it’s not too late, because really any day can be Pee on Earth Day. In fact, she writes…

Our official Pee On Earth celebration will take place in three weeks or so next to a beautiful cove in Cotuit, Mass. on Cape Cod.

Pee On Earth Day is a a day to step into your place in the cycle to return nutrients to the earth where plants can use them. A time to put aside our society’s overwrought aversion to this usually pathogen-free human excretion, which is simply the proteins our bodies didn’t use. Put it to work to grow food, fuel, and fiber. Did you know that if we recycled even half of the nitrogen in this country’s urine to grow certain crops on brownfields, we could supply a good portion of our nation’s fuel needs? Think peace.

Here’s how to observe Pee On Earth Day any day of the year:

–Urinate directly onto well-mulched soil, preferably around a tree or hearty plant. But grass is fine.
–Urinate into a container and pour the urine around trees, shrubs and gardens
–Urinate into a container, dilute it with 8 parts water and pour it into a houseplant
–Pour urine onto a pile of leaves or woodchips destined to become soil
–Pour urine into a composter filled with lots of carbonaceous material, such as brown grass.

There will be no lingering odor, especially if the urine is directed to aerated soil with leaves or mulch on top, and likely won’t in any other case. When in doubt, scratch up the soil with your heel to get some air into it before applying urine.

There is no health risk if you come in contact with your own urine. You can’t give yourself a disease that you don’t already have. (However, if you have hepatitis C or leptospirosis, I have different directions for you.)

Happy Pee On Earth Day!

Love, Carol

Me, I’m looking forward to the official Pee on Earth Day celebration in three weeks….

Pee on Earth Day

Today is “Pee on Earth Day,” which is “a day to bring one’s urine outside to nourish plants and save water used to flush toilets, will be June 21 in the northern hemisphere (Dec. 21 in the southern hemisphere).”

This is the second year in a row that my partner Carol has declared “Pee on Earth Day” — yeah, it’s another way to sell her book Liquid Gold, but it’s also a fun idea.

I’m making my plans for peeing on earth here in St. Louis. What are you planning to do?

A tale of the city, part four

First part of this series: link.

As it happened, Jesse McKie’s grandfather went to the same church I did, the Unitarian Universalist church in Concord, Massachusetts. He came up to me once during social hour one Sunday, and said, “Are you on a jury in Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised.

“I’m Jesse McKie’s grandfather,” he said.

I told him since the trial was still going on, we could not talk about the trial, or anything to do with it. So he showed me sketches he had made while he was sitting watching the trial. I remember one quite good drawing of the judge — I no longer remember her name. After the trial was over, we really didn’t talk about it. We would smile at each other and say hello, and that was about it. He died a couple of years later. What could we have said.

I still remember the expressions of the faces of the defendant’s mother and stepfather when we returned the verdict of “Guilty”: expressions that you might have when the nightmare that has you moaning in your sleep suddenly gets much, much worse.

Conclusion of the story…

Cheap Yankee

Not that I’m obsessed with gas prices or anything, but….

My ’93 Toyota Corolla got 37 miles per gallon on the trip up to Cambridge and back. As a cheap New England Yankee, with gas prices hovering around three dollars a gallon, I’m feeling pretty good about that. Sure, a new Toyota Prius would get 44 miles per gallon (as tested in the real world by Consumer Reports), 19% better than my thirteen year old Corolla. But that new Prius would cost me well over twenty grand, whereas my Corolla cost six grand, used, in 1997. So I’m keeping a car out of the landfill, and saving gas, and saving money.

Oh, and I walk to work.

Here’s a case where being a cheapskate is pretty much the same thing as being an environmentalist.

Memorial Day weekend

I’m about to drive up to Cambridge to spend a couple of days with Carol, who has been working up there. I’ll have to fill my gas tank on the way up. Ouch. I can feel the pain in my wallet already. Carol sent me a link to a little online movie about the high price of gas. Be forewarned: the lyrics to the country-and-western soundtrack aren’t exactly polite in places, and you may not want to watch this with your kids. But I’ll bet you’ll be humming the chorus to yourself next time you stop at a gas station. Link

Going to the dump

Yesterday was a brilliantly warm May day. Perhaps a little too warm, for in this ear of global climate change every bit of weather that seems out of the ordinary reminds me (rightly or wrongly) that we’re headed for very different weather patterns over the next few years.

Today, I’m headed off with the First Unitarian youth group on a retreat. We’re going to meet up with the youth group at the Unitarian Universalist church on Nantucket Island. Then we’re going to make a field trip to the dump. The Nantucket dump has some of the best “antiquing” (a.k.a. trash-picking) you’ll find at any dump anywhere. Since landfill space is at a permium on the island, they make a huge effort to recycle everything, and anything that’s remotely useable is set aside so it can be picked through.

So we’re taking a kind of an ecojustice field trip with the youth group. And maybe we’ll be taking a look at the future: already, our consumer society is so glutted with things that you can get just about whatever you want on the used market for free.

After thinking about these kinds of things, I’d be pretty gloomy if it wasn’t such a beautiful day outside.

Perspective

John Bullard, a member of the Unitarian Universalist church here in New Bedford, has a powerful piece on global warming (and the leadership vaccum in today’s world) on the editorial page of today’s Boston Globe. Link

John writes, in part:

Right now we are showing (and our leaders exemplify) characteristics that, in combination, are toxic. We have believed since Genesis that we are apart from nature and our job is to achieve dominion over the earth. We believe we are in control of the earth. What hubris. We are largely ignorant of science, and we hope what we don’t know can’t hurt us. And lastly, we live in denial. This issue of the changing climate isn’t really that big a deal. Arrogance, ignorance, and denial — that is a fatal combination.

What we need from our leaders is the opposite. We need them to know that there is no more important issue than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We need a proper sense of perspective. This isn’t just about Cape Wind. This is about more Cape Winds, everywhere we can put them. This is about nuclear power because the risks from long-term storage of nuclear fuel rods pales in comparison with the harm being caused right now.

When John speaks of leaders in this piece, I think he mostly means political leaders. But I want to extend what he says to religious leaders. Global warming is no longer something religion can ignore — what will our liberal faith do to make sense out of the looming environmental disaster, and how will our faith motivate us to strong and immediate action?