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Archive for November, 2006

Daniel Boone, you are parked in a tow-away zone

Thomas Kemp, a local attorney and friend, posted an excert from a Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, who visited an eco-village in North Carolina called Earthaven (post here). His quote from the article gets to the heart of where we find ourselves:

We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand.

This is truth. Our culture, in large part, is focused on consumption. It is the purchase, the checkout, the finish line that matters. The foundations, history, and the true accounting of our technological triumph in retail sales and electric and fuel distribution is for scholars, retirees, or the coffee table.

Thomas has spoken on this topic, with Chris Hardie of Richmond News Review, as it applies to the food we eat and specifically concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). He asks if we need “industrial farming to meet our nutritional needs?” I don’t believe we do, but it certainly distances us from the process of production (that is unless you live next door).

It is partly because our production systems are so efficient that we are so removed from them. Unfortunately, if we allow ourselves too much separation from the pork we eat or the electricity we use, we lose the big picture. We stop valuing the energy, engineering, and effort that gave us the end-product. And we lose the biological connection between the life of the pig and our need for nourishment. We lose the ecological connection between the land stripped for coal and the power line running to our house.

We don’t all need to go back to building water wheels and killing what we eat. We can be more intentional about our choices and examine why we make them:

On the official Earthaven tour, a banker with a small farm who was taking the tour just to get tips on animal husbandry, shook his head at the thought of living by consensus with lots of other people. “That’d kill me,” he said.

What the visitor realizes at Earthaven is how much energy is expended in mainstream culture just keeping other people out of our hair. There’s a reason everyone on the block drives separately to the grocery store. It’s a waste of energy but, arguably, a rational purchase of independence. For the most part, we don’t use energy to be powerful; we use it to be alone

[emphasis added]

Intro to Sustainability Podcast

Last Sunday after meeting, Phil Seybold talked to an audience of 20+ at First Friends Meeting Richmond about sustainability, green building, saving energy and the environment. Click HERE for the mp3. It should play in your browser.

Phil (and the audience) provide a lot of information but a couple of things really stick out: 1) Reducing the energy requirements of your house, i.e. conservation, through the use of compact flourescent light bulbs, effective use of storm windows, and insulation will pay for itself very quickly - on the order of a year. 2) When accompanied by conservation, alternative energy solutions such as solar panels and wind turbines, are much more cost effective than you might think. I have heard a figure of $9/watt installed for solar panels. Looking at our last electricity bill, we used 860 kWh for the month. Divide that by 30 days = 28.6 kWh per day. If the avg. number of peak sun hours is 5 then we would need to harvest 5.7 kW during each hour that sunlight is available. Multiply that times 1.43 to account for system losses** and we come up with 8.2 kW per hour. $9/watt times 1000 watts = $9,000/kW times 8.2Kw = $73,788. A second mortgage! But if we can find ways to reduce our energy use by 2/3rds that figure goes down to $24,571. A new car!

If that is the simple cost of sustainability, and we know it isn’t always simple, then we have a starting place. There is no risk to going down this path. The technology is proven. It is reliable. It makes use of a limitless energy source. There _is_ risk to continue down the path of burning coal to power our homes.

I’ve wanted to upload this for a week now. Thanks to Phil Seybold (Phil, if you have a website send me a link and I’ll add it here), Doug Gwyn and First Friends Meeting Richmond, and the Cope Environmental Center for allowing me to record this. I hope you’ll give it a listen because I think it’s really important to make this a regular conversation.

**Real Goods

[technical details]
The podcast is stored using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Ask me for more details.

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