Electrifying the Eightfold Fence

The earthquake and tsunami damage which led to calamitous events at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan lay plain the futility of attempting to end catastrophic failure through engineering.

There were several backup plans in place to prevent a meltdown of the six reactors at this facility, some of which were dependent on the idea of either having access to the electrical grid – which failed because of the earthquake and tsunami – or else, barring that, to being able to generate sufficient energy for the cooling systems with on-site generators – which failed because of the earthquake and tsunami.

The control rooms for some of these backup systems were submerged in floodwaters; years of careful planning and consideration were rendered completely useless in just a few short minutes of Mother Nature getting up and taking a brief stretch. Between infrastructure (toppled because the land on which it lay suddenly got fundamentally fed up with being where it was), and water (appearing in massive quantities where no water had been before), the engineers in charge of safely operating this nuclear power plant were simply overwhelmed.

Why would a nation like Japan, whose proud civilization has withstood century after century of natural disasters, including earthquakes, typhoons, blizzards, mudslides, red tides, plagues, and volcanoes, put itself in danger by relying on nuclear energy, when one small misstep – let alone the series of missteps which were taken at Fukushima – could cause a bigger disaster than had ever been seen before?

The answer is simple. Japan does not have much in the way of natural resources. They import all of their oil, virtually all of their coal, and most of their raw materials for manufacturing. To be self-reliant, the Japanese have developed an extensive energy grid, of which nuclear power is a major component.

We at Myrtle’s place have been thinking about energy production and consumption a lot lately, and the events in Japan have put a morbidly human face on the question. The catastrophe would have been bad enough had it involved only natural sources of destruction. Entire towns were washed out to sea – the satellite photos show before-and-after scenes that simply defy the imagination.

But because the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle, the story of the Sendai earthquake has become a tragic cautionary tale about the dangers of dependence on centralized energy grids. We say “centralized energy grids” and not “nuclear power” for a very important reason – while nuclear radiation is an easily sensationalized danger, the very palpable fact is that any other sort of power generation plant would have proven equally incapable of dealing with the overwhelming force of shifting tectonic plates and surging tidal waves.

Some other forms of energy production would present their own dangers – petrochemical explosions, for example, in the case of oil or gas powered electrical plants; chemical exposure for coal plants; etc. – and all would have equally been incapable of producing, for the foreseeable future, electrical power on the scale the civilization built up around them requires in order to continue.

We would like to suggest the radical idea that the alternative to imported oil, or nuclear power, or coal, or whatever source is currently being used in whichever part of the industrialized world we are looking at, is not new electrical plants relying upon a renewable resource, or any other sort of energy alternative.

Wind farms, large-scale solar power plants, wave power plants, hydroelectric dams, these are all impressive engineering marvels, and they are all superior to the use of fossil fuels, in that none of these alternatives require spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, but they all also feed the structure which places civilization in danger in the first place.

The alternative to the current energy structure is a different process altogether.

Currently, energy is dispensed from the top down in a centralized model. The “grid” is not really a grid at all; it is a giant plinko game, in which energy is dropped in from the top, usually in the form of a particular kind of fuel (say, oil) which is processed in one central location (say, petroleum refineries along the Gulf of Mexico), and then scattered along various paths, with increasing costs passed along at each of these steps, until it finally falls into a slot (say, the tank of your car).

Renewable energy sources like solar or wind make sense not just because they don’t involve much pollution (which, of course, is a strong argument in their favor), but more because they enable a paradigm shift in terms of how energy is distributed.

Rather than relying on a central electric generation station, energy comes from discrete points such as your own home solar and wind generators, or distribution points much like vending machines. Japan, in fact, had recently announced the creation of many of these sorts of outlets for electric vehicle recharging.

This is hinted at with one of the favorite phrases of the DIY (“Do it yourself”) movement: off the grid. Getting off the grid typically evokes images of a solitary shack in the woods, or even out in the desert of West Texas, where solitary hermits ranging from benevolent Grizzly Adams types to raving lunatics like Ted Kaczynski types, have turned their backs on civilization.

We think these hints are drawn with fear and trepidation, both on the part of DIY devotees and also on the part of a civilization which has grown afraid of its own shadow. Mainstream consumers do not even dream, much less plan, of off grid living, because the image has been sealed off from them. The propaganda war has been won by the fringes; there is no room for this new way of thinking for the vast majority of us, who live comfortably in the middle.

But “off the grid” should not apply only to individuals; it should apply to us all, collectively, not just “also the middle”, but especially the middle.

As it stands now, most large businesses have already made contingency plans to at least temporarily operate in the absence of city utilities – backup generators for their various computer server farms, water storage, cooling facilities, the works – and some have even made the logical leap to installing wind and solar generators to produce at least some of their energy needs on a permanent basis.

Homes, though, are probably an easier place to start. Some homeowners have already begun making the switch to wind and solar power; most specialists in the conversion of domestic buildings to wind and solar suggest that maybe a quarter of home energy needs can be met by sun or wind sources. This, however, is a gross understatement, based on a couple of fundamental misconceptions.

First, and foremost, the engineering of homes is not typically all that energy efficient. We have dark-colored roofing materials, thin walls, windows in the wrong places, and a host of other problems, all of which can either be avoided in construction phases, or corrected when retrofitting one’s home for energy efficiency. Painting our roofs white, or better still, covering them with solar panels or solar tiles, adding insulation and planting sun-absorbing trees and vines in the appropriate spaces in our landscapes, correcting our windows and window treatments, these are all fairly simple steps to take.

Further, our lifestyles can easily be changed to consume less energy. Some changes – like riding a bike instead of driving a car – would be considered radical and difficult. Others, however, like replacing light switches with rheostats, are basic and simple.

Look around your home for any appliance with an LED light that stays lit when the device is off – put it on a power strip, and turn off the power strip when not using the device. Presto! If you are a typical American, you have just cut on average 20% off your utility bill. Really? Yes, really. Televisions, computers, modems and routers, printers and faxes, coffee makers, bread machines, microwave ovens, stereos, DVD players, game consoles, these are all gadgets which expend a lot of energy even when they are technically “off”.

Second, sources of energy like solar, wind, and geothermal do not have to be used exclusively – they can be “layered”. Why would we not fit homes with solar panels on the roof, on the garage or carport, on the fence line, etc., and also set up wind turbines on the roof and in the corners of the yard, and set up a geothermal system to (at the very least) power the HVAC system? Each of these sources of energy are currently available, and in spite of the fact that each is still a speciality niche for highly specialized contractors, each can be had for roughly $10,000 for the typical 1,500 sq foot American home on a .25 acre lot. Given the price of housing, adding $30,000 – which seems like a lot if taken by itself – is not really that much. It seems especially paltry when you add up 30 years of utility bills you won’t be paying, during the life of your mortgage.

There are plenty of examples of fully functional off-the-grid homes the size and scale of a typical suburban house, suggesting that it is possible (given the political and economic will) for houses currently consuming electricity generated at centralized power plants to not use one watt of “grid” electricity.

What would that do to our civilization?

Seriously, stop to consider the implications of not only having an individual here or there off the grid, but having entire communities off the grid. Rather than being pot-smoking, birkenstock and tie-dye wearing, hummus and pita-chip munching hippies, or else crazy pipe-bomb building math geeks with delusions of grandeur, those “off the grid” folk who generate their own power would be your next door neighbors, with whom you have conversations about the weather, or your favorite local sports team, or your childrens' schools.

Picture the next natural disaster – say, a hurricane or a blizzard – and think about all those stories you have heard in the past about so-and-so many thousands of people having to do without electricity for days and weeks and months at a time. Now imagine that at least half, or even just a third, of those people still had power and could help out their immediate neighbors who were not so lucky.

The next natural disaster wouldn’t seem nearly so bleak, would it?

Added to this communitarian idealism lay some tactical and strategic benefit for countries fighting terrorism; Mother Nature is not the only one to target power plants. But suppose, just suppose, al-Qaida or other miscreants wanted to disable our energy infrastructure... and they couldn't, because there was no target? We would be able to survive an attack as a group because we would be meeting our needs as individuals.

The dilemma posed by off-the-grid thinking is just this: far too many people have co-opted this idea, and made it essentially an anti-social objective. Getting off the grid, however, is not something for individuals. It is something for everyone. We must replace the grid with 6 billion individual cells; we must stop trying to give “power to the people” and instead let the people make their own power. We must, in essence, become collectively individual. We must be independent together.

Something of the spirit of this idea is discussed in Laura Ingalls Wilder's “Little House on the Prairie” books. Pa Ingalls makes a frequent point of emphasis in stating that everyone in the American West is “free and independent”; at the same time, neighbors do not think twice about helping each other out with various chores or situations that none of them could survive alone – things like raising a barn, digging a well, surviving malaria, or any of the other menaces pioneers faced.

In the 21st century, in urban and suburban areas all around the world, we are facing a new kind of pioneer difficulty. We live in an interdependent culture, economy, and ecology. What happens anywhere affects everyone everywhere. The benefits of that kind of interconnectedness are obvious, but so too are the dangers. The Kaczynski method of insulating oneself against those dangers is obviously wrong, however. Instead of cutting ourselves off from each other, we must find ways of helping each other regain our status as “free and independent” citizens.

If all of Japan were electrified via solar, wind, wave, geothermal, etc. sources of energy, no one would be talking about whether or not the Fukushima meltdown may prove to be as bad as Chernobyl. Instead, they would be helping each other bury their dead, rebuilding their towns, and moving on.

Pray we all learn the appropriate lessons from this tragedy. We at Myrtle's place have a ten year plan in place to get “off the grid” while still living right smack dab in the middle of the city. Ten years sounded like a long time when we put the plan together, but it gets shorter by the day; hopefully, your family can get started on your own plans soon too.

Happy farming!

Wherein a Good Idea is Laid to Rest....

“An expert is a man who has made every mistake which can be made in a narrow field.”
Niels Bohr

We have a very fine solar-powered textile dehydration unit (aka “clothesline”) in our backyard.  It’s painted the same blue color as the trim on our house, so it is very inconspicuous, even for those who can see it, and thanks to some clever landscaping, that does not include very many people.  Our next door neighbors can see this contraption, but that will soon change, as our new black currants,  blackberries and grapes on the eastern side of the house reach maturity.

So, that part of our laundry de-mechanization has gone according to plan.

However, as we reviewed the budget (both fiscal and physical) this spring, we came to the realization that now just is not the time to invest in a hand-cranked laundry ringer.  The calculus is simple – we have approximately $5,000.00 in capital improvements we can make each year, so we have to budget that money very carefully, with an eye towards return on investment (ROI).  In addition, we are operating at a deficit on time available to work on our various projects.  If we are going to invest more money, it needs to be for something which will give us more produce, or barring a financial ROI, it must give us more time.

Put simply, Mr. Myrtle Maintenance has a day job; between home, chickens, and children (not to mention various friends, acquaintances, and stray needy folk, oh and a home delivery herb business) Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance has three day jobs.  Neither of us has the time or energy at the end of the day to hand-crank that blasted manual laundry contraption.  And the cheapest one we found would have run us several hundred dollars.  Several hundred dollars, and it will increase our time deficit?  No thank you!

We suspect that our willingness to put our money where our laundry is will increase dramatically once our youngest farm hand is old enough to turn the crank.  Child labor laws, after all, only apply to those who would pay their under-aged assistants.  Room and board don’t count, right?  So, don’t expect us to follow through on our manual laundry experiment for at least six or seven more years.

That having been said, our failure to launch on this particular project is an excellent example of balancing personal values with the scientific method in action on a small-scale sustainability project.  Science, remember, is not the art of explaining what we ought to do; it is the art of explaining what is observably true – there are some major caveats to that definition, of course, but we needn’t be concerned with precision here.  Our point is that we must continually balance what is true with what we ought to do about it.

The ancient Greek philosophers were the first recorded rhapsodizers about the tension between mythos and logos – between passions and reason, between Dionysus and Apollo, between DeForrest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy.  However, because the Greeks had their heads in the clouds (or, at the very least, in their wineskins), they pondered all sorts of ridiculous questions which had nothing to do with home and garden.  Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”?  Puh-lease.  How was that supposed to make someone a more productive farmer?

We kid, of course; there is much to be gained from reading Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and the gang.  However, there is a kernel of truth in the notion that the Greeks hid as much wisdom as they uncovered.  Prior to the rise of the Greek pantheon, the most prominent Mediterranean deities had strikingly different personalities from those we know as “Olympian”.  And even the Olympian gods and goddesses we think we know are filtered through 2,500 years of literary interpretation, and may bear little resemblance to the gods and goddesses the Greeks actually worshipped.  For evidence see:  Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or Disney’s Hercules.

Many heavenly job duties were reassigned when the military might of the hellenic peoples overcame the more pastoral sensibilities of the predecessors of the Greeks – and yes, we know, there were some powerful military predecessors, too – just look at the surviving Minoan artifacts on Santorini, provided you’ve got a clear enough head after too many shots of ouzo.  The point, though, is that the number of Greek gods and goddesses imbued with martial zeal and skill far outweighs Greek gods and goddesses imbued with knowledge of home economics, agronomy, or poultry science.

And those who do represent non-military ideals are far different from their predecessors.

Aphrodite, for example, is often considered a hellenized version of Ishtar or other manifestations of prehistoric “Earth Mother” goddesses.  So, too, with Demeter.  And many scholars attribute to the Eleusinian Mysteries – rites related to worship of Demeter and Persephone – ritual elements which seem strangely out of place for a mere “garden goddess” like Demeter – eroticism practiced underground for the purpose of ensuring crop fertility – these folk were clearly cut from a different cloth than the protestant west of modern America.

The division of divine job duties can provide countless hours of fun for those of us who enjoy watching scholars of obscure subjects get into nasty debates no one else can understand, because every classics scholar worth his or her salt is absolutely sure of the position they have painstakingly researched, in spite of the fact that equally qualified scholars with opposing points of view are fairly easy to find; the aforementioned Aphrodite – Demeter – Ishtar comparison, for example, for which of course there is only conjecture, not proof, could get a Greek specialist and a Sumerian specialist spitting at each other by their third respective glasses of wine.

Pardon the tangent – what does this have to do with our decision to keep our electric washing machine, even in the face of our own strong arguments against doing so?

Just this – we struggle constantly not to be trapped by ideology, particularly of our own creation.  Far too often, people are trapped by strong-armed arguments about what ought to be, even when those visions fly in the face of what is.  We have often said “You can be a fundamentalist anything,” and it is true.  We would love to have the perfectly independent “off-the-grid” homestead, but we don’t live in a perfect world. 

Compromises must be made which ensure that the larger vision is retained.  Eventually, civilization as it is crosses the borders of our dream worlds as we think they ought to be.  Ted Kaczynski faced this dilemma when loggers invaded the woods where he had built his survivalist shack; we think he picked the wrong solution to this intrusion on his dream world.  If he’d just swallowed some pride and kept grading papers at Berkeley instead of trying to divide himself from the human race, he’d have a lot more garden space now than he currently enjoys.  As Spinal Tap reminds us, “It’s a thin line between clever and stupid.”

In the case of the Greeks, in the grind of time and changing tides of civilization, we lost the poetry of Sappho, but we retained the recipe for baklava.  You win some, you lose some.  At Myrtle’s place, we have given up on quickly getting rid of all of our electrical appliances; it’s a mistake we have learned and moved on from.  We’re still investing time, sweat, and money in other environmentally friendly ideas, though.  We hope you do, too.

Happy farming!

Rest on Your Own Laurels, not Somebody Else's!

Serendipity, synchronicity, coincidence, and self-organizing behavior are all human linguistic attempts to explain those weird little occurrences which make us all go, in a pre-verbal sort of way, “Whoa, dude, how did that happen?”  Déjà vu, ESP, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and any number of other hokum-pokum, in which we don’t really believe, are nevertheless always on the menu, in spite of our innate skepticism, simply because every now and then, reality benefits us (and, yes, sometimes proves detrimental) in such a way that we take it personally.

“What are the odds?” someone might ask.  The answer, of course, is “100%” because, after all, whatever the weird thing was, hey, it actually happened.  Therefore it was quite probable.  Quod erat demonstrandum, baby.  (Cue the peanut gallery: “Ooh, you speak French!”  and, yes, we stole that joke from Thomas Dolby…)

We had such an episode this past weekend, when our delicious Saturday began with a visit from a new Friend of Myrtle who works for an agricultural education organization we will probably talk about at greater length at some future date (once we have done our research, and gotten perfunctory permission to discuss them by name, though we can’t imagine they would turn down free publicity).  This new Friend of Myrtle brought along a sample of their new educational product, an herb wheel, which is a circle of pictures of herbs, along with a description and a list of uses, both medicinal and culinary.

As it turns out, all of the herbs on the wheel are also in our garden.  All, that is, except for one:  bay leaf.  Those are pretty good odds, really – out of 12 herbs, we had 11.  Not bad, right?  Except that it brought out our competitive streak.  We resolved right then and there that the next opportunity we had, we would search high and low for a bay laurel tree.

It had to wait, however, as we had other visitors on Saturday for whom to prepare.  Our good friends from Austin were coming to town, and we don’t get to see them nearly often enough, so gardening was put on the back burner.

As fate would have it, though, they came bearing a gift.  A gift for the garden.

Yup.

A bay laurel tree, from The Natural Gardener in Austin.  An heirloom variety, no less.  It will have a place of prominence in our herb garden – in fact, it will hardly be able to avoid prominence. 

In pots, these trees seldom grow above shoulder height; ours is not in a pot, however.  It is right in amongst the rosemary and oregano, shaded on one side by the water oak and the house.  Eventually, it will probably reach somewhere between 10-15 feet, although laurel trees are notoriously unpredictable in their growth habits in the wild; conceivably it could hit as much as 30 feet tall, though we really doubt that will happen in our yard – in its native Mediterranean climate, it has the luxury of sending down deep roots through sandy and rocky soils; here, it has to scratch and fight with East Texas clay; it will probably peter out after four or five years of vertical growth, and then settle for being part of the lower canopy.

Image via Wikipedia

Still, this will be the tree around which our other herbs circle.  This will be advantageous in the middle of summer, as the laurel will add shade to our western exposure, and will shield our mint and basil plants from the afternoon sun.

Then, too, there are the numerous benefits beyond our self-indulgent (some might say petulently self-centered) desire to have a complete set of herbs.  Laurus nobilis is an evergreen, which means that in the middle of winter, when the only tree in our front yard which still has its foliage is our young loblolly pine, our rosemary, oregano, lavender, and curry plants will no longer be lonely.  The glossy leaves of the laurel will still proudly proclaim that herbalists live here.

And while most cooks are familiar with the dried bay leaves which adorn so many winter soups and stews, there is much to be said for fresh bay leaves, not only as a garnish, but also as a crushed (or even powdered) seasoning additive.  The whole leaf is typically removed from the dish prior to being served, as it has jagged edges capable of causing some serious gastric distress; however, when crushed, the leaf is perfectly comestible, and adds a subtle depth to most meats and stews. 

The berries, too, are nutritious, and create numerous culinary and medicinal possibilities.  Massage and aromatherapists swear by bay laurel scents and poultices as a treatment for everything from rheumatoid arthritis to hypertension.  The fortunate blend of essential and fatty acids make bay laurel a good addition to a health-conscious diet.

And, really, can anything be more symbolically fortuitous than adding the laurel, which first the Greeks and then the Romans decided was the fitting crown of champions, to the garden?

Except perhaps a giant stone with a sword stuck in the middle, or a totem pole, or a crystal pyramid, or a patch of four leaf clover, or a giant burning wicker man, or…. Well, you get the idea.

Happy farming!