Better Off: one year, two people, zero watts

I just finished reading Better Off by Eric Brende who, a decade ago as part of a graduate project, went from MIT to OTG (off-the-grid) for 18 months with his wife, and amidst it all, new baby.

The book is based on his journals from that 18 month period and has a ton of really interesting anecdotes and observations.  Bottom line: he really never came back to the machine-and-technology world.  He didn’t stay in the zero-watt Mennonite community he joined for the project, but he and his family learned they quite liked a life with very little technology and have over the years built a lifestyle that suits them really well.

The end of the book has an epilogue that is markedly different in tone from the rest of the book in that it takes a sober look at his conclusions–no folksy tales about how and who and why and when in the country. A very stripped down appraisal of the True Cost of how we live–and the True Cost is high, make no mistake.

Interestingly, he gives a nod to the internet he uses at the library and how it allows him to reach a larger audience for trades, barters and such.

It’s worth the read.

In Praise of Mary Oliver

We  heard poet Mary Oliver read from her works at Benaroya Hall here in Seattle last night.  The collection of poems she read spanned her entire oeuvre–an excellent selection.  She read for an hour; it was such a delight to hear her work read in her own voice.  Also a delight was her sense of humor, her humble good grace, her great heart.

Her relationship with the natural world, with the beauty and gift of nature itself, made me feel utterly sane.  I’m not sure what I mean by that, just that I felt at ease and sane by the end of the reading.  Perhaps her call to presence when breathing the sweet air of the morning, or hearing an owl at night, made me feel that there is great sanity in loving the loveliness of this planet we share.  That all the flat screen tvs and  ipods in the world can’t  compete with the  feel of the sun on your skin on a summer day.

Yes, I think that might be it.

Plastic Disturbia

The other day I was paddle boarding around the bay in West Seattle. At this time of year, we have extreme low and high tides, and the slack tide in between tends to be the collection point for a lot of garbage in the water. Even as the day was lovely, the paddling exquisite, I kept coming across a disturbing pattern: big globs of muck that were built out a tangled mess of fishing line, 6-pack ring, seaweed, plastic bags, algae, bungee cords, dead fish, feathers, plastic bottles, unidentified gunk and plastic food containers. The common ingredient: plastic. And there were a lot of these little floating islands.

These congealed half-bio-half-plastic masses are very quickly becoming ubiquitous in our oceans. If the only damage were that of the scenery, I could almost but not quite shrug it off.

The damage is much, much worse. In fact, you could say that what I was seeing off Lincoln Park was just the barest tip of an iceberg.

Sierra Magazine has an article this month entitled “Message in a Bottle” and it’s worth a few minutes to read. Gird yourself, you may not be prepared for the story:

• There is an area off the coast of Japan known as The Garbage Patch, three times the size of Texas and a seeming doldrums where the world’s plastics collect and degrade.
• Don’t kid yourself: plastic doesn’t ever entirely degrade like things in the organic world. Plastic simply breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. Those pieces at some point become indistinguishable from krill and other food sources in the ocean
• This plastic broth is making its way into the food chain; the bellies of baby fish are gorged with the stuff and yet they die of starvation. Adult birds and fish are ingesting it. It’s real, it’s happening.
• One of the main culprits is a thing called plastic nurdles--manufactured plastic molded into small nuggets for easy shipment to manufacturing plants all around the world to make things like that handy blue plastic water bottle, that shovel and bucket your kids play with at the beach, the parts in your car, the caps on your soda, the packing in that new TV (not to mention the TV itself), the plastic wrapper on the grapes you brought to the picnic, the cap on your latte-to-go, your flip-flops, and that bobble-head toy you got at the ballpark. The massive ships carrying these nurdles sometimes lose their cargo, sometimes they accidentally dump large quantities of the stuff, sometimes it just gets loose.

The thing I can’t get out of my head, the thing that haunts me is how much plastic there is. We really don’t even think about plastic as plastic anymore, we think of it as normal. Diamonds may not be forever, after all they are organic structures, but plastic really IS forever. Where will all of this stuff go, this stuff that really IS forever?

In my own little life, we have upped our efforts to decrease the amount of plastic in our lives, but it’s an uphill battle. We reuse our plastic bags and buy in bulk as much as possible, we forego the plastic cap on the latte, we avoid the over-architected containers.

And we have to content ourselves with that. It’s not enough, but it’s something we can do.

The clean-up on this mess will be monstrous; if we started today, we could have 100% employment for decades. The one upside to this is it’s undeniable: the massive three-times-the-size-of-Texas floating islands of garbage are real. You could go there today and be blown away by the iceberg-depth and island-breadth of the mess.

Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy (redux, since there are authority issues running rampant out there)

If you weren’t able to see this before, due to YouTube authority issues, please check it out now–it’s freakin High-Larious.  And Thank You ArnoldDigital for the use of the clip!

Our Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop and Deli

The Husky Deli in West Seattle is local delight.  In the summer, the line for the ice cream counter stretches out the door; you can see kids twirling around on the old-fashioned soda counter stools–you know the kind, round, twirlable–happily licking the drips from their cones and trying to keep up with the melting concoction.

I stopped by there yesterday to get myself a pint of their original Husky Flake ice cream to take home, and the guy who helped me looked a tad older than the usual summer help they get.  I assumed he was part of the familly who founded the West Seattle landmark that the deli is.

Looking around, I noticed some photos up on the west wall that I hadn’t noticed before–they looked to span about 80 years.  I asked him who all the guys were, and he just beamed: “The one to the right of the clock was my Dad. Next to him is my grandfather who founded the deli. The other side of the clock are my uncles and they didn’t do much.”

Then he said, “My grandfather founded this in 1932.”  I marvelled at the timing of this, considering the whole world was in a depression at that point–tough time to be opening an ice cream shop.  I said as much to they guy as he was packing in a generous amount of Husky Flake into the pint container (happy me!).

He said, “yeah, but you know, they got a grant to make ice cream cones that they delivered to the local schools, so they were busy every single day making those ice cream cones and delivering them.”

I asked if that was part of a PWA grant and he nodded, “yeah, the kids were happy, my grandfather was happy–worked all day and night, but happy.”

Husky Deli is still thriving to this day, more than 70 years later.  It’s a strong part of our entire community, and a local gathering place.  It was born in the midst of a crisis but hung on with government help.

That’s small business and government at its very finest. I cannot think of a better example of a win/win situation.

Here’s my question: Can you imagine our current government having the leadership and vision to fund a massive PWA in this day and age?  No, it’s simply out of the question.  The less taxes/small government people who insist they are for the small business man and woman would jettison the idea before it ever saw light of day.  That’s the party of fear, not progress.  The party of small thoughts, not big dreams.

And we would all be the poorer for that approach, because the time is perfect for a massive mobilization of grit and ingenuity focused on the environment and energy challenges.