Monday, June 29, 2009

The Costs of Our Throw Away Economy

The New York Times reported that 3 workers died today at a waste transfer plant in Jamaica, Queens. They went into an 18 foot deep hole filled with 4 feet of sewage decomposing anaerobically and giving off so much hydrogen sulfide that it killed the workers. "According to state records, the commercial plant is run by M. & P. Reali Enterprises, doing business as the Regal Recycling Company. A man who answered the phone at the plant said the company had no immediate comment." The NYT did some pretty lazy investigating to report these rather unglamorous deaths that are a cost of our throw-away economy. Shouldn't we care that the way that we have chosen to deal with human waste (modern plumbing and chemical water treatment) leads to us having 18 foot holes full of toxic sewage in our city's peripherial, low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods?

These fumes were the result of a waste management infrastructure that is trying to cover up the ecological realities of decomposition because the scale of NYC's waste is way too massive for any ecosystem nearby to digest. NYC's sewer system is so poorly built that even a minor rain event will overflow the drainage culvert into the sewage culvert, part of a system called "combined overflow". The two mix together and pour out into the city's waterways as water infused with petrochemical residues from the streets and untreated sewage. On a dry day, the sewage would make its way to a treatment facility. Probability would have it end up at the NYAFCO plant in Hunt's Point, which chemically treats 70 percent of New York City's effluent waste. Finding info online about NYAFCO is pretty hard, similar to the elusive waste transfer station in Queens. It would be hard for them to put up a snazy website like Monsanto, where they cover up the systemic messes they make with photos of smiling kids with dark skin who benefitted from some Monsanto funded community development project.

To mention the systemic messes breifly, I taught fourth graders in a classroom a quarter mile from the NYAFCO plant for two years. It smelled like feces in my classroom as my students took their high-stakes state tests that determine whether the school gets federal funding or gets shut down. This is an example of society literally shitting on low-income students of color, denying them access to the excellent education that their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers have. I do not think it is a coincidence that the neighborhood with the largest waste treatment plant in the city has some of the city's lowest test scores. As Majora Carter (who founded Sustainable South Bronx) puts it, if industrial polluters were operating in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, which is 88 percent white and has a per capita income of $85K, the green movement would have cleaned up industry long ago. In fact it did. Something New Under the Sun by John Robert McNeil talks about American cities in the early 20th Century pushing their industrial factories, especially coal, out of the city limits. Back then, the effects of pollution were immediately visible to people. Soot from coal hovered over the city, coating everything, and causing people to get sick and die. Today, environmental justice is about race and class because the people most affected by industrial pollution are the people of color living in the areas with low property values.

As far as trash, we need mechanical, chemical, and dangerous, exploitive labor solutions to bottle it up, pipe and truck it away from the eyes of the people who created it. NYC trucks 600 tractor trailers full of trash every day out of the city to landfills as far away as Michigan. That is a line of trucks 9 miles long every day! If NYC had a comprehensive composting program, that costly, environmentally destructive, and deadly pipeline of trash would be cut in half.

New York has some work to do to descend from this zenith of consumption and waste. We can start by not collecting our putrescent wastes in toxic cesspools that actually kill the people that have to go into the pools and drain them.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Urban Composting--It Went Anaerobic!

Oh boy.  So, I was keeping our composting kitchen waste on our balcony in a cardboard box with several layers of cardboard underneath it to absorb the draining moisture.  Then I saw a food grade 5 gallon barrel on the street discarded by a restaurant.  I thought keeping the material in plastic with a lid (but poking holes throughout the barrel to ventilate) would contain the insects inside the barrels instead of swarming around our tiny balcony.  I had too much material to fit in one barrel, so I still kept the cardboard box and searched the streets for more discarded barrels with no luck.  After a week of daily rain, things have dried out and the insects are taking over out there.  I had to give up and go buy another barrel.  They decrease the insect swarms, but its a balancing act here.     

Cardboard breaths and drains, plastic does not.  I turned the original barrel to find a pool of liquid at the bottom.  I smelled the retched stench of anaerobic decomposition.  Deprived of oxygen, the microorganisms that decompose the material break it down with a chemical process that off-gasses methane.  The methane in my barrel was sealed in by the weight of the material.  When I turned it, the methane was released...It is a powerful, powerful smell. 

I sat out there for 45 minutes, turning the material to expose it to oxygen and start to dry it out.  I have to let it air out probably for a few days, so the biggest reason why I switched to plastic barrels, to contain the flies, cannot be employed yet.  The barrels will ultimately require more maintenance than the cardboard box to keep them aerobic and not too wet.

What I am learning is that ultra-urban composting (on a 20 square foot 7th floor balcony) is about balancing your priorities.  Consider the labor you want to input, ventilation, moisture level, carbon level, insects, and odors.  

Tight parameters lead to creativity.    

Current Article on Descent

There is a great article out now about the Transition town movement in Orion Magazine, "The Transition Initiative".  They are talking about my jam:  community empowerment through knowledgea and skill building.  "The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called." 

Here is another excerpt:
“The people who see the value of changing the system are ordinary people, doing it for their children,” says Naresh Giangrande, who was involved in setting up the first Transition Town. “The political process is corrupted by money, power, and vested interests. I’m not writing off large corporations and government, but because they have such an investment in this system, they haven’t got an incentive to change. I can only see us getting sustainable societies from the grassroots, bottom-up, and only that way can we get governments to change.”   Yeah!

Read it and let's discuss.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Starting to Explain Descent Culture

A Descent Culture recognizes that we need to transition to more localized and cycled resources in order to meet the needs of our lifestyles.  Clearly, there are huge challenges in the transition because we exist in a civilization addicted to fossil fuels, growing our economies for the sake of growth, and consuming and throwing away as if the resources that allow for our consumption are limitless.  We can promote descent with our personal choices, by advocacy, or by profession, but however we find a Descent Culture we should use guiding ethics to help us and our communities look out for each other.  I like the ethics of Permaculture:  People Care, Earth Care, Redistribute Surplus.

Permaculture is anthropocentric.  We do not want to save the 6,000 species that go extinct every year because we are altruistic.  We want to pay attention to that global pattern because it speaks to the health of ecosystems worldwide, and we depend on ecosystems to support our own species.  We are connected to and in fact entirely dependent on the life-support systems on this planet.  

A good friend of mine recently told me that humans are superior to the rest of nature and that technological advancement will carry us through the current resource depletions and global ecological collapse we are witnessing.  I tried to explain to him how risky and arrogant this notion is.  Why are we betting on inventions that do not exist to save us from our own destruction?  Isn't it more conservative and wiser (let us live up to our species name "homo sapiens sapiens" or "man, the wise, the wise") to work toward a sustainable, or better yet, regenerative species existence?  In other words, it seems smarter to promote the health of the systems that create the resources we depend on.

The introduction of Microcosmos by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan is an articulate response to my friend.  The authors flip the dominant attitude that humans are the supreme creation of nature by saying that actually, microorganisms are far more advanced and important to the health of this planet than humans.  The first forms of life on this planet--originating about 3.9 billion years ago, possibly in a nutrient-rich "soup" struck by lightning, thereby ordering the inanimate chemicals into a structure that was capable of self-animation--were microorganisms.  Very quickly, microorganisms have been developing for 3.9 billion years, while the human species showed up about 2.7 million years ago out of the mammalian class, which is about 70 million years old.  Microorganisms are far more active members in global nutrient and resource cycles and are also incredibly resistant and adaptable life forms.  It would be impossible for microorganisms to go extinct without destroying the self-regulating global life-support system.  Life would cease on Earth.  However, the extinction of the human species is a realistic prospect for the story of this planet, and one that would not necessarily harm other species. 

But lets try to avoid this.  We can be wise!  We can contribute to global ecological health! We can use our heavy brains to thoughtfully manipulate natural landscapes and even regenerate resources as we consume them (a potential vector for new technology).  Descent is an integrated approach to converging crises.  I see the guiding principle for social and economic change as promoting individual and community empowerment.  Extracting wealth and resources from one part of the world and shipping or piping it to another needs to minimized.  Localize wealth creation and cycling.  Let us improve the quality of our food, air, and water by relying on ecologically responsible systems.  At the core of our businesses and organizations should be a care for human health and life-support system health.  Not limitless profits (see Biomimicry as a Business Model).  

The problems are systemic.  Descent Culture solutions are systemically minded but locally or regionally geared.  This idea is not new, it is espoused by many organizations and part of mission statements all over the world.   Descent Culture is unique because it promotes human empowerment through low-tech, low-cost solutions to large problems.  Let us teach each other what we are wise about, to promote homo sapiens sapiens, and lets build our confidence do things we have not been trained to do.  Build a compost bin, tune your bike, retrofit your plumbing to redirect greywater, build a lean-to greenhouse and start a garden, ferment your own sauerkraut (like my sister just started doing) or honey wine, build a cob oven and bake your own bread.  Take action toward a Descent Culture!

      

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Urban Composting Continued

I returned to our apartment after being away for almost three weeks to find a lot changes on the balcony.

I started composting I think in early May. After my trip, the compost had definitely "matured". It was teeming with fruit flies, so I had to move it to the back of our tiny balcony, as you can see in the photo below. It had not been touched since I left. The material had condensed considerably, all of the moisture collected at the bottom, and it smelled like parts of it were decomposing anaerobically, which means without oxygen. This means unpleasant odors. I turned everything over and added carbon to try to achieve the desired moisture level of "a wrung out sponge". My girlfiend, while supportive of this endeavor, does not want to share our small balcony with dozens of flies. I might have to donate it to a local large scale composting operation...

On the bright side, our herb garden is now a vibrant place of green growth. I was initially concerned because of its north facing orientation and tall buildings all around that allow very little direct sunlight. It turns out that this is a decent spot to grow our garnishes.



A month ago I took seeds from a store-bought tomato, pepper, and lemon and planted them in containers. They are all coming up. Lets see if the tomatoes and peppers will be able to fruit.

Children Starchitects in Harlem

My good friend Michael Klein, co-creator of the Critical Educator Network (an amazing new organization that is tackling the achievement gap in the crucial arena of teacher training and development), invited me into his classroom at Harlem Link Charter School to do a series of lessons on architecture.



I set up the premise that we as community members did not design the neighborhood we live in, so there are probably elements that we do not like. Here is our chance to design a neighborhood that we can be happy living in. The students are designing our own homes, learning basic model building skills using chipboard and elmers and training them to think that they have the power to influence the environments in which they live, work, and play.



My internship at Yestermorrow Design/Build School helped me recognize how important it is for non-professionals to have an understanding of architecture and building. It does not take much training to be able to troubleshoot a domestic plumbing system or design and build an addition onto a house. Many people just do not have the confidence. Confidence is derived largely from our ability and the messages we receive about our ability, both factors that good teachers can change.

Who wants that confidence, though? We exist in a consumerist society that values being able to buy our way out of these problems. Knowing about plumbing if I am professor or a waiter does not help me achieve the dream. The problem here is that this disenfranchises us because we depend on "experts" or machines to make, install, and fix the things we depend on. Teaching children to be critically aware of the environments they live in is part of Descent Culture because it empowers us to know and to act.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Peak Oil and Descent

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is a pretty decent intro book describing the urgent problems surrounding peak oil and what life will be like transitioning away or rather down from oil. He really is a descent author.

Peak oil is the critical issue that creates the descent imperative. While coal, nuclear, and renewables all need to be a part of our descent discussions, oil is the dominant resource in our industrialized civilizations. Human civilizations are depleting global oil reserves at a rapid rate, about 31 billion barrels every year are pumped up from the earth's crust and piped, shipped, and trucked mostly to centers of population and wealth. This number is increasing as wealthy nations increase consumption every year and China, India and the rest of the globe's peripheral countries develop competitive petroleum based economies.

What does 31 billion barrels mean? According to Kunstler, our planet had stored 2 trillion barrels of liquid oil before humans started burning it. As of the year 2005 humans had extracted roughly 1 trillion, or half. Half is the tipping point. Peak oil happens when half of the oil in a reservoir has been extracted.  Reductively speaking, the second half requires more energy and is more expensive to extract.  Furthermore, it is just impossible to pump out every barrel. Once half has been reached, production gets more expensive and slows down, wreaking havoc on our economies because they are completely addicted to oil.

So, if the current level of 31 billion barrels stays constant and there are no new reserves discovered, our civilizations will use the 1 trillion barrels of liquid oil remaining in about 32 years. That means that it took 150 years, from 1859 until 2009, to reach one half and now the second half will be gone in 1/5 of that time. The difference between 1859 and 2009 is that now the world is forced to support more people consuming more based on models of growth that ignore ecological realities. We will not be able to extract all of the remaining reserves because at some point in the extraction of the second half of reservoirs it will take more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. That's a serious problem. We also have a global economic climate that promotes growth as inherently beneficial. China alone poses annual threats to global oil production because its economy grows 9 percent every year and its oil consumption grows commensurately.

That was long winded but important. It takes a few years to assemble the global data on oil reserves, so a true understanding of what we have left is only acheived in hindsight. This hindsight played out with U.S. peak oil production when geologists and markets discovered in 1971 that U.S. oil had peaked the year before. It is likely that global peak oil has already occurred, sometime in the last 8 years. This is the hypothesis of current geologists who are in the Hubbert and Deffyes camp. It is not in the interest of oil companies--who hold the information about global reserves--to be factual or transparent about what our addictive societies depend on to sustain false growth. On January 9, 2004, Shell revealed that it had exaggerated its reserves by 20 percent, or 4.5 billion barrels. OPEC regularly makes statements that it can increase production to meet global demand, but does not follow through possibly because its fields are reaching peak.

But what if we discover lots of new oil? That just won't happen. Our current production relies on fields discovered before 1964, the year when the rate of global oil discoveries peaked. The largest OPEC reservoirs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that provide the world with most of its oil were discovered 70 and 57 years ago respectively. We just are not finding new reserves that can promise to yield significant amounts anymore, and do not think that it is because the oil industry, backed by the governments of wealthy nations, are not trying hard enough.

But what about the 3 billion barrels in the Alberta tar sands? To start, the ratio of energy produced to energy expended there is 2:1.  That compares to 28:1 in the Texas oil fields of 1916. The oil extracted from the tar sands is dirty dirty oil and requires a messy and corrupt operation to extract it. Locals' voices are silenced as the noisy machines pollute the air and water and raise respiratory and immune system problems in surrounding communities. The sands have to be dug up and piled high, denuding landscapes and killing ecosystems. Then the oil has to be extracted and intensively cleaned to produce a product that is only good for asphalt. Our addicitive economies relying on this miniscule amount of dirty oil is equivilant to the following anecdote: An alcoholic walks into an old pub and asks for a beer. "We're out," says the bartender. "But if you want, you can tear up the carpet that has been here since we opened and probably squeeze out enough spills to fill a mug."

There is much more to say on the topic of peak oil.  Last month, I read Crude by Sonia Shah and I just checked out Powerdown by Richard Heinberg from the library and I hope to write more soon.  However, to finish and bring back 31 billion:  the U.S. with less than 5 percent of the world's population consumes 25 percent of its oil, or about 7.5 billion barrels every year (that is 20.5 million barrels every day!)  The U.S. is at the tippy top of this spike in human energy consumption and will soon be descending the energy dependence of our infrastructure, industry, and lifestyles.  I want to prepare for this descent with realistic urgency, intelligent research, discussion, and creativity.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Suburban Permaculture Laboratory

I just got back from a whirlwind tour of the Midwest, stopping in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio to spend time with my parents and old friends. I built a compost tumbler at my parent's house to convert their kitchen waste stream into a resource. The tumbler does not require a pitchfork to turn the pile, will not attract foraging mammals, and can generate finished compost quickly. I used gas line pipe as the crank. My parents will add their kitchen waste regularly, but every couple of weeks RNK here will come out and turn the crank to mix up the material, providing oxygen to the areas that have been settling. Occasionally aerating the material re-activates the thermophilic bacteria that decompose what has been collected, thereby speeding up the composting process.



I also helped my dad plant 12 grape plants to start his vineyard. They are fruiting less than 3 weeks after planting.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

O.I.L.

Two Tidbits.  Fit them into your synthesis of the world how you see fit.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq back in 2003, the USA Today published the mission as Operation Iraqi Liberation, known for short as OIL.  It was quickly changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Before serving in the Bush Administration, Condoleeza Rice worked for Chevron and sat on their Board of Directors.  Chevron appreciated her contributions to the company so much that they named a double-hulled tanker after her, the 129,000 ton Condoleeza Rice, registered in the Bahamas as part of a policy called Flags of Convenience (FOC), which I will discuss more in later posts inspired by Crude by Sonia Shah.  (Quickly, FOCs allow wealthy nation's oil companies to register their ships in other countries with lower taxes and less stringent safety requirements, saving oil companies billions of dollars.)  


Chevron changed the name of the  Condoleeza Rice in April of 2001 to Altair Voyager in order to "eliminate the unnecessary attention caused by the vessel's original name."    

 


Biomimicry as a Business Model

Michael Shuman's The Small Mart Revolution is largely a response the dominant economic paradigm of non-place based, big business as the only viable model for doing business in the era of globalization. Shuman calls this model TINA (There Is No Alternative) and pitches the case for a LOIS (Locally Owned Import Substitution) model. Here are some key thoughts that I took from this book:

Not only is it socially and ecologically destructive to support TINA businesses (reason enough for me to support LOIS, but much of the U.S. cares more about the bottom line of profits), it is just factually incorrect that TINAs enjoy competitive advantages because of their size, structure, and ability to search out ever cheaper labor and infrastructure. Every year U.S. taxpayers pay $50 billion in local and state taxes because officials offer subsidies to attract TINAs (Wal-Mart, BMW, Citibank, Whole Foods, Verizon, Home Depot, Boeing, etc.) to set up shop on their communities. This same advantage is not offered to local small businesses because we do not need to entice locally owned businesses to stay local. When TINAs move in, they promise a certain number of jobs, revenue, social contributions, and the beginning of a long lasting relationship with the community. They usually do not fulfill those promises and will move their operations in a matter of years if cheaper opportunities are available elsewhere. This means that the community's investment in tax dollars quickly disappears unless they cough up another impressive subsidy to encourage the TINA not to leave town. In addition, federal business tax code allows businesses to write off the costs of moving and can declare taxes they incur in foreign countries as U.S. tax credits, making the costs of moving completely FREE!

The dominant paradigm justifies TINA social and ecological destruction over the ethical benefits of LOIS by saying that TINAs can offer lower prices, that is the bottom line for Americans. However, as we can see, the price tag is false. The price tag is further falsified when we look comparatively at local wealth creation.

A group of economists from Civic Economists did studies that showed that locally owned businesses have higher economic multipliers than TINAs, meaning they contribute more dollars that cycle within the community and create more jobs that are more permanent. They did a study in Austin, Texas with a Borders and two local bookstores. They found that for every $100 spent at Borders, $13 circulated in the Austin economy, while they local bookstores circulated $45, three times the economic multiplier.

Then there are the societal costs of paying for workers because our leaders set up a system that further increases the price tag of the TINA model. Last post I referenced the stat that taxpayers spend $2.5 billion per year on welfare assistance to Wal-Mart workers alone. Does anyone have stats on the combined welfare bill for workers of McDonald's, ADM, Campbell's and the like? Here is my synthesis: Politcal and business leaders work together to set minimum wage levels. Then large businesses pay their workers low wages and do not provide benefits. The government uses social programs to pay for the basic needs of the wage earners. This means that because wages are set so low that workers do not have access to the basics, everyone has to front the bill for the difference. This seems to me like yet another example of corporations being allowed to shirk responsibilities and putting the actual costs of doing business on the citizens. This takes away my right to support businesses I like and boycott ones I do not like. Whether I like it or not, I have to financially support businesses that have unfair practices with my taxes.

The economic free passes enjoyed by TINAs are allowing these businesses to grow without natural limits. Limitless growth simply does not exist. All growth is within the context of the characteristics of the organism and its environment. Promoting limitless growth may only hurt small local businesses and small community wealth at first, but the TINAs will also start to hurt because only one species is being cared for, not the whole system.

Some trees do grow very tall. Some are short. Trees have different characteristics. These are bold statements. Some companies, because of the characteristics of the products or services they provide, might promote community health and wealth as large companies. I am not sure what might be: telecommunications and electronics, airplanes, power generation, table saws, book publishing? However, most companies do not need to be absolutely enormous, especially food growth and production and construction materials. Starting a descent culture for these two industries would contribute enormously to the health of our communities and the life support systems on this planet.