Book Review: You Are Here

I wanted to take a moment to review a book I just read called You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet

I am of mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I think the message is a vital one. The author, Thomas M. Kostigen takes journeys to some of the most environmental fragile and ravaged places on the planet. He shows us directly the outcomes of our actions, the actions we take on a daily basis. It's depressing as all hell. If you want to feel like you should just drown yourself in your Yerba Mate', by all means pick up this book. I know the author means really really well, and his most urgent hope is that by reading this we will feel called to act. Unfortunately, he doesn't tie what he's seeing and experience to direct and very real things that each of us can do. He tries to, but this is where the book falls completely flat.

In some places, he makes sweeping pronouncements that most anyone who would buy this book probably already knows, like "We've yet to realize that the global village people have talked about is for so long is here. Now the question is, how do we all live together and make the best of it?"

In other places, he offers us vague and unachievable aims like "With an oil palm sustainability label on products, consumers could make informed choices about the products they eat and/or buy at the supermarket. It's these types of solutions that will make the difference" So, how exactly am I supposed to get such a label on products, how does that "expose the vital link" between my actions and the outcome (deforestation in Borneo due to palm oil plantations).

But my biggest beef with this book is the shoddy quality of the writing. God, are there no book editors left on this planet?

Check out this "paragraph" for an example:

From an environmental perspective, the past is the best measure of things to come. It always has been. Certain weather cycles exist as they have for centuries. Certain wind patterns occur at the same time each year. On a very basic level, the change of seasons informs us of temperature changes because we've experienced those seasons before. Think about the first time someone lived through winter. I bet the next year they buttoned up.

I dare you to give me the author's theme for that paragraph! What the heck is he trying to say? is something I asked myself frequently while reading this book. Sometimes I had to go back and read a paragraph over to make sense out of it.

Here's another example:

Still, exaggeration and alarmism are too frequent in environmental writings. Like everything, the conditions that plague Mumbai are complicated and consist of many factors, not just one or a few. We are, after all, talking about a society that has existed for five thousands years. But there are parallels and there are consequences, which are very real. We can take preventative steps -- even little ones count.

If not for the political slant of this book, I would wonder if it was ghost written by George W. Bush, so convoluted and confusticating is the prose. And after that last little homily about little steps counting, the author fails to name even one that we could take, to avoid whatever he's talking about in Mumbai. Instead, he jumps right on to another subject.

All in all, this book shows some interesting things. The author has taken bold steps to visit logging camps in Borneo or remote villages in Alaska that are sliding into the sea. But aside from making us all want to slit our wrists in depression, he accomplishes nothing whatsoever with this journey that he takes us on. What I would love to see is real actions tied to the horrific environmental catastrophes that he takes us to.

Bottom line: not recommended. Treehugging, spotted-owl-saving, recycling liberals will be depressed and non-liberals will just be confused.

A Day To Celebrate

The buzz in the air was unmistakable, we ate a hurried breakfast and then walked down the street to our neighbor's house. She had baked coffee cake, my husband brought the french press down to make some more caffeine, and my friend next door had some yummy smelling banana bread. The younger kids played on the floor as we listened to the pre-speech festivities. Another neighbor rushed in breathlessly at 9:00 am to tell us that Obama was already president, since it was noon in D.C., even though he hadn't been sworn in yet. Tears and hugs, and then there it was - Obama saying the words and becoming the next president of the United States. Along with Aretha's hat and scat, Yo Yo Ma, and the touching image of Rev. Lowry seeing the completion of a dream he shared with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not so many years ago.

Wow.

That called for an impromptu inaugural parade of our own, so with pots and pans and a joyful noise being made, we headed around the neighborhood, stopping at friend's houses and whooping it up.

Late that night I walked down to our neighborhood market and there was a veritable hugfest going on. People still in shock, still smiling from ear to ear. I gave and received a few more hugs for this awesome day. We all worked hard to make it so, and as President Obama didn't fail to point out, we have much more work to be done. For today though, we celebrate.

The Out-Of-Time Laundry Approach

We're crazy-busy right now with our robotics team going to the State Championships this weekend in Hillsboro. I'm probably the crazy-busiest of all, given that I'm
A) The Mom
and
B) The Coach.

Poor Wayne just had hernia surgery, so he's not really able to be helpful in any meaningful sense, except for offering suggestions about things that I could be doing. And...um...that's not really helpful. So everything falls on me right now - dishes, food, sweeping, laundry, yadda yadda yadda. The nice thing about having kids this age is that they can pitch in a lot and really help out. There's nothing like being able to say "Could you please go clean the bathroom" and actually having it look clean afterwards (even the toilet!)

Laundry is perhaps the biggest time-killer, especially if you're trying to hang it all out to dry, especially in this damp and cold season when it can take a couple of days to do so. These are the times I'm especially tempted to just fall back on technology and fossil fuels and throw it all in the dryer for an hour or two of spinning heat. But I hit upon a solution that's a good compromise between this and laundry martyrdom. I run a load of laundry, then I take the heaviest slowest-to-dry items and put them in the dryer, but I don't run it yet. I get another load started in the washer and hang the quickest-to-dry items (like my polypro running gear) in the bathroom over the heater vent. The rest goes on the drying racks in the garage. I repeat this with load two and perhaps even a load three. By the time the last load is done, I have a full dryer and I run it with the heavy stuff. So I do use the dryer, but for one load out of three. My laundry work-time is cut at least by 30%, and that lands it in the "manageable" category. That's my out-of-time tip for the day.

Trash Talk

I've been reading this book You Are Here, which I'll write a review of later this week. In each chapter, the author visits a different place on the planet, and ties it into our personal habits and practices. Right now I'm on the chapter on garbage. A quick search of the EPA website reveals this fact about Americans and garbage:

Municipal solid waste (MSW) generation in 2007 declined to 4.62 pounds per person per day. This is a decrease of 0.6 percent from 2006 to 2007. The recycling rate in 2007 was 1.54 pounds per person per day (an increase of 2.7 percent over 2006). Discards sent for combustion with energy recovery remained steady at 0.58 pounds per person per day. Discards sent to landfills after recycling and combustion with energy recovery declined to 2.50 pounds per person per day in 2007. This is a decrease of 2.7 percent from 2006 to 2007

They also noted that:

The tons recovered for composting rose to 21.7 million tons in 2007, up from 20.8 million tons in 2006.

This is all good news - Americans are recyliing more, decreasing the solid waste stream, composting more.

The scary fact really in that whole paragraph is that we still send 2.50 pounds of garbage per person per day to landfills, after composting, recycling, and trash taken out for combustion. 2.5 Pounds. Per person. Per day!!!

So I set out to discover this week how our family stacks up, so maybe we can find more ways to reduce our waste. This week I weighed every piece of compost, recycling, and garbage that went out of the house.

Here's what I found for our family of four for the week:

Garbage: 5.2 Pounds
Recycling: 7.5 pounds
Glass Recycling: 7 pounds
Compost and food scraps to chickens: 15 pounds

For our family, that brings it to

Garbage: .18 pounds per person per day
Combined recycling (glass and other): .5 pounds per person per day
Compost and chicken scraps: .53 pounds per person per day

Not bad compared to the national averages, but I know we can do better. For one thing, if we start making our own kombucha, a lot of that glass will go away because we currently buy it from the store in glass bottles.

Frankly, when I look at the amount of garbage and recycling that our household generates, it seems like a lot sitting there. I'm astonished that the national average is 13 times more garbage per person per day. That's really an incredibly huge mountain of trash per person. Surely we as a nation can do better than that.

So pass the word: weigh your garbage, start a compost bin, reduce the amount of stuff in packaging coming in to your house, recycle more. Let's see if we can get that number down, way down.

Eeeeewwww, You're Drinking Fermented FUNGUS??

I've been scanning the internet this morning for instructions on brewing our own kombucha. I'd long heard about its probiotic properties and decided to try it for myself. Like many people I imagine, my first response was more or less "ick!". But it's an acquired taste and I guess I acquired it. Then I really got to like it. It's kind of like drinking a soda, but without the sweetness, and it's great for digestion and overall health.

Now of course Wayne and Mackenzie also became addicted to the stuff, so we're buying several expensive glass bottles of the stuff a week now. We especially like the Gingerberry flavor from Synergy. Time to make our own! I think I'm going to order this kombucha starter kit from The Happy Herbalist to get us started. You can't complain when your kids beg to drink something this healthy. Even if your daughter has been heard to say "Eeeeewwww, You're Drinking Fermented FUNGUS again???"

Some Great Reading

Here's an excellent post on the No Impact Man blog about heating houses, sustainability, choices, and what it means to "Gaman" ("endure," or "tolerate") in Japanese culture.

Gardening Fashion Tips

So I told my daughter to put on some clothes appropriate for gardening, and this is what she comes up with... in January mind you! Luckily it's not as cold outside as it has been, but I'm still not sure its miniskirt weather, let alone leopard-print miniskirt with cowboy boots weather.

You can rest assured that I was wearing jeans, a thick sweatshirt, and sensible Wellies!

Dark Days Dinner: Last of the Garden

We've been spreading our leaves over the garden beds, so I'm pulling up some of the last of the produce. I was surprised at how good the carrots still looked. I'm planting even more carrots next year if they're going to last this long. They tasted delicious, not bitter at all!

For this weeks' Dark Days Challenge dinner, we had hamburgers (local beef) along with some beets from the garden, the last of the purple carrots, and another pumpkin pie from our garden pumpkins as well. Unfortunately the frost got the beet greens (my favorite part) so we only had the beets to eat.

The Leaf Fairy Arrives

The sound of a dumptruck pulling into our driveway last week was music to the ears of this wintertime gardener. Our city's leaf pickup program lets you sign up for leaf delivery, and this year we ordered five dump truck loads of leaves. This will be the spot we'll be expanding our garden to next summer, so getting it filled in with a nice huge pile of composting leaves is just about perfect.

I'm ferrying some of the leaves to cover our raised beds in the backyard, some will cover the existing garden and mulch the landscaping and fruit trees, and some will get moved to the chicken pen for them to dig through and peck over.
And best of all, since our city uses giant leaf vacuums (the size of street sweepers) instead of requiring people to bag up their leaves, it saves a literal ton of plastic bags from being used in the process.

The only difficult part of the whole process is that when people sweep their leaves off of their property and onto the side of the street to await the leaf vacuums, it can pose a pretty bad hazard to cyclists, so fall accidents on leaf slicks are unfortunately not uncommon.
I'm always extra-vigilant when cycling, especially if you have to divert around a leaf pile and out into traffic.

I have noticed leaf piles springing up in yards all over our neighborhood, so I know that we're not the only house that the leaf fairy has visited this week. It's great to see so many people taking advantage of such a wonderful and free resource. I have to admit that as city budgets get tight, I worry that programs such as this may be the first on the chopping block. It can seem pretty "non essential" to hand-deliver leaves to people all over town. But encouraging self-sufficient food supplies needs to be near the top of the list, and since organic fertilizers and bagged compost are expensive and leaves are free, this can encourage people to become gardeners who may not have the resources to create a spend-to-grow style of garden.

There have been lots of fundraisers lately to save our County extension service as well, which gives free gardening advice and helps with all kinds of questions on food growing, preparation, preserving, etc. I've called the Extension more than a few times with thorny questions and have always gotten great advice. Again, this kind of service seems like it will become more and more necessary, not less, as times get lean and fuel prices begin to rise again.

Why I Love Holiday Letters

Oh I know it's the time of year for all of the grouchy editorialists to bemoan and/or lampoon the holiday letters they get from family and friends. But I'm here to say, even if I'm the lone voice, that I love holiday letters. I love them even if they only tell me about the A that little Johhnie got in choir and not the D he got in Math, even if they tell about Uncle Jim's fishing trip to Mexico and not the fact that he spent a week in rehab, or omit from the glowing accounts of Jennifer's stage debut that she threw up in the costume room from stage fright.

I don't care that it's the "best of" each family's year. I'm just happy to see their faces and hear their exploits (seriously edited though they may be), and am sincerely joyous that they have things to celebrate in their letter. I'm happy that they may have taken trips to tropical places, that their kids are doing outstanding things, or that their puppy is the cutest on the planet. Why not spend this time of year rejoicing in our loved one's accomplishments instead of demeaning them because they don't give us the nitty gritty details of every derailment along the way. After all, those omitted bloopers are all just steps on the same path of the accomplishments that they choose to share.

And having lost a few good friends and family members on the path of my life, people who will never again have the opportunity to send me a corny or even boasting letter, I'm all the more happy to see the ones that do arrive each and every year. So bring 'em on, I say, send 'em to me. Share the holiday joy.

And yes, as this is my "sustainability blog" I know that an e-card might be better than a paper one, environmentally speaking. But I really love the physical act of getting cards and letters. It doesn't happen all that often these days, where an email or text message is more likely to arrive. If we're going to cut down on paper use and mailing, let's tackle all of those endless credit card proposals, junk mail flyers, and the avalanche of political stuff I got this year before taking away the sweet traditions of the holiday cards and letters.

Best Ever Gingery Gingerbread Cookies

From the snowy Pacific Northwest, I send you warm greetings as our days begin to get longer. I hope that the holidays find you with family or friends, community, and plenty of laughter and love. And here's the best gingerbread cookie recipe I've ever found. Everyone at our dessert stop in our progressive dinner agreed that these are the absolute bomb. For an extra good twist, throw some lemon flavoring in the frosting!

3 C. Flour
1 1/2 t. baking powder
3/4 t. soda
1/4 t. salt
1 heaping T. ginger
2 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. cloves
6 T. butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1/2 C. Molasses
2 t. vanilla

Cream butter and sugar together until smooth. Add in well-beaten egg, molasses, and vanilla. Sift dry ingredients and add a little at a time until all is blended. Store at room temperature for 2 - 8 hours, roll out 1/4 inch thick and cut out shapes.

Bake at 375 degrees on greased cookie sheets for 11 minutes. Frost and enjoy!

Getting Progressive

To celebrate the solstice and the return of the light, our neighbors suggested a progressive dinner through the neighborhood. So four families started at one family's house for appetizers, on to another for some yummy salad and a pumpkin-mushroom soup that was divine, then on to a third house for pizza and a spicy red pasta, and then up to our house for dessert: gingerbread cookies and homemade peach crisp. It was such a great idea, and we had a wonderful time with our neighbors. One of our neighbors is a professional storyteller and she had prepared a couple of solstice stories from different places around the world to tell. At our house, I played carols on the piano and several of us sang along. It felt like a kindling of the kind of holiday spirit that really draws people together during this darkest time of the year. We all enjoyed it so much that we're planning to make it a quarterly event on the equinoxes and solstices.

Since we've been snowed in off and on this week, it has really made me appreciate the good neighbors that we have, and the things in our neighborhood that people here have made a priority. When you regularly support a small local food store that carries local foods and has a great little restaurant/coffee shop attached, then when you can't leap in your car and roar off to a big supermarket, you have this great walkable place right there and available. I think our culture has long favored the supposed "convenience" of big box shopping, tons of choices and bulk amounts and shopping once a week over patronizing a smaller more local store. Our store doesn't have the aisles and aisles of stuff that a larger grocery would carry, but by making sure we keep it in business, we're never stranded without close access to a terrific little grocery.

Likewise, our town has invested in a good transit system that serves a large part of our city. So even without the ability to bike, we could still get downtown to the gym and to the library. I wasn't without books or a swimming pool, even though the roads were iced over!

And the fact that our neighbors always come together out on our hill whenever it snows to sled and chat over cocoa or hot tea makes me look forward to these wintry days. One neighbor made big signs that alerted the few drivers to the fact that children were sledding. Snowball fights, sled trains, and sled races abounded as the kids came out to enjoy the wintry weather. It's wonderful to be surrounded by so many nice families and people interested in making a strong and thriving community, whatever the weather.

Dark Days "Special Eggs" and Pumpkin Pie

For this week, I fell back on an easy mostly locally-sourced favorite for our main dish. Our family calls it "special eggs", since that's what my son started calling it years ago when he was younger. I make eggs scrambled with milk, sun-dried tomato pesto, feta cheese, and chives. Each year I've been sourcing more and more of the ingredients. First the eggs, from our chickens starting 3 years ago. Then the goat milk, about a year after that, then the cheese, which I got at the Farmer's market last week, and the chives from our garden. Only the sun-dried tomato pesto is not local, but next year when we grow a bigger tomato crop, I plan on making that myself.


But the tour de force of this week's preparations was a homemade pumpkin pie. I've been skimming the cream off of our raw milk to save for making pie. I picked sugar pie pumpkins to grow in our garden this year so that the ones that didn't get turned into jack-o-lanters could be made into yummy pies. The kids helped pick them, then we roasted the halves, toasted the seeds for snacking, and mixed with eggs, cream, and spices for a pie that the kids pronounced "the best pumpkin pie we've ever had!"

My tip for pumpkin pies: if you have extra pie fillings, pour it into ramequins and bake for a crust-less pumpkin custard. Top with whipped cream or eat plain. Our entire family likes to eat this for breakfast!

Crying Over Spilt Milk

You know the old saying "don't cry over spilt milk"?? That one never made sense to me when I was a kid. I mean, you spill some milk, so what? You clean it up, you go to the store and get another gallon of milk. Big deal.

Now that we're getting our milk locally and only once a week, I would certainly cry if we spilled one of our precious half gallons. As it is, if we use some for one thing, we have to go a little short on something else. Of course, we've still got the option of going to the store and getting some cow's milk for Wayne and I to drink (only the kids are allergic and need the goat's milk), and luckily for us we can actually get local, organic cow's milk in glass bottles at our corner market. People who invented the saying about crying over spilled milk I'm sure didn't have that option. They had whatever came out of the cow, goat, or sheep that day, and that was it.

Now that it's winter and our hens aren't laying as much, eggs are another precious commodity. I dropped one a couple of nights ago coming back from the chicken coop and knew that meant one less egg for breakfast. It may seem archaic to live from hen or goat to mouth as it were, but I also think it brings with it a much greater appreciation of both your food and its source.

Mackenzie just read Old Yeller and its sequel Savage Sam. The picture of pioneer life it paints shows just how tenuous their hold on basic survival was. Their food for the winter depended on keeping the raccoons and skunks out of their corn patch and the wild animals away from their drying salted meat. Any excess milk had to be made into cheese or butter or it couldn't be kept.

I also just finished reading Life As We Knew It, which will really get you to thinking about all the conveniences of modern life, and how well you would cope if they all suddenly disappeared. Would you be making do, or crying over spilt milk? It's a reasonable read if you're interested in how the world might cope without its current transportation system (though that's not really the theme of the book or anything).

Local Meal, Dark Days Challenge

Since my computer crash, it's been hard for me to get time to post about our local eating, but we're still doing the Dark Days Challenge here. Our Thanksgiving wasn't a 90% local meal, but we did try to incorporate a lot of local foods into our Thanksgiving dinner. The best surprise from that was that when you use really great ripe, fresh local cranberries then cranberry sauce tastes AMAZING. It's nothing like that stuff you get in a can, or even the stuff I've made from scratch before. Luckily, Oregon is a major grower of cranberries, not too far from here on the coast. Unfortunately, our local supermarket (who used to be better about showcasing local growers) had bags of Ocean Spray cranberries from Vermont out on their Thanksgiving display! I had to ask where the local cranberries were, and I was so glad that I did. They were wonderful. We also had local greens and veggies, and I made a pumpkin pie from scratch with pumpkins from our garden, cream from our local raw goat's milk, and eggs from our own chickens. The kids proclaimed it the best pumpkin pie ever!

So on to our local meal for this week. I decided to make San Francisco Stew, a recipe from my grandma, it's like a savory chili with some bacon and brown sugar. We're quite lucky here as it's very easy to source a lot of local foods. Our small corner grocery that's a few blocks away sells local grass-pastured ground beef, so I picked up a pound of that. We buy a 1/3 of a pig each year and have it butchered, so that takes care of the bacon.

I was fortunate enough to get in on a bulk order of dried pinto beans a couple of months ago. They're local and transitional organic. Still, they have a fair bit of dirt and rocks included, so first Asa had fun sorting beans from rocks. Then we brought them to a boil and then let them soak overnight.


At our karate dojo, someone brought in a basket of onions and garlic from their garden for free, so those were chopped up and cooked up with the ground beef and bacon.

Last month, my mom told me that if I gathered in all of the green tomatoes from my garden and individually wrapped each one in newspaper and kept them cool, they'd ripen up on their own. So I unwrapped all of my tomatoes and lo and behold had some gorgeous red ones from my own garden. Those went into a pot to boil down into tomato sauce for the stew base.

To this I added the only non-local ingredients: salt, pepper, and some brown sugar (there aren't many local sugarcane sources in the Pacific Northwest! though I might experiment with substituting honey in the recipe in the future).

Along with the stew, we had peppers and purple carrots from our garden (the last of the peppers, but I still have a few more carrots left), and for dessert some yummy homemade applesauce from some windfall apples that my neighbor said I could glean from their trees.

With all of the various ingredients that we were able to grow, glean, trade, or buy locally, I'd say this meal was about 99% local, very cool! I love that this challenge really got me thinking about what I could use from around here.

My Unofficial Bike Count

While gas prices continue to plummet (fortunately at least signalling that we're collectively using less of the stuff), I have been surprised to note that the number of bike commuters has remained relatively high. Even as we head into December and the colder and wetter weather that comes with the winter months, I have noticed an unusually high number of bike commuters on my regular routes.

I usually keep my own personal tally as I commute to work, and as I bike home from the gym in the morning. Two years ago, it was typical to see about 10 - 15 cyclists on my 2.5 mile route (one way). This year, it's about doubled to an average of 32. That's more than one cyclist per block on my route!

What Are You Doing Hal?

Computer crash has got me posting from random other computers right now. So I haven't gotten my description or photos up from last weeks' dark days challenge. Wish me luck with new hard drive installation and maybe I'll get this week's stuff up! We did eat a great local meal last week though. If I had the time, I'd try to do an all-local Thanksgiving, but falling in the middle of our Robotics team end-of-season madness, I don't think I can pull that one off. Still, the cranberries for sure are coming from Oregon, and my green beans will be from my garden.

Farmwife Days

It's no wonder that throughout history, cultures have had enormous celebrations when the fall is winding to a close. There is so much to do in this season of harvest, it can seem overwhelming. Couple that with the fact that our family's schedule is always a little nutty this time of year (due to being involved in the FLL robotics, which schedules its tournaments in December, and with some sort of holiday performance - this year Asa is in a production of Scrooge) and it can be crazy-making. So when I'm not trying to get the kids to various activities, and help them with all of their interests, I'm trying to play farmwife. Clean the chicken coop, bring in the last of the tomatoes before it frosts, make applesauce from all of the windfall apples, try to find screen doors to dry walnuts on, and get the garden beds ready for winter.

I've got lots of thoughts I'd love to give voice to here, about the recent elections, economic woes, the fact that canning is gaining huge popularity again suddenly, victory gardens, and bicycle advocacy, but very little time to type them out. I guess that will have to wait for the dark days of winter.

Definitely Try This At Home

This sounds like a great idea. At the Urban Hennery, they've issued a "Dark Days Challenge" to eat locally. From November 15 to March 15:

The “Rules”:

Cook one meal a week featuring at least 90% local ingredients
You define local - the standard definitions range from 100, to 150 to 200 miles
Ingredients can be things you grew and preserved yourself, sourced from local farms and markets, or purchased at the store
Write about the meals you cook, your challenges finding ingredients, why you’re eating local or whatever else strikes your fancy for each recap. Photos are optional.
Include friends and family in your sourcing and eating as possible

More info and sign up at the Urban Hennery

Truly Spooky

Word.