Micro Dwellings

Home.

This winter I visited the MicroDwell 2013 exhibit at the Shemer Museum in Arizona.  Micro dwellings are exactly what they sound like; less than 100 square foot structures designed to serve a functional purpose using a very small amount of space and resources.  These structures take well to passive heating and cooling, are often portable (at least to the site) and inexpensive to build.  And many of them are just as innovative in terms of design and aesthetic as their full-sized counterparts.

I like the idea of designing small.  I think that smaller living spaces discourage the accumulation of needless possessions, save resources, and improve the quality of life in high population density places.  While the size of these spaces can be initially daunting, consider that small dwellings are not a new idea.  Thousands of people live in trailers, studio apartments, and rented rooms and have for a long time.  Perhaps it is time for us to address some of cultural and climactic challenges with innovative design.

The MicroDwell website and Photograph source:

http://microdwelling.net/

Visit the Shemer Museum Website:

http://www.shemerartcenter.org/

Stone Soup

Hash.

According to a 2012 report released by the Natural Resource Defense Council 40 percent of the food in the United States goes to waste. Much of this is in the production and marketing of pre-packed and pre-prepared foods, and much of it is due to over-sized restaurant portions. But a lot of it just gets tossed from our refrigerators because we forgot to get around to cooking it.

Food waste argues against itself. There are no good reasons to waste food, only good excuses for why it happens. I believe that one of the primary contributors to American food waste is the loss of home life and the domestic art of cooking. Sure, people still make a couple of things here and there, and we will still make a special trip to the store to try a new recipe from the Times, but the art of daily cooking, and the practice of sitting down to eat has been disappearing from our lives since the 1980's. Cooking has become a form of social action.

That we make too much food and then throw it away or let the leftovers go bad is true, but an overlooked and important contribution to food waste is in our food preparation. More specifically, because we no longer cook from scratch or with regularity, we waste more food. Vegetable ends and peels go into the trash or compost instead of a broth. Past-fresh breads and pastries are thrown out instead of cooked into a bread pudding. Leftovers and need to be eaten now items are tossed over for takeout instead of cooked into a improvised hash. Knowing how to prepare our food, what is edible and is not, how long it can be kept, or how to freeze and preserve leftovers or seasonal batches can prevent food waste as well. Do you use the lemon zest before you slice the lemon? Do you remember to toss the squeezed lemon wedges in with the chicken to season it as it roasts?

While food preparation waste may not be the largest contributor to our overall food waste, the NRDC claims that a decrease in our food waste of even 15 percent could feed 25 million Americans annually. Small changes go a long way.

The best things you could be cooking with things you might otherwise throw away:

1. hash
2. vegetable broth
3. sweet or savory bread pudding
4. veggie and cheese spreads/tapenades
5. smoothies and juices

Recipes:

Hash is an dish with protein, veggies and some kind of starch (potatoes etc.) although you can substitute a grain like rice or quinoa.

The New York Times lists lots of simple and delicious hash recipes:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/vegetable-hash-for-an-easy-dinner/

Vegetable and meat broths can be made easily from scraps and frozen until you need them. An easy starter recipe from Frugal Living:

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/makeyourowningredients/r/Vegetable_Broth.htm

Bread puddings are easy and flexible, substitute any kind of bread and add or subtract sweet and savory ingredients.

Ina Garten's Bread Pudding:

http://www.barefootcontessa.com/recipes.aspx?CookBookID=0&RecipeID=813

Veggie and cheese spreads can be made in minutes with bits and pieces of whatever you have lying around. Alton Brown has a great beginners recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/roasted-vegetable-spread-recipe/index.html

Smoothies are almost infinitely variable. Better Homes and Gardens provides a great selection of recipes:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/drinks/anytime-drinks/smoothie-recipes/

Resources/References:

NRDC Report of Food Waste:

http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

A Cloven Hoof

Meat.

In the last few days it has been revealed that large quantities of foodstuffs common in the European markets were labeled clearly as beef when they were, in fact, horse.  Many people have found this upsetting; especially those that have eaten it.

A few observations:

Most religions of the world place dietary restrictions on their practitioners.  Buddhism and other religions object not to the eating of meat per se, but to the needless and dis-compassionate taking of life.  Judaism and Christianity have dietary laws clearly intended as practical guides to food safety, avoiding the ingestion of blood or decomposed meats; the animal must have a cloven hoof.  The Hindus hold the cow in sacred reverence.

We form intimate working and recreational relationships with horses, not with cows.  Horses are easier to ride.  Some cows have horns.  Neither species speaks English.

It takes far more resources to fatten a cow for slaughter than it does to fatten a horse, though neither is especially more or less nutritious.  There are lots of countries, due to climate and resources, that historically have and continue to raise horses for meat.  Many of these countries are modern, and European.  Americans typically pretend they do not know this.

So.

There is neither a better reason to not eat a horse than a cow nor a better reason to eat a cow rather than a horse.  Eating animals is eating animals, at least to some extent.  Cows and horses bear a good resemblance to one another, certainly more so than a fish and a horse.  If you can eat one, you can probably eat the other.

The controversy that is unfolding this week is not about whether or not it is gross or morally and ethically reprehensible to eat horses or even horses versus cows.  This is the illumination of the modern food system.  What should really be making us feel uncomfortable about about this is how difficult it is to determine the original source of the meat.  That the food industry even in such a small geographic region as continental Europe can be so convolute so as to have obscured both the source and the end product.  The real argument no longer lies in how we eat, vegetarian versus carnivore, but in the industry that has come to feed us.

This is what we eat.  This is not happening across the world right now, its happening right here.  We just haven't shined the light.  Be impeccable with your food.  Understand where it comes from and vote with your dollar.  Buy locally, and trust small food handlers.  

To watch video of the wild horses of Oregon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QgYVaHqQQ

To watch a truly distressing portrait of the American cattle industry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhlhSQ5z4V4

A Walk In The Woods

saunterer.

A long weekend and the beginning of summer do a lot to remind us to go outside, breath the fresh air, listen to the birds, stretch our legs, and experience wildness. I think it’s important, amid the beer, fireworks, weenie roasts, and recreational vehicles that mark the American camping experience, to make sure that we do just that, stretch our legs and experience wildness. It’s not often anymore that the majority of us find ourselves away from the crush of noise, information, and development that comes with “civilized society”, and I think our distance from the wild plays a key role in our health and well-being, and our decision making as a people. Distancing ourselves from the wild is part of why we are able to devalue the environment, and that devaluation reveals itself in our politics, policies, and way of life. It allows us to waste resources, diminish habitat, allow entire species to go extinct, and engineer our bodies and our food.

I feel at my most engaged in the environment when walking through it. A walk in the wilderness does more to ease my mind, body, and soul than almost anything else. And it reminds me, in a tangible and profound way, that I am connected to this place, this world, this land, that it sustains me. Thoreau, in his 1862 essay, Walking, had this to say about the value of a walk in the woods, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land… They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”

We can make no progress in the improvement of our daily lives, in the fostering of health, community, sustainability, or peace, until we acknowledge and embrace our connection to the wilderness. Take a first step, take a walk.

To read the full text of Thoreau’s Walking:
http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html

To Read Emerson’s Nature:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html#Chapter%20I

Photo courtesy of:
http://dinabloomphoto.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/edith.jpg

Risky Business

greed.

I am not a businessman. I’m not playing with gender here, because I’m not a businesswoman either, and even if I were, the last six months have proven to me that it’s being a businessman that really counts. I have never claimed to be a businessman, nor do I have any desire to be so, but in my line of work, being as tied as it is to the construction industry, there is an essential and growing need to “do business”. In fact, I, as I am nearly daily reminded by my boss, have no degree or advanced coursework in business. Aside from being reasonably good at what I do and able to write an articulate sentence and perform elementary math functions, I am almost wholly unqualified for business. However, being a geologist, this is not something that has typically been a problem. Until recently.

The recent economic crisis has left my place of work a barren wasteland of empty cubicles and lost bids. The men that remain are largely shells of their former selves, clearly having spent most or all of their adult lives defining themselves by their jobs and paychecks, they are now leading obvious lives of quiet desperation. What remains, before we’ve even seen signs of recovery, are desperate men clinging to the tenants of “business” and convinced that if they proceed exactly as they have in the past, using the same business models, something will change. By necessity, my education in “business” has been rapid.

What I’ve largely learned is this, honesty is not important, not to clients, but particularly not to staff. Neither is humanity nor compassion, employee loyalty is only valued in good times, in bad times, just cut them loose. Preserve, above all else, the profit margin for the owners and the inflated salaries of management. Claiming to be right is more important than actually being right, and the only people who are every really right are the ones with the least actual knowledge of the subject. Salaried and exempt employment in hard times is license to take over the lives of your employees, how about say, going to Texas, unexpectedly, with the flu, for many weeks, to work 90 hours a week and only be paid for forty? Hey, you don’t want to do it we’ll find someone more desperate than you who will.

They say in hard times you see peoples true colors, but in truth, with business there’s only two colors, red, and black. And as far as I can tell, real “businessmen” will do whatever it takes to stay in the black, as long as it poses no threat to their egos, salaries, or established operating procedures. And we wonder how we arrived to the place in which we find ourselves.

I invite everyone to take a moment to inventory your value system, and look hard at what really motivates your decisions and the way you treat the people that you work with and those that work for you. If it’s your mortgage, your car payment, the lifestyle to which you’ve grown accustomed, or professional ego, then the current economic crisis offers you an opportunity to tap out of the fight, implement a new business model, live under a new paradigm. It’s the only path we have to a sustainable economy.

Photograph courtesy of :
http://www.photomediacenter.org/images/Businessmen.jpg

Friday Night Fish Fry

dam.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in conjunction with the Bonneville Power Administration and several other federal and state agencies announced last week that they will resume "Sea Lion removal" along the Columbia River this week. To be clear, "Sea Lion removal" is not the transportation of Sea Lions to alternative habitats without dwindling sources of food or radioactive water, its just killing Sea Lions, either with a rifle if you're a good shot, or by lethal injection (if you're not). Why, you might ask, are we killing Sea Lions? The official story is because they have migrated upriver in search of food, depleting the increasingly fragile salmon population. But really, its not how much salmon they eat, it's that they won't pay $10 a pound for it. So you see, the Sea Lions have to go.

Don't get me wrong, the decreasing salmon population is distressing, both for the salmon and as an indication of the overall health of our waterways. After constructing 25 dams on the Columbia and an additional 250 more throughout the watershed, the wild salmon population has dropped from 10 million to 300,000. The last thing the salmon should have to deal with on their long and treacherous life journey is a natural predator. Besides, this policy clearly reflects an acknowledgment of the impacts of human consumption and energy generation on natural systems while restoring balance between species and promoting biodiversity.

This Little Piggy

bacon.

Its been 16 years since I've had a piece of bacon. For more than half my life and to varying degrees, I have eliminated meat and dairy from my diet. When I was younger it was a choice based on the loosely formulated ethics of myself and my peers. And then it became about nutrition. Now if I'm asked for a reason for not eating meat I say that it's some combination of ethics, health, and habit. A lazy answer at best. But the real reason to not eat meat or dairy, or at least not very much and certainly locally raised, the reason that most accurately encompasses all of the repercussions of this aspect of modern diet, is really very simple.

Not eating meat may just result in world peace.

Meat production and consumption is tied to global hunger, deforestation, soil loss, water quality, class wars, and global warming. As just one example, 70% of U.S. grain and 80% of corn goes to feed cattle, not people, and the World Watch Institute tells us that "Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition between affluent meat eaters and the world's poor."

Not to mention the distressing karmic consequences of our collective and ongoing abuse of the very animals we depend upon for sustenance.

In his essay "The Only Diet for a Peacemaker is a Vegetarian Diet" Fr. John Dear discusses both the tangible and ethical connections between peace and food consumption and ties his discussion to the Christian directive to pursue and propagate peace. He notes that Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tolstoy and St. Francis of Assisi all agree, vegetarianism is a keystone to humanity, compassion, and peace.

To read Dear's entire essay:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/10/10250

To watch the veggie world's response to Paris Hilton's Carl's Junior Ad:

PETA's banned Superbowl Ad

http://www.peta.org/content/standalone/VeggieLove/Default.aspx

Photo Courtesy of: http://www2.journalnow.com/

The Only Diet for a Peacemaker is a Vegetarian Diet, John Dear, Published on Thursday, July 10, 2008 by the National Catholic Reporter

A Good Meal.

potato.

In the 1940's Northern Ireland created a "Grow More Food" program, which included ploughing, planting, and harvesting the land in front of the Parliament building. This leads me to wonder how many community garden plots, tomato plants, stalks of corn, zucchinis, summer salads, loaves of bread, might we cull from the White House lawn or the Washington Mall?

World hunger statistics in real time:

http://www.stopthehunger.com/

Photo by M McNeill18 Mar 1940