Leg 1: Permaculture

The first leg of The Plan is the institution of a Permaculture system.  Here are two definitions of permaculture:

1. The design, installation and maintenance of indefinitely sustainable human communities set in balanced ecologies, both urban and rural.

2. Any system of sustainable agriculture that renews natural resources and enriches local ecosystems.

An indefinitely sustainable human community, for us, breaks down into:

• shelter
• power
• water
• food

The second definition listed above is interesting to us because of the phrase renews natural resources.  We want to cover all of the above bases, while actually improving the ecosphere we’re coming into.

Earthships:

• Provide shelter

• Provide their own power:

  • They are solar passive and operate on thermal mass principles, meaning that even in quite extreme climate conditions the internal temperature is constantly between 16.5 and 19 degrees.  This almost or entirely eliminates the need for fuel expenditure for warmth or cooling.

  • They are designed to incorporate solar panels to power electrical devices.

• Provide their own water through rainfall catchment from the roof; this water is then used once for drinking, showering, washing, cooking, once for watering plants in the greenhouse and outside (grey water), before being used a third time for flushing waste (black water);

• Have a greenhouse running the length of the construction to provide growing space for food.

In addition, Earthships reuse tyres and cans, waste products, and thereby clean up the environment around them.

Other things which are Earthships have going for them:

• They make use of rammed earth, a locally available resource
• In principle, they can be built by an owner-builder with a minimum of technical expertise

There is no doubt that an Earthship-type design is an incredibly elegant solution for what we want to do, and we are in total awe of what the Earthship people have achieved and are achieving.  However, we do have a couple of reservations.  These are:

1. Earthships still require a lot of cement, plastic (for waterproofing), and petrochemical-based rigid insulation.  We are not “romantic environmentalists”, who will refuse to build a dwelling if it’s not 100% sustainable.  However, because we believe that the days of easily available plastic and cement are ending, and because item 3 of our mission statement is about educating others (hopefully into the plastic, cement-free future), we would prefer (insofar as it is feasible) to start off as we mean to continue: that is to say, we’d prefer to build with things we know will be around indefinitely: locally made, energy-efficient, renewable materials.  We don’t yet know if it’s possible to build a well-insulated (wool? strawbale?), structurally sound (adobe? cob?), waterproof (???) Earthship without these things, but we really hope it is; and (without wanting to be arrogant) if it can be done but hasn’t yet, we’d like to get the doing of it onto the Earthship agenda.
2. On a more personal level, we know already that most if not all of the funds we hope to have at our disposal will go into buying land.  In the second Earthship book, Michael Reynolds suggests that the way to go about building Earthships is “out-of-pocket”, gradually building over time as funds are available, and we agree.  Because we lack funds for labourers and materials, we’re looking at self-building, and freecycling a lot of our building materials.  All this takes time, effort, and community-building.  We’re very happy to invest those things in the process, but in the meantime, we’ll be living in temporary accommodation for (potentially) many years.  If we organise that temporary accommodation badly, we might end up using a generator for heat and to power machinery, buying in our food (and, worst case, water) externally because all our available time and energy is taken up either by building or by working to finance building, and doing most of the heavy lifting ourselves – we’ve read about many a relationship foundering on the kind of long days and physical labour we’re talking about, particularly if there’s nothing but a tent to go home to at the end of a gruelling day.

The more we think about it, the more we believe that a small, comfortable, quickly, cheaply and easily built, relatively sustainable, well-insulated structure which can serve as a temporary dwelling is an absolutely necessary part of what we want to do.

In providing a near-immediate shelter solution, this structure will give us the freedom to get other, equally essential bases covered, so that the Earthship process can unfold with those systems already in place.

We expect the land we’re going to be able to afford to be remote, and entirely unserviced. That being the case, three things in particular which strike us as vital to do early are:

• establish a permaculture food forest
• start a biogas / heat-producing compost heap a la Jean Pain
• sort out rainfall catchment, even on a temporary basis

Just to be clear, the aim in the medium term is absolutely to build an Earthship.  But at this stage, we think that the first structure we’ll build on our land will be a Superadobe structure.

Superadobe buildings are the brainchild of Nader Khalili, the founder of Cal-Earth. His work has its foundations in fast-to-build, economical, non-expert-buildable, earthquake-proof emergency housing.  The basic premise is that you fill a long (plastic) bag with tamped earth or sand garnered locally, and build it up in courses with barbed wire between the courses to reinforce the structure.  You end up with something like a giant upside down coil pot, constructed on a catenary curve, which forms a dome.  From this starting point you can construct subdomes as you need or want them.

Left unplastered, the superadobe bags will get damaged by UV from sunlight, which will affect the structural integrity of the building after a couple of years.  If they are plastered with adobe, however, superadobe structures are incredibly durable.

The food forest

The other major element of our proposed permaculture system is the growing element.  We’ve done a lot of research into Permaculture food forests, water management techniques (swales etc), animal partnerships, aquaponics, no-dig gardening, topsoil creation, the list goes on.   The idea is to end up with a garden (and, to some extent, animals) that would still be alive, self-supporting, and providing abundant food if you walked away and left the property for months or years. We plan to have our food forest well established within a year of taking possession of land.

We’ve already started here in Holland with a no-dig garden – some might claim we have developed an unhealthy obsession with horse poo.  To those, we say “neigh!”.

 

What’s up

This entry has been longer in coming than I’d like.  I’m finding it challenging to “blog while doing”.  Tips greatly welcomed!

Life in general

I’m currently doing a lot of work towards obtaining permanency in my job.  In one way this goes right against the Big Plan, but for the intervening period it’s pretty essential, in order to amass funds for training and education, for activism in the meantime, for survival in the nutty, nutty system as it stands (which, will we or nil we, we need to do at least for the time being).

Meanwhile, Chloe and I (mostly C) are ramping up the pace of getting the renovation on this place done; having looked at the situation from all angles, we’ve decided to get some help in for some of the more expert, and heavier, work.  By the end of next week, we’ll have the central heating pipes and electrical conduits in the walls, floors or ceilings instead of hanging around looking like a set from the movie “Brazil”; and we’ll have the beginnings of a bathroom, in the sense that the plumbing will be in.  To prepare for this, we’ve been doing a lot of ripping out of wood panelling (which I read today will be recycled into chipboard – not quite sure how to feel about that!), tile and other rubble (recycled into cement, apparently – better than making the bloody stuff from scratch, one hopes!), and freecycling all the fixtures and fittings we can for the bathroom.  We’ve done pretty well: All except tile and shower recess have been freecycled.  We’ve also bought some recycled 1930’s doors to replace the terrible double louvre doors we currently have.

We’re paring down as we go: this week I sold a bookshelf and a secretaire which, while lovely, were simply surplus to requirements.  We also put three of the evil louvre doors up for freecycling, and they went almost instantly, which surprised us!  But there’s a lot more to do: in the process of emptying what will be the bathroom, we’ve become painfully aware of exactly how much stuff we have – I’m a bit embarrassed to have previously been so smug about not being “an accumulator”!  However, we’ve agreed on a policy: no box comes back down from the attic until its contents have been ruthlessly vetted, decluttered and proper homes found for every item.

Mindfulness: walking the talk, starting NOW

At the start of this thinking process, I thought that it would be a matter of living (unsustainably) within the current framework much as I’ve done since moving to the Netherlands, researching, training and lining up for the next stage for as long as we were here, and then going over to genuinely sustainable living in one fell swoop when the moment came.

The more we think and research, though, the more we’re coming to realise that we need to do as much as we can within our current framework, in our current circumstances.  This is for our own sanity; for the sake of leading by example; for exercise in getting our heads around what a genuinely self-supporting life is going to entail; so that we can show all the people we’re currently trying to convince of our seriousness that we are in motion.

We will remain wage-slaves, because we have a mortgage to pay and renovations to complete.  The theory is that the renovations will make the house more valuable, which will deliver us a greater return in the end. We will freecycle, recycle and re-use as much as practicable, but we will use evil energy-intensive, non-eco stuff (paint, cement, plaster) to get the renovations done.  We will be on-grid, using gas and (green) electricity to heat and light our home for as long as we live here.  We will probably continue to buy some food from far away because it’s the only affordable way for us to do it.

Things we’re getting right, right now

While we had the use of a van, we also went and harvested a lot of horse manure for use in the rapidly expanding garden.  For the last couple of weeks, basically all the leafy greens for our salads (of which we eat at least one a day) have been coming directly from the garden, which is exciting.  The first crop of “cut and come agains” is now tending to legginess and bolting, which is expected, so C has just intersown the next batch between the last batch. More on what we’ve learned about food production below.

We are currently eating the last of the meat in the house.  We’re not sure what our next move is: either it will be vegetarianism, or it will be home-grown meat.  We’re researching small-scale aquaculture, and we’re intrigued by (if still inhibited by squeamishness from actually adopting) the idea of keeping guinea pigs as food animals, with their droppings being a source of fish food.  Check out this (somewhat gruesome, but really interesting) vid:

Next week we plan, unless it’s prohibitively expensive, to go over to an organic vegetable packet instead of buying vegetables from the market.  There appears to be an organic farm within 5 km of our home which provides this service.

We have started collecting rainwater for watering the garden, and greywater (from the washing machine) for flushing the toilet.  The rainwater catchment in particular has been an eye-opener: we diverted a downpipe from one half of our roof into a 140 liter SULO bin, and were astonished to note that it was full within 15 minutes of steady (not torrential) rain beginning to fall. We have had two decent rainfalls since we instituted this system, and it’s been more than enough to service the whole garden.

The back yard with newly instituted raised beds

There’s no denying that dipping jugs to water the plants and carrying buckets through the house to be heaved into the cistern and / or used directly in the toilet bowl is a faff.  But a little inconvenience is incredibly worthwhile when you consider that we are now drinking and cooking with our drinking water, rather than mixing it with shit and flushing it away; when you consider that our entire water requirement for the kitchen garden is now being met by the rain we’re catching from our own roof.

Further down the track, we’re looking into allotments; subsidies for solar panels or boilers; creating a permaculture network locally (we have already made one “gardening friend”!).

What else is happening

We recently saw a call for interns on a new Earthship Demonstration project in Montana, beginning in June 2009.  We became terribly excited, Chloe applied for an internship and was accepted, before we really understood the sorts of costs that would be involved in getting to and around Montana, to say nothing of the costs of camping there!

So we’ve had to tell the Earthship folks, regretfully, that it won’t happen this time around.  However, we’re still determined to do an internship, as soon as there’s time, space and money to make it happen.

 

Interlude: the nature of recreation

Even as I begin this entry, I fear that I’m going to come off as a terribly earnest killjoy. Still, I’d love to hear what if any reader feedback there is on this, so here goes!

Today I was reading one of the “lifehacking” sites I’m still somewhat addicted to. I’ve winnowed my subscription list back by about 90%, but some sites, sometimes, have some interesting things.

Today on Zen Habits, there was an article which claimed you could improve your “life balance” by creating a “personal growth map” with the following seven areas:

Spiritual
Intellectual
Professional
Psychological
Physical
Social
Recreational

I had a bit of a play with the idea (using a really good free mindmapping webapp, mind42.com), and managed to come up with some stuff under 6 out of the 7 headings: Spiritually, I’m exploring Quakerism. Intellectually, I’m researching about fifty things. Professionally, I’m developing my voice and doing my job and various projects. Psychologically – well, there are various things I’d like to be doing but am not yet. Physically, I’m walking the dog every day (more or less – I was naughty today, I must admit) and cycling every day, and would like to incorporate swimming at some future time.

Socially – this is an interesting one. Does this mean “hanging out with mates” social, “Facebooking” social or “making a valuable contribution to your community” social? Assuming it’s all of the above, we’re doing some of the first and second and an increasing amount of the third; the third element indeed forms a major part of our plans for the future.

The category I ended up being puzzled by was recreational. Before I go on, I want to be clear that I do know how vital a part of a balanced life recreation is. Promise.

The originator of the personal development map idea was quick to point out that most activities in life would cross between areas of the map. What interested me was this question: is any recreation actually not one of the other things?

Going for a walk is recreational; it’s also good for your physical, spiritual and psychological wellbeing.

Playing a game of soccer with mates is (possibly) all of those AND social.

Reading a book is quite possibly intellectual, or psychological.

Arts, drafts, DIY, gardening: intellectual, physical, social… depending on what sort of thing, any number of the others

Listening to or making music: intellectual, spiritual, psychological, social if done in a group.

Having drinks with mates is recreational; it’s also social.

Facebooking etc – arguably social …

Eating a delicious recreational meal is physically useful and can be social.

Doing absolutely nothing can be restful – physically, psychologically, spiritually.

Interestingly, the only things I can think of that tick the “recreation” box alone are things I’d rather never do again and feel worse about myself when I do do them. These are things like:

Watching crap telly (particularly on my own)
Eating crap food (ditto)
Shopping for things I don’t need
Drinking to excess
Reading crap books or magazines

I think I like doing these things (particularly the first two!), but I don’t. I may crave them, but they don’t recreate me in any meaningful way; in fact, they diminish me. If any of you, dear readers, can think of something that is purely recreational without being simply a waste of time, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I think the personal development map has definite merit as a way of tracking life balance and mapping out future directions, but my version would skip the recreation category. This may seem controversial, but my reasoning is this: every life has some elements that are simply a chore, but I believe a truly balanced life can only be achieved if  a solid majority of the activities that form your day give you some measure of satisfaction and renewal.

 

Our mission

Treading lightly isn’t enough.

Just to clarify, the thesis that will underlie this entire blog from now on is this:

The triple whammy of credit crunch, climate change and peak oil will mean that the current Western capitalist affluent lifestyle becomes acutely unsustainable within our lifetime.

It’s not a comfortable thesis (to this I can attest, having had my head in the sand around it for the last several years). It may even (we hope) be wildly inaccurate. It’s not the intention of this blog to be a rant about how stupid everyone’s being and how doomed we all are if we keep it up – first, there are a lot of much-vilified voices in the desert doing this already. Second, we are in a poor position to point any fingers, given that at this point, we’re still operating within this system. Third, I have never been at all comfortable with telling others how they’re supposed to live.

The aim of this blog is to give an account of what we’re doing and why. You certainly don’t have to agree. For those who don’t, who think that climate change is a myth, that the scientists have the answers to the energy crisis, that the credit crunch will pass, that the above crises are merely a reflection of the trend toward scaremongering and catastrophisation in the media – I recommend watching this video:

Its thesis is applied to the climate change debate in particular, but it can equally apply to the other two. Put very simply, his argument concludes that, if there’s even the slightest chance that the doomsday-sayers are right, the only sensible move is to take some sort of action.

That’s all the arguing I’m going to be doing for our case. Do your own research. Form your own conclusion.

Mission Statement

The next step of our lives will take us out of existing systems and into a future which is more than just “sustainable” – which is actually geared to putting back into the environment and our community more than we take out of it.

our aim is

1) to get our basic needs met – that is to say:

• food
• water
• shelter
• fuel

- without further damaging an already maimed biosphere;

2) to create a system of living which is indefinitely replicable while still incrementally replenishing the environment; and

3) to show other people how to do likewise, and (thereby) create a community based on balance, co-operation, mindfulness and respect.

In order to meet these three aims, we are looking at three “legs” of development:

1) permaculture;

2) permafacture;

3) community-building.

Watch this space for details on each.

Our first steps in this direction

• We’ve done, and we continue to do, immense amounts of research
• We’ve signed up to the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia, Earthship Biotecture and Open Source Ecology’s feeds, to stay current with their news
• We’ve started to get involved in the permaculture and sustainability communities
• We’re gathering arguments so as to put together a really hot proposal for applications for internships with Earthship Biotecture, where you learn intensively about all the Earthship techniques with the folks themselves over a period of some weeks
• We’re planning a visit to the freshly built Earthship right here in Zwolle, the Netherlands
• We attended a (rather ineffectual) sustainable building workshop in order to start learning some building techniques

What we’re getting right, right now

By the standards of your average household, I guess Chloe, Teesy, the Katten and I aren’t doing too badly. We use green power, we cycle, walk and PT it instead of owning a car, none of us has stepped in an aeroplane since we got a mortgage… we’re not buying stuff we don’t need, hell, we’re not buying a fair bit of stuff we actually do quite need. We recycle, of course. We also re-use like maniacs. We are (well, mainly C is, to be fair) in the process of establishing a kitchen garden and a grey water system to water it without using drinking water.

What we’re still doing wrong

Our insulation is non-existent here (the windows upstairs aren’t double glazed, we have no cavity wall insulation or batts), so we’re spending much more on heating than we should be.

We aren’t buying organic, or even local, because it’s either unfeasible, too expensive, or both. This means that almost everything we eat at the moment is hurting the world.

We use a fair bit more water than we need to.

We don’t leave our dogshit on the streets our neighbours have to share with us (this makes us unusual by Dutch standards, it seems!) – but we do put it in plastic bags and dispose of it in the garbage.

We are starting to grow our own food, but for now we’re using non-heritage seeds.

For the much-needed renovations to our house we are using conventional building materials, that is to say plaster, cement, silicone products, solvents, plastics, etc etc etc, all of which is doing harm not only in terms of the miles it has to travel from the place of manufacture, but also in terms of the damage it does to the environment both at the start of its life and (looking into the future) at the end of its usefulness.

We’re moving in a general direction of greater sustainability, but progress is slow and hampered by constraints of budget, location and dependence on existing systems.

Enough excuse-making.  Time – past time – to start changing.

 

The story so far

I hate coffee

- but it does give me one thing: a rather uncomfortable kind of nervous energy, which (on the up side) turns easily over into an urge to write.

So I’ve been meaning to get onto this entry for weeks, but now appears to be the moment, out and about, with inadequate keyboardage, but whatever.

Where to begin? Is it wise to begin at all? Should we be keeping our huge, long-term plan a secret, in case it jeopardises more immediate plans (like hanging on to my job), or in case it doesn’t work and we end up looking like fools?

Ah, who cares.

My life has always been cleft by two strong but largely incompatible urges. On the one hand, I have always wanted to be a Nartist. You know, someone who sings and paints and sculpts and writes and composes, who lives in that culturally rarified sphere. Whose life is devoted to making beautiful things. Of those pursuits, the one I’m best at (by far) is singing, and at a certain point I made a number of compromises in order to pursue the goal (now attained!) to make my actual living as a singer.

On the other hand, I have a (very probably over-romanticised) yearning for a life without waste, without pollution, without wage-slavery or other compromise for financial gain, with environmental activism, building and growing and inventing and re-using and replenishing – preferably in a high-profile, replicable way, so that others who see the coming shitstorm might later stumble along their path slightly less than I on mine. I want a smallholding in a genuinely civil society, where there is co-operation not only between people, but also with the world, with God and/or the Universe – that is to say, living with a clear and constant sense of being _in step_ with the bigger ordering forces around us.

This second path I have more or less entirely neglected – I chose singing. Shelving that other dream, as well as leaving the place where I had envisaged realising it, were two of the compromises I made. At the time it seemed a reasonable enough choice, particularly in view of the fact that, as a lone sometime ME sufferer, many of the things I’d need to do were simply physically beyond my reach.

Now that C is in my life, I’ve had the opportunity to reassess my thinking around that choice. C has played an instrumental role in bringing me back to a sense of accountability around the urgent realities of peak oil, climate change and credit crunch; but increasingly, we’re not just talking about the problems, but actively planning major changes in search of solutions.

We’d like to be operating within three sets of guidelines:

1) Whatever we do should have a positive impact on the natural world around us.

2) We should be set up to meet our own manufacturing needs indefinitely, and without breaking guideline 1.

3) We should deal with the world and build toward the future in accordance with our spiritual leading.

In future entries, I’ll start to outline how we are beginning to plan toward a life that is lived within each of these guidelines.