#19 Winter 2012 Green Living Journal

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A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment c GreenLivingJournalpdx.com d Winter 2012-2013

Contents

Issue 19 c Green Living Journal d Winter 2012-2013

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Publisher’s Page Getting from Here to There...............................................5 Local Notes . .........................................................................6 Energy - My Saudi Arabian Breakfast...........................8 Building A Platinum Home for the Golden Years . .............. 12 The Earth Advantage Institute ................................ 14 Transportation - Fuel from Plants............................. 15 Electric Vehicle News Mr. Graunke and his Dream Car .............................. 17 RE-World Re-Art: Block and Sons iPad Holders...................... 18 Eco-Fashion Wearable Food Trimmings ........................................ 19 Health - Sauna for Life ................................................... 20 Recycle - The Mysteries of Recycling: Part II........... 22 Gardening - Savoring Suburbia ................................. 24 Food - Make 11 Miles of Carrots ................................. 26 Education - Place-based Education ....................... 27 Book Review- The Nature Principle........................... 30 Classifieds . ........................................................................ 31

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Green Living Journal P. O. Box 677, Cascade Locks, OR 97014 Publisher: Columbia River Press LLC PDX Editorial Team: Katie Cordrey, Gary Munkhoff Susan Place 541.374.5454 gary@greenlivingjournal.com Advertising: Susan Place 541.374.5454 crads@greenlivingjournal.com Prepress/Graphics/Ad Production: Katie Cordrey iByte Company info@ibytecompany.com 509.493.1250 National Editor: Stephen Morris ed@greenlivingjournal.com Webmaster: Michael Potts Michael@thepublicpress.com Distribution : Ambling Bear, Portland Pedal Power Cover Photos: Oats and Raspberries via tumblr, Bio-trimmings Buttons courtesy of Hoyan Ip, Carrots courtesy of Kim Hack Printed: with soy-based inks on recycled paper by Signature Graphics.

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Copyright Š 2012 Columbia River Press LLC The Green Living Journal Family is Proud to be a Member

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A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment c GreenLivingJournalpdx.com d Winter 2012-2013

Publisher’s Page Getting from Here to There

Issue 19 c Green Living Journal d Winter 2012-2013

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By Gary Munkhoff Americans have to be the most mobile people in the history of the world.

Whether by plane, train, automobile, bus, ship, bicycle, motorcycle, scooters or whatever, we are constantly on the move. If our founding fathers were writing the Constitution today, they would have to include our right to be mobile in the Bill of Rights.

We also have to be the most comfortable people in all of history. We are kept toasty warm and cool as cucumbers thanks to the energy provided by the sun, wood, electricity, fossil fuels, and geothermal sources.

Comfort and getting around are just our normal way of life, and we rarely give either one of them a second thought.The bad news is that we have reached a point where we must now give serious thought to the consequences that our mobility and our comfort are having on our world.

They are both dependent almost exclusively on the energy derived from the burning of fossil fuels - a lot of fossil fuels. The fact is that we are burning fossil fuels at such an enormous rate that we are degrading our personal health, our national security and the very web of life that supports us all.

Unfortunately, there is no quick fix, but there is a long term solution for our deadly addiction to fossil fuels. Spelled out in Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute is a realistic course of action that would have us completely off of oil, and down to one-third of the present day need for natural gas by the year 2050. Their plan does not require any new technologies, subsidies, or new laws, but it does require us to overcome our natural tendency to procrastinate and to make some minor financial sacrifices.

A few folks have already decided to do something about the amount of fossil fuels and energy that they are using, and, yes, they are making financial sacrifices. As you read about Gail and David Nemo’s new home and Gary Graunke’s dream car in this issue, give serious thought to what they are doing. They are proving that we can reinvent fire if we have the will to do so.

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Local Notes

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Upcoming Earth Care Summit to Explore “Living Waters” Interfaith Network for Earth Concerns, a project of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, is holding its fourth annual Earth Care Summit on Jan. 28, 2013. Join individuals and congregations from around the state to learn about greening resources, be inspired by speakers and each other, and enjoy a seasonal dinner with old and new friends.

The theme of the summit is “Living Waters.” The event will explore the water issues we are facing on global, regional and local levels, and provide practical ideas on how to address the issues at home and in your congregation. The event will include an optional tour of the green features of the host site, St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Beaverton (12405 SW Butner Rd.), which is the steward of a wetland and forest on its grounds and recently completed a remodel with green features.

The summit will also include a keynote address, a congregational case study, and roundtable discussions on a variety of topics including: water and worship, caring for watersheds, and climate change and water. The event will be held from 5:30 to 8:45 p.m., with a building tour offered at 4:30 p.m.

Groups from your congregation, organization or schools are encouraged to sponsor a table. Dinner table (seats eight) co-sponsorships are $200 or $120 for students.

Regular registration is $25/person or $15/student.

For more info: http://www.emoregon.org.

Turning a Brown Field Green The land at NE 82nd and Siskiyou has a checkered past.

It is a former landfill, capped in 1982. Many of those living and working in the Madison South and Roseway neighborhoods have seen this area attract unwanted activities and

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attention. The site has remained derelict, despite its tremendous potential for the neighborhood, city and region.

The Dharma Rain Zen Center, a Soto Zen Buddhist temple, sees great potential in the Siskiyou property for a new campus that is sustainable, beautiful and benefits their congregation and the neighborhood alike.

They plan to create an attractive, compatible, low-impact campus that serves the community. They will: • Restore the 14-acre parcel to a vibrant, biologically sound and diverse state, removing the plentiful invasives, designating a third of the site as habitat areas and naturescaping the entire site. This will form a wildlife corridor between the Rocky Butte/Gateway, Green/ Grotto habitat complex and the Roseway Golf Course/ Madison High School/Glenhaven Park complex.

• Protect the health of the watershed by minimizing infiltration of rain through the landfill and prevent the leaching of landfill contents into the aquifer.

Rather than just paving the entire site, which would be the default, they will do this by rainwater harvesting from rooftops and driveways, and extensive plantings and bioswales.

• Maintain the methane abatement measures currently in place.

• Utilize green building methods, guided by a green design philosophy.

• Improve neighborhood connectivity, safety and beauty by encouraging collaboration between Dharma Rain’s membership, local citizens, non-profit groups, public agencies and private enterprises on aspects of the site development, such as paths through the site.

• Create public gathering areas, and a residential co-housing complex that are models of sustainable, community-oriented and multi-generational design.

For more info: http://www.dharma-rain.org

A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment c GreenLivingJournalpdx.com d Winter 2012-2013

Local Notes Portland Supports Urban Gardens

work (GO!), which is working to connect businesses and consumers who want a healthy future for the Gorge. GO! hosts Gorge Green Drinks, a monthly networking event that highlights green businesses in the Gorge. GO! is a project of the Columbia Gorge Earth Center.

Auction: Nov. 23 - Dec. 9 For more info: GorgeOwned.org/Local/Auction

Tidy Up Your Kitchen Compost

Take the GO! Local Challenge!

Shop the Gorge this holiday season and be rewarded with prizes and good karma.

On November 15th, the Gorge Owned Business Network (GO!) will launch its second annual GO! Local Challenge, aimed at raising awareness about the benefits to the community when people shop locally. How does the Challenge work? Spend at least $50 with three local businesses or nonprofits in the Gorge, complete an online form, and get entered to win prizes.

For more info: http://GorgeOwned.org/Local

What are you giving this year?

Looking for unique items from Columbia Gorge businesses, wineries, breweries and more? The GO! Local Holidays Online Auction makes it easy to find locally made goods and services for every local on your list. Proceeds from the auction benefit the Gorge Owned Business Net-

For more info: http://kitchencompostcaddy.com 503-206-5665

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On June 13, 2012, Portland City Council made a significant step toward increasing access to healthful, affordable food for all Portlanders by adopting the Urban Food Zoning Code Update. The new regulations address community gardens, farmers markets and market gardens, as well as alternative food distribution methods such as community sponsored agriculture (CSA) and food buying clubs.

Because even a small cost can be a barrier for some, this proposal has very little in the way of permit fees, land use reviews and the like. Almost all activities will be allowed outright if standards are met.

This action puts Portlanders in position to take advantage of the ideas proposed by Roger Doiron in his article Savoring Suburbia that begins on page 24 of this issue.

Illustration by Rob Gisler. Reprinted Here Courtesy of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability

Along with the Portland residential composting program came the beige compost collection bin that was supplied to all residents. It is large, takes up a lot of the counter top, and is not very attractive.

Jeff Evans found the use of the pail unergonomic and cumbersome. He wanted to find a way to mount the bucket under the counter and to latch the lid in the open position. This way a person could scrape food scraps into the bucket from a more convenient height, and peel vegetables directly into it. While preparing a meal you would be able to easily toss food debris into the bucket, all with the lid latched in the open position. Then with a flip of the latch by your finger, gravity should drop the door closed and you could shut the cabinet door. He also wanted to get the bucket off the counter, out of sight, and use a space under the sink that is underused.

Jeff decided the Kitchen Compost Caddy should offer an optional basket, located beneath the bucket, for storage of compostable bags.

His final thought was to do something about the foul odor coming from the bucket, which would get even worse in the hot summer months. He cured the problem by offering a replaceable activated carbon filter mounted to the underside of the lid to neutralize the odor and to absorb the smells of the decomposing food.

After several designs and prototypes, Kitchen Compost Caddy is ready to make your composting easier. Designed and manufactured here in the Pacific Northwest, the Kitchen Compost Caddy could be coming to your kitchen soon.

Energy My Saudi Arabian Breakfast

By Chad Heeter

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Please join me for breakfast. It’s time to fuel up again.

On the table in my small Berkeley apartment, this particular morning, is a healthy looking little meal – a bowl of

photo courtesy of Flickr member zane.hollingsworth

imported McCann’s Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet’s Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a café in downtown Berkeley, I’d likely have to add another $6.00, plus tip for the same.)

My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So, for just over a buck and half an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I’m energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I’ve just added a little butter, milk, and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.

Then, what you’d be likely to see – what’s really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) – is about four ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (another three ounces of crude), and don’t forget those modest additions of butter, milk, and salt (another ounce), and you’ve got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.

Now, let’s drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does this tiny gusher of oil actually come from?

(We’ll let this oil represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.)

Nearly 20% of this oil went into growing my raspberries on Chilean farms many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields of County Kildare, Ireland, and that specially raised coffee in Guatemala – think tractors as well as petroleum- based fertilizers and pesticides.

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Energy

Issue 19 c Green Living Journal d Winter 2012-2013

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The next 40% of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging, and shipping. Take that box of McCann’s oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness – a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices.

Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns, and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann’s website illustrates each step in the cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting, and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes.

Those five essential steps require significant energy costs.

Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which is in turn inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my “breakfast” leave Ireland and travel over 5,000 fuel-gorging, CO2-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California.

Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood.

Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps hints at a birthplace in the good old Cascade Mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped “A Product of Chile,” tells all – and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.

If you’ve been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you’ve noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been accounted for. That final 40% of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, the chilling in refrigerators and the cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might imagine. For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming, and finally disposing of it.

The “caloric input” of fossil fuel is then compared to the energy available in the edible product, the “caloric output.”

What they’ve discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of over seven calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food.

This means that in eating my 400-calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have “consumed” 2,800 calories of fossil-fuel energy.

(Some researchers claim the ratio to be as high as ten to one.)

But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me only a few calories of energy, but to process just one pound of coffee requires over 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy – the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or around two and a half pounds of coal.

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Energy So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food? First check out how far it traveled. The farther it traveled, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg’s Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it required. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.

By now, you’re thinking that you’re in the clear, because you eat strictly organically grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations though, the manner in which food’s grown is where differences stop. Whether conventionally grown or organically grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed, and chilled the same way.

Yes, there are some savings from growing organically, but possibly only of a slight nature. According to a study

by David Pimentel at Cornell University, 30% of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional (non-organic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer. This 30% is not consumed on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced in very close proximity to the farm.

Manure is a heavy, bulky product. If farms have to truck

bulk manure for any distance over a few miles, the savings are eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel. One source of manure for organic farmers in California is the chicken producer Foster Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for example, will have to truck tons of Foster’s manure from their main plant in Livingston, California to fields over one hundred miles away.

So the next time we’re at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only where and how this product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped? Well, if you’re in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from Nova Scotia, maybe it’s not such a bad question. But should we give up on organic? If you’re buying organic raspberries from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel cost is too great, as is the production of the greenhouse gases along with it. Buying locally grown foods should be the first priority when it comes to saving fossil fuel.

But if there were really truth in packaging, on the back of my oatmeal box where it now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into this product. On a scale from one to five – with one being non-processed, locally grown products and five being processed, packaged imports – we

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Energy

Energy Chad Heeter grew up eating fossil fuels in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. He’s a freelance writer, documentary film maker, and a former highschool science teacher.

(This article appeared previously in “The New Village Green” by the editors of Green Living Journal, published by New Society, 2007. A limited number of this very cool little book are available for $15 from Green Living, 100 Gilead Brook Road, Randolph, VT 05060. Includes shipping and handling.)

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could quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet. From this we would gain a truer sense of the miles-per-gallon in our food.

What appeared to be a simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries, and coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a Toyota Prius hybrid – by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by the end of the week I’ve still eaten the equivalent of over two quarts of Valvoline. From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast as a waste of precious resources. And what about the mornings that I head to Denny’s for a Grand-Slam breakfast: eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage? On those mornings – forget about fuel efficiency – I’m driving a Hummer.

What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, as well as into its future, when these non-renewable resources will likely be in scant supply. Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I’m not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled thousands of miles around the world to reach my plate. But then there’s the rise of perhaps 600 million middle class Indians and Chinese. They’re already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and the taste of foreign flavors. What happens when middleclass families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast, topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They’ll dip more and more into the planet’s communal oil well. And someday soon, we’ll all suck it dry.

Building A Platinum Home for the Golden Years Part I: Planning

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By Gary Munkhoff and David Nemo

Introduction

In his book Reinventing Fire, Amory Lovins realistically shows how the U.S. could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels by 2050 using the technologies that are available today.

A growing number of forward-thinking people are already moving towards a fossil-fuel free lifestyle by making use of photovoltaic panels, electric drive cars, super efficient homes, and by walking, bicycling and using other alternative transportation options.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), our homes and apartments accounted for 23% of the total energy consumed nationwide in 2010. The bulk of this energy is produced from the burning of fossil fuels, and its cost averaged out to $2,024 for each and every household in 2009. A reduction in the amount of energy that our homes use would be a win - win situation for both the environment and our pocketbooks.

In this issue, and continuing for the next several ones, we are going to bring you Gail and David Nemo’s story of building their retirement home using a whole different set of design criteria. Criteria that would drastically reduce their home’s environmental foot print, and at the same time, make the home more comfortable and healthier to live in. What the Nemos have created, using their thoughtful personal goals and their mindful concern for the environment, is a home design, that with wide spread adoption, could move us towards Lovins’ goal with a sense of elegant

simplicity.

The Neno’s have designed a sensible home of the future in which the investment focus is on advanced sustainable living technology rather than on grandiose and expensive architecture. It has the appearance of being a conventional home built on a lot in an established Portland neighborhood. This is a home that would appeal to a large segment of American homebuyers.

Getting Ready

In 2008, Gail and David were a few years from retirement, but were starting to make plans for that “golden” time of their lives. They had decided that there was a smaller home in their future, one that would be better suited for retirement. Being comfortable, as the years passed, was their primary consideration, with energy efficiency, lower utility bills, and reduced maintenance right behind.

Then Gail had knee replacement surgery and was unable to climb stairs to a bedroom.

That’s when, according to Gail, “having to turn our ground floor living room into a makeshift bedroom convinced us that our future home should not only be small, comfortable, and efficient, but also have no stairs.”

So, finding a suitable home for retirement became their long-range objective. At this point they weren’t necessarily focused on building a new home, but the longer they looked, the more they realized they would need to build a custom home to satisfy their needs and wants. They were already familiar with the design/build process, as they designed and built the home they had lived in since 1989.

They knew what they were in for.

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Building Finding the Right Place

Going Green

Planning for retirement was not the only issue that was on the Nemos’ radar screen at this time. In his position with the Portland Development Commission, David saw that there was, within his, and other city organizations, “a growing concern with looming environmental issues and the need to create more sustainable buildings and neighborhoods.” At this same time, the call for incorporating sustainability into our culture was being championed by a growing number of respected voices. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth hit home with a lot of Americans and the Nemos were no exception. By going green, their home would be very comfortable, and at the same time, have a much smaller environmental impact. A perfect fit for them.

Moving forward from this decision point brings many issues and challenges, but Gail and David did their homework. They knew that their home would cost more per square foot to build. They also knew it would be built to standards that were: • well beyond the existing building codes, • not familiar to the average building contractor, • more expensive to build, and • tricky to finance.

Faced with these problems, they chose to enlist a team of experts to guide them successfully through all phases of

Investing in Platinum

Buying or building a house is the largest investment that most of us will ever make, so it behooves each one of us to make intelligent decisions and choices before we invest in one. Gail and David have set a high standard for wise home investment. Hopefully, others will follow their lead and invest in similar type homes.

First, they decided to invest less in square footage (2000 sq ft versus the average new home of 2400 sq ft) and more in the features that offer: • extra comfort, • a healthier interior, • lower monthly expenses, and • less impact on the environment.

Also, the Nemos can forever take pride in knowing that their extra investment will continue to produce dollar and environmental savings, not just for years, but for many generations to come.

Next, they did a lot of research and decided to build to the sustainable standards set by an independent third party. They chose to work with the Earth Advantage Home Certification program and build a house that would meet the Platinum standard (the highest level offered). This level gave them the balance between desired features and afford-

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Given that they planned to install solar panels and wanted a backyard suitable for a garden, a lot with a mostly unobstructed southern exposure became the highest priority. Also, to accommodate a no-stairs entry into the home and a backyard bocce ball court, the lot needed to be flat and wide. After a year of searching, they eventually came across a lot that met their needs and was in an area of Portland that suited them.

their project. For all you would be homebuilders or remodelers, this is a key point. Assistance and experts are available to work with you every step of the way to insure that you receive maximum return on your investment. Their help does not preclude doing a lot of your own homework. As David offers, “I did considerable research on my own of materials, building methods, and codes so that I could better understand the pros and cons, and cost-benefit, of the many decisions that needed to be made during both the design and building process.”

Building

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The Earth Advantage Institute

Building ability that fit their situation.

Finally, to insure that their home would be built to their satisfaction and function properly, they put together the following team: • Suzanne Zuniga, architect • Castle Rock Homes, builder • Peoples Solar, solar system installer • Harvest the Sky, rainwater harvesting system.

With their site selected, goals defined, and their team in place, the Nemos were ready to move forward. The next installment will highlight some of the home’s design features and construction techniques.

The Green Living Journal would like to thank Blaine Bartholomew and Jim Stevens with Umpqua Bank for connecting us with Gail and David. We also wish to thank Sean Penrith, the former Executive Director of the Earth Advantage Institute, for taking the time to provide details on that organization. And of course we wish to thank the Nemos for taking time out of their very busy construction process to provide us with all the details and for answering all of our questions.

Earth Advantage Institute’s core mission is to supply the tools to design and build better homes and buildings. They foster innovative partnerships that leverage market forces to accelerate the reversal of climate change caused by the built environment.

Earth Advantage Institute (EAI) was launched as a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) spinoff from Portland General Electric (PGE) in 2005. Sean Penrith was hired as the founding executive director with one program and five people on board. In the seven year’s since, EAI has grown to 25 people and a focus on residential energy efficiency, residential and commercial certification as well as a robust education and training depart-

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Building

Fuel From Plants! The Basics of Biofuels

By Todd Kaho Petroleum has been the transportation fuel of choice for more than a century now, but it’s not the only fuel that can run our cars and trucks. Some of the most promising replacements for oil come from organic biomass, including crops such as corn and soybeans. Those are the main sources for the most common types of biofuels in use today, ethanol and biodiesel fuel.

What Is Ethanol Fuel?

Ethanol is simply alcohol fermented and distilled from the sugars in plants. Most ethanol comes from a few crops, including corn and sugar cane, but there are other promising sources that aren’t food crops. Cellulosic ethanol production uses the non-edible parts of plants such as corn stover, lawn and tree waste, wood chips, and quick-growing plants such as switchgrass and miscanthus. The cellulosic ethanol industry is struggling to get off the ground, but it could be more cost competitive in the future with new technical breakthroughs and if gasoline prices keep rising.

A “flex-fuel” vehicle is a car or truck that offers the flexibility to run on either gasoline or E85 (85% ethanol and 15% gasoline). The transition from one fuel to the other is seamless — the vehicle’s computer automatically adjusts the engine controls for best performance for whatever blend is in the tank. The flex-fuel option adds only a few hundred dollars to the overall cost of the vehicle, most of which is in fuel system components that can handle the alcohol. There are now more than 7 million flex-fuel vehicles on the road.

Automakers have an incentive to produce flex-fuel vehicles, because these vehicles help them meet the federal fuel economy standards.

However, not all vehicles are designed for E85, and you don’t want to use this biofuel in an incompatible vehicle.

The alcohol in the fuel requires a fuel system that can handle its more corrosive nature. E85 can ruin fuel lines and other components in a regular car or truck.

Some owners don’t know their car, SUV or truck is E85 compatible. However, many manufacturers have been aggressive at marketing their vehicles’ flex-fuel capabilities, and most models have prominent “Flex-Fuel” badges on their rears or flanks. Another giveaway is a bright yellow fuel cap with E85 flex-fuel identification, although not all compatible vehicles have these.

Biodiesel Fuel Basics

Biodiesel is another flexible alternative fuel with serious potential. Pure biodiesel is better for the environment than Issue 19 c Green Living Journal d Winter 2012-2013

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ment. In addition, EAI engages in several consulting and research projects related to the built environment. Currently, EAI is led by an expert management team with David Heslam, a long-time green builder and energy efficiency expert serving as interim executive director.

They are, like most nonprofits, mission driven, but, unlike most nonprofits, EAI does not primarily support itself with grants or government subsidies. Instead, they derive their revenues from their own value based programs and services that are marketed to real estate professionals, appraisers, home performance contractors, architects, engineers, builders and homeowners. Their steady growth confirms that they are skilled in developing programs that are both innovative and practical Earth Advantage Institute certifies homes as a third-party verifier for both the ENERGY STAR and LEED for Homes® programs, as well as for their own new home, remodel, multifamily and net-zero programs. They work hand in hand with builders to insure that each project is deigned and built to the proper standards for certification and high performance.

Earth Advantage Certified Homes recently launched their Energy Bill Guarantee as an indication of their certainty that their certified homes will perform efficiently. Under normal operating conditions, EAI guarantees a homeowner’s utility bills, for three years. If the home does not perform as predicted, EAI will refund the homeowner the difference, each year, for the three years.

To date, EAI has certified over 12,000 homes across Southern Washington and Oregon. They are the sixth largest LEED for Homes provider in the country. Their Earth Advantage Broker and Sustainable Homes Professional training is nationwide and growing.

For more info: http://www.earthadvantage.org

Transportation

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Transportation petroleum diesel because it produces lower emissions and is biodegradable, making it safer to handle. Like ethanol, it burns clean and can be produced domestically.

Commonly produced from high-fat plant sources such as soybeans, there are also new non-food crop biodiesel sources in development. One of the most promising of these is algae. The process has been demonstrated in small-scale facilities and a few larger operations. Proponents point to algae’s high oil yield relative to the land required to produce it. Algae can be grown in a variety of vertical bioreactors that don’t need a lot of acreage.

Pure biodiesel (B100) can run fine in some diesel engines, but like ethanol, it is more commonly blended with petroleum diesel. B5, a 5 percent blend of biodiesel with 95 percent petroleum diesel, is approved for use in nearly all new clean diesel cars (check your owner’s manual to be sure). B20, which has 20 percent biodiesel mixed with 80 percent petroleum diesel, is approved for use in the latest generation of full-size diesel pickups. Biodiesel is also a great alternative for diesel tractors and other diesel-powered implements around the homestead. As with E85, finding biodiesel in your area might be a challenge, so you’ll want to turn to online tools and apps to make it easier to find biodiesel pumps near you. In most new clean diesel cars, the use of B5 is allowed without voiding the warranty. Dodge, Ford and most General Motors full-size clean diesel pickup trucks can now use B20 without affecting the warranty.

You don’t have to look far to find people who think biofuels could be better, or who outright question their green credentials. Although some of the criticism of biofuels comes from environmentalists asking legitimate questions about the costs and benefits of our fuel choices, some of the resistance to biofuels is undoubtably fueled by petroleum interests. One fact is undeniable, however: it takes only one disruption in the supply of oil to push E85 and biodiesel back into the headlines. They aren’t perfect motor fuels, but ethanol and biodiesel are the leading clean liquid fuel alternatives we have today. The more we support their development, the less dependent we will be on petroleum.

Excerpted from MOTHER EARTH NEWS, the Original Guide to Living Wisely. To read more articles from MOTHER EARTH NEWS, visit www.MotherEarthNews.com.

Copyright 2012 by Ogden Publications Inc.

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Tell Them You Saw Them In The Green Living Journal 16 A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment c GreenLivingJournalpdx.com d Winter 2012-2013

Electric Vehicle News Mr. Graunke and His Dream Car

By Gary Munkhoff and Gary Graunke

Gary’s Honda Insight Photo courtesy of Pat Connor OEVA The Insight didn’t have the driving range to meet all of Gary’s driving needs so in 2008 he purchased a Toyota Prius, which he then modified to have a larger battery that could be charged with an ordinary 110 V outlet (PHEV). This resulted in a car that delivered 70 - 85 mpg with no range limitations.

Gary was getting close to his dream with the Insight for short trips and his Prius for longer runs, but he wasn’t there yet.

It was also during this time that the world of electric vehicles was forever changed by Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and Carlos Goshn of Nissan. Musk’s roadster showed that an EV could have a driving range approaching that of a gas-powered car and Goshn’s Leaf was the first production EV to find its way to market in almost 90 years. Once more Gary stepped up. He purchased a 2011 Leaf and is participating in the Department of Energy’s study of Leaf owners.

As Gary says of his Leaf, “There is room for improvement, but it is a great start...”.

The ever expanding West Coast Electric Highway charging infrastructure in Oregon has allowed the Leaf to serve nearly all of his transportation needs—his excellent plugin Prius languishes in his driveway. An upgraded Nissan “emergency” portable charger that comes with the Leaf has allowed Leaf owners to go beyond the charging network to places as remote as John Day using RV parks, dryer outlets, etc. A recently added solar array on his garage has meant a minimal electric bill for the summer--$10 a month to

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There are some dreams that just never die and there are some people that will never quit pursuing them.

Gary Graunke had such a dream and for the last 46 years he has been pursuing it.

The dream began in 1966, when two representatives from General Motors came to Gary’s high school and talked about electric drive fuel cell vehicles, which they believed were “just around the corner”. In an electronics shop course, Gary was already working with electric drive motors to propel a large three-wheeled robot, so it was easy for him to see the potential for an electric car. The quest was on, but he was a little ahead of the times.

Then in the 1970s, when the gas shortages struck and everyone was waiting in line for hours to buy 10 gallons of gas, Gary was once again seriously interested in electric vehicles (EVs). Luckily, there had been some advances in technology that enabled electric cars to once again be available. So he went electric car shopping, but could only find two that were actually available. One was not even capable of reaching 45 mph and the other cost more than his house.

Gary’s dream was once again on hold.

Interest in EVs continued to grow along with technological advancements and some major automakers were developing programs and limited production models. In 2000, Gary ordered a Ford EV Ranger from his local dealer even though it cost three times more than the gasoline powered version of the same vehicle. After 34 years Gary’s dream was about to come true, or so it seemed. Unfortunately, six months after he had placed his order, Ford decided not to sell their Rangers but to lease them instead for a hefty $500 a month. The final blow to the deal was that at the end of the lease the truck had to be returned to Ford. Gary declined.

Not one to give up, Gary bought a US Electricar S-10 ( a Chevrolet S-10 pick up that had been converted to electric drive) on Ebay. It came with some minor problems, but Gary soon had those fixed and he drove it for about two years. He also rented a Honda EV and a General Motors

EV1, but these vehicles were eventually called in by their makers and crushed (for more on this see the film “Who Killed the Electric Car”).

By now two major changes had come into play: Honda and Toyota introduced their hybrid models, and there were enough people converting gasoline cars into electric ones that there were reliable components available. Gary dove in.

After a lot of reading, participating in online forums, and studying possible vehicles for conversion, he settled on a 2000 Honda Insight hybrid. He spent six months converting it to 100% electric drive and it became his daily driver for the next eight years.

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EV News power his house as well as his electric cars.

After driving a Tesla Roadster with its 200+ mile range, Gary feels that Tesla’s model S sedan is in line with his dream car vision with the exception of its $80,000+ price tag. The relentless improvements in battery technology will make cars with the range of the Tesla much more affordable within a few years. Once again patience is required. In the meantime, Gary notes that the GM Volt and Toyota plug-in Prius serve as effective transition vehicles, doing everything conventional vehicles do, only more efficiently.

In the quest for his dream car, Gary attended many events with other non-profit groups. It became apparent to him that the EV offered a solution to the problems of air pollution, climate change, and the economic and national security aspects of imported oil. This social relevance aspect of the EV, which is above and beyond its mechanical superiority and its lower cost of operation, caught Gary’s fancy and set him on a much broader quest: mass adoption of the EV. Gary is now a tireless advocate for the adoption of electric drive as the future of personal transportation.

Countless hours have been spent in meetings, conferences, vehicle demonstrations, presentations, testifying before the legislature, and other behind the scenes efforts to make his real dream come true: an EV in every garage. With all of the new models coming to market and as the recharging infrastructure nears critical mass on the west coast, we now have the freedom to choose EV’s as a practical alternative for many drivers. While social inertia, the perceived issue with “range anxiety”, and an unfriendly media are obstacles to rapid adoption of EV’s, their adoption rate in the first year has been twice that of hybrid vehicles.

Gary wonders what opportunities and changes will come next. Will it be integrating EV batteries with the smart grid to even out the fluctuations inherent with renewable energy generation? Perhaps it will be combining natural gas and plug-in electric drives to power larger vehicles. There are many ways that the young and young-at-heart can become more adaptable, resilient, and efficient in order to support more people with fewer fossil resources and less impact on the planet.

And so Gary just keeps on going and going and going and....

Re-Art Beautiful iPad Stands Crafted from Local Salvaged Wood

By KC Eisenberg What goes better with the sleek lines of an iPad than a rustic chunk of live-edge wood?

Based on the work of the fellows at Block & Sons, nothing!

These Portland crafters sculpt beautiful stands for iPads out of local, sustainable wood, which are then finished traditionally with linseed oil and beeswax.

We love the juxtaposition of the ubermodern device nestled into the wild lines of the blocks.

The blocks can be purchased via: Block & Sons website: www.blocksandsons.com; The Beam & Anchor shop: http://beamandanchor.com and other fine boutiques around the country.

Article and images courtesy of Sustainable Northwest Wood, supplier of FSC certified and sustainably sourced dimensional lumber and Northwest hardwoods. http://www.snwwood.com

18 A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment c GreenLivingJournalpdx.com d Winter 2012-2013

Eco-Fashion Wearable Food Trimmings

Food Waste is Fodder for Fashion in the Bio-trimmings Project

By Katie Cordrey

For more info: http://www.hoyanip.com

Bio-trimmings images couresy of Hoyan Ip

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London-based Hoyan Ip, a 2012 MA Fashion graduate, observed that food waste could help offset fashion industry waste.

So, she set about using discarded food to make buttons, buckles, and other garment trims.

Ip says, “Fashion represents change. Bio-trimmings are unique products that act as an object to educate and make good changes towards both sustainable fashion and ethical living for the future.�

She points out that production of fashion trims represents a significant environmental impact. Raw

materials for plastic buttons are sourced from oil and metal zippers and snaps rely upon mining. Producing these items contributes to global warming, land degradation, air pollution, and toxic contamination of water bodies.

Her Bio-trimmings project retrieves food designated for the trash bin. The food is dried, cooked, blended and re-formed into sustainable fahion products. Even the water used to clean-up is re-used as a component in the next production batch.

Ip hopes that her Bio-trimmings project will not only raise awareness, but act as an impetus for on-going research. She plans to continue her work with the support of bio-genomics and scientific research entities. She wants to develop practical applications for food trimmings and other wasted materials in an effort to build a sustainable and ethical world where food waste is fodder for fashion.

Health Sauna for Life - Sauna for Health !

By Nils Shenholm

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Sometimes it is a simple wood-paneled room, with an electric heater and a thermometer on the wall, letting us know how hot it is. It may be at the gym, or fitness center, or maybe in your own home. Sometimes it will be a small freestanding building in a wooded glen with an authentic wood-burning heater. “It” is a sauna, and saunas bring different images to mind for different people.

Saunas were largely unknown in this country before the 1950s, but have steadily become more popular as the source

for both good times and therapeutic benefits. Pronounced “SOW-na”, it is a Finnish word that describes both the process of the bath, and the place where the bath takes place.

There are many cultures around the world where a form of sweat bath is part of daily life, but here in North America, most of us associate this form of bathing with the far northern latitudes of the planet. After all, Helsinki is at 60 degrees north, about the same as Anchorage, Alaska.

The process and terminology of the sauna are legacies of Finnish immigrants. The time line begins 2000 years ago when forest people living in what is now modern Finland began to heat and steam their bodies in small enclosed shelters similar in design to the domed ‘sweat lodge’ of the native people of North America.

Anthropological evidence of early saunas show fire rings in close proximity to hollows in the ground or places protected by the cavity created when a large tree is toppled with the roots intact. Hooped branches or saplings supported a covering of boughs or hides, making an enclosed space that could be made warm even in an extreme winter environment. There are still people who see value in the primitive process of crawling into the dirt floor interior of a sweat lodge environment, but most people today prefer a comfortable wooden room with platforms on which to sit or recline.

Why is the dry heat of a sauna preferable to a hot shower or bath after a day of work or recreation?

We know that immersion in or standing under a stream of hot water feels nice enough after an afternoon skiing or stacking wood, but the sauna will warm you in a way that hot water never can. And you will stay warm!

Your skin will thank you too, especially as you age. The older we get, the less tolerant our body systems, in particular skin, are to trauma. Sweating helps the skin to clean, ex-foliate, and refresh. No soap needed; your body does it naturally. You’ll feel, afterwards, as if a long, soapy shower is a big step backward.

Perspiring also provides a way for the body to expel and release toxins and impurities that otherwise accumulate in tissue. The effectiveness of this can be seen by the fact that a sauna is sometimes prescribed in the detoxification regimen used to help individuals diagnosed with “sick building syndrome,” in which a person is adversely affected by the chemicals used in modern construction materials. If the sauna can help people who are seriously ill due to toxic accumulations in the body, think of how the routine use of the sweat bath can improve overall health.

Dry heat can also relieve muscle soreness, regardless of source. Strained muscles relax and benefit from the increased blood flow induced by the heat. Lactic acid levels are reduced, and the production of endorphins increased to ease muscle aches and contribute to a sense of overall wellbeing. After a sauna and a good night’s rest, you won’t wake up stiff and sore, but pain-free, ready for the day’s activity .

What about stress?

To many sauna enthusiasts, stress relief is the primary benefit. We live in a fast-paced world, with plenty of opportunity for emotional overload. Sitting in a warm, dimly lit room-enjoying the quiet calm- seems to help the day-to-day worries melt away. Beyond the relaxation and endorphin pulse, the calm restfulness induced by sauna makes for a good night’s sleep. This benefit has real value.

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Health In Finland they say: “If a sick person is not cured by spirits or sauna, then there can be no hope.” Sauna for life and sauna for health ... indeed!

Nils Shenholm is a life long designer and builder, and has provided both traditional and modern saunas from his shop in Duxbury, Vermont since 1989. He is a charter member and board member of the North American Sauna Society.

Learn more and see his work at saunavermont.com.

Photos courtesy of the author.

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But beyond these and other therapeutic benefits, perhaps the one we mustn’t forget is the social and spiritual aspect of sauna. We sit or recline with our partners, friends and family, usually wearing what we came into this world wearing, often in gentle light, or sometimes with just the glow of the fire if one is lucky enough to use a woodburner fitted with a glass door. Just outside the small window, the winter sun is fading, tree shadows across the snow-covered land lengthen and swallow up the near view terrain in patches of silver and grey and deep blue. Daylight is nearly gone. The winter cold will keep its grip-but inside, the warmth penetrates your skin. Your body has been enveloped in a blanket of dense, even heat. The air is calm but powerfully radiant ... the whole space a vessel of comfort.

Every now and then, the host will pour a ladle of fresh water on the heated stones, releasing a plume of steam, what Finns call ‘the spirit of the sauna”, into the hot dry atmosphere. The exhilarating feeling of intensified heat is powerful but short-lived, as the room quickly returns to the hot, dry state.

There is a primal feel to a sauna, no matter how modern its construction. Your companions breathe at a deliberate, even pace ... warm air in, warm air out. Church-like, near silence seems appropriate, creating a cadence that is subtle, yet profound. There is no need to speak just now, only to relax think deep thoughts.

As the quiet deepens, other sounds filter in, perhaps the drip of water from the melting snow on the roof. The fire takes on a life of its own. If fuel has just been added, the flame will quicken and crackle with life. If the fuel load is waning, you become aware of the slow exhale of smoke up the flue.

Sauna literature is marked by frequent references to the church-like atmosphere within. The similarities are obvious.

They are both places that nourish and renew the spirit. But in the sauna your body is cleansed as well. The deep calm and sense of well-being that follow a stint in the sauna are difficult to describe or measure, but when you finally step to the door, it will be with thoughtfulness and reflection.

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Re-Cycle The Mysteries of Recycling

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Part II: The Business of Recycling Why Recycle?

What is 35 miles wide, 35 miles long, and 300 feet deep?

Well, according to an article posted on the Popular Mechanics website on November 13, 2008, that is how big the landfill would be if America put all of its garbage for the next 1000 years in one place. As big as that seems, if it were broken up into thousands of landfills scattered across the entire country it would hardly be noticable. The fear that we are running out of space for landfills, which was the original impetus for starting recycling programs, is unfounded. So if we are not running out of space for landfills, why bother to recycle and run another fleet of big fuel-guzzling trucks over the same routes that the garbage trucks are already following?

That question may have been valid for some in 2008, but today it has been replaced with the question: how can we recycle more? And it is not just the environmentalists that are asking how. It is also being asked by companies such as Waste Management, Inc., the nations largest solid waste management company. In a recent article in Waste & Recycling News, they report that Waste Management believes that their waste stream can eventually be mined for an additional $10 billion to $12 billion of annual revenue.

Recycling is big business, it is profitable, and it has social relevance.

In fact, the business of recycling could very well be the poster child for the triple bottom line business model: People, Planet, and Profit. It’s a win-win for everyone. We recycle because: • it produces profits and attracts investment in new technologies that increase recovery rates, • it creates jobs and stimulates local economies, • it reduces the amount of energy needed to produce new products, and • it reduces the demand on our natural resources.

A Closer Look

successful, the price received for the processed material has to be greater than the cost of producing it.

As we pointed out in our Fall issue, today’s large-scale recycling efforts are in response to drastic changes in products and consumption habits brought on by events and cultural shifts that began in 1941. As a relatively new industry, recycling is still struggling with growing pains and faced with knotty problems.

As an evolving industry, recycling is constantly changing. It is a moving target. This spells confusion for the general public as they try to be conscientious and follow the rules of the day for what they can and cannot put in their curbside container. In order to cut through the confusion surrounding recycling and to better understand the process, we decided to check out a local materials recovery facility or MRF (pronounced “murf ”).

An email to Farwest Fibers put us in contact with Vinod Singh, the Operations Manager for the company’s Hillsboro plant, who quickly arranged a tour date for us. Vinod held

a brief pre-tour meeting to acquaint us with the company, its safety concerns and rules. Then we donned our hardhats, safety glasses and vests, and started the tour.

When we entered the plant the first impression was utter chaos, with noise, front-end loaders, and a maze of conveyer belts, catwalks, people grabbing and tossing stuff, and piles and piles of what appears to be garbage.

As we proceeded, an order and a sense of flow slowly become apparent. As Vinod expertly explained what was going on, the answer to, “How does it all work?” started to come together.

There are three different sources of recyclables that enter the facility: • curbside collection from residences,

The business of recycling is all based on the principle that certain items in our everyday trash can be collected, separated, compacted, packaged, and then sold as raw material for other industries. In order for the process to be 22 A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment c GreenLivingJournalpdx.com d Winter 2012-2013

Re-Cycle

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• bulk collection from businesses, and the employees on the sorting belts are now idle, which in turn increases the cost of the recovered materials.

• outside drop off centers where people deliver and After sorting, the separated sort their items into separate bins. material is then loaded into a baler Recycling Electronics The sorting process is different where it is compressed, strapped for each of these, and while we were In Good Condition take to: into large bales, and then stockpiled Free Geek - Portland there they were running material for shipment.

EcoBinary Beaverton from curbside collection. The objecWhat Can’t Be Recycled and Goodwill Industries - Various Locations tive is to separate the incoming trash Janus Youth Programs - Portland Why? that has no marketable value into Open House Ministries - Vancouver Such items as plastic bags or different classes of material such as, Reuse Computers - Vancouver other forms of plastic film, hard ferrous metals, paper, and different Salvation Army - Vancouver plastics such as that found in toys, types of plastics. The sorting machinShare, Inc. - Vancouver bailing twine, styrofoam, cooking oil, ery does this by making use of : lids, non-ferrous pots and pans and To Recycle take to: • rotating star shaped discs, shoes are no-nos in your curbside EcoBinary-Beaverton • gravity, container. That’s because the sortCentral Transfer and Recycling Center Brush Prairie ing machinery is not designed to • forced air, Empower Up - Vancouver separate these items, allowing them • magnets, and EG Metals - Hillsboro to get tangled in the machinery or • people.

Free Geek - Portland passing them through where they Goodwill Industries - Various Locations After being sorted, the trash now will fall in with non-similar items IMS Electronics Recycling - Vancouver has marketable value. and contaminate the final product.

Office Depot - Vancouver Vinod explained that the machinThis can result in the buyer rejecting Reuse Computer s - Vancouver ery has its limitations on what it can, the entire load of material and refusSatellite HHW Collection Events - Various and cannot sort and that there are ing to pay for it.

Locations some items that will actually stop the All of the above items can be Technology Conservation Group - Portland machinery altogether. This is why only recycled at the drop off center where Total Reclaim - Portland certain items are allowed in the curbthe person dropping it off sorts it Washougal Transfer Station - Washougal PSC Environmental Service side bins and all goes well as long as into the proper bin. Since it is now West Van Materials Recovery Center - Vancouver the public pays attention to what they already sorted, the material bypasses Far West Fiber NE Marx Depot - Portland put in their bin. the sorting machinery and can be Quantum Resource Recovery - Portland Problems occur when material quickly checked manually and then that should not be there, shows up. go directly to the baler.

Then there are those items that cannot be processed by this facility. Clothing, carpets, pet food bags that have plastic liners, rubber hoses, batteries, syringes, aerosol cans, food, bioplastics, compostable cups, propane bottles, window glass, disposable diapers, and styrofoam peanuts, can’t be processed here, but can possibly be recycled elsewhere. Check with Metro http:// http://www.oregonmetro.gov for more detailed information.

And finally there are those items that can be recycled one day and not the next. This can be both confusing and frustrating for the public that is making a conscious effort to do the right thing. This situation occurs only occasionally, and is usually caused by a downward shift in the market While we were there, some plastic bags got stuck in the ma- price that puts it below the cost of processing that material.

This is beyond the control of the company that collects your chinery at the very beginning of the process, and brought the entire sorting line to a halt. One of the workers then had recyclables and the company that processes them.

Vinod summed up the present state of recycling this way: to climb into the machine and remove the plastic film that when he first started in the business, the in-pile looked like was entangled in the rotating star shaped discs. Meanwhile,

Gardening Savoring Suburbia

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By Roger Doiron

Re-Cycle a pile of newspapers with a few cans and some cardboard thrown in; today the in-pile looks like a trash pile of cans and plastic bottles with some paper and cardboard mixed in.

Recycling has come along way, but, even at that, Oregonians still send 50% of their trash to the landfill. How to raise that percentage will be subject of our next article.

Many thanks to Emily Klavins wth the Center for Earth Leadership, Michelle Metzler with Waste Management, Inc., and Vinod Singh with Farwest Fibers, for their time, suggestions, and ideas that made this article possible.

Suburbia is to food what cable television is to entertainment. Just as people moan about having 800 TV channels and nothing good to watch, the suburbs have spawned hundreds of food options, yet very few of them are fresh, local or healthy. This is strange when you consider that the original theory behind suburban development was that they’d offer the best of city and country living combined.

Apparently, very few suburban planners got the memo.

Rather than having delicious, country-style foods located within walking or biking distance, most suburban residents have to drive 10 minutes just to get to a McRib sandwich.

We have been very efficient at turning farms into subdivisions and Subways over the past 70 years. The challenge of the next 70 years lies in turning the suburbs back to farms.

Of course they won’t be the quaint “cow and a barn” farms of our great-grandparents, but with a little planning, the suburbs can become food-producing landscapes again — and in exciting new ways.

This summer my family and I are embarking on an adventure to do just that. We’ve always grown a garden to feed ourselves, but this year we’re taking it a step further, growing a new suburban farm that my youngest sons, ages 12 and 14, will manage. They plan to start small by selling salad greens to neighbors — delivered by red wagon and bicycle — then scale up to a driveway farm stand when the zucchini and tomatoes start coming fast and furiously.

My sons are lucky because our Maine town recently passed legislation that allows people to sell their homegrown produce to their neighbors. Other towns in our state have gone even further, passing “local food sovereignty” legislation that supersedes state and federal laws and allows for the production and sale of a broader range of home-produced foods. I’m sure these laws will be challenged someday if someone gets sick from eating quiche made from eggs from backyard hens.

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Gardening

Is This Legal?

You may wonder whether opening a home farm stand is legal. In the Doirons’ town of Portland, Maine, residential zoning ordinances were recently revised to include this provision: “The sale of products produced on the property in excess of what is consumed by the occupants of the property is permitted.”

Ordinances vary by location. If you are considering opening a produce stand, check with your municipality first.

Steps You Can Take to Transform Suburbia • Plant a home kitchen garden if you haven’t already. One of the surest ways of having easy access to fresh fruits and vegetables is to grow them yourself.

• Find some like-minded people in your community and organize them into a locally sourced potluck group. It’s fun to get together each month to inspire and be inspired by each other’s cooking.

• Forget 1990s block parties — organize a neighborhood country fair instead! Plan sack and eggon-spoon races for kids, and offer prizes for the best locally sourced pies and homegrown veggies.

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But hopefully, the courts will realize that industrial eggs have spawned many salmonella outbreaks throughout the years — which spread faster among pent-up chicken populations and affect many more people than a neighborhood coop ever could — yet we’ve never outlawed selling eggs produced in factory farms.

With nearly half of America’s 313 million citizens living in the suburbs, we’re going to need to break a lot of new suburban ground to begin to meet even a small part of our food needs from local-food sources. But even more importantly, we’ll need to break with and replace our outdated perceptions of what the suburbs are and should be.

I am confident that we can and will because, frankly, we must. Suburbia’s sprawl has been eating up prime farmland and our agricultural heritage for decades. Now it’s time to bite back.

• If your town or city does not allow sales of home-produced foods, petition your local government to consider updating the code. The Institute for Food and Development Policy, or Food First, is a think tank that carries out advocacy and education on community food development.

Excerpted from Natural Home & Garden, a national magazine that provides practical ideas, inspiring examples and expert opinions about healthy, ecologically sound, beautiful homes. To read more articles from Natural Home & Garden, visit NaturalHomeMagazine.com. Copyright 2012 by Ogden Publications Inc. Photo courtesy of the author.

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Food 11 Miles of Carrots Help Root-out Hunger in Clark County

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By Kim Hack During the course of our lives, some of us will rely on a food bank for emergency or supplemental food assistance.

In Clark County, about 10,000 food boxes are distributed to over 33,000 people per month; forty percent of recipients are children. This need for food assistance only continues to grow. Food boxes traditionally have been an assortment of canned and boxed items. Shelf stable food will always be an important part of the food box, because of its long storage life, offering quick complete meal options and client preferences.

In 2009, the Clark County Food Bank made it a priority to bring more fresh whole, nutritious fruits and vegetables into the emergency food bank so clients could eat healthier.

Dietary choices play a central role in everyone’s health and well-being. When individuals and families are given the opportunity to eat a variety of nutrient-dense foods, every aspect of life is affected positively. The risk of chronic disease is decreased, confidence and a sense of self-efficacy are established, and day-to-day living becomes more enjoyable.

To bring in healthier options, Clark County Food Bank began growing carrots in 2009 at the county-owned 78th St

Heritage Farm. Bill Coleman, Treasurer and Board Member, planted the first seeds of this idea both metaphorically and literally. Initial inspiration for this project came from the Emergency Food Network’s Mother Earth Farm, an eight acre organic educational farm in Tacoma, Washington.

With the county’s and community’s support and his passion and persistence, Coleman began planting carrots. Occasionally people will refer to the carrot field as a ‘carrot patch’, but that term does not capture the magnitude of this operation.

If the rows of carrots were lined up end to end, there would

be over eleven MILES of carrots; that yields over 30,000 pounds of carrots annually!

Carrots were selected, because they are a charismatic vegetable and popular with most kids and adults alike. They are bright orange (although white, yellow and even purple ones will pop up), crunchy, and slightly sweet. Carrots store well and have proven themselves to be a productive crop to grow. They also have versatile uses: carrots can be eaten raw, baked, stir-fried, juiced, or even pickled (highly recommended). Thousands of families in need have received these healthful, delicious carrots through 29 Clark County Food Bank partnering agencies.

In June, the fields are prepared for the carrots. Then the seeds are sown in time increments to elongate the harvest season. By early August, thousands of feathery, leafy, green carrot tops have emerged. The first of the carrots are harvested in August.The last of the carrots are harvested in early November. Every Saturday during the harvest season, from 9am to 1pm, volunteers are invited to harvest, wash, and bag carrots.

Historically, the 78th St Heritage Farm was run as a poor farm where people experiencing hard times could be housed and fed. The food bank garden continues in that spirit to feed people in our community who are in need.

Volunteers aged two to 92 have come out to get their hands dirty. The farm draws hundreds of volunteers from a wide variety of groups: church groups, Girl & Boy Scout Troops, local businesses, service organizations, students, interested community members, Restorative Justice Youth, and Larch Correction Crews.

Alan Hamilton, Clark County Food Bank Executive Director explains: “The wonderful (and fun!) thing about the farm is not just that it brings nutritious food to people who need it, but it also provides a great chance to allow for meaningful community engagement -- kids and families

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Education Place-based Education:

Connecting Classroom and Community

By David Sobel

Something’s Happening Here

Food

Are you interested in getting involved? Email volunteer@ clarkcountyfoodbank.org, call 360-693-0939, and visit www. clarkcountyfoodbank.org.

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pulling carrots! Additionally, it provides good visibility of the need within our community.”

Through intensely sunny days and cold muddy ones, volunteer harvesters continue to smile and talk amiably with one another as they pull up carrots. Beyond growing carrots, this harvest brings people together around a common interest and facilitates important conversations about hunger in our community. More and more people are joining in on this effort to make healthful, locally grown food available to everyone. Through the food bank farm sites, partner organization’s gardens, local farmers, and plant-arow efforts over 135,000 pounds of local produce have been grown and distributed through the Clark County Food Bank to people in need.

Clark County should be proud of this extraordinary community response towards hunger in our county. Collectively, we will need to continue to grow our efforts one carrot and apple at a time to ensure that everyone is able to eat healthfully and happily.

As you stroll down the halls of your neighborhood school at nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, you notice that something is different. Many of the classrooms are empty; the students are not in their places with bright, shiny faces. Where are they? In the town woodlot, a forester teaches tenth graders to determine which trees should be marked for an upcoming thinning project. Downtown, a group of middle school students are collecting water samples in an urban stream to determine if there’s enough dissolved oxygen to support reintroduced trout.

Out through the windows, you can see children sitting on benches writing poems.

Down the way, a group of students works with a landscape architect and the math teacher to create a map that will be used to plan the schoolyard garden. Here’s a classroom with students. In it, eighth graders are working with second graders to teach them about the history of the local Cambodian community. In the cafeteria, the city solidwaste manager is consulting with a group of fifth graders

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Education and the school lunch staff to help them design the recycling and composting program. Students’ bright shiny faces are in diverse places in their schoolyards and communities.

You don’t have to pinch yourself. It’s not a dream. Placebased education is taking root in urban and rural, northern and southern, well-to-do and rough-around-the-edges schools and communities across the country. Take a whirlwind tour with me as we drop in on some of these happenings.

Two recent headlines in the Littleton, New Hampshire, Courier paint the picture: “Using the River as a Textbook” and “The Town Becomes the Classroom.” Like many small New England cities, Littleton turned its back on its downtown river, the Ammonusuc, at the end of the nineteenth century.

Now, with funding from the Department of Transportation, the town is creating a Riverwalk, which will connect Main Street with the river and open up a new economic development zone. Working in conjunction with the town planner and the town engineer, teachers and community members are engaging students in the design of a river museum at one end of the Riverwalk. Different grades will become responsible for the changing exhibitry of the museum. High school history students might create exhibits on logging history in the Great Northern Forest. Sixth-grade science students will design hands-on water testing activities. Perhaps third graders will take on the task of creating the entrance mural as part of their study of local plants and animals.

The town is already functioning as a classroom in a novel collaboration between Chutter’s General Store and the marketing program at the Littleton High School’s vocational center. When the well-established downtown candy store realized that its internet sales site was costing more than the revenues it generated, the owners looked to the school for a solution. The high school needed more space and the marketing class was seeking real-world projects. The school district and the town agreed to rehabilitate a space below the candy store to create a marketing classroom for less than it would cost to build new space at the high school. By having the marketing class take over Chutter’s internet business, the students get economics experience and the candy store owners generate a bit of revenue as a result of the reduced labor costs. Through a balanced focus on economic development and environmental preservation, the community gets revitalized and the state curriculum standards are met.

In Louisiana, getting out of the classroom often means getting into mosquitoes, so the 4H Club at Caldwell Middle School in Terrebonne Parish took on the real-world challenge of mosquito control. One parent, whose daughter has asthma, was interested in finding ways to control mosquitoes in residential areas without aerial spraying of pesticides. First, students and teachers started to experiment with raising guppies to see if they would eat mosquito larvae. But these students got a lesson in ecology when a professor from Nichols State University recommended na-

tive mosquito fish instead, because of the problems caused when nonnative species are introduced into local waters.

Students bred the mosquito fish and then released them into stagnant ponds, ditches, and even swimming pools.

Just a fun project? Melynda Rodrigue, 4H sponsor and Caldwell teacher, indicated that math teachers will chart the numbers of offspring and the time period needed to repopulate the tanks, science classes will study the fish’s life cycle, and social studies classes will study the impact on the community’s environment. Some students used their writing skills to create a brochure for distribution to the community, and other students got public speaking experience through presentations at other schools in the area.

In Berkeley, California, a similar grassroots school-andcommunity effort has been transformed into a bioregional initiative. From one vegetable garden at the Martin Luther King Middle School came the idea to have a garden on every schoolyard in Berkeley, which spread to the idea of a garden on every schoolyard in California. And since you can’t realistically feed all the children in any one school with produce from one garden, why not create connections between local farmers and the school district? Instead of freeze-dried burritos trucked in from the Midwest, how about burritos with organic beans and cheese grown and produced by area farmers who are threatened by suburban sprawl? These ideas have led to the creation of the Food Systems Project, where the aim is to have all the food in the Berkeley school lunch program be organic and locally grown within the next decade.

At the same time, food preparation and agriculture education become an integral part of each school’s curriculum.

The Food Systems Project is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Linking Farms to Schools initiative, the California Department of Health, and the Center for Ecoliteracy, a broad coalition of funders trying to address the problems of child nutrition, school improvement, and sustainable agriculture in an integrated fashion.

Project director Janet Brown comments “By using food as an organizing principle for systemic change, the program addresses the root causes of poor academic performance, psychosocial behavior disorders, and escalating children’s health issues such as obesity, asthma and diabetes. At the same time the program connects the loss of farmland and farming as a way of life and the social problems facing school communities (Sobel, Orion Afield, 2001).

Doesn’t it make sense–using the daily meal as a focal point for learning? Comenius, the seventeenth-century education philosopher, articulated one of the core precepts of placebased education when he said, “Knowledge of the nearest things should be acquired first, then that of those farther and farther off.” (Woodhouse, Thresholds, 2001) You can’t really get much nearer than the internal micro-environment of your digestive system as a focal point for the curriculum. The mosquito-breeding ponds in your backyard and the down-

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Education town places where you shop are similarly appropriate contexts for learning. And so, as the rallying cry for place-based educators, I nominate that popular Beatles refrain, “Get back.

Get back. Get back to where you once belonged.”

Distance from Beauty

If we’re going to get back, we need to look first at where we are now. Katie Avery, third grade teacher in the White Mountain-encircled town of Gorham, New Hampshire, got at the crux of the problem during a curriculum planning meeting when she asked, “Why are we using textbooks that focus on landforms in Arizona when we have such amazing resources right in our backyard?” Good question. Here’s the picture: Gorham sits in the shadow of Mount Washington, the loftiest peak in New England, and home to the worst weather in the world. The Presidential Range has a fascinating alpine zone, classic glacial cirques, and some of the most awe-inspiring mountain terrain in the country. Yet most of the students have never hiked the mountains and the curriculum ignores the great local teaching resources. Instead, geography is taught using pretty pictures of faraway places.

Generic textbooks designed for the big markets of California and Texas provide the same homogenized, unnutritious diet as all those fast-food places on the strip. The landscape of schooling looks like sprawl America. State-mandated curriculum and high-stakes tests put everyone on the same page on the same day and discourage an attention to significant nearby learning opportunities. Educational biodiversity falls prey to the bulldozers of standardization. Schools hover like alien spacecraft, luring children away from their home communities. More and more, we drive a wedge between our children and the tangible beauty of the real world.

In the provocatively titled article ”How My Schooling Taught Me Contempt for the Earth,” Bill Bigelow illustrates this alienation. During his boyhood in the late 1950s, he rambled the hills around his home in Tiburon, California, just across the bridge from San Francisco. “I loved the land.

I spent every after-school moment and every weekend or summer day, outside until it got dark. I knew where to dig the best underground forts and how to avoid the toffee-like clay soil ... I knew from long observation at nearby ponds the exact process of a pollywog’s transition into a frog, and the relative speed of different kinds of snakes: garter vs. gopher vs. western racer... (We also) had a love/hate relationship with ‘development.’ Almost as another natural habitat, we played in the houses under construction: hide and seek, climbing and jumping off roofs, and rafting in basements when they flooded.

“Located near wetlands, grasslands, remnant redwood forests, and new development, the school was well situated for field trips and for social and natural science learning.

“How did our schooling extend or suppress our native earth-knowledge and our love of place? Through silence about the earth and the native people of Tiburon, Bel-Aire School, perched on the slopes of a steep golden-grassed hill, Issue 19 c Green Living Journal d Winter 2012-2013

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taught plenty. We actively learned to not-think about the earth, about that place where we were. We could have been anywhere–or nowhere. Teachers made no effort to incorporate our vast, if immature, knowledge of the land into the curriculum. Whether it was in the study of history, writing, science, arithmetic, reading or art, school erected a Berlin Wall between academics and the rest of our lives. The hills above the school were a virtual wilderness of grasslands and trees, but in six years, I can’t recall a single ‘field trip’ to the wide-open spaces right on our doorstep. We became inured to spending days in manufactured space, accustomed to watching more earth bulldozed and covered with yet more manufactured spaces. (Bigelow, 1996) It was the same everywhere. In my mid-twenties, I got interested in plant taxonomy. After peering at a violet under a hand lens one afternoon, I paged through Gray’s Manual of Botany trying to understand the difference between stamens, pistils and calyxes, when poof! the proverbial light bulb went on. In my mind’s eye, I saw the much-larger–than-life-size model of a flower that had perched on the lab table at the front left corner of my tenth grade biology classroom. “That was a model of flowers that grew right outside the classroom door!”

I said to myself in disbelief. As a high school biology student, my unquestioned misconception was that this was a model of a rainforest flower, or at least a far-away flower. It never occurred to me that real flowers, with real flower parts, existed on the school playground. Yet, I was your true science geek– carried a slide rule, got over 700 on my biology achievement test, and planned on following Martin Arrowsmith’s footsteps into biochemical research. I was on the ball, but most of our teachers had no sense that it was important to connect up the classroom world with the nearby outside world.

Place-based education is the antidote to the not-thinking about the Earth common in many schools. Instead of settling for textbook accounts of distant places, Katie Avery and the other third graders at Edward Fenn Elementary School worked with a children’s book author to write and illustrate a book about Gorham. As you read it, you “laugh at the hilarious adventures of Peewee Skunk, Amos Moose and Shylee Beaver, go back in time and learn about the history of Gorham, visit different places around Gorham today, and find out about the jobs people do.” Is it a surprise that the third grade social studies test scores and civic pride increased as a result of this project? Which leads us into a definition for place-based education: Place-based education is the process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum. Emphasizing handson, real-world learning experiences, this approach to education increases academic achievement, helps students develop stronger ties to their community, enhances students’ appreciation for the natural world, and creates a heightened commit-

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Education

Book Review

ment to serving as active, contributing citizens. Community vitality and environmental quality are improved through the active engagement of local citizens, community organizations, and environmental resources in the life of the school.

Place-based education converts the activist plaint of Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) to Please in my Backyard (PIMBY). As a truly grassroots movement, its practitioners draw strength from the image of those hearty dandelions and other herbaceous plants that force their way up through asphalt. As William James described, “I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual by creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”

Drops of waters and rootlets unite! Give me your students yearning to be free! It’s a simple proposition really.

Bring education back into the neighborhood. Connect students with adult mentors, conservation commissions, and local businesses. Get teachers and students into the community, into the woods and on the streets–closer to beauty and true grit. Get the town engineer, the mayor, and the environmental educators onto the schoolyard and inside the four walls of the school. This is where we belong.

David Sobel is a faculty member at Antioch University NE and author of Place-Based Education Connecting Classrooms & Communities published by The Orion Society

that the connection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival. Additionally, outdoor experiences may enhance the ability for us to learn and think, to expand our senses, and improve our physical and mental health.

Much of the research cited in The Nature Principle is correlative rather than causal and conclusions are sometimes flimsy because the science isn’t all in and the available evidence is not entirely consistent. But there is no denying that many of us are multitaskers immersed in technology and media prevalence at such a level that Louv’s call for us to occasionally unplug, boot it down, get off line, and get outdoors really must be seriously considered.

Patients suffering from emotional or physical ailments have had some success with nature-based therapy but there has been more research conducted regarding the impact of nature on mental health. We don’t really know the negative consequences of our de-natured lives on our health and well-being…and it is difficult to quantify impacts of being outdoors or the lack of being connected to nature.

So what is a typical nature therapy prescription? Therapeutic horticulture, animal-assisted therapy, care farming, eco-therapy, going for a hike, gardening, green exercise or adventure, visiting a local park, trail outings, being outdoors in nature alone or with others.

Louv’s book has a considerable amount of ideas for business: developers integration of nature, housing design, high technology and so on; planners creating a restorative workplace using natural elements to improve productivity, health, and happiness (indoor plants, outdoor view, abundant natural light); product design and new products and services; biomimicry (copying something in nature such as using spider silk, which is five times stronger than steel); city planners that use natural aspects within the business district; vertical farms, rooftop gardens; planting trees; pedestrian and bicycle paths, etc. Clearly, there is a need for a new business ethic to emerge. John Muir said, “When you tug on a string in nature, you find it is connected to everything else.”

Imagine if such a concept was appropriated by businesses?

So what will it take for society to reconnect with nature on a major scale? Louv proposes a three ring approach: • apply funded direct service programs in schools, community organizations, conservation organizations, etc, • individuals and volunteers should pound the message drum, and • networked associations without funding among communities, families, and individuals helping people to create change in their own lives.

Louv took his message about the Nature Principle to a high school in California and a homework assignment for

Book Review The Nature Principle

People Can Benefit By Reconnecting with Nature Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012

Reviewed by Roger Lohr

The Nature Principle: Human Restoration the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder is by Richard Louv, who wrote Last Child in the Woods, and has toured around the country recommending that we help kids discover or reconnect with nature. This can be called a movement and now Louv is extending his message to adults. His premise is supported by research and anecdotes

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Book Review

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those that attended his presentation was to find a place in nature and spend a half hour alone there. Students were asked to write a one page essay about their outdoor experience. Overwhelmingly, they returned from their solitary visit to the outdoors feeling better than when they left…and perhaps their findings can give us hope that we can benefit by regularly connecting with nature.

Roger Lohr of Hanover, NH owns and edits XCSkiResorts.com and has had published articles about sustainability, trails, and snowsports in regional and national media outlets.

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