A Visit to Howell History Farm

My expectations were pretty low when I tagged along on my 4th grade daughter's class trip to Mercer County's Howell History Farm. How interesting could it be to harvest corn? It turned out, however, to be a profoundly affecting experience.

Consider some of the anxieties we accumulate over time while living in town: the constant consumption of fossil fuels harmful to the planet's future, kids who stay indoors in front of computer screens and have little chance to interact with animals or witness the miracle of their birth and growth.

All of that quickly changed on the farm. After eating popcorn and delicious cornbread cooked with a wood stove, the kids soon found themselves being put to work. To my surprise, they jumped at the chance to do work with their hands.

The kids started by stripping corn kernels off the cobs.

Then it was time to grind the corn into meal with an elegant iron contraption.

Then they walked to a cornfield across the valley, to gather corn stalks into a shock so the corn could cure and dry.

On a crisp, clear day, a cornfield is a magical place of rustling leaves, promise and mystery.

As the kids twisted the ripe, dry ears of corn off the stalks and tossed them into bushel baskets, I became fascinated by the flying buttresses of roots that help hold the 12 foot stalks upright.

Some of the ears were a radiant shade of red. We were told this is dent corn, because of the dents in the kernels.

As we waited for the bus, having experienced corn harvest from field to kitchen, the kids discovered how fun it could be to drink water from a do-it-yourself drinking fountain. On a 1900 farm, the connections and feedback loops are simple and direct. Start pumping and water will start to flow. In town, water emerges from the faucet after a long and complicated journey from a place none of us have ever seen. On the farm, the water rises up from the ground beneath our feet.

Another opportunity a farm provides is the chance to focus our eyes on distant hills. Trees are lovely things, but I'd gladly trade some of the shade for a vista or two.

Most every goal of sustainability, every change of behavior being encouraged in town--in order to prevent our life on earth from being a flash in the pan--was a normal part of life on a 1900 farm. Living in town all this time, I had forgotten how much the country has to teach, and how much of a more satisfying future can be found in the past.

A Small Victory for Walking

It was a typical situation on a Sunday evening. My 14 year old daughter, having spent the day with her friends, called and asked for a ride home. Something in me resisted driving the car seven blocks to pick her up, but I didn't want her to walk home alone in the dark. Last time we were in this situation, I rode her bike over and jogged home with her. She rejected my offer to do that again, with that classic teenage tone of disbelief that a parent could be so unreasonable. Clearly, the easiest thing would have been to jump in the car and give her that sacred ride home.

Instead, I decided to walk over to get her, with my younger daughter and our dog, Leo, as company. To my surprise, the walk home was uncontested, even magical. A cloudy, cool evening, the still air rich with the smell of fallen leaves. My daughters walked together, hand in hand, talking of the day. None of this would have been ours, cloistered in a car.

The Power of Windows

Power windows, power wash, power steering. No, this post isn't about adding a power assist to everything in life, in the pursuit of convenience and ease. Nor is it a plug for PC's. It's more about disconnecting oneself from a grid addiction, powering down, and rediscovering in turn the power in things that don't need to be plugged in.

Windows, for instance, the timely opening and closing of which can determine whether a house gathers the day's heat and holds it through an autumn night, or needs the furnace to kick in when the cold night air sneaks through windows left open.

Habits, Muscle Memory, and Energy Consumption

Learning to play a musical instrument involves training muscles to do things automatically that are too fast for the mind to keep track of. If the muscles learn to do many things automatically, the mind can focus on larger aspects of the music, like expression. Not everyone learns to play an instrument, but we use the same process to negotiate all we do during the day. Some of the movements we do automatically help reduce our carbon footprint, others don't.

For instance, when you go to wash your hands, which hand reaches out to turn on the faucet? Reaching with the left, to turn on the hot water, consumes more energy than the opposite. For the first minute or so, water from either faucet will be cold. Even if you turn on the hot water faucet, chances are you'll have finished washing your hands before any hot water actually comes out. But a silent chain of reactions will have been set off in the house: Hot water will leave the hot water heater and head up the pipes towards your faucet. The water heater then fills itself back up with cold water, which must be heated. Meanwhile, the hot water that got pulled up through the pipes but never made it to the faucet dissipates its heat in the walls of the house, which only makes the A/C work a little harder to keep the house cool in the summer.

Simply using a couple quick doses from the cold water faucet avoids this chain of energy-consuming events, and doesn't change the brief handwashing experience in the least. To "play" a low carbon hand-washing sonata on the faucets, then, means learning to automatically reach for the cold water, get hands wet, turn the water off, soap up, then turn the cold water back on to rinse. It sounds involved, but learn the habit and the muscles will take over while you daydream about other things. Over a lifetime, that's a lot of energy saved.

Imagine if all kids in the elementary schools learned this method, to carry with them in habit and muscle memory for the rest of their lives. It should be part of every crew member's training for a life spent on spaceship earth.

Tips for More Energy Efficient Cooking

We hear more and more about how much energy is required to produce meat, particularly beef. Shifting to more poultry and vegetables is one effective way to reduce one's carbon footprint. But there are also various ways to reduce energy use in the kitchen:

Dr. Seuss might appreciate this green approach to hard boiling eggs.

1. Put raw eggs in just enough water to cover them. Cover the pot.
2. Heat to a boil.
3. Turn off the heat. Leave cover on pot.
4. Allow to sit, with no additional heat, for fifteen minutes.

How to boil "green" water (This is particularly handy in the summer, when the last thing you want to do is heat up the kitchen unnecessarily):

1. Heat only as much water as you need. If it's for tea, then use the teacup to measure the water as you put it in the teapot. Add a little extra in case some boils away as steam.
   
2. If heating water in a pot, for instance for soup, keep a lid on the pot while heating the water. This reduces heating time by preventing heat from escaping as steam while the water is being heated.
3. Set a loud timer in case you wander too far from the kitchen while the water is heating.

Use the microwave instead of the stove for cooking:

1. Sweet potatoes in the skin--easier, and no doubt much less loss of nutrients, than peeling, chopping and boiling in water.
   
2. Sweet corn (one and a half minutes per cob). I learned about this when I ran into a friend in the vegetable section at the grocery. Websites describe elaborate preparation of the corn prior to putting it in the microwave, but I find it comes out great when simply put in with husks left on. The silk comes off very easily after cooking.
   
3. Though it be a violation of tradition, for a quick cup of "green" tea, put a teabag in a cup of unheated water and heat to something approximating boiling in the microwave. Staples, which are becoming rarer on teabags, don't seem to create a problem.
   

Imagination and Water Use

One thing that will help you green your domestic habits is imagination. For instance, many people are in the habit of letting a lot of water flow from faucet to drain unused--while shaving, washing hands, dishwashing, or before taking a shower. This sort of habit might become less common if people held in their minds an image of all the rigamarole involved in 1) getting clean water into that faucet, and 2) dealing with the water after it heads down the drain.

Follow the water. Most of Princeton's drinking water is drawn from the Raritan River, just downstream of Somerville, NJ. It's run through a water purification plant, then pumped 20 miles over to Princeton. Water is pretty heavy (8 lbs/gallon), so one has to assume that it takes a lot of energy to push it hither and yon. If it slips unused from your faucet down into the drain, it quickly loses any pristine qualities as it mixes with all the rest of Princeton's sewage headed for the wastewater treatment plant on River Road on the east side of town. There, large amounts of fossil fuel energy are used to clean the sewage sufficiently so that it can be discharged into the Millstone River. Diluted in the river, it heads northward to the Raritan River, where a portion of the river water is pulled out, purified and sent once again towards our faucets.

After all that travel, cleansing and purification, how incongruous it is that our drinking water emerges from the faucet, flashes for only a split second in the light, then is immediately transformed into a civic burden as it heads once again to the sewage treatment plant, unused.

If we had to carry our water 20 miles to our homes in buckets, we'd make use of every drop. But the way the system is set up, our water flows in an endless stream from our faucets, with nothing but our imaginations to help us understand the elaborate investment of work and fossil fuel energy that goes into getting it to our homes and dealing with whatever heads down the drain.

Incentives for Consumers to Reduce Power Consumption

In a column entitled "Mother Nature's Dow", NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman describes five initiatives to help shift away from fossil fuels. According to Friedman, "The fourth is decoupling — the program begun in California that turns the utility business on its head. Under decoupling, power utilities make money by helping homeowners save energy rather than by encouraging them to consume it."

By chance, a relevant clipping I had torn from a December, '08, San Francisco Chronicle article emerged from the paper chaos on my desk. It describes how such a program works for the consumer: "PG&E offers rebates if customers can cut the amount of natural gas they use in January and February, compared with the same months a year earlier. For every percent cut in gas usage, customers receive an equal percent credit on their bill. Those who save 10 percent or more get a 20 percent credit."

Green Roofs, Green Walls

Green roofs are becoming more and more common. To see a spectacular green wall, take a look at http://princetonnaturenotes.blogspot.com/2009/03/walls-go-green-in-madrid.html.

Sustainability in Spain

One of the quandaries for parents, now that it´s clear that the use of fossil fuels is deleterious to the planet, is how to give kids the same mind-opening benefits of travel that we had at that age. Some of my most vivid and joyful childhood memories are of exploring meadows and mountain streams in Austria when I was ten, and hiking in the Andes. Are they really going to be able to manufacture enough jet fuel from farming algae, as one airline magazine article described?

So, traveling in Spain with family, feeling an ambivalence that didn´t enter in ten years ago, the least I can do is take note of sustainable practices. Bicycles in Sevilla, for instance, where they´ve added quite a few bike lanes and made bikes available for borrow. The bikes fit into docks lined up along the sidewalk, and can be borrowed and returned with the help of a plastic card that´s fed into a machine. These have proved very popular. In the historic district, in the vicinity of the cathedral, they´ve made some streets pedestrian and bike only, and reintroduced a trolley. It can feel strange at first, encountering a wide city street, no cars, no racket. Some people miss the energy and the bustle of traffic, but that´s part of the challenge in a world where the romance of motion is so dependent on fossil fuels.

Compact fluorescent light bulbs are more common, as are duel flush toilets. Recycling in the city is achieved through the clustering of large bins of different shapes here and there on sidewalks. Apartment dwellers take recyclables down to the street and toss paper, bottles, cans and trash in their respective bins. The bins for bottles look like green metal igloos that have attracted the interest of sophisticated street artists.

A friend in Caseres even separates out her food waste, which here is called organics, and takes it down to a bin on the street. What happens to it next she doesn´t know, but it sounds like some sort of process is in place.

Though Spain has the lowest birthrate in Europe, it´s also on a building spree, with more building going on here than in England and France combined. Apartment buildings are rising pell mell on the outskirts of Caceres and other cities. Who´s buying them, one might ask. People buy them as investments, apparently, and young adults may be shifting away from the tradition of living with parents well into adulthood. A system of freeways (I remember seeing them being constructed on a previous visit ten years ago) now makes intercity driving in Spain as convenient and boring as in the U.S. 

The trains here are a beautiful thing to behold. The Ave train ("wing" in spanish) we took traveled at 230 kilometers per hour. It´s as quiet and smooth as a plane, and faster when one takes into account all the airport rigamarole that´s avoided. One nice touch: the escalators at the train station turn off automatically when not in use.