Q. Dear Umbra,

Municipal and individual composting operations are gaining steam nationwide. Some obvious benefits include space-saving in landfills, and cheaper and (hopefully) "greener" fertilizer. While I am an avid supporter of composting, I am curious if municipalities with composting facilities could see decreased decomposition rates in their landfills. Do yard and plant scraps even play an integral role in landfill decomposition? Thank you.

Todd
Vancouver

A. Dearest Todd,

Give thanks -- then compost!Since this is Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., a time when we are at our most gluttonous, composting is a timely issue. In fact, I'm putting together a video with tips for getting started -- keep an eye out for it.

In the meantime, your question is an interesting one. Are yard and food scraps the key to quicker decomposition in landfills? The answer is no. In fact, such organic waste is the bane of a landfill operator's existence; it takes up a quarter of the space and is a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas that's twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Paper is also a problem: it's another major source of methane, and accounts for about a third of our municipal solid waste.

This is why composting and recycling are so important. Here in the U.S., we are better about "recovering" paper and yard waste than food waste: In 2007, according to the EPA, we recycled 54 percent of our paper and composted 62 percent of yard waste. When it comes to food waste, however, we compost only about 2-3 percent. In fact, we flat-out throw away more than 25 percent of the food we buy. Pigs.

Composting, as you say, frees up space and creates a nice rich fertilizer. Because it reduces methane, it's also a tool in the climate fight. In short, it's a win all around, and we'd be turkeys not to participate.

Caruncly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

We typically try to minimize the impact of our buying decisions. We carefully considered buying some Thai mats, handcrafted by a family the shopkeeper knows. Then she told us that all textiles and furniture, whether organic or not, are all fumigated with methyl bromide before entering the States. It seems no one is talking about this issue -- is it a problem? Are my mats messed up? What about all the cool hemp clothing, is it all contaminated?

(m)Ethyl M.
San Francisco, Calif.

A. Dearest (m)Ethyl,

This here is one of those good news, bad news situations. The good news is, methyl bromide has been banned under the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that seeks to stop the destruction of the ozone layer. The bad news is, the U.S. keeps getting exemptions that allow it to continue spraying the stuff, though it uses far less than in the past.

Methyl bromide, used primarily as a soil fumigant and on food imports, is toxic and will, as the EPA delicately puts it, "affect not only the target pests it is used against, but non-target organisms as well." That's us! The greatest danger, the agency says, is at the fumigation site itself. After that, the stuff wafts up and gets busy eating ozone.

I cannot say for sure whether your Thai mats and hemp pants have been sprayed with methyl bromide or one of the "safer" alternatives, because imports are subject to a labyrinth of federal regulations that depends upon where they come from, what they're made of, and whether the inspector got a good night's sleep. Sometimes a visual inspection is enough, and finished products are often treated less suspiciously than raw materials. I can tell you that the good people at the Pesticide Action Network are doing consistent, thorough, obsessive work on this topic, and you should definitely check them out.

Phytosanitarily,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am planning to reuse my boyfriend's old melamine chest of drawers for our baby's nursery. But since it's a bit low, I would like to build an additional module on top of it to make a changing table of the correct height. My in-laws are currently remodeling their kitchen and have dozens of cabinets I could reuse to build the changing table top. Now I know melamine and particleboard are evil, but is older melamine OK? If their kitchen cabinets are 20 years old, can we assume they have already off-gassed most or all of the formaldehyde they had to off-gas? It makes no sense to throw it all out in the garbage!

Raphaëlle
Montréal

A. Dearest Raphaëlle,

Congratulations on your impending arrival and your commitment to reuse. I can tell already that you are going to raise a wise child.

You're right that melamine, which combines with formaldehyde to make the plastic resin we know, is -- well, tricky, if not outright evil. For a long time it was hailed as the key to a sort of miracle plastic, even an eco-friendly-ish choice, and then it got into our pet food and our baby formula and some of our Halloween candy and it started to seem dangerous and creepy. And then we realized that, like any plastic, melamine could leach chemicals when heated -- in the microwave, for instance. More creepy.

Having said all that, however, I think your particular reuse is a fine idea. We know that you and your boyfriend and your baby are not going to heat or eat the chest of drawers. You are relieving your in-laws, and your landfill, of at least some of the waste from their kitchen-remodeling project. And you are being crafty! Any offgassing should have happened long ago -- it is generally most intense in the first year, and dwindles from there. I say go forth and modul-ify -- and let me know how it goes.

Awwwwly,
Umbra

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

More work than anyone imagined -- watch a slideshow of the project unfolding.Leise JonesIt is worth noting that the original JP Green House budget for the first year of the project was $25k. In retrospect, this was woefully inadequate, but by no means out of line with the four previous rehabs I had completed. We now project that total expenses for the first phase of the rehab, from purchase (July 2009) through occupancy (January 2010), will come in over $200k, a cost overrun of Big Dig proportions. Like the largest public works boondoggle in U.S. history, we seriously underestimated the problems; in our case, the difficulties in rehabbing a poorly maintained structure which had been abandoned for five years.

Our first clue in this regard, uncovered during the first week of ownership, was that the sill plates -- hard pine beams resting on the stone foundation on which the building sits -- in more than half of the building were termite-ridden. The major structural work of supporting the building, pouring new foundations, and replacing the sills and lower framing was both beyond our own capacity and also precluded occupancy and the piecemeal rehab we planned.

Most anyone who has worked on an old building will nod knowingly in sympathy at our experience of grabbing hold of one problem only to find another, and then another. It’s like tugging on a loose piece of yarn and watching a whole sweater unravel. So to with the JP Green House, but the silver lining that was gradually revealed as we came to understand that no part or system in the 100-year-old, ill-maintained, former corner store could be left in place, was the opportunity to shoot for a truly revolutionary standard of energy efficient rehab.

Between purchase of the property last July and October, the scope of work and scale of our ambitions for the JP Green House were raised from a modest, homeowner conducted spiff-up to a full, down-to-studs demolition job, complete new wiring and plumbing, and, most important, the goal of passivhaus certification. Unlike most energy-efficiency investments, it is very difficult to determine what should be considered additional costs of aiming for passivhaus. Yes, we would have had to attend to the structural problems in the JP Green House under any remodeling plan, but neither would we have needed the massive (for a single family house) buttresses and footings to support thick concrete floors, which will serve as heat sinks, had we not gone down the route we chose. Thankfully, we had patient, expert guidance from a number of highly proficient advisers -- particularly Greg Caplan of Living Structures, Inc. in JP, my dad, Harold Ward, recently retired from teaching at Brown University, where he ran the Urban Environmental Laboratory and Environmental Studies Program, and Peg Preble, our neighbor and master electrician. We were also fortunate to connect with the just-founded design/build firm of Placetailor, headed by Simon Hare.

There will be no shortage of work left for Andrée and me. The schedule calls for completion of all rough carpentry, insulation, HRV system and ducting, electrical and plumbing, sufficient to meet Boston building code, by mid-January, with the first passivhaus blower test soon thereafter. This still leaves to us construction of all interior walls, completing kitchen and bath, all finish work, storefront exterior and a few other odds and ends like construction of the deck necessary to access the new front door.

We have had tremendous community support, with too many volunteers to name joining our crew for a few days to full weeks and 20+ turnouts for Saturday work days. We are looking to expand on this support with a contractor “barn raising” week in December, whereby our friends and other interested construction professionals gain hands-on experience with passivahus building techniques, while donating time and expertise to help finish off the project.

The JP Green House is almost entirely an expression of faith -- on our own part (Andrée and I are looting our retirement accounts to meet the nut), our families (both of which have given important assistance), and the generous volunteer hours, donations of supplies, tools and appliances of our community. What we have not received, thus far, is any support from federal, state or local “green build” programs, utility “renewable portfolio” funds or private foundation grants (other than an estimated $9k we expect in tax benefits and small rebates).

The JP Green House is a “pure” model, therefore: a demonstration of what may be done without relying on funding sources that are unavailable to all. On the other hand, we will occupy our home and start our JP Green House program work without any reserve or cushion, lacking the solar hot water and pv systems necessary to achieve < zero carbon impact, and with the old strorefront, to be used as community space, passivhaus education and outreach and “hub” for 350.org campaignign, still to be completed. More on this interesting state of affairs in the next post.

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Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

Seventh GenerationAt first blush, one’s enthusiasm for the Million Baby Crawl would seem to depend largely upon three things: 1) enthusiasm for babies, real and animated; 2) a penchant for baby-related puns (we’re going to rattle Congress!); and 3) interest in frittering away time on the interwebs.

But that does a disservice to the intention behind this effort, which is to rally support for reform of the nation’s chemical policies. You don’t have to have babies—or even wuv them!—to want the feds to better regulate the toxics that find their way into our homes and bodies.

The facts are out there, and they are not cuddly-wuddly:

Scary stuff, and you can read much more about it, as well as the push for reform, on the Environmental Working Group site.

Erin Brockovich lends her star power to the launch of the Million Baby Crawl.So the Crawl has commenced. A creative spin on the traditional online petition, it finds legendary green-products manufacturer Seventh Generation partnering with consumer-rights advocate Erin Brockovich, eco-pediatrician Alan Greene, and a coalition called Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. Visitors can “create a crawler” (again, you don’t have to have a baby, or ever have had a baby, or ever have thought about having a baby, to participate) or “find a crawler” by zip code or name. The goal, say organizers, is to deliver (ha! deliver!) the signatures to Congress in January—so far they’re at 12,160 and counting.

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

We are a family of five, with three little boys growing bigger every day. Which is the better environmental investment for our family: to replace our existing hot water heater with a solar model, or to switch to an on-demand, "instantaneous" hot water system?

Thanks!
Gillian and Grant
Toronto, Ont.

A. Dearest Gillian and Grant,

Whaddaya mean, my bath is heated with coal?Solar hot water is the better choice and would still be so if your children grew not one inch taller. Solar hot water takes advantage of the sun hitting your roof, which hopefully happens regularly without costing you money, nor the Earth anguish. A tankless heater will still use a polluting energy source to heat the water. It is a rare ratepayer who gets electricity from all-renewable sources, and Torontoians (?) seem to have the usual mix of coal, gas, nukes, hydro, and so forth.

All a tankless model does differently from your (I assume conventional) hot water heater is heat water as you need it, rather than storing hot water for hours. Like your tank heater, it uses either an electric coil or a gas fire to do this. A tankless on-demand model is, in the best scenario, a bit more efficient than your existing hot water heater. But it still has all the problems of using a non-renewable resource: pollution, greenhouse gas production, a sufficient power generation and delivery system, and of course reliance on the supply of whatever resource is used. You might be interested in reading my earlier column on tankless heaters.

A solar hot water system, on the other hand, can provide the bulk of your hot water needs without using any non-renewable resources (other than those used to make the equipment). Solar hot water is neither a new nor a highly complex technology, so you need not be a brave early adopter to have a system installed. There are a wide variety of systems (again, see a previous Umbra solar water love-fest) to choose from, and there are often financial incentives from one's city or state. Toronto seems to have a solar hot water initiative heating up right now, in fact, and here is a list of system suppliers to peruse.

The two potential drawbacks that I see are the initial financial outlay and whether your roof and home are well situated. But you won't know whether these are actual or theoretical drawbacks for your specific situation until you investigate the systems available where you live, their costs, and the fabulous financial incentives that might be coming your way. Here are some resources from the U.S. government on solar water heaters and how to calculate their costs.

Always choose the sun over the coal mine.

Sootily,
Umbra

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Boys will be boys ... online or off.School started this week. We have two fourth-graders and a second-grader. Ken has the misfortune to be driving a carpool that involves four boys and two schools and takes about an hour round-trip. I am biking to work every day now, because we’re cutting back to just the one beat-up station wagon for transportation. Today I was almost hit by a Hummer.

New school year, new shoes, old lunchboxes, and a new household rule that we're all wrestling with: No internet access except Saturday mornings.

One of our children -- and I think it's fair to keep this private, so let's say child #1 -- was developing an addictive relationship with online gaming. When given the opportunity, he would do nothing but play games on the internet; easily twelve hours at a stretch. Child #2 was also a fan of gaming, but didn't seem quite so hypnotized -- he would cut himself off after two hours. Child #3, who is garrulous and loves sports, was fed up with #s 1 and 2 for being "boring and stupid" -- he couldn't get them to go outside and play much.

We, the parents and parental-figures in the lives of all three, were feeling uncomfortable about the clearly deteriorating situation with our Gamer. He was pale and spindly, and irritable whenever the games were taken away.

But let's face it, we all love to have those children who "self-entertain." We like it when they play alone, or nicely with others, and let us do our own thing much of the time. This is especially true in a house of three boys. Child #1, the Gamer, was pretty easy that way. Just the opposite is true of child #3, who is either talking or moving at all times, and to whom we sometimes say, "Wouldn’t you like to go watch TV for a while?"

Oftentimes, the problem of too much screen-time in a household is really a parental problem. Not only are we all addicted, to a certain degree (I'll admit my fondness for crafting two to three Facebook posts a day), but we have lost much of the community that made it easier to raise children. It's well-documented elsewhere (see Robert Putnam's work) and I won't rant, but without safe neighborhoods and at-home parents around, our kids' lives are quite attenuated, and they rightly expect us to entertain them within these limitations.

Part of the JP Green House project is to create a better childhood for our three boys, and any local kids who want in on it. Looking at the situation we had gotten ourselves into with #1, 2, and 3, it was inevitable that we'd have to fess up to our own bad habits around screens. So we called Comcast and explained: No we don't want cable TV and 144 channels, along with high speed internet, thank you -- just turn it off ... no really, turn it off! What do you mean we can't just have a phone line?

It isn't pretty. Day 1 of No Internet found #1 first sulking in bed, then raging at his dad, and then secretly staying up until he thought everyone was asleep, and nabbing a cell-phone to play games on.

Day 2 was better: all three kids were out in the street on their bikes, complaining about the excessive number of girls with pink bicycles in the neighborhood. There are worse things than girls who like pink.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I have recently become a grandmother. (Eek! Doesn't seem like it was that long ago that I made the decision to have a child.) Though I had just one child, my daughter is pregnant again. She married a guy with seven sibs, and they want to have three or four, including adopting one. How do I talk them out of it? Having more kids will defeat their work to live lightly on Earth, won't it? Even adopting -- making a kid from Asia or elsewhere [into an] American -- doesn't help much, does it?

Crowdedly,
Terry

A. Dearest Terry,

New rule: You can raise as many kids as you can fit in a Smart Car.Andrew Currie via flickrDo not try to talk them out of it unless your side goal is to never see your grandchildren.

How did you feel about people who told you to have more than one child? To say nothing of relations who said one child was not enough. I shudder to think of the family strife that might ensue. Best to simply love your grandchildren and help them grow into strong citizens.

It might be permissible to gently speak with your daughter about the environmental impact of Americans, on a one-time only basis. You may wish to pair this conversation with an offer to help her have a smaller eco-footprint, via some useful contribution such as ... let's see ... cooking vegetarian meals for the family once a week? Or by setting aside money for the children's college fund now, in hopes of raising an inventor of solar-powered tractors.

Having kids will not help your child's overall lifetime carbon footprint, no. We are responsible for the environmental impacts of our child raising, and it is reasonable to consider that we are responsible for the lifetime impacts of any child we choose to birth or raise, as well as our descendants through that child. A recent study out of Oregon contemplated this idea of carbon legacy through childbirth, if you wish to read some interesting genetics and carbon math (and transfer your anxiety from your daughter back to yourself, which is where it might more properly belong).

It is a bit unfair to carry a multi-generation burden of guilt around for child raising, when most of us can buy and sell a car or a toothbrush without thinking too hard about the centuries of atmospheric carbon and landlocked garbage we have created. Think about it all we must, though. Alas.

In terms of adoption, you have a point that international adoption is not automatically an environmental act, beyond the fact that you are choosing from an existing pool of children rather than adding another to the world's population. One could adopt a child from another country and then raise an SUV-driving, vinyl-buying American who has an outsized carbon footprint. If a child is adopted domestically, you are not adding more people to the carbon-piggy American population, but the same danger lurks. In either case, you can help your daughter raise thoughtful children who are careful about their own impacts as they get older.

These are interesting ideas to discuss on a theoretical level with your daughter, but only if your relationship allows for such discussion. Otherwise, child bearing is an intensely personal act, and outsiders are generally unwelcome at the decision table. Keep your mouth shut and your arms wide open.

Mazeltovly,
Umbra

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

OliBac via flickrAh, back-to-school season. The rustling of leaves, the squeak of new sneakers, the reassuring sound of chalk on a blackboard. Wait, does anyone still use chalk? And if they do, is it emitting some sort of toxic dust that’s dooming our children to a life of bad health and environmental despair?

School, once that bastion of knowledge and wholesomeness, has become a sort of devil’s playground, presenting dilemmas ranging from toxic threats (probably not chalk, but what about radon or asbestos?) to junk-food lunches to diesel buses. We hereby present a few useful links and resources for navigating the hallways of your educational institution, whether it’s the local Kindergarten or a top-tier college.

Study up on the issues and think about whether your school makes the grade—then give yourself recess. You deserve it.

For the younger (swing)set

Most of you organized parental types have no doubt finished buying school supplies, but in case you’re scrambling—or all the colored pencils mysteriously break at once—here’s our guide to greener back-to-school shopping and a rundown of materials to avoid and embrace. Think about whether you can buy less overall, and remember: shopping online is better than driving to the mall.

Now that your kiddo is stocked up and off to school, will the bus ride be a source of bad fumes? Visit EPA’s Clean School Bus USA site to find out more about the issue of diesel buses and what school districts are doing to address it.

The toxic fun doesn’t stop when the bus puts on its brakes: unhealthy schools across the country are dealing with a legacy of bad building decisions. Once again, our friends at the EPA have a thorough (if not very pretty) site dedicated to making schools healthier places. You can also visit the Healthy Schools Campaign for a look at the issues and solutions (and enter their photo contest!).

One more major component of your child’s day: school lunch. Today’s lunches are a pale, plastic-wrapped imitation of the hot lunches of yesteryear (which were nothing to write home about, but at least they involved vegetables). A growing contingent is pushing for healthier lunches, and Congress is taking up the Child Nutrition Act this fall. Don’t let them keep feeding your kids crap. Get involved today.

And if you’re off to college ...

Take a look at our list of the 20 greenest colleges in the U.S. If you’re going to one of them or another green-leaning school, good for you! If you missed the boat, you could always transfer ... or better yet, check out our green campus special for inspiring profiles of student activists, tips for helping your school see the light, and handy links and resources for making this school year the greenest yet.

And keep an eye out for the newest Umbra Fisk video, coming soon: Umbra visits College of the Atlantic, the country’s first carbon-neutral school.

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Innovation in progress. Excuse our dust. For more images from the JP Green House, visit Leise Jones Photography.I was bringing two new friends down the street for a tour of the JP Green House last week. "Now prepare yourselves," I warned, as I always do, "it's not bright shiny green yet. You'll need to use your imagination."

We rounded the corner and there it was: A hulking, gray house with a strange triangular shape on a prominent streetcorner.  Gray shingles were falling off the exterior. Plastic tarps covered the gaping window-openings. In the garden, the grass grew tall around the dumpster and a huge pile of brush at the back was waiting to be shredded. Pumpkins and squash vines were spilling out over the raised beds of vegetables, and my attempt at making a flower bed had revealed my feeble knowledge of plant-aesthetics. Weeding was overdue. A large hillside on the north side of the garden was covered with blue tarps, smothering out our nemesis, the pernicious invasive weed Vincetoxicum.

Inside, I showed off the newly repaired foundation with pride, though to the untrained eye it is merely a concrete floor. The interior is entirely gutted, with no interior walls and only the frame to show.  I verbally painted the vision for my guests: Picture the 12 inches of insulation and the polished concrete floors that will keep in the passive solar heat from the south walls; the solar panels and the mini wind turbines that will provide the minimal amount of electricity we’ll need for appliances.

Imagine a big open first floor with a kitchen and living room connected to the "community room," which we will open to our neighbors for meetings, book groups, potlucks, climate-action planning, meditation, songfests, and a homeschooling collective. Imagine groups of schoolchildren visiting for tours of a zero-carbon house and discussions about the meaning of sustainability. Imagine the deck outside the kitchen, an herb garden, a thicket of berry bushes.  Picture clean laundry waving in the breeze, and the Earth flag over the front door. I go on ...

Most people get it; they see the vision as we describe it; they get excited. We are careful to talk about process, because we know it will be endless. When asked, I will expand the vision to include our sense of what our three children will learn from living in a demonstration home, learning to give tours, raise chickens and vegetables, and contemplate the future without paralyzing fear. And I will talk about the trouble and the passion of building a dream with the love of your life: fighting over money and housework and the kids, the grief of climate change we face together, the spiritual work of building together.

There are occasionally cynics, who point out how far we have to go. It’s okay -- I am occasionally one of them.

It was an excellent week of climate news, much of it covered here on Grist. I watched with fascination as the comments accrued in response to Adam Sacks' post about the need to tell the full, horrifying truth about the coming ecological crash. The same tension between despair and hope is everpresent in our household as well. Elizabeth Kolbert’s wonderful article about No Impact Man and other successors of Thoreau brought up an issue I talk about constantly: The very American desire to "fix yourself," in this case "green your lifestyle" to degrees of near absurdity, usually as some sort of a time-limited personal project, which begs the question of whether these aren't just gimmicks. This despite the clear evidence that climate change cannot be solved by millions of people making relatively easy "lifestyle changes."

What makes us different? We have asked that question of ourselves and others and we are still answering it.

Part of the answer is just humility: A demonstration home is just that. We are trying to model a viable future, and be honest in the process about the difficulties and the compromises. (Ken insists on having a clothes dryer; I refuse to give up leather shoes; we have to drive all of our kids to school, because the schools in walking distance don't please us.)

Another part of the answer is action. We are committed to our political work on climate (we are the Boston "hub" for 350.org), to the point where we neglect the house itself to do it.

The most gratifying news of the week for me was the announcement of the new initiative by the Yes Men, BeyondTalk. Go to BeyondTalk.net and pledge to engage in civil disobedience for climate change.

Ken and I discussed it. We decided that we would have to take turns doing actions, so that we don't both get arrested at the same time. Someone has to take care of the house and the kids. And we considered whether we should set up a small fund for bail and other legal expenses. Then we went back to our discussion of our options for exterior siding: Should it be red?  Definitely not green.

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

Carl M via flickrThose of you following our last post (Should Kuba Have a Puppy?) can see that both votes and comments on this question are running 9 to 1 in favor of the gratification of pet ownership. This is even though eco-curmudgeon Ken has made the point, with hard statistics, that keeping domestic animals essentially ensures the death of wild creatures that we would all heartily agree to preserve (indirectly, through habitat loss and overuse of resources).

So what?

Well, the JP Green House is meant to be a demonstration project. We aim to build a zero-carbon house on a low budget, grow veggies and raise chickens for eggs, cut our consumption to a level sustainable for the planet, and make it all public. This means full transparency of finances, building dilemmas, relationship agonies, parenting fiascos, and just the overall messiness of the thing. (Quick house and garden update: Foundation finished, windows and insulation are next, debating exterior options, many radishes, one pumpkin, fabulous dahlias, still short 50k.)

How does the utopian vision jibe with the fact that Kuba wants a puppy, the reality that Ken bought a motorcycle last week, the admission that I am writing this on a 95-degree day in Boston with my window AC blasting?

Are we a demonstration of hypocrisy? Or the immense difficulty of living within our earthly means? I'm afraid we're bound to reveal it all.

Fellow climate-organizer A., who does not own a car and rides his bicycle 12 miles from a prosperous Boston suburb to protests and meetings in our neighborhood, is one of the most sincere environmentalists I know. He writes brilliantly about the failures of major green groups to reckon with the true implications of climate change. He rants inappropriately at meetings, and never avoids calling people on their lifestyle failures. He’s more of a crank than Ken (and that’s saying something). And he smells a little funny.

A. enjoys bugging people. Last week out of the blue he responded to an email I sent from work about the economic crisis by accusing me of ignoring the true ecological disaster. Do you always address people you barely know this way? I snapped back. Basically, his answer was yes. In contrast, I try to walk a tightrope on which I avoid offending anyone by openly criticizing their consumption. I know I might regret my general affability and politeness in twenty years. Geez, we were all too busy to go to those climate protests and write our Congressman before Greenland melted...

I’ll leave you with all this hypocrisy, unresolved in my own mind.

But now for our next poll. I was over at Sue's house around the corner, today, drinking my third cup of coffee and bitching grandly about the past week, which has just been a slugfest for me, when I came up with a brilliant new question.

"How do you think the neighborhood would react if we raised rabbits for food?" I asked Sue. "I love rabbit--we used to eat it in Europe a lot. Delicious with garlic and spinach."

"Around here?! I don’t think so. You’ll have all the vegetarians and vegans picketing by the front door."

"Really? Do people realize where store-bought meat comes from?" I launched into a tirade about factory farming and got the evil eye from Sue, while her ten-year-old daughter turned pale across the room. (Point of fact: Our family is omnivorous, but we currently buy only meat raised humanely and organically on a local farm. We eat it with relish, however, the blood running down our chins. Also, I wish I had a picture of the day Eli ate a raw baby octopus, with the tentacles hanging from his mouth.)

So, the JP Green House question of the week is: Should we raise cute fuzzy bunny rabbits and slaughter them for their meat? Should we make moccasins and baby booties from their skins, sell rabbits-foot keychains for good luck, so as not to waste any usable byproducts?

Well why the heck not? Cause it's mean?

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Who could say no to this face?Ken WardKuba, 10, has waged a brilliant campaign. Unfortunately, I'm the target. Who can say no to a puppy? It's ... Grinch-like.

My parents managed the trick, but that's because my Dad was raised on a farm and Grandpa Ken, on my Mom's side, trained hunting dogs -- so when my folks said dogs didn't belong in a city, who was going to argue? I don't have the background, or perhaps backbone, to peremptorily dismiss the matter, so I've fallen back on penny-ante arguments, the sort of weaselly excuses grasped by legislators who don't want to vote the right way.

Kuba, with unending patience, has batted each one aside. When you find yourself debating the pros and cons of a Boston Terrier vs. Portuguese Waterdog, it's time to throw in the towel. (It'll be a mutt, if there is to be an "it"; we've no budget for pedigree.)

As with any decision at the JP Green House, I've looked into the question of how this action will affect our carbon footprint. The blogosphere is full of articles and posts on how to reduce your pet's carbon footprint, but I found no comprehensive analysis of the collective carbon impact of pet ownership.

By rough calculation, however, the impact is sobering.

According to the American Veterinary Medicine Association, there are 72 million dogs and 82 million cats in American households (also 12 million birds and 7 million horses). Using the one (unattributed) estimate of pet emissions, 0.5 metric ton per cat and 1.75 tons per dog (which compare to 8.5 metric tons/year for U.S. homeless persons and seems in the right range), we get 41 million and 126 million metric tons, respectively, for U.S. cats and dogs, for a staggering total of 167 million tons/year. That is 375 percent greater then total U.S. cement production.

Sure, we can cut the impact of one pet by a number of means, particularly avoiding mass-produced pet foods. And by adopting a mutt we do not add to the problem. But the larger question -- is pet ownership compatible with averting climate cataclysm? -- is a tough one.

So, Grist readers, please weigh in on the question, should Kuba have a puppy?

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

Wanted: Experienced couples therapist, preferably also with degrees in theology and law, for fractious, passionate pair riddled with apocalyptic anxiety, burdened with love for their children (all of them), acutely conscious of the finitude of time and resources, and fearful that the world has gone mad. Must take insurance.

Everyone told us that building a house could wreck a relationship. And we knew it was true. The rehab of a beautiful old house in Hull had been one of the final blows to Ken's marriage. I spent part of my childhood living in one room with my family of five, with our kitchen in the garage, while our house was torn down and rebuilt around us; fun for us, less so for our parents. But Ken felt that we needed to undertake something together. It was his insistence that the relationship be something more than just a safe place to retreat from the mad world. He was not wrong. Despite all the ups and downs this past year has brought, I have never regretted throwing my energy and resources into the JP Green House.

When I met Ken, he had thrown away almost everything he owned in the process of dissolving a marriage and selling the house he had rebuilt by the sea, a place he'd thought he would be forever. Ken had moved back to Jamaica Plain and was living in two rooms in the home of my friends Ginger and Susan. He spent his days writing about climate, puttering in the workshop he created in the garage, and shuttling Eli back and forth to his mother's. He appeared in the living room when I was taking my guitar lessons with Ginger once a week, a scruffy, handsome presence with a banjo or mandolin to add to the mix. He is the best finger-picker I have ever met.

I was in a more subtle crisis, raising my kids without much help from their father in a bubble of my own fear, which came out of my growing acquaintance with the writings of James Hansen, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Bill McKibben. And also out of my close observations of the weather.

Ken can't pay bills on time, keep his car registration current, or manage the location of his wallet and keys from hour to hour. He can quickly and accurately spin out a logo, a story, and an angle for a campaign. He can carve an ax-handle, mow a lawn with a scythe, and make sense of the Old Testament, cast aluminum in the backyard, and play anything with strings. He's a visionary, a man with vast talents, and deficits to match.

I am a humble and boringly rational person by contrast, but very reliable. I tend to know what's meant to happen, who is expecting us, what state the kids are in, and whether there is anything in the fridge for dinner.

Ken collects wonderful objects from the trash, planning always to create more wonderful objects from them ... at some point. I get into moods where I will throw away anything in my path. I clean when I'm frustrated; I shove things into closets. Ken spins in a complex arena of objects, projects, plans, and visions. I insist on a realistic vision of things that will actually happen. We are both idealists, and we are both uncompromising.

You might say we complement each other, but domestic life can be difficult around here: full of sturm and drang, and testosterone-ridden, as I grumble on bad days. We play subtle games of chicken, seeing how long we can each hold out before someone caves and does the shopping or the cleaning, resentfully, or steps up to the task of shutting down the video-game casino in the boys' room to toss them outside for a taste of real childhood, or waters the garden or cooks a meal ... heck, we can bicker over who should write the next piece for Grist!

At worst, you might say we are held together by sheer curmudgeonly self-righteousness (like some of the great homesteaders: Helen and Scott Nearing come to mind). At best this is a relationship of great passion: intellectual, emotional, spiritual, physical. Add to this the large, untamed personalities of our three children and the complexities of our household become apparent. We bring this into the story of the JP Green House because it is fundamental: we aim for transparency, to convey the inherent messiness of the great transitions we are all making.

This is a meeting of two raw souls, living in dark times: love in a time of cataclysm. To be continued ...

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

Nothing hits the spot on a hot day like an icy glass of all-American root beer. (Okay, if you want to split hairs: Nothing hits the spot on a hot day like an icy glass of all-American root beer when you must stay sober.) The problem is that when you take your wilting self to the cool respite of the beverage aisle, you discover that nothing in this life is simple.

Perhaps, like me, you go with the simple criterion of avoiding anything produced by Big Soda and loaded with high-fructose corn syrup. Ha! If only it were this straightforward. What started as a handcrafted, medicinal-tasting beverage devolved during the last century into a mass-produced cloying shadow of its former self. The good news is that root beer, like Mickey Rourke, is making a comeback, and the results can be kinda wild.

Today, your beverage aisle might showcase retro, handcrafted "root sodas" with exotic spices, certified organic root beers, a green-tea root beer, and a diet root beer spiked with an eco-sounding plant-based sweetener. You might even be able to find a local root beer with an ostensibly lighter carbon footprint. OK, so what's a green-minded, confused consumer like you to do, short of licking your cracked lips, throwing up your hands, and heading to the nearest vending machine?

Answer: Let taste be your guide. Because if it tastes awful, it's not going to matter if it's eco, healthy, or handcrafted by pygmy monks chanting hymns to Gaia -- you aren't going to buy it. At least not twice.

So for you, and only you, I assembled a tasting panel consisting of my spouse, a few willing friends, and our gleeful, sticky progeny (see video at bottom) to try some of the root beer alternatives to Big Soda. Herewith, our Highly Unscientific Results:

Maine Root
Ingredients: Carbonated pure water, organic fair trade–certified cane juice and spices (according to the website, the company uses extracts of wintergreen, clove, and anise).
Eco-claim: Organic fair trade–certified cane juice (though not USDA organic certified). Also, if you happen to live near Portland, Maine, you can take a small comfort in knowing that this root beer will be delivered via a biodiesel VW Jetta.
Price: $7.16 / four-pack of glass bottles

This is a fizzy rather than creamy root beer. Aside from the one comment that this root soda has a "nice nose," all of the adult tasters felt that it was way too sweet, and one went so far as to describe it as a "marshmallow in a glass." While you'd assume that the overly sweet quality might appeal to kids, it didn't. One claimed that it "smelled like mushrooms."

Boylan's Root Beer
Ingredients: Carbonated water, cane sugar, pure essential oils of sweet birch, cinnamon, sassafras, and anise, extracts of bourbon vanilla, yucca and licorice, and other natural flavors and spices, caramel color (from cane sugar), citric acid.
Eco-claim: Touts itself as "100% natural," which means no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives -- which is, methinks, a reasonable place to set the bar, considering that soda basically consists of three things: water, sweetener, and flavoring.
Price: $5.96 / four-pack of glass bottles

The online description says this traditional-tasting beer was developed as antidote to the super creamy, vanilla-laden style of root beers that is popular today. Interestingly, more than one taster described it as "traditional" and one described it as thin, perhaps owing to its lack of creaminess. Another said it had a "slightly astringent finish." One of the kids tasted pepper.

Zevia Natural Diet Soda Root Beer
Ingredients: Triple-filtered carbonated water, natural erythritol, natural GMO-free caramel color, stevia, citric acid and natural flavors (citrus peel oil, winter green oil, cassia oil, anise seed oil extract, ginger root extract).
Eco-claim: Touts itself as "100% natural" and "nature's answer to diet soda," but the marketing emphasis is on stevia's superiority to artificial sweeteners, not its environmental impacts. (My take is that stevia, at this point in time, doesn't seem particularly environmentally destructive. Read more of what I have to say about stevia.)
Price: $5.69 / six-pack of cans

After several expletives and exclamations, it was clear that my panel would rather suffer dehydration headaches than drink this root beer. One of our tasters said it "tastes like the snacks at my diabetic father-in-law's house." Another sighed, "That's definitely a diet drink." I found it sickly sweet and only vaguely root beer–like. The kids found it "weird" and "bad" but worst of all like "polishing toothpaste." (Q: Since when do kids use Topol?)

Whole Foods 365 Everyday Value Root Beer
Ingredients: Filtered carbonated water, cane sugar, natural root beer flavor, citric acid, caramel color (from cane sugar).
Eco-claim: None on the packaging, but Whole Foods has a notoriously green agenda.
Price: $2.49 / six-pack of cans

"A good, solid root beer," said one taster, and another approved of its "caramel nose." Another said, with obvious relief, "No funny aftertaste!" I found it to be smooth and straightforward and neither too sweet nor too weird. The kids deemed it spicy, sweet, and root-beery. Our panels (adults and kids) separately ranked it No. 1, with no dissent.

Blue Sky Certified Organic Root Beer Encore
Ingredients: Filtered carbonated water, organic cane juice, natural root beer flavor, caramel color and citric acid.
Eco-claim: Uses USDA-certified organic cane sugar. Why pony up for organic sugar? Although you don't have to worry about GMOs yet when it comes to cane sugar (GMO sugar beet crops have been planted in the U.S.), conventionally grown sugar does have enormous impacts on the environment. Read all about it in a World Wildlife Fund report.
Price: $5.69 / six-pack of cans

This was the neither-here-nor-there root beer. Although it had a "nice nose" and was "pleasantly effervescent," its aftertaste bugged the tasters who described it as sour, flat, or medicinal. The damning comment: "No worse than any other root beer." One of the kids said it was "more like Coke," which shocked her parents, who would never let their kids drink Coke.

Santa Cruz Organic Root Beer
Ingredients: Sparkling filtered water, organic evaporated cane juice, natural root beer flavor, organic lemon juice concentrate, organic vanilla extract.
Eco-claim: In addition to using USDA-certified organic ingredients, the company itself makes green efforts. The can also carries a Green-e label that states that this root beer is made with 100 percent certified renewable energy.
Price: $6.99 / six-pack of cans

That fact that this soda is clear may telegraph that it doesn't use artificial color, but our tasters found its transparency "kinda freaky" and "trippy." A child commented that it looked like white wine. After sipping, someone blurted out, "That's root beer?" No one actively disliked this soda, but every taster complained that it was not root-beery enough. Two tasters said it was "like a ginger ale" and one thought it was like a Sarsaparilla (a drink made from the eponymous root rather than the sassafras root that gives real root beer its flavor). Kid zinger: "It tastes like the fluoride I hate the most."

Virgil's Microbrewed Root Beer
Ingredients: According to the website: carbonated water and unbleached cane sugar along with these natural herbs and spices (including point of origin): anise from Spain, licorice from France, vanilla (bourbon) from Madagascar, cinnamon from Ceylon, clove from Indonesia, wintergreen from China, sweet birch from the southern U.S., molasses from the U.S., nutmeg from Indonesia, pimento berry oil from Jamaica, balsam oil from Peru, cassia oil from China.
Eco-claim: Like Boylan's, its ingredients are "natural." Although artisan consumables and green-mindedness often go hand in hand, it's worth remembering that this isn't always the case. This product aims to be tasty rather than to save the world. Upside: no greenwashing. Downside: What, no freakin' biodiesel Jetta?
Price: $6.36 / four-pack of glass bottles

This beer is brewed and flash-pasteurized as opposed to "cold-brewed," which allegedly produces a sub-standard product. "Nice and dark," someone cooed as we poured it. Strangest comment: "Dark and bubbly like a good Jacuzzi." Every taster noted the licorice taste and used the polite-but-damning adjective "different" to describe it. Refreshingly, this entry is not too sweet.

Steaz Organic Sparkling Green Tea Root Beer
Ingredients: Sparkling filtered water, organic evaporated cane juice, organic caramel color, natural flavors, organic fair trade–certified green tea, citric acid, ascorbic acid (Vitamin C), Sodium citrate.
Eco-claim: UDSA organic ingredients plus organic and fair-trade green tea. Triple-bottom-line company.
Price: $3.99 / four-pack of glass bottles

Does green tea really belong in root beer? "Damn hippies," spat one taster. Most tasters found the dominant taste not to be root beer–like or tea-like but akin to caramel or syrup. Thin, watery texture made one taster lament that it had, like limp hair, "no body." One kid said it tasted like Sprite.

Saranac Root Beer
Ingredients: Filtered water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, sodium benzoate (preserves freshness), natural and artificial flavors, citric acid.
Eco-claim: None on the bottle, but according to its website, Saranac's green initiatives include recycling its spent grains into cattle feed (insert boo-hiss from grass-fed beef fans) and recycling the CO2 from its fermentation process. Although people in my neck of New England think of it as a "local" root beer, it's brewed 144 miles from my house, according to MapQuest.
Price: $6.29 / six-pack of glass bottles

I was so peeved to discover that this beer contained HFCS that I almost didn't include it in the tasting. (Alas, HFCS is not uncommon in comeback root beers, as Eric Asimov discovered in his taste-test.) I included it because I was curious: Would anyone taste it? Sure enough, the very first comment was, "The sugar is different in this one!" Another taster said, "Overly sweet." Ultimately, tasters liked its texture, which was so creamy and smooth that one taster said it was "like whipped cream in my mouth." I thought it had an overly tangy aftertaste. It was the runner-up for the kids, who said it was a "plain-old root beer."

The bottom line: Whole Foods 365 Everyday Value Brand root beer tastes great and doesn't contain HFCS. It may not be earnestly green, handcrafted, exotic, or zero-cal, but its low price means that you might be able to afford to top if off with a big dollop of really yummy organic vanilla ice cream. Enjoy!

Watch the Junior Tasters at work:

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This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

Long story short, my parents have been thinking about buying me a car since soon I will be going to University and that way, I won't constantly be using their cars. My mom suggested a Volkswagen Beetle Convertible, which I love the look of. However, it doesn't appear to be very environmentally friendly. I didn't do a lot of research since I don't really understand all the car terms, but the website I checked said that the Mini Cooper was a lot more eco-friendly for about the same price. I was just wondering which car you would suggest, preferably a convertible?

Megan Y.
Toronto, Ontario

A. Dearest Megan,

Fun, yes. But necessary?Vicarious car shopping is my favorite. Especially for a car I would never, ever buy, like a convertible. And in Canada, to booot! Howevah, I am an environmental advice columnist, so before we shop it is my duty to say this: I don't understand why you will need your own car. Typical university students spend their time living near campus, attending classes, studying, working at some nearby job, hanging out with proximate friends, and maybe going on an occasional weekend trip.

If you are attending a poorly planned university where a car is a necessity, all is forgiven and we will talk about how to pick one in a moment. Otherwise, we need to discuss. Your needs as a student could most likely be met with a combination of walking, biking, taking public transit, and renting the occasional car. You could also join a car-sharing service (here are your Canadian car-sharing resources). All of these will be less expensive than owning a car (check out this True Cost to Own calculator), be less of a hassle, keep the Freshman 15 at bay, and of course emit fewer pollutants. Please look into the transit situation at your matriculating university and reconsider your plan to add another dirty driver to the planet.

If your situation absolutely requires a car and my officious attitude should be shelved, I do have one further question. What is the point of owning a convertible when you live in Canada? I am familiar with the peri-Canada area, having lived in northern New England and the Pacific Northwest. A convertible is for sunny, warm areas with little precipitation, aka not Canada. Think about the maintenance issues for the hood.

Alright, enough rain on your parade. Your parents are willing to spend at least $25k on a new car, you're ready to cart all your new friends around, and you think the Beetle is cute. It sure is. Here are other convertibles in the lower price range: the Mazda Miata, the Ford Mustang, and the Toyota Solara. Slight more expensive are the Honda S200, the Volkswagen Eos, and the Nissan Z. Then we move into BMWs, Porsches, and Audis, which we shall set aside. I like Consumer Reports, and they like the Nissan, the Mazda, the Honda, and the Toyota for reliability and performance. Hm. All Japanese cars. Strange ...

On the fuel economy front, the U.S. government provides a side-by-side carbon footprint and air pollution score for the cars of your choice, and of course the Canadians compare cars as well. Out of your two favorites, the Mini Cooper does get better mileage -- or kilometrage. You wrote me because you were concerned about environmental impact, however, so I would go a little further if I were you and look into the fuel economy of all the convertibles in your price range.

Basically, I'm going to let you do your own footwork. Your first university research project. Look for a reliable car based on ratings. I think it's worth it to subscribe to Consumer Reports online, but you may also find old copies in the library; you should also take a cruise around GreenerCars.org (which will also require a subscription to get full details). Then evaluate the emissions and go with the best of both worlds. There's no point in buying a car you yourself have not committed to, and I'm not going to take responsibility for a car you hate. My only vote is against the Volkswagen. The mileage is poor and the long-term performance will be too. Alas for its enticing cuteness.

Regretfully,
Umbra

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Environmental education in Guinea Bissau

Among all the responses to the new data showing we're getting sicker and fatter, I was most struck by Kerry Trueman's comment at Civil Eats that what we are really suffering from is "kitchen illiteracy." Now, that's the kind of insight which seems easy to dismiss. We all know it's not about a lack of interest or knowledge -- it's about a lack of time, right? As I once asked, how can you fix the food system when you have to fight convenience? Working parents are forced by circumstances outside their control to buy processed food because cooking real food takes too long. These folks don't have time to boil pasta much less prepare a healthy meal.

Well, what if I told you that assertion might be wrong? What if "convenience foods" aren't actually all that -- for lack of a better word -- convenient? A few years ago, a UCLA researcher performed an observational study of a group of LA families to see how they handled mealtimes.  Here's what she found:

Surprisingly, dinner didn't get on the table any faster in homes that favored convenience foods. Meals took an average of 52 minutes in total time to prepare. The difference in the total amount of time expended was not statistically significant between meals involving extensive use of convenience foods (with such foods making up 50 percent or more of a meal) and more limited use of such items (between 20 and 50 percent). 

In fact, families saved only when it came to the amount of hands-on time spent preparing dishes — and the savings were relatively modest. Families with an extensive reliance on convenience foods saved an average of 10 to 12 minutes over families with more limited reliance on such products. Home-cooked meals required an average of 34 minutes of hands-on time.

Now, this was a small study and its sample wasn't particularly representative. It looked at 32 college-educated, predominantly white median-income LA familes -- at a minimum, they had to be willing to let researchers into their homes (in some cases with a videocamera). Plus, only about 10% of meals studied involved single-serving (i.e. meal-in-a-box) processed food. However, in many cases half or more of a meal used convenience foods and Hamburger Helper-style "extenders" were common. Still, you can't generalize from this study as to how different income groups or ethnicities approach dinner.

But what the study did show was that using processed food saved all of 10 minutes in the kitchen.  The study did note that sometimes those extra minutes make all the difference. As a participant in an earlier cooking study said: "When we're exhausted, if the 20 minutes we bargained to spend cooking starts turning into 35, that's enough to finish us off.”  As a result, I'm not going to suggest that everyone just suck it up and spend another 10 minutes in the kitchen. Also, one of the core conclusions of the study involved the fact that the act of cooking was not fundamentally where people were looking to save time:

This study illustrates, through observation of real families in real-life situations, that raw ingredients need not substantially increase preparation times. The menus and shopping strategies are likely to change with an increased emphasis on raw ingredients. Not all families (or individuals within families) want to prepare or eat such meals; they prefer the more complex menus that are possible, with the same time expenditure, using commercial foods. Others may find that fresh raw ingredients require more shopping trips or more planning than they can invest, or they may lack the cooking skills to prepare them.

That, my friends, is the very definition of "kitchen illiteracy."

I draw a couple conclusions of my own from all this.  First of all, education will indeed be an important part of any food reform. Increasing people's comfort and familiarity with food, bizarre as it is to consider, is absolutely necessary.  But there's also this fact: if you offer consumers real, fresh food products which save 10 minutes in the kitchen, you just might change people's cooking habits for the better. And that's not just wishful thinking on my part -- the USDA thinks so, too!

One of the more positive studies mentioned in the USDA's recent report on food deserts involved just this kind of product. And it got very promising results:

One intervention stocked prepared packs of fruits and vegetables (washed, cut, and bagged) at two tiendas (small stores) that served primarily Latino customers in North Carolina.  Fruit and vegetable intake for customers at these two tiendas was compared with the fruit and vegetable intake of customers at two control group tiendas that did not offer the fruit and vegetable packs (Ayala et al., 2009).  The study found that customers who shopped at stores where the packs were sold increased fruit and vegetable intake by one full serving. Customers who shopped in the two control tiendas exhibited no change in consumption.

And make no mistake: Increasing fruit and veg intake by a full serving is HUGE. Very few interventions that have been studied/modeled improve intake that significantly. For example, a USDA study that looked at the effect on purchases of a 10% subsidy on the price of vegetables determined it would increase fruit and veg consumtion by 5%. The NC study metioned above increased it by 40%. Not that this kind of product is revolutionary. These sorts of things are very common in Europe -- a classic example being ready-to-cook "soup mixes," i.e. bags of trimmed, washed veggies and herbs.

Of course, these kinds of value-added products don't require an enormous factory, a massive distribution system or a vast sea of corn and soy to engineer. So, it's understandable that Big Food hasn't done much with them. But still, someone should. And it might make more than a small dent in our societal eating disorder of too much of the wrong kinds of food.

h/t Janet Majure at Foodperson.com

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Top 25 reasons to give a damn about climate change

Left behind.coldcolours via flickrIt's Sunday on Bourne Street. I am weeding at the JP Green House, furious at the reappearance of the Dog Strangling Vine that we battled hard last summer. A pernicious creeping vine, it takes over any neglected area around here: East Coast kudzu. An abandoned house is not really vacant, but inhabited by slow destructive forces like rot and weeds. I tackle a few shoots and then, discouraged, turn to watering the melon and pumpkin patch, newly planted two weeks ago. Ken zips by, testing the bikes that he's tuning up after the winter. The young African men at the halfway house next door are riding a pocket motorcycle up and down the street, noisily, over and over again. I contemplate telling them off but decide it's not neighborly.

Our neighbor John has been cleaning out his wife's uncle's house. The uncle died at home around midwinter, ninety-something, and the task of cleaning out 70 years of accumulations fell to John, because he'd recently lost his job as a jewelry salesman. He is 55 and a bit grim about his prospects. Ken has been helping him sort through stuff, and has heard about the "changed balance of power in the marriage" and other predictable outcomes. Our neighborhood is quirky but mostly middle class. Still, you can't swing a cat around here without knocking down somebody freshly unemployed.

John netted us some great trash finds: a Debbie Reynolds paper-doll set with complete outfits; old photographs of the graduating classes of St. Andrew's School, including later-convicted pedophile priest. John wonders if we could sell the last of his uncle's furniture and quaint games and toys at our upcoming yard sale.

I dump the fresh compost on the heap at the back of the garden and give it a few turns. I contemplate planting another bed of wildflowers, but decide to wait until next weekend. Tar-paper has been flying off the Green House since we had the asbestos shingles removed, and showing up all around the neighborhood. I decide it would be good to be seen marching around with a plastic bag, resolutely cleaning up, waving cheerily to neighbors in their yards. I do that for a while, until I'm distracted by a great-looking pile of trash on Catherine Street, a few yards down.

Closer inspection reveals that each bag of trash contains some treasures. In one there are two pairs of boys' winter boots--good ones. In another, beach towels and swimming goggles. An ancient credenza reveals durable plastic cutlery, never used, along with the horror of tupperware containing ancient leftovers. Three wicker baskets in excellent condition reveal a plethora of children's mittens and hats. There's a great bronze planter, a speckled blue and white tin teakettle, and a pair of binoculars in perfect condition that somehow recall my childhood of hiking in the California hills. Someone left in a hurry here. Someone moving out, lease up? Another lost job, or home?

Magic stay-on clothes!Ken WardI call Ken over and we pick through each bag. "It's like Christmas in reverse!" I exclaim. We are joined by one of the Africans, who gives the picked-over trash a glance and then wanders off with his cell phone.

I remember what John said: "I've been unemployed for nine months now. I think people keep expecting this to end, but it seems like it could get worse." He was baffled, worried. I pile all my newfound treasures in the car, dump them out on the front lawn, and sort. I pick up the girl's size-7 snowsuit, a few pink hats, and a pair of pink swimming goggles and bring them down to Sue, who has girls.

We do a lot of trash picking. Ken, especially, will screech his decrepit Volvo to a halt beside any promising curbside pile. He loves old stuff, but recognizes the value of almost anything. Broken electronic equipment can be smashed or taken apart by the boys. Any wood can be kindling. Old photographs help us decipher our surroundings.

There is much joy in a good find, but also lots of opportunities for sarcasm and irritation. We all struggle under the burden of luxury turned to garbage. We lose our jobs and are left without a means of subsistence in the midst of all this excess. We rarely need what we find, and a lot of it gets redistributed to friends and neighbors, to Goodwill, or back to the trash.

Yet I dream of never needing to buy another thing, but just existing under the guidance of this strange trash-karma that brings us whatever we need.

A Sunday-night prayer:

May the Deity of Garbage and Abundance hold John Our Neighbor in his mercy
Along with the family who moved out so quickly
That they left those fabulous 1960s binoculars behind on Bourne Street
Amen.

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Every year around this time, the father in me starts thinking deep thoughts about why I’ve dedicated my career to environmental awareness and, in particular, helping people who don’t consider themselves activists understand why environmental issues should matter to them. In more recent years, it’s morphed into an almost singular focus for me on why the climate crisis should matter to all of us.

For me, it’s simple. It’s the kids.

As a parent, I want to do everything I can to make sure my kids are exposed to fewer hazards than I was. I always laugh when my own mom says, “Well, we fed you [some processed food I could never imagine giving my kids] and you turned out OK,” or “We didn’t even have carseats when you were growing up and you’re just fine.” Yeah, yeah, yeah – I for one feel completely free of nostalgia for the “good old days” of the toxic dangers of the 1970s. We’ve gotten smarter and that’s a good thing.

That’s why I was so disappointed to find out how stuck companies that are making the products we parents are buying to protect our kids are on climate because climate is simply toxic to our children’s future. When Climate Counts (which I direct) announced scores on the climate action of the toys and children’s equipment sector a couple of months back, results were dismal.

At the request of the many consumers who were interested in this sector, we scored 13 of the biggest companies – companies who make familiar family brands like Graco, Safety 1st, Instep, Evenflo, Chicco, One Step Ahead, Britax, Peg Perego, and more – and TEN scored less than five points out of a possible 100 on climate. No understanding of the overall impact of their companies’ energy use, waste, distribution, and sales on climate. No evidence of any efforts to reduce energy use or greenhouse gas emissions. No support for good climate policy. And, no conversation at all with the legions of parents who buy from these companies because they want to ensure the safety of their kids. No conversation about climate change, something that could have a greater impact on the current generation of children that maybe anything else.

The companies that make children’s safety equipment are incessantly frightening parents like me into an upgrade: “Hey concerned parent, remember that carseat you used for your newborn in 2006? Well, nothing could be more dangerous for your newborn with a 2009 birthday. You’ve got to buy this year’s model in order to keep you kid safe!” Most of us hear the call and do just as we’re told, stretching our own wallets way too often to support a business model fueled by planned obsolescence.

Look, I’m a big believer in steady safety improvements and appreciate that these companies are constantly looking for ways to make their products safer. But here’s the problem I do have – why hasn’t that thirst for safety carried over yet to climate?

Children’s equipment companies know parents want to keep kids safe. And that’s not just today or this week or this year. I think about the safety of my kids long after they’ll have left my house, long after I’m gone. I want their entire lives to be safe and secure. I want to take every precaution possible in the way I treat the world I leave them. I’m not trying to anticipate what could result from global climate change. I don’t want to know – and not because I’m trying to avoid thinking about it. I don’t want to know because I don’t want it to happen.

So that affects the way I think about the products I buy ostensibly to keep my kids safe. I think those choices have to extend far beyond the catastrophic car accident I hope will never happen, far beyond the tiny fingers that might get slammed in the bedroom door (which has happened, despite my precautions), far beyond the potential toxic chemicals that may be in the food we feed them. They have to extend to climate change.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

In May of 2008, the property at 133 Bourne St., Boston, Massachusetts was purchased from HBHC Bank by myself and Ken Ward. Ninety-nine years old at the time, it had long served the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Roslindale as both a corner store and a family dwelling. At the time of purchase, the house had been abandoned, foreclosed, and uninhabited for four years. It would require an almost total rehab, but seemed to hold immense potential, with space aplenty for a blended family of three young boys, a large central area at the front of the house that called out to be made into community space, and an immense yard, with ample room for vegetable gardening, play, and a workshop for projects.

Climate activists and community organizers, determined to walk the talk and somewhat tired of only throwing words at the problem of a completely unsustainable future predicated on endless growth with finite resources, we set out to create the JP Green House: a zero-carbon demonstration home and garden, with a small community center.

Ken and I had been looking at decrepit houses: abandoned houses, foreclosed houses, houses that had keys in lockboxes that our young realtor had the combination to. We had been informed about short-sales and bad deeds and houses for whom no one would give you a mortgage. We didn't know it at the time, but we were on a local tour of the dirty underbelly of the housing bubble, just as it was about to explode. We caught some of the flying debris, in the form of 133 Bourne St., and we declared that we had seen the future. It would be a future of unviable, wrong-headed materialism lovingly reworked into sustainable, handmade, homegrown urban homesteading.

Doesn't that sound nice?

Then the bottom fell out for us too.

Within two weeks of claiming the keys and cheerfully setting to work mowing the long grass with a scythe and gutting the basement, Ken tore through the last of several levels of floor boarding -- and declared that we had no foundation.

Not a month later, the stock market collapsed. We chewed our nails fretfully for two months, while a third of our money dribbled away, until we finally had the sense to pull it out.

It was a winter spent planning, worrying, and fighting about money, while the two of us contemplated the "new" JP Green House from the vantage point of a too-expensive rental down the street, and our three boys bounced off the walls. We hired architects -- and then we fired them when they produced drawings suitable to some cushy greenwashed fantasy of a suburban rehab. We built our website and distributed postcards and added names to our mailing list, all the while wondering if it could really be done.

The news from the climate scientists grew ever worse. The economy withered. I went to DC for the first major coal-plant demonstration in March. Ken negotiated with Bill McKibben and 350.org for our house to be the Boston hub for that movement. Was that, we wondered, more to the point than rebuilding a derelict house?

By spring we were back above water. We had hammered out an agreement with Placetailor, a design-build firm of young, green architects and builders, to do six months of structural work and super-insulation and get us in there. By May they were showing up at 6 a.m. on their bikes and launching into the construction with proper zeal. Our "urban farmer" Gabe, from Green City Growers, built us raised beds and filled them with his magic soil mixture for the first crop of veggies. Ken tackled the inscrutable forms that might get us government money, and set out to plant so many raspberries that they would defeat the "Dog Strangling Vine" that covered our hillside. Simon and I relished our separate composting mechanisms -- his a box full of worms, mine a traditional pile in the back. Kuba filled the dumpster and dug in the garden with gusto. And Eli hung around being charming. We were in the local paper, on local TV (see video below) and local radio.

We still have no money for solar panels, or even a composting toilet. But we careen toward the certain future of more local-reliance and less carbon -- steadied by friends and neighbors, inspired by our kids -- nonetheless.

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

The intro question for the first gathering of 350.org activists in Massachusetts early this month was, "How do you feel, personally, about climate change?" Having worked on the agenda, I should have been prepared -- but it still stumped me.

When I spoke, it was a distillation of five years of hard thinking and writing; truthful, but packaged. We are offered, I said, but two choices: blind optimism of the sort that Waxman-Markey cheerleaders purvey, or deep despair, the feeling one gets from most climate scientists. I prefer, I said, a resolute hope that comes only in accepting reality -- the reason for my commitment to 350.org and Bill McKibben's brand of honesty and humor. Having said this, I felt cheerful.

Two others sitting in our circle did a better job. Someone, I don't remember who, said, "I'm surprised that no one has said they're angry," and immediately I too became angry.

Fred Small, Senior Minister at First Church Cambridge/Unitarian Universalist, a folksinger of tremendous talent who had us on our feet singing with all heart his new song "350," spoke next. Fred said that between despair and hope lies resolve, but to live life well and with resolution, one must be both present and unattached, accepting that "I cannot solve this." This struck me powerfully, and right away I felt calm and purposeful.

That's how it goes. I careen from enervating despair, kicked off by anything from reading National Geographic to watching my son and his friends toss a ball around, to chipper optimism, when I learn that the Massachusetts Council of Churches is joining our 350.org campaign or one of my posts generates a flurry of responses, to black anger, when I see all our major organizations settling for the too-weak Waxman-Markey, or hear that my good friend David Merrill has to scrounge to keep globalwarmingsolution.org going. I do not have Fred's balance, probably because I think I must try and solve this.

The idea of the JP Green House, the building itself, and Andrée are inseparable and came to me in reverse order. When I met Andrée, I was living in a two-room apartment in Jamaica Plain, writing all day, every day, about climate. I stopped only to pick up my then-seven-year-old, Eli, from school and started immediately after dropping him off. The "bright lines" project I was pursuing aimed to create free space for senior U.S. environmentalists to consider the stark realities of climate change and devise new strategies outside the boundaries of job description and organizational imperatives. With the clock ticking, and Jim Hansen moving the hands ahead, every minute seemed precious.

Andrée took guitar lessons with Ginger downstairs, and every once in awhile I'd be invited down to sit in, and in those fleeting moments of three-part harmony, guitar, banjo, and mandolin, I remembered what living is all about.

When it came time to move last year, we decided to buy a house together, letting our three boys (Eli, now 9, and Andrée's Simon, 7, and Kuba, 11) get to know each other as neighbors. That thought led us to the old, abandoned store on Bourne and Catherine Streets -- a challenge of the sort that I, with four building rehabs under my belt, felt confident taking on. As we drew near to home ownership, it seemed natural to check into Boston-area low-carbon demonstrations, and it was with some surprise we discovered there weren't any. In fact, there are a mere handful of useful, accessible model green homes in the nation (and we know of only one that is low-/moderate-income). So we thought, "Why don't we build one?"

And the JP Green House was born.

The challenge, it turned out, was larger than my construction experience. Instead of moving into a basement apartment in our new building as planned, Eli and I moved in with Andrée and her boys -- and the boys have handled it better than the adults.

I do not have time to do what needs to be done on climate and the JP Green House and, like my friend David, I cannot finding funding or position to support work that desperately needs doing. The JP Green House represents all that is hopeful, outward, community-engaged, inspirational, kid-friendly, educational and, in the person of Andrée, loving.

Writing, organizing, and campaigning on my own time contributes little and displaces much, yet how can any thinking person at this moment do anything else?

I have no answer, but I know that I am not alone facing the dilemma. I find self-exposition faintly embarrassing, but these seem like troubles larger than mine alone, and I hope that we will hear from others with the same dilemma.

Watch Ken expound upon the climate crisis during a spring appearance at Tufts University -- warning, f-bombs ahead!

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1

Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House

When it comes to eco-parenting, mothers tend to get the spotlight—everything from cultural references (Mother Earth and Mother Nature, anyone?) to marketing blitzes (hello, Big Green Purse!). But there are plenty of fathers out there doing their part for both progeny and planet. We showcase a few of them here, including our own Grist staff dads.

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Aim high.With Father’s Day looming, it’s my duty to come up with related content on Grist, and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we should best mark the occasion. A list of eco-friendly gift ideas? Nah, we did that last year—plus with all the other lists of eco-friendly Father’s Day gifts out there, that’s getting almost as stale as the classic tie-or-hankie conundrum anyway.

Maybe a round-up of our parenting advice? Like our Ask Umbra columns on diaperless parenting and the never-ending diaper ado and recycling car seats. Or our whole special series on parenting and health. Or Richard Louv’s tips for how to start a neighborhood nature club.

Or perhaps it would be best to highlight some of the fatherhood-related pieces we’ve had from guest contributors—like Marcelo Bonta’s reflection on his daughter and the diversity (or lack thereof) of the green movement; or John Kurmann’s struggles with whether to have children; or A. Carl Leopold’s memories of life with his famous father, Aldo.

But then I came across a piece our own David Roberts wrote last year. A piece he headlined—out of modesty, crabbiness, or because he was in a rush—“Ramblings for Father’s Day.”

I missed the piece when it first appeared—perhaps because I was editing twelve other things and just didn’t see it fly by, perhaps because I was a month away from the birth of my own first child and caught up in that. But I believe it deserves a re-airing. If I were to indulge in my own ramblings about why, you’d think I was trying to butter Dave up for something. So I’ll let (some of) it speak for itself:

The multi-billion-dollar parenting industry wants you to think that parenting is complex and technical and that you need expert advice to handle it. But I’ve discovered that it’s fairly simple. I’ve unlocked the grand secret. Are you ready? Here it goes:

If you want to be a good parent, be a good person.

There you have it. Children will model their lives on the lives they see. So model a good life.

Terrifying, right? Warming the diaper wipes is one thing, but living a good life? Being a good person? Who knows how to do that?

But there’s no way around it. You can tell them to manage anger constructively. You can tell them not to take more than their fair share. You can tell them that all people, even those most pitiable or aggravating, deserve empathy and respect. You can tell them that they should own their feelings and not be afraid or ashamed to express them. You can tell them that kindness is not weakness and that love can move mountains.

But if you react to your own anger with yelling or violence; if you hoard and begrudge resources; if you insult or berate others; if you are insensitive to those you love; if you bottle up your own feelings or attack perceived weaknesses in others—if you do that stuff, that’s what they do.

There’s more where that came from—and it’s the best “eco” advice you’ll get this Father’s Day. Go read it.

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Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1