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by Stephen Hren and Rebekah Hren, July 18, 2008 9:34 AM
In a few cities around the country we've gotten access to bicycles and been able to tour around. This is my preferred method of sightseeing, as the pace is slow enough to take in detail but not so slow as to only see a small slice. You get to stop wherever you want for as long as you want when you do see something cool, unlike with public transit (or even a car, for that matter, since parking is always an issue). We've done some great biking in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Albuquerque, and even rented a tandem bike and cruised down the bike path from Santa Monica to Venice Beach to check out the tchotchkes people have for sale there. Talking to cyclists, one thing that's been disappointing to us is the derisive attitudes towards electric bicycles. I was hoping this pigheadedness was limited to my own particular circle of bicyclists in North Carolina. Americans, it seems, cannot do any activity without turning it into something competitive. Take Frisbee, for example. Here's a simple sport that anyone can play in a relaxing way. But there's a problem: there's nothing competitive about it. So we have to have Ultimate Frisbee and Frisbee Golf so that someone can win and someone can lose. Random tossing of the disc is frowned upon, unless it's in practice for some future competition. What's the point? The same macho attitude is prevalent among many bicyclists. Whether you're talking to a spandex-encased century-rider or a grungy fixed-gear messenger, you run into that underlying competitiveness. If you bring up the fact that you're thinking of buying an electric-assisted bike, they cock their noses and look at you like a demented sissy. Even Rebekah, who can't call herself a biking enthusiast, although she does errands all over town on her bike, was an initial skeptic. It's time for the attitude to go. Basically, I'm sick of going two miles an hour up the hills in our neighborhood. I've done my fair share of riding, and one thing that's always bummed me out is, even though you usually go up an equivalent distance as you go down, the fact that you go down very quickly and up much slower means that you spend way more time going up. And going up sucks. Sure, it's good exercise but, frankly, I get plenty of exercise doing carpentry, gardening, etc. I just want to get the groceries home and crack open a cold beer in the backyard, not sweat like a stuck pig pedaling back from the coop with a few saddlebags full of groceries getting passed by slugs in the grass next to me. Unfortunately, we have inherited sprawled-out cities from previous generations who were hoodwinked by the romantic convenience of the automobile, as Douglas Morris describes in his volume It's a Sprawl World After All. Although abandoning many of the outer rings of architecturally appalling and poorly-built suburbs and returning them to farmland while we infill our cities is a good strategy over the long haul, the fact remains that many of the places we need to go, especially bus and light-rail stops, are a long ride away. We need to be encouraging people to bike, and telling them to toughen up and pedal harder isn't going to actually get them to ride more. If you haven't ridden an electric-assisted bike, take a ride. Going uphill at 15mph is worth more to me than all the attitude in the world. For more info on living without a bike, check out Chris Balish's How to Live Well without Owning a Car. The bikes weigh a bit more than non-electric bikes, but can be pedaled easily after the batteries die, something that can't be said for electric scooters, which weigh about three times more and you are going to be pushing up those hills after the voltage drops off. We don't know of a model currently existing that recharges the battery with braking energy, but we're hoping one comes along. Another possibility would be to use an amorphous photovoltaic panel, one of the flexible kinds that can be rolled up, and drape it over your bike to recharge the battery at stops. Speaking of bikeable towns, one of the last cities on our tour is New Orleans, where we will be July 24th. New Orleans, post-Katrina, obviously faces serious challenges. But now, almost three years after the hurricane, the pace of reconstruction has been so slow that gripping possibilities still exist to remodel the city into a more sustainable place. We're grateful that so many solar companies around the country have sent volunteers to install systems there, and that so many dedicated architects, builders, and regular citizens have also volunteered designs, time, and labor. A top-down initiative for sustainability, rather than for charter schools and overpaid government subcontractors, would have helped expose the silver lining to that large cloud. What's done is done. We prefer to believe that New Orleans remains better positioned than many other large U.S. cities to transform itself into an independent eco-city
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by Stephen Hren and Rebekah Hren, July 17, 2008 9:36 AM
PV stands for photovoltaic, or solar electric, for those of you on the learning curve out there. I'm a PV installer, and also a licensed electrician. I went to electrical and solar school and apprenticed under an electrician in order to get my electrical license ? specifically to be a solar installer. So here's my confession: I might be nearing the end of my PV career. But let me explain! I used to get the biggest thrill from PV. I loved seeing and touching the panels, their shiny black blueness, their silver electric lines, the magic that, without sound or motion or pollution, turns sunlight into electricity. (How cool is that, anyway?) I even loved inverters, the straight-laced, complex electronic boxes with snazzy graphics that turn the panels' direct current (DC) into the AC current we use in our houses. I had hoped it would be a long-term relationship, a marriage so to speak, and I have to ask myself, is the honeymoon over and I now need to adjust to the longer-term commitment, more stable but not quite so exciting? Or is it something else? Solar is the only career I've had where I've been excited to tell people what I do, and almost always I get an interested query or comment in return. And I don't think it is just because I am a female electrician, which is admittedly rare. Everyone wants free electricity from the sun, you would have to be an idiot to turn that down! But to get back to the point, my present disillusion with PV stems partly from a conversation I had a few weeks ago. It was with a student in an all-women's PV installation and design course I was teaching for Solar Energy International, and we were talking about "right livelihoods." What exactly is a right livelihood? Obviously it depends on your own morals and conscience. I've thought about this concept often throughout my early adulthood, although I never had such good terminology. Right livelihood to me means working within my skill set, to do more good than harm for the people and plants and animals around me, while doing something I enjoy and can get paid at least a little for. I just finished reading Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, which reinforced the notion. McKibben devotes much of chapter one to the research concluding that, in general, happiness increases up to a per capita income of $10,000, after which point any increase in money has no noticeable effect on happiness. Increases have perhaps even a negative effect, as chasing dollars often leads to overwork, less time with community and family, and a hyperindividualism that can cause depression. Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Dr. Paul Farmer's lifelong dedication to curing diseases of the lowest rungs of society, touches on this idea as well, and is one of those rare books that can make you sit down and reassess your life. For a while I thought PV installation was the best answer to my right livelihood, but I'm starting to question that. Here's why: the price of heating fuel keeps going up, and I expect electric rates to rise as well. PV is incredibly expensive, and whole-house systems are only affordable for the wealthy, or those in states with significant credits and rebates (even with rebates a system will still cost close to or more than $10,000). So now, when I see PV panels, of course they are still sexy, but a little guilt creeps in too when I think about the fact that one 200-watt panel costs more than some people in developing countries make in an entire year. Of course, developing countries can and do install less expensive micro-PV systems to run small lights or fans, but I don't live in a developing country! The problem in my neck of the woods ? Durham, NC ? isn't lights and fans but winter heating bills. Our electricity is still so cheap here in the States that keeping the lights and fridge on costs only about $15/month. But heating bills, whether from electricity, natural gas or propane, are veering out of control for lower income families already struggling with higher food bills and general inflation. What is going to happen this coming winter? Hell if I know, but it could get really ugly. So I've started to shift my mentality. Am I really helping anyone with PV installations? Maybe I reduced the electric bill for a member of the middle class and they will donate the money they saved to weatherization for lower income homes? Hmm, possible, but I doubt it somehow. I don't discount the reduction in green house gas emissions from every PV system I install, but if the electricity was being used unwisely in the first place, it is possible reduction and conservation could have served the same end at much lower cost. So what if I start installing solar air heating systems instead? They cost only a fraction of what PV does, and can offset a significant portion of winter heating needs. Sadly not as sexy as PV, but more of a right livelihood? Am I being too hard on myself here? Looking for the perfect and discounting the merely good? At least air heating is still solar power, and I would still be a solar installer, if more of the HVAC variety than electrical variety. I'm going to have to balance my ego here. I love being an electrician, working with something invisible and dangerous ? high voltage DC ? almost like being a secret agent! Venting ducts aren't nearly as exciting. Our book, The Carbon-Free Home, has more details on DIY solar air heaters. You can build your own in a few days for a few hundred dollars. This wouldn't be the best job security move for me, going from something highly technical that takes special training and is the fastest growing industry stateside to low-tech DIY. But hey, part of the reason Stephen and I are happy is because we constantly realign our lives with our personal goals as they shape shift with the changing reality of the
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by Stephen Hren and Rebekah Hren, July 16, 2008 9:29 AM
For those of you trying to make heads or tails out of the financial news out there, a good place to start would not be an economics textbook (it took me four years in college and an economics degree to figure out those were all garbage myself), but a small volume by Joseph Tainter titled The Collapse of Complex Societies. In this thin book, most of the chapters are about anecdotal histories of collapsed societies, with the intellectual meat of the book residing in a short, twenty page or so, chapter in the middle. I'll try a brief summary here, but I don't have the book with me and it's been several years since I read it, so be forewarned this summary has accumulated some of my own cultural detritus over the years. Essentially, complex systems, and these could be civilizations, agricultural networks, or Fortune 500 companies like Enron or Fannie Mae, do not exit the scene the same way they enter it. Layers of complexity are added one at a time in a kind of organic growth. Complexity allows for a division of labor among individual components of the system in addition to broadening the resource base that the entity has access to. But complexity in human organizations also brings with it additional nonproductive managerial layers that increase in number and proportion along with the size of the entity. When the producing members of the system begin to reach the physical limits of what they can produce (here's where traditional economics fails miserably, as it cannot foresee this ever occurring), the return for each producing member slows dramatically. This is because instead of just producing for themselves, they also bear the weight of the nonproductive managerial layer. A threshold is quickly crossed where it makes more sense to work alone or in small groups or to abandon the activity altogether. Either way, the built-up entity no longer makes sense, and ceases to exist in a dramatic fashion. On a worldwide scale, we are watching this happen in a variety of arenas. Oil production is an obvious example. For those of you not familiar with the fundamentals of the concept of Peak Oil (or for great daily updates on resource limits generally), the energybulletin.net website has an excellent primer on the subject. When Matt Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert, made a bet with Joe Tierney of the New York Times in 2005 that the oil price would average $200 by the end of this decade, I was skeptical. It hasn't happened yet, obviously, but it looks like it certainly could! Being a member of the far left (revolutionary left is probably more accurate), I always find the Republicans' responses to our most serious national issues funny (in a sad, no-hope-for-the-human-race kind of way). Their reaction to the "oil crisis" is especially amusing for its blatant attempt at personal gain at the expense of the problem they are trying to solve. Opening up off-shore drilling will make some dollars for our local oil meganationals like Exxon (and we all know they're suffering terribly), but it is almost certain to lower the worldwide availability of oil and drive up the price for two simple reasons. First, all available oil rigs and engineers are currently employed drilling for offshore oil in incredibly productive places like Saudi Arabia, the west coast of Africa, and Brazil. Compared to these places, off-limits areas near our own coasts are pittances in terms of productivity, but because oil companies prefer the taxpayer-subsidized returns and security they get here at home, they will likely move rigs from these productive areas to our less productive ones. Replacement engineers and new off-shore rigs take 5-10 years to create. Second, the majority of this shoreline resides in some of the most hurricane-prone areas in the world. Putting more of our energy infrastructure out there guarantees a possibility some of it will get slammed whenever a hurricane brews in the gulf. Every time there's a strong thunderstorm off the coast of Africa, the price of oil will be going up. It's been heartening over the years to see some folks give up on the idea of fossil fuels and commit to eradicating them from their lives. An awesome new book, The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, details how entire towns and neighborhoods can accomplish this. As the larger systems continue to stutter and fall we can create a much more sustainable, and as Rob likes to point out, resilient, civilization by becoming locally independent for our food and energy. Complex systems behave like the giants they are. They lose a leg, are toppled, and that's the end. But diversified smaller systems and communities, like the caterpillar or the millipede, can lose a leg or two and keep on
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by Stephen Hren and Rebekah Hren, July 15, 2008 9:27 AM
So, let me just state for the record here that I'm an electrician (a solar electrician), not a writer. So when my husband, Stephen, and I embarked on our book tour for The Carbon-Free Home this summer, I had no idea what to expect. We are taking the train around the country, stopping in about 20 different cities, and speaking at a variety of locations: green building stores, energy fairs, and of course, independent book stores. We are about halfway through our trip, and it has been eye opening, to say the least. Attendance at our talks has ranged from zero (yes, zero!!) to about 125 people. And I surely can't say why 75 people show up in the middle of the day at the public library in Omaha, Nebraska, while not a lone soul stops by our table in a hoppin' natural food store on a rainy Saturday in Flagstaff, Arizona (except for our friend Kevin's parents, who drove all the way from Phoenix). But I've got some theories for the low turnout events. I know for certain Stephen and I are wonderful and inspiring public speakers, so low turnout surely can't be blamed on us! The most prominent of my theories is green fatigue. You've probably heard of greenwashing (the thin false veil of sustainability corporations will throw over their operations and marketing materials), but from what I've seen, green fatigue is the natural next step. To wit: my new favorite hobby is stopping by bookstores in towns we visit to see if I can find our book on the shelf (wow, that's embarrassing, sorry). And since our book is a "green" book, if I can find it, it is usually hiding amidst the greenery. And whoa! There's some foliage there to take out with the machete: green biz, green money profit, green cars, green clean, green sex, you name it. What flashes through my mind as I stare at the shelves is brain clutter, paralysis of options, media overexposure, green fatigue. Stephen and I bought literally scores of these sustainable, natural building, eco-friendly books when we were doing the research for our book. And what we found is that a fair share of these books are either impractical, talking about the wrong kind of green (cash dollars), or too labor-intensive. So when I find myself standing at the entrance to the grocery store in Flagstaff trying to convince innocent shoppers to enter into conversation about my book, I'm not all that surprised when they shy away to thump the seedless watermelons on special in the cardboard bin next to me. What to do? I want to cry, "Wait! My book is honest, I wrote it to get people to take one step, any step, towards energy independence. I'm not just hanging on the bandwagon here, this planet and your eco-interior design firm are going straight down the suck hole if you don't start to make some serious changes." I know there is a lot of eco-noise out in the world right now. If I hear one more thing about solar panels that stick to your window and are 50% more efficient, I might just bust that window with a baseball bat and jump right out. Hang up your damn clothes to dry on your solar clothes dryer, build a solar oven, open your curtains on a cold sunny day, but don't worry about some hypothetical solar electric panels 20 years away from reality. Solar energy is FREE, dude, so start using it however you can ? right now! So In the interest of alleviating a bit of green fatigue, here are some of the very few "green" books and articles I've read and recommend! Art Ludwig, The New Create an Oasis With Greywater and The Texas Manual on Rainwater Harvesting Since much of the country has been under drought conditions over the past few years, these two books together can help you make the most of your water resource through recycling greywater and catching the rain that falls on your own roof. Lyle Estill, Small Is Possible: Life in a Local EconomyA quirky and engaging look at ways to revive moribund local economies. Lyle is a visionary, to say the least. Mike Oehler, The 50 Dollar and Up Underground House BookThis is the book that Stephen and I found a copy of, oh, about seventeen years ago (when we were seventeen years old). I blame it entirely for the crazy notions we got about building our first house together out in the woods. Carol Verolia and Kelly Lerner, Natural Remodeling for the Not-So-Green House: Bringing Your Home Into Harmony with NatureOf the myriad green building books on the market, this one's legit. And, last but not least: Homepower MagazineHomepower stays on top of the fast-paced world of renewable energy, but keeps a practical approach, recommending only technologies that are field-tested and really
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by Stephen Hren and Rebekah Hren, July 14, 2008 9:40 AM
Rebekah and I are currently entering the second half of our train-travel book tour around the country, speaking at independent bookstores, libraries, food co-ops, and green building stores. I started out from North Carolina in the middle of June, working my way solo through the Midwest for two weeks to meet up with Bekah, who was teaching a class on photovoltaic installations at Solar Energy International's education campus in Paonia, Co. From our meeting point in Denver, we headed out to San Francisco, down to Los Angeles, and we're now in Albuquerque, scooting along the bottom section of the country on our way back home. We don't have the same opportunities on the road to be as energy conscious as at home. A lot of travel is inherently unsustainable, since mobility as a rule requires energy. But trains are substantially more efficient than planes, and I've noticed a certain smug schadenfreude in the smirks of the Amtrak staff (and many of the travelers, too) whenever the subject of high oil prices and the hell of airplane travel comes up. No doubt we've sorely neglected train travel as a nation over the past few decades. The federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on roads each year, tens of billions on airplanes, but only a billion or two on trains. Nevertheless, for a man who bleeds green like myself, even train travel can infuriate. Amtrak apparently makes no attempt at recycling, tossing cans and bottles into the trash even in states with substantial return deposits like California. The snack bar attendants refuse to fill our personal coffee cups without tossing a paper cup in the garbage "to keep count." My dumpster diving tendencies are barely held in check when I see precious items piled high in the garbage as I exit the train. I want to just pick up the whole bag and take it to the nearest recycling center, stale beer smell and all, earning myself a few dollars in the process. Fortunately for my wife and the other passengers, I've already loaded myself down with too much else ? books, mostly ? to manage any more weight. I still haven't learned a lesson from when I was 18 and rode my bike across the country carrying all of the Vintage translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. By the time I got back to North Carolina from Portland, I had read only a measly thirty pages (probably somewhere around a page read for pound carried). I try to view each city we visit as a sustainability challenge. How can these fossil fuel sinkholes be converted to Ecocities, a la Richard Register? As we jostle along on city buses, I mentally transform asphalt shingles into solar water heaters and green roofs, car-choked avenues into pedestrian-friendly woonerfs, and abandoned lots into community gardens. I must admit to feeling particularly overwhelmed when applying this activity to Los Angeles, however. On the face of it, no city holds more potential to being converted into a fossil fuel-free haven. Now, don't laugh until you hear me out. Start with the beautiful temperate weather. Add on access to plenty of water. The sprawl means plenty of space for most households to grow substantial quantities of food year round, and few tall trees or buildings in residential areas means great solar access for solar hot water and solar electricity. The reality on the ground, however, remains much different. Los Angeles is the paragon of American individualism, to its ultimate demise, I'm afraid. Maybe Angelenos will prove me wrong and come together to dramatically reduce their fossil energy use. I hope so, because there's much to be admired there: a sense of creativity and racial equality unmatched nearly anywhere else I've been, for instance. In the physical sense, conversion to carbon-freedom would be easier to do here than in a great majority of other American cities. But as Jared Diamond elucidates in the subtitle to his book Collapse, societies choose to fail based on their day-to-day decisions and actions. Societies live for today, stay stuck in their outmoded ways, and eventually the physical reality of the earth catches up with them and busts their collective ass. I hope time and the people of Los Angeles prove me wrong: it would be one of the more inspiring stories our species has
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