The Urban Homestead: Your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city.
by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
Port Townsend, WA: Process Media
2008
In honor of Earth Day, here’s a brief review of a fascinating book about making your lifestyle more sustainable. While some friends of the blog jokingly refer to this as “that hipster survivalist book,” The Urban Homestead is not a book about how to be a green poseur. Rather, it is a book that breaks down various elements of living greener and lays out a variety of strategies — some easy and some ambitious — to make it happen
Category Archives: Environment
The Earth Day 2009 resolutions meme.
Mike Dunford initiates a meme for Earth Day 2009:
I’d like you to take a minute or two to come up with three things that you can do to be more environmentally friendly. The first should be something that’s small, and easy to do. The second should be more ambitious – something you’ll try to do, but might not manage to pull off. The third should be something you can do to improve something you’re already doing.
I love this meme! No matter what habits you’ve already cultivated (and we’ve cultivated a few), there’s always room to optimize them. So here are my Earth Day 2009 resolutions:
Friday Sprog Blogging: the environment.
This morning, over breakfast, the Free-Ride offspring and I discussed the environment. You can hear the conversation (that crunching is from English muffins). The transcript is below.
Friday Sprog Blogging: energy (part 2).
This week, we finally get to the elder Free-Ride offspring’s part of last-week’s bath-night conversation about energy. Here’s the audio of the discussion, complete with splashing bathwater and odd squawks from my computer.
For those who prefer words on the screen, the transcript is below.
Looking for data to make environmentally friendly food choices
At the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, a bunch of commentators were asked to weigh in with easy-to-make changes Americans might adopt to reduce their environmental impact. One of those commentators, Juliet Schor, recommends eating less meat:
Rosamond Naylor, a researcher at Stanford, estimates that U.S. meat production is especially grain intensive, requiring 10 times the grain required to produce an equivalent amount of calories than grain, Livestock production, which now covers 30 percent of the world’s non-ice surface area, is also highly damaging to soil and water resources.
Compared to producing vegetables or rice, beef uses 16 times as much energy and produces 25 times the CO2. A study on U.S. consumption from the University of Chicago estimates that if the average American were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent, that would be the equivalent of switching from driving a Camry to a Prius.
Americans currently rank second in world in meat consumption, weighing in at 271 pounds a year, up from 196 pounds 40 years ago. And that doesn’t include dairy. We get an estimated 75 grams of protein a day from animals, and 110 grams total; the government recommends only 50 grams a day.
The idea of eating lower on the food chain to save the planet isn’t a new one. However, this isn’t a suggestion that helps the Free-Ride household reduce its environmental impact, since we are already meatless.
What’s more, figuring out how to tweak our dietary choices to further reduce our impact is made difficult by the lack of transparency about the real environmental costs of our options. The labels in the supermarket don’t list how much water, land, or petroleum-based fertilizer went into producing your pound of potatoes or peas. Nor do they reflect the amount of energy used to process your tofu, nor the natural resources to can you chickpeas, nor the fuel to ship your bananas.
All of which makes it very hard to know how to make better choices about the foods we eat.
Friday Sprog Blogging: energy (part 1).
This week, the bath-night conversation turned to energy. If you prefer to listen to the sprogs, what with the splishing of the bathwater and their American accents, you can download the audio file. (Actually, owing to the length of the conversation, this week it’s just me and the younger Free-Ride offspring. Next week will feature my conversation with the elder Free-Ride offspring, with the younger chiming in at the end as younger siblings are wont to do.)
The transcript of our conversation is presented below.
Edible (and sustainable) construction in a lean year.
You may remember that last year we were inspired by Bake for a Change to dabble in “green” gingerbread construction. As 2008 draws to a close, the challenge has been issued once again to make a house both good enough to eat and eco-friendly enough to heat (or cool, etc.).
The rules are the same as they were last year:
Ethics and population.
Back at the end of November, Martin wrote a post on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered these assertions:
- It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.)
- It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption.
- It is unethical to use public money to support infertility treatments. Let those unfortunate enough to need such treatment pay their own way or adopt. And let’s put the money into subsidising contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption instead.
I understand the spirit in which these assertions are offered — the human beings sharing Earth and its resources have an interest in creating and maintaining conditions where our numbers don’t outstrip the available resources.
But, there’s something about Martin’s manifesto that doesn’t sit right with me. Here, I’m not trying to be coy; I’m actually in the process of working out my objections. So, I’m going to do some thinking out loud, in the hopes that you all will pipe up and help me figure this out.
Movie Review: Sizzle.
Randy Olson’s newest film, Sizzle, bears the subtitle, “a global warming comedy”. To my mind, it delivered neither the laughs nor the engagement with the issue of global warming that it promised. Maybe this is just a sign that I fall outside the bounds of Olson’s intended audience, but perhaps the biggest question this movie left me with was who precisely Olson is trying to reach with Sizzle.