As a lot of you know one of my pet issues is the effect of our collective style of living on the ocean, specifically the pacific gyre, also know as the great pacific garbage patch. The New York Times had a great article on it yesterday, and though I have written about it before its worth talking about again. What I did not know is that the Pacific Gyre is one of as many as 5 similar zones in the world, where the debris from our daily lives accumulates. Thousands of square miles of plastic floating about in the waves, slowly choking the life out of the sea. I was thinking about the gyre just this past weekend, as it was sunny and beautiful and our new house is only a short walk from Ocean Beach. The girls and I decided to walk down and have a picnic with Jamey’s dad, who was visiting from the Midwest. Sitting there looking out at the waves I decided to do an informal beach combing type survey. I walked up and down a short way from where we set up our camping chairs and towels, and this is what I came up with:
Not that it is anything shocking to find trash on the beach, in fact I guess it would be shocking NOT to find trash on a beach. And let me tell you, Ocean Beach is a relatively clean beach. There are trash cans, volunteers come down frequently, folks pack out their recyclables and other sundries, but still, a short 15 minute walk on a clean beach and I came up with 28 pieces of plastic wrappings, various sizes,a granola bar wrapper, 3 straws, 10 bottle caps, 18 small pieces of hard plastics, & a small plastic tube.
Its not that we’re all a bunch of pigs, it is more I think that the way we have set up our lives it is next to impossible not to come into contact with plastic. And plastic is the number one type of trash finding its way into our oceans. It doesn’t break down, it doesn’t go “away”, it floats and floats, and in its own small way wreaks tremendous devastation; whether it is sea turtles that mistake the plastic bags for jellyfish and starve, their bellies bursting with clear bags; or albatross chicks whose parents skim bits of plastic off the surface of the sea, mistaking them for fish, and feeding their chicks until the starve; or the smaller plankton eating fish, who start the food cycle, who eat and are eaten until all that plastic, all those chemicals with their unpronounceable ingredients of pheno-bi-ethanol-petro-whatever end up in…us.
I try and use less plastic, but it is so very hard. The manufacturers of the world have decried that “plastic is the future”, and even if I bring my own shopping bags, wrap up sandwiches in wax paper, use re-usable (Plastic) containers for the kids lunches, I really feel I am battling against the tides. Guess it’s time to change the tides.
When I was remodeling my home I was confronted with something I knew very little about – landscaping. I knew what I did not want, which is as good a place as any to start. No grass monoculture. I am not against lawns mind you. There is just too much of a downside to all that green. It takes a bit more than a half gallon of water to cover each square foot with an inch of water; and an inch of water per week is the generally accepted standard for lawn irrigation. Not to bad – til you do the math. I had a tiny postage stamp in front of my old house, two 6 X 12 foot sections of grass – and they needed more than 70 gallons a week to stay green, more than 3,600 gallons a year. I switched to ornamental grass and Mexican beach stones in my new home, and I haven’t watered them for 3 months. Even a modest sized lawn of your typical suburban home can hit over 1,000 square feet, and that adds up to 500+ gallons a week.
The backyard was a more complicated challenge. I went so far as to call a few landscape “Architects” to come and give a bid. I thought they were like regular contractors, they would look at the project, let me know what they could do and tell me how much. Silly me. First think I learned about landscape “Architects” was that they charge $100.00 bucks just to show up. Now I am not a complete moron, I did chuckle at the first guy who told me that. But after calling 4 or 5 more, I realized they all wanted 100 bucks to show up. I figured the joke must be on me, so I got the checkbook out and made 2 appointments with 2 landscape “Architects”. After shelling out $200.00 and getting price quoted twice I realized I was right, the joke was on me. The landscape “Architects” both agreed that $75,000 or so would be needed to change this:
into something more interesting. Unless they planned on making it into a pot plantation, 75k was just not going to happen.
Ever.
So what to do.
It’s not that I am lazy, I am just, well, lazy. And I do not know much about landscaping – I may have said that somewhere. So clearly I need help, professional help. At least that’s what my wife says. So I think, on her recommendation, I am going to start taking 500 milligrams of Welbutrin twice daily. And use MyFarm to make something useful as well as practical.
MyFarm are basically folks who set up gardens in your backyard. I have always wanted to garden, and the idea of calling it an Urban Farm sounds far to chic and forward thinking to pass up. I hope to make this an ongoing feature on the blog here, document the weed pulling, dirt sifting, and bug shooing that I figure is involved in making some food out back. Another thing to figure out will be how much of a carbon offset this whole thing will be – carbon reduction is well and good, but increasing carbon absorption and O2 output with a more robust backyard has got to count for something.
As sea levels rise, coastal flooding will increase. Projections are for a 1.4 meter rise over the next 100 years, and that could be on the low end. Different local municipalities have proposed different strategies for dealing with this inevitable fact. In our own backyard rising tides will flood sections of the Sunset, Marina, & Financial districts, much of the Eastern Waterfront, as well as towns and cities throughout the bay area.
I am grateful for these smart people and the thought they are putting into this problem; but I believe it is all on the wrong track. Holding back the oceans has been tried, and while it has worked in some cases, as cities like Venice attest to, when it fails, as it did to New Orleans, the devastation can be irreparable. This is a problem that has to be addressed before it occurs; anything after the fact is like giving a condemned prisoner a last meal. The Raydike system is particularly interesting, as it proposes a system of light beams installed right away around the bay to show people where damns and other structures would need to be built to keep the waters out. The idea of rising seas is a total bore for most folks, a 1.4 meter rise in the bay just does not seem to be a big deal, even though it is in fact a cataclysmic proposition. Raydike could help inspire people to do something about the problem now, instead of dumping it on our children.
If we do not address our contributions to global warming now, we will eventually need something like the BayArc Tidal Barrier or the Folding Water levee system. I acknowledge the engineering thinking behind these systems, but if we get to the point where these must be built, we are really fucked. Action has to be taken immediately, in every household, to reduce energy consumption, reduce emissions, and live sustainably, or our future will be giant barriers spread out across the bay. Is that what you want?
“After being engineered in Germany and used throughout Europe for over 30 years, a completely sustainable plastic piping system for potable water use has finally hit California.
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Cheaper than metal pipes and stronger than CPVC or PEX are only some of the environmental benefits to using Polypropylene with glass over conventional piping systems. Aquatherm is approved by Greenpeace and applies to 9 different LEED categories and is listed by UPC, UMC, NSF and IAPMO.”
If you would like to learn more about polyproylene pipe and how to incorporate this system in your green building design, feel free to contact the manufacturers Bay Area rep:
I was reading the paper the other day about home pools, a household icon of the 50’s that still plagues neighborhoods today. Don’t get me wrong, I like to swim, and lounging by the pool, partaking in the occasional ogle, isn’t the worst way to spend a hot afternoon. No, I am talking more about the home pool, the chemical filled holes in the backyard that are used not nearly as much as people thought they might, like a nice pair of Manolo shoes or an Armani suit.
There are 958,000 public and private pools in the state of California. If a tiny pool uses 30,000 gallons to fill, that is at least 285,000,000,000 gallons of water at any given moment, and that is a low number since many many pools are bigger than thirty thousand gallons. How many millions of gallons of chemicals to keep that water “clean”? How many of those pools are left to fester and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes? Now in some places, where it is oppressively hot I can see why you might want one – but wanting isn’t a good enough reason when talking about sustainable living. The environmental costs for private pools are huge. Pools no longer add to a home’s value like they may have 30 + years ago. With so many other options, like beautiful new public pools, the home pool just doesn’t make sense for sustainable builders. How do you justify the costs in terms of water use and pollution? I just do not see it.
And on to fireplaces. Another fixture of the modern home, who doesn’t love a nice fireplace? Well, me for one. Honestly, ask yourself when was the last time you actually used the thing? I think people like the idea of a fireplace far more than the actual fireplace itself. Maybe its the primal nature of the thing, maybe it reminds us of some distant past when we needed a fireplace to cook and keep us warm, maybe its nostalgia…
But hey, it is an item whose time has past. Given the efficiencies available in modern HVAC systems, coupled with the really excellent insulation options now available, fireplaces are just very last century. I am not going to even go down the whole “Burning things is bad” argument – rather I am going to just talk about the space itself. If you are doing a remodel, ask yourself if you need that space? Oftentimes the fireplace dictates how a room flows, restricts how you arrange your furniture, how you use a room, and for what? The one or two times a year you might take a match to the palace, if even that much? I find fireplaces to be a waste of space. They unbalance a living room, dictate focal points that don’t need to be there and limit your flexibility, all of which runs counterproductive to the most efficient use of a space, which is one of the keys to sustainable living. So if your doing a remodel, here is a radical idea, ask yourself if you really need a fireplace, does it really add value to the home, or are you better off without it? The planet is, of that I am certain.
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