Daydreaming Again

In my mind there is a city. The density is about 15,000 families per square mile (That's about 3 million people for a city the square mileage of Manhattan Island, so dense, but not too dense), living in mid-rises and row houses.

When I was young, there was a community garden for every mile of land (meaning there still had to be a lot of food trucked in), but as I've gotten older--and technology has gotten cooler--that's now a 40-story vertical farm, employing a tenth of the people living in the one-mile "food circle" and providing no fewer than 1000 different crops. The growing highrise is adjacent to a processing facility that turns the farm's peanuts into peanut butter and its chilies into hot sauce. Employees of the vertical farm get paid and also get a free share of the crops.

There's still a park for every mile, too, in place of my original community garden plots, because people need to sit on the grass and that grass cools down the city wonderfully.

The population is diverse and well-integrated, without sacrificing the feeling of cultural community that, say, an Irish girl might want to have with other Irish people who live nearby and understand the necessity of having a butcher around who knows how to make a proper black pudding.

And you can have that black pudding, if you want. Outside of town, there's a ring of farms that are designed to raise cattle and sheep and chickens in such a way that their waste can be turned into biofuel (haven't ever figured out how to harness the methane in their wind, but it may come to me). They are pastured, of course, and the pastures are covered in local grasses, organically grown.

Back in the city, commercial and residential areas are mixed, so that there don't need to be any "big box" stores that take an hour to drive to, because you can find pretty much everything you need within a couple of miles' walk of your home: groceries, a shoemaker, a yarn boutique, a hair salon, an electronics store--all the important things. Industry nestles up against home where possible--polluting smokestacks are replaced with carbon filter caps and green energy buildings.

People know each other and the schools are safe and thorough in their educating and the kids come home to family members or neighbors who make sure they get a good afternoon snack, a bit of exercise, and a quiet place to do their homework. There are enough baseball, football, and soccer fields, along with hockey rinks, swimming pools, and basketball courts, to make sure there's something for almost everyone.

Every building has solar PV built right in, so there's no need for more than a couple of wind farms on the outskirts of town to supplement the grid and provide the power for battery-operated car docking stations. When there's no wind and little sun, car owners can make a little money dumping energy back into the grid.

For people who want to grow their own food, or just don't want to pay for the produce at the store on the ground floor of the vertical farm, there are garden plots on all the building roofs, making sure that people have a contact to nature and a cooler roof in summer and less run off all year long. Kids learn how the food chain works by growing things, picking them when they are ripe, and going downstairs to the apartment to cook them minutes later.

People have also rediscovered the use of water cisterns, which adorn all the buildings, providing as much of the water for each building as the climate will allow. There's central plumbing and water reclamation facilities and fresh tap water--don't worry. Nobody has to live on only what the rain provides, but at least the cisterns take a little bit of the burden off the water grid.

People don't worry so much about paper or plastic. Because it's never more than a few blocks to the local grocer (who is also the local farmer), people are content to bring their baskets--just like those quaint ones we all see in the "rural middle ages" movies.

Except that these baskets are filled with not just the foods that could be grown outside in the agricultural zone, but foods that are grown in the vertical farms. In the northern midwest, people can get melons and berries until November and again in April because the vertical farm acts like a season extender. It's all about resources, of course, so the place doesn't keep the temperatures tropical year-round. The heat and lighting are dictated by the region, to an extent, but the seasons of bounty are a little longer, produce from warmer climes can be grown during the warmer months, and the cold season still provides enough to live on.

This kind of city has always been a dream of mine--a place where people can get everything they need without going too far and wasting too much. And you want to know the funny thing? This isn't a new idea, or one that is unattainable.

The Amish do it--sure, they have more contact and trade with the "English" world now, but they still pretty much get what they need right near home. There are communities in many parts of the world that don't bother with the rest of us too terribly often. They do just fine.

The big problem is that most of us no longer know what "getting what we need" means. I'll admit it: getting what I need sometimes means buying the latest scifi film. It sometimes means Starbucks or a 3 Musketeers bar or that ever-needed lemon. I'm not shy about the fact that I like having things!

But maybe we should rethink how we get those things. Al Gore proposed a plan last year to replace US energy generation as we know it with 100% carbon-free sources in the next ten years. (Wow--and he thought running for president was hard!)

It's a fantastic idea that most of the establishment immediately marked as fundamentally unattainable. Let's stop and think a minute, though. What would his daydream world look like?

People who have spent their lives working in the steel, automobile, and coal industries have been losing their jobs by the thousands. In Al Gore's daydream, they'd be put back to work--first retrofitting the plants where they used to work and then building concentrating mirrors for solar arrays, or electric cars, or windmills. People could be put to work designing and building the new electrical infrastructure we need to make sure that the wind in Iowa can help power the buildings of Philly.

People who bought those new electric cars would be faced with expensive personal conveyances that could, in part, pay for themselves in a very real way. One of the problems we have to deal with while growing a new energy economy is the fact that, really, our batteries kind of suck. Once the sun goes down and the wind stops howling, we need to store that energy. By plugging in your electric car and charging it up, you'd be providing that battery. So why could we not, say, have all those garages in all those highrises in all those big cities install smart meters--meters that allow electricity to go both ways. During the day, the car could be charged by the grid. At night, if the car owner so desired, the battery in that car could help to light the highrise and lighten the driver's electricity bill.

(This is a particularly attractive choice for families like mine, who rarely use their car. In this future, our car could hold down the parking spot and the utility bill!)

His world would no doubt rethink agriculture as we know it. Less thinking about immediate yield and more about sustainable futures. It would have sustainably harvested forests. He probably even dreams of carbon-neutral air travel--though personally, I think we need to rethink the need for "live and in person" speaking engagements and make it fashionable to "satellite in" via audio-visual uplink.

The point here is, there are millions of us who have dreams about these things. And yes, I'm unlikely to ever be able to make my dream a full reality. But I can join the local garden club that plants and tends the greenery in those little havens of oxygen called city parks. I can plant some herbs in my kitchen (if I can find a way to keep the cat from eating them) and reduce at least some of my food miles. I can write my local electric company (again) and complain (again) about the fact that they (still) don't offer green energy (even though there are some hydroelectric and wind power plants in the midwest).

So dream, but work, too. Sure, there are the standard "use CFLs, plant a tree, turn off the TV, ride a bike" things that all of us know we should be doing, but what other things can you come up with that you yourself can do to make at least a little bit of your dream come true?

Think about it and get back to me, okay?

________

Want to find people living the dream? Global Ecovillage Network is just that--a network of ecovillages around the globe. Kinda cool.

Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

Living more frugally when in debt or overshoot is a sane and moral choice. The more of us who make this choice, the faster the collective transformation will go. We are at a crossroads. Disaster is not inevitable, but we need to change.
--Vicki Robin
Learn more about Your Money or Your Life and the Financial Integrity movement

I hate change.

Seriously. Change is exhausting and scary and difficult and I don't like it one bit.

The fact that change brought me the love of my life, a new place to call home, and maybe even some sense of peace (sometimes) is really quite beside the point. Change sucks.

But change is the only way to live--each of us is conceived, is born, lives, and dies eventually of something. It's all change.

Now, you can try to make change less painful in an awful lot of ways. You can work as hard as you can, sacrificing everything in the pursuit of something to make the change "worth it"--accrue tons of money so that you can always "have enough" and never have to worry. You can concentrate on saving the world--spend all your time sacrificing for the greater good; stop eating meat, fruit, whatever is the environmental baddie of the day; stop using plastic, aluminum, steel, wood, air; stop using the internet, the television, the car, the bike, your shoes--making sure that future generations can enjoy the earth (because you didn't).

In other words, you can try to take control of a fundamentally uncontrollable situation, hoping to make yourself feel safer.

But the truth is, you'll never feel safe, and I'd posit that life isn't about feeling safe anyway--at least not in that way. Life is about living, which is one of those hopelessly hokey things people put on bumper stickers, but it's true.

The problem with life being about living is that everyone has a different idea of what "living" entails. Is living having a fancy car and a fancy house and eating at five star restaurants every night? Is it acquiring as much "stuff" as you can get, so that you can say "I have enough to live on if everything collapses"? Is either of these ways of life fundamentally wrong--or right--for anyone and everyone?

The world itself will eventually make this determination for all of us. Currently, we as a species are living like we've got four or five spare planets tucked away, just waiting for us to pull them out of mothballs once we've used up the resources on this one. I found it interesting that the hundreds of thousands who jammed the Washington Mall to watch Barack Obama advocate change and a turning away from childish things managed to leave 120 tons of trash in their wake. This is not change I can believe in.

Eventually, the world will stop us itself. Crops fail every year, for a variety of reasons, and we look to technology to stop these disasters. We engineer crops that withstand a certain plant virus--then grow hectare after hectare of them, making them vulnerable to some other plague. We create new pesticides to stop this plague, killing off beneficial bacteria whose job it is to keep plague #3 in check. We "reintroduce" said bacteria to the soil, further disturbing the balance... It goes on and on and eventually, the earth is going to win and we're not going to be able to grow anything on that land, because it just plain needs time to heal.

We do much the same with every resource we have, but here's a thought: What if we, for starters, used less resources? This is not to say that we don't actually need to feed the billions of people on this planet, but what if we decided that we didn't need lemons from Florida in the dead of winter in the northern midwest (and yes, I'm talking about myself here)? That would mean less gas used to get the lemons from there to here, less monoculture in the agriculture landscape there, and more support of the farmers here in the midwest, who grow a mean winter cabbage and a variety of other winter greens that will satisfy my vitamin C requirements admirably.

What if, instead of using acres and acres of farmland for endless crops of corn to be used for ethanol, we instead stopped driving quite so much? Less driving, less ethanol, more room for food crop. And what if we as consumers were a bit more diverse and discriminating in our choice of foodstuffs? The farmer who once grew only one type of corn on his 150-acre farm could now grow five or ten different crops, rotating his crops in and out of each field and increasing the growing power and stability of the ecology of his own local soil. At the same time, he'd increase the nutritional content of the local diet and make sure that people could satisfy themselves with local food, using fewer food miles and coming back full circle to driving less, using less ethanol/gasoline/electricity, and improving the local agriculture.

No Impact Man posted a blog entry recently in which he commented that "we [environmentalists] should joke around more." I love both the cartoon and the sentiment. Because the flip side of the ethical and environmental snarl I've just written about is the joy of living well.

Now, living well can definitely mean spending $300 on one meal for two (say, your Valentine's Day blowout). I'm not into spending that much for a meal, myself--but don't ask me how much I spend on the mortgage to my beautiful condo on the beach. I spend my money on housing, because I "need" to see the water. Which is also living.

Living well can also mean spending a rainy day inside on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. Heck, you don't even need to have bought that book--that's what libraries are for! Now, you can think about where that tea came from, where the cup came from, where the library got the book and how much, ecologically-speaking, it cost to make it, or you can just let go of your eco-guilt for a minute and enjoy the fact that you have a roof over your head and a good book in your lap.

And the next day, maybe you can remember how nice that day was--a day when the most consuming thing you did was, maybe, turned on the stove to heat some water and the light to see the print when it got dark, and think "maybe that's a good way to live more often than not."

Maybe buying your child fewer toys and offering him more attention is a good way to live. Maybe making a homemade meal with local foods you never even knew your area had is a good way to live. Maybe walking to the store that's only a mile away and not buying more than you can carry home is a good way to live. More often than not.

And if that change in thought--and change is hard--saves some money, or some resources, or some stress... Then maybe change doesn't need to suck quite so much all the time.

______

Today, you get an ecological link, just because it's Friday!

• A Skyscraper Grows in New York City: The Vertical Farm Project is researching the sustainability and feasibility of building high rise gardens in metropolitan areas. The result could be a decrease in average food miles, a greater connection between the city dwellers and their food, and even the possibility of farms that not only supply their own power and water, but give some back to the community, as well! This project is, in my mind, the next building I want shooting up in my backyard!