Gardening The Future.

I have now presented my poster to the class about my window farm. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to learn about window farming. Showing my window farm to people gives me an opportunity to educate others about creative gardening and producing/buying local organic food.

I was asked many times today about what I was going to do with window garden now that the class project is over. My garden will live on so do not worry. My window farm will be moving with me to a Boy Scout summer camp that I run. There it will hang in a window in the dinning hall. With this prime location I will have around 1500 people walk by it during the summer and I am sure that many of them will stop to take a look.

The possibility of having 1500 people learn about local food is an exciting idea that I cannot turn down. Exceptionally sense most of that 1500 will be middle school kids. Teaching kids at a young age is the easiest way to make meaning life changes.

And after camp the garden is moving with me to Chicago where I hope to expand it.

I hope that many of you are think about making your own window garden, and if you do please let me know. Here are a few things that I have learned from making my own can could help you.

First, herbs are the best to plant in a window garden because many of them do not grow to big. This style of gardening is not good for large plants. Also herbs allow you to continually harvest them without completely killing the plant.

Second, do forget to water them. The bottles themselves are not very big and with that they cannot store a lot of water. I have to water my garden every two days or it will quickly dry out. I learned this the hard way and my lettuce has not fully recovered from it yet.

Last, come up with a design of your own. You could simply build one close to mine or you could be creative. Being creative with your garden makes this project such a fun to do. A good friend of mine is now making one out of old sections of plastic plumbing of different sizes. Some of the pipes even have right angles in them so he can be even more creative with the design. He is planting wild flowers in his.

Over all this has been a fantastic project. I have truly enjoyed designing and building my garden and learning about environmental issues at the same time in class.

I don’t wear boots, but my shoes were made for walkin’ too

I love driving. I love that I go to school out of state because it means that roughly 8 times a year I get to drive for 12 hours with nothing but my iPod and my thoughts to keep my company. I love that my steering wheel doesn’t care that I’m a horrible singer, and I’ll never again see the random drivers on I-70 in Illinois who give me funny looks when they happen to catch me rocking out by myself, so I love that I have no need to feel self conscious. I love that my car offers me quiet and solitude and a refuge from the house that I share with 75 women where privacy is a rare and treasured luxury. Because of this, over the past three years I’ve developed a horrible habit of taking long, unnecessary joy rides. If I’m stressed or confused or bored or even happy, my go-to activity is soaking in the beautiful Kansas flint hills from the highway (Kansas landscape gets a bad rap, by the way. I think it’s gorgeous. If you’ve lived in Kansas your whole life and you can’t appreciate its beauty I highly recommend leaving the state for long enough for you to miss it. When you come back I promise the view will be AMAZING). I consciously choose to ignore the fact that my driving and senseless waste of gasoline is damaging the very earth I so lovingly admire on these excursions.

For this project I had to face the fact that in a post peak oil world my wasteful driving adventures would not be possible. In fact, gasoline would be so expensive that driving probably would not be a practical or feasible option for even the small daily errands where the ease of transportation is taken for granted. In a post peak oil Manhattan, I would have to find alternative means of transportation, which is exactly what I tried to do for the last week. Unfortunately, public transportation in our city is pretty much non-existent, but that would probably be pretty scarce post-peak oil as well, so that was ruled out as an option. There was bike riding, but I don’t own a bike, and while I’m sure I could’ve borrowed one from one of the women I live with, the cold winter air told me bicycles were a bad idea. So, I spent a week letting my feet get real friendly with the sidewalks of Manhattan.

When you’re lazy like me and hop in your car for even the shortest of errands, you really don’t notice how small Manhattan is. Honestly, pretty much everywhere in town is a walkable distance. The only place that I wanted to go that I really felt too uncomfortable to walk to was Target- it would have meant walking down Highway 18, then walking down the ramp with traffic on to Seth Childs Rd., then attempting to cross Seth Childs. There were other routes that could have been taken, but in the end I would have to have crossed Seth Childs and I couldn’t think of a safe location to do that, and my jaywalking skills are a little rusty. So I caved and drove my car. I was only going for toiletries, so I could have gone to Dillons which, I learned from having to get a prescription filled, is only a 15-20 minute walk. When traffic is taken into account, it didn’t take much longer than driving. But I had a gift certificate to Target from my birthday and, let’s face it, I’m a poor college student so I was going to go to Target, damn it! But here is what I figured- in we discuss a post-peak oil scenario, oil hasn’t run out, it’s just reached its plateau of production so gas would still be available, just super ridiculously expensive. So, were this really the case, it may be feasible that I’d use the car every now and then when extenuating circumstances called for it. I decided though that I would want to make the most of my expensive gasoline usage since my car trips would be few and far between. I went around my house asking my friends if anyone needed anything from Target. I found four girls willing to come with me who would have gone later that day anyway, and most likely all in separate cars. Carpooling and reducing at least a little gasoline use on the parts of my sorority sisters made me feel a little less guilty about the car ride.

The biggest challenge I faced when not driving everywhere I needed to be was getting to places on time. Even with a car at my disposal, punctuality has never been my strong suit. When I had to walk everywhere, punctuality just completely went out the window. Fortunately I didn’t have many pressing matters this past week where tardiness really would have bode poorly for me, and I did break down and drive to the Triota induction Friday night even though Dr. Hubler’s house is literally three blocks from mine because I was running late and I was wearing heels. Fail. With the grueling pace at which the world runs today, it was truly difficult to fit in so much extra time for travel to get in all of the things that I needed to do. However, reading the blog posts of my fellow classmate who is authoring the Tech Blackout project, I realized that I probably have more free time to fit in eco-friendly transportation than I think I do, I just waste all of my free time with mind-numbing, energy-sucking technological distractions. Like TV. And TV online. And stalking random classmates from elementary school via facebook while watching TV online. This really got me thinking- in post-peak oil Manhattan domestic energy costs will inflate hugely, so I probably wouldn’t be using all of my techno gadgets as much anymore either, making more time for walking. I can’t adopt complete periods of energy blackout in my living situation (I can’t go in a room here without someone watching TV), but I can limit my computer time, which is a HUGE consumer of my free time. Starting this week (repair and mending week), I will limit my non-school work related computer usage to one hour a day to both conserve energy and free up my free time.

This week made me realize how important convenient transportation is to me. My great grandmother passed away so I had to go to Wichita on Saturday for the funeral. Obviously, I put the experiment on hold and drove the 2.5 hours to be there for my mom and family. But it made me think, what if it really wasn’t as easy as just jumping in the car and going? What will happen when gas is flat out too expensive for me to do that? I live hours from  all of my family, both immediate and extended- limiting my access to transportation would mean separating me from the people I love, from my main support system. It makes me realize how important it is that we develop alternative energy sources, because access to transportation to see my family is not something that I want to have to sacrifice in the future.

Living Post-Peak Oil

The wonderful environmentally-conscious individuals in the Women’s Studies department have finally broken me down to accept and confront a fact that I, along with most Americans, have been in denial about for far too long: oil, the main energy resource we depend on for not only our way of life, but largely for our survival, is non-renewable. Its supply is finite, and it’s quickly running out. But before we drain the earth completely of her black gold, or Texas tea, or whatever Beverly Hillbillies colloquialism you prefer, oil production will reach plateau and then begin to decrease, causing oil prices to skyrocket. Environmentalists and alternative energy advocates have been tirelessly working to warn the world that our dependence on oil has left us vulnerable to catastrophe in this post-peak oil scenario when oil becomes too expensive for dependent energy use. Energy for the technologies we depend on may not be readily available and the transportation of goods and services that our economy is built on- that people’s lives revolve around- would become impossibly expensive and impractical. We would be forced to rely much more heavily on a locally-centered, much more self-sufficient way of life in this post-peak oil scenario.

I have theory that should this happen in my lifetime (which according to postpeakliving.com experts concur that it will), I’ll be dead within two weeks.

Ok, maybe I’m being a little overdramatic, but seriously, I don’t know how to take care of myself. I know how to drive myself to Target and buy myself stuff. I live in a sorority house where my food- in all of its processed, pre-cooked, and plastic packaged glory- is delivered to my door on a weekly basis from big trucks. I pay a house bill more expensive than my tuition so that someone will come in and cook it for me. When an article of clothing is torn or goes out of style, I get rid of it. Sometimes I bag it up and take it to Goodwill, but I’ll be honest, often it merely ends up in the trash. It never seemed like a big deal because driving to a store and buying a new one of whatever I had disposed of is so easy. When I need to get from one place to another, I hop in my car and often don’t think twice about the cost of gas. Basically, I’ve lived a spoiled, cushy, wasteful life, and in a post-peak oil world, I would be nothing but a pathetic waste of space and would probably die of starvation.

So I’m pretty hard on myself, but other people around the world began having the same fears, but instead of accepting their fates as wastes of space, they’ve come together to create what are being called transition towns- communities committed to sustainable living. Part of the transition is a push for individuals to reskill themselves in areas that used to be common knowledge for people not-too-many generations ago, things like gardening, cooking, sewing, appliance repair, and all is done with an emphasis on community and local living.

For my project I’ll be exploring what my life may be like in a post-peak oil Manhattan. Taking a page from the all too quotable movie Napoleon Dynamite, I need to develop some sweet skills. But not like bow hunting skills or computer hacking skills. I will work on reskilling myself in some areas that I think will be important in order to become self-sufficient in an energy crisis, areas like energy efficient transportation, sewing and mending, cooking, and community building. The goal is to prove to myself that the type of lifestyle where Target isn’t the answer to everything is feasible. Perhaps if I adopt a lifestyle that is more self-reliant, reducing my personal dependence on oil for my daily survival, maybe that could be one step further away we could be from reaching a peak oil scenario.

And hopefully I can keep from starving to death in the future. That would be good too.

Uses of crude oil ( Part Deux )

So now we can look at one of the most abundant dependencies of why we pump so much crude oil out of the ground, travel. We are a nation that loves to drive large vehicles and live spread out amongst a large continent and build roads for our convenience of traveling where ever we want to. Three main topics will be looked at for the travel that we use for our everyday lives both direct and indirect.
First, personal use vehicles, whether it is car, truck, van, motorcycle, we consume for simple travel every day. From work, school, to shopping needs/wants were are burning our favorite little fossil fuel and creating greenhouse gases. Although at times it could make a large change to more man powered miens of transportation like walking or bicycling.

Second, the way we have all those products delivered to local food/retail stores. Especially in the case of oversea products, it starts by shipping by water through burning fuel (and we ship oil by boat that burns oil) to bring the product to a US port. Follow that by placing container units onto a semi truck to transport that product to a distribution center of company X. Company X then distributes said products through another semi truck burning more oil to deliver to local markets. Then we as consumers drive our vehicles to said market to purchase product from company X and throughout it all burning more oil and creating green house gases.

Third, we use large passenger planes to transport people long distances with high volume of people. Although we are still burning oil and creating greenhouse gases, this could be argued as the most efficient mass transit. Although it does hurt the environment the efficiency of transporting a large amount of people at one time in place of each individual or group of individuals traveling through car. One could argue though that we could return to large sail boats for oceanic travel though.

Uses of crude oil (part One)

As we all know that crude oil is used to create the gasoline that we burn in our cars but, what else do we use oil for?
Let us start off with what people generally have in cars, cup-holders, a piece for manufactured plastic with in car, truck, suv, or whatever; point being what would you put in a cup holder? Answer not a traditional cup with an open top, most likely a bottle of your favorite soda, water, sport drink, or maybe a coffee cup (with a lid of course) which are all made out of plastic. So we are putting plastic with in plastic, what is the big deal you might say, well the plastics used are petroleum based which is a limited natural resource for manufactured convince. We use petroleum to produce bottles to contain water in vast quantities for easy access but there is a movement to change that. In San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom banned use of plastic water bottles with in city government buildings, and the trend is growing. New York City is in the stages of a similar proposal and hopefully the trend continues. Why, because the use of plastic bottles for water is such a large business and many people buy water by cases of 24 bottles of “fresh” spring water. In turn the use all the bottled water creates large amounts of semi recyclable plastic bottles. In reference to semi recyclable, because plastic is a chemical based byproduct of oil it will lose its consistency when broken down and reused. Although many still want to buy bottled water here is one company that supports the change; BIOTA (http://www.biotaspringwater.com) creating a bottle from biodegradable corn oil so that the bottle can be disposed of without creating large quantities of pollution. Another solution for tasty filtered water is to purchase a Brita filter (http://www.brita.com) which will save money over time plus keep from creating excessive waste.
Another use for oil that many might not consider is fo-fur. Yes oil helps save innocent little rabbits and chinchillas from being turned into the next head turning fur coat, hat, boats, gloves, etc (think you have the idea). So sparky (that’s me) how does oil help save cute little animals you might ask? Well the crude oil will be turned into acrylics for uses in paints, wax, and in this case synthetic fibers. So we have a synthetic fiber which can be manipulated to make the fibers very, very small to create soft felling material to imitate real fur, and thus saving small creatures with soft fur everywhere.
Another animal saved by crude oil would be the whales, because the use as crude oil as a cheap substitute for whale oil was economically more efficient.
One more large use for crude oil many do not consider is the one thing most of us touch everyday, asphalt. Oil is used as binder or glue for all the aggregate or rock components of asphalt. There are movements for a greener composition of asphalt with the use vegetable oil waste, thus the waste material would be the new component of binding or glue.
I will have another “Uses” blog later in the week. Hope you feel informed.

Political conflict and Crude Oil

Oil production and political conflict seem to be a continuous volatile relationship. One of the largest and most predominate of our generation is the invasion of Kuwait in the early 90’s (wow that makes me feel old that I said 90’s). A little background for the Iraq invasion of Kuwait and why it happened. Iraq had invaded Iran back in 1980 for border disputes and just to gain land during a time of Iranian civil disputes. Iraq had invaded Iran with out formal announcement or declaration of war. Although Iraq struck first Iran was on an offensive for a majority of the eight year war. Now Kuwait plays in because of funding Iraq during the war with funds from oil revenues. After the Iran-Iraq war Iraq was in debt to Kuwait by $14 billion for war finances. Iraq was pressured by Kuwait to begin repayment after the war which Iraq economically could not. Iraq would try to increase oil prices through OPEC, but Kuwait (also a member of OPEC) would not allow this by increasing their own oil production. So in retrospect every time the price per barrel of oil dropped by $1 in the U.S. in caused a $1 billion loss of revenues on oil in Iraq, and so further economic drought, thus causing tension between Kuwait and Iraq fuel actions of war. Iraq would go on to accuse Kuwait of “slant drilling” or directional drilling to tap the Iraq oil fields for oil reserves. So now the invasion of Kuwait happens and not supported by the UN council, and so, the UN sends coalition forces (mostly US) to push Iraq out of Kuwait. While Iraq troops fled Kuwait troops of Iraq set the Burgan oil fields on fire. The Fires would burn for months and cause tremendous air and land pollution. The fire would burn through approximately 6 million barrels of oil per day. Not only can we look at this as tremendous amounts of pollution but wasted natural resources that can not be replenished. Further more Iraq was accused of purposely dumping 400 million gallons of crude oil into the Persian Gulf, causing even more devastating pollution the marine life.
Not only was the environment affected by war but also the people of the area. Here are a few pictures from the Gulf War to help you see the effects.

Pollution of oil

Ok let us talk about one of the most recognized pollutions of oil focused on by the media, large tanker oil spills. One of the most covered stories by the media when a tanker goes down on the open ocean and scenes of “black gold” floating on top of the water, or pictures of rescue efforts for the local animal life. Effects of oil spills upon sea birds can be that the oil penetrates their plumage (feather layers on the body) and keeps them from insulating their bodies; furthermore it disrupts the bird’s buoyancy or their ability to float on open water. Another animal that is tremendously affected would be seals, when their fur becomes coated with oil it causes the insulation aspect to be ruined and so causing cases of hypothermia. One more animal to mention that will slowly tie everything together, fish, as they swim through the water and ingest oily water it destroys the organs and digestive systems. So to tie all of this together we have a eco system with in the ocean that theses animals are all apart of, starting with the fish population declines from the pollution then so will sea birds who eat them, along with; seals, large whales like sperm whales. Also if the seals are dying off either from effects of oil pollution or lack of food the orca whales (killer whales) food supply will no longer be there (no more exciting Alaskan cruises). So to show who the ocean is affected and why we might focus on it is pretty obvious because it does do a lot of damage, but it is not the worst form of oil pollution. Using of oil for energy to power machines emits much much more pollution than a single oil spill. Driving of cars as an example, In the US alone we consume the most petrol because of living lives of excess. We live spread out and a majority of areas with out public transportation, so each individual drives a car and burns green house gases on at least a daily basis. Consumption reports show that in April we actually had lower consumption but due to the cost of gasoline, not because of necessarily changing the structure of American travel.

So how do we live simpler to lower our polluting tendencies?

Less Fuel 4 Cleaner Air

Hey guys-
So I posted this on Tuesday night, but apparently it didn’t work out somehow…good thing I checked tonight! Anyway…
This is my final, wrap-up blog! I’ll begin by discussing the City Commission meeting that was earlier tonight. Unfortunately, something came up and I was not able to go. But I work at the Collegian Tuesday nights, so I was able to talk to the reporter who covered the meeting after it was over. He said the attendance was the biggest he’s ever seen for a Commission meeting (and he’s been covering them all semester). He said that Diane, the woman I talked about in my earlier posts who organized the first meeting and brought up the Bicycle Master Plan again, served as the “leader” for the group of cyclists in attendance, which he said was probably about 40 or so people. He said she spoke to the Commission members about the city’s concern for lack of bicycle safety and awareness, presented the petition I mentioned, and told the Commission how they really need to pay attention to the Plan concerning the rest of the downtown redevelopment. He said there was some public discussion, the Commission agreed and then most the cyclists left. But he also said after most cyclists had left, the Commission members continued to be sympathetic toward the cyclists, bringing up the plan and bike lanes, etc. when discussing the rest of the items on the agenda.
I don’t know about you guys, but I think of this as a serious success! I think that’s saying a lot especially since they continued to bring up the bike issues after the issue and probably all of the cyclists had left the meeting. Thanks to you guys if any of you journeyed over to the Pathfinder and signed the petition or attended the meeting. It looks as though in the coming years, Manhattan might actually become more biker friendly!
And on that note, I think overall my project was a big success. Though the personal aspect of my project – not driving/riding in a vehicle at least twice a week – failed miserable (I think I only actually did it one week), the personal benefit from the overall project was a huge success. As I’ve said before, before this project, I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was 12. So at the very least, I remembered how fun riding a bicycle is. But I learned so much more. The numbers that I found in my research for my educational part was personally staggering. I used to drive my car all the time just because I am a lazy person and only recently started to worry about it because of gas prices. But realizing that cars are the number one cause for polluting carbons in the atmosphere, which are doing this biggest damage to the environment, is almost unreal. Now I am driving my car less not only because the price of gas is sky high, but because I feel horrible contributing to those numbers if it’s not something like driving home to KC or someplace where I can not logically get without a vehicle. I can’t wait for this summer, because I am going to ride my bike everywhere! Also, when I am back in Manhattan for the school year, I will definitely be attending critical mass each month because it was so fun!
The best thing that I think I took away from this project is that one person really can make a difference in something. The only reason the Commissioners were concerned at all about the bicycle issue is because they saw through the petition and through the number of people who attended the meeting that this really is something the community cares about and is something they need to push. And the only reason that happened is because those individuals, like myself, each made the choice to drop their signature and attend that meeting. NEVER assume that if you don’t do something, someone else will, because if you have that mentality, that means so do others, so you NEED to be that person who is going to get out there and take action because you know someone else is too lazy.
The last point I will make is how this all ties into Ecofeminism. Ecofeminists, very basically, look at the environment as something that is being exploited by human nature, which has a connection to women because the exploitation is almost identical to how women are treated and exploited in our society. Riding my bike instead of driving my car relates directly to this because the only reason anyone drives a car is because the government and the media have conditioned us to think and have physically gotten us to the point where we think we have to, and in some cases we definitely have to, because urbanization has caused our homes, businesses and offices to be so spread out, that we need these cars to get from point A to point B. And the reason they did this was to promote vehicle usage. Just like how our society has taught many of our men and women to believe that men should be or are superior and dominate to women, making it OK to take advantage of them, so has society justified using these deadly and unfathomably polluting vehicles on a not just daily, but hourly basis, by making us believe it is OK to harm, exploit, rape the air in our environment, because we think we need to. Just as we cannot survive without the women we harm for reproduction, we cannot survive without the air we pollute for breath for survival, yet the society we live in today says it’s perfectly OK to do both those things. Which is why choosing to ride my bicycle more to pollute less is an Ecofeminist act.
I hope you all enjoyed my project and got something out of it; I know I did.

Economics of renewable energy

Hi everyone, I am sure you are all as excited to read this as I am to post it but here is my blog posting for the economical aspects of renewable (green) energy. Well to start out with lets talk about wind turbines. The electricity produced has a higher up front cost of production from wind turbines than it does from more traditional methods like fossil fuel consumption. However as with all things economic you must look past the up front cost, and consider long term cost, opportunity cost, and environmental cost. When wind turbines are built they cost a large sum of money for each unit, but in the long term they are saving fossil fuels and are producing a good amount of energy for the world. On the down side if you are a bird watcher you will hate these because well birds seem to fly into the turbine blades and kill themselves. However, a few birds to save the over consumption of fossil fuels like coal, a fair trade in my opinion. In exchange for the loss of a few birds though we will reap the following benefits:
one unit wind turbine will offset the emission of 7,100,000 pounds of CO2
33,000 pounds of SOx (an contributor to acid rain and smog)
10,000 pounds of NOx (a leading component of smog and cause of asthma)
the amount of pollution saved annually is the equivalent to planting 83,000 new trees, or driving 75,000,000 miles less in a conventional automobile each year.
This kind of put it in perspective about how green the renewable energy can really be, these numbers are annually so this is just one years worth of accumulation.

So when you weigh the benefits vs the cost of renewable energy just using the example of wind power it seems to be an easy decision to me, wind power is great. This is just using one example of wind power, there are multiple different types of renewable energy that can be utilized. For more information about them and facts about them visit the following link: http://www.aresearchguide.com/energy.html

Less Fuel 4 Cleaner Air

Time for the community post!
So critical mass was a success. I know it was kind of a last minute on here, but I really encourage you guys to come out to future ones.
critical mass is held the last Friday of every month (and for those of you who will be living here this summer, they’re still going to have them so attend because there won’t be as many people to go!). I think they decided that it is going to be at 7:00 p.m. each time to keep it consistent.
I know Wikipedia isn’t the best source to use, but I think this description of the event is pretty good:
Critical Mass is an event typically held on the last Friday of every month in cities around the world where bicyclists and, less frequently, unicyclists, skateboarders, inline skaters, roller skaters and other self-propelled commuters take to the streets en masse. While the ride was originally founded with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to bicyclists, the leaderless structure of Critical Mass makes it impossible to assign it any one specific goal. In fact, the purpose of Critical Mass is not formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and traveling as a group through city or town streets.

Like the definition says, in many bigger cities, critical mass is huge and intended to make a political statement – less cars, more bikes – about the environment and about people being more biker friendly by riding during rush hours, usually 5:00 p.m. Here are a few pictures of critical mass from San Fransisco.

Now, needless to say, our critical mass was slightly smaller than that – only about 30 people. It’s also different because it’s not political here. It’s merely a group of people from the community getting together and riding around town to promote bike awareness, but mostly, to enjoy the ride and each other’s company. With 30 bikes riding through the Ville and down poyntz and other busy streets, I think we definitely made an impact. There were cars and people cheering us on, and we even picked up a few stray bikers on the way! It was a really slow, easy ride and we just had a fun time and enjoyed the weather with other bikers in town. This, I think, relates to all we’ve been talking about with voluntary simplicity. Voluntary simplicity has an emphasis on expanding and developing relationships with people, which is exactly what our critical mass is about. It’s friends and strangers getting together to hang out and have a good time and meet each other while going on a fun ride around town, which is healthy for both your mind, body and the environment! I met some new cool people out there and I really encourage everyone to spread the word and attend the next critical mass! Go bikes!