The GW Issue Few Wish to Hear

Most environmentally aware people try to keep up with the science, the debates, and the drafting of policy that will hopefully address Global Climate Change (a.k.a. Global Warming). The hope is that we can diminish human contributions to greenhouse gases before the planet becomes unlivable. Things like developing energy sources that don’t require raping the earth or poisoning the air and water (Mountaintop Removal) or never-ending oil wars, conservation at home and at work, switching urban transportation fleets to biodiesel, purchasing hybrid cars, commitments to rebuilding infrastructure such as the electrical grid so it doesn’t ‘lose’ nearly half of our generation capacity, ending the decimation of tropical rainforests, etc.

And many of the people young and old who are paying attention and doing what they can to mitigate their own carbon footprints are also well aware that with some tweaking of our antiquated agricultural policies that were originally designed to ‘beat’ the Soviets in some kind of mock Cold War game of who can produce the most corn, we could be saving 20% of our fossil fuel consumption simply by switching the nation’s primary shipping systems – trains, ships and semi fleets – to biodiesel made with alternative feedstock crops. Along with our agricultural machinery. A combine can run just fine on biodiesel – or, with a pre-heater refit, straight vegetable oil.

Yet there’s a huge contributor to climate change that people don’t seem to be particularly aware of or take seriously as far as choices they could make to lessen their own impact. It’s not about carbon dioxide, which is the primary focus of most attempts to mitigate Global Warming, but about other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane. For these the agricultural sector is again the most significant contributor, and it all revolves around our hard-to-kick habit of eating way too much meat.

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Onions, Onions Everywhere!

At right is the first rush of the bunching onion harvest, prepped for drying in my wonderful (but quite ugly) solar food dryer! These are just the whites – grown from seed – that have been seriously overrun by volunteer grape tomatoes. I decided to let the volunteers grow because the celeriac I’d put where they are all got washed away by torrential rains all spring. Unlike my Abe Lincolns up top, these actually are turning red about a month late. Rain and cool weather all the way through July has kept the Lincolns green-green for way too long, don’t know if they’ll ever ripen.

Seems that’s the story up and down the Eastern Seaboard this year. Cooler than normal, and wet enough to make swamps. I hear New Jersey and other states are having tomato issues, as are all my neighbors, so I’m not alone. Potatoes are taking a big hit as well, rotting in the wet ground or turning black with blight. Both crops may be total commercial losses this year, which means it’s even MORE important that mine come in and get preserved. That’s where my food dryer comes in!

I have so looked forward to not having to buy lids, boil jars, hard-prep and then water-bath this year. We don’t have AC in the cabin, since there’s no point for the perhaps 3 whole weeks of summer when it’s so hot we have to go sit under a tree instead of stay in the house, but it does get sticky and uncomfortable in the extreme when canning, even though I’ve learned to do the water-bath out on the gas grill.

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Some Issues of Concern…

First, to get us all in the spirit of spring, check out Geoff Lawton’s YouTube short on the psychological benefits of gardening. If you like what you see, check out his new DVD, Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way, available from Permaculture.Org.

Most committed modern homesteaders try to keep up with the many issues of concern to us personally, our country, and our chosen way of life. Things like rural development policies, governmental agricultural and energy policies, self-sufficiency (and roadblocks to that), management of forests and water sources, etc. It’s because we care that we are who we are and do what we do. And a good many of us try to keep up daily or weekly with the best sources of information we need to keep abreast of those issues.

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EPA Halts MTR Permits for Review

The ‘Breaking News’ headline at the anti-mountaintop removal website I Love Mountains brings tears to the grateful eyes of we lovers of these ancient, beautiful and abundant mountains…

Hope renewed across the Appalachian coalfields – Obama Administration suspends mountaintop removal permits for further review…

Obama’s new EPA administrator Lisa Jackson announced this past Tuesday that the agency would be delaying somewhere between 150 and 250 permits issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers to coal companies to flatten mountains and destroy watersheds in their desperate quest to extract the last of the sequestered coal with as few paid miners as possible.

What the EPA will be reviewing are blatant violations of clean water regulations former President G.W. Bush waived in his 2002 “fill rule” and a last days repeal of the stream buffer zone rule that would allow coal companies to ignore any and all impacts of the water supplies of rural residents, towns and cities dependent upon these mountain streams for drinking water supplies.

The map above (h/t Appalachian Voices) shows graphically how open strip mines and MTR directly affects the very poorest regions of Appalachia. One might suspect that these areas are happy to have the good jobs these operations offer, but the reality is that this kind of mining is equipment-reliant, done with machines and not men. For instance, King Coal once provided 120,000 decent paying jobs in West Virginia, but now fewer than 20,000 citizens call themselves coal miners. The people whose environment is being raped are getting nothing of value out of the deal. And may indeed be harmed significantly as their water supplies are systematically polluted, sickening their crops, livestock and families.

As reported on this blog in several posts linked below, some of the people in these poor counties have better ideas about what to do with their mountains, things that will improve everyone’s life, make them leaders in clean, renewable energy supplies, and create green jobs for local residents. Especially check out projects like Coal River Wind, which proposes to harvest the wind instead of the mountain itself.

Another great article with good links and pictures is Hope is Alive in Appalachia!!! by Kossack ‘faithfull’. So get off your duff – call some legislators, sign some petitions, and spread some love of mountains in your circle today!

Links:

Old King Coal vs. Reality
Hope is Alive in Appalachia!!!
Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul
Coal River Wind
I Love Mountains

Old King Coal vs. Reality

WV win, NC loss:
Champ moves down in the rankings

West Virginia, Feb. 13: A federal appeals court in Charleston, West Virginia, has ruled that the US Army Corps of Engineers may permit coal companies involved in the controversial and environmentally destructive practice of “Mountaintop Removal” mining to bypass the Clean Water Act rules in its permitting process.

The rules had required environmental impact studies and reviews prior to permitting the coal companies to blast the tops off ancient mountains and using the debris to fill in valleys, a practice that destroys mountain feeder streams, diminishes supply and pollutes the water supplies for towns and cities downstream. An excellent overview of the situation and local efforts to stem the tide of destruction can be found in this diary by Bruce Nilles on the political website Daily Kos.

One of the mountains immediately threatened by this ruling is Coal River Mountain, one of the last mountains still standing in West Virginia’s Coal River Valley. A local coalition, Coal River Wind Farm has developed an excellent alternative to destroying the mountain and watershed that will return economic value to the area, jobs to the residents and power to the grid all at the same time. Do check them out and lend your voice to their efforts to convince WV state officials to choose alternatives to King Coal and the filth he leaves in his wake.

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Old King Coal, a Filthy Old Soul

Back in June I posted a disgusted ode to King Coal’s most outrageous method of extracting the combustible black rock from these most beautiful and abundant Appalachians. In that post, Desperate for Fossil Fuels, I described the environmental horror known as “Mountaintop Removal” and offered a bunch of useful links for further information, environmental coalitions and direct actions aimed at stopping this crazy rape of the earth.

Just six months later on December 22, an earthen dam gave way at a coal ash holding pond in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling more than a billion gallons of the sludge into a neighborhood as well as into the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers. Three homes were completely destroyed, many others within the 300 acre sludge zone had to be evacuated, dead fish littered the banks of the rivers and the people of eastern Tennessee as well as the rest of the nation suddenly became familiar with what this waste product of burning coal contains. It’s not pretty.

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Yet Another New Energy Source

Putting the vortex to good use!

As the world economy continues its wide swings mired in uncertainty as well as hope that the necessary changes in the way we energize our world will finally get a real chance for development, scientists at the University of Michigan, funded by the US Department of Energy, have developed a new technology inspired by the way fish swim that can harness the power of slow-moving water.

Most hydropower technologies rely on the action of waves, tides or faster currents caused by dams, and need the water to move as fast as five or six knots in order to operate efficiently. This new system can generate electricity in water that flows less than one knot (about 1 mile per hour), and does not require placing obstructions in or on top of the water as other methods do. Rather, this new system uses cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs beneath the surface of the waterway. As the water moves past the cylinders, it creates vortices which push and pull them up and down on the springs. It is the mechanical energy in the vibrations that is converted into electricity.

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Used Tires: Pollution or Resource?

I don’t know about you, but I pick up junked tires that other people dump off the side of mountain roads in my county – usually along with assorted junked appliances and badly bagged household trash – and take them with me when I do the monthly trash run to our local Inconvenient Center. I call it that instead of its own self-title of “Convenient Center” because it’s damned IN-convenient. They put all their dumpsters inside a compound with high chain link topped by barbed wire and guarded by a grizzled old grouch (and his junkyard dog) who seem to really hate the idea that people have trash and recyclables to responsibly dispose of, which is only open 3 days a week when almost all of us are actually out working honest jobs instead of hauling our own trash.

Anyway, there is a corner of the inconvenient center devoted to junked appliances and tires, which supposedly get recycled at some point (though I’ve never noticed the piles to go down any). Better to have those big junk items at the center than on the roads and hillsides. They never biodegrade, they are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and they look really nasty. So, you might have been wondering, how exactly do they recycle things like the 190 million car, truck and equipment tires tossed every year in this nation, and what COULD be done with them?

My friend Vito over at RideLust has asked the obvious question, based on a recycling technology that could actually be of some great use and wouldn’t spread West Nile Fever. It’s called Rubberized Asphalt Concrete [RAC], and it would not only give us better, longer lasting road surfaces, it would save us a whole heck of a lot of petroleum dependence!

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Preparing for Winter

After the hard rains of leftover hurricane Fay flooded the basement and caused hubby and I to have to sleep on the living room floor on a fouton (and we’re still there, since it’s just us for a few more weeks), we got our first real cold front yesterday. Nights are down into the 50s and scheduled to stay there for at least a week, reminding us that it’s now time to think about winter heat.

So in between harvesting concords and muscodines, I’ve prepared the stove pipe cleaning mechanism. No, it’s not a nice English chimney sweep brush, it’s an old holey towel tied around other old rags and a large round river rock, onto which I tie a long piece of rope. We get up on the roof and remove the chimney hood, then drop this thing into the pipe so it will scrape down any accumulated soot. Which falls into the stove in the basement. The pipe runs straight up through the main floor and loft, so there are no bends and kinks. This is good if you’re heating with wood, as bends tend to accumulate more creosote and are difficult to clean. The tall pipe is the “central” part of our central heating system, giving off a lot of heat when it’s cold and making the single wood stove very efficient.

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EVs: Hope for Rural Transportation?

Yeah, I know. EVERYBODY is starting to dream about a whole new generation of cars and trucks for getting around in the 21st century without fossil fuels. But those of us who live in the wider countryside inventing wider, self-sufficient lives as homesteaders usually have to plan a bit farther out than city dwellers. Who, when push comes to shove (or just $5+ a gallon gasoline), can always ride the bus or take their bike or even hitch-hike on crowded roads full of mostly empty vehicles at a near standstill any time of day.

I’m a big fan of Toyota’s Prius and Honda’s Insight, but the hybrid technology isn’t really where it needs to be for my desire to somehow translate someday homestead energy self-sufficiency to transportation as well. For that, I’ll need all-electric. And something a lot more stable, dependable, useful and warmer in the winter than a glorified golf cart.

Something big enough to carry at least a couple of people, safe enough to protect us from bad drivers, fast enough to use the interstate, with enough range to get to and from the nearest regional farmer’s market – that’s about 60 miles round trip – without having to buy someone else’s electricity. Grocery store and other such amenities are in closer, smaller towns, 5-7 miles away (less than 15 round trip). I’ll need either a pickup-style bed – with sides and tailgate – or large luggage space in order to carry tools, machinery, trash (we have to haul our own), groceries (only shop once a week) and general ’stuff’. Like logs for firewood and lumber for building and… well, you know what I mean. And something that charges in a short enough period of time (whenever gas stations start offering paid by-the-hour 110 and 220 volt chargers) to get 500 miles in one day on occasion.

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