http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/garden/22impact.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
March 22, 2007
The Year Without Toilet Paper
By PENELOPE GREEN
DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.
A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture - the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set - her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.
A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.
Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. "I've noticed," Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. "I've got enough problems," he said.)
Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella's parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.
Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin's best friend.
Why there may be a public appetite for the Colin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren't budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.
Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen "An Inconvenient Truth"; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.
Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book, "Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism," will be published by University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded of environmentalism's last big bubble, in the 1970s, long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the movement back decades). Those were the days when Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk said, "focused on a brand of environmentalism that kept people in the picture."
"That's the thing about this current wave of environmentalism," he continued. "It's not about, how do we protect some abstract pristine space? It's what can real people do in their home or office or whatever. It's also very urban. It's a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?"
With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears. Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.
Before No Impact - this is a phrase that comes up a lot - Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)
In this household, food was something you dialed for.
"We would wake up and call 'the man,' " Ms. Conlin said, "and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we'd call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob's. For lunch I'd find myself at Wendy's, with a Dunkin' Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: 'The man! The man!' "
Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily from a limited regional menu - right now that means lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the unplugged freezer - hashing out compromises. Spices are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because homemade bread "is awful without salt; salt stops the yeast action." Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with wheat grown locally and a sour dough "mother" fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also finding good sources at the nearby Union Square Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan said.
Olive oil and vinegar are out; they used the last dregs of their bottle of balsamic vinegar last week, Mr. Beavan said, producing a moment of stunned silence while a visitor thought about life without those staples. Still, Mr. Beavan's homemade fruit-scrap vinegar has a satisfying bite.
The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue - community building - as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed's Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.
The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care - six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away - and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place - 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away - estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).
Until three weeks ago, however, Ms. Conlin was following her "high-fructose corn syrup ways," meaning double espressos and pastries administered daily. "Giving up the coffee was like crashing down from a crystal meth addiction," she said. "I had to leave work and go to bed for 24 hours."
Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl's. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)
Yet since the beginning of No Impact, and to the amusement of her colleagues at Business Week, Ms. Conlin has been scootering to her office on 49th Street each day, bringing a Mason jar filled with greenhouse greens, cheese and her husband's bread for lunch, along with her own napkin and cutlery. She has taken a bit of ribbing: "All progress is carbon fueled," jeered one office mate.
Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment, said she saw "An Inconvenient Truth" in an air-conditioned movie theater last summer. "It was like, 'J'accuse!' " she said. "I just felt like everything I did in my life was contributing to a system that was really problematic." Borrowing a phrase from her husband, she continued, "If I was a student, I would march against myself."
While Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport - giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment - she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. "It was my last hurrah," she explained.
It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother's bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks' salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.
The bingo windfall points to a loophole in No Impact: the Conlin-Beavan household does accept presents. When Mr. Beavan's father saw Ms. Conlin scootering without gloves he sent her a pair. And allowances can be made for the occasional thrift shop purchase. For Isabella's birthday on Feb. 25, her family wandered the East Village and ended up at Jane's Exchange, where she chose a pair of ballet slippers as her gift.
"They cost a dollar," Ms. Conlin said.
It was freezing cold that day, Mr. Beavan said, picking up the story. "We went into a restaurant to warm her up. We agonized about taking a cab, which we ended up not doing. I still felt like we really screwed up, though, because we ate at the restaurant."
He said he called the 100 Mile Diet couple to confess his sin. They admitted they had cheated too, with a restaurant date, then told him, Yoda-like, "Only in strictness comes the conversion."
Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. "They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back," Mr. Beavan said. "We always say, 'We're trying not to make any trash.' And some people get really into that and others clearly think we're big losers."
Living abstemiously on Lower Fifth Avenue, in what used to be Edith Wharton country, with early-21st-century accouterments like creamy, calf-high Chloe boots, may seem at best like a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion. On the other hand, consider this response to Mr. Beavan's Internet post the day he and his family gave up toilet paper.
"What's with the public display of nonimpactness?" a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. "Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)"
Indeed. Concrete benefits are already accruing to Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan that may tempt others. The sea may be rising, but Ms. Conlin has lost 4 pounds and Mr. Beavan 20. It took Ms. Conlin over an hour to get home from work during the snowstorm on Friday, riding her scooter, then walking in her knee-high Wellingtons with her scooter on her back, but she claimed to be mostly exhilarated by the experience. "Rain is worse," she said.
Perhaps the real guinea pig in this experiment is the Conlin-Beavan marriage.
"Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr. Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert
http://tinyurl.com/3a5wyh
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/us/27warming.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
March 27, 2007
By TIMOTHY EGAN
SUMMERHAVEN, Ariz. — High above the desert floor, this little alpine town has long served as a natural air-conditioned retreat for people in Tucson, one of the so-called sky islands of southern Arizona. When it is 105 degrees in the city, it is at least 20 degrees cooler up here near the 9,157-foot summit of Mount Lemmon.
But for the past 10 years or so, things have been unraveling. Winter snows melt away earlier, longtime residents say, making for an erratic season at the nearby ski resort, the most southern in the nation.
Legions of predatory insects have taken to the forest that mantles the upper mountain, killing trees weakened by record heat. And in 2003, a fire burned for a month, destroying much of the town and scarring more than 87,000 acres. The next year, another fire swept over 32,000 acres.
“Nature is confused,” said Debbie Fagan, who moved here 25 years ago after crossing the country in pursuit of the perfect place to live. “We used to have four seasons. Now we have two. I love this place dearly, and this is very hard for me to watch.”
The American Southwest has been warming for nearly 30 years, according to records that date to the late 19th century. And the region is in the midst of an eight-year drought. Both developments could be within the range of natural events.
But what has convinced many scientists that the current spate of higher temperatures is not just another swing in the weather has been the near collapse of the sky islands and other high, formerly green havens that poke above the desert.
Fire has always been a part of Western ecology, particularly when the land is parched. But since the late 1980s, the size and reach of the fires have far exceeded times of earlier droughts. And the culprit, according to several recent studies, is higher temperatures tearing at a fabric of life that dates to the last ice age.
“A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But it’s happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States.”
And it comes at a time when millions of Americans are moving to these places. Since 1990, more than eight million homes have been built in Western areas that foresters call “the urban-wild land” interface, also the focus of recent federal firefighting efforts.
The fear is that what happened to Summerhaven is a taste of things to come. As heat-stressed ecosystems provide fuel at the edges of new homes, catastrophic fires could become the new normal. Dr. Swetnam compares it to new developments in hurricane-prone areas in the Southeast.
Others say the projections are overly alarmist, and note that fuel buildup is a legacy of fire repression, not necessarily higher temperatures. They also say the higher reaches of the West may simply be evolving into less alpine settings, and could resemble life that exists at lower elevations.
Still, there is a broad consensus that much of the West is warmer than it has been since record keeping began, and that changes are happening quickly, particularly in places like the sky islands.
“The West has warmed more than any other place in the United States outside Alaska,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, a University of Arizona scientist and co-author of the recent draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last month in Paris.
A trip up to any one of the 27 sky islands shows the ravages of heat on the land. The forests are splotched with a rusty tinge, as trees die from beetle infestation. Frogs with a 10,000-year-old pedigree have all but disappeared. One of the sky islands is the world’s only habitat for the Mount Graham red squirrel, an endangered species down to its last 100 or so animals.
For the squirrel, the frog and other species that have retreated ever higher, there may be no place left to go.
“As the climate warms, these species on top of the sky islands are literally getting pushed off into space,” Dr. Overpeck said.
The Coronado National Forest, which includes Mount Lemmon and Mount Graham, lists 28 threatened or endangered species. Heat has greatly diminished the web of life that these creatures depend on, and they “have not evolved to tolerate these new conditions,” Forest Service officials wrote in a report on the declining health of the sky islands.
For people moving to the breezy pines to escape desert heat, the fires that swept through places like Summerhaven can be terrifying. Fire comes much earlier, and much later, in the season.
“You can tell the weather is changing,” said Michael Stanley, head of the water district here, which lost two-thirds of its customers after the fire. “The snow melts earlier. The fires are big. It makes life very interesting.”
On her regular hikes around Mount Lemmon, Ms. Fagan has noticed many changes. She recently saw a type of rattlesnake that usually lives in the lowlands, and — while hiking over snow — was surrounded by gnats.
“I’m standing on snow while swatting away gnats,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh my God, what are these guys doing out in the winter?’ ”
Last year, wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres in the United States — a record, surpassing the previous year. The Forest Service has become the fire service, devoting 42 percent of its budget to fire suppression last year — more than triple what it was in 1991.
The current drought is not nearly as bad as the one in the 1950s, or one in the mid-16th century, but it has caused a huge forest die-off.
The only difference this time around is higher temperatures, said David D. Breshears, co-author of a study published by the National Academy of Sciences on the subject.
The increased heat, Dr. Breshears believes, is the tipping point — stressing ecosystems in the Southwest so quickly that they are vulnerable to prolonged beetle infestation and catastrophic fires.
“The changes are so big, and happening so fast,” Dr. Breshears said. “We saw it happen all the way up the elevation grade and across the region.”
Dr. Swetnam, who said he used to be skeptical about some of the projections on Western landscape changes, came to a different conclusion after studying fires. Since the mid-1980s, about seven times more federal land has burned than in the previous time frame, he found, and the fire season has been extended by more than two months.
Dr. Swetnam laments the loss of areas unique to the Southwest.
“The sky islands have existed since the Pleistocene,” he said, “and now with these huge fires you stand to lose some unique species.”
All of which should be a caution to people moving to reaches of the desert prone to dramatic change.
“The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t like people like me saying things like this, but large parts of the arid Southwest are not going to be very nice places to live,” Dr. Swetnam said.
Here at Summerhaven, Ms. Fagan, who lost her home and gift shop to the fire, is staying put, even though she knows — firsthand — about the changes under way on the sky island where she built a business and raised her two boys. She made her last mortgage payment on her house a few months before the fire took it.
“We lost 90 percent of our community and two-thirds of our mountain to fire,” she said recent one warm morning. “There may be nothing left to burn. But I can’t ever leave this place. I love it too much.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/us/27warming.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
March 27, 2007
By TIMOTHY EGAN
SUMMERHAVEN, Ariz. — High above the desert floor, this little alpine town has long served as a natural air-conditioned retreat for people in Tucson, one of the so-called sky islands of southern Arizona. When it is 105 degrees in the city, it is at least 20 degrees cooler up here near the 9,157-foot summit of Mount Lemmon.
But for the past 10 years or so, things have been unraveling. Winter snows melt away earlier, longtime residents say, making for an erratic season at the nearby ski resort, the most southern in the nation.
Legions of predatory insects have taken to the forest that mantles the upper mountain, killing trees weakened by record heat. And in 2003, a fire burned for a month, destroying much of the town and scarring more than 87,000 acres. The next year, another fire swept over 32,000 acres.
“Nature is confused,” said Debbie Fagan, who moved here 25 years ago after crossing the country in pursuit of the perfect place to live. “We used to have four seasons. Now we have two. I love this place dearly, and this is very hard for me to watch.”
The American Southwest has been warming for nearly 30 years, according to records that date to the late 19th century. And the region is in the midst of an eight-year drought. Both developments could be within the range of natural events.
But what has convinced many scientists that the current spate of higher temperatures is not just another swing in the weather has been the near collapse of the sky islands and other high, formerly green havens that poke above the desert.
Fire has always been a part of Western ecology, particularly when the land is parched. But since the late 1980s, the size and reach of the fires have far exceeded times of earlier droughts. And the culprit, according to several recent studies, is higher temperatures tearing at a fabric of life that dates to the last ice age.
“A lot of people think climate change and the ecological repercussions are 50 years away,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “But it’s happening now in the West. The data is telling us that we are in the middle of one of the first big indicators of climate change impacts in the continental United States.”
And it comes at a time when millions of Americans are moving to these places. Since 1990, more than eight million homes have been built in Western areas that foresters call “the urban-wild land” interface, also the focus of recent federal firefighting efforts.
The fear is that what happened to Summerhaven is a taste of things to come. As heat-stressed ecosystems provide fuel at the edges of new homes, catastrophic fires could become the new normal. Dr. Swetnam compares it to new developments in hurricane-prone areas in the Southeast.
Others say the projections are overly alarmist, and note that fuel buildup is a legacy of fire repression, not necessarily higher temperatures. They also say the higher reaches of the West may simply be evolving into less alpine settings, and could resemble life that exists at lower elevations.
Still, there is a broad consensus that much of the West is warmer than it has been since record keeping began, and that changes are happening quickly, particularly in places like the sky islands.
“The West has warmed more than any other place in the United States outside Alaska,” said Jonathan T. Overpeck, a University of Arizona scientist and co-author of the recent draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released last month in Paris.
A trip up to any one of the 27 sky islands shows the ravages of heat on the land. The forests are splotched with a rusty tinge, as trees die from beetle infestation. Frogs with a 10,000-year-old pedigree have all but disappeared. One of the sky islands is the world’s only habitat for the Mount Graham red squirrel, an endangered species down to its last 100 or so animals.
For the squirrel, the frog and other species that have retreated ever higher, there may be no place left to go.
“As the climate warms, these species on top of the sky islands are literally getting pushed off into space,” Dr. Overpeck said.
The Coronado National Forest, which includes Mount Lemmon and Mount Graham, lists 28 threatened or endangered species. Heat has greatly diminished the web of life that these creatures depend on, and they “have not evolved to tolerate these new conditions,” Forest Service officials wrote in a report on the declining health of the sky islands.
For people moving to the breezy pines to escape desert heat, the fires that swept through places like Summerhaven can be terrifying. Fire comes much earlier, and much later, in the season.
“You can tell the weather is changing,” said Michael Stanley, head of the water district here, which lost two-thirds of its customers after the fire. “The snow melts earlier. The fires are big. It makes life very interesting.”
On her regular hikes around Mount Lemmon, Ms. Fagan has noticed many changes. She recently saw a type of rattlesnake that usually lives in the lowlands, and — while hiking over snow — was surrounded by gnats.
“I’m standing on snow while swatting away gnats,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh my God, what are these guys doing out in the winter?’ ”
Last year, wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres in the United States — a record, surpassing the previous year. The Forest Service has become the fire service, devoting 42 percent of its budget to fire suppression last year — more than triple what it was in 1991.
The current drought is not nearly as bad as the one in the 1950s, or one in the mid-16th century, but it has caused a huge forest die-off.
The only difference this time around is higher temperatures, said David D. Breshears, co-author of a study published by the National Academy of Sciences on the subject.
The increased heat, Dr. Breshears believes, is the tipping point — stressing ecosystems in the Southwest so quickly that they are vulnerable to prolonged beetle infestation and catastrophic fires.
“The changes are so big, and happening so fast,” Dr. Breshears said. “We saw it happen all the way up the elevation grade and across the region.”
Dr. Swetnam, who said he used to be skeptical about some of the projections on Western landscape changes, came to a different conclusion after studying fires. Since the mid-1980s, about seven times more federal land has burned than in the previous time frame, he found, and the fire season has been extended by more than two months.
Dr. Swetnam laments the loss of areas unique to the Southwest.
“The sky islands have existed since the Pleistocene,” he said, “and now with these huge fires you stand to lose some unique species.”
All of which should be a caution to people moving to reaches of the desert prone to dramatic change.
“The Chamber of Commerce doesn’t like people like me saying things like this, but large parts of the arid Southwest are not going to be very nice places to live,” Dr. Swetnam said.
Here at Summerhaven, Ms. Fagan, who lost her home and gift shop to the fire, is staying put, even though she knows — firsthand — about the changes under way on the sky island where she built a business and raised her two boys. She made her last mortgage payment on her house a few months before the fire took it.
“We lost 90 percent of our community and two-thirds of our mountain to fire,” she said recent one warm morning. “There may be nothing left to burn. But I can’t ever leave this place. I love it too much.”
Friday, March 9, 2007
It's not easy being GREEN workshop
It’s not easy being GREEN workshop
A practical workshop for OUTDOOR EDUCATORS to make it EASIER to implement sustainable programming and building designs.
Date and Time: April 2, 2007 8:30-4:00
Location: Sustainable Living Centre at Kinark Outdoor Centre, Minden.
Cost: $40 (includes lunch)
Accommodation: $24 (includes a continental breakfast)
For more information or to register please contact:
Erin Derbyshire at erin_derbyshire@bwdsb.on.ca or (519) 534-2767
A practical workshop for OUTDOOR EDUCATORS to make it EASIER to implement sustainable programming and building designs.
Date and Time: April 2, 2007 8:30-4:00
Location: Sustainable Living Centre at Kinark Outdoor Centre, Minden.
Cost: $40 (includes lunch)
Accommodation: $24 (includes a continental breakfast)
For more information or to register please contact:
Erin Derbyshire at erin_derbyshire@bwdsb.on.ca or (519) 534-2767
Monday, March 5, 2007
Getting to the Bottom of the Good Life
John Cossham
IF he is not the greenest man in Britain, he must be a contender.
For the past 20 years John Cossham, of York, has made a point of finding a new way to reduce his environmental impact every year, starting long before it was generally accepted that the burning of fossil fuels was warming up the planet and threatening disaster.
It all started when he dropped out of university at the age of 18.
He became a vegetarian and then started growing his own vegetables. Gradually, he began turning most of his own waste into compost.
Now he says, he and his wife and two children put less global warming gas into the atmosphere in a year than the average household does in a month.
He has, of course, no car and no mobile phone and never switches on the central heating.
He rides a bicycle and once a week he uses that and a trailer to pick up 100 kilograms of damaged organic fruit and vegetables, from shops in York, which he takes home for his compost heaps. He recommends an "ethical supermarket" called Out Of This World, which has branches in Leeds and York.
He allows his wife and two boys, nine and seven, to use the lavatory in their semi-detached house on Hull Road, York but he prefers to use a commode and feed the contents into a dedicated composting bin, along with damp sawdust, as recommended in a book called Humanure, by Joe Jenkins. The sawdust comes from the logs he cuts for two stoves in the house.
When the mix is ready, it feeds cucumber vines, raspberry canes, apple trees and other plants on which the fruit grows well away from the ground – just a precaution, he says, because the composting process kills any bugs.
Tonight he will be revealed as one of the advisors who helped BBC reporter Justin Rowlatt cut his impact on the planet, and his household budget, over a year for Newsnight. Tonight's edition of Panorama, Go Green Or Else, will sum up Mr Rowlatt's experience and introduce Mr Cossham as his composting expert for his Ethical Man experiment.
Mr Rowlatt said: "He is, quite literally, the King of Compost. He filled me with enthusiasm for making my own, but I didn't actually try the Humanure process, because my wife drew a line."
Mr Rowlatt and his wife and three children saved more than £2,500 over a year of greening their lifestyle.
Mr Cossham has done a bit more than that.
When he is not working on his garden or his allotment, he works part-time as a children's entertainer called Professor Fiddlesticks. He also earns a little as a composting consultant and claims Family Income Supplement to take his income up to about £15,000 a yea. Their electricity bill, from renewable sources, is £200 a year.
Mr Compost's top tips
Build a compost heap in layers, with dry brown stuff on wet green stuff.
Tip urine in to help keep it active and to save energy and chemicals at sewage works.
Use it to grow pumpkins, which keep well through the winter and make nice soup and fried slices.
Cooked food attracts rats unless you treat it with a Japanese preparation called bokashi.
Last Updated: 05 March 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
