And again.

We're very slow learners, us civilized folks.  Here we are, with another mass shooter orgy; it will go on for weeks now.

If you have the stomach, take a look at my post from 2007; Screaming Headlines.  Nothing has changed, if anything, the media have had practice now and crank out the trash faster.

I maintain now exactly what I said then: THE reason these shootings happen is; the instant celebrity, the media orgasm frenzy, the "smug-shot" photograph the killer knows will be repeated on every front page and news outlet for weeks.

If we banned such coverage- the shootings will stop.  I guarantee you.  Did we have these events before the media potential was realized?  Sure.  Once every 20 years.  Crazy persons exist.  Now- it's twice a year, and accelerating; and so far, not one major media outlet (The New York Times?  Washington Post?) has taken the high road, and announced the will not make a celebrity of the murderer.  Not one.

So what can you do?  There is something.  Don't watch.

And- tell the medium involved you're doing it.  Here's what I do:

When the Smug Shot shows up on my screen; I immediately go to the bottom, where there's a "Contact Us!" link.  I contact them.  I tell them; having seen their murderous coverage, I have turned it off; and will not visit their website for the next 3 days.  Actually- yeah, they lose revenue, when you don't click.  You can make up a standard message, and just paste it in, repeatedly.  Here's mine:


"You have chosen to make a murderer a celebrity.  I choose to not read your lethal coverage.  The media frenzy is unquestionably THE CAUSE of these massacres.

"I am normally a serious reader of your news; but now I have closed your site; and will not return for 3 days; I will take my traffic elsewhere.

"Stop this mindless snuff porn you are pushing.  Look in the mirror.  You are complicit."


If that gives one media employee a sick stomach- it's worth it.  Copy that (or improve it) if you wish.

I'll check back in in 3 days; if their coverage is still "America's Favorite Home Murderers!"- I'm out of there, 3 more days.  Cover the event, cover the survivors?  Sure- a little; then respect their sorrow.  Publicize NOTHING about the killer; not their name, photo, story- make them become a non-person.

Tell them.  And put this post up on your Facebook site.

The media have shown they have the spines of jellyfish- we don't have to follow them or participate.

There is other stuff to do, and read, in the world.

Maybe if the survivors, and parents of the dead- made this their crusade, someone would listen?

The Parable of The Shed: Why 30 years is not forever.

One useful aspect to all of us forcibly attending Camp TEOTWAWKI now, is that many people truly are starting to be more mindful of their choices.   Think before you invest.  Look before you leap off your burning bridges.  That sort of thing.

Guidance in making long term decisions though, is hard to come by, and harder to judge.  Does this expert advisor actually have a clue, or ...  have I wound up with Alfred E. Neuman,  yet again?

Not long after Spouse and I built the Little House, and actually started living here, it became quite clear that we needed more space.  15' x 20'; including a wood stove, piano, and kitchen sink, and dining room table, just does not leave a lot of room for projects, like building a set of shelves.  No place left to walk, while that is under way.

Virtually all farm type operations include outbuildings; a barn, a shed- a workshop.  So it wasn't too difficult to decide that we did, indeed, need a multipurpose shed, not too far from the house.  We figured it should serve as a: work shop, bad-weather wood shed, seasonal storage space (eg. storm windows and skis in summer), materials storage (eg. boards, plywood), tool storage, empty mason jar storage.  You know.  A shed.

So quickly, you get to "where, exactly"; "how big", and "how".  "Where" was pretty limited; by the need to be close; "how big", it turns out, was partly determined by "how".

Standard construction around here would be a "pole barn" - treated wood poles, gravel or concrete floor, pre-fab roof trusses, and sheet metal sides and roof.  You just go the lumber yard, and order the stuff.  And there are loads of experienced construction teams who can zip it up for you in a couple days.

It was very easy to decide not to go that route- we had no money whatsoever.  Which meant- materials out of our 40 acres of oak/maple woods, and/or scrounged materials, and a "barn-raising" party for labor.

Then, you have to work out the details.

Something you pretty quickly find out, when you're living this kind of do-it-yourself life; the details are NOT "important".  The details are EVERYTHING.

Oddly, we teach our children the opposite, these days.  "Sure, teacher, I got the answer to the question wrong, but you can tell I understood it!" - will often get you a pity-pass in schools, even in universities.  But not in real life.  My father pounded this one in when he was an engineering prof, and I was in High School; and I got to listen to him gripe about his students.

  "But Professor, yes, I got the math wrong, but it's just a decimal point!  You can tell I totally understood the problem!"  "I don't give a good goddam if you 'understood' the problem!  Your goddam building FELL DOWN; and 370 people died!!  The only thing that matters is the right answer.  The F stands. "  And he would shake his head in amazement at their incomprehension.

So, I was well trained to do my homework regarding construction, and I'd adsorbed quite a bit of information via osmosis- and from helping my father re-build most of the houses we'd lived in (many).  Looking around at the old homesteads here, I found quite a few old chicken coops and corn cribs that were made with just white oak posts for their basic support; planted in the ground; and easily 50 years old.  Obviously, white oak can last a long time in our soils; the stated lifespan for chemically treated poles in direct soil contact is usually 30-40 years.

Doing more homework- the expected lifespan for white oak fenceposts around here is less; 20-30 years.  The difference is attributed mostly to the roof- poles under a roof should spend more of their life dry.

Most of my available poles are not exactly "white oak" - Quercus alba; but burr oak; Q. macrocarpa.  The textbooks say, though, that in this case, they're pretty much the same in regard to rot resistance.

So, using my own oak poles, we should be able to put up a shed that will last 30 years; no sweat.  We had a good supply of 12"-8" diameter red pine poles for rafters and plates; pine boards and 2/4's for other structure- and we helped a friend tear down a local railroad station for windows and siding.  We did buy metal for the roof.

When you're 30 years old- 30 years into the future looks indistinguishable from "forever", or "until we die."  And, guess what?  It isn't.  Here I am- 30 odd years later-

And sure as heck; the time has run out on some of my burr oak poles.

This is the SW corner pole.  And, as you can see- it's entirely rotted off- the bottom of the pole is now a good 6" above the ground.  Hm.

We just discovered it, absurdly enough.  The shed had gone through a phase where it got increasingly cluttered and useless, to the point where I only referred to it as "The Dread Shed"; and it got to the point where Middle Child and his wife decided to totally overhaul it, bless them.  Unburying the corner- where we already knew a woodchuck had chewed through the outer wall (and wrought havoc inside for months); we discovered the rotted off pole.  Oh, so that's why the windows have been breaking.

The shed is not falling down.  One of the advantages of using big logs for plates and rafters- they're enormously strong, and well secured on the other poles- most of which are not rotted off.  This corner is the wettest one.  But- the building is sagging, putting stress on everything.  

So now what?  Fix it?  Tear the shed down and rebuild?  I don't want to.

Dammit, I'm 60 years old now, busy, and I want the bloody shed to be in usable shape; I don't want to be building, or fixing.

Why didn't I build it to last in the first place?

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That turns out to be a complex, and highly significant question.  Lissen up; and maybe you can avoid my mistakes.

A)  I was young (30) and stupid.  I thought 30 years was forever.  It really really isn't.

B)  Everybody I asked thought 30 years was forever, too.  Or plenty long enough.

C)  The entire construction industry is built around the idea that structures should not last more than 50 years; even homes.  Then you should build a new one.  You want to benefit from the constant improvements in modern materials and design, don't you?  Well then.  They really like that- so if you read their text books, or go to them for advice- that's what they'll tell you.

and

D) Building structures with longer life-spans is quite a lot more expensive.  Like double.

E) Financial advice is always- that investments in durable structures are not sensible.  The reasoning there: if you put that money in the stock market instead, it would give you better returns (no laughing, now); and, they're quite sure you will move to a better, more expensive location later in life, as you become more successful; so you won't get the benefit of the more durable structure anyway; and whoever you sell your old place to will not pay you any premiums for the better buildings; people just don't.

F)  That's the way we build stuff in the States- always have.  Ever since Europeans arrived here- they've been sure they were going to move in the next 10-20 years, to someplace better. Why build for the long term?

See any holes in any of the logic here?

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I'm cogitating, pondering, and kneading all this stuff right now for a couple of specific reasons; I've got to figure out what to do about this shed; and- about future construction here.  We're in the process of building space for animals (guineas! ) - and you can check out a recent rhapsody on barns by Sharon, here.

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More in the next post.   Think about it!  And think about all the stone farmhouses in Europe... and how old they are...

Picking the right path...

Billy M left a comment on an earlier post asking for some basic opinions/advice- 

"The research I've done on heating for food has only resulted in seemingly balanced arguments from the two options I have at my hands. I have an old propane grill ($5 at a garage sale), as well as an electric stove that came with the place I am renting. The most convincing information I read said that propane actually releases a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere, since it is a natural gas, and that the methods of obtaining electricity have become efficient enough to surpass the carbon emissions of propane. However, other readings have said that propane may just be slightly more efficient than electricity, although the fact that it is a natural gas does in fact bring down the resourcefulness of the energy source.

I don't own any type of device that would allow me to burn wood...

So I guess what I'm wondering is if you have any facts/opinions straight out of how someone should go about heating food (if they did in fact have all three options -- wood, propane and electricity)

Billy, you're not alone in wanting to know "the right answer" for a question- I'd love to be able to give it.

What struck me immediately here though was the missing component- Billy, basically.

What kind of cooking do you do?  What kinds do you LIKE to do?  Are you allergic to woodsmoke?  Do you enjoy cutting, splitting, handling firewood, or are you really too busy?  How much "extra" time do you have- either to wrangle wood, or propane containers?-

Etc.  Hopefully you get the idea.  Who you are- what you need- and even what makes you happy- all these considerations are genuinely IMPORTANT to the answer.

You are important.  We need to remember that.

"Sustainable" practices WON'T be- if they make people miserable, and they won't stick to them.

  Which seems obvious, but quite a few enthusiasts will, in the excitement of the moment, adopt practices that they can't/won't - uh, sustain.  Because in their enthusiasm for the greater good, and the benefit to the planet, they forgot- WE are part of the planet we're trying to save here- and we matter, too.

The whole decision- what kind of fuel SHOULD I cook with - can get pretty crazy complex if you keep picking at it.

Propane is a fossil fuel- bad carbon.  It's mostly delivered on trucks- diesel fuel; more fossil carbon. Where does your local propane actually come from?  Natural gas is often moved in pipelines/pipes- pretty efficient, if available- but still fossil carbon.

Electricity is mostly coal (bad), and nuclear (BAD); with minor bits of natural gas (badish) wind (ok) and hydro (okish) - depending on where you live.  If you've got the option as some do to essentially purchase straight renewable electricity- that could make a difference in your decision.  

Wood is "current budget" carbon- good carbon; and it CAN be renewable, though like everything else wood can be done badly.  If you live in a city - it may not be legal- most available wood-burning stoves are much dirtier than they have to be, and wood smoke is pretty irritating for the neighbors.  Do you have a good supply?  The space to store it, the time?

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As an aside here- firewood is kind of dominating my life at the moment- because of the floods last fall, and global warming.  I cut and gather it myself; the floods made harvest much more difficult/much more time consuming- so I wasn't able to do my normal autumn wood cutting.

  And- the firewood we had cut from our own plantings; stacked, curing/drying - got soaked thoroughly by the 14" of rain in August/Sept- and is unburnable.  Given normalish weather- it wouldn't be nearly so wet, and we'd have had days of low-humidity sunny windy weather in Sept/Oct that would have dried it very well.   So in fact I'm cutting firewood every other day- and burning it fast, since it's cold this winter; lots of below 0 F nights.

There are a LOT of other things I need to be doing- but here I am.  The Little House has no backup heating system- it's firewood only (with a little passive solar boost- not useful at 1 AM).

Will rainy autumns happen more often?  Don't know.  This wet autumn, though, may be the thing that pushes me over the edge into adding a layer to my firewood process- a drying/storage shed.

There have been many years where a rainy week in November got my wood a little wet- making me aware that if all the winter stacks had been under a roof, I'd be burning less wood; doing less hauling- but- it's always been a fairly minor factor.  And every time that happened, I've done mental calculations- what would it cost me- money, time, and new habits- to design and build a wood drying shed?  A bunch.  How big would the benefits be?  Considerable.  Balance?  Kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other.

This year is the first where all the stacked wood is so wet it's nearly useless.  I can make it burn, but it gives little heat, and clogs the chimney fast.  The balance may have shifted- instead of being a minor improvement, the shed may now be a necessity, up-front costs or not.  

It strikes me that this kind of shift may be another major aspect to global warming- tiny local processes/technologies may no longer be reliable.  Pushing people over all kinds of edges.

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Maybe the best I can do for an answer to Billy M's very sensible question is to describe my own answers.  More than one answer, since I've changed, over time.

When I first moved to the Little House, a major factor in the calculation was money- we didn't have any.  We DID have wood- 40 acres of hardwoods.

With that in mind, I designed the Little House to use wood both for heating and cooking- all year.  Including our sultry hot continental summers.  (It's a huge advantage to be able to design a dwelling from the ground up- with all the integration factors being considered.  I still missed a few, of course.)

The House can essentially be tweaked to function like a big chimney/cooling tower in the summer - the downstairs has big windows in all 4 walls; the upstairs/loft has one huge window (floor to ceiling) on the north, and a normalish window on the south.    All the windows but the small one upstairs open on a hinge- so unlike a sash-window, where the actual opening can only equal half the window area at best, the hinged windows when open make holes equal to the entire window area- huge, in our case.

And- there's a BIG opening between upstairs and down- so if all the windows are open, any heat from the stove is quite free to rapidly move up, and out.

It works fine, too- we did all our cooking with wood for probably the first 5 years or so.  

Then several things changed- we had children (available time and energy vanished), we got involved in other projects that were important too; and we got a little money coming in.

  Suddenly it became more sensible to use propane for cooking in the summer.

And that's what we still do.  The stove that heats the house is a modern Canadian stove designed for both heating and cooking.  If we need heat- it's on, and we cook with wood.  If we don't need heat- we cook with propane.  The time required for the propane is a small fraction of time needed to cook with wood in the summer- and no question, July and August are a little more comfy if we don't have to crank up the woodstove to make a cup of coffee, or soup for lunch.

One departure from that practice can be canning- if we're canning tomatoes or whatnot- we will usually use wood- canning takes a lot of heat; and ergo a lot of money.

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One more aside- cooking in China.  As part of my work, I've hiked well up into the mountains in a number of places there, out into nearly untouched countryside.  These are ancient communities, long in "balance" with their environment.  Chances are, this clan has lived here since these people were Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens.  That long.  

They long ago hit the limits of their environment; and adapted, in many ways.  Only the rich can afford to burn wood- there's just not enough of it, and mostly it's needed for other uses, tools, furniture, housing.  They burn- rice straw, and pine needles.  Under a wok.  That's exactly what a wok is for- cooking over a very quick, hot fire.  Their whole cuisine is adapted in that direction- because of the primordial shortage of fuel.

I'll bet you could cook entirely on - junk mail.  If you had the will, and someplace outdoors for the smoke to go away.  :-)  You'd need something like a ventilated 5 or 10 gallon steel can for the fire to burn it, and the wok to sit on- (I'm kidding- mostly... probably too many toxins in junk mail smoke to be good cooking fuel...)

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So.  Answers to questions like this are going to be highly variable, I think.  Forever.  Because one of the most important components in the decision making algorithm is always going to be personal.  How does this fit your life, your finances, your region?

If it makes you miserable- in the long run, it's not a good answer -

The good answers should leave you - solvent, not overworked, and satisfied.

Green light- Slow Down.

Gimme the answers quick!

If you've been to a sustainable stuff meeting, that's kind of the underlying mood. Man, we've gotta do something NOW, or we're all going to die!

I understand the urge, and I even think it's mostly a positive thing. But it can far too easily lead us into New! Improved! disasters. This is true both for society, and for all of our own small personal choices. Sell the car! Sounds brave, bold, and fierce- but I'd think a long time, and maybe just park it for 2 months without selling, before actually doing it. It could be catastrophic for you, personally. We still have to live in this world. This one.

A sad, and disastrous, example we're struggling with right now: Ethanol - made from - food.

From the BBC, for a sort of outside opinion:

Biofuels Make Food Expensive

I realize I may immediately antagonize a lot of green folk here- but making fuel from food was always a bad idea. A few of us actually said so, right out loud. Nobody wanted to hear it.

At this point, even the people running huge distilleries and cranking out the subsidized ethanol profits admit, as quietly as possible, that ethanol from corn will not ever make any significant difference in our fuel supply.

Why do they admit it? Somebody finally did the math. How complicated was the math? No calculus required- if you ever got a B on a math exam in the 6th grade, you could have done these calculations. X amount of corn can be made into Y amount of ethanol; with Z amount of land available. If all the corn was used for fuel ethanol, it might supply a small fraction of US automotive fuel use. Leaving nothing for the chickens, pigs, etc - and the farmers who raise them. (Basic practice in this blog- I do not have time to dig out all the references for you- if you doubt something I say here, google it immediately- and don't bug me if I'm off by a couple of degrees.)

For years the few people doing arithmetic on corn were focused on "can you get more energy out of ethanol than you put in?" I'm not getting into that here- they're still fighting about it, and clearly the answer is "not much, if any".

The point here: that was not the only question we should have been asking, if we wanted to make sensible choices.

Now, the "push" for ethanol has gotten so far ahead of common sense that the folks in Iowa may have to IMPORT corn - NEXT YEAR- if they want to feed any pigs and chickens. (Not going to get into meat questions right now.)

The real farmers, as usual, are caught in a trap. They've been losing money growing corn for decades. Really. Little by little, the loans with the bank for production have gotten bigger and bigger. They can look prosperous- but usually, the bank owns most of the farm by now. The scoffers among you are saying "oh bosh, if it were that bad, there would be bankrupt farmers all over the place." There are. And suicides, and broken families. Look it up.

So the survivors are quietly desperate to make a few pennies, some day, so they can actually dream about getting out of debt. Ethanol looks like salvation. So they tend to get quite huffy if you say "well, but... wait a minute here..." Then you get painted as a farmer hater. And they quit listening. Or thinking. Very human.

But in reality, we're now spending a lot of resources and effort to develop what we know is ultimately a dead end. The apologists now say "Yes, but it's a useful bridge to better sustainability!"

Yes, but. Wouldn't it have been better to pick a non-dead end technology, and put all those resources into that direction? I think so. And the argument "we've got to take action now!" is one that often shuts down discussion.

Greenies are human too- and quite capable of hearing only what we want to. "Hey, I've got this figured out, quit bugging me about it!"

I am a scientist by training. One of the basic tenets is - never quit doubting; never quit thinking; never quit looking; even when you're 95% sure you know an answer.

Are you struggling with questions about how to live green? Should I give up my toilet paper? Should I sell my car?

My very first advice - take a deep breath, and slow down. You don't have to make these decisions instantly - in fact it will probably be far better if you don't.

Think about it. Close your eyes, and see yourself 5 years from now- doing or not doing. If you think, "maybe I could..." then- give it a try. Often you can get family members to go along if you do set a time limit on the experiment, like the Yw/oTP folks are doing. "Look, we'll try this for 2 months and then talk about it, ok?"

All the pieces have to fit together. And it just takes time to get there.