"If only life WEREN'T that simple...!" Part 1: Bringing home the Bacon...

 (Note: This is part one of a multi-part series that evolves the more I learn just how simple life can be, and strive to share these simple truths with anybody who will listen. Alas, that seems to be the most complicated part!)

As a kid growing up in the turbulent late 1960s  and early 1970s, with the war raging, polluted air and water everywhere and most conspicuosly right in our own back yards, the population bomb ticking, an oil crisis crippling the economy, inflation high, the possibility of nuclear war with Russia and ecological collapse looming, the "what me worry" attitude of MAD magazine's Alfred E. Neumann seemed appropriately and particularly mad.  There was everything to worry about and very little to celebrate.  Yes, I grew up worried.

But today, at 50 years of age, on a planet of 7 billion (double what it was when I was a kid!), with true peak oil on the horizon and climate change very much in evidence, the only things I'm worried about (and they are big anxieties) are nuclear proliferation and species extinction.  The rest all seems so very... simple.

And even those two big issues seem solvable.

What changed for me in the intervening decades is that I went out into the world with worries about specific problems and to my astonishment found specific and very simple solutions.

So let me be specific, and maybe I can help you stop worrying too... !

We will try to break up our simple story into the usual existential categories: Food, Shelter, Water, Energy and Waste Management, although not necessarily in that order since there is a lot of overlap.
Let's start with...

1. FOOD

"Bringing Home the Bacon" or "How simple it is to grow your own food...

Remember how we were all going to starve to death because agriculture is failing everywhere -- topsoil and nutrient loss, desertification,  new plant diseases that would make the potato famine blight blush?

Well agriculture is indeed failing but NO we won't starve.

At least I won't, and you don't have to either.

Turns out we don't need agriculture.

 I know, I know...

Look... let it GO.

It was a bad experiment and it took us 10,000 years to realize it. It didn't make us any healthier, in fact Spencer Wells documents the toll it took on our bodies in his excellent book "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization".

Fact is agriculture made a few people very very very very very very very rich for thousands of years and provided nutritionally iffy (and later downright crappy) starches and sugars that were easy to transport and store (even if it did require the creation of armies and city-states and a host of political problems) and were cheap enough, once economies of scale kicked in, to feed entire armies and hordes of slaves (so you could reserve the protein and fat for the rich) keeping them just high enough on the calories to go and die for you and build your pyramids.

And the great thing about agriculture was that the species it relied on -- wheat, corn, rice, barley, oats, sorgum, sugar cane -- were weedy grasses that seemed to follow people around whenever we screwed up and scorched the earth, when we foolishly cut down our forests, or when climate changes expanded the deserts.  Grasslands are generally successional from desert to forest and in certain conditions they will persist and evolve marvelously complex ecosystems with deep deep perennial root systems and associated microbes that can support vast assemblages of animals.  Natural history has it that we evolved our marvelous ability to hunt in huge groups and develop sophisticated weapons in a savannah landscape peppered with patches of forest and swampland.  But we didn't eat that much grass -- we left that to our prey species.

Whenever there was a fire, however, or in riparian areas where flooding seasonally wiped out larger vegetation, certain annual grasses would sprout up in the aftermath of disaster and start to reclaim the land for more complex ecosystem dynamics to come.  And at some point in our cultural evolution we decided to rely on these "disturbance ecology" species and use them to develop a system of profit and haves and have nots. The rest, as they say, is history.

But we don't NEED grain agriculture or sugar -- just as any Eskimo (I mean "Inuit", but since Eskimo means "eaters of raw meat"  it is appropriately used here).   And heck, you couldn't make your own daily bread without a lot of help, certainly not in a disaster, so put that electric bread maker away and tune in to a different reality...


Of Meat and Men

Turns out you CAN make your own meat.

Yeah yeah, every backyard gardener thinks it is easier to grow plants.  After all, they don't run around and poop on things, and they keep their metaphorical mouths shut, not a peep out of them when they are hungry and they don't whine (or scream!) when you chop them up to make salads.  Sure, they'll signal their displeasure with a wilted or yellowed leaf from time to time, and they are prone to certain rots and insect infestations, but on the whole they seem very tractable.

The problem is, unless you are going to grow soybean or Mayan breadnut trees, they aren't going to yield much protein, and often they are deficient in one or another essential amino acid,  so to live "high on the hog" so to speak, you are going to have to grow alot of different kinds of plants and strive for "protein complementarity", adding foods together to get all the right amino acids. 

I was a vegetarian for a number of years, and a vegan for an additional 7 months and I enjoyed my shopping excursions (I felt like a hunter gatherer) and cooking experiments.  But it was my visit to the Bedouins of Syria that turned me back into a facultative omnivore with carnivorous leanings.

Facultative means here that what I eat depends on my environment; I'm still perfectly happy to eat vegan or vegetarian in places where there is botanical abundance.  But when the sh!t hits the fan and starvation threatens I'm not convinced I have the skill or will have the land, or water, or nutrients or resources or time necessary to grow my own plant food and keep my family alive and healthy.  The bedouins argued exactly that with me, and they should know since they had to adapt to the desert wastelands of Arabia when the first civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mauritania, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and elsewhere collapsed, taking with them vast areas of once productive agricultural land, turned to desert through bad irrigation practices, soil exhaustion and overgrazing.

The bedouins I visited in Syria said, "our sheep and goats and camels travel with us on their own legs and require very little water. They eat scrub vegetation that is thorny and unpalateable to human beings and turn it into life giving Haleeb (milk) from which we make our laban (yoghurt) and jibn (cheese) which are fermented and need no refrigeration. They give us fresh meat that also needs no cooler because they carry it with them on their bodies until it is time for sacrifice.  We have this relationship, the animals and us. We shelter and protect them, and  they also give us life... 
"The farm on which you are staying on the other hand... it destroys the land.  It uses up the precious sweet water that is beneath the desert and sends it to the city in the form of bread or fruits and vegetables or tobacco.  It leaves behind MilH (salt) that kills the land so even the desert plants can not grow. And it attracts pests and diseases that they then fight with chemicals that poison our water and land and food. So why do you think being a vegetarian is more friendly to our environment?"

I had no good answer within that context and it was useless to argue about factory farming versus small scale horticulture, and about organic farms versus ones that use artificial fertlizers and herbicides and pesticides, and about grass fed beef versus cattle fed soybean grown at the expense of a Bolivian rainforest.  These were Bedouins, and their reality was right in front of us -- a parched landscape that had lost its fertility thousands of years ago because of human desire to "make the desert bloom" for a profit.

Their point to me hit me like thunder when I left their wedding party after eating the most delicious fresh sheep cheese and returned to the farm I was staying on, watching the fellahin (peasants) toiling in the hot sun, weeding, ploughing, spraying...

Keeping animals was easier, particularly when you could rely on them to feed themselves...

As this is all about simplicity for us moderns though, my return to civilization made me rethink that. How would I feed my animals in the city, with no grazing land at all, whether pasture or scrub vegetation?  So perhaps growing meat wasn't so simple afterall.

Okay, I explored the other "micro-meat" options.  At home in Los Angeles I had started trying to grow my own soybeans (I always wondered why vegetarians seemed content to grow corn and tomatoes and herbs but depended on the supermarket for their primary protein!) and things were going well until some garden snails destroyed my whole crop.  Then it dawned on me that I could eat the snails, and when a little research showed that, in fact, these particular snails were the same species that the French call the delicacy "escargot" I had quite a great feast (the snails that everybody puts poison on their lawns to kill in California actually are escapees from a failed attempt to start a supply chain for French restaurants!).

I also bred and ate crickets and grasshoppers (the grasshoppers you can actually get in Oaxacan restaurants in Los Angeles like the wonderful Guelaguetza Restaurant, fried with cheese, called "Chapulines con Queso").  And I ate lots of beetle larvae, which every science teacher knows how to breed in a tupperware container with some bran and apple cores. We call them mealworms and many a school child has tried them on "insect eating day" at the Natural History Museum.

But my attempts to convince people about "man eating bug" (with excursions into silkworm eating, and ant salads, and waterbugs and live termites and  even live jumiles (stinkbugs in the Hemiptera) in an indigenous  Cuernavacan marketplace) didn't win me a lot of converts, particularly among prospective mates. I even lost one girlfriend after simply mentioning what I had tried on my last trip to Mexico.

So while I'm quite convinced we can grow insects and snails, and even guinea pigs, which they eat in Peru, at home in the city, it doesn't do much for the majority of us who are expected to "bring home the bacon" so we can live "high on the hog". 

So to the question "where's the beef" I turn my attention to "there's always the pig".
Real pigs, not guinea pigs.  And yes... in the city.

Pigs in the forest

When I was staying with a Dyak tribal group in Borneo in the mid-80s, deep in the primary rain forest, we went hunting and gathering for plant food (they weren't agriculturalists) but not for animal protein.  The Dyaks, like the Batak I visited in northern Sumatra, ate "Babi Hutan", otherwise known as "forest pig".  Romantic legends suggest that all forest people run around with spears and bows and arrows wondering where their next meal is going to come from.  There is no denying the sport of hunting (I recently went pheasant hunting with my Uncle Mark in Wisconsin) but human beings rarely put their lives at the mercy of the unknown when they can help it.  My former professor Susanna B. Hecht, who lived among native peoples in Amazonia, used to delight her UCLA classes by saying "it isn't that they didn't know about animal husbandry, of course they knew how to keep animals.  It's just that they were smarter than that.  Instead of going through the hassle of trying to corral an animal in a fenced enclosure and then taking up the burden of going and getting food for the animals and risking their animals developing diseases because of the unhealthy living conditions that an animal pen creates, they used their genius to influence the plants that grew around their village so that the animals were always around and were well fed.  This botanical sophistication and knowledge of animal behavior made it simple to just go out and silently, with a blow pipe, harvest meat on the hoof.  They reasoned "animals have legs - they should go and forage for their own food. Why should we waste our time feeding the animals.  But if we grow what they like within easy walking distance, they won't go away, they'll stay near our homes".

It was a kind of quasi-domestication that few post-Roman Empire Europeans understood (the Celts and Druids would have understood it very very well as they did the same thing!).

In the case of the Dyak group I stayed with in the forest, they took it one step further -- they had an open door policy for the pigs, building their homes on stilts with the top floor being kitchen and bathroom and the bottom floor being a pig paradise.  It had gathered brush strewn about in one area where the pigs could safely bear and raise their piglets and a wallow beneath the upstairs toilet hole.  To ensure that the pigs would come around they would simply take a... er... go to the bathroom.

Yes, pigs are sh!t eating creatures, as are dogs.  We got first hand experience with the dogs when we were staying with friends in California who had two massive setters and our toddler did his business in the potty.   It was our son's habit to play with his LEGO Star Wars figures while on the toilet and the lightsaber and helmet of one of them fell in the potty with the poop.  He called out to us saying, "I dropped some LEGO in my poop!" and this attracted the attention of the dogs.   One of the them  came in and tried to lick the poop in the potty right from between our son's legs, causing him to scream out. We shooed the dog away and brought our son to the bathtub to wash and he said, "but who is going to save my LEGO?". At that moment the other dog came bounding past us and attacked the potty, devouring our son's bowel movement.  When we were finally able to push the dog away all that was left was an empty potty with spotlessly clean LEGO pieces.

That pigs and dogs gladly eat human feces is something that the Dyaks turned to their advantage, a rather sophisticated form of recycling that Westerner's may not be able to stomach, but which could save our lives in a disaster (if only my Irish ancestors had remembered these truths instead of being seduced into eating the low-value Potato starch and relying on the tuber agriculture introduced to Ireland by the British via the French we would have never suffered the losses of the great famine).

In Sumatra we visited restaurants built over ponds with birdcages hanging over the pond.  The birds weren't just for decoration, though they were lovely and gave the dinner a marvelous symphony (or cacophany, depending on your point of view).  The bird cages were open on the bottom so their poop would fall in the pond where the carp and other fish that they served in the restaurant lived.  Inspection of the human toilets showed that they also discharged into the fish pond from which we were eating.  Yet to survive and survive well, one doesn't have to feed one's future  food on the wastes of one's previous' meal, at least not a meal that passed through your own body.

Of course pigs don't NEED to be fed on other's body wastes; this is just an extreme example that people need to know in order to get through hard times.  Pigs are happy rooting around in the forest for truffles and grubs and whatnot, and the Batak man I travelled on a bus with through Sumatra and dined with at a roadside piggery was proud to say that hunting pig was as easy as it was fun; a day of sport followed by many days of feasting. Our conversation  started  on a bus filled with farmers and their chickens when he, with his tatoos and distended ear filled with heavy earrings and chains of pig tusks over his bare chest, poked me in mine and asked, "Christian or Muslim?".  Not sure what was the politically intelligent thing to  say, I naturally went with my expansive truth:
"I am raised a Christian but I also have Christian and  Muslim relatives, even Jewish ones... we are a very mixed family you see..."  I thought I'd covered all my bases there and at most we could have an argument about obligations to love one's family regardless of creed or religion...
He smiled to reveal sharpened teeth. 
"So you eat babi hutan?"
"I have, yes, I have eaten forest pig".
He slapped me on the shoulder in delight.
"I am Christian.  I eat Babi Hutan.  This is why I am Christian.  When the missionaries from your religions came to speak to our Batak people some wanted us to become Muslims like the farmers down there... (he gestured to the valley below as the bus strained to climb up the narrow winding road toward the still forested slopes that I was travelling to in order to visit orangutan researchers)... some wanted us to become Christians.  When we found out that Muslims won't eat Babi Hutan, but Christians will, naturally we all decided to become Christians.  Think about it -- what kind of a God would forbid a man to eat Babi Hutan?  What kind of a God would force a family to work all day in the fields in the hot sun when there is food so delicious and easy to get in cool and shady forest? This is why I am Christian. Come, we will eat Babi Hutan together at the next rest stop. You will be my guest!"

In a forest here in Germany we have gone wild pig and deer hunting with our friends, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, whose family castle sits atop hectares of land that look much as they might have in Medieval times when many Germans still lived from the bounty the forest could offer.  Huge oak trees drop prodigious amounts of acorns on the forest floor, and the deer and pigs turn these bitter but abundant seeds into great pork and venison which we enjoyed by the roaring fire in the castle at night.  At a  trip to a restaurant near the Baldeneye Sea in our own city of Essen, a restaurant surrounded by big oaks, I collected enough acorns in 15 minutes from the porch to make my own meal that weekend at home (I leached the tannins out through boiling). But while I was preparing the acorns to make them edible, reflecting on the time and energy I was investing and knowing they wouldn't be a complete protein by themselves, I thought, "what if I had a pig to eat these acorns, wouldn't that be marvelous".

Of course Germans are big pig eaters and are proud of their pork industry.  We've visited pig farms in the region and spoken with the farmers. The question was, "how simple would it be to do in the city?"

Pigs in the City

It was when working on my Ph.D. with the Zabaleen, Egypt's Coptic Christian Trash Recyclers, that I encountered the simplicity of urban survival in the face of poverty thanks to a symbiotic relationship with pigs.   The Zabaleen have been migrating to the urban slums and informal areas  of Cairo for nearly a century now, as productive land-holdings in the countryside are taken away from them, or become too expensive due to land speculation, or become mechanized, displacing labor, or fail because of ecological exhaustion, rising salinity  and desertification.

When they move to the city and build their dwellings, they tend to arrive with all of their animals, chief among them, their pigs.  In the years before the tragic "swine flu slaughter" when the Egyptian army eradicated most of this living protein treasure, mistakenly equating the name "swine flu" with Egyptian pigs (by the time the strain of virus we called "swine flu" started traveling from the Americas to other parts of the world it had evolved into  a  human disease that had little to do with swine, whatever its zoonotic origin may have been), my friends and colleagues there were famous for their succulent pork, fed completely on the city's organic garbage.  The pigs in many of my friends' apartment buildings generally lived on the ground floor but often had free range of the house; getting to the roof sometimes to work on our solar hot water systems we had to jump over a sow and her piglets who liked sleeping on a particular part of the staircase.
As a graduate student living on very little money  in the nearby Islamic slum of Darb Al Ahmar, it was my great pleasure to go into the Coptic informal area and get some relief from my usual diet of 'ful' (fava beans) and 'ta3miya' (falafel, also made from beans) and 'kushari' (a noodle dish with lentils and tomato sauce).  I craved protein and my Zabaleen friends always had it to offer.

These were people living on a dollar or two a day and they were inviting ME over for huge feasts of high quality roast pork, grown in their own homes. There was never any concern about "running low on food"; the delicious and savory meat, so generously offered, was often accompanied by fresh eggs, chicken, duck and goat meat and sheep cheese, all from the roof.  Moussa's family even had a cow and a calf living in the upstairs bedroom, and this was familiar to me because my former student Alvaro in South Central L.A. had a bull in his backyard in the 1990s.

The thing is that it is possible to produce plenty of food in the city.  The fact that we see this happening in the poorest parts of the world, and that people in such "slums" and "ghettoes" are actually often eating a better diet than the rest of us who are addicted to the "army and slave rations" that rural agriculture provides in the form of breads and cereals and tuber starches and sugars should give the rest of us great hope.

What could be simpler than keeping meat on the hoof in the home that is quite happy living on our kitchen and toilet wastes?  Your cultural prejudices may make you find such a thing currently abhorrent, but with all due respect to my observant  Jewish and Muslim friends, we may all want to re-visit and reform our attitudes toward what we consider 'kosher' or 'halal' or clean or un-clean in a world where population is set to reach 9 billion or more within our lifetimes and the carrying capacity of our environment is strained to the max.  If modern medicine declares animal protein fed on waste material to be 'clean', i.e. pathogen free, then our religious and cultural attitudes need to be reformed to reflect this new understanding (remember that the founders of our religions didn't have any knowledge of the microbial world or tiny parasites  and had to use blunt instruments of prohibition to try and keep us safe).

But the essential point here is that whether we are talking about pigs or fish or many other animals, there is a great circle of life and rather than just singing Karaoke versions of Elton John songs from the Lion King and thinking we are doing something to "save the planet" we might instead be adopting some of the simple practices of the people for whom necessity really is the mother of invention.

But what about us vegetarians?

Now there will be those who will read about the simplicity of providing animal protein to a growing population who will take offense saying, "hold on there, you say it is simple, and I'll agree, pigs and carp you might get to grow in the city eating nothing but materials we now consider waste. And it may be "healthy". But there is nothing simple about slaughtering another living being, particularly one as intelligent and compassionate as a pig.  You face considerable moral complexities when you take the knife or the gun to a sentient being, and it is proven that pigs are as intelligent as dogs if not more so."

I will concede that point.  Killing isn't simple for me, and I've been lucky that my Dyak and Coptic friends did the slaughter and butchering for me.  One time in Central Borneo I was treated to a meal of dog and pork at a roadside Dyak restaurant and I had to choose my own dog and my own pig for the meal.  The dog choice was surprisingly easy, considering that the dogs on offer were mangy ugly mutts, all snarly and reminiscent of Stephen King's Cujo or the zombie dogs in Resident Evil.  But the pigs were so cute and loving, and they all wanted to nuzzle my hand with their muzzles, grunting satisfaction that they had a visitor... I literally couldn't bring myself to point to any single individual and imperiously signal their slaughter. I had to have my Indonesian colleague, do it, he being a  Muslim who didn't care for pork anyway and certainly wouldn't eat dog  (though he was indulgent with me experiencing his country's different cultures).

And anyway, when I was training to be a  clown in Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus |
Clown College, the famous Lou Jacob's son was a clown who kept pet pigs and trained them for his act and prevailed upon me at the age of 13 that pigs not only are extremely bright but made marvelous home companions (he lived with his in his circus trailer).  Years later the actor Luke Perry, who kept small pigs as pets, brought one from his litter to a birthday party my band was playing at for our friend John G. Avildsen (who directed Rocky and Karate Kid and Lean on Me and Power of One among other great films).  We talked pig for a while, extolling their virtues and he offered to give me one, but I was traveling too much at the time to have pets and anyway didn't know at the time how easy they can be to feed. And no, I don't think I could have killed Luke Perry's ever so soft and cute pet pig.

So  my point is, yes, being a carnivore does carry with it its own complications (though most vegetarians I know drawn the line with fish, some even  considering them to not be categorically "animals").  Still, fish and clams and mussels and 'shellfish' can all be grown on "garbage" (i.e. recycled nutrients) and when it comes to pigs, there is no reason why we can't do as the Tuscans of Italy do, and create a swine dairy industry to get our protein without butchery. Ah, blessed are the cheesemakers!

Pig cheese?

Absolutely! Imagine if you could grow your milk and cheese at home with the only inputs being your kitchen and market scraps and, for those even more adventurous, toilet wastes too? Think its impossible? Then you've never tried  "Porcorino: The Rarest Tuscan Cheese".

Turns out the Italians have been making cheese from pig milk for millenia.  It is a delicacy with a flavor somewhere "between brie and peccorino".  In fact let me quote from the website whose link I have provided above because it is so poetic:

"In a town nestled in a thickly wooded valley on a volcanic slope in southern Tuscany you may be able to discover what is certainly Italy’s most closely-guarded culinary secret, a rare cheese made from pig’s milk called Porcorino (Porcherino in the local dialect).

Italy’s most closely-guarded culinary secret, a rare cheese made from pig’s milk called Porcorino (Porcherino in the local dialect). Shaped into firm, exquisite rounds only an inch or two in diameter, produced in small quantities almost exclusively for local use for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, some food scholars have speculated that one of the objects on the table in Da Vinci’s famous fresco of The Last Supper in Milan, is in fact a round of this tasty food...

It has a consistency both firm and runny, somewhere between brie and peccorino. The flavor clobbers the hard palate with a sensation nearly indescribable in its complexity and overwhelming richness: a product of the swine to make one swoon. Imagine a milky tiramisu that melts and vibrates before exploding with overtones of porcini mushroom and a back taste hint of chestnuts (perhaps a product of the pig’s diet). Imagine damp woods, crisp autumn leaves crunching under foot, a dog barking in the distance. Imagine wild strawberries and rotting logs.

Challenges to Porcorino production are great. Although pig milk, at eight and a half percent butterfat, is exceptionally rich and the proportions of components like water and lactose are similar to those of cow milk, pigs produce on average only thirteen pounds of milk a day, far below that of a cow (at 65 pounds). For now production is limited to a few thousand liters every year from a small herd of half-wild swine.

Milking a pig is extraordinarily difficult, to say the least. For one thing, they have fourteen teats as opposed to a cow’s four, and when stimulated to produce oxytocin, they eject the milk for only fifteen seconds at a time (the ejection time of a cow, by contrast, is well over ten minutes). Hence it requires enormous dexterity, skill and speed. Only two or three members of one family carry on the tradition. They are now quite elderly and the young are moving away to Rome or Florence. It isn’t at all certain the tradition can be maintained."

Okay, so milking a pig turns out to  not so simple, but not unfeasible and maybe easier for some than killing a pig.  The point is that it can be done and has been done and is being done and is anyway a whole lot simpler than dying of starvation.  And I say this as a Culhane whose family had to flee Ireland, despite having no dearth of kitchen and toilet waste and market wastes, because some potatoes went bad and their neighbors were literally turning to eating grass -- not wheat and corn and rice and sugar cane -- but lawn grass and weeds.

Keeping pigs for whatever reason, is a whole lot simpler than starving, or even worrying about "where the next meal is going to come from".

And the marvelous pig's ability and willingness to live on the waste products we produce makes them our salvation if we want to maintain our dense civilizations and feed the hunger for animal protein that urbanization seems to bring with it.

And that leads to the second and perhaps more important revelation of how simple life is once we realize how valuable garbage is:  where the energy is going to come from to get us past peak oil so that we can cook our pork?

 The anthropologist Marvin Harris pointed out in his 1975 classic "Cows,Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddle of Culture"  that the origin of the Judeo-Islamic prohibition against pork probably derives from a need to protect people from the Trichinosis parasite  that is known to infect pork and wild game.  Proper cooking was the answer to that, but proper cooking requires reliable energy.

So in our next meditation on how simple life is, we turn to how simple it is to get that reliable energy, not only for cooking but to cool and heat our homes, provide light  and generate electricity.
The answer of course, turns out to be the same as for raising pigs in the city.  It lies in our kitchen and toilet wastes.  I wish things could be more complicated, but they aren't.  Life simply IS that simple.

But that, we will explain in greater detail, in the next essay.  The following photos give you an idea of what I'm going to explore.   For now, give up your worries of starvation and befriend a pig farmer or think of getting a pet pig.  It might just save your life, with very little effort indeed!

German bacon being cooked on our biogas stove. In this case, while civilization is intact and legal restrictions keep us from keeping pigs, we buy our meat from the local market; Germany is famous for its pork industry which it claims is one of the "greenest" in the world.  But our cooking gas comes from what we would otherwise feed pigs if we had them: our kitchen scraps, put into an "Insinkerator" food waste grinder which was originally called "the Mechanical Hog" when it was invented in 1927 at a time when American families were giving up the pigs that used to be an essential part of every household.  To replace the food grinding services that hogs provided, Insinkerator created a machine to make garbage disposal as convenient as it was when there were pigs to feed at home. Today we use that machine to turn our garbage into feedstock for our biodigestor which is like a "mechanical hog"  that produces our cooking gas.

Our two "plastic pigs" on our porch in the rain. Come rain or shine they always produce reliable methane for our kitchen. The rainwater barrel inverted in teh center between the greenhouse and the black tank, above the solar collector, is filled with biogas at the start of the meal.

 A little mozarella with the bacon gives it extra flavor; eventually we would like to try Porcorino Pig Cheese from Tuscany which we will try to get next time we drive down to Italy.

Tomatoes and herbs we do grow on our porch, taking advantage of our biogas fertilizer -- the effluent that remains after we turn our kitchen wastes into methane.

Finally we add eggs to the mix. We dont' grow our own eggs at home yet, but our Zabaleen friends in Cairo grow both pork and eggs in the city so we know we can do this when we need to.

 

After the meal we've only used up a small fraction of the stored cooking gas so we have plenty for dinner and for tomorrow. The nice thing is that biogas production is a perpetual process so we will never run out of fuel. That is the easy part.

The Solar CITIES IBC Tank Biodigestor just got simpler!

 Actually it has been this simple for over a year now, but we just got around to learning enough Blender to make these 3D images.

 Gosh it's easy to build a family scale biodigestor!  All you have to do is buy a used IBC Tote Tank (those 1000 liter/275 gallon practically indestructible HDPE tanks that they ship liquids in all over the world; on Craig's List they can be had for about $125!) and put a 2 inch pipe (usually in two sections) running from about a half meter above the tank to about 15 cm above the bottom for introducing the feedstock (ground up food waste in our case),  a 1 inch pipe running from the middle of the tank to a valved elbow for letting out the effluent/fertilizer, and a 1/2 tank fitting with elbowed valve to let out the biogas that results.

You don't have to alter the tank in any way; all the inputs and outputs can be made through the cover.

You may find it a bit difficult to find the bulkhead tank fittings/adaptors in some hardware shops, but check out aquarium, pool and boating shops, or look online and you should find them.

To get the gas and the effluent out you can use garden hoses or clear plastic tubing. No big deal there; this stuff isn't under much pressure at all.

The gas comes right out the top so you don't need any pipe there.  The fertilizer comes out of the "dead zone" in the middle of the tank (fats and oils, which contain lots of energy, tend to float, and proteins and carbs tend to sink, so the top and bottom of the tank are biologically acive) so you want that one inch pipe going down to the halfway mark.  The feeding pipe should reach to about 10 or 15 cm above the bottom of the tank to leave room for the rocks and active sludge without the food getting blocked on its way down and into the tank.

But that's about it.  You'll want the feeding pipe up top to be about a half meter above the tank so that enough of a head can build up to force the gas out and so that you can pour all your food waste in without overflowing since the effluent outlet is half the diameter of the input pipe.  As you add the ground up food waste slurry (we use an Insinkerator brand garbage disposal to make it) fertilizer fluid will be coming out of the 1 inch pipe, but it will come out slower. You could use a larger pipe, but sometimes they don't fit the lid easily.  We've found with the proper feeding regime the dimensions depicted here work fine!

 Make sure the lid has an intact rubber O-ring gasket; one of ours didn't and while it eventually worked out using silcone, you can experience troublesome leaks. Some used IBC vendors sell you lids without the rubber ring inside; check and see just to be sure!
Then just fill your tank with about 50 to 100 kg animal manure, top off with water, screw the lid on and wait for a couple of weeks. When you get your first flammable gas you are ready to start feeding ground up food scraps -- about a 25 liter buckt of mixed food waste and water each day!

What is Solar CITIES and how can you help?

About us: 

 Founded in 2006,  Solar Cities is a nonprofit organization that works on capacity building in developing countries through an industrial ecology approach to sustainable developlement.  Through  green collar education, gender equity empowerment  and poverty alleviation we help families develop sensibly scaled technologies for creating affordable enivonmental solutions at the household level.

Solar C3ITIES e.V. is a not-for-profit organization based in Germany. We work all over the world, particularly Africa and the Middle East, developing home-scale sustainable development solutions with, by, and for families and communities.

Our current focus is on providing low-cost high-efficiency biogas systems and system integration training for "food-waste-to-fuel-and-fertilizer" biodigesters at the household and community level.  We incorporate in-sink food waste grinders like the "Insinkerator" brand garbage disposal into our biogas systems as the "jaws and teeth" of our "artificial sacred cow" biodigester. 

Mission: 

To Provide low income families, both nationally and globally, with safe, clean, climate friendly, hot water, sanitation, light and microenterprise opportunities. 

Who are We:

Founders; Executive Director;Dr. T.H. Culhane, Dr. Sybille Culhane

Ahmed Khalifa: Secretary/Treasure, 

Moustafa Hussein, Hanna Fathy, Heidi Fink, Hussein Farag, Joram Samoan, Mike Rimoin:  Solar CITIES Innoventors and Practioners  

Current Projects:

Soylent Green is People, but Food Scraps are Solar Energy!

We build biodigestors because we see proper utilization of  kitchen and toilet wastes as the best way to bring solar energy to the city!

It is our contention that  food wastes, whether in the form of high energy  raw table scraps and plate scrapings, or processed through an animal gut, are the most cost effective and reliable form of stored solar energy. Unlike fossil fuels, which are also stored sunlight, food waste is climate neutral and, when turned into methane and fertilizer through a biodigester, produces no harmful toxins or pathogens and can no longer provide sustenance to mammal, bird or insect vectors of disease. Unlike direct sunlight, or other forms of transformed solar energy like wind power and hydro power, food wastes are available come rain or come shine, night and day, 365 days a year.  And since so much of the world's stored solar energy is accumulated in our cities as uneaten plant and animal parts, left-over and thrown out food scraps and human and animal manures, we believe that any true "Solar CITIES" will transform these substances, now considered liabilities dumped into landfills or  discharged into rivers lakes and oceans, into the primary sources of fuel and fertilizer.  A real solar city would exhaust all of its organic wastes first before turning to other forms of sunlight, and would save fossil fuels, which are ancient solar capital reserves useful for investing in big infrastructure projects, for last. 

It is for this reason that our top priority is helping everybody on earth first make use of their stored solar energy by teaching them how to grind food wastes and tranform them into clean burning biogas for cooking, heating, lighting, refrigeration and electricity generation  and nutrient rich soil for growing healthy food and fighting desertification and deforestation.

 

Philosophy:

By tapping into the spirit of community cooperation and extending it to a global scale, experiments in more sustainable living can be run on a huge scale at a very low cost and in a way that invites community and stake-holder participation. By using only off-the-shelf, locally purchased or manufactured, recycled and ‘found’ materials we strive to give everyone a chance to

take control of their own destiny as they pursue a dignified and comfortable path to fully sustainable

development.

The low costs associated with the Solar CITIES project make it affordable and scalable and appropriate for microfinancing opportunities. We work in a modular „build as you go“ fashion. Each dollar spent adds to the growing capacity of the systems and capacity building in the communities.

For example, when you support solar CITIES, every donation has an important place in the ecology of development:

25 dollars will pay for a local metal worker, welder or plumber to spend a full day helping us build a renewable energy system.

50 dollars will purchase the glass for solar collectors for three families

100 dollars will purchase one of the two tanks needed for a family biogas system

150 dollars will purchase the copper pipes for a family solar hot water system

200 dollars will purchase the aluminum sheeting , paint, insulation and plumbing fittings to build a two panel family solar hot water system

250 dollars will purchase the materials an entire single family biogas system that provides 1 to 2 hours of cooking gas a day

300 dollars will purchase the materials to build a treadle pump so families without electricity can provide themselves with water

350 dollars will hire a local youth worker for a month to assist her community in building renewable energy and waste management systems.

400 dollars will provide an airline ticket to bring a Solar CITIES trained trainer to another African country to train more trainers

450 dollars will purchase the materials for a family biogas system that provides 3 to 4 hours of cooking gas a day (or can run a gas refrigerator for 24 hours).

500 dollars will purchase the materials to build and install a full solar hot water system on a family's roof.

750 dollars will pay the salary of a Solar CITIES expert to spend a week in a new location starting a project.

1000 dollars will purchase an airline ticket to send a Solar CITIES trainer to a new location to start a project.

There is a PAYPAL donate button to the right of this post at the top of the sidebar column. Go ahead and click and show your support today!

Because we TRAIN AS WE BUILD, every activity becomes an educational opportunity. Thus ever donation is directly contributing to re-education and capacity building. Beneficiaries pay for their education through donating extra time and labor to the project by sharing the expertise they acquired in their own home or community to others. This way every dollar stretches beyond the borders of any particular project site.

Vision: To produce a sustaibable asset-based, low income approach to income to poverty reduction through job training and hands on productionto provide capacity building of all the stakeholders involved.

What is the Problem:

Most of the energy and water consumption and waste generation in a household or community occur

in the kitchen and the bathroom.

• Kitchens and bathrooms are traditionally female managed domains so most health risks associated

with energy, water and waste are incurred by ‘voiceless’ women and children.

• The technologies associated with energy production, water supply and waste disposal are traditionally forprofit male domains that occur outside the household without consideration for the well being of women and children in poor communities.

• Solar CITIES brings these domains together by bringing sensibly scaled technologies and design

information for creating household level industrial ecology solutions to families around the world.

Goals and Objectives:

• Industrial Ecology Approach toSustainable Development

• Asset-based Approach to Poverty Reduction

• Stake-holder Participation Approach to Urban Planning

• “Green Collar” Job Training Approach to Education

• Gender Equity Approach to Community Empowerment

• Collective Intelligence Approach to Problem Solving

Honoring Diversity and Lessons Learned

Solar CITIES works on small infrastructure issues with an expertise in

renewable energy.  Solar CITIES is principally involved with

‘watergy’ issues that can be solved using appropriate technology.

Solar CITIES trainscommunities to build small biogas, wind and solar systems.

Solar CITIES conducts outreach and education workshops using holistic learning, multimedia and

edutainment.

Started by a husband and wife team while they were living in the slums of historic Cairo, Solar CITIES was conceived as a way of working with collective intelligence at the

household level to solve the daily challenges of securing basic amenities like clean water, hot water, energy, food and hygienic waste management. We take a neighborly ‘barnraising’ approach to solving global issues and making the world a better place

The Solar CITIES approach is to work at the level of the family, building capacity

through building relationships. At Solar CITIES we turn the normal development equation on its head. We choose to think locally -- i.e. we think of how to solve problems in our own homes,

in our own back yards, within our own communities -- with the faith that by coming up with solutions that are good for you, are affordable and can be created at home

using available materials, the best ideas will by themselves diffuse and spread through personal social

networks until they have reached the entire world. The key is to build a network of families and friends and acquaintances that is blind to nations, cultures, races, religions, and borders.

With todays social networking technologies, people now share information without great effort and news travels very fast. Solar CITIES takes advantage of this by working only with people we have gotten to know, and then expanding the network each time, so that we know ever more and ever more different people. Many people talk about the downsides of globalization and urbanization, but Solar CITIES, cofounded by a multicultural couple holding doctorates and specializing in urban planning and education, sees these two trends as potential solution generators

Solar Cities takes advantage of social networking to connect us with likeminded people and people in need that makes our global network expand each day.

Due to the vast migrations of people around the planet, and our interconnectedness through constant travel and telecommunications, awareness of each others needs and mutual problem solving can be vastly accelerated. Multiple perspectives can brought to bear that vastly reduce redundancy and wasted resources through needless trial and error. Through site visits and multimedia internet communications we have been able to bring technologies and ideas from India to Egypt and

from Egypt to California, from Alaska to East Africa and from Central America to South East Asia.

Solar CITIES at work around the World

Quotes from Solar CITIES stakeholders

Mother in the slums of Cairo: „ It used to take me up to 7 hours to bathe my 6 children because of the time it took to fetch and heat the water. We had to boil 20 liters at a time on an open flame and it was dangerous work. Many children in our community get third degree burns and some die each year because of scalds, and houses have burned down, to say nothing of the air pollution using kerosene stoves generated. Now, because I was able to build my own solar hot water system on my roof with Solar CITIES, I have 200 liters of safe, clean hot bath water every day at the turn of a tap. Because the sun never stops shining here, we know we will never run out of hot water, and everybody can bathe whenever they like. The burden is off of me and I can devote more time to studying and learning a trade.“

Young man in the garbage area of Cairo: „Garbage is my life, because I am a recycler. But garbage can be very dangerous – my baby niece was killed by rats that were attracted by the kitchen waste and ended up in her crib instead. Now that we build biogas systems next to our homes and on our roofs, the organic waste all goes into the sealed tank and has no smell. For this reason no rats, dogs, cats, flies or other disease causing or dangerous animals come around anymore. We simply don't have smelly garbage near our house or in our streets anymore. Instead we get all of our cooking gas from our kitchen scraps. So we've turned a terrible problem into a promising solution to clean up our city and improve our health and lives.“

GET INVOLVED!

YOUR HELP OR DONATION CAN PROVIDE A FAMILY WITH SAFE AND CLEAN, CLIMATEFRIENDLY AND INFLATION-RESISTANT COOKING FUEL, HOT WATER, LIGHT,

SANITATION AND MICROECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES.

There is a PAYPAL donate button to the right of this post at the top of the sidebar column. Go ahead and click and show your support today! 

"Keep off the Grass": A Diet for Emerging Explorers

Slaves on a sugar cane plantation in Jamaica "cutting the grass"...

My commitment to "keep of the grass" was clinched during a conversation I had last week at Base Camp with National Geographic "Explorer of the Year"  Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner -- the first woman to summit all 14 of the earth's highest mountain peaks without supplementary oxygen.

  The conversation included her husband  and frequent climbing partner Ralf Dujmovits as well as  John Francis, vice president for research, conservation, and exploration at the National Geographic Society.  And it revolved around the question "what is the  best diet for explorers who routinely go into extreme conditions?". 

Don't get me wrong -- the conversation didn't take place in extreme conditions, it  took place at the National Geographic Headquarters "Base Camp" in Washington DC,  a far more comfortable location for discussion than  the base camps Gerlinde usually hangs out in for weeks in the Himalayas or other daunting mountain ranges.   But it included discussion of my own visit to Everest Base Camp last spring and my recent trip to the base of Mera Peak in Nepal, and the difference I felt this year when I decided to eliminate sugar and starch from my diet, and last year when I trudged up the Khumbu valley toward Mount Everest trying to rely  on the daily and generous  provision of Mars bars, Snickers and Bounty bars offered to help us get that "quick boost" of energy that sugar is supposed to supply.


My observation was that without the carbs this year the trek up to 5500 meters was immeasurably easier than last year, even though the route in the Hinku valley, with steeper daily ascents and descents, and nights in cold snow bedecked tents instead of the the relative shelter and warmth of the  tea lodges in the  Khumbu, was technically more difficult.   


Gerlinde and Ralf and John confirmed this observation.  Gerlinde said "when you are climbing the highest mountains in the world, pushing your body to the limit, blood sugar swings become your enemy.  You quickly face exhaustion.  Starches, sugars, carbohydrates, they are the worst thing.  When we climb we focus on eating protein.  The body turns it into the necessary glucose for the brain and body to work most efficiently but it also keeps muscle from being lost."

Ralf chimed in, "We train and train before we climb and we would go onto the expedition with very strong, big muscles, but we noticed that when we returned we were always thin as a rail, having lost a lot of muscle mass. This is because your body digests itself when you are undergoing intense exercise and it consumes muscle protein before turning to your fat reserves.  But by increasing the protein in our diets and eliminating the starches and sugars we find we can keep our muscles."


Gerlinde said, "we start the treks with a diet high in protein and fat and very low in carbohydrates, but we noticed that at high altitude Ralf was getting bad headaches. It turned out that fat requires a lot of oxygen to burn and above 3000 meters the oxygen gets thinner and thinner. By 8000 meters there is almost no oxygen at all and fat in the diet becomes a problem. So while we normally will not worry about the fat content of our diet, we have to eliminate it for the high points of the expedition. But in general the secret is getting rid of as much carbohydrate as possible, and that means no breads and potatoes, and certainly no sugared drinks or candy bars..."


Ah.... candy bars.  In years past I packed my backpack with choclate bars -- Bounty bars, with their coconut filling, are among my favorite.  I rationalized it by parroting the same lousy advice I had gotten from my Gym teachers in high school, "when you are doing strenuous sports, you need the jolt of energy they provide and it is okay, because you are working out so hard you'll burn it all up anyway..."  


Wrong.


Explorers as well as athletes are beginning to understand, through accumulated experience, that the less sugar they dump in their bloodstream, the more steady their energy feels. 

Taking it to the Ends of the Earth


This year, from day 1, I gritted my teeth and politely refused the bowl of candybars offered each morning.  At the end of the day, after a hard, breathless, bone aching, muscle burning climb, when I lay in my tent, illuminated by my Solar CITIES aluminum tab torch, I would often discover a Snickers bar sitting in the side pocket, surreptitiously popped in there by a caring guide wanting to ensure that I didn't wake up with hunger pangs when the exhaustion let up.  Or was it one of my colleagues, trying to test my resolve and lead me into temptation?  I would hold the ever more delicious seeming chocolate before me in the dim glow of my aluminum can flashlight and read the label, dreaming of how good it would taste.  Sugar, cornsyrup, modified cornstarch, dextrose, sugar, sugar...  and though I knew that nobody would ever know or care if I ate it or not, I would put it back in the pack and tell myself "you can do this, if you just hang on, the cravings will surely go away."


Of course I had a precedent.  At Harvard in early 1980s, as a Biological Anthropology undergraduate, I had won a prize with a paper I wrote called "Of Man and Meat: Nutritional Imperialism and its effects on aboriginal cultures".  Reading classics like Weston Price's "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" and William Dufty's "Sugar Blues" I had decided, since I wanted to spend my year after college at the Harvard Research site at Gunung Palung mountain in Borneo, that I would go on what I called a "hunter-gatherer diet".  I vowed at the beginning of my junior year that I would eliminate all "non-nutritional cash crops" from my diet, including not just alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and sugar, but all refined and processed carbohydrates and oils.  I did continue to eat grains, but only "whole grains".  


The experiment lasted for 2 years, right through graduation, until I left for the jungle, and I felt better than I ever had in my life.  I also invited a girlfriend on the diet who had been plagued by weight problems.  At 5 foot 2 inches she dropped from 150 chunky pounds to a svelt 112 while I maintained the 150 pounds appropriate for my 5 foot 9 inch mesomorphic frame.  It was 1985 and I had proven to myself the value of what people now call the "Paleolithic Diet". 


John Francis confirmed for me that his experience on the Paleo Diet had given him similarly good results, despite the fact that he was on it for a much shorter period of time.


Still, when I was doing that experiment, I was a mere 21 years of age. When everybody else was suddenly getting old enough to drink I was eliminating the excess calories but I was still  young enough that it was hard to say whether the unflaggable energy that got me through Harvard and into the deepest rainforests of Indonesia came from this extreme diet or mere youthful vigor.


During the lead up to my last  Nepal expedition I had somehow turned 50, and, apart from 2 years as a vegetarian and 7 months as a Vegan, had spent the intervening years eating all manner of junk food (for more than a decade, while working as a teacher in the ghettos of L.A. and as a grad student at UCLA, I practically lived on the Mcdonald's dollar value meals!).   I had gone from my college weight of 150 to a hamster cheeked, pot bellied 180.  It was getting to be discouraging to look at my reflection--- I kept checking each day to see if the man in the mirror was really me and if he might be induced to change his ways. I needed to find out if the hunter-gatherer diet would really work for those of us on the near side of the midpoint to the century mark.


Summiting the peaks and valleys of the diet roller coaster


Three things encouraged my decision to go radical again.


The first was the announcement that I would be having a baby girl in October.  I started thinking about my desire to see her graduate from college, realizing I will be at least 72 when that happens.  Another was my fathers ailing health as a man dependent on glucophage pills and a cocktail of medicines to deal with his type 2 diabetes -- I wanted to be able to act as a role model and ally to  encourage him to give up the sugar that is killing him so he can live to see my 4 year old son and my new daughter at the very least grow old enough to appreciate his genius, his kindness, and his treasure trove of fun and exciting information about film and circus history -- particularly Disney lore -- which are his fields of expertise.   The third was the desire to prove something I had started in Guatemala in the year 2000 when I lived for almost a month on nothing but Maya breadnuts, avocados and lemons from our rainforest research site.  I wanted to show that we can live happily and successfully without the agriculture that is currently destroying our planet's complex ecologies.


I had a precedent that gave me courage:  my UCLA colleague Angel Orozco, a Guatemalan friend with whom I had formed an NGO to promote agroforestry at the end of the 1990s and with whom I had lived at the Los Angeles Eco-village, had embarked on the hunter gatherer diet during the years I was overseas and hadn't seen him.  I remembered him as a heavy, round faced, large framed man; he was always my "big friend Angel".  When I finally got together with him to deliver a speech about my work with biogas as one solution to deforestation, I had to be reintroduced to him.  He sat smiling at me through my entire speech while I wondered, "why isn't my friend Angel here at my talk? He said he would be..."
At the end of my talk this tall, thin, muscular, thin faced and handsome man who had been smiling  shook my hand and said, "I am Angel. I'm so glad you didn't recognize me".  The transformation was astonishing.  He said, "I didn't go on any weight loss program or take any pills, I just did what we had discussed years ago in the rain forests of my homeland -- I adopted a strict hunter gatherer diet.  But to do so, I abandoned all vestiges of food from agricultural economies -- no sugar, no corn, no wheat, no rice, no oats, no barley.. "


"Sounds like you're avoiding all the grasses" I told him, impressed.

The problem with the Poaceae


On our long bus rides from Mexico City to the Peten Rainforests of his homeland, Angel and I used to discuss archeologist Dennis Puleston's idea  that the Maya couldn't have based their lowland civilization on corn because of its destructive impact the grass we call "maize" has on tropical soils.  We used to reflect that in general the planting of agricultural grasses is among the most destructive practices we humans have been engaged in for the past millenia.  My Master's Thesis focused on "tree cereals" that, through agroforestry, could replace the "weed cereals" that society depends on.

Working in horticulture at the Los Angeles Zoo for 4 years I had come to regard human reliance on the family Graminae/Poaceae as one of the biggest mistakes our species ever made.

Think about it -- there are approximately 463 plant families on the face of the earth (experts estimates vary slightly but all are close to this number). But the lion's share of the plants upon which civilization has come to depend belong to only one of them: the grass family.   This includes  sugar cane, wheat, rice, corn (maize), oats, barley, sorghum, and millet.  When you look at our supermarket shelves almost every product is a product of the top 4 -- wheat, rice, corn and sugar.  Corn syrup and sugar make up the bulk of the beverage section. And vast areas of the landscape are being transformed to a monocrop monocot factory to feed our hunger for these few members of this one family.  The devastation grass family cultivation and processing has on entire cultures was recently brought home to me while working with Maasai leader Kakenya Nataiya in Kenya, where the entire Maasai way of life is threatened by the transformation of the traditional grazing lands into sugar cane plantations.  Where once there were thousands of species interacting with the Maasai and their cattle, what some people naively called a "grassland savannah" is now become a true grassland -- home ot only one species of plant, the grass called Saccharum officinarum in the Poaceae.

(The video above shows the headmistress of Kakenya Ntaiya's Center for Excellence Dream School for Maasai Girls describing the impact the sugar cane industry is having on her culture and the future of the children)

It would be as if the Rockefellers or the Kennedy's made up 3/4 of the world's population.  When one family comes to  dominate culture and commerce  in an age of diminishing biodiversity, the prospects for maintaining a healthy ecosystem become nil to nothing.


So the quest to maintain a healthy body suddenly became linked to the more vital quest to maintain a healthy planet for our children and grand-children.


As a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, dedicated to preserving our environment,  and reasonably expected to walk our talk the decision became natural.  I decided to adopt a new and very rigorous diet to complement the one I was on back at Harvard before my first Borneo expedition. It  would be a diet I would maintain not just when out  exploring, but every day, at home and in the field.  It  would be a diet  that, through  its complete dismissal of our "daily bread", would complement my desire to eschew the "non-nutritional cash crops" that destroy health and local economies.  It would be a diet that I will continue  for the rest of my life to model for my son and daughter as they grow to appreciate their role in this marvelous and fragile blue planet three rocks from the sun.  It is a diet that served me very very well on my last expedition with Alton Byers and Chris Rainier and Anrita Sherpa to explore "last mile technology" in some of the remotest places on earth.  It is a diet I have decided to bring home, out of the cold and into my own kitchen.   I have decided from now on that I will...


KEEP OFF THE GRASS.


As with most explorations, we'll have to wait and see what we discover...


Stay tuned!

Looking Toward Zootopia

Looking Toward Zootopia

By T.H. Culhane, Ph.D.

Walking with a throng of students toward the engineering department at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the morning, as we pass a construction site,  we are confronted by two imposingly large buck deer with impressive antlers who have decided to  nonchalantly cross the street with us.  It is hard to say where they came from, or where they are going – the city is ringed by mountains but we are nowhere near a so-called “natural” area;  still the residents of this campus environment don’t seem alarmed. They take it in stride, as if it is a perfectly natural occurrence to share the road with large wild mammals on the way to class.   During the evening,  as we drop a local friend off in her residential area,  mere minutes from the city center,  we pass an entire family of deer methodically walking along the sidewalk  in search of tasty flower plantings lining people’s driveways.   Our friend, noting our surprise, comments,  “we’re so used to such urban wildlife here that we have almost stopped noticing.  A lot of people figure, “it used to belong to them anyway,  before our subdivisions encroached on their territory,  so we might as well learn to live together.”

In a progressive area like Boulder, where people come from all over the world to study environmental  science,  it would almost seem as though a “zootopia” where humans and wildlife coexist peacefully within an urban landscape is possible.  Our friend’s son tells us they routinely host raccoons,  possums, skunks and other ostensibly wild critters in their backyards – occasionally they will  even see a puma mountain lion or even a bear pass through.  The animals don’t seem to mind the presence of human beings when they aren’t harassed and if anything they seem to find the gardens and garbage cans of human residents an easy and reliable food supply, perhaps even more convenient than foraging in the wild.  And many creatures seem to appreciate  our built environment for the easy shelter it provides against temperature  extremes and inclement weather,  to say nothing of the prodigious amounts of heat our buildings pump out. 

This is not only true for the native wildlife that urbanization is normally displacing.  Exotics also seem to find immigration to the city appealing.  In the city of Chicago,  when I was a child in the 1960s, a flock of tropical green parrots escaped from captivity  near lake Michigan and started breeding in the trees near my apartment in Hyde Park Boulevard .  Taking advantage  of the famous “heat island effect” of cities, the parrots survived the harsh winters by nesting in large ducts releasing waste heat  from the subway system.  In the spring they ventured back out to the trees in the parks by the lake.  During a recent summer I went back to one of the parks I used to see them in as a child and sure enough they and their descendents were there,  screeching and squawking from their nests as though they were  in a tropical rainforest.

That non-human animals would find cities habitable should come as no surprise; regardless of how well adapted they are to whatever  piece of  “nature” surrounds them , most organisms prefer to be sheltered from weather  extremes and from the elements  and prefer to have food, water  and nesting materials around them in abundance.  Human beings have pooled these resources in our own urban and suburban habitats, and other animals and plants recognize this.  If there is a compatibility problem between  cities and wildlife, it is usually because we humans resent the presence of non-humans and deliberately try to exclude or exterminate  them.  But we have to rethink this strategy in the 21^st century.

The rapid rate of biodiversity loss is arguably the most pressing issue facing humanity today.  While we can probably engineer our way out of most of our resource bottlenecks and health crises given time and political will, Wilson and McArthur’s theories of island geography and our understanding of genetic drift and inbreeding depression suggest that many of the earth’s animal and plant species are at such critically low population densities that they can almost be considered “living fossils”.   The mantra “extinction is forever” has a haunting finality to it and while the history of planet Earth shows that even without  human pressure on natural ecosystems, climate change and habitat modification over time will make species extinctions inevitable,  what differs today from previous “natural” extinction events is the rate of species disappearance,  with gene loss and ecosystem degradation occurring at such a rapid pace that co-evolutionary systems can no longer operate adaptively.   It isn’t just specifics groups of organisms following the dinosaurs into oblivion, it is the unraveling of entire ecologies.  The result is what Harvard professor E.O. Wilson has called our entry into the “Eremozoic Era” – the great “age of loneliness”. 

Although most of the habitat destruction leading to extinctions can be credited to the agriculture and forestry industries, the built environment itself,  due to  the exponential expansion of urbanization,  is often considered a major antagonist to the preservation of biodiverse ecologies.  There is no question that urban demand for resources has always been a primary driver of  the landscape transformations threatening natural ecologies (the city-countryside relationship, with rising urban populations requiring  a substantial “ecological footprint” to maintain themselves,  is well understood) but in recent years urban sprawl itself has a emerged as a major force in habitat loss.

Yet while the city as currently conceived  poses a threat to wildlife we are also seeing the emergence of a new paradigm in urban form as wildlife itself seeks to reclaim its place in landscapes that we modify.  If anything, the agricultural lands and mining lands that feed the city their resources may be the most hostile places for wild and animals and plants to try to coexist.  Thousands of hectares of herbicide and pesticide laden monocropping are completely hostile to robust food-chains and complex ecologies, and are for the most part devoid of trees which are among the few organisms in terrestrial ecosystems that can provide the multidimensionality that permits overlapping and non-competitive  niche spaces conducive to biodiversity.  But, as a Mayan friend pointed out when flying from his rainforest research station in Guatemala to Los Angeles, “I looked out the window of the airplane as I crossed the United States, and all I could see was  the yellow and brown  of farmlands until we flew over your cities. Then I noticed the green.  Besides the few patches of wilderness parks and forest plantations, your cities are some of the last places where there is a lot of visible tree cover. “  From a migratory bird’s perspective,  cities and their suburbs are havens not only of diverse vegetation,  woody and herbaceous, but water  features as well.  They appear as islands in a sea of cropland uniformity and barren-ness.

Some animals have taken well to the presence of resources and shelter in the cities.  Richard Hoath at the American University of Cairo noted that the Egyptian weasel,   Mustela subpalmata,  which used to occupy a much larger part of the Nile Valley,  was in serious decline in agricultural areas, but that in Egypt’s major city of 20 million people,  this normally nocturnal species “can be seen in the day” though it is “most frequently encountered at night dashing across streets and disappearing beneath a parked car.”  The idea that the ubiquitous presence of parked cars might be seen by some animals as a defense shelter against predation may strike one as odd,  but most animals don’t have an automatic aversion to “artificial” environments and look at the world through fairly utilitarian rather than symbolic eyes.

This does not imply that human beings can simply build anthropocentric habitats and hope that other species will adapt; our structures and plantings can have a profound effect on “natural” and “artificial” selection processes.  A case in point is the current displacement in England of native red squirrels by “invasive” North American Grey Squirrels.  The former, now on the IUCN red list,  is susceptible to a parapox virus that the latter carries but doesn’t get,  and is also dependent on pine forests and pine cones which are also in decline in urban areas. Red squirrels also can’t easily digest acorns. The grey, on the other hand,  does well in oak dominated areas and on the kind of broad-leafed trees that dominate many residential and parkland plantings.  So it is no wonder that one is ubiquitous and the other rare.  

One way to ensure a more favorable mix of squirrel species (and other wildlife)  is simply for planners, architects and gardeners to use the landscape palette to attract and retain specific wildlife rather than merely conform to popular horticultural trends.  In fact, the National Wildlife Federation’s “Backyard Wildlife Program” encourages urban and suburban residents to “Turn Your Yard Into a Haven for Wildlife!”  They give certificates to people who do exactly that, saying,  “By providing food, water, cover and places for wildlife to raise their young, your garden can join the nearly 150,000 Certified Wildlife Habitat™ sites across the country.”

We might consider that if much of our planet’s wildlife is doing poorly in human habitat it may simply be because of paucity in the predominant palette of vegetation,  which  tends to be so very poor in diversity that it favors only a very small number of organisms, particularly those few that co-evolved  with the particular plants our unimaginative  gardens over-emphasize.  Landscape architects, lacking training in ecological sciences,  tend to view plants as mere ornamental decorations, forgetting that ecologies depend on intricate symbiotic and commensal  relationships that took millions of years to develop. 

When much of the smaller wildlife disappears from human modified habitats it usually has much less to do with these non-human’s fear of human “encroachment” or even direct conflict with people, but more with a drastic reduction in the supporting vegetation and associated food chains. 

As in the adage “for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost” a cascade of unfortunate ecological events can occur when a single type of vegetation  is removed that once  hosted a wide range of interdependent microbes, fungi, insects, arthropods and vertebrates .  In subtropical and tropical areas, urban plantings tend to favor the “Mediterranean Zone 5” vegetation,  and thus these degraded habitats select for those organisms that co-evolved in that region, often with devastating consequences on native wildlife.  Some studies have shown that vacant lots, left to grow over with weeds, contain a much higher biodiversity than urban parks where manicured trees and lawns are unable to support more than a very few species of wildlife. From this perspective we should be “naturalizing” our parks with a wide range of habitat types (such as Prospect Park in Brooklyn is seeking to do) to attract and maintain as many different animal/plant assemblages as possible.  Right now our parks are the furthest thing from being modern arks.

There is a lot of concern about the introduction of “non-native” and “invasive” species into wild habitats; we often neglect to consider that our urban plantings are almost all made up of an “easy to grow and maintain” assemblage of trees, shrubs, ferns, flowers and grasses that were selected from around the world based purely on their market and aesthetic values.  They usually require heavy maintenance  and inordinate inputs of fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides to stay alive.   There has also been severe landscape modification to establish fast growing timber and firewood producing mono-crops of trees which now make up the major species over vast areas; the preponderance of Eucalyptus trees all over the world,  trees which originally come from Australia,  but which are now are the dominant life form in parks and highway, street and residential plantings in regions as diverse as Iraq, California, Rwanda and Spain, offer very little in the way of food or shelter to non-Australian wildlife.  Curiously, nobody has taken seriously our proposals to allow Koalas, which are endangered in Australia, and exclusively eat Eucalyptus leaves,  to freely breed in city parks outside Australia (even the Los Angeles Zoo, which is filled with and surrounded by Eucalyptus forests, still gives their few Koala’s contraceptives  to keep them from breeding  and employs human laborers to cut Eucalyptus branches to feed the rare marsupials).  Similarly, despite Panda Bears, which eat only bamboo and are on the verge of extinction in China where their bamboo forests are being cut down for agriculture and urbanization , we don’t see initiatives to give them a chance to breed in other regions of the world where bamboo serves as one of the chief ornamental plantings.  We decry their disappearance in the “wild” without considering that the plants they depend on for survival actually exist all over the world thanks to urbanization.

Usually when there are struggles between   humans and non-humans in the built environment they involve  society’s intolerance of  these larger animals rather than their intolerance of us.  Creatures such as mice and rats, squirrels and sparrows,  ducks and ubiquitous pigeons,  even raccoons , skunks, badgers and coyotes have found ways to co-exist and even thrive in our cities.  But so-called “charismatic megafauna” – the pandas and koalas that serve as the poster children of the conservation movement,  the “lions and tigers and bears – oh my!” sung about on the yellow brick road  to the Wizard’s  paradise of Oz,  the elephants which populate Paris in the children’s book “Babar”, the chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas which end up taking over the world in “Planet of the Apes” and all the civilized ,  well-dressed talking animals of the Disney cartoons – these are the creatures most endangered  through our rampant urbanization of planet Earth. 

In fantasy we hold out to our children the elusive hope of living in harmony with some of the animals whose  size approaches or exceeds ours, but our general fear of possibly dangerous or conflictual encounters with most of the “undomesticated” creatures of the Earth keeps most of them out of designated “human habitat”.

 Frequent trips that I make to pet stores around the world reveal  a growing affection for smaller “exotic” or “un-domesticated animals” as part of the accepted  species assemblage living with us in urban settings (I owned two iguanas, several quail, rabbits and hares, guinea pigs, cockatiels and parakeets when I lived in Los Angeles),  but only rarely do I meet people, like Birute Galdikas, who lives with scores of orangutans and gibbons in her home in Indonesia, or Daphne Sheldrick, who runs and orphanage for elephants near Nairobi, or  the couple that  kept two wolves  as watch-dogs in the  avant garde video store they owned in the Los Feliz neighborhood,  or  the nature-show television host in the Hollywood hills who showed me the large alligator he kept in his swimming pool, or legendary Hollywood Musical Producer George Sidney who told me about keeping an elephant for years in his back yard in Beverly Hills.   People who are pushing the envelope  of cohabitation by substituting llamas and yearlings and ostriches and emus for the usual house trained dog,and cat,  or backyard cow or chicken, are fare too rare at this time of incipient mass extinctions.

The recent police slaughter of a menagerie of  49 “exotic animals” (among them endangered Bengal Tigers) set free in a suburban neighborhood by a private owner in Ohio, killed because law enforcement personnel were too afraid of them to think rationally or didn’t know how to dart,  net and re-capture  animals that were doubtless more frightened than they, shows that society doesn’t consider large animals worthy of caring attention when they transgress certain boundaries. It seems we’d rather let them follow the dinosaurs into oblivion that rethink the human-nature relationship.

Yet almost every city boasts a rather large collection of charismatic megafauna, and has for hundreds of years.  A well run Zoo is considered one of the hallmarks of a great city. Most city planners, in fact, consider a city incomplete if it doesn’t have a zoological park (sometimes several) where families can introduce their children to the other animals with which we co-evolved.   The larger and least domesticated  creatures are the biggest draw. 

And where cities couldn’t afford to house these animals, circuses filled the gap, and served and still serve the vital function of carting big charismatic megafauna from town to town so humans detached from “nature” could contemplate their relationship with  these other large residents of our common spaceship earth.   Both institutions also offer the chance for co-evolutionary relationships to continue to occur, challenging both humans and non-humans to reconceive their relationships.

But Zoos and Circuses both evolved from Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions affirming man’s “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,  and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth”. And they owe their physical and psychological profiles to ideas based on  “Bentham’s Panopticon”: factories, schools, hospitals, insane asylums and poor houses.  Wild animals have been forced to stand-in for “criminals”, the insane”, “the feared feminine” and “the despised other” and for forces that fill people with anxiety and confusion.  So neither of these institutions has been able to solve the conundrum of how we can evolve  a society that permits the harmonious coexistence of  “all creatures great and small”.

There are models for successful coexistence of large domestic animals in the urban context.  Every time  I go to visit my friends in the informal “garbage recycling” community of Cairo’s Zabaleen people I marvel at the presence of pigs living on the ground floor of apartment buildings, cows residing in second floor bedrooms, goats, sheep and donkeys walking up and down the staircases, and ducks, chickens and rabbits populating the roof, each providing a vital urban ecology function and helping these poorest of the poor eke a living out of the refuse of the rest of the city.  The urban pigs transform the organic waste of Cairo’s millions into valuable meat, hide, bone and fertilizer (and in some cases biogas) while the urban goats and sheep and cows transform marginal vegetation  along the roadside and railroad tracks into milk and cheese.   We see this pattern  in many marginalized communities around the world – I’ve even been to the homes of Mexican immigrants in American cities who kept livestock in homes and grew nopal cactus, corn, chayote and other  agricultural plants instead of front lawns because they felt the grass and other ornamental plants that dominate our cities were a “waste of space”; one student of mine even kept a bull in the back yard in Los Angeles.  The Los Angeles Urban Eco-Village  where I lived for three years tended their permaculture garden with a “chicken tractor”.

Meanwhile, in Indian and Indonesian cities we’ve marveled  as  not only “sacred cows” walk the streets, but domesticated elephants, whose large size, intelligence and strong trunks enable them to  do a lot of important construction work.  We’ve seen sacred Hanuman monkeys (Grey langurs) and other primates  leap from urban porches to telephone poles and tightrope walk the high tension wires to the next apartment complex where people put out offerings of food to these furry relatives of ours, treating them little different than we treat squirrels in the West (with the caveat  that they do protect their homes with barred windows to prevent these curious cousins from stealing or breaking things.)  By understanding the needs and specific behavioral ecologies of many  “not-quite domesticated” animals humans find they can develop fairly close relationships with them, relationships that could one day lead to co-evolutionary relationships that can border on symbiosis rather than predation or parasitism.

In fact, in the late 1800’s, the Australian Acclimatization  society championed the idea that all animals and plants should be brought into “domestication” so that they and their human partners  could enjoy the mutual benefits each might confer on the other.  At that time there was a sense among many that dogs and cats and farm animals were merely “early adopters” in an world where animals “chose domestication” as much as we chose them to be domesticated,  and where , as humans fulfill their biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”, we get closer and closer to fulfilling the biblical prophecy in Isaiah: 6 where  “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

Nowadays, in permacultural and “industrial ecology” and “urban ecology” circles, we are beginning to popularize a similar idea of harmony among humans and non-humans, learning to see the mutualistic functional relationships we can create if we start valuing the “ecosystem services” and “environmental services” that non-humans contribute to our urban well being.  From “Effective Microbe” Bukashi compost, biogas, and fermented foodstuff techniques, that honor the role of “probiotic” micro-organisms in maintaining our  health and that of our soils, to the use of Zebra mussels, snails and a “schmutzdecke” assemblage of aquatic organisms to create living machines to purify our water,  to cities employing ungulates to keep highway and power line strips free from weeds and putting endangered manatees to work clearing  navigable waterways  from water hyacinth and other river and canal choking aquatic plants,  we see more and more places recognizing the contribution animals can make to make cities more livable for both us and them.

The city isn’t the problem, our mentality is.  From a bird’s eye view, and from that of many other animals and plants, the city hasn’t really taken any land away from nature, in fact it has merely raised it up, and in so doing it has created  even more dimensions for niche space and livable habitat.   The Caixa Forum Museum in Madrid, for example, sports a 24 meter high vertical  garden  along its south facing wall that hosts a prodigious number of insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds, fed by a gravity led stream of rain water. 

Where the pre-urban landscape in Madrid once offered only the ecological footprint defined by the two dimensional area of what is now the roof of this building, now it offers many times the surface area in three dimensions for living beings.  And this would be true of all our buildings, if only we would learn to see them that way, and invite our non-human relatives to work with us instead of fighting so hard against them.

Because of the complex surfaces it provides, the myriad opportunities for shelter and the pooling of water and food and resources and energy that characterize the urban environment, the city may very well turn out to be the best place to build our arks to save what is left of biodiversity.

If we learn to see the environments we  have built and occupy through the eyes of other organisms that don’t divide the world into facile categories like “Civilization” and “Nature” we might be able to help the non-human passengers with whom we share planet Earth to survive. And we might be able to call this kind of new urban form “Zootopia”.  I, for one, am looking forward to it.

Dr. T.H. Culhane lived at the Los Angeles Eco-Village while attending graduate school at UCLA and worked with colleagues there to create one of the first urban permaculture experiments in a dense built environment in a low income neighborhood.  Culhane's entire apartment was off the grid for 3 years, had its own home built composting toilet  and recycled much of its greywater.  The eco-village itself had nutritious gardens instead of lawns and kept earthworms, rabbits and chickens, using a chicken tractor for weeding and pest control. It was frequently visited by opposums and racoons and many species of birds, lizards and amphibians.  The buildings themselves sit along what was once a riparian streambed that Chumash Indians used as prime hunting ground. Currently the Eco-Village is working with the Bresee Center which has partially restored the stream.