full green ahead
Is there life after oil? A few of the tips for a green future found in this winter’s books include building with awareness, growing your own food inch by inch in the urban garden, and transitioning your town to a post-petroleum economy.This article first appeared in Winter 09 Su Casa
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, by Rob Hopkins, foreword by Richard Heinberg, Green Books, paperback, $24.95.
Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home DVD and Guidebook, by Ted Owens, Syncronos Design, paperback and DVD, $39.
New Green Home Solutions: Renewable Household Energy and Sustainable Living, by Dave Bonta and Stephen Snyder, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, paperback, $24.99.
Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting, by R. J. Ruppenthal, Chelsea Green, paperback, $24.95.
New Mexico: An Explorer’s Guide, by Sharon Niederman, The Countryman Press, paperback, $19.95.
Vanishing America: The End of Main Street Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments, by Michael Eastman, introduction by Douglas Brinkley, text by William H. Gass, Rizzoli, hardcover, $39.95.
Photography: New Mexico, by Thomas F. Barrow and Kristin Barendsen, essay by Stuart A. Ashman, Fresco Fine Art Publications, hardcover in box, $95.
Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grassland, by Gregory McNamee, photographs by Stephen Strom and Stephen Capra, foreword by Bill Richardson, University of New Mexico Press, paperback, $24.95.
The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, by Rob Hopkins, foreword by Richard Heinberg, Green Books, paperback, $24.95.
In The Transition Handbook, author Rob Hopkins begins with an assumption that becomes less controversial seemingly by the hour: the world’s supply of oil dwindles daily and either we already have or soon will have passed the peak of production. We’re not running out tomorrow, but the fact of diminished supply will affect all our lives sooner and more forcefully than most of us imagine, he argues. Coupled as evil twins, peak oil and global warming caused by human-generated carbon dioxide challenge humanity to refocus our home communities on sustainability and self-reliance—that’s Hopkins’ vision. He proceeds to lay out a method for transforming our villages, towns, and cities into places that generate their own power, grow much of their own food, and even build their own homes out of local materials.
This “planned relocalization” will build local resilience, by which Hopkins means “a culture based on its ability to function independently and to live within its limits, and able to thrive for having done so.” Man, oh man, this sounds a lot like our grandparents’ New Mexico. Is it utopian? Maybe. Social engineering? Not if Hopkins’ profoundly democratic grassroots action plan captures the imagination of engaged citizens who shape a plan that fits their hometown—as it already has in 30 transition towns across the globe—rather than suffering under top-down policies driven by crises.
The notion of hometown runs covertly through this book. Many of the strategies Hopkins describes directly build community by strengthening the bonds among neighbors, increasing people’s allegiance to each other and to the place they live, and reinforcing their collective independence and interdependence. This secondary agenda—or is it the primary one?—reinforces Hopkins’ assertion that the transition away from peak oil can actually make us happier people: “This is not a book about how dreadful the future could be; rather, it is an invitation to join the hundreds of communities around the world who are taking the steps towards making a nourishing and abundant future a reality.” OK, that’s a utopian perspective, but despite the English origins of the transition-town concept, it seems very American, a secularized City Upon a Hill sermon (which didn’t originate with President Reagan, by the way) whereby these enlightened communities lead the way out of the hydrocarbon wilderness.
It could happen. Hopkins lays out a rationale and a clear path for transitioning a town through the book’s excursions into science and economics, the history of oil production, a scan of the current state of the oil economy from sources as mainstream as the U.S. Department of Energy, an exploration of the psychology and practice of vision-based change, a look at how one English community became a transition town, and tips for doing it yourself. Hopkins augments all this with charts and graphs and photos and illustrations, newspaper clips about successfully transitioning towns, tools for creating an action plan, even activities to stimulate group discussions.
During the recent presidential campaign, both major party candidates acknowledged the need for alternative energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to reign in greenhouse gases. Some kind of transition away from oil dependence awaits: how will we handle it, by choice or by force?
Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home DVD and Guidebook, by Ted Owens, Syncronos Design, paperback and DVD, $39.
Green home building may have passed the tipping point toward general public acceptance, but it still remains an arcane subject for the average person. Both in the broad philosophy and definition of what constitutes green building and in the specific details of design and construction technique, the field continues to define itself. A tremendous array of options present themselves to would-be green builders and green home buyers. Whether they’re weighing the benefits of competing wall systems and insulation, energy-source options, water conservation, lot location, or even which green-building certification program standard to follow, these folks face the challenge of decision making based on a developing knowledge base. The ground shifts constantly, standards evolve, the performance bar gets raised, and options open while inherited wisdom succumbs to newer smarter approaches.
Into this landscape comes Ted Owens’ book and DVD, Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home. A thorough and thoroughly thought-out case study, the book and DVD combine empowering how-to information with an inside view to the decision making Owens went through as he built his Corrales, New Mexico, home. (The house was featured in the Spring 2006 issue of Su Casa. You can view it on our website or at Owens' site buildingwithawareness.com, where you can also order the DVD/book package. Building with Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home is also now available through the Gaiam catalog.)
Owens is a man of many talents. A filmmaker, designer, writer, and juror in the recent Su Casa/Build Green New Mexico awards competition, he also undertook building his own home, albeit with help from a good many friends, strawbale workshoppers, and conventional subcontractors.
The book tracks pretty closely to the contents of the DVD, though as Owens writes in the introduction, the hard copy “leans towards the nuts and bolts of construction.” In both media, high-level concepts include things like how passive solar energy works, designing for solar orientation (where a time-lapse video segment shows sunlight and shadow sweeping elegantly across the faux-flagstone concrete floor of the finished home). Details of construction range across how to score and cut adobe brick, recipes for earth plaster (don’t forget the wheat paste!), all about rainwater cisterns, and so on, from foundation to roof peak. Owens also includes references from the book to the exact location on the DVD for the corresponding video, so you can literally see how he and his crew did it—priceless.
You can watch the video straight through for its edutainment value, with plenty of pretty shots of the cute house nestled in rural Corrales, New Mexico, with the Sandia Mountains rising to the east. Owens has a light and elegant touch as a filmmaker, giving images room to resonate emotionally and making hard work look like fun. But you can also dig around in the DVD for how-to hints, using the book as a road map to the DVD. That’s a smart just-do-it combination.
Few of us will ever build our own homes. That notwithstanding, at Su Casa we find that many of our readers and many of the folks in our articles like to be closely involved in the design and construction of their houses, whether ground-up new construction or major remodel. Ted Owens’ mission, made explicit in the book/DVD title, is to encourage building with awareness—whether you do the work yourself or hire a contractor.
New Green Home Solutions: Renewable Household Energy and Sustainable Living, by Dave Bonta and Stephen Snyder, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, paperback, $24.99.
While Ted Owens’ book and DVD will prove useful to someone who’s more than passingly familiar both with green and with home building and is ready to start ordering straw bales and digging a foundation, New Green Home Solutions by Dave Bonta and Stephen Snyder views the subject from a much higher altitude, a kind of words-and-pictures flyby of “whole home” strategies for green living. And the photos prove you can have your cake, too, from gingerbread California Mission homes to metal-and-stucco country bungalows to mossy cedar-sided cabins.
Consider this a preliminary briefing on going green. Some of the advice, like switching from incandescent to compact fluorescent lighting (what about LED?) or putting your computer on a power strip (which you turn off!), has been so thoroughly reported in every form of media as to feel passé by now. But hey, maybe somebody hasn’t heard the news.
Still, as a survey course on the available options for green, the book is remarkably clear and well-organized. Take wind, for instance. With recent promotion by billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, wind has been touted as a potential key to national energy independence when implemented on a large scale. Feeding the grid, the Pickens plan would maintain the centralized nature of power production in this country. Bonta and Snyder suggest another tack—wind power for the individual home. They describe the various types of generators or windmills, explain how they work, how much wind you need, and how to evaluate the costs versus benefits. For many homes, wind makes the most sense when used with solar electric or small-scale hydropower as a suite of energy sources. Microhydropower likewise gets its due in these pages, along with the various forms of solar energy and even ground-source heating.
Many of the book’s pages occupy themselves with explaining in general terms the green values embodied in the lovely home photos but without adding much to the conversation. For example: “This totally off-the-grid home proves that energy independence does not mean sacrificing comfort or beauty.” That message must be worth repeating, though, as some unmeasured percentage of the home-buying public apparently thinks “green home” means a hippie shack with salvaged automobile radiators collecting solar heat on the roof.
Along the way, Bonta and Snyder make the case for green in an admirably clear-headed tone without veering into alarmist rhetoric, as if to say, look, your home is a polluter; here’s how you can fix it. If you’re just wading into the green-building waters, New Green Home Solutions can help you navigate the options and formulate questions for your designer, architect, or builder. And it’s a sweet armchair cruise among a wide range of modern-leaning homes, as well.
Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting, by R. J. Ruppenthal, Chelsea Green, paperback, $24.95.
When Rob Hopkins talks about resilience in The Transition Handbook, reviewed above, he includes the notion of local food production. R. J. Ruppenthal in Fresh Food from Small Spaces takes that idea and shrinks it down to the smallest application, the backyard, the apartment balcony, the container in the kitchen: “no place is too small to raise food.” He’s all about making city dwellers “part of the sustainability equation.” You can grow and harvest lettuce, sprouts, mushrooms, berries, honey, nuts, spinach, beans, tomatoes. You can keep chickens for the eggs and bees for the honey—you get the idea. While this might not meet all your nutritional needs, Ruppenthal claims you can raise 20 percent of your food, and it’ll be a particularly nutritious, healthy part of your diet. Ruppenthal tells you all you need to know to get started: the containers to buy, the kind of soil you need, tricks for maximizing your space, even how to use reflected sunlight. He also provides plenty of specific details on things like sprouting plants, growing mushrooms, making yogurt, and composting (get some worms). Now that’s changing the world from the ground up.
New Mexico: An Explorer’s Guide, by Sharon Niederman, The Countryman Press, paperback, $19.95.
Veteran New Mexico writer and journalist Sharon Niederman brings her considerable experience traveling our vast state to bear on this comprehensive new guidebook. Sure, guidebooks follow a formula—pick the top places of interest, serve up tidbits of history, then drill down into the real deal: where to eat, where to sleep, and what to do in between. Niederman delivers all this with a unique perspective, particularly her feel for authentic food, cowboy culture, Western Americana, and rootsy traditional activities. From dots on the map like Pie Town and Shakespeare to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Niederman gives all you need to plan a day-long, week-long, even month-long excursion across the state’s 121,000 square miles.
Nuevo Mexicanos who think they know everything will at least appreciate the restaurant listings. I, for one, always ask the locals where they eat when I’m away from home, even when I think I know the good spots. Niederman gives great recommendations. Here’s one: TLC Bakery, tucked into a little strip mall by Whiting Coffee on Osuna Road in Albuquerque. I often stop in (with my pound of fresh ground coffee from Whiting two doors down) to buy bagels and bread and maybe a killer Danish pastry. Niederman lists it among her top Albuquerque bakeries: now that’s knowing your subject.
It’s that kind of slightly obscure but knowing detail that distinguishes New Mexico: An Explorer’s Guide. Niederman covers the state in eight sections devoted to the major regions and cities. For each, she gives a few paragraphs of background then comprehensive listings of information centers, medical and emergency facilities, major sightseeing opportunities, historic landmarks, sporting activities and opportunities, campgrounds, hiking, you name it! She delves into lodgings from B and Bs to resorts to casino hotels, plus eateries from those priceless quickie cafés to Santa Fe’s toniest restaurants. Special shopping suggestions and calendars of events round out the information. Forget about references to national chains, though—you can get that anywhere. This book is about the uniquely New Mexican. That includes more than a few detours into the quirky, bizarre, and fascinating—all in good fun!
Vanishing America: The End of Main Street Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments, by Michael Eastman, introduction by Douglas Brinkley, text by William H. Gass, Rizzoli, hardcover, $39.95.
An eerie photo tour through the remains of premall America, Michael Eastman’s book presents a visual elegy to the Main Street towns where most boomers grew up. Shot without people, the photos capture the crumbling decay of movie houses, diners, drive-ins, and so on across the United States. He found a few images in one of New Mexico’s classic unrenovated towns that preserves its midcentury look, Las Vegas, where the Serf Theatre marquee still shades its locked doors. Eastman, who has a terrific eye and knows how to stay out of the way of his subjects, photographed most of these places with an unvarnished objectivity that veers away from nostalgia toward despair. Forget Wall Street, these Main Streets are past rescue. You can’t imagine anyone will fix up the “juke joint” in Memphis, Tennessee, where a hand-painted sign reads, “no dope smoke, no cursing, no free love.” No kidding. And the cowgirl mural in Las Vegas, New Mexico, is already gone.
Photography: New Mexico, by Thomas F. Barrow and Kristin Barendsen, essay by Stuart A. Ashman, Fresco Fine Art Publications, hardcover in box, $95.
This slickly packaged book showcases the work of 25 contemporary photographers who have made their careers in or about New Mexico. The roots of photography here include many of the great pioneers of the field, including Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin, and Eliot Porter, who focused on epic landscapes, telling details of nature, and stoic paisanos.
Photography: New Mexico includes more recent photographers who have continued working in that tradition, plus others who have pushed through the postmodern veil. Standouts include Miguel Gandert’s amazing documentary work in South America, Erika Blumenfeld’s transelike experiments in raw luminosity, Jo Whaley’s studied still lifes, Herbert Lotz’s affecting portraits, and Joel-Peter Witkin’s narrative fantasies. The work ranges widely in vivid reminder that photography captures metaphor more often than it renders the literal.
Otero Mesa: Preserving America’s Wildest Grassland, by Gregory McNamee, photographs by Stephen Strom and Stephen Capra, foreword by Bill Richardson, University of New Mexico Press, paperback, $24.95.
Long a cause célèbre among environmentalists, Otero Mesa in south-central New Mexico cradles a relatively untouched 1.2 million acre grassland above the surrounding deserts. Four years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management approved a plan for drilling exploratory oil wells in this unique de facto wilderness, rousing intense opposition from ranchers, environmentalists, religious leaders, business people, and Governor Bill Richardson, who has countered with a plan to zone off 300,000 acres as a National Conservation Area. In lovely photographs and smart writing, this book makes the case for preserving Otero Mesa against the chants of “drill, drill, drill.”