I’m working on the design of my home landscape and wanted to start doing zone and energy input planning. In looking for a solar chart of my latitude I came across this nifty University of Oregon Sunchart Online tool. Just enter your zip code, time zone and a couple of other parameters and presto! a PDF or PNG of the chart for your area.

I just discovered a link to a press release about Rochester’s “Greenprint” which contains a link to the full report (PDF). I would have liked to have attended this event, but I also want to find out about opportunities to plug in after the fact. A friend who is a strawbale building expert said he met with Mayor Duffy a few weeks ago. So there appears to be some reality behind this. The fact that Hillary was behind the whole thing was encouraging.
The report seems to conflate “green” with alternate energy and energy conservation, which I view as a small subsection of green. Nevertheless there are some 12 specific action items, several of which have to do with training, awareness and education. The ethanol activity in the area is apparent. One of my goals is to push at the crop productivity issue of growing sugar beets instead of corn, so this might be a place to start to make some connections.

I’m often annoyed by projections that start out “given current rates of …” I’ve noticed there are a lot of stupid things we do as a society, which when changed on a large enough scale will start to bring us into alignment with reality once more. I rarely see anyone analyze what the effect of eliminating stupidity would have.

Here’s a quick list I came up with in five minutes.

1. Flushing toilets with drinking water

This clearly makes no sense in a world starving for fresh water. A simple fix is to use gray water for flushing. Run a drainpipe from a hand sink to the toilet reservoir. Here we run up against government bureaucracy and zoning regulations. Even a place as advanced as Berkeley, CA is attacking “gray water guerrillas” for re-plumbing their houses for gray water reuse.

2. Feeding food-grade grain to livestock

Energy calories are lost at every link along the chain from crude oil production to grain production, especially corn, and on to feed for cattle. Every calorie of beef requires many multiples of grain calories, which in turn use many multiples more of high-quality petroleum-based energy. The ROI on this energy is so far negative that no one in their right mind would even consider it. In fact, it is criminal insanity.

3. Feeding food-grade grain to machinery (ethanol)

At best, ethanol produces about 64% of the BTUs produced by gasoline. So does it make sense to grow corn, which is highly petroleum-intensive (as grown today) to lose at least 36%? Again the ROI is ridiculous here. In real estate, this is called an alligator. This doesn’t even start to get into the ethics of growing corn for energy or cattle feed when people are starving everywhere.

BTW, Sugar Beets yields double per acre what corn yields as an ethanol stock.

4. Deforestation, especially for ethanol crops or beef

Forests provide so many services, and are so productive, that there is not one good reason to cut them down. They create oxygen and soil, sequester carbon, filter and store water, maintain genetic diversity, prevent flooding, grow food, timber and medicine. Forests are a resource without a measurable opportunity cost, because the next best use is so far below and less than their use just as they are as to be wholly inaccurate. Therefore, all of our economic activity ought to be geared toward growing and harvesting forests. A friend of mine has just started an investment fund based on purchased forestland throughout the country. He suggested that the Southern Tier, rather than targeting switch grass for ethanol production, should be replanted to black cherry, which is in high demand for woodworking and grows in only a very small area in the world.

5. Depleting energy capital rather than energy income first

This is where I get annoyed with the current analyses, even at the Oil Drum, that show that solar, wind and biofuels will never replace the demand for petroleum-based energy. The point is we are outrageously and extravagantly liquidating the assets in our trust fund, when we could be living very comfortably off the interest.

6. Lawns

The American lawn represents one of the single largest agricultures in the world, the gross product of which is very nearly nothing. It uses more artificial fertilizer than the agriculture of India and requires endless hours of mowing, gasoline-powered equipment and chemical sprays. We could easily grow the bulk of our food by simply replacing our lawns and planting to vegetables, herbs and fruit trees. When we do this we see grass as it is: a weed.

7. Suburbs

Suburbs are clearly a result of car culture. I am not one to believe they need to go away, but need to be re-designed. There is a subdivision in Davis, CA called Village Homes that is built along sustainable lines. It includes a community garden, fruit trees everywhere, extensive swaling for water retention, and sidewalks in the back yards. All new subdivisions and housing developments can be designed and planned to avoid the suburban scourges, too much driving, water runoff from streets and parking lots, over-extended infrastructure and so on. Existing suburbs can be retrofitted to reduce need for driving and replanted to useful small-scale gardens and agriculture. Some reforestation can be started.

8. Seed Patents

I have nothing against intellectual property, but the idea of cornering parts of the food market is just plain wrong. The seed companies ought to be able to patent maybe the specific changes they’ve made to existing stock, but the original DNA belongs to no one.

9. Air Travel

George Monbiot has a lot to say about how destructive air travel is, so I won’t repeat that. High Speed Rail would be a much more efficient and cleaner way to travel long distances. This is practical today but would probably require infrastructure and subsidy on a national level. I’ve always found travel by train to be much more comfortable and enjoyable than air travel anyway. If you’ve flown recently, you might agree.

10. Market Fundamentalism

The Thatcher revolution, under whose cloud we’ve been forced to live for the last 30 years represented an extremist swing away from moderate liberal capitalism, where the excesses of capitalist redistribution of wealth from laborers to owners is moderated by democratic government. We have two hundred and fifty years of history to look at here. The laissez faire extremism of the last generation needs to move back toward the middle.

As I was looking for vacant lots I got a call back from the South Wedge NET officer, Peter Saxe, who was very generous with information and ideas. He recommended I get hooked up with Rochester Roots, and one way to do so was to visit the South Wedge Farmers market, which meets Thursday from 4-8 pm, behind Boulder Coffee at S. Clinton and Alexander.

So I went and met Jan McDonald, the director of Rochester Roots School Garden program and told her I was looking for opportunities to do some Permaculture projects and also to connect with established communities and organizations. She told me about the garden project at Clara Barton School near Corn Hill, and I set up an appointment to go meet her there this morning.

More to follow.

After about two years of hemming and hawing, I finally contacted the City about getting access to a vacant lot to do some experimental gardening and urban farming. I hope to find a lot not too far from my studio and start practicing sustainable design there.

I’ve been considering, also for years, whether to take a true Permaculture Certification course. There’s a two week intensive in Ithaca starting in August, or I could do weekends there all winter (ugh!). Or Yankee Permaculture does their e-mail distance learning course over the winter. None of these courses is cheap ($1000 is the lowest I’ve seen) but the certification would give me the right to teach using the Permaculture moniker.

I posted yesterday about the Colloquium over at Rochester Turning as a comment to the post on Brighton Going Green and looked back at the additional comments this morning. Found this excellent story on the Maple Ridge wind farm on Tug Hill in Lewis County.

From this article there appear to be some key learnings: 1) get someone local interested by 2) emphasizing the income from the turbines ($6,000 minimum per in this case). 3) And maybe most importantly, find a good site. Maple Ridge is at the east end of Lake Ontario (which is very flat ) and so gets pretty constant wind. Seems to me similar conditions would prevail south of Buffalo all the way to Erie, PA. Anyone know of activity in that part of the state?

I’m considering opening up Greenerminds to guest posters and eventually to open registration. I want to see if I can attract a core group of local sustainability-minded folks first and get that running. This has been on my mind for some time, but I’m settled enough now in my day job that I can bring some focus to it.

As usual, making a decision, the road rises to meet me. I ran into Dave Vail yesterday and posed the question whether he’d want to participate. He said he’s a terrible typist, but I’m sure we can get around that. He mentioned the Natural Building Colloquium coming up the end of July in Bath, NY, and I started getting excited about the possibilities of attending. Sadly, it’s a Tuesday to Saturday thing, and registration is $400. I might still be able to justify a day or two off and that cost if I can figure out a way to recoup it.

This immediately brings up the question for me on a personal level of how much I’m willing to spend to go green, both monetarily, time-wise and in terms of convenience. I just spent about $550 for a pallet of rock, a yard of topsoil, yard of mulch and 18 lilacs for a hedge. These are capital improvements, so I’d expect to see the return when the house is sold (hopefully not for a long time). A hands-on learning experience seems expensive at $400, but what’s the return and when? I might learn something that could save hundreds in heating next winter, or meet someone which results in a ten thousand dollar idea.

The D & C ran a story this week on a new, state-of-the-art cellulosic ethanol plant to be built here in Monroe County. I don’t know much about the merits of cellulosic ethanol, but The Oil Drum was not very sanguine about it a few months ago. After hearing Eric Massa wax optimistic on the subject, I sent him an e-mail that he might want to curb his enthusiasm. As I remember, there was an issue with the enzymes and energy inputs needed for production. I’ll try and look into this further.

Interesting to me is that the plant will be located in Greece, a heavily Republican suburb, and not exactly the progressive capital of Western New York. This smells of something.

Then yesterday, they announced another plant to be built in Caledonia.

A couple of weeks ago, our County Legislature passed a budget which included shifting $175K from Cornell Cooperative Extension to a new thingy at MCC. Reasons given included things like “we’ve been getting complaints from the agricultural community about CCE.” Almost on the same day, the announcement was made that Mr. Bob King, formerly the CCE head in Monroe County, would head up the new venture. So if you were getting complaints about a thing headed by this guy, do you expect something different about something headed by him again? Rochester Turning was looking into this some.