Finding and Using Manual Power or Low Energy Solutions

“When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open, and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.” - Michael Bridge

Part of our personal quest for sustainability as a family has included finding ways to do the things we do with less energy. Part of this includes making some of our own food from whole foods instead of buying processed equivalents. Yet this means we have to use tools in the kitchen that are more readily available in energy-sucking versions like food processors, microwaves, mixers, etc. Where we don't feel we can get away from using a tool entirely, we've tried to slowly replace these tools with manual powered or low energy solutions.

Manual powered and low energy alternatives we are using in our kitchen.

We like coffee. We decided while we don't drink a lot of it, we weren't prepared to entirely give it up... yet. We also prefer grinding our own beans. We had an electric grinder that we bought at a department store but it recently stopped working. This time around we decided we would go to the local kitchen goods store downtown and buy the hand-cranked coffee mill you see pictured above. It works great, and we are now using no electricity to grind our own coffee. We still haven't settled on a low energy solution for making the coffee, but we're considering a French press when our auto-drip coffee maker stops working. In the meantime we finally found and bought a replacement Hot Shots (also pictured above) to heat one or two cups of water at a time for tea, broth, hot cereals, or for whatever else we might need small amounts of boiling water. Using the Hot Shot is a lot more energy efficient than heating it in the microwave or heating a kettle of water on the stove.

We had an electric food processor that a relative gave us, but we rarely used it. We knew we wanted to use a food processor more, but we also couldn't justify using the electricity. We found our hand-crank food processor pictured above and have been using a food processor more (for example to make our own hummus as you can see in the photo) but not using any electricity to do so. We've had the hand-crank mixer the longest. It was a gift from a college friend. We would like to find one that is a little more user-friendly (the handle on this one slips a lot) but for now this one has served us well enough. We also were given a three-cups measuring cup set that included lids for grating cheese or vegetables and for hand-juicing fruits, which allowed us to also give away our electric juicer.

I really would like to find ways to do things like make toast or bake or roast in more energy efficient ways, but we haven't yet found or settled on anything. We have south-facing windows in our apartment, so there must be a way for us as residents in an apartment complex to use solar options that are non-permanent -- meaning we could put them in the window while in use and tuck them away when we're done.

Do you have any suggestions for manual powered or low energy solutions for kitchen or household items? What has or hasn't worked for you? Are there any of these devices that you share with neighbors so only one person has to own but many can benefit from its use?

P.S. I have been biking more and more as a means of transportation. I'm up to biking at least twice a week, some weeks more, and my average trip to run errands or keep appointments is between 4 and 6 miles. I've found I'm more keen to line up my errands and appointments to make efficient use of my time and get more done with each commute.

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

"The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine." - John Howard

So far so good on the bike commuting! I've managed to keep myself motivated to bike to and from campus even in the rain, and have started working bicycle commutes in elsewhere when possible, such as biking to a gathering with some classmates and acquaintances. It turns out my trip to and from campus is actually 2 miles each way instead of 1.5. I've managed to get my time down to about 15 minutes to get to campus (slightly downhill) and about 20 minutes to get back, so not bad for someone who is morbidly obese and out of shape! Hopefully the exercise will help the latter two concerns.

I had baskets installed on my bike so it makes it very convenient for carrying along my book bag, my lunch, and my change of clothes, washcloth, and towel. I bike the 2 miles in, wash up a bit and change, go to classes, and then bike the 2 miles home once per week, except there will be three weeks this semester when I will do that trip three times in a week. We're going to order another trailer hitch for the bike trailer so I can have one on my bike in case I need to take Ian somewhere by myself or in case Kathy needs me to take the trailer or I need it to cart something around too big for the baskets. Otherwise the trailer stays hitched to Kathy's bike in case she wants or needs to go somewhere while I'm gone for a day of classes.

I'm quite excited to have transformed a 180-miles commute in a gas guzzling pickup truck each week into a 4-miles commute by bicycle. That's bound to have a significant impact for the better on our carbon footprint. I feel the decision to relocate and invest in our bicycles has been a huge success in walking (or rather bicycling) closer to our talk. Here's to more and more bicycling and less and less driving!

Eating Vegetarian and Progress on the Bikes

"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I couldn't have found a better quote to start this post, because it's my own complicity with which I struggle. For me the complicity is with a system that inefficiently consumes far more (plant-based) food than the amount of (animal-based) food it produces. It's complicity with a system that creates through assembly-line slaughter practices a great deal of pollution and disease. If I could afford to eat local, sustainable meat from farms and animals I could get to know then I would do so in moderation, but the frustrating reality is that for anyone not at least well into middle class buying local meat is one more big stretch on top of the big stretch to buy whole foods instead of processed foods.

That stated, we do go out to eat from time to time because we've learned that if we don't treat ourselves on occasion we end up caught in a cycle where we are very strict for a while and then we binge, which is neither sustainable nor healthy. I've made a very intentional effort to get myself past this little niggling inner voice that tries to convince me that eating a mostly or entirely plant-based diet would be boring and yucky. On those occasions when we go out to eat, I find the vegetarian options and order from there. The reason for this is that I want to have some very good, delicious experiences with vegetarian options to prove to me that I can feel satisfied with what I just ate both physically and emotionally. I want to experience good vegetarian options that make me both full and happy. So far so good. We've also purchased a decent little vegetarian cook book and started buying ingredients to try some of what look like very yummy vegetarian and vegan options.

Now that we live in the same town as my graduate school, we are really taking bicycle serious as a mode of transportation. We finally got around to fixing up our bikes (with the exception of replacing the seats with more comfortable commuting options), attaching the bike trailer to one of our bikes for our son to ride with us, getting bike helmets (safety first!), and deciding to start going for family bike rides with the goal of using them as our primary means of transport around the city. It's only 1.5 miles from home to school for me. If I could once commute 5 miles each way by bike between home and work, 1.5 miles each way should be easy enough to work back toward. Here goes something!

The Challenges of Renting and Living Tiny

“Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

Our family has decided to relocate to the city where I attend graduate school. On the whole this is a huge plus because I've just cut out 180 miles of driving (at a minimum) a week from my life. That's a huge carbon emissions reduction right there. We're a mile and a half away from school, which is definitely a good biking distance for losing weight and getting in shape again. Overall, I'm very happy with this move.

In the process of looking for a new apartment or home to rent, we realized just how fortunate we are to have lived in this little cottage of roughly 500 square feet we're leaving behind. We were quite happy to live in a single bedroom apartment, but very few landlords with single bedroom apartments would rent for a variety of reasons including septic systems, insurance reasons, or in the case of the apartment complex we settled with corporate policy. While we only ended up increasing our living unit size about 150 square feet, it still feels like we're moving in the wrong direction to me.

Nuts About Soap Nuts

"I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world." - Mark Twain

We finally used soap nuts (berries) to do our laundry and we love them. Our clothes come out clean and soft and we aren't using petrochemicals to wash them, so that makes us happy. We're still machine washing for now so we don't know how well laundry will go making a liquid soap from the soap nuts, but tossing them in the wash in little cotton sacks has been great so far. Added bonus: we also got my parents using them! For anyone that knows my parents, this is a really big deal. We left them a whole box after they tried them in a couple of loads and we'll get another for ourselves before our next load of wash. We've found that in the machines at the laundromat we can use five per load and use them two or three times before swapping the nuts in the sack. We also wash exclusively in cold as it seems to make the soap nuts last longer.

It's not all success, though. We followed the instructions for stain treatment and found that it was rather wasteful and not very effective to use the soap nuts for stain removal. We'll need to find a natural stain removal technique that's more effective and not nearly as wasteful.

Word of warning on the smell: soap nuts don't really smell great. I think they smell a little disgusting myself. That said, we don't smell them at all in our clothes. Our clothes come out not smelling like anything, which really is quite refreshing. We even had a load of musty clothes and towels that got wet when our water heater leaked and sat for a few days before washing. They were really stinky going into the wash and came out smelling like... nothing, clean in the truest sense.

It should be noted that we use soap berries, which we refer to as soap nuts because the terminology seems to be that both soap berries and soap nuts are referred to more generally as soap nuts. We looked into growing our own and what we learned is that actual soap nuts contain more soapanin but the trees that produce them aren't very hardy and take seven years to produce, meaning we're not likely to be able to grow them ourselves. Soap berries on the other hand come from a more hardy tree that produces in only two or three years, but the berries contain less soapanin and thus we'd need to use more. Even still, it seems more likely we could grow soap berries for ourselves.

It's The Little Things...

"All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small." - Lao-Tzu

We finally made the switch from regular laundry detergent made from petrochemicals to soap nuts (actually, soap berries). We have yet to actually try them but will likely be doing our laundry for the first time with them tomorrow, so look forward to a report on how well they worked for us. I would ultimately like to grow our own soap berries, but we're looking at waiting anywhere from two to seven years before a tree produces the fruit, and we don't have a definite permanent or even long-term residence right now with graduate school still in the scenario for each of us for years to come. Even still, if I'm going to buy something to wash my clothes that comes from somewhere else, I would rather take the naturally grown product that uses no petrochemicals than the conventional petro-based detergents. My hope is to eventually switch from a washing machine to doing laundry by hand in the tub, but for now we're taking small steps and acclimating.

We've also taken smaller steps toward replacing electric appliances with human-powered versions. We found a hand-crank food processor that we're going to try. It's plastic, which isn't great, but at least it doesn't require electricity to run. We need to get a better hand mixer to replace our poorly designed one, but otherwise I actually enjoy using it because it gives me a little bit of a workout in the process and is a bit cathartic (although frustrating with our current poorly designed mixer). My hope is to find human-powered ways to do things while still using appropriate technology to do them efficiently.

We've started buying a little more local food and hope to increase this. In conjunction, we've agreed to limit our meat consumption (which has big negative environmental impacts and is an expensive part of the food budget) to no more than three pounds a week and try to find other ways of getting complete proteins from plant-based sources. If we can stretch out meat effectively through stir-frying and other creative meal preparation, we can return to more ethical, humane, and healthy meat purchasing practices that support the local, non-corporate farms even on a very limited budget.

All of this and more isn't much now, but we hope it will add up. We're going to try square foot gardening to grow food. We're also going to try canning and other non-refrigeration preservation techniques to tackle our biggest energy drain: refrigeration. This will be a challenge as renters, but not impossible. Suggestions and advice are always welcome!

On Corporate Power, Rights of Nature, and my Advocacy Work

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." - Alex Carey

I had the great fortune of having to read Ted Nace's book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy for my Political Economy and Sustainability course in graduate school. I really appreciated how Nace laid out the corporate legacy and history in both America and our English roots. So much of the Revolutionary War and the original hope for our new nation was to reject corporate power and restrict rather than enable corporations. That our Constitution doesn't even mention corporations was an alternative to the original discussion around outright banning them. Originally corporations were restricted to very specific charters that could be revoked, couldn't own stock in other corporations, and were more place-based.

Over time in our nation the corporations have found ways to use the Constitution (such as in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company in which railroad tied Supreme Court justices granted corporations personhood based on a perversion of the Civil War amendment meant to give freed slaves (well, male anyway) equal protection and due process) to give corporations more rights and power than the people. Nace gives great insight into the how and why of this rise of corporate power.

I also recently attended a Daniel Pennock Democracy School session in my state where I learned more about the history and consequences of the rise of corporate power and how to work against it with rights-based and place-based organizing. I strongly recommend if you can attend a session, or if you need to organize to fight corporate power in your community consider arranging for a Democracy School. The instructors did a great job of presenting more of the how and why, but also the consequences for the people and the rich history of how corporate power and even our Constitution are contrary to the principles upon which our nation was originally founded.

What I have come to recognize is that for all of the social justice and sustainability work that I would like to do or am doing, a couple of the root causes are corporate power (the excesses and reckless abandon of corporations has a devastating impact not only on our communities but our environment, which is an important part of our community) and the lack of defining law to check corporate power and spell out inalienable rights of nature in a way that the community can defend against abuses against nature. I'm hoping to rework my Theory of Change and really return again to focusing on corporate power as a root cause while also trying to deal with specific symptomatic issues, as well as adding rights of nature as a crucial core advocacy responsibility. I need to consider my personal actions, too, that enable corporations to thrive and continue repressing and how I can reduce my contribution to the problem while I find ways to help build defining law that can return our nation to one that sees the inherent harm in corporate power and restricts rather than recklessly permits corporate power to be the rule of law.

Class Background and Eating Disorders

"Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger." - Gary Oldman

For the past two weeks I have been working on an assignment for my Diversity, Justice, and Inclusion course in graduate school. Using questions about class background from a worksheet written by Paul Kivel, we were to explore our class background and how it has shaped the people we are now and how we make our decisions and interact with others. I am very much from a working class (at times borderline working poor) family and it was especially emotional to revisit my past and drudge up stuff that I would have rather left there. To discuss it openly was even more emotional and stressful, but not without some great insight that hopefully I can use to progress toward more sustainable living.

When I was younger we didn't have a lot of food, though my parents often skipped meals so we could eat three meals a day. We didn't have a lot of variety or eat much beyond processed or canned foods. We ate lots of pasta, Ramen, sandwiches, bones-in chicken and pork, canned tuna, canned vegetables, and so much potatoes. Breakfast was almost always cereal or toast.

In the process of writing about my class background and our food choices, it really sank in that the lack of variety, a life of not quite enough food for everyone in the family, and very little in the way of luxury foods or eating out shaped how I treat food and dining now, including my overconsumption and desire to eat out as much as I can. This isn't something I never realized before. I just don't think it truly sank in and impacted me the way it has this time.

So there's the big elephant in the room, as it were. In striving to control my portions and change my eating habits to healthy, sustainable choices, I need to remind myself that when I choose to eat too much I'm trying to overcompensate and hoard as a reaction. I need to remind myself that eating out frequently is not sustainable and is a reaction to making up for lost time. I need to remind myself when I begin to choose based on quantity and luxury that I need to consider the choice I'm making and instead focus on quality and necessity.

Once again, much like working toward a more collaborative way of thinking and working, I need to recognize when I'm making poor choices, disable those poor decisions before they are made, and shift my thinking toward making better choices until those better choices become more automatic than the poor choices. This is going to take a lot of hard work, but it isn't impossible and is in fact necessary for me to live a more sustainable life.

100 Thing Challenge Report

"There are no failures - just experiences and your reactions to them." - Tom Krause

Well, we didn't do it. Our goal was to get down to 100 things each by January 1 and we still each have more than 100 things. That being said, we did get rid of a lot of stuff and we've changed our thinking. Now when something comes in we think of what we can give away to balance it. We think more carefully before getting something new to us on whether it is a need or a want, and if there's some way to accomplish the same need or want with something we already have. I still want to make another attempt at the 100 Thing Challenge, but for now with all that is going on in our lives, I'm happy to settle for knowing we got rid of a lot of stuff and made an earnest attempt at it. Even more important, I feel I've come away from this realizing that it isn't so much the end goal as the journey that is important. What we really needed from this wasn't to learn to live with 100 things each but to change how we think about stuff, which actually happened with us. So while we failed our numerical goal, we still have success!