WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME WE CONSIDERED all the costs of purchasing an item? Are we only considering what the cost will be upfront?  Or do we also determine the maintenance costs, the disposal costs, and the environmental impacts?  So many questions . . .

WELL, THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE FOUND OUT SO FAR: There are different types of life-cycle analyses that can be done.  The emerging science of environmental full life-cycle analyses or cradle-to-grave, from manufacture (‘cradle’) to use phase and disposal phase (‘grave’), are being done .  This type of assessment helps us make more informed decisions through a better understanding of the human health and environmental impacts of products, processes, and activities.

ANOTHER TYPE OF ANALYSIS IS A LIFE-CYCLE COSTING STUDY. The up-front costs of any purchase represent only a small proportion of the total cost of ownership.  The cost of ownership of an item or service is incurred throughout its whole life and does not all occur at the point of acquisition.  A purchasing decision normally commits us to over 95 per cent of the through-life costs.  There is very little scope to change the cost of ownership after the item has been delivered.  Furthermore, recurring costs can increase with time for example through increased maintenance costs as the item ages.

WITH OUR FORAY INTO THIS TYPE OF ANALYSES, we started with a comparison of a life-cycle cost analysis for LED bulbs in low voltage landscape lighting compared to the standard halogen bulbs.  We analyzed a system we were about to install which comprised quite a few lights, more than our average system, although the conclusions would not change with less lights.

THERE ARE FOUR VARIABLES that go into calculating the life cycle cost with LED lights:

•    savings in electricity costs

•    the cost of maintenance being lowered because the bulbs last much longer and don’t have to be changed every year

•    the savings in bulb costs

•    savings by using a smaller transformer as the electricity draw is less

See the detailed analysis

Conclusions

IF YOU WANT TO SAVE MONEY and have a lighter footprint, go with LED bulbs in your outdoor lighting system.  Actually go with them for your indoor lights too.  Although you will be increasing your initial cost, the initial cost will be recouped in two years.  After 20 years your savings will pay for your whole lighting system.  I suspect that no other choice in products will have this large an impact on your pocket book or your conscience.

NO MATTER WHO YOUR higher power is, the winter solstice is celebrated as a festival of lights all over the world. When the sun gets so low in the sky and the hours of the daylight dwindle down to depressingly few — at least for all of the countries north of the equator — we feel a human need to come together with friends and family. And when the sun, source of all of our life energy past and present, pulls itself out of free-fall and begins to trace arcs in the skyline that are ever-higher and higher on the horizon, we are filled with hope. Just as all living things on the planet are reborn, so may we ourselves be renewed, dedicating the year to come, let it be better and brighter.

AS THE EARTH REVOLVES around the sun, we resolve in our hearts to increase the peace in world. And we wish you a wonderful winter in 2009 and a happy new year in 2010, with love from all your friends at Green Apple Landscaping.

THE FILM STARTED OUT AS a personal project when I first apprenticed with earth architecture pioneers Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley in the rainforests of Oregon in the summer of 2004. At that time, I realized that natural building was going to be one of the most potent forces that could help shelter us from the converging catastrophes of the early twenty-first century. But it was being done out in the backwoods by hardcore deep ecologists, unaccessible to anyone else who hadn’t heard of it already. This was a grassroots movement that was never going to get good mainstream media attention; it deserved to tell its own story.

SO I BEGAN TO FILM what I saw and what I did, so that I could explain to all of my friends and relatives why building houses out of mud could be strong and beautiful, practical and affordable. It’s not easy to overcome most people’s prejudices towards dirt! In our hyper-regimented society, there is a serious stigma towards materials that are not industrially-produced and standardized. Anything out of the ordinary will usually be viewed with some suspicion, and anything that even remotely invokes the image of a ‘hippie’ house is going to get a lot of people’s guards up.

TO TELL THE STORY convincingly, I would have to prove that as a fundamental building material, unadulterated earth wasn’t only an appropriate choice for the third world, but that it had deep roots in Northern Europe and the Southwestern States, as well. To show that it could be built many stories high, I had to journey to the Middle East, and to show that it could withstand awesome earthquakes, I had to travel to the West Coast. To understand the origins of earthen architecture, I had to immerse myself in continental Africa, and to deal with legitimate questions about gentrification in the future, I had to really get to know inner city ghettoes.

IN MANY WAYS, I WOULD have much preferred to have just built my own house out of cob and be done with it, to just be the change that I want to see in the world. By now I would have long since finished building my dream home, wherever that might be in the world, sitting around the fire, baking bread, maybe taking care of a couple of goats. But there was a vacuum that desperately needed to be filled, and no one was stepping up to the plate, so I filled that niche as best as I could. And I have to say, I had a hell of a lot of fun traveling all around the world, meeting some amazing people, and learning a lot more than I would have from just staying in the same spot for four years.

THERE IS NO WAY THAT this film could possibly have been made all by myself. Computers got old and needed to be replaced, cameras broke down and new ones needed to be bought. When you’re in a foreign country and you don’t speak the local language, it’s helpful to have a traveling buddy who can take still shots while you shoot video, and vice-versa. Even if you’re using simple equipment, it also doesn’t hurt none to have another body to help lug it around across the continent and beyond. And when you’re only working intermittently on ecological activist jobs that exactly don’t pay hand over fist, there is no shame in availing yourself of ideological supporters who are willing to you get from place to place.

MANY PEOPLE CAME TOGETHER and contributed their skill sets to the project, because they believed that people need to know that the way that we house ourselves in North American is patently wrong-headed. They know that we need to look to all of our ancestors that used their ingenuity, and the common materials that were the closest — and to our best and brightest mad scientist environmentalists — who are using their ingenuity, and common materials that are the closest! Among these people, Peter held the vision, and contributed of his own time, energy, and resources to ensure that this important film would be seen by as many people as possible.

SO INVITE YOU TO WATCH the film FIRST EARTH – Uncompromising Ecological Architecture. Right now, while the DVD is still in post-production, you can see the film in its entirety in a YouTube-embedded frame on the official website for the film. Just click on the link “Videos”, and you can watch all twelve parts in succession. The website is also filled with additional material, hundreds of still photos and extended interview footage with some of the most important pioneers of the natural building movement. And if you enjoy the film, feel free to share it with anyone you wish. Happy viewing! – Compliments of Green Apple Landscaping.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVDXmUzuZUI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=stmQPaXGQzk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUOfaHt2rq4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_VkHsTWS5U

I HAVEN’T HEAR OF A SINGLE incident of city slickers building barns in their backyards and raising cows. But cows are not the only mammals that produce milk for human consumption, only the most common. Of the all animals I could have in my backyard, personally, I would prefer to split the rent with a couple of goats. Nigerian dwarf goats can get by on a small lot, and you can handle them without needing someone else’s help. Few things make me happier than starting off the morning with some pita and labane, with a little bit of olive oil and za’atar… mmm… I could easily get used to a couple slices of goat cheese on a foccacia with roasted red peppers and eggplant later in the day… Think I’m kidding? Here is a short film shot by Time Magazine about a woman who raises several goats — and chickens, and rabbits, and pigs! — in her own backyard, not four short blocks away from my former home in inner-city Oakland, California! I am seriously jealous!

NOW WE TAKE IT TO the next level: aquatic animals. Who would have imagined that you could turn your aquarium into an actual fishing pond? Indoor fishbowls are too small to produce anything substantial, and most freshwater fish will die off very quickly in stagnant still waters. But as a number of innovative urban fish farmers have found out, some species like perch and tilapia will still thrive even when confined to tiny tanks, as long as aquaculture plants are grown in conjunction with the fish. The plants feed off of the nutrient-rich poop that the fish produce, and the fish benefit from the water filtration services that the plants provide. True, for them to survive in cold Canadian winters, you would have to build a small greenhouse on top of the pond to maintain a temperate climate under the bubble. But our neighbours to the west in Milwaukee, Wisconsin experience winters that are harsher than ours, and they harvest 10,000 pounds of fish food in the middle of the city! Watch this clip to find out how they do it:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks

AND NOW WHAT MAY BE the most radical form of urban farming: beekeeping! Yes, apery is still practiced in downtown Toronto, as it has been for at least a century; the Toronto District Beekeepers’ Association was founded in 1911, and it’s still going strong. Bees are so important to the entire food chain, because they pollinate all of the other plants that you grow in your outdoor garden. And the honey that you could produce by maintaining a healthy hive that feeds off the flowers in your own backyard would be better for you than any other honey, because it would naturally inoculate you from any allergic reaction to local hay fevers. The biggest challenge that beekeepers face in the urban areas is reassuring their neighbours that homegrown hives don’t pose a threat to them or their children. It’s no easy task to overcome those phobias. But as the video clip below makes plain, even an area as urban as New York City can boast of its busy beekeepers. And as the song goes: If they can make it there, they can make it anywhere!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KSTYtS6c3E

IN THE FIRST GREEN APPLE PIE trilogy on urban agriculture, we laid out the problem in detail: the population of the planet is growing exponentially, and even factory farms can’t keep up with the rising demand for more food. The solutions being touted by agrobusiness corporations are either catastrophic for our planetary support systems or else they are scientifically impossible. The population of the planet will eventually decrease to a fraction of its current figure — it has to, at some point, we are only experiencing a temporary unsustainable overshoot that will rectify itself in a matter of decades. The only question that remains is whether that descent into a world of far fewer humans will be a slow, measured one, or a rapid, frantic one? Will the transition to the food distribution systems of the future be marked by consensual belt-tightening and right-sizing, or will it be fraught with nightmarish sectarianism and ruthless class war?

I REALIZE THAT THESE WORDS may evoke hostility and even anger in some readers of the blog. Yes, it is absolutely frightening to come face-to-face with the realization that our exceedingly comfortable way of life, based on the hyper-exploitation of finite natural resources and socio-economic pyramid schemes, is drawing to a close. But please, please, do not shoot the messenger. We cannot avert our eyes and stick our heads in the sand until the very moment that the tsunami washes away everything that we care for. But there is good news. The good news is that humans have lived on Planet Earth for literally millions of years, quite comfortably, giving as good as they got. The corkscrew roller-coaster ride of population-boom-and-bust is merely an anomalous spike in course of human history, and it certainly does not prove that humans are incorrigibly cannibalistic — only that the prevailing culture of reactionary capitalism categorically is.

SO WHERE DO WE GO from here? Well, the good thing about local food solutions is that they are all win-win solutions. Yes, they use less precious resources. Yes, they are healthier for you, your family, and for the watershed that quenches our collective thirst. Yes, they ensure our political and physical security in a world in which there are no more guarantees. Yes, they tear us away from the A.D.D.-infecting Sega systems that alienate us from our own friends and families, and bring us back to real life, back into our beautiful bodies. Yes, they make everyday activities like eating much more romantic. And heck, yeah: local food just tastes better. Period. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it sure isn’t going to fall in one day, either. But we’ve got to start sometime, and the sooner the better. For every step that we take towards the Earth, the Earth will take two steps towards us. And she’s going to feel so good to come home to.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGbnG0nH3n4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzXDWz4BZ0U

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScKnopsrT0s

I SHOULD BE FORTHRIGHT and explain here that I have some personal experience with chickens, myself. Three years ago, I was living on a modest permaculture plot in a small town. Our next door neighbours were conventional chicken farmers, and they raised what must have been several thousand chickens at a time in a concrete coop that is apparently considered to be the industry standard for housing fowl nowadays. From right up close, I could see that their living conditions were absolutely atrocious.

I DON’T WANT TO ENGAGE in provocative hyperbole, but it’s hard to not make the comparison between these cruel cages and genocidal concentration camps. Certainly, from the chickens’ own perspective, they would not be able to see many major differences between the two. True, chickens may not be capable of making calculations in advanced trigonometry. But you know what? Neither am I… And in their ability to experience physical and emotional pain, there is no measurable difference whatsoever between a chicken and your Great-Aunt Shirley.

I AM NOT GOING TO USE this forum to advocate for a vegan lifestyle. Certainly, there are a thousand and one industries that cruelly use animal products when non-living materials would clearly suffice. But there are so many competing philosophies around human food consumption, and it seems that almost every other week another doctor or dietician comes up with a new regimen that purports to grant its practitioners maximum human health. So I definitely won’t tell you not to eat animal products, but I definitely will ask of you, that if you do so, to try to do it ethically and morally.

UNFORTUNATELY, FROM MY OWN perspective, there are not really any store-bought ethical options in the City of Toronto. Now of course ethics and morals are purely subjective, and not everyone is going to agree on how other species should be treated. But the point is that the industry is dominated by only a couple of massive agrobusinesses, who grow their chickens in horrid conditions. And the laws that strictly regulate the industry are tailor-made for these faceless corporations, so even if you wanted to band together and create an eco-alternative, you can’t!

AND FROM THIS SAD STATE of affairs emerges the backyard chickens movement. Historically, city slickers have peacefully co-existed with non-human animals for as long as there have been cities. It is only in the last sixty years or so that a sanitized version of suburbia has been pre-packaged and sold to the North American people, one in which there is a complete disconnect from our food sources, and our kitchens bear no evidence as to the origins of the animals we eat. And so nowadays our children have come to believe that slabs of meat are born already stuck onto styrofoam and wrapped in plastic… (and if Biotech has their way, they soon will be)!

BUT I REMEMBER YEARS AGO when I was looking for a place to rent in downtown Toronto, I saw a first-floor apartment in Little Portugal. The landlord took me on a tour of the house, and I was startled to discover a chicken coop in the backyard, with real live chickens in it! Apparently, this was not an anomaly; lots of Italian immigrants came over to this country and maintained their traditions of raising chickens for fresh eggs. Many continue to do so till this day. It’s officially illegal, but as long as the neighbours don’t complain, it remains unreported and everyone is happy.

IN THIS CRAZY, MIXED-UP WORLD we live in where food prices are rising all the time and we can’t trust the household-name big businesses to provide us with healthy and ethical food, it’s starting to make more sense for more people to think about raising chickens on their properties. And this has not gone unnoticed by the bureaucrats at City Hall. In a couple of months, they will be rolling out a backyard chicken pilot program in a number of neighbourhoods, to see how people react to it. Just like city-wide recycling services and compost collection: if it’s a success on a small scale, then they’ll expand it to the entire city.

AND TORONTO IS NOT THE ONLY city in North America that is considering amending its by-laws to officially permit small-scale urban egg farming. Dozens of American cities have already given the green light to backyard chickens: from San Francisco to Phoenix, Portland to Pittsburgh, Seattle to St. Louis, Chicago to Boston, Atlanta to Miami, Denver to Dallas, Los Angeles to Las Vegas; even the biggest metropolis on the continent, New York City, has A-okayed raising chickens in residential neighbourhoods. Even closer to home, in Brampton to the north, Guelph to the west, and Niagara Falls to the south, town councils have spoken with one voice: Legalize it!

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? If you support the idea of legalizing backyard chickens, then please call you City Councillor and encourage them to co-sponsor a bill. If you’re open to the idea of raising chickens in your own backyard, then get educated, learn everything you need to know. And if you live in one of the neighbourhoods that gets the go-ahead to bring the chickens out from the underground, and if you’re ready to accept the responsibility and reap the rewards of having backyard chickens, then give us a call, and we’ll happily design and build you a backyard chicken coop!

For more information about raising chickens in Toronto,
check out TorontoChickens.com.

For more information about industrially-manufactured animal products, two excellent films are Fast Food Nation and Food Inc.

H E R B S

BEFORE YOU GET IN over your head, it’s probably best to start off with something small, like a small herb garden. No, it won’t fill your belly with a full meal, but it will add subtle and intense flavours to whatever you’ve got cooking on the stove. Or brew up a pot of tea from original ingredients that you know the names of. It’s kind of like getting a puppy to see if you’re ready to bring a baby into the world, know what I mean?

BUT IT GOES DEEPER than that. Historically, health care was not always state-subsidized, before there was such a thing as a state; and professional doctors weren’t always a phone call away, before there was such a thing as a phone! But in every community, there were always women and men who had immense knowledge of the local roots and herbs that could be used medicinally to effectively treat almost every condition, without invasive surgeries.

YOU, TOO, CAN HARNESS this earth knowledge and let food be your medicine, and medicine be your food. Dress your salad with vinegars made from homegrown herbs, infuse teapots with what’s growing in your garden. Cure what ails you by turning potted plants into tinctures, transform bay window gardens into botanical balms. Or relax your mind with aromatherapy by mixing essentially oils all by yourself. A cornucopia of plants eagerly await you.

V E G E T A B L E S

LET’S START OUT SIMPLE with something that’s already being done all across Toronto. The soil in this city is ideal for growing some of your favourite vegetables, and there are few things more pleasurable than walking into your backyard with nothing more than a big bowl and a pair of scissors to harvest a Sunday afternoon salad. Think radishes, green beans, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, garlic, lettuce, peas, and kale.

EVEN THOUGH TORONTO experiences horribly harsh winters, there are all kinds of fresh vegetables that can be grown in this climate. If you’re serious about taking care of a garden, then there are a number of ways to extend the growing season with cold frames and greenhouses. Either way, there are no shortage of cool-season vegetables that are both delicious and nutritious, so it’s certainly possible to keep your family well-fed on garden greens this far north of the equator.

WHEN THE SUMMER SUN starts to fade, that’s the time to start thinking about what you’re going to be eating during the winter months. Before the advent of refrigeration and transcontinental trade, what you ate in February was what you preserved in September. So after the August harvest, get out those old mason jars and start canning and pickling! You’ll be glad you did once winter sets in.

F R U I T S

FRUIT AND NUT TREES take several years before they produce food, so you have to have a long-term plan for the plot of land you’re living on. But if your children are still young and you plan to live in your house to a ripe old age, it’s well worth it to start thinking about the decades to come. In addition to fruit trees, there are berry bushes and grape vines that will go to fruit in far shorter time spans.

OUR SOCIETY HAS BECOME seriously addicted to glucose, fructose, and all kinds of highly-concentrated corn sugar derivatives that rot our teeth and turn our kids into crazy maniacs! Natural sugars in their proper proportions that come from fresh fruits are a healthy alternative that won’t increase your family’s chances of contracting diabetes.

FRUITS ARE ESPECIALLY versatile four-season foods. They can be dehydrated on drying racks, turning them into perfect between-meal snacks, or they can be canned into jams and jellies and baked into pies. And precisely because of their high sugar content, they can easily be fermented into an alcoholic drink of your choice, without any special knowledge of calculus or chemistry!

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In the next couple of blog entries, we will continue to explore the multitude of ways that your front and back yards can be so much more than ornamental trophy gardens. With a little bit of professional permaculture advice, your home could easily become a homestead on an eighth of an acre, if you’re interested in having more food security for you and your family.