Heat and Humidity

When I was born in Springfield, Illinois, the heat and humidity were just part of Summer. I hated going down there after my parents got divorced, for no other reason than the ridiculously high humidity and the sweltering days. Now, the climate has shifted north and we are in the hot zone. Yesterday, it felt like I was a guppy, breathing water. It was supposedly the third highest humidity ever recorded here with dew points above eighty degrees. It made me feel sick. I had to force myself to eat something for lunch and other than a few cheese curds and a couple cucumbers, nothing else even sounded good. The combination of high heat and humidity make it difficult to cool a body down and for many, exhaustion ensues. I am much happier when the temperature is fifty or below. My theory is that you can always put on more clothes if you need them, but even if I had been naked yesterday, I would have felt overheated.

What was most striking about the weather yesterday was that it just seemed to make me angry. It did not help that I was working under the conditions dictated by someone who had no idea how to get the job done easily or with any sort of common sense, but that is just a small part of the picture. The work was over an hour away by car and although the traffic was light, it still seemed way too far to drive for the amount of money I would be making. Add to this the horrible first-day traffic snarl that occurs in and around EAA and their annual Air Venture Fly -in. We had to drive over ten miles to get my carpool riders in and another ten miles to get out and back in after lunch break. Added to this, the work should have been done in less than half the time, but because of stupid decisions made along the way by "the boss", we had to spend even more time and effort doing things twice and then three times in some cases.

Hiring professionals is usually done when you need skilled workers, but this guy seemed to think we were just glorified temp workers with no skills or experience. In my case, and in the case of at least one of my fellow workers, our individual experience was quite possibly greater than his entire life span. Now, before you let that sink all the way in, I must add that we were both nearly double his age, we both grew up in the theater and we both tend to work smarter, not harder. All the heavy shit (about two tons of cable and wire) were on wheels when he arrived. The first order of business, as he said was to unload all of the copper out of the boxes and onto the floor, taking the wheels out of the picture for the rest of the day. Indeed, he did have a detailed drawing of where every pre-labeled end was supposed to be placed on the several sticks of truss... (which filled a room as large as an airport hangar) We should have placed each coil near the middle of the run, pulled half off in the direction of where it was supposed to end up, flipped the coil and run the rest out toward the source of power, but that would have made sense.

Perhaps the weather was only a small part of how angry it got me, but after struggling all day to make things work, get them finished and looking pretty, the last step of the day was equally grim. We had practiced exemplary cable management and could have gotten the last step done in about twenty minutes, but he told us that we needed to stretch out the coils and recoil them before they were sent to the dimmer racks, from which power flowed. Another ton of cable being pulled out and back nearly 100 feet was the last thing we wanted to do late in the day, but he was the boss. This leads me to the main point of my Heat and Humidity rant. The entire climate change issue is the result of letting ignorant people lacking all common sense make important decisions for the rest of us.

Since 1984 I have had the experiences of riding my bicycle around all five Great Lakes to spread the word about how to live a more enriching life, a more rewarding, full and passionate life, while using less resources and conserving the natural wonder and beauty of our planet at the same time. Back then, some called it voluntary simplicity or self-sufficiency, I called it living better for less; today, we call it sustainability.

The self-centered oligarchs just see what they want, nothing else matters. however many of us need to be maimed, killed or thrown to the curb it is of little consequence as long as the wealthiest among us continue to get their way. I used to love working with the company that I worked for yesterday, they were a big corporate player, but their middle level managers respected the stagehands union enough to let us get work done without very much interference. When this guy told us to do the opposite of what made sense, or what was smart, we should have said "No.", or at least "If you want that done, you will have to do it yourself." Instead, we resigned ourselves to doing more than double the work for the same pay and welcomed our difficult row to hoe.  The heat and humidity had taken their toll on our reasoning skills, but there was no reason to abandon our experience and skills fo rthe sake of a guy who had no clue.

We continue to break records for heat and humidity across the nation. For those of you who still think climate change is a myth, check out a few sources of information. The human species has forever changed climate, we have tools at our disposal that can change the course of our destructive actions, but we lack the will to make better choices. We have the power to stand up, with one voice, and say, "No!" all we lack seems to be the will. climatechangepsychology at blogspot is a good place to start.

Whom Do We Serve? (part two)

Years ago, my sister came up with the idea of a bumper sticker that would say just those four words. I wish that I had begun printing them then. Some ideas are so valuable that they need to be put into public consciousness and action immediately. The very act of asking this question brings far more to the table than many are willing to bring up, think about and share with others. These are the sorts of questions that are [pure gold in the realm of human evolution. If we refuse to think about these concepts, then we must be willing to relinquish the very freedoms that our founding fathers worked so hard to secure. The servitude that I am  bound to is due to my "business" with Wells Fargo Bank. Their recent re-finance of our debt will "save" two hundred dollars per month, but the time cost of that relief means that I will be paying Wells Fargo Bank an extra 10 thousand dollars, nearly half a year of the salary I collect for doing my job. I was so naive when the banks got their bailout after crashing the economy, I thought the gravy train was a one time thing. Sorry! The bank bail out continues and their freight is being paid by the few who were doing everything possible to stay afloat on the world-wide economic collapse that followed. In essence I was one of their "best customers". I have never been late on a single payment and whatever I had to do to meet my obligations, I did. It is a lasting sting, like an un-scratchable  itch, that I voluntarily entered into a social contract, I would domicile within the city limits of Green Bay, Wisconsin, serve my community, commit to a long-term relationship with neighbors, etc. I am but one of about 100 thousand people who are willing to live under the coal dust that blows through our neighborhoods, in an area where the fish can't be eaten safely, alongside petroleum tank farms and pipelines, coal piles and fly ash, we are actually paying the very real costs of all the toxic compounds in our environment, while faraway billionaires reap the benefits of our out-dated fossil energy system.

This view of the back of our rental shows another project in process. First I had to build a frame for the sun shade, next we are going to mount it over the upper porch which gets searing hot. My original plan was to utilize the solar collector behind the sun screen as an awning for the second floor, but it is way too heavy to lift up there with just a handful of friends. The solar panel was built in 1974 and has been providing 1/3 of the heat for the building for nearly ten years. This one piece of equipment has allowed me to pass fossil fuel savings on to dozens of renters who just want to feel warm in the winter. Some don't care if the heat comes directly from the Sun or from fossil energy. Those who do, like me, really love it.

On the bumper of a car, it relates directly to the fossil fuel addiction that requires us to serve people who frack, explore and "drill baby drill"! Not to mention the toxic emissions from refineries, waste land that is created, or the boom/bust economic effects of the fossil fuel industry. I have to state plainly that I have a problem with the word industry. Industry in my mind creates, fossil fuel exploitation can only, by its very nature, destroy. The only sensible possible future will use electric vehicles that are solar rechargeable.

I serve humanity generally by my teaching about biochar. When soils become healthier, so do the people who feed on the products of that soil. I once thought that buying an old quarry would be the best way to do organic agriculture, because all the soil in your beds would have to be created, so you would know the source of your compost, so you could keep it relatively clean. My soils, here in town contain lead, from the years that we were first using the automobile. Even after the petroleum distillers knew that the lead was poisonous, they fought to keep lead in gasoline un-regulated for several generations. I have to be aware of how much parent soil I add to my compost pile and the quality of the soil before I add it to food/flower beds. I do not want to introduce lead into the places I grow food and as long as I have control over what soil goes where, I can be especially careful not to add contaminated soils to my beds. Generations to come will benefit because I take the time to heal the soil, build it and enrich the native creatures who call the soil home. Serving these creatures pays back dividends that are undeniable, but hard for some to fathom. When the soil is healthier, the air is fresher, as the soil gets healthier, it holds more water, moderating temperature changes. The cascading feedback loops that are created between the soil and the organisms who inhabit it, create waste products that are literally food for plants. Serving the bottom of the food chain influences the health of the higher organisms who live around them.

If I had a dollar from every one of my pageviews, I could purchase a twenty acre parcel and begin to restore virtually all of it! Serving the future is the only hope we have. Those who claim that it is "too late" are just looking for an excuse to not put our money where our mouths are. Whom do you serve?

Climate Change

Granted, this is what climate does. Change. But is certainly doesn't change at the rate which we have pushed it to. In a myriad of ways, we accelerate the speed at which air moves. over-riding some and perturbing most of the natural flows and cycles that were formerly responsible for climate. Not weather, which we all recognize, but climate, long term trends that lead to ecological regions, ecology and individual niches. Most of our activities speed the air, creating impingement on natural flows and movements of air. Energy laden air tends to move upward, carrying particles with it into higher levels within the atmosphere.

When a house burns, air coming out has six times the volume than when it was at room temperature. Consequently, the weight of the air mass is considerably less, causing the bolus of air to rise, like an invisible balloon. Similarly, the air that flows through our internal combustion engines does the same, expanding greatly and carrying particles up and out in all directions. People may say, "My engine only displaces a small volume of air." which is true until you multiply it by a thousand or more revolutions per minute. I drive a small, efficient auto, getting 50MPG hwy. 45MPG city. I think it has a displacement of 1.2 liters per revolution of the engine. The engine inhales that much about fifteen hundred to twenty two hundred times per minute. That translates to emissions of at least 300 to 440 gallons of air every minute which "wants" to rise up, carrying dust, hazardous chemicals, carbon and debris with it.

Most people have heard of inversions, created when cold dense air lies atop a warmer level, preventing the dirty bolus of air from rising. In this case the energy embedded in the air changes from potential energy to kinetic energy as the upwelling spreads out and creates vortices along the horizontal boundary where the rising air meets much colder, dense air.

We have a winter weather pattern that persists over the Fox Valley in Northeast Wisconsin that is a giant oscillation. During the day, the Bay of Green Bay warms the air above it, and combining with the prevailing winds, slowly carry a contaminated bolus of air out over the Bay. At night, the winds reverse sucking the same air back over the city of Green Bay, the Fox Cities, Lake Winnebago, it's pool lakes and along the Niagra Escarpment beyond Fond du Lac. I have seen this daily cycle go on for over a week, creating a toxic soup of air that contains vast quantities of carbon, dust, debris and toxic compounds. The air is held down by extremely cold dense air. This single interaction between natural cycles and the human factor should prove that we are having a devastating effect on climate. This air, normally would have had a tiny fraction of the carbon added that it has today.Ignoring for a moment the toxic compounds, this thick air that we create actually captures more energy from the sun than it did just a few generations ago. Remember, as well, climate normally operates on a time scale of many many years, perhaps being stable for 1,000 years or more. Think of the 10,000 years that it took after the last glaciation to achieve climax forests that covered Wisconsin in trees. We pretty nearly eliminated forest cover in two generations and have expanded from under one million residents in the entire state, to over one million in just the Fox River Valley.

The combined impacts of our lifestyles have the ability to create catastrophic inversions as well as giant mushroom clouds of warm air from our communities. The destabilization of the atmosphere occurs any time that conditions are not right for inversions. As we burn fossil fuels that took millions of years to form, we release not only all of their stored energy, but hazardous chemicals as well. Because we will burn in hundreds of years, what it took thousands to lay down in the earth's crust, it has an effect equivalent to ten suns, just not all neatly spaced at regular intervals across the planet. Most are focused on cement kilns, cities, industry, mines, agri-business land and transportation corridors. These unevenly heated areas, especially like where I live in the Fox River Valley, give rise to rivers of rising air that act as giant walls of upwelling. If the source is small enough, it will take the form of a single mushroom cloud, but a million people strung out over 100 miles, blend into a giant high pressure ridge that can't help but influence climate in negative ways.

We are causing change. The change is several orders of magnitude greater than the Earth changes by itself. This effect can be documented worldwide, especially in developed and developing nations. It is happening now, so the time to curtail the bad habits we have learned in the last several generations must end. Multiply even a tiny number by a very large number and you will get an immense number. Our nation alone is 1/3 Billion people, using the majority of the Earth's resources. There is enough of everything to sustain us all but there are limits to what we can expect the planet to abide. The greed that it takes to justify the sense of entitlement that we have is the only thing that I can imagine motivating the naysayers. We cannot wait until every ignorant person becomes enlightened. We must act. We must require investment in proven technologies that decrease or carbon footprint. We must not be mislead by massive corporate interests who benefit most from our current trajectory. We must begin to look more critically at our way of life that taxes people around the globe for our opulence and comfort. We certainly can't allow developing nations to make all the same mistakes that we have. Many billions are looking to us for guidance in reaching their own better futures. If we want to remain an influential participant on the world stage, we need to be able to come to terms with the fact that what we tried worked for a while, but it has come back to bite us in the ass. We are dying off at higher rates from more diseases that stem from our affluent lifestyle than ever before. Change is afoot, let's not ignore it until it becomes too late!

Getting Ready for Spring Planting

As the end of winter approaches, and the frost begins to come out of the ground, many of us look forward to the coming warmth of Spring, the yielding soils and the smells of thawing compost piles.
ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. is looking forward to tree planting excursions and events that center around sustainability and permaculture. Spring is also a good time to reflect on plans for expansion and how far we have come in our pursuit of Eden. At last count we had over two dozen perennial plants that produce food each year with very little weeding, tilling, or trimming. The most work we do is the harvest.
We see our organization as a pollinator of sorts. Each of us and the groups we belong to are wonderfully complete in isolation, but once cross pollination occurs, new awarenesses and new forms begin to emerge. Through continued planting of seeds, we can reestablish life where none had been, create surplus where there had been lack and create life upon the harshest soils. Our home has been a microcosm of what we do on a larger scale across vast acreages. When we arrived here, there was one rotting Apple Tree and several very old Lilacs. The soil was prone to drying out and cracking. It had become so compacted as to only support invasive species, and very few of them. The grass always turned brown in peak summer and the water pooled around the house and made it's way into the basement.
We began a process of loving the Earth back to life, establishing a compost, mulching and introducing clay busters that would look beautiful and provide food for birds, bugs and butterflies. We planted several trees right away and added a few more each year until now there is protection from much of the harshest sun of summer and less of the biting winds o' winter for our bit of land to deal with. The longer we are here, watching what the climate dishes out, the more we see that can be done to make our part of the planet more hospitable.
Pemaculture has allowed us to find food at virtually every season, right near our back door. It has allowed us to see more wildlife, create a healthy, organic, and sustainable oasis in the heart of the city, and has led us to have such abundant harvests as to share our surplus with others. Our ecotours allow us a forum to spread the word about environmental recovery, sustainable approaches to housing, energy, and food so that more and more people can live better while using less. We invite you to share in one of our events or take a tour of our facilities. To arrange a tour, please either write or call ahead, so that we can be ready to make your stay great.
You can contact us through e-mail at: tnsaladino42@hotmail.com, write using snail mail at: 1445 Porlier street Green Bay, WI 54301-3334 or call using our number (920) 884-2224.