The true nature of sustainability@home

Sustainability at home.  The idea of this is based on a romantic ideal, the return to a better world, one  rooted in the soil, living enriched lives with our children who chase chooks and gather eggs while we pick apples for a good old fashioned home baked pie. Roll out those neat ordered rows of vegies like custom made wallpaper of our sustainability dreams. Yeah, right.

Until recently  I’ve had just a few, small, relatively short lived crisis’s of sustainability faith, but then I chanced upon an advertisement  and it changed me.

The advertisement’s for a scheme where you can rent a chook and a portable chook pen  to set up in your backyard. So far, so good. It’s the rest of the ad that had me reeling. Now you’ve rented your chook, you’ll need a chook leash, you know, to take it for a walk. Hmmm, that’s weird and contrary to the nature of the average chook. Can’t imagine they’ll take to that in a hurry. But it’s the next part that had me.  We all know that chooks are famous for pooping.  To avoid the embarrassment of a gloopy poopy you can purchase chook nappies. It was right there in black and white, chook nappies. That’s when I realised that this whole concept of sustainability at home had simply got out of hand. I know people want to make a living, and they’re great at coming up with ingenious ways to reduce our water use while creating an income, and for the most part these are commendable.  But the chook nappy - it opened my eyes. I am no longer the same person because of the chook nappy. The chook nappy is crappy.  To mix my birds, it’s the canary in the cage, the feathered aviarian that tells us that things are not well in the mainstream, backyard push for a sustainable lifestyle.

So I figure this is a great opportunity to address this issue. Usually I write about my family’s adventure in backyard sustainability, where we challenged ourselves to go six months  without spending a dollar on food, power, water, fuel or basically anything but pay the mortgage, rates, insurances while living on a suburban block.  We did that in Queensland in 2005. We did bizarre things like grow our own toilet paper, eat garden snails, kept a goat in the backyard and even went without chocolate.  We wrote about it in the book Living the Good Life,   it details the ups and down’s of the six months, lots of recipes and facts, a row of raves designed to enlighten and enliven, even maybe make you laugh. It doesn’t romanticise sustainability and there’s not one chook nappy involved.

Instead I’m writing about the Ten popular misconceptions of a sustainable lifestyle.

Myth One - Everyone loves animals, it’s great to raise your own.

Animals bust down fences, fly over them, poke holes in them with their heads, they lean on them, they dig under them, they can lift gates off hinges, and snap 6 inch batten screws.  All because they love the things that we love to eat, and with half a chance they will scratch them out of the ground, and annihilate them in less time than it takes you to grab your pitchfork. Repeatedly.

Anyone who thinks those nice white fluffy  sheep are peaceful creatures should see mine. They’re noisy, insistent, greedy, they’re forever sorting out their pecking order with the goats. You can hear it while you’re in the garden.  The kind of thud you feel through your feet the same time you do your ears. The goats ate the blackberries. Our block was so overgrown that several cars were later found  buried deep in them.  Kind of a house sale bonus –the cars are now gone, and so are the blackberries. The goats ate the blackberries, but not the cars.  Which was great, but they’ve also  ring barked my sugar maples. One goat, let’s call her Peg, is so smart she can open gates and take the lids off buckets. She did this recently. Apart from having a big feed herself, she let all the sheep in too and they almost ate themselves to death. Pegs smart.  But the pigs weren’t about to be outdone.  They must have witnessed this transgression and decided on one of their own. You’ve  got to respect them for their ability to upend a battery on the wrong side of the electric fence and break out. Being shorter in nature, they didn’t even bother with trying to outwit the latch, a pig, let’s call her Browny, stuck her nose under the shed door and, well now it kind of hangs there a sad and buckled testament to our failed understanding of a pigs strength.

Pigs are not delicate creatures. When  Browny got into the shed she too wanted to remove the feed bin lids. So she trampled them till their poor buckled sides gave and the bucket lids popped off. She scoffed sufficient food to feed several tribes of starving Africans in five minutes.  Pigs are amazing animals, they tell you they plough your paddock for you, and they do. But you have to put a formidable amount of food into their tank for them to keep up the good work.  They also turned me into someone out of a hill billy movie. Because I can now soo-eeee! like the best of them. And when they coming running downhill towards you at great speed you worry about your kneecaps.

Our nappiless chooks, are past masters at seedling removal. And I’ll never forget the time I put them in the paddock with all my lovely tall sunflowers and looked out to see them like jumping beans, leaping up and pecking out the hearts. And you don’t want to get me started on about ducks.  I have ducks that have a 90% to 10% fart to duck ratio. It’s outrageous and while I’m ducking for cover I can’t help thinking of all the methane production.

Animals are not easy.

Tomorrow: Myth two - Gardening is easy – sow the seeds in a row, watch em grow.

Vegetarianism anyone?

Pinky and Browny the two sows left the block a couple of days ago. It was quite a turbulent  time for Trev and I. We'd both got to enjoy having pigs, they have the average intelligence of a three year old, and while this is geared mostly around how to incorporate more of the world around them in them, they are an engaging animal. They love a scratch and are always curious to see what you are up to. I've got a kick out of opening the back door and doing the 'Soo-ee!' and watching them run from all over the paddock (especially when there were piglets) for whatever treat I was brandishing at the time.

But the pigs have been a failed experiment on a number of levels. They did get rid of the bracken fern, but continued to over hoe the paddocks, they cost a lot to feed and we're not satisfied that in the end we raised ethical meat.  It could well be a tautology. While we both agree that raising our own animals is preferable over purchasing supermarket meat sourced from intensive feedlots or sow stalls etc,  in the long run we can't, in all conscience, say it gets the green light.

Trev gets enormously peeved when I use this analogy. But I always say, 'What say tomorrow a mob of aliens came down to earth and went, 'Whoaaa! Look at all this livestock fellows! The planet has a plague of these two legged fleshy beasts, and all the fleshiest bits are conveniently naked, that'll make it cheap and easy to process. Their offspring look tender too. They'd be great snapfrozen at about six months of age. We could even work out a way to get them to smile just before we do, they'd be sure to sell better. We'd make sure to give them good lives, make their end nice and quick. It'd be an environment win/win too. They've overpopulated to the max and are destroying the planet. So let's stop off here on our way to planet bla bla and cull them back to manageable levels.'

All sounds fairly reasonable from the viewpoint of an alien.  Yet we'd see it as a horrendous concept, but we use the same kind of justifications when applying it to other animals. Trev says I'm anthropomorphising but I don't see it as being any different. Animals form relationships with one another, they can feel fear, no one can see a mob of piglets or lambs gambolling around not to know that they can play and feel pleasure. And in the end we are, in the developed world, affluent enough to be able to choose to source our protein from plants. Eating another animal might only be justifiable if it came down to a 'well if I don't I'm dead' scenario.

It's vexed.

Then of course we sold off all these cute piglets knowing that for most of them it will be a short stay on earth in their current form (longer as fat on human thighs). And Pinky and Browny were enticed (oh so grudgingly) but so trustingly onto the back of a truck several days ago and will be making an appearance again soon as sausages in our freezer.

I never had any intentions of eating them. But I did agree it was a better way of acquiring meat. Well. I've decided differently and Trevor, though nowhere near as adamant as I am, is also unsettled by the experience and agrees we won't keep pigs again. Apart from being 'tractable tractors' that have hoed up half of our block, eaten an enormous and unsustainable amount of food while doing so, and woken us every morning grunting impatiently at our bedroom window, they've been a great personal insight into our ethics.

And Caleb – he was quite happy to lip his licks when he saw them walking around in the paddock, he'd refer to them by their composite meaty parts and would grew so excited by the prospect of eating them he talked about needing a bacon inhaler. 

What are your thoughts on the ethics of eating meat?



What's your view of the composting loo? Can you deal with your own poo?

Trev and I like to say we can deal with our own shit. But strictly not true as it's Trev's job to clean out the dunny.  I maintain a discreet distance while pointing out what fruit trees I want it planted under.  Caleb loves the new house, but is embarrassed when his friends come to stay and we have to introduce them to the loo. He doesn't like the toilet.

We have a Enviro-let. A self contained unit that heats and mixes our ordure in order to turn it into usable compost. Building codes meant we had to build a small hatch in the side of the wall to pass the tray of compost through so as not to walk it through the house. It's supposed to be every three months according to the manufacturers specs. But in reality it's more frequent that that.  When  you sit on the seat two plastic leaves slide to the side and you do your biz. When you get off, they close. We also use a small fitted lid that sits above the leaves to reduce any possibility of smell. It's not normally smelly.

We don't like this toilet much either. It is our single biggest power user in the entire house. We used it in our old shed because we were able to buy it secondhand (hey, we can deal with other people's shit too) and it was only going to be temporary till we found a better option. We haven't yet, and the council only has a few options it has given the tick of approval to.

We had a Nature-loo in QLD, it was great. It was a porcelain bowl with a wooden seat, it looked quite normal till you lifted the seat and where the porcelain ended a black chute began. No s-bend. Basically it was a glorified long drop with an exhaust fan, it extracted the wiff through a roof top vent and was typically odourless. That was unless the power went out and then we wrapped a especially bought gladwrap roll around it till the power resumed. At the bottom of the house we had two large black Dalek shaped and sized plastic containers where the poo was stored. The wee is drained off, in this case into an otherwise un-used and pre-existing septic tank. The trouble was that whenever you wanted to exchange the Dalek's they were enormously heavy. It was our only grizzle. We needed a trolley system to reduce the weight.

Amazingly when our poo is composted, our annual 'yield' weighs in at an average of 25kg. The thing that really bothers me is that the average Australian uses 16,000 litres of potable water to flush away that 25kg of waste per year. Then we spend a lot of money and resources trying to treat it. It never becomes an asset. It is treated anaerobically not aerobically, which means it forms toxins instead. It's like the big doh! of civilisation.

Here's an excerpt from Living the Good Life on using it in the garden.

The gardener’s reward

The raw material is broken down by micro-organisms, and thermophilic action (heat), which kills pathogens and viruses, and the length of time itself renders most possible vectors for disease harmless. As the composting system is aerobic, microbes, which require an oxygenated environment, are able to break down the compost into a useful plant food. The humus is covered in pores, which shelter nutrients, water and air more than soil can, and it releases nutrients gradually as it breaks down.

When emptying a composting toilet the ‘humanure’ is required, by law, to be buried. To be on the safe side, it should not be used on vegetable beds, but buried under a tree and covered in mulch.

In many less squeamish cultures, humanure is a useful source of topsoil on food crops. In the past Japanese farmers would vie for travellers’ excrement by building comfortable roadside privies and, once it was composted, they would use the deposits to enrich their soil.

According to composting toilet manufacturers, installing composting toilets in households is a slow-growing trend. Stuart Elliot of Nature Loo wonders ‘why the government doesn’t recognise the benefits of composting toilets and provide incentives to people who install them’.

As John Foss of the Surfrider Foundation (Surf Coast) says, ‘Recycling human and industrial waste is the only way that Australia can manage sustainable population and agricultural and industrial growth into the future’.

Any way you look at it, it’s time we got our shit together.

What about you? How do you feel about composting loo's and seeing your own poo's?

Photo is of the loofah's we used instead of loo paper. Still would if only I could get it to grow successfully here. I'll keep trying.

Community Supported Dairy's

This is an old photo - it's a younger Trev and Possum, our lovely old four litres a day harridan from Queensland. It adds up we've been drinking goat's milk for the majority of the past ten years. A wee pause when we first got here, and another now as we've dried off Peg and Tilly. So it's cow's milk until they're freshened again with new kids. I don't mind cow's milk, it's gluggier than goats milk but the only place I notice the difference is in a cup of tea. But the thing that gets to both Trev and I is milk containers. Wouldn't we love to buy milk in glass bottles that you return for a full one!

We're not going to be able to get up early and milk goats forever, when we're older we'd like the option of a local, sustainable, organic milk in a glass bottle.

We've read a lot about Community Supported Agriculture and watched the 2005 movie The Real Dirt on Farmer John. An interesting take including a bit of crossdresser while driving a tractor. Novel. But I wonder about the possibility of a Community Supported Dairy. I've been talking to an interested councillor in the area about the possibility. I wonder, does anyone know of one in Australia? A place where local milk from a variety of suppliers is processed in the area and sold directly to retailers, no middle men, in glass bottles, which can be returned?

Vegetarian Sport

A bit of vegetarian sport in the pumpkin patch.

Facebook Pages - Who Killed Dave? and Living the Good Life

I admit it, I'm a novice when it comes to social media. Apparently it has the power to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Though I  know one thing - it can get to you faster than a speeding bullet!

http://www.facebook.com/WhoKilledDave
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Living-the-Good-Life/355125247881999

I'm hoping to expand on these pages and start fb-ing more. Caleb is my supervisor, though his 'Oh jeez mum, don't you know anything?'  is getting a little repetitive :-)

The Trevorium

The purple blanket has been vanquished, in its stead is a handmade door made a la Trevor. In fact we should call the house the Trevorium. Above the door you can see Trev's well engineered steel platform that holds the hot water cylinder now artfully covered in plasterboard.

Trev's also worked on the bookshelf in the office area. It covers one wall and it's our goal to completely fill it with books. At the moment it has far too many copies of Who Killed Dave?
on it. We left a lot of books behind when we left QLD, and I often regret not bringing them with us.

Must take photos of our bedroom. We're still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It looks very zen, but doesn't do our backs much good getting up in the morning. I also have to take photos of what is no longer the floordrobe and the pantry, Trev's finished milling up and making the shelving.  Might make the supreme effort tomorrow :-)