Foxes and field mice

(obligatory picture)

The soundtrack to this blogpost is this song

 

I read a book recently, it’s called The Most Good You Can Do, by Peter Singer, and it inspired me to do (and write) this.

Reading this book didn’t so much change my mind as it showed me the way further down a path I am walking. My views on personal relationships (<< future linked post coming) are, one could suggest, somewhat radical. I want to extend this so as to make everything personal. Allow me to explain.

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I recently read another book (bear with me here) called Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe, which I also very highly recommend. It’s all about how to talk about complicated things with simple words (I’ll complete this part in this style). But the small piece of smart thinking that I saw that made me go, “ah”, was a little thing in this books about the “shape checker” (padlock).

Bear with me for this part, and if you find it boring or stupid, just skip to the next “–“. I will try to say what Randall said with different words, since I don’t have his book with me now: The thing that’s most interesting about shape checkers is not how they work, but what they mean.

This kind of machine, which include number checkers, other kinds of shape checkers, body-part checkers and talking checkers, try to tell whether a person is part of a group or not. These might be groups like group-that-has-the-right-metal-shape, group-that-knows-the-number, group-whose-body-part-or-talking-sound-the-checker-knows, and so on, and then it allows the person to open it depending on whether they are in the right group. This is something that is very normal for us everyday, but it’s only because we got comfortable to the deeper idea of what it means to use a shape checker: if you are not in the group, we don’t trust you. Of course, if we did, there would be no reason to have any kind of checker at all. And I don’t like this.

As difficult as it sounds (and probably is) I would like to live in a world where there was no need for shape checkers. Where nobody would steal your hand computer or car or food-heating-radio-box, and where there would be no things that are so (valuable) or so (dangerous) that they must be kept away from people by using checkers.

I think the biggest problem that stops this from happening is that some people have a lot of stuff and some people have very little stuff, and they got into groups where the first (small) group is trying to get more stuff while keeping all their stuff, and the other (really big) group is saying “help! we don’t have enough stuff.” As if that weren’t enough injustice, at the same time, all this getting of stuff is making a kind of air that makes our world very hot, which is very bad if we want to live here for a long time, and it’s also making a lot of heavy metal and other bad things go to places they are not from (usually where the people that don’t have enough stuff live), and making things get sick and die. This happens because we are either: only thinking of a our own small groups, so we can’t or don’t want to see big problems, or don’t think it’s our job to fix them, OR (in the case of people with no stuff) we have too many “now” problems to think about the problems of the world.

Sometimes, people teach wrong things to people in their group or the other group to try to make things stay the way they are (which is not good).

I am very lucky that I was born into the group of people with stuff. I have more stuff than I will ever need, and I went to good schools and met good people and did a lot of things that taught me how to be smart, and I will probably continue to make and have more stuff than I can use. So I want to spread the love around a little bit, to make things better for the other group, and also to try to make the world we live on not get very hot and kill us. What I really mean, is that I don’t want to think or act like I am in another group. Until the group I am in looks like the group I am not in, I want how I treat people to be the same no matter what group they are or are not in.

It will mean I have less stuff, but I do really believe that I, and most people, can be just as happy with much less stuff than they have now. Peter Singer says something like this in his book, but he says it much better than I do. I found out that it’s possible and even easy for me to do this because I know to be happy and in my situation, it’s not that hard, at the heart of it. It’s not always easy for a lot of people to be happy, but if they learn how, they can do more good and feel more good at the same time.

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To get back to the doing good part, I won’t try to explain or summarise the contents of The Most Good, since Peter Singer is a far better writer than I am, but I will refer to it as necessary while I talk about the steps that I will plan and take. If you disagree with or are confused by anything, good job, your brain is working! This should probably happen since I am trying to condense 211 pages of occasionally complicated and unintuitive reasoning into a single blog post. Feel free to write me, or I also encourage you to get the book and read it yourself!

The first thing I want to do is a declaration. After that, I will write a more detailed specification.

I am going to:

1. Tell you how much money people pay or give me
2. Say how much of it I am going to spend on people-that-are-not-me
3. Talk about who is going to get this money (and what they will do with it)
4. Describe how I will implement everything, and,
5. what is my plan for the future

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1. Here is all the money flows that point towards me. I have to focus on the recent times, since I don’t have all the data from the past and I also have not been completely financially self-sufficient for very long.

– At my last job, I made €3200 before, equal to €2012.59 after tax, health insurance and social security contributions. This happened for a few months, before immigration issues dictated I stop work. I will probably have another job soon that will pay me a similar amount of money. While it may not seem like a lot, to put this in perspective, that’s a few euros ahead of the yearly per-person average (PPP-adjusted) economic productivity of Cambodia.
– I used to make €800 before, equal to €642.38 after, and I will also make donations for this time period
– Every year, there’s a little money-swapping ritual in my culture around Chinese New Year. I think I pocket about €1500 each time this happens but I will count it properly next time
– Every time I get a new income stream, I will add it to this list. For example, one day someone might pay me to play my wooden box with six metal lines and make sounds out of my mouth that make people move their body and feel happy (or sad) (or both).

Why did I just do this, since normally people do everything they can not to talk about these sorts of things? Well, simply put, I this we keep this more secret than we have to– I don’t really care or think it should be important, and if it makes someone uncomfortable to talk about it, they’re probably doing something of no merit (or even unethical) and getting paid unreasonably much to do it, OR they’re a a victim of such people, and doing something really difficult and getting paid unreasonably little to do it.

Also, the reason I am writing this at all is that I want to make it public knowledge, and maybe make you think about considering doing something like this too. Telling you stuff like this lets you know I’m serious.

2. I’m starting small, but plan to increase in the future. I think it’s easier to go forward than backward with things like these, and keeping the momentum in one direction is important.

– I am going to donate enough money to get down to 90% of my after-tax income.

Because I might not stay forever in Germany (where I currently am), I am going to write off the health insurance and social security contributions– that is, not to consider I will ever get any of them back. In the unlikely even that I stay long enough to, I will readjust my numbers to reflect this. In any case, I expect my donation fraction to increase in the future, so this is not a big issue to me.

This means I will keep €578.14 of my low income times and €1811.33 of my higher income times, and give the rest away. While it may not seem like a lot, to put this in perspective, my monthly keep is just a few euros behind the yearly per-person average (PPP-adjusted) economic productivity of Nepal. That’s just bananas (bad!). Anyway, what I will implement is effectively a 10% gift, but with a few details:

I’m going to make as much tax-deductible donation (so long as the tax-deductibility does not affect the effectiveness of the donation) as possible to get my after-tax income to the desired level.
Tax systems are basically black boxes, and I am many-parts untrusting of the German government to spend enough on the right or important things, and I am some-parts disapproving of the spending distribution of my taxes paid.

At first, I wrote a very lengthy paragraph here, but let me just cut it down to spending I don’t approve of. In principle, I don’t believe in regressive spending. This includes infrastructure that disproportionately benefits  higher income people or special interests. Munich, for example, spends a lot on roads and allocates a lot of on-street parking, which are mostly used by car-owners. Public transportation is also too expensive, and does not, I believe, have the social benefits of energy efficiency, air quality, and traffic easing build into the price. I approve of none of this. Also, I don’t support any military spending.

I’m basically saying I don’t want to give the Germany government more of tax euros than I have to. I want to decide to the furthest extent possible where my tax dollars go. I do use infrastructure, and I think if I work within the tax-deductibility structure, my cost on society will not go unpaid, but really, I don’t trust The Man any more with my first single euro cent as I do with my last.

– I am going to donate half of the Chinese New Year money, probably all of it in the near future.

3. The Most Good You Can Do talks a lot about what makes an effective donation. This can be a very difficult question. Let’s start with what is good?. I’ll go a little fast here if you don’t mind.

I think a pretty good answer is, “what increases happiness and what decreases suffering” can be considered to be good. Quite often, these things go together, which I think is very fortunate. The next question is, where can we make the most happiness and get rid of the most suffering? The surprising (or unsurprising) answer is, “it’s probably not in a developed country.” This begs the clarification, how do I know how much good I’m doing? and the answer to that is that’s very difficult to know.

How much happiness to I get from going to a concert? How about to a museum? What if the museum was nicer? How does that compare to how much happiness I get from eating? What if the food is better? What if I’m hungrier? What if the food was really cheap? What if I was blind or had malaria every year?

There are two things at work here. One is that high up the list of needs (where I am) that it becomes very difficult to measure marginal utility. Our options are also much more expensive and complex in their use cases. On the other hand, when we deal with things like life expectancy or health, it’s often much more (but not completely) straightforward to measure efficiency. Unfortunately, the problems that you usually fix in these cases exist where healthcare is really, really bad. It is also, as a feature, really really cheap.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Aravind
Against Malaria Foundation

The staple of calculating the efficiency of a donation is the Quality-Adjusted-Life-Year (QALY). This is the monetary value of the burden of some kind of condition that affects both quality and length of life, and by that definition also the cost of an intervention that solves the problem. One QALY is equivalent to one year of healthy life.

Now, it starts to get fuzzy when we talk about non-health interventions, since we’ll be stabbing at vague and small numbers (how much would I benefit from a free subscription to a magazine? 0.01 QALY per year? you see how it gets weird). But what about education? That’s a legitimately effectual but also very difficult to calculate intervention.

I think it’s best to start with health and life expectancy. The most efficient work produces 34 QALYs (about the length of healthy adult life in most developing countries– it should shock you how little that is), for about $3000. If your impact is important to you, and you’re looking at less than this, it’s probably worth a good long think about.

Now you are probably thinking, but what about the arts? but who will pay for the museums?. Here’s what I think.

While there are people suffering in the world, the least fortunate are always the most deserving of help, and I will not donate to any cause that does not help the most of them the most efficiently. I have my after-donation income that completely belongs to me, and I will go to museums and concerts, but I fix my priorities for the amount that I have set aside for the purpose of creating positive change for those who are unable to effect it themselves.

But what about the environment? I think most climate initiatives are fundamentally broken. I like a few of them, but I think the biggest thing they miss is that to fix the atmosphere, the cost of everything MUST INCREASE. Energy is way too cheap and this is the single reason why we use so much of it. Renewables cost more for the moment, and it doesn’t work to force divestment from coal and oil while keeping electricity and gasoline prices the same, driving the same amount, traveling as far, etc. Everybody wants the world to be saved but very few people are willing to change their behaviour for it.

I think that by improving life outcomes for the lowest income, least educated, most fertile part of the world, hopefully, we’ll have fewer people around and more people making more sensible demands for fixing the planet. Because we’ll all be in the same group (see group theory above). For the moment, I’ll try to fly as little as I can (I’m already a car-sharing, bike riding hippie so I don’t know how much further I can push this other edge of the envelope)

Why isn’t this my job? Well it used to be! But here’s the rub:

I wasn’t very effective. I could have been– if I’d studied more relevant things, got more relevant degrees, and so on. Coming in inexperienced and unqualified meant that I was kept to the shallow end of tasks I could take on. While I could be quite effective in the right job, the overhead to reach it was big, my chances slim, and I also burned out living in Ghana.

On the other hand, I am reasonably financially productive where I am now, and for the present arrangement of things, I produce much greater impact donating a fraction of my earnings than working in the industry of making impact.

4. I have decided to use Givewell to help me find the most effective initiative to donate to. I really want to get the most good for my euro, so I am going to give to the Against Malaria Foundation. I believe this represents as good as the highest efficiency for lives saved per $/€/£/¢, worldwide.

Each year, I will tally my donation amounts and send them off in the 1st week of January. Taxes happen in April, so I’ll have all my receipts by then. After that, I will write a report to this blog.

5. I realise that 10% doesn’t sound like a lot, and it’s not my final goal. There are of course people who donate much more than that. My number will go up, and here are some considerations:

– I need to know how much I can stably handle. I’ve been a little bit iterant for the last years of my life, and it’s nice to have a little bit of a safety net when moving jobs and countries.
– It’s just as important to give as to enjoy it. Making a sacrifice is not the point, and suffering to give is unsustainable and an unrealistic plan to do any kind of good. I’ll probe this boundary slowly.

I used 10% as a suggestion from the book, which does a few little income-breakdown exercises. I chose to use the model for someone earning roughly the same amount of money living in the Boston area, and adjust it a little bit, considering that my expenditures and tax rate and welfare allocation are a little different. I will reevaluate this on a regular basis, perhaps at each donation period, and with luck get to a higher number soon.

I realise that 10% doesn’t sound like a lot, but so few people in this world are doing even close to this, and so little of this money is actually going to somewhere it will make a difference. Hopefully, by doing what I reason to be effective, and talking about it, I can both do something and convince some people to do something to.

 

(talk to me, talk to people about this!)

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Well, that’s all for now, gentle readers! I’ll see you again in the future!

all photos: Laura Stupin

garden grow

>I sure hope it does.

Behold, my super duper greywater management solution. The long straight pipe waters some plantains, whilst the pipe with the bend in it waters what will be a vegetable bed.

I was quite appalled to find, when I arrived here, that my shower and my sink both drained out into the yard. Hello sir, we’re in a desert. And it’s the hot dry season right now.

On top of that, the sink and bath drained out of two different pipes. However, I’ve finally managed to reroute the water for good use. The kitchen drains to a much trickier location, so for the moment I’m just washing all my plates into a bucket in order to use the water, until I find a better solution.

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Constructing this system was a lot more trouble than I initially envisioned. The connections leaked. The end of the sink-drain was a sharp right angle and it was really hard to get a good fit/seal with the transfer pipe.

To make things ten times worse, PVC is notoriously hard to “reduce” (neck down to a smaller diameter) so I opted to build the entire system out of one-and-quarter inch size pipe (which is what the house pipes are) rather than a much easier quarter inch, for example.

The biggest problem it created was for the vegetable watering setup. Since the final delivery pipe is so large, it will never flood completely– which would make it conveniently drip from every hole at the same rate

I had to carefully cut, and re-cut, and prop it at a good slope, and bend the pipe by hand into a straight-but-slightly-curved shape, and carefully adjust the alignment of the holes to get an even drip along the whole length.

After many hours of work (including moving rocks, composting, digging, and hitting and repairing a water supply line to my bathroom –I have no idea what it was doing in the middle of the yard), My system is finally complete. I still have to move some more rocks and dirt to fill up the area around the long pipe to reduce the tripping hazard.

Still, I’m quite proud of the work thus far. The second-biggest plantain is really happy (the biggest one is dead). It sprouts a new leaf every week.

I’ve sown beet seeds! I really hope they sprout soon. No chickens yet.

still kicking redux

I’m still kicking too, by the way, after almost a month of drinking solar-disinfected water. I haven’t bought a plastic bottle in a month.

I also refuse styrofoam, which is waaay too commonly used around these parts. You should refuse styrofoam too (watch just 1:20 of this, starting at 1:00).

Okay. PSA over, on to the story.

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Whilst this happened a few weeks ago and has since filtered down in my memory, at the time it was one of my most visceral experiences. There are no pictures (you’ll soon see why), not that I particularly wanted to take any.

It all started when I got home one night, and a strange man who was talking with the security guard came up to me and asked me for ten dollars. Because of the time of night, and how sketchy his story was, I awkwardly extracted myself and went to bed. The security guard told me the next day never to trust that man: he’s “not okay” in the head.

–

A few days later, I was sitting in the park watching some kids play, jumping and swinging from low branches on a tree. They performed some real feats of strength and flexibility. A small child came over to hang out, and sat on a low wall in front of me.

It took me a few minutes to notice, and when I did I was horrified: his left foot was badly infected. He’d suffered some kind of injury to the ball, but the infection had spread to the whole foot: it was painful for him when I touched the top of his foot near the ankle. When his foot swelled too big for him to put a sandal on it, he limped without one. The soft skin had been punctured, and the wound was leaking and dirty.

–

After almost freaking out, I managed talk to Aldo (the boy) through some of his friends who could understand my terrible Indonesian. No, he didn’t want to go to the hospital. Yes, his parents knew about the foot. I told him he HAD to go to the hospital TODAY and offered to take him. He refused, and got up to go home.

I wanted to pick Aldo up and carry him to the hospital, but I made the better decision: to go to his home and talk to his parents.

Now, who else would has father be than the sketchy man who asked me for money? This is the part that made me saddest. They were a huge family of five kids, four plus parents (twenty three, nine, six and less than one) lived in a tiny wood-and-thatch house (out of place in a really nice part of town). The father and mother chewed betel nut and smoked cigarettes constantly, and there was a huge pile of glass bottles in the yard.

They told me that his foot had been injured a week ago, but he had refused to go to the hospital. The only reason I heard from any of them was that the boy was scared. I told them their son would have to go to the hospital TODAY and offered to take him. They agreed, and their son burst into screams and crying. I’m sure you could hear him from town, and nobody could do anything to console him, and he almost passed out from bawling so hard.

His father could neither intimidate or convince him to stop and to go to the hospital, and the mother at one point started laughing at him. They eventually put him, limp, onto a motorcycle and took him. I followed.

I really don’t blame the kid for not wanting to go to the hospital. Growing up in a home where the parents clearly lack concern for their children’s health and education, I’m sure he had a horrible idea of needles and saws and lack of anaesthesia. Well. He was right about one thing.

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I was glad I didn’t take Aldo to the hospital alone. At least this time, they didn’t use anaesthetic. I watched a doctor cut a hole to drain and disinfect the foot, and had to help his father hold his feet still while the doctor worked.

It must have been intensely painful from the screams. Pus and blood flowed freely. I watched the doctor flush the wound with antiseptic (using a syringe to push iodine under the skin) and then put some antiseptic-soaked fabric under the skin of the abscess. Scalpel, syringe, gauze, forceps, bandage.

Fortunately, after you’ve watched a goat slaughtered, you’re ready for anything, and I managed to see the whole thing through.

We left with his foot in a huge bandage, and some antibiotics. When they rode off home, I was convinced the boy hated me. He certainly didn’t look happy. His parents were strangely grateful for two people who’d watch their son’s foot swell to twice its size and not done anything about it for days. I was simply in shock that all this happened before lunch on Saturday.

–

When I checked back on Monday night to make sure Aldo had been taking his meds and had gone for a checkup, I found only his mother there, who told me that her husband was too drunk from the night before to take him to the hospital today; they would go tomorrow.

I was stunned by how matter-of-factly she said it. Could she have taken him? The father came back later, and seemed not to think it a big deal that he had missed the checkup.

They went the next day, according to the mother.

I saw Aldo at the port after a week away from Oecusse, and he looked good. I don’t think he hates me (he waves at me when he sees me now, and it doesn’t look like he’s waving his middle finger) . Except for some scarring, his foot looks normal, and it no longer pains him.

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I’m not sure how to feel or think about this whole ordeal. On one hand, I’m pretty sure it saved Aldo a foot, and I hope it taught him, if not his parents, the importance of getting injuries and illnesses addressed early. On the other hand, it’s put me in a much closer and more awkward situation with a couple of people I want nothing to do with.

I can’t believe they have such a huge family and both parents squander money on smokes, betel nut and booze, are equally terrible at raising (and taking care of) their children.

I feel very slimy interacting with the boy’s father. (I won’t elaborate) He’s pretty good at sneaking into situations that make it difficult for me to say no, as well as at using guilt and sympathy. He makes his son do the respectful handshake with me, which makes me angry. His son should be cursing his father, not thanking me.

I don’t want thanks or anything from them at all. I really didn’t want to be a part of this whole fiasco in the first place. It crossed my mind to look the other way, but Aldo might have lost his foot.

As much as I want to be far far away from them, I worry about the kids.

Sun sun sun, here it comes!

This is really turning out to be a week of innovation.

Despite the fact that I can proudly shower with the same amount of water as some American toilets flush with (1.5gal / 6l), I (still) wallow in misery and self-hatred at my use of plastic bottles.

Then, in what can only be described as epiphany, I realised that I can stop buying plastic bottles completely. I don’t even need to buy water at all. I can solar disinfect all the water I need! After all, if there’s one thing this place has, it’s sun. I’m never going to buy any more drinking water, ever!

I can’t believe I’ve known about this for so long but have never applied it. I’m starting today.

(In case any of you are worried about the whole plastic bottle business, turns out that PET bottles are safe for SODIS)

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Here is the article text (from SODIS website)

Indian study confirms that PET bottles for SODIS use are safe

29th of June 2010 – Samuel Luzi

In India, already more than one quarter million people use the SODIS method to treat their drinking water. However, especially in India, reports on hazardous substances in PET bottles have caused uncertainty among users and prevent a rapid dissemination of the method. In particular the family of plasticisers has recently given rise to discussion. While no plasticisers are used in the manufacture of PET, traces of these substances have already been detected in mineral water from glass and PET bottles. In 2008, Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research examined the risks involved in the application of the SODIS method (Schmid et al 2008). A recent study by the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai with PET bottles from India now confirms the results of the Empa study: during the SODIS process, only very small plasticiser quantities are released in the water, and the WHO limiting values for drinking water are never exceeded. Therefore, the SODIS method does not constitute a health risk if applied correctly – the people in India can safely continue to drink their SODIS water.

Certificate from the Department of Civil Engineering, India [pdf]
Project Report, Department of Civil Engineering, India [pdf]

Best idea comes second this week

You might be familiar with the bucket shower: a very low-tech way of washing. In a place like Timor, barely anyone has a shower that sprays water– only bucket showers. How it works is that you use a little plastic hand-bucket to lift water out of a large sink or barrel, and pour that water over your (soapy) self.

It’s fun, and I like it a lot.

–

I know of a couple of other “bucket” showers… I used one kind at an army camp in Australia where water was scarce, and the shower was designed for great water efficiency: you would fill a two gallon canvas “bucket” from taps, and then hoist it overhead with a rope. A tap in the bottom of the bucket allowed you to release a shower of water to clean yourself with.

With this method, the cleanliness as a regular shower is possible while using very little water. You can get surprisingly fresh and clean by vigorously scrubbing under a small stream. Another advantage is that you can determine the exact temperature of your shower, which you cannot with the old school bucket method.

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What I have invented today is a hybrid method: the bottle shower. I feel terrible about the number of plastic bottles I use here. Despite concerted attempts to drink as much (boiled) water as possible from the pitchers at restaurants and only to buy water in the most efficient size (can’t drink from the tap here), I’ve still got a few big plastic bottles on my hands.

If you’re thinking that what I do is to fill them up with water and than shower with them, you’re absolutely right. It affords me not only better aim and flow rate control (it’s easy while taking a bucket shower to dump out all the water from the hand-bucket and completely miss yourself, or to simply pour more than you intended) but also helps me keep track of how much water I use, by counting the number of bottles.

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This is my contribution to the world today. You’re welcome.

That island in the sun

Singapore used to style itself as the “garden city”, but these days everyone is trying to be just that. Last I heard, Singapore wants to turn that all around, and be a city in a garden. Now that’s pretty neat.

–

My sister’s been working for gardens by the bay, a new “concept park” in Singapore, and she’s told me a bunch of neat stuff lately. Now, I ain’t the biggest fan of this country, but they have actually done quite a few neat things.

They built a very under-publicised water solution which won a big international award, and from what people tell me (the descriptions online aren’t great), is indeed a very well designed and effective project. From what I hear, it returns water to the ocean cleaner than the water that flows from the ocean in. The green roof on their main building emulates the other high profile green roof in Singapore.

Gardens by the bay looks like a really neat project too: whilst they are building gardens with climates very different from Singapore’s tropical weather (mediterranean woodland and cloud forest), the developers are carefully keeping track of every input and output to make sure they make the best use of resources, and carefully designing buildings to carry out functions passively and use minimum external energy.

While the pictured green roof is not as effective as one could be (roofs can grow food and sprout trees and bushes that are much more effective at soaking up carbon than grass. this roof looks like it’s pretty high maintenance too), you must admit, it’s kind of a sexy building.

High end developments are really not my style, but it’s nice to see the whole “green” movement being invested in and held up as something to aspire to, especially in a country I strongly associate with materialism and luxury. And while we might not want a green roof like the one pictured on every building, the first step to getting awesome green roofs on every building is getting people to want them.

That island in the sun

Singapore used to style itself as the “garden city”, but these days everyone is trying to be just that. Last I heard, Singapore wants to turn that all around, and be a city in a garden. Now that’s pretty neat.

–

My sister’s been working for gardens by the bay, a new “concept park” in Singapore, and she’s told me a bunch of neat stuff lately. Now, I ain’t the biggest fan of this country, but they have actually done quite a few neat things.

They built a very under-publicised water solution which won a big international award, and from what people tell me (the descriptions online aren’t great), is indeed a very well designed and effective project. From what I hear, returns water to the ocean cleaner than the water that flows from the ocean in. The green roof on their main building emulates the other high profile green roof in Singapore.

Gardens by the bay looks like a really neat project too: whilst they are building gardens with climates very different from Singapore’s tropical weather (mediterranean woodland and cloud forest), the developers are carefully keeping track of every input and output to make sure they make the best use of resources, and carefully designing buildings to carry out functions passively and use minimum external energy.

While the pictured green roof is not as effective as one could be (roofs can grow food and sprout trees and bushes that are much more effective at soaking up carbon than grass. this roof looks like it’s pretty high maintenance too), you must admit, it’s kind of a sexy building.

High end developments are really not my style, but it’s nice to see the whole “green” movement being invested in and held up as something to aspire to, especially in a country I strongly associate with materialism and luxury. And while we might not want a green roof like the one pictured on every building, the first step to getting awesome green roofs on every building is getting people to want them.

Real big on quarks

It’s official: century gothic is the “greenest” font, using 30% less ink than Arial, and even more economical than some eco-fonts.

It’s so green that the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay changed their default email font to century gothic to save the ink, the environment, and most importantly, money: 30% greater text-for-ink efficiency is a lot, since printer ink costs about $10000 a gallon.

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I’ve also heard, but found conflicting arguments, that dark coloured webpages save energy. Whether they do or not, mine’s dark because I find gentle lights and dark backgrounds easier on the eyes.

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Finally,

This is super awesome: Loband is something like a browser-in-a-browser (perhaps not an accurate description) written by a bunch of really smart guys one of whom I saw speak at this class (which is really awesome and welcoming to audit-ers and not-MIT / not-students). It’s neat because it allows an internet user to load all of the content of a webpage text-first, and then waits for instructions to load pictures, sounds and flash…

Okay, I figured it out. It’s a service that’s run on a high-bandwidth server, to be accessed by users in low-bandwidth areas. It filters websites requested through the service down to their core content at the server before sending it to the user, reducing the amount of information that needs to be transmitted. As the name suggests, this allows for efficient and judicious use of bandwidth in situations where connection speeds are low.

The original business idea was for a whole bunch of high speed servers running loband in Europe-near-Africa and Asia-with-internet-near-Asia-without, allowing users in these countries better access to the internet, and easing congestion in those networks. I can’t remember who was supposed to pay for it– perhaps internet providers in those countries, who benefit from less traffic? I don’t recall, but I do remember it made a lot of sense when I heard it.

I don’t know how that worked out. In any case, Loband is a useful card to have up your sleeve.

Hippy hoppy

After visiting IDDS, I had a great week-and-a-half in Santa Fe and other places, NM. I stopped on the way back for claw fights atop Mesa Mentosa and camping at Ghost Ranch (one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been), and happy fun times camping with the Stupin family in Colorado (on the way to and from IDDS). New Mexico is one of the most beautiful places on earth*.

I danced some tango in Santa Fe, which turned out to be really nice. Santa Fe (and surrounding area) has some great dancers, who are super friendly and sweet. I haven’t been dancing so much lately, and I forgot how having awesome dances with just a few people can make my evening.

I drove up to Taos, NM with Laura Stup, Papa Stup, and Carla Tennenbaum (artist extraordinaire from Brazil, who was at the last two IDDSes) to see the Earthship office/visitor center.

Earthships are SUPER AMAZING!

There are a few basic principles of Earthships (Earthships are houses people live in). They (quoting Earthship Biotecture):

-Heat and cool themselves naturally via solar/thermal dynamics
-Collect their own power from the sun and wind
-Harvest their own water from rain and snow melt
-Contain and treat their own sewage on site
-Produce a significant amount of food
-Are constructed using the byproducts of modern society like cans, bottles and tyres

Whilst most of these principles are really quite common-sensical (from just a simple efficiency viewpoint), what is really impressive is how well the Earthship folks design and build an integrated system that efficiently and effectively accomplishes the design goals, and continue to improve and optimise their system as they gain knowledge and experience.

The best part? They claim to be pretty much on par with the cost of conventional construction, per square foot. This is a really powerful thing: people no longer need to make an economic sacrifice to achieve an ideal or principle goal.

(Photo by Carla)

This feels like the future to me: it’s low impact, it’s beautiful, it makes economic sense (of course, don’t get me started on how I think that the true costs of producing goods and electricity and disposing of waste are not presented accurately to the consumer, encouraging people to live unsustainably), and, to use the words of the Earthship folks, if your pocket is deep enough [they] can design and build anything you want.

Still, I’m not one hundred percent satisfied with where Earthships are, just yet. There are two things that I’m just a little unsettled by:

The simpler of the two to explain is that many of their buildings use aluminium cans and glass bottles as “bricks”/filler material for concrete or adobe, to make walls. This is in line with their principles of using recycled materials, and also allows neat designs (in the case of bottles, it lets light pass through walls). I have a problem with them using cans in construction because aluminium is such a high value recyclable material. (glass does not have this feature) It takes a fraction of the energy to smelt new aluminium to melt down old aluminium and re-use it. And it takes a ton of energy to smelt new aluminium.

It just struck me as a little bit careless.

The second thing that unsettled me was a conversation between a visitor and a staff member. It wasn’t quite a conflict as a clash of ideals: the visitor had a house that was hooked up to the electrical grid, had an array of solar panels and was able to sell electricity back to the grid (produce a surplus of energy) despite using electric stoves and electric heat. The staff didn’t seem to approve of being connected to the grid, as if it might undermine the house’s energy independence — even though the house was actually energy positive, and Earthships rely on propane, a fossil fuel, for cooking and heating.

I didn’t have a problem with the ideas put forth per se, but was surprised by the defensiveness and disapproval.

Still, final verdict: Earthships are super awesome! One day I’ll live in a house that works just like that, harvests water and solar power and grows crops and has chickens (for eggs) and fish (for fish) which eat micro organisms that feed on the sewage stream of the house. Maybe goats?

*

All photo credits: Laura Stupin