My Fair Share

I guess this MyFairShare thing has been going a few years now – fits and spurts, stops and starts, yin and yan, some might even say manic and depressive.  All would be true and fair comment on my approach to most things.

I was speaking with a friend the other day.  We were both commenting on how there just weren’t enough “me’s” to do everything we had to do as well as do everything we wanted to do.

Then just tonight instead of going to bed I got in the mood to find something I had written a while back and while searching MyFairShare and not finding it, I instead found a piece which reminded me that building a more self-sustaining and community nurturing life is just like building soil.

It takes time, but the more you got, the more you can get.

That post included the above photo – about 2- 2.5 years old it is.  And, when I first saw it tonight I did not recognise it – I couldn’t picture where in my yard that place is.

Then I worked out why.

It doesn’t look like that anymore.  At that level, there is much more shade from the leguminous trees and longer grasses that have moved in to succeed the weeds and other plants that initially colonised the newly constructed swale.

It has taken not much more than neglect, but with the groundwork in place, it has happened.

How much of a parallel is there with my own life? Maybe that is a bigger question, and one that perhaps I ought ponder with another glass of cheap red wine as I stare into the darkness of what may well be our first wintry night here in Australia’s inland north.

It can take a while sometimes for things to happen, but they do seem to happen – especially if they are worthwhile.

This morning, we went to feed and water some friends’ day old chicks, and change the temperature on their incubator.  On the way home, we stopped by another friend’s – a bloke who I would not have met had it not been for The Crop Circle – and dug up the bamboo he’d been growing for us from shoots from another of his clumps.  I needed some more, and will grow my own poles, since I used the other poles he gave me to make a raised garden bed for another friend who wanted to get a raised garden going but couldn’t find a prefabricated garden bed that fit her needs – she is the lady who is looking after three horses who provided the supply of poo that I wrote about a few months ago.

When I got home, I spread out some more of the mulch that another friend had offered because they had far more than they needed and then another friend phoned to invite us over to his place to check out the new piglets that we are going to raise at his place for meat.  They had a fire recently and lost a few fruit trees, and while I was looking through my email I came across a message from a nursery that just happens to have on sale the same plants that they had lost in their fire.

And, while reading One Straw’s blog the other night, I had a moment of serendipity when he wrote of his intentions to try out some methane production following the method of Jean Pain, about which I had been reading just the day before.   So, I threw him a line and am now committed to following suit  – demonstrating the potential of methane production in tandem with compost production, and in my situation, doing it one block from the main street.

Meanwhile, the idea I mentioned last September is chugging along just fine, and may one day even expand:  Community Connections is a phone company dedicated to providing low cost VoIP telephony with high levels of local support, and when someone joins up, they get to nominate a local community organisation to whom we will give a third of their monthly subscription fees – the multiplier effect in action.

Communities of people all connecting in different ways, and yielding benefits in so many different ways.

It reminds me of something I said a couple of years back:

I like seeds.  I like how they grow from an itsy bitsy thing into a whole big and bountiful thing.

I think I like community for the same reason.

I received the following email from a member of our local Crop Circle.

I found your AWOL bantam hen and surprise surprise she was sitting on 6 eggs under the bottom of the slippery slide. She is a proud mother of 3 babies so far but is still sitting and your silky has started hatching but I am letting her go till she decides to hop off and let us have a peek. Feel free to pop around if your children would like a look.  Thank you for the loan of your girls.

Well, while we went away to help a friend who lives on a remote station cum conservation area recover from an operation, we had our chickens looked after and now the 4 have become more.  We cared for someone.  Someone cared for us.  In doing so, everyone benefited.

I think that counts as a fine example of community in action.

I stuck my arm in the compost pile that I made yesterday to see if it was going to do what it is meant to do, and it burned my fingers.

So, I turned it, watered it, and walked away smiling.

Compost is meant to get hot – I understand that. Being in the sun is probably a good thing then for a compost heap.

But, today I built one under the biggest tree that we have. Just unloaded the manure from the trailer and mixed it with a year’s worth of leaves from under the tree.

I would have run it all through the shredder but we are out of fuel – so maybe some other day.

Anyway, I was piling it all up and marvelling at how the heat was building while I was putting it together when I realised something: I don’t actually like making compost heaps in the sun.

It’s summer here, and about 40 degrees from 8am to 6pm (I guess that’s maybe 105 F?), so I reckon the air temperature is enough for the heap without the sun beating down and eating at my skin as well.

I cannot believe that it has been more than 2 years since I got some horse manure.

And so it was that yesterday I took my trailer to the place of a friend who is caring for someone else’s three horses.

There we were, two blokes collecting poo, just yabbering in the summer sun.  At one stage, there was a grandfather and a couple of kids in on it as well.  Afterwards, we stayed for dinner and fine company (a few wines and then maybe a few rums…).  What a great way,  I thought, to connect with community and tread lightly.

Now, sitting in the driveway, replete with slight steam for effect, is a trailer full of horse poo. Golden nuggets, just waiting to do the dance with our worms on the compost heaps that our vege patches turn into during these silly summer months.

I read something yesterday about the outside of the poo having some water repellant layer, which is why they hold their shape so long. The bloke who wrote that reckons the best thing to do is soak them in water, and then just pour the slurry on.

I might give it a go.

My Footprint Results

Now, if we look at the breakdown of the bar graph, we can see that my carbon consumption is significantly lower than Australia’s average almost 30 global hectares.  Actually, my household’s carbon consumption (4.3)  is less than the global average of almost 7 global hectares.

Now, I could be happy about that and think “wow, how good am I.  Clearly, I am a great global citizen, and I can hold my head high because I offset my household emissions and use green power and sometimes I walk to the supermarket.”

Or, I can view it in terms of total consumption.

Global averages for Food, Housing and Goods & Services are, respectively, about 7, 2 and 6.8 global hectares.

My own averages, while consistently below my country’s averages, are 22, 6 and 6.5.

So, what does that tell us?

It means that food-wise and housing-wise, I use triple the global average, which is still 150% of what the earth can sustain.

It also means that in terms of goods & services, I use less than average, but that is still more than what the earth can sustain.

So, where does this rambling train of thought take us?

It doesn’t matter how much carbon I reduce, there is other consumption that more than offsets any reductions that I make.  If I continue as I am, then I am destined to reduce the amount of stuff available to others, and to reduce the quality of that stuff since pressure on limited resources can invariably reduce their capacity to regenerate.

In short, and in waffle, I think the answer to my friend’s question is that “going carbon neutral” is a beneficial thing, but it is not the only thing.  In terms of middle class luxury, I think the answer is that one of the adjuncts to this luxury is the luxury of taking a blinkered approach to things, by isolating individual components and focusing on them to compensate for our unwillingness to focus on our real impact on natural systems that affect others.

And that is why this post comes under the categories of Tread Lightly and Reject Greed.

Post script:  I am aware that I am typing this on an electricity hungry, highly polluting personal computer instead of doing good work to save the world from the tyranny of my own hyprocrisy.

I have never really had the patience for composting. Turning, building, watering, etc all seems a bit too planned for the way I tend to be … which is to say that I am probably just a bit disorganised, dithery and downright scatterbrained.

But, I did try earlier this year. I built the thing almost as high as me. I tended it and did the right things, and then got distracted and forgot about it. I must have known that I would, because I built it straight on one of the vegetable garden beds.

Well, today, I thought I would see if I could resurrect that spot where the sticks and leaves and poo and all the other stuff was put all those months ago.

I cleared away the surface of compacted lawn clippings, and beneath them I did find arguably the richest soil on our block.

And I remembered why I prefer to focus on building soil instead of making compost: I’m lazy, and nature takes care of the rest.

“If we put the skin back then the worms can eat them and the dirt will stay damp for the plant”
“And, we ate the fruit and put the skin back on the garden, and the core we gave to the chookies [chickens]”
“And then we got the eggs from the chookies..”
“And we put their shells back in the garden too…”

I’m pretty happy with the responsibilities that come with a parent. But I try to temper that with an understanding that it could be a fine line between appreciating values and indoctrination – my values are my own, and so I do think that they should be given an opportunity to choose their own way.

So it was quite a (pleasant) surprise during the recent week where young Charlotte (5) and Tom (3) included aspects of my own values in their thinking.

The above conversation is just one example of their banter as they played imaginatively both in the garden and beyond.

Okay, okay.  I know that it has been way over a year since I started Kyle’s Carbon Accounting Method.

The idea of counting up everything for the second 6 months just Was Not At All Appealing, so it has taken until now to do it.

Right, so on with the detail.

Family 12 monthly income: 4 800 carbons

Total 6 monthly spending: 19 600 carbons  (July – Dec)

Total 6 monthly spending: 5 200 carbons (Jan – Jun)

Balance: -20 000 carbons

Per person balance: -5 000 carbons

Well, that’s pretty ordinary.

So, what does that mean in terms of Western averages.  According to Kyle’s figures, the Western average per month is -900 carbons, which would mean that our figure of -5000 carbons for 12  months is a fair whack better than  the western average of -10800 carbons.  Of course, since the global average for 12 months is about 2400 carbons, then we are significantly “worse”.

Now, those figures are interesting psychologically – we are double the global average, and the western average is double us.

So, if we want to Really Feel Good about how Wonderful We Are, then all we have to do is say:  Hey, we consumed half the carbon of next family.  Of course, if we wanted to be realistic, then we would say something like:  Hey, we consumed twice as much as the average global citizen, which really means that we consumed about 4 times the amount that there is for us.

If we took out the renovations to the house (which I always feel compelled to do, since it doesn’t happen every year – although it is into its 3rd year now…as my wife keeps reminding me!), then the figures would be:

Family annual income: 4 800 carbons

Total annual monthly spending: 9 500 carbons

Balance: -4 700 carbons

Per person balance: -1 175 carbons

This comes down to -98 carbons per person per month, which is slightly “better” than the world average of -212 carbons month.

So, what does that all mean?