So my friend Holly is watching a farm here in Prattsburgh while the family is away for Christmas, so naturally, I spent some time there helping her and goofing off. This farm is very rustic: the farmhouse has no electricity, is heated with a woodstore, has karosene and propane lamps for light at night, and an outhouse to shit in. Ironically, twenty feet down the road, the family has a jam kitchen; a metal shed, the type that is usually used to store trachors or whatever, only this one has an industrial kitchen in it, where Noreen, the mom, makes large quantities of jam with another employee, to sell at farmer's markets. The ironic part is the jam kitchen has electricity, electric heat, a flushing toliet, all the modern convienences that their farmhouse does not. They just built the jam kitchen within the past few years (I helped put up the electric poles running across their field to the kitchen; that was fun,) and are planning to eventually also get electricity in the house, but for now they don't have it, so I got a bit of a taste of what life without electricity would be like.
Also, I helped care for a flock of 250 chickens, some geese, cats and dogs (normally, they also have some cows around, but another farmer had the cows at his farm and was watching them,) so I got to remember what getting up at the crack of dawn to care for livestock in the bitter cold feels like. I was reminded that chickens aren't really cute so much as disgusting and barbaric; or at least, when you get that many chickens together, that is how it is. Because of the pecking order, you could visably see which chickens lived at the bottom of their little oppressive society; some where nearly bald. Chickens are evil when you are trying to get eggs out from under them; likewise when the rooster wants to mate. Nevertheless, their eggs where some of the best I've had, and I still think keeping chickens is the best way to ensure you are eating high quality, truely free-range eggs.
As for living without electricity, I began to think twice about that again; being at their house, lighting kerosene and propane lamps, which don't throw very much light, are dangerous and create toxic smoke inside the house, reminded me of living without electricity while in Africa; while using candles every night has a certain charm, it is also quite dangerous; one night, for example, I was reading in bed and got the brillant idea that I should put the candle on my belly so that I could see the book better. I was reading Walden, and I ended up falling asleep, the book fell into the candle, and next thing I know, I'm waking up with a flaming book in my hand. I beat the fire out, but I never did get to finish Walden as whole pages had been consumed with fire. Also, when living in a house where you have to go outside to use an outhouse, AND you don't have electric lights, you end up stumbling around a lot in the dark often before finding the toliet.
But really, living without electricity becomes smaller then an annoyance by about the second week without it. We are very adaptable, as humans, and I believe this goes for things like living without electricity, using outhouses and doing chores...
While at the farm, I read an article in a National Geographic about how light pollution is affecting us, wildlife, the earth itself. Some people are even suggesting that the increasingly early puberty in girls is partly due to light pollution; living in a world of eternal "daylight" is somehow faking their bodies out, causing secondary sex characturistics to develop much earlier then "normal." I don't know if this is true or not, but I know you can increase the fertility of many animals by exposing them to more light; in fact, that is how factory egg farms work; by keeping lights on chickens 24 hrs a day, they tend to lay twice as many eggs as a chicken which is not exposed to this. Of course, the factory farmed chicken's body also wears out twice as fast, but since production was increased, if only temporarily, this method is used.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting to be reading about light pollution at a farm where the only artifical light is in the jam kitchen.
I've also found myself starting to adapt to the slower lifestyle of Upstate New York already; I've been drinking less coffee, sleeping more, moving slower, spending lots of time just sitting in the snowy woods, trying to learn something through the observation of birds. I've been learning some of the calls and which birds they belong to; trying to figure out behaviors of Downy Woodpeckers, Crows and Chickadees. I've decided that I'm going to spend at least fifteen minutes a day, from now on, somewhere woodsy (either actual woods or a park, if I can't make it to the woods,) sitting still, back against a tree, learning about the living things around me. It is not only a great way to start learning the alarm calls, baseline calls, etc of birds, but it also has a calming effect, the way I believe meditating must be for some people. I've decided this is part of my evolving religion or spiritual beliefs, which I guess fall on the pagan/mystic side of things.
Love ya,
Carrot
which did not have electricity or real plumbing. I remember spending the night at some of my teachers' homes where kerosene lamps were drilled into the walls. It wasn't that hard to light them, or to turn them off. You need more of them compared to electric lamps, but I didn't find it to be a big deal. I didn't have to do it every day of course.
"Consistency is not a human trait" - Maude, from Harold and Maude
The other thing you'll find out about trying to light your house with kerosene is that it is EXPENSIVE.
I am thinking about buying a portable kerosene heater for my mountain cabin at 8800 feet in the mountains. I snowmobile in there from time to time during the winter. (I'm going up for weekend tomorrow.) I have small propane heaters in almost every room and a fireplace and a generator. They are adequate for spring and fall. But those big logs take a long time to heat up when they have been soaking up sub-zero tempuratures. So I want a portable heater that will kick off a lot of heat that I can carry from room to room. A 23,000 BTU heater costs about $120 and that would be about the right size.
I was pricing them and kerosene just a few days ago. Around here, kerosene costs $7 gallon if you buy it in bulk or $9 a gallon if you buy 5-gallon cans or $10 gallon in one gallon cans. A heater burns about a gallon every 6-hours so that is very expensive heat. I assume it is very expensive light too.
I'll go ahead and do it for my cabin because I use it for so few days during the winter that the comfort is more important to me than the ridiculous cost. I guess if I can afford 10-gallons of gas in my snowmachines and all the propane I burn in my stoves and generator I can afford a few gallons of kerosene too. But I would not dream of heating my home that way.
It sounds like that farm house is an environmental nightmare. The only thing dirtier for the environment then wood stove heat is coal stove heat. It probably is not real well insulated either.
I definately wasn't saying they where necessarily chosing the cleanest things for the environment; I think I might chose to heat my house someday with a pellet stove or something along those lines; it was just interesting to look at a different lifestyle and different choices, and to think about how fast people can adapt to different siduations.
I wonder though, if using coal-generated electricity (as most of the electricity in this area is,) would be cleaner then burning kerosene and heating a house with electricity? Are their choices really dirtier then that?
Love ya,
Carrot
Burning a home stove is definately dirtier then using electricity produced by a coal burning power plant.
Almost all coal burning power plants have been equipped with amazing smoke scrubbing technology that capture most of the pollutants. They burn millions of tons of coal and only a tiny trickle of smoke comes out the top along with a lot of CO2 (plant food) and steam.
The smoke coming out of a farmhouse chimney is not scrubbed. You get all the nasty pollutants PLUS the CO2. If there is any question in your mind about how nasty this smoke is, here is a little experiment you can try. Go up on the roof of the farmhouse and put a garbage bag over the fireplace chimney while the stove is burning. Put your head in the bag with the smoke and see how long you can stand it.
If tens of millions of New Yorkers all tried to keep themselves warm by burning wood, pellets, coal or whatever the pollution would be unbelievable.
I remember when I was a kid in my small town in Wyoming when large numbers of the homes were heated with wood and coal stoves. There was a constant pall of smoke over the town in the winter. Now most homes are heated with nice clean coal fired electricty or natural gas and our air is much cleaner.
So I have no need to carry out that experiement; I know from cleaning chimneys and just living in wood-heated homes in the winter most of my life that the smoke produced is not "clean." Not only does it release carcinogenes into the environment and use many, many trees to heat an average-sized home, but the air families breathe in wood-heated homes is dry, smoky at times, and can lead to many more respiratory illnesses then in homes heated other ways.
However, I'm still not convienced that coal (in the form of electricity,) is a good alternative to this; everything I've read and heard about coal plants suggests otherwise (look at the sludge disaster that just occured in Tennessee for a great example of how dirty it can be http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/24/spill_at_tennessee_coal_plant_cre....) This scrubbing technology you refer to isn't even up and running at most plants: http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/carbon-capture-and-storage-a-coal-and-elect....
I'm excited to say that some of the little towns around here are getting commerical windmills to generate eletricity and that some people are even putting individual windmills up in their yards; as far as I can see, this has to be one of the cleanest ways to generate electricity yet developed. There was a big debate among landowners here who where argueing that the windmills where ugly, would kill lots of birds and would cause the removal of unnecessary trees, but I say, compared to the evils of coal, lets start putting up windmills!
Love ya,
Carrot
Windmills are great. They work particularly well when the wind is blowing. Unfortunately, some of the coldest days are also very still days. I have no problems with generating clean energy.
And I agree that coal is dirty. My only point was that it is cleaner to burn coal at a central power plant where the smoke can be scrubbed than to have millions of distributed home stoves fired with wood or coal or pellets.
And yes, the emissions from coal fired power plants are scrubbed at almost every coal-fired plant and most of the nasty stuff (sulfer) is removed. The thing that is not being removed is carbon dioxide. It is debateable whether carbon dioxide, which is a compound exxential to all life on earth, is a pollutant. From time to time you blog about singing to your plants. You are infact benefitting them by giving them an extra dose of carbon dioxide which they use in photosynthesis.
If I had my choice we would be building nice clean nukes.
thats an amazing one,,,,I mean it