Inner City Farmer

I’m really embarrassed right now. I just took the Ecological Footprint Quiz designed by Redefining Progress, and my results stunned me. The bottom line: If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need 3.14 Earths! My monstrous footprint requires 121.91 acres when I am ostensibly trying to survive on just one-fifth. Ugh.

The good news, I guess, is that the average in this country is 246.41 acres so I am doing much better than most, but, still, 121.91 acres! You have got to be kidding me! How can this be? As you might imagine I have an incredibly small housing footprint but my carbon footprint is through the roof. Why? Mostly because of air travel. If you take even a couple flights each year, you’re basically offsetting all the good you might be doing by biking to work and eating from your garden. Air travel as we know it is unsustainable, and I foresee it becoming a luxury in the very near future in the same way taking a cruise across the Atlantic was at the turn of the last century.

Despite my horrific score, I’m glad I took the quiz because now I know exactly what I should be working on around here. I challenge you to do the same. It takes less than five minutes and only stings a little bit.

It’s a common problem for homeowners. How do you get rid of the critters you don’t want while at the same time attracting those you do? My neighborhood is plagued with mice and rats, creatures I prefer to admire from a distance. Once they start trying to get into my house, I feel the need to start taking direct action.

The most effective remedy I’ve come up with is the brother-sister cat combo I adopted two years ago. Thanks to Zephyr’s incredibly logical system of naming things, they are named Brother and Sister. Compared to his skittish sister, Brother is quite a showman. Here you can see him proudly showing off the rat he has just eaten three-quarters of.

Like most female cats, Sister is actually the better mouser. They become particularly efficient, I have found, the less I feed them. Unfortunately, their utilitarian value dips every time I discover that mice and rats aren’t their only prey. I used to have far more birds and lizards visit my backyard before I decided to adopt two kitties. Oh well. Everything in life is a trade-off, isn’t it?

Ever since I moved into this place, I’ve been stockpiling my old used batteries. What do you do with these toxic time bombs? How does one properly dispose of them? In the good old days we used to just blithely toss them into the garbage and hope some future generation of smarter humans would figure it all out. Admit it, you did. We all did. But now we know better.

Through diligent research I discovered that in Austin you can drop off your spent batteries at the Household Hazardous Waste Facility, which is open noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays and 7 a.m. to noon on the first Saturday of each month. The problem for me is that the Facility is in way South Austin, which, the way I drive, might as well be Africa. So I called up the Facility and found out that you can also drop off your old batteries at pretty much any Radio Shack or Batteries Plus. I took mine to the Radio Shack in the Hancock Center and simply handed them to the guy behind the counter who dropped them in the plastic tub you see in the picture above. Easy, simple, done.

Are you looking to buy a “green-built” house? Does this sign entice you? Well, don’t be fooled. Slapping “green-built” on a new housing project is the marketing tool of choice for shady real-estate developers these days. These condos just down the street from my house are about as green as a slimmed-down Hummer.

The builders started off with a very noble and environmentally friendly idea. They tore down the old inefficient condos that once sat on that lot with the idea of building fancy new condos on the existing concrete slabs. But then a problem arose. The old slabs were falling apart and didn’t pass inspection so the builders had to bust them up and start anew, which required the use of an unfathomable amount of cement. I don’t want to rehash the argument against our society’s overuse of cement here. Suffice it to say that it is one of the most energy-intensive materials around while its production is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

In my book, as soon as the builders poured new slabs they should have lost any right to be called green-builders, but if you’re still not convinced just take a look at the industrial dumpster the builders are using. I’ve watched it get filled and emptied at least three times in the past several months. While that might be standard practice in the American construction and demolition industries, which produce 140 million tons of waste each year, over a third of the country’s entire solid-waste stream, true green builders pride themselves on producing as little waste as possible.

And then there’s their use of Tyvek, a Dupont-produced “housewrap” that is one of the most controversial building materials on the market today. While it does make a house “tighter” and therefore more energy efficient, it has also been linked to mold growth and rot inside of walls. Its long-term impact on the environment is also largely unknown. Does it break down in a landfill? Can it be recycled? No one knows for sure because the material hasn’t been around long enough for its life cycle to be studied in the real world.

This is not an isolated case. This is trend. People are growing increasingly aware of the detrimental impact our houses have on the environment and so more and more are happy to pay a little extra for a green-built house. Just make sure that if you’re the one doing the buying that the house was made green by designers and not by a marketing department.

Don’t you wish the intersections in your neighborhood looked like this? If you live in the Northwest (of the country, not Austin, sadly), there’s a good chance at least one of them does. The City Repair Project, an “organized group action” that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live, was created in Portland, Oregon in 1996 by citizen activists who wanted a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society. The movement and its ideals have since spread up and down the West Coast to towns like Eugene, Olympia, Seattle, Santa Monica, and Oakland.

Could Austin be next? If so, I know of a perfect intersection, Nelray and Chesterfield, which is right here in my neighborhood. A guerrilla gardener has already hit one corner of the intersection, creating this beautiful array of flowers and vegetables:

On the northwest side of the intersection sits this pleasant-looking bush, the name of which escapes me:

This was the shrub that was sporting pretty lavender flower just last week. I think it might be a Bush Germander?

Together these two corners of the intersection show the inherent natural beauty of the area, but the the two corners opposite show the present-day reality.

Nice tag on the curb, huh? The southeast corner has also been hit with a splash of graffiti:

To me, this intersection represents all that my neighborhood is (as well as could be). Instead of allowing some high-school punk to lift his leg and piss on all of our street corners, wouldn’t it be nice if we were to come together and take back our streets? A City Repair-type action is the most beautiful way of doing it I can think of. Anyone want to join me?