WORLDFIRE - Chapter 13, Part I
Abandonment to Providence
Straw bale home in Yellow Springs, Ohio
“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Luna, the family’s Golden Retriever, hovered close as I loaded up my saddlebags in the soft morning light. I was happy for her sweet company. After bidding my four-legged friend and her gracious guardians, the Pestanas, goodbye, I rolled into town for a newspaper interview on my way to a bike shop for some minor trike repairs. Meeting me at the shop were two friends of the Pestanas who had kindly offered to shuttle me to a green home renovation project outside of Oxford, Ohio called “Edge of the Woods.” I was not prepared for what I would find when we arrived.
The interior’s dramatic tree beams and the unique curvature of the ceiling were unlike any home redesign I had ever seen. I had also never met an architect as excited about a project as Greig Rutherford. He and his team were creating a green eco-home for Marge and Gary Glaser by massively renovating a 1957 box home Greig described as “extremely energy inefficient” and “disconnected” from the world outside. In addition to eliminating utility bills, he told me their goal was to “reengage with the outside world” in a way that works with “how the sun moves across the sky” and “how the changes in the seasons” impact the structure. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone describe a home as a “living organism” that “inhales and exhales through natural processes.” Greig said the project was “about wonder” and “about living in a way that’s poetic.” Marge described their new home as “an embodiment of the medicine wheel” that honors the four directions in a way that is “meant to be a living, breathing celebration of where we’re moving toward, building with some awareness and building with kindness to the Earth.” Her hope was for “Edge of the Woods” to serve as an inspiration for others around the world.
Not many of us learned in school that buildings could be designed to inhale and exhale, but most of us did learn that trees “inhale” carbon dioxide and “exhale” oxygen. No human technology can compete with the elegance and efficiency of the carbon drawdown naturally done by trees. Forests globally draw down about one-third of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. This makes protecting and restoring forests one of the most powerful tools we have in our climate emergency response toolbox. Yet the world’s tropical rainforests are currently being felled at the rate of as much as 30 soccer fields a minute. The primary drivers are illegal logging; fuelwood harvesting; clearing for cattle; cutting for palm oil and soy plantations; and logging for timber, wood products, and pulp and paper. Portions of the Amazon rainforest are now emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb, primarily due to fires that are set to clear the land for agriculture. But it is not just rainforests that need protection and restoration. America’s national forests are also under assault.
Like most Americans, I love our public lands. As a kid I dreamed of one day becoming a ranger, a dream I realized during my college years when I spent a summer patrolling the backcountry of Colorado’s Indian Peaks Wilderness Area as a U.S. Forest Service Wilderness Ranger. I assumed at the time that the Forest Service was in the service of protecting forests. I would later learn that the agency is more about cutting than conserving. Most people don’t realize the Forest Service budget actually revolves around commercial logging of America’s national forests. The proceeds from timber sales actually create a perverse incentive to log and clear-cut healthy forests. This despite the fact that the federal timber sale program generates only a tiny fraction of the economic benefits provided by recreation and wildlife habitat. Yet every year, Big Timber is subsidized with more than $1.6 billion of our tax dollars to raze vast swaths of our national forests. I know a little something about this having served as head of the National Forest Protection Alliance (a coalition of grassroots forest protection groups formed to end commercial logging). As legendary Earth warrior David Brower was fond of saying: “I’m fully in support of the Forest Service. I wish we had one. What we have is a Timber Service.” It is way past time that we finally turned the Timber Service into a Forest Service that actually protects our precious public lands, not just for us, but for all who dwell in the forest.
Protecting forests is key to protecting the climate. A 2018 study conducted by a team of researchers identified twenty “natural climate solutions” that could draw down 21% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Guess what natural solution topped the list? Reforestation. Because trees store so much carbon, healthy, standing forests are one of our first lines of defense against climate chaos, but forests can’t help us if they aren’t standing. Many people aren’t aware of the essential role forests play in protecting the climate. Fewer still realize that logging is one of the main drivers of climate breakdown. In his brilliant book, SMOKESCREEN: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate, forest and fire ecologist, Chad Hanson, shares this stunning fact: “The overall impact of logging in US forests is… about the same as the overall effect of coal production.” Hanson helpfully explains how “most of the carbon in logged trees is emitted into the atmosphere almost immediately from the incineration of slash debris and mill residue.” In his book, he also clearly explains the science of how global heating and logging dries out forests and makes forest fires more intense.
In researching this book, I came across a report commissioned by a southeast forest protection group called the Dogwood Alliance. Titled, “The Great American Stand: US Forests and the Climate Emergency,” their report also connected the climate dots. Asserting that “we cannot solve the climate crisis without a major scale-up in forest protection and restoration across the planet,” the group trumpeted the need for forest protection to “become a top priority in America’s climate agenda.” Instead, large stands of public and private forests are currently being razed and exported for biomass burning. This despite the fact that intact forests draw down 40 times more carbon than industrial tree plantations. Dogwood’s report details how “the U.S. South has become the world’s largest exporter of wood pellets to Europe, where they are burned to generate electricity in place of coal. This new market is driving increased logging… Meanwhile, burning wood for electricity releases up to 50 percent more carbon dioxide than burning coal per unit of electricity generated.”
Any sound climate policy must include a ban on industrial-scale tree burning, which is but one of many destructive forms of biomass energy. I was heartened to see a group of 78 scientists in 2015 publicly criticize an EPA memo that encouraged burning trees for energy as part of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. Among the letter signers were famed biologists Thomas Lovejoy and Stuart Pimm. In 2018, nearly 800 scientists wrote to members of the European Parliament urging them to forbid the same practices as part of the EU’s renewable energy directive. As Chad Hanson vividly warns us in his book, SMOKESCREEN, “[W]e cannot afford to increase carbon emissions by treating trees as if they were giant sticks of coal.” We need to put people to work conserving and restoring America’s majestic national forests, not cutting them down. Just decommissioning the hundreds of thousands of miles of mostly abandoned logging roads–many times the length of the Interstate Highway System–would provide countless restoration jobs in struggling rural communities.
We know that climate breakdown threatens our survival. We also know that forests draw down carbon for free. This makes ending deforestation and ramping up reforestation crucial to restoring a safe climate. Some scientists have proposed that planting a trillion trees globally could inexpensively draw down much of the carbon pollution pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. When examined more closely, the solution is not quite so simple. Regardless, it takes decades for newly planted trees to absorb even a fraction of the carbon dioxide standing forests absorb. This is why protecting the forests we have has to be our first priority. When left alone, forests have an amazing capacity to heal themselves. I love the idea of Strategic Forest Carbon Reserves to help stabilize the climate (similar to how the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve was designed to help stabilize oil markets), but only forest reserves that empower–not displace–Indigenous Peoples to protect them.
The good news is almost everyone loves trees and forests. They provide homes for wildlife. They help us breathe. They clean the air. They gift us with shade. They stabilize the soil. They quench our thirst (tens of millions of Americans rely on national forests for more than half of their drinking water). They selflessly serve us in countless ways. Far from just a bunch of beautiful trees standing around, forests are amazingly complex living communities. We now know that trees not only share resources; they care for and communicate with one another. The more we learn from science about trees, the deeper people fall in love with them. But mostly, we love them simply for what they are. This means a national and global campaign to protect and restore forests actually stands a fighting chance. Just as the Glaser’s eco-home was being built to inspire wonder, so can our innate wonder at the magnificence of trees and forests inspire us to become their loving protectors.
After finishing our tour of “Edge of the Woods,” I got dropped off back at BikeWise, where the bike mechanic was just wrapping up the repairs. He had diagnosed the cause of the slipping gears as a loose derailleur. When I asked how much I owed, he and his co-worker refused to let me pay. Then they did me an even bigger favor by turning me on to a bike-friendly route into Cincinnati, a road on which I would see only a handful of cars all day.
Now just miles from my childhood home, I spent the afternoon pedaling down an all but deserted country road in eager anticipation of reuniting with my family. Eventually I came to the Great Miami River, where the air instantly cooled in the wooded waterway. Crossing that river marked a personal milestone, for I was now on home turf where I had spent my youth. Although the ride from Oxford had only been 25 miles, my legs had protested the entire way. After seven straight days of pedaling, they were ready for a break. It felt surreal pulling into my sister Sheryl’s driveway, realizing I had pedaled almost 1,600 miles there from Colorado. In a case of perfect timing, my brother-in-law, Joe, greeted me at the top of the driveway right as my nephew Andrew’s school bus pulled up to the curb. We later made a fun family project out of cleaning up the trike before heading out to dinner. It was unspoken where we would go. I had gone too long without one and needed a Cincinnati chili fix.
I spent the next morning working on my blog while Joe secured the trike to a trailer for transport across town for a show-and-tell for my niece Amanda’s 5th grade class. I was struck by how much the hundred or so students at Mason Intermediate School knew about solar and wind energy. Impressing me even more was how they didn’t just want to know how the trike worked for me, but how it could work for them. I was talking to the designers of the future, but we need to hand them a future worth designing in. After the talk, I headed to my brother Dan’s house, happy to be inside with family where it was warm and not outside pedaling alone in the cold.
My last day in the Queen City began with a morning round of media calls, before joining Sheryl and Joe for lunch. After saying our goodbyes at the chili parlor, I rolled down the road to the entrance of a massive landfill near my sister’s house to produce a quick video. Ranked at the time the sixth largest landfill in the U.S., it was the largest in Ohio. Already the highest point in Cincinnati, “Mount Rumpke” was looking to get even higher. Most people don’t realize what happens when biodegradable materials like food scraps, grass clippings, and leaves are thrown away. “Away” is an actual place and that place is usually a toxic landfill or incinerator. According to Eco-Cycle, an organization for which I once designed and ran a recycling center, 50% of what we toss in the trashcan is compostable and biodegradable organics. Here’s why that matters: organic materials don’t break down naturally in landfills like they do in backyard compost piles. Because they are buried, they decompose without oxygen, which produces methane and carbon dioxide. With gas capture at landfills largely ineffectual, they become methane pollution seeps. According to the U.S. EPA, municipal solid waste landfills are actually the third largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S.
Keeping compost out of landfills is one of the quickest ways to calm the climate. Because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas, and only persists in the atmosphere for about a dozen years, composting must become a top local, state, and federal priority. As articulated in an Eco-Cycle position memo: “Policymakers should prioritize programs that keep organic materials out of landfills and incinerators as a critical first step in immediately curbing greenhouse gas emissions.” Composting not only reduces carbon emissions. When added to the soil, it can help draw down carbon.
So what is the alternative to toxic landfills and incinerators, many of which are built in fenceline communities where often the poorest Americans, through no fault of their own, are made to suffer even more? The most common solution is recycling. This is something everyone can do. Manufacturing a recycled aluminum can, for instance, consumes 95% less energy than manufacturing a new one from virgin materials. But there is a reason why recycling is the last of the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. It’s because reducing and reusing need to come first.
This brings us to one of the world’s most unheralded and immediate climate crisis solutions: zero waste. For it not just how we electrify and transport ourselves that is wrecking the climate. According to the EPA, the way we process, produce, transport, consume, and dispose of our goods and food accounts for 42% of domestic greenhouse gas emissions. This climate pollution even has a name: consumption emissions. This next fact stunned me. Eco-Cycle calculates: “For every can of garbage we produce in the US, there are 87 cans’ worth of materials that come from industries that make our products and packaging, including timber, agricultural, mining, and petroleum waste.” As described by the group: “A Zero Waste system is cyclical, as in nature, and does two fundamental things: it redesigns our systems and resource use—from product design to disposal—to prevent the careless and polluting practices that lead to so much waste. It then captures discards and uses them, instead of natural resources, to make new products, creating a much cleaner manufacturing process with far less pollution. This new system carries with it new businesses and jobs to feed local economies.”
Consider these jobs numbers from Eco-Cycle:
“Zero Waste programs that reuse, repair, recycle, and compost materials create more jobs than landfills and incinerators per ton of materials handled:
· Recycling creates an average of nine times more jobs than trash.
· Composting creates at least twice as many jobs as landfills and four times as many jobs as incineration facilities.
· Reuse creates as many as 30 times more jobs than landfills.”
By embracing zero waste, we can crank down the heat while we crank up the jobs. It has been shown that even a 75% national waste diversion rate would create 1 million more jobs by 2030 than garbage business as usual.
Despite having only about four percent of the world’s population, the U.S. produces roughly 12 percent of the world’s garbage. How did this happen? Beginning in our formative childhoods, most of us were indoctrinated by television commercials to be good little consumers. Hypnotized by materialism, we have been conditioned by society to conform in ways that dishonor the Earth that gives us life. Eventually, I could no longer abide the obnoxious ads and I just stopped watching (there is a reason why my favorite bumper sticker is “Kill Your TV”). I have found that not owning a television set frees up not only my mind, but precious time to think. Whether you terminate your television or not, breaking the spell of consumerism is a prerequisite for our collective survival. Earth’s limits are demanding that we differentiate between what we want and what we need. When we start renting storage units because we don’t have enough room in our houses to store all of our stuff, you know things have gotten out of hand. I will never forget, on a backpacking trip to Machu Picchu years ago, how struck I was by the rural Peruvians I encountered living so simply without the manic accumulation of material stuff Americans are famous for. That made a lasting impression on me. My experience with Colorado’s Marshall Fire made an even bigger impression on me. It wasn’t easy, but within a couple of years I had managed to replace the most essential items I had lost in the climate conflagration. Losing practically everything gives you a unique perspective on what is truly essential. A minimalist to begin with, that fire transitioned my lifestyle to one of even more simplicity. Wanting to be the change I want to see in the world by curbing my own consumption, I was very discerning about what lost items I replaced. Most of my clothes, furniture and household items are now used or donated. The sacred element of fire taught me that we can live rich and deeply meaningful lives while limiting our material possessions to what we need over what we want. Fire taught me that we can meet our needs in a way that leaves enough for everyone.
There was a time not so very long ago when things were built to last. I’ve stood on a steamboat where the original steam engines are still working after 100 years. Today things are designed to fall apart. We have to stop producing an endless stream of eventual junk in the form of disposable cars, furniture, carpets, electronics, and plastics. Instead, we need a circular economy, one built on regenerative business models that curb our consumption by facilitating the sharing, repairing, and reusing of products and the production of durable goods that can be refurbished, remanufactured, and recycled. Producers must be made responsibile for the full lifecycle of their products. This requires regulations and transparent monitoring of the manufacturing supply chain. This must also apply to the renewable energy industries.
Eco-architect William McDonough has a brilliant Earth-inspired vision for making things that he calls Cradle to Cradle: “Everything is a resource for something else. In nature, the ‘waste’ of one system becomes food for another. Everything can be designed to be disassembled and safely returned to the soil as biological nutrients, or re-utilized as high quality materials for new products.” The UK, one of the world’s leaders in cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, has laws that cover packaging, batteries, end of life vehicles and electronic and electrical equipment. The European Union has similarly instituted corporate policies that reduce waste. Their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws extend a producer’s responsibility to manage their products at the end of their lifecycle by setting up systems to ensure that packing waste is collected and recycled. In the U.S., some EPR progress is being made at the state level, but federal producer responsibility mandates are desperately needed. Probably the most well-known domestic producer responsibility policy is bottle deposits (e.g. where you pay a 5-10¢ deposit on every bottle you buy and get it refunded when you return the empty bottles to the store). I remember this just being the way it was when I was a kid. I loved collecting bottles lying on the side of the road so I could buy candy and comic books at my local drugstore. I remember, while living in Germany for a year, how every village in Bavaria seemed to have at least one local brewery where you could purchase your beer and return the bottles to be reused. Some ideas are so good they never go out of style. Yet fewer than a dozen U.S. states even have reuse bottle deposit laws.
Another innovative program producing real results is pay-as-you-throw (PAYT), a form of trash metering where residents pay for the amount of garbage they leave at the curb. PAYT programs have been shown to be not only the most effective, but the most cost effective, way to divert waste. There are currently more than 7,100 PAYT programs in the U.S. In one, San Francisco, the city diverts 80% of its waste from landfills and incinerators, versus an appalling low 32% waste diversion rate nationally. In Boulder, there is not only curbside recycling; there is curbside composting and composting for all commercial businesses. I realize most communities are not like Boulder, but communities like Boulder serve as an incubator for what can happen elsewhere. There is a reason why local communities are where some of the most profound social change is happening. It is easier to convince politicians to do the right thing when those politicians are also your neighbors.
Then there is the issue of plastics produced from petroleum. Plastics are so ubiquitous they are difficult to avoid. They’re everywhere. Even the shell of my rocket trike was made from petroleum-derived carbon fiber. Most everyone knows about the global pollution crisis of plastics and microplastics, but did you know that the proliferation of plastics is also exacerbating the climate crisis? The plastics industry is on track to emit more greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 than the coal industry. According to the Center for International Environmental Law, the production and incineration of plastics in 2019 alone added atmospheric greenhouse gases “equal to the emissions from 189 five-hundred-megawatt coal power plants.” The group recommends “ending the production and use of single-use, disposable plastic; stopping development of new oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure; fostering the transition to zero-waste communities; implementing extended producer responsibility as a critical component of circular economies; and adopting and enforcing ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors, including plastic production.”
After that, the goal should be for any remaining essential plastics produced to be recyclable, reusable or compostable. The day cannot come soon enough when all the municipal landfills and incinerators in America are replaced with zero waste recycling, reuse and composting centers, with the shuttered landfills cleaned up and mined for their valuable resources. It is all about closing the loop. The rest of nature doesn’t waste anything. Why should we?
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.