Farewell, My Subaru_One Man's Search for Happiness Living Green Off the Grid

by Doug Fine

  We’ll know we have a handle on sprawl when new-home sales are no longer reported as a major sector of the American economy. Economists will have to establish a new category to track growth, maybe one that looks at sales of retrofitted preexisting homes (and businesses) designed in communities that don’t require cars to acquire basic necessities. Maybe the category can be called green-home sales.

  Fifth, stay atop new carbon-reducing technologies. The world moves too fast in the digital age to rely on one fixed solution. Kevin Forrest points out that my carbon-neutral truck, for example, might just be a temporary solution until hydrogen cells (or some new energy technology) becomes viable. If we hear about a legitimate new green development (like the solar-powered airplane that recently flew for fifty-four straight hours over New Mexico), we can e-mail it to a hundred friends. Thus we can create market demand.

  Bill Clinton may not be the savior that Al Gore is when it comes to climate change prognostication, but Clinton is convinced, in his latest book, Giving, that smart business decisions by corporations, and savvy and kind behavior by citizens, can solve not just the world’s poverty problems, but its ecological ones as well. “By simply changing our buying habits as ordinary citizens,” Clinton writes, “…the increased demand will cause…companies to follow suit.”

  Indeed, Équiterre is an organization founded on the premise that our wallet is the greatest activist (http://www.equiterre.org/en/). And, believe me, CEOs are paying attention. They might not act until a low-carbon product or behavior is profitable, but it is you and I who can make it so. Number crunchers are standing by to count the dollars we generate.

  So buy the Seventh Generation toilet paper and Earth-friendly dish soap. I like the “think about seven generations from now” motif in Native American mythology and I try to incorporate it, plus a little Hindu meditation and Buddhist worldview, into my Judaism. And I appreciate it when anyone gives a noble idea the ol’ college try, even when it’s rife with a little consumer hypocrisy. It’s better than lying to start a war so you can enrich the vice president’s company.

  By far the greatest impact we can have on crafting a sustainable future is not just by buying “green products,” but rather by actively understanding that every part of life can and should be infused with carbon reduction. It’s not just about oil prices and organic produce. When we, say, pay our garbage bill, we can make our voices heard about where the waste goes (by calling our local town or country representative and attending waste board meetings. Dick Gephardt once said that the U.S. is not a representative democracy; it’s a representative democracy of those who participate).

  We’ve got every right to ask, “Is everything possible being recycled?” “Is the methane from the landfill harvested for power?” We’re the ones paying the sanitation contractor. The same goes with public sewer service: the technology exists today for municipal waste effluent to leave the processing plant as potable water and compost. Yet oftentimes, decades-old technologies dump raw or nearly raw waste into rivers and oceans. There is no reason for this, other than inertia.

  We also need to think about where our grid power comes from. We can call our electric company, enjoy the Muzak while we spend an hour wading through the voice mail system in search of a human, and when we finally get through, we can find out if the generating station for our home area is powered by coal, nuclear energy, or natural gas (mine uses all three), and ask what the plans are to move to cleaner options. Some grid companies are already shifting to sustainable options like wind or solar. These utilities give us the option of paying more to offset the cost of their not killing us. If our electric company is not going green, we can cease to be customers, and use the wind or the sun to power our homes on our own (this isn’t so easy for people living in an urban apartment, but even these folks can lobby their congressperson to change utility rules or convince their building manager to take the whole structure solar). Take it from me, it’s an investment, but it will drastically reduce your fossil fuel footprint and give you energy independence, should anything happen to utility grid power. Once you buy the equipment, “the sun’s free,” as Herbie the solar guru likes to say. Though Rupert Murdoch is said to be shopping.

  Waste and electricity are part of the hidden infrastructure of our lives that we once took for granted. We need to train ourselves to immediately have awareness of our global impact in all aspects of life. For example, if we switch our homes to solar power, we can make noise about the packaging the panels are stuffed into if it is not recycled. It’s our money and we can take it wherever we like. We can ask our dentist where the enamel comes from. We can ask our bank to use a kinder material than vinyl for checkbook covers, and we can demand that the department store’s landscaping is local and sustainable. We can and should be pains in the ass about this stuff until a carbon-reduced mind-set is as mainstream as a Kenny G solo. And we can make sure our friends care (and vote), too.

  Eventually we really will find that living sustainably and thinking about our carbon footprint permeates every part of our day: the paper in our printer, the material in our decking, our children’s cafeteria lunch food—is it organic and local? I say we should think big. Shoot, why can’t our air fleet move to solar? Why can’t the state or local government transfer federal highway funds toward rebuilding a decrepit or non-existent public transportation system? I see it as a new civil rights movement. Every corner of our society has to be infused with a move toward low-carbon emissions and overall non-sprawl sustainability, the way that every business decision today, by moral and codified law, has to be conducted without bias as to race. When it comes to infusing sustainability society-wide, in 2008 we’re still in the age of Jim Crow.

  A fair number of brainwashed people still think that environmentalists are hurting the economy, the same way some said integration would damage American culture. A critical mass of folks is only now starting to realize that sustainable life is the only way to survive as a society. I like to imagine looking back in forty years and having President Winfrey (or, if you like, President Kid Rock or President Nugent) humbly remember a time when we were actually shortsighted enough to pollute our own atmosphere to the point that we almost couldn’t live in it anymore. It will seem laughable. I hope.

  These five steps can be taken together or piecemeal. I have to admit, even the first item on this list of suggestions (installing carbon-reducing politicians) is proving a tricky one for me. Here I am preaching sustainability, and my own U.S. representative doesn’t have a basic understanding of the importance of predator/prey balance in our vast New Mexican ecosystem (he wants to exterminate all wolves). Resisting the urge to be conspiratorial about backroom gerrymandering in my state, I’ll lay it on myself and likeminded community members to raise enough awareness to get this nineteenth-century joker out of office and replace him with someone wiser than an eight-year-old.

  Which actually leads to a sixth suggestion that overlays all the previous five. I think it’s the most important one of the bunch. We should, we must, infuse the next generation with an understanding about sustainable living in our intertwined world. In the course of everyday life, we’ve got to let our kids know that things will soon be changing (hopefully for the better) in all of the basic elements of our lives. Part of every education should include lessons in where our food, clothing, water, transportation, and fuel comes from. Better yet, we can trash the Game Boys and teach kids how to provide all of the above without fossil fuels or exploitation. For many of us this will mean learning right alongside our whippersnappers. That’s what Google is for.

  The obstacles to crafting a sustainable society sound formidable. We live in a massive nation going through one of its most corrupt, violent periods (someday, the 2000 and 2004 U.S. election frauds will illustrate how primitive the U.S. representative democracy was in its first three hundred years), but in society, as in physics, disorder often precedes positive change.

  I see with my own eyes how the six suggestions I’ve lai
d out here actually work in the real world on the local level. In my community, townies in Silver City with full-time jobs have formed a goat co-op, where a dozen families share their milk, greatly reducing the time commitment necessary for providing healthy, local, carbon-free protein. And this in a highly populated, growing town.

  Even closer to home, in my own rural valley, local apple farmers were almost out of business a few years ago because the supermarket chains were buying only from the monoculture producers who, according to my orchard-tending neighbor Davey Menendez, guaranteed that “you’ll never see a worm or a brown spot.” Well, one of my valley friends helped start a local farmer’s market and a harvest festival featuring some of the most tasty apples I’ve every crunched. And I’ve already mentioned the valley co-op that saves all of us from driving fifty roundtrip miles to town every time we need a carrot. This market (coyotes permitting) features my eggs, as well as local vegetables and organic, sustainably-raised valley beef. These institutions are the real reasons I can go days with out starting my truck: living in a functioning community economy, I don’t always need to start an engine to lead a modern, comfortable life.

  We all lead busy lives, and so I don’t think we have to make all these changes at once in order to be a good carbon citizen. And we don’t have to grow all our own food in order to eat locally. We don’t even have to build our own furniture in order to shop locally. In fact, there is a long precedent for dividing labor in indigenous communities that predates box stores. I recall something a Tlingit canoe carver once told me in coastal Alaska. I was marveling at all the indigenous skills I didn’t possess, wondering how I ever would have survived before, say, FedEx and Thai takeout.

  “You know, there was always trade,” he said. “We carved, and the folks farther north rendered the fish oil. Not everybody had to know how to do everything.” This mind-blowing fact of vibrant, segmented, pre-Western economics helped me live at peace with the reality that I couldn’t personally perform every task necessary to live sustainably. But I can try to get most of what I need close to home. I want to send as many Chinese factory slaves back to the countryside as I can. Even Kunstler writes in the usually apocalyptic Long Emergency, “life…will be intensely local and success or failure will depend on the quality of each community.”

  Even though scientists and doomsday authors might disagree about our prospects, I believe strongly in the interconnectedness of all things, and so, in the end, my oil-reduction efforts come back to the personal. It’s about more than just my carbon footprint. If I take steps that feel like positive ones for the Earth and my community, then I am taking positive steps for myself.

  * * *

  FIVE THINGS I LEARNED IN MY FIRST YEAR OFF THE GRID

  1. Batteries are the big ugly hole in a solar-powered life. Not only are the dozen golf cart–sized batteries that store the sun’s energy for me at the ranch immensely heavy—they easily weigh seventy pounds each—but they are an environmental nightmare. Contradiction city. The lead inside them is responsible for defiling much of Canada. During my solar installation, every time I herniated my back by hauling one to my leaky power center behind the laundry room, I coated my hands with a tasty dusting of sulfuric acid, just in time for lunch. Yum. Plus, these batteries last for only ten years, max, which then becomes a landfill issue.

  Johnny Weiss, co-founder and executive director of Solar Energy International, an educational nonprofit (www.solarenergy.org), told me not to hold my breath for improvements. “For the most part, we’re using the same battery technology that Thomas Edison used with our space-age solar panels.” Presently, an Austin-based company called EEStor is getting a lot of publicity with its supposedly revolutionary super-battery because of financing from big-time venture capitalists, but we’ll see: the alternative energy world is full of “next greatest thing” technologies that never seem to make it into my solar supply catalogue. At least not yet.

  2. Lately, the cost of solar components has been rising about 10 percent a year because of the dang demand in energy-efficient Europe and because the world’s supply of the silicon that goes into solar panels is limited. I bought four solar panels in anticipation of getting off the grid. Then it took me a year to get all the necessary components and roust the local contractors. Once I met with my solar electrician, I learned that I needed four more panels of the same 165-watt size. These four cost about a hundred dollars more each than the first four. I blame Vladimir Putin. He’s scaring Europe so badly with his threats to switch off the Russian natural gas taps that it’s turning soccer hooligans into environmentalists.

  3. Sometimes having a “grid inter-tie” system, that is, a solar- or wind-power setup that is still connected to the energy company’s power lines, can be even more effective than moving off the grid entirely. In many states, utilities are required to buy back any surplus energy you produce with your home solar panels or wind generator. Instead of receiving an electric bill, you can receive an electric check.

  4. Store your alternative fuels away from the house. Recently, I woke to a dog pack covered in vegetable oil, as Michelle’s two hounds and Sadie, now one happy family at the Funky Butte Ranch, got into a wrestling match right where I had stored the batch of waste oil that I had collected from Sisters Restaurant the previous day. The dogs, who made the house smell like moldy manicotti for several weeks, had shiny, oily coats for at least that long. And so I learned that if you’re going to collect your own gas, you need to set aside some space for your own gas station. Hopefully, the coating of flammable oil that now rings my house will evaporate before it might set the ranch ablaze like a tinderbox.

  5. You cannot train a goat to sit, stay, or roll over, though with persistent training you can get one to yodel the first verse of “Them Belly Full.”

  * * *

  RESOURCES

  www.farewellmysubaru.com—The adventure doesn’t stop here. Stay up to date on goings on at the Funky Butte Ranch and discuss the issues raised in this book.

  www.abqaltenergies.com—Website for Albuquerque Alternative Energies.

  www.solar-nation.org—An alternative energy political activist organization.

  www.solarenergy.org—Solar Energy International, an educational nonprofit that holds wind and solar workshops.

  www.localharvest.org/csa—A website for finding sources of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) anywhere in the continental United States. CSA is a partnership in which you, the produce eater, help cover the costs of a local farm, in return for getting a regular delivery of seasonal local fruits and veggies.

  www.cspinet.org—Center for Science in the Public Interest is a health, food and consumer safety, and scientific organization, that, among other things, can tell you how much saturated fat is in your enchiladas.

  www.vegoil.us—National VegOil Board, a nonprofit research, educational, and promotional group dedicated to using grease as a fuel.

  www.treehugger.com—A media outlet “dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream.”

  www.foe.org/globalbiofuelsdatabase—An environmental group’s database concerned with the ecological impact of different kinds of biofuels.

  www.dripworks.com—A company that sells efficient drip-irrigation systems.

  www.campaignearth.org—A website that provides monthly steps that can be taken to reduce carbon emissions.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After college, DOUG FINE strapped on a backpack and traveled to five continents, reporting from remote forests and war zones in Burma, Rwanda, Laos, Guatemala, and Tajikistan. He files radio work for NPR and PRI and is the author of Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Wired, Salon, U.S. News and World Report, The Christian Science Monitor, and Outside. Fine lives in a remote valley in New Mexico among a few goats and many coyotes. Visit him online at www.farewellmysubaru.com.

  ALSO BY DOUG FINE

  Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man

  To protect privacy, some human names and
dates have been changed. The names of members of most other species are real.

  Copyright © 2008 by Doug Fine

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  VILLARD and “V” CIRCLED Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Valisa’s Kung Pao Chicken with Cold Sesame Noodles recipe on Chapter 8 comes from http://lekkertje.blogspot.com. Grilled Rattlesnake Dijon recipe on Chapter 11 comes from http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/martin/wildrecipes/wgrratt5.htm. Potato, Pepper, and Onion Frittata recipe on Chapter 14 comes from http://foodblogga.blogspot.com.

  As of press time, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the Internet. Random House, Inc., is not responsible for the content available on any such site (including, without limitation, outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete information).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Fine, Doug.

  Farewell, my Subaru : an epic adventure in local living/Doug Fine.

  p. cm.

  1. Fine, Doug. 2. Environmentalism—New Mexico—Biography. 3. Sustainable living—New Mexico—Biography. 4. Human ecology—New Mexico—Biography. 5. Green movement—New Mexico. I. Title.

  GE198.N45.F56 2008

  333.72092—dc22 2007042533

  www.villard.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-50460-9

  v3.0