Consider tea tree oil. I’ve switched all of my personal care products so that I’m only using organics, and tea tree oil is fairly useful as an anti-microbial agent in these products. But it’s oil from a tea tree, which means it must be pressed out of some part of that tree, leaving a lot of detritus behind. How many pounds of waste are generated per ounce of tea tree oil, and how much water, arable land, etc. is used to grow the tree for that oil? Are these trees grown on land that previously hosted diverse ecosystems, or grew food crops?

If I’m the only one using tea tree oil, it’s a sustainable practice. I’m sure I could use as much tea tree oil as I need without ever affecting the health of the biosphere. But then, I’m also sure I could use all the coal or oil I wanted without seriously affecting the health of the biosphere. It’s when you add in the other 6.7 billion of my fellow humans that we have problems with diminishing oil supplies and a heating globe. So…how many of my fellow humans can subscribe to a given “sustainable” practice before it becomes unsustainable?

I’ve recently read The Transitions Handbook, which talks all about reducing the climate impacts and oil needs of a community. One of the big themes in this movement seems to be re-skilling, or learning to do some of the things that our forebears knew how to do in order to get by on less. It’s not as stark as all that, but that’s not really the point. I guess what I want to know is, just how sustainable and regenerative were the practices that we still have access to? Things like the burning of firewood and the building of sailing ships for transoceanic commerce stripped landscapes bare of trees across large swaths of Europe and the eastern United States. Are those the skills we need to re-learn? Other, more harmonious ways of living with our local piece of nature may be lost in the pages of deep history.

All in all, I think the Transitions approach is the only practical idea we’ve had for facing the threats of peak oil and climate change, mostly because it isn’t a single idea. The concept is really just to get people together in a particular community and talk about what’s likely to be in store for the future, and how that community can best cope with it. It’s less about a single practice or strategy, and more about facing the issue squarely and engaging the ingenuity of communities.

But I do wonder whether there actually is a way that 6.7 billion people – likely to be 9 billion people before the trends reverse – can live sustainably on this planet.

I’m unconvinced, but hopeful.

You see, I’m on a business trip right now, and while I’m headed home tomorrow evening, for tonight at least I’m completely unable to help her or provide any real sort of support. It’s not life-threatening, but neither of us is overly keen on laying down and getting rest when we’re sick, so deciding that a trip to the emergency room is in order is no ordinary event.

I don’t travel a lot these days, but tonight’s drama reminds me of all the other things I’ve missed over the years: Emily’s birthday, her Master’s defense, the wildfire near-miss…and now this. I spent my adolescence watching my father travel almost non-stop, seeing how much he missed in the process. Watching him, I swore that I’d never put my career ahead of my family. But moving to a place where there isn’t exactly a thriving local market for what I do, it’s impossible to avoid a little travel here and there. At one point, I was flying across the country every six weeks or so, working for a start-up based out of LA. Things aren’t that demanding anymore – I travel only a couple times a year now – but somehow it seems that things still have a way of happening without me.

From the way others act around me on these trips, it seems like an unusual thing not to enjoy – or at least, get a certain thrill out of – traveling for business. It does have a way of making a person feel important I suppose. Of course, I’m here to do a job…and I certainly work hard on business trips. We are all here to do one job or another, but others seem very interested in playing hard after the workday’s done.

It’s not that I don’t like the company I keep on these trips; especially since joining Red Hat, people I run into are incredibly nice. I guess I’ve just got a different perspective on this, mainly looking back…wondering what I’m missing, and who’s missing me.

Their whole show centered around the question of whether it was technically possible to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the stack of a power plant, as if this would settle the question of whether clean coal was possible. Their only acknowledgement of the whole segment of our population who think clean coal is an oxymoron was one quote from a representative of the Big Coal side of the debate. True to form, he explained with an analogy from his past, about how his mother had had a different idea from him of what constituted a clean bedroom. Yeah, that’s the same. Environmentalists are obviously just a little…anal…when it comes to how dusty they like their air. They’re just making a mountain out of a molehill.

As if this weren’t enough, NOW then spent several minutes retracing the well-covered ground about how many of these folks don’t believe in human-induced global warming. Gasp. Guess what? Some people think we never went to the moon. Crazy people exist. Some of them get help, some don’t. It’s tragic that so many of them are in power, but this is a syndrome that wealthy people seem predisposed to. Get over it.

In spite of all this, I’m not really too concerned about what they said. I’m really disappointed that we can’t seem to have an honest, all-cards-on-the-table discussion about things like clean coal. We see, in a single article, discussion the technical challenges alongside the health problems in communities where coal is mined, alongside the fact that we’re blowing up mountains and poisoning water tables for this stuff, alongside concerns about the uninspected retention dams that collapse and kill people. We can never take a full accounting and understand that capturing and transporting CO2 from coal-burning power plants takes a lot of energy, which means we’ll have to accelerate all of the above in order to maintain the same electrical output. This isn’t about whether you believe in global warming (like God, it believes in you!), it’s about having an honest discussion about where we stand and where we can reasonably go from here. Without the marketing distractions from people who stand to make a lot of money, or want to protect existing investments.

The same thing applies to smart electricity grids, wind and solar power, battery technology and hybrid vehicles, biofuels, local vs. industrial food…just about anything that isn’t supported by a large existing marketing machine. We cannot seem to have an honest, comprehensive discussion in the mainstream media about these things. And this is probably the single most important thing when it comes to choosing a wise direction for our future. Without honest discussion, we cannot make decisions that are good for us and our children.

So, this is what I want. This is my wish for Earth Day 2009, if you like.

Media, stop wincing, and stop mistaking equal representation for honest discussion. Just give us the information. All of it. Remember the reason you got into this business, and do your job.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.

Most people think about waste as throwing away something that’s still good, or not using something up completely before casting it aside. Using this definition, to reduce your waste you can simply unplug from our serial-consumption society a little bit and start using things until they’re worn out. This is what our ancestors did, mainly out of necessity, and it’s probably part of the reason many of us have furniture items that once belonged to our grandparents. Of course, things were made with a different ethic back then…one of maximized durability, not planned obsolescence. Yet even given the death-dating that takes place in the design of modern products, it’s possible to put the brakes on our ravenous appetite for things a little bit. Maybe it means hanging onto the truck you bought ten years ago, and have already paid off, even if it’s got a cracked dashboard and it’s not as shiny and new as some of the others on the road. The point is to examine those things you’re thinking about replacing, and deciding whether they’re still useful or could be repaired and be useful again.

But wait a minute. Go back to that example about the truck. This points us to another type of waste: the inefficient use of resources like gasoline that has been built into the very fiber or our lifestyles for so long. If I hang onto my truck, I’m still consuming gasoline in prodigious quantities…as if it were nearly free, and couldn’t hurt a fly once burned. Once, the prevailing wisdom – prevailing, not necessarily best-thought-out – held that these two principles were pretty much solid. We weren’t likely to run out of oil (or, at least, let’s not talk about it), and there is no such thing as global warming (oops). So, by hanging onto my truck I’m wasting quite a bit of ever-more-precious oil, and doing more than my part to degrade the environment. If I chuck the truck and get something smaller, maybe a hybrid or something, then I save quite a bit in terms of gas and environmental side-effects, but I’m pushing another used truck onto the market, which will undoubtedly result in one car somewhere else being junked. The metal parts can be recycled, but the composite panels used for the interior? I doubt it very much. (Read Cradle to Cradle for reasons why.) That also brings up the point of pushing yet another gas guzzler onto the secondary market, which means it’s unlikely I’m actually improving the gas consumption in the aggregate…unless the junker that gets retired after my truck replaces it actually got worse mileage.

So, I find myself stuck in quicksand: if I do nothing, I sink slowly and quietly below the surface. If I struggle, I only hasten the sinking by digging my way down. Emily and I are starting to see this dilemma every time we think about replacing one item with a more efficient counterpart. Replacing the dishwasher with an Energy Star version is great, but then you wind up putting that old one in a trash pile somewhere. Same goes for the washing maching we just replaced (okay, the transmission was fried on the old one, so there wasn’t much choice), our refrigerator, just about everything. We put in bamboo floors, but threw away our old carpet (nasty stuff, but still). What to do??

When you’re trying to lighten your own footprint on the Earth, it’s extremely difficult in today’s world to avoid making someone else’s that much heavier. This has to be the hardest problem we’re going to face in trying to green up our society, since removing these inefficient goods without creating ever higher mountains of trash, or flooding the secondary markets with energy-guzzling monsters is nearly impossible.

I have a Meyer lemon tree in my back yard that will probably be my first target. It seems to produce a profusion of blossoms, though we’ve only had it for a couple years, and it hasn’t borne much fruit. I recently found out why: late freezes seem to be killing the blossoms. This year has been unbelievably bad (for Florida), with temperatures reaching down into the mid-teens on several occasions already. I figure if I can get some cuttings growing, I might be able to coax some high-yielding house plants out of the deal. I’ll probably start here, but it’s definitely not all I’ve got on my mind these days.

I’ve also got my eye on some huge fig trees that produce some of the best brown turkey figs I’ve ever had. Oh, and there are three orange trees – two large, one smallish – that seem to produce pretty well. The smaller one has actually had a profound effect on the route Luke and I walk ever morning. I go out of my way to walk past this tree every day, because when it blooms, it gives off the most delicious scent that you can smell from over a block away.

I’m also coming to see the trash service as competitors. This morning, I walked past a four-foot cutting of prickly pear cactus in someone’s yard waste bin, waiting for the trash guys to come pick it up. This was more than enough to root several good cuttings, according to what I saw at the Edible Plant Project. This was near the apex of our walk, and it took me about half an hour to get back to the house, pick up my work gloves, and get the truck. I passed EWS (Emerald Waste Service, known as “Earl” to us…don’t ask) on the way, and thought, “No way he’s already been all the way around to here…” But he had, and the cactus was lost to the iron beast. Oh well, better luck next time.

This is a whole category of gardening I honestly didn’t know existed. Before talking to the Edible Plant guys, I thought cuttings were for herbs. I really can’t explain how excited I am as I think about taking some of the best that Florida has to offer – great fruit – with us when Emily graduates, and we move on to our next life.

As we waited for everyone to arrive, some really interesting conversations sprang up, and continued sporadically throughout the class. Most of it was related to the task at hand, but I was struck by how many people are really deeply interested in learning how to apply the lessons of modern homesteading, and how far we’d come as a group. This is the crowd I never knew existed in Gainesville; I’d been to several classes at INDIGO in the past, and while people always seem interested and friendly, there’s usually a certain reluctance for people to really embrace their inner hippie and get their hands dirty. Not so here; people were talking all over the place, about how many chickens they’re raising, or how they plan on applying ideas of edible landscaping to become self-sufficient (in terms of food) in their retirement. Some of us talked at length about the CSA situation around town, and what to do if you can’t get past Rosie’s waiting list. At one point, I found myself talking with Michael about how I might improve my prototype greenhouse design by storing more water in the pipe and choosing better pipe materials to absorb more sunshine (and heat) for overnight.

I have to say that today was a high point in my re-education about Gainesville, which really began about a year ago. Since then, I’ve discovered that you can get just about all of your food – except for the odd out-of-season tomato – within 50 miles of my house. Now, we have pork, beef, chicken, more veggies than we could possibly eat (even if we knew what they all were), milk, and much more…and we spend almost no time at the grocery store these days. Seriously. Today represents the next step in that process, which I first glimpsed last spring when I learned about square-foot gardening. Using the knowledge of edible landscaping with perennials, I think we can really take that next step, and start making our land produce for us without constant coaxing.

My first project on this subject is going to be to see whether I can root some cuttings from fig trees down the block that produce some truly beautiful fruit. Oh, and there’s that orange tree a few blocks away…I guess I’d better start volunteering out at the Edible Plant Project so I can learn as much as possible about this stuff. It simply has to be as important a life skill as knowing how to balance your checkbook.