Inner City Farmer

I took my son Zephyr to see Wall-E this weekend. Like most kids his age, he concentrated most of his attention on the central love story; the greater message was a bit over his head. But what a message it was: the world is effectively going to hell in a handbasket!

I think I deserve a gold star because my favorite part of the movie also happened to be the most important: the discovery of the plant inside the refrigerator. That simple splash of color introduced into such a bleak landscape came at just the right moment. If I had to stare at those brown mountains of trash any longer, I may have given into Zephyr’s request that I let him run up and down the stairs inside the theater.

For all the power of the movie’s message, I doubt it’s going to change our society’s twisted view of the environment all that much. At the latest G-8 Summit in Japan, the world’s most powerful nations devised an incredibly weak response to the increasingly urgent problem of global warming, establishing a goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050.

“At this rate, by 2050 the world will be cooked and the G-8 leaders will be long forgotten,” said Antonio Hill, spokesman for Oxfam International. “The G-8’s endorsement of a tepid 50 by 50 climate goal leaves us with a 50-50 chance of a climate meltdown. Rather than a breakthrough, the G-8’s announcement on 2050 is another stalling tactic.”

Perhaps instead of sitting around sipping bottle water and patting each other on the back, these so-called world leaders should have spent the afternoon watching a kid’s movie. They might have learned something.

Here’s the toughest part about trying to create a completely sustainable environment in an urban setting: I have neighbors on all four sides of me, and not all of them think the way I do. My neighbor directly to the west of me has caused me the most grief. For a while there we maintained a civil neighborly relationship. We borrowed things from each other. We talked over the fence. We even drank beer together on occasion. But from the outset there were signs that our connection would not grow any deeper.

We simply don’t see the world in the same way. First, he dropped off a container of toxic chemicals on my front porch and suggested I nuke my backyard with it in to get rid of the mosquitoes that plagued us last summer. Then he asked to borrow a piece of particle board to use as a backstop so that he could shoot the opossum that lives in our neighborhood. But the last straw came the night he laughed at me for believing in global warming. I fled his house in horror, but he wouldn’t let it go, emailing me the following morning. “If you have any facts to backup [sic] your ridiculous position, I’m all ears. I know you haven’t a clue, so I’ll respect that and leave it where it is. And now I’ll leave you with a simple thought… the polar ice caps on Mars are melting at the same rate as on earth, yet no CO2 emissions, SUV’s, evil rich, or coal-fired power plants exist on that planet. Ask one of your egghead experts about that one.”

Curious to discover what the hell he was talking about, I researched the matter and found that he was quoting from a story in National Geographic about Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, who attributed the simultaneous warming of Earth and Mars to changes in the sun’s heat output. What my neighbor didn’t mention was that Abdussamatov’s radical theory was quickly refuted by every leading climate scientist in the world, including Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England’s Oxford University. “His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion,” Wilson said. “And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report.” I didn’t speak to this neighbor for six months.

We have since reestablished a neighborly relationship, but every time I smile at him across the fence it’s through clenched teeth. We not only see the world differently, evidently we speak different languages too. Last week, he told me he wanted to chop down a tree that was on his property but hung between our houses. His reasoning was that the opossum used the tree to climb on to his roof. I told him I didn’t think he should do it, that I wasn’t an advocate of cutting down any trees, and certainly not one as beautiful as this one. It was a Texas redbud, which sports beautiful pink flowers each spring. I used to enjoy staring at it from my kitchen window, but I won’t be doing that any longer. Yesterday at 6:30 in the morning, my neighbor destroyed it with a chain saw.

Nothing says Independence Day more than getting in the car and heading for some far off destination. To celebrate the Fourth when I was 22, I got in a car with my then girlfriend and drove ten hours just to see a show at Red Rocks (Blues Traveler and the Allman Brothers), and then we returned the very next day. When I lived in Eugene, Oregon, I drove an hour to the coast just to get drunk and watch high-school kids shoot bottle rockets at each other (and on one unfortunate occasion, me). Strange to think that such holiday road tripping is quickly becoming a luxury most of us can’t afford.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Instead of looking at the impending “energy crisis” as a bad thing, why not celebrate the benefits of the Death of the Car Culture? The mainstream media is starting to catch on. In a special report, Time magazine lists “Ten Things You Can Like About $4 Gas.” I feel like I could name twenty more.

So where am I going this weekend? I’m staying right here in Austin, enjoying my house, maybe doing a little work outside. The farthest I plan to go is Barton Springs, a world-class swimming hole less than ten minutes from my house. I could drive two hundred miles or fly half way around the world, and I wouldn’t find a better swim spot.

It’s hard to see ourselves for who we truly are. It must be some biological thing. When we sing in the shower, we think we sound great. When we have b.o., we never seem to think we smell as bad as we really do. I am no different. I think my house looks like the coolest place ever. I mean, I’ve got an arch for an entrance and I just increased the square footage of my house by like 30 percent, using mostly natural materials and doing all the work myself.

But then there are those days where I see the mess I’ve made and have yet to clean up–just look at all that sand! I see the junk I’ve stacked up along the side of my house, waiting for a use that will keep it out of the landfill. I smell the stink emanating from the sand pile in front of my house because my cats think it’s a giant litter box. These thoughts, this doubt, were racing through my mind as I went to introduce myself to Chris and Megan, who just moved in two doors down from me. “They must think I’m a real freak,” I was thinking as I said hello.

But instead of scorn or judgment this is what came out of Megan’s mouth instead: “Do you think you could teach me to do that sometime?” She was pointing at the front porch I made out of cob. You’ve got to love it when that happens.

“Sure,” I said. “I can teach you as soon as I start building a cob tool shed in my backyard.”

Now that I have have some help I am more excited than ever to start that project, but first I need to finish plastering the exterior of the wall of the room that was a garage and is now called The Man Cave. I put a second coat on today, this one sandier, smoother, less prone to cracking. It’s looks pretty damn good, but that opinion is based on my own vision and could be slightly prejudiced.

When I first discovered natural building, I kept hearing the name Ianto. At the Natural Building Colloquium in Kerrville, Texas last fall, it seemed every other conversation started or ended with Ianto-this and Ianto-that. “Who was this guy?” I asked myself. Unfortunately, out of all the celebrated natural builders who attended the Colloquium Ianto Evans was the only who couldn’t make it. My interest was piqued, however, and as soon as I got home I ordered his book The Hand-Sculpted House, which I credit for my desire to remodel my entire homestead using cob.

There’s another name that keeps appearing in my life, and it’s Masanobu Fukuoka. While reading books and articles about different philosophies of gardening, I keep seeing references to this man. Curious to find out more about him, I checked out his book The One-Straw Revolution from the library. For anyone with an interest in permaculture and organic gardening, it should be required reading.

Here’s Fukuoka’s life story and philosophy of farming in brief: As a 25 year old in Japan, he was working as a plant pathologist for the Plant Inspection Division of the Yokohama Customs Bureau when he had an exhaustion-induced epiphany that modern agriculture was FUBAR. He promptly quit his job and returned to his family’s farm where he practiced “do-nothing farming,” which didn’t require plowing, fertilizing, adding insecticides, or even making compost. His philosophy of farming mirrored his philosophy of life, that human beings, full of ego and arrogance, are prone to meddling where they shouldn’t, that if left to its own devices the natural order will be just fine, thank you very much.

As basic as this idea is, it was revolutionary at the time. It was also effective. Fukuoka’s farm produced just as much rice as ones of equal size that used modern practices, and it did so with only a fraction of the inputs and labor. He let nature do all the work and provide all the nutrients, and he used the time he freed up to write books and further develop his philosophy. “There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song,” he writes in The One-Straw Revolution.

In the 1970s the world finally discovered this man and anointed him one of the pioneers of the organic farming movement along with Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale. But Fukuoka was never in it for the fame. He wrote several books and lectured on occasion but slowly dropped out of the public light. At 95, he is still alive today, living somewhere in Tokyo, but he no longer farms and even his fan website has no direct contact with him. Who is Masanobu Fukuoka?