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Field trip from Amsterdam to Paris
I stumbled bleary-eyed down the gangplank to board the plane that would take me from Amsterdam to Paris, to connect to the plane that would take me home.
I’d been up all night, enjoying the offerings of Amsterdam, riding the giant Ferris wheel, getting harangued by a lingerie-clad prostitute for taking a picture of her silhouetted against her purple-lit window, and eventually grabbing a few Z’s on the church steps at the Occupy Amsterdam protest.
An ungainly sign stood in front of the ticket-taking desk. I almost fell over it. It said: “This KLM Flight uses BioFuel,” and had one of those QVC codes you could take a picture of with your smart phone, if you owned one, which I do not. The flight attendant who welcomes you aboard and makes sure you don’t plop down in an empty first class seat handed me a pamphlet. It was about the biofuel that the plane’s engine would be digesting during this flight. The pamphlet declared me a pioneer of aviation. Your modern day Amelia Earhart. I got to my seat, stuffed the pamphlet in the seatback pocket, and woke up at Paris’ flying saucer-looking airport.
A few days after my return home, it came back to me like a detail from a forgotten dream. One of those words that make you nod knowingly, until you realize you have no idea what it means: biofuel.
Dutch KLM’s website informed me that biofuel is made out of Used Cooking Oil, as if used cooking oil had – through its function as an Ingredient in a new and improved type of Jet Fuel – become prestigious enough to warrant its own proper noun.
The Boeing 737 Next Generation aircraft on which I’d been sleeping like a baby was one of the first commercial flights in the world to fly on a mixture of 50 percent conventional jet fuel and 50 percent biofuel. Biofuel apparently has a higher energy content, functions better in cold weather, and emits less carbon dioxide than conventional fuel. (The airline industry is responsible for two to three percent of manmade carbon emissions.) Eventually, KLM thinks it can reduce carbon emissions by half using biofuels.
Biofuel is made out of used vegetable oil picked up from restaurants. In a plant in Louisiana, the oil is hydro-treated and distilled into diesel. The plant, which is a joint venture between a fuel company and food giant Tyson, is capable of making fuel out of anything from seeds of the poisonous, tropical jatropha shrub to porcine fat. Yes, pigs could well fly.
Even though, at $17 per gallon, biofuel is exponentially more expensive than $3-per-gallon conventional fuel, it seems to be catching on. In the month after I took my place alongside the Wright brothers in the history books, Continental, Alaska Airlines and Lufthansa launched biofueled flights.
Still, cash is king, and it may be years — until the price of biofuel drops, or petroleum runs out — before we’re all flying around on Used Cooking Oil like the Boeing 737’s fearless (if sleeping) pioneers of aviation.
“Oh look,” says a delighted Dani Baker. Dark is falling fast as Dani walks me to the campsite on her 100-acre farm where I’ll be pitching my tent. “It’s spinning! That’s the thing about windmills. When the sun goes down they keep making electricity.”
Cross Island Farms’ 10-kilowatt windmill went online a month ago, and Dani is still in the honeymoon phase with the svelte turbine. She just got her first electric bill since the installation. It had been cut by more than half from the year before.
Cross Island Farms sits on Lawrentian shale on Wellesley Island, in the St. Lawrence River, which separates New York from Ontario. Folks up here call this the North Country. The toll on the bridge that leads to the island is cash only; it isn’t wired for EZ-Pass. An extended outage here isn’t so hard to imagine.
That’s why the Bakers are determined not only to renewably generate enough electricity on-site to run their farm, they also want it to run if the grid goes down.
Tomorrow morning, they will unveil the other two legs of the stool that will make their organic farm energy independent: a 5.5-kilowatt solar array and a 17-kilowatt propane generator that could keep the farm going for 13 dark days.
The morning of the open house, it’s drizzling. Hot cups of coffee on the screen porch punctuate a flurry of outdoor work. David Baker takes a break from “mud mitigation” (laying down hay where the solar panels’ wiring was buried) to give me a sneak preview of what’s at the other end of all this wiring. Out past the tomato field, 24 sleek panels are mounted at a 45-degree angle on metal legs atop concrete pedestals.
There’s still caution tape in front of the solar array because the shipment of parts was delayed by Hurricane Irene. Solar installers from Alternative Energy Systems have been here, in raincoats, since first light.
David fishes out his iPhone. He looks through the screen and steps back, back, past the rough timber fencepost that marks the corner of the crop field, and snaps a picture. He uploads it to the farm’s Facebook page, which will send a tweet to 115 followers.
Direct marketing is practically as much work as farming, but Facebook, too, is an aspect of sustainability, David explains. The farm doesn’t yet support the farmers: David works as a computer programmer of industrial machines, and Dani, a retired New York State prison psychologist, receives a pension. Reaching the small slice of the population that’s willing to pay more for organic food is crucial to the farm’s survival.
There seems to be a more considerable slice of the North Country population interested in not paying for electricity. Despite the rain, 20 people, most of them homeowners, trickle in for the tour.
They want to know how much everything costs. The $74,000 wind turbine cost the Bakers just $8,000. The New York State Energy and Research Development Authority paid half, and chunks were covered by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a federal tax credit. A NYSERDA grant covered about a quarter of the $40,000 solar array, and Dani expects a federal tax credit. The generator cost $12,800, including the six-foot deep, six-foot wide, 18-foot long hole in which its propane tank is buried.
One of the open house attendees did not have to travel far. Katherine Gwaltney, 29, has been living and working at Cross Island Farms as a WOOFer, or a member of Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which links willing workers up with farms. She arrived here just in time for the wind turbine’s ribbon cutting. She’ll be moving on to another farm in Vermont tomorrow.
“It’s been interesting to be here while they’re doing it all,” she says, as the group meanders from the turbine to the solar array, where the caution tape has been removed. A worker is still busy tinkering with the control box. His legs, scurrying up and down a ladder, are visible from where the group stands in front of the array.
“It’s a whole other part of my education. It’s really grass roots that they’re taking it upon themselves to generate energy solutions on this farm without waiting to see what happens with big wind.”
A tomato plant gets prime real estate in Central Madrid. Photo by Becca Tucker
Barbara Gref and Becca Tucker
Two Spanish businessmen stroll around a bustling plaza at lunchtime, their short-sleeved collared shirts buttoned over bulging bellies and tucked into belted dress pants.
They take no notice of the activist encampment in the middle of the Plaza Puerta del Sol. Here in the heart of Madrid, itinerant artistic types have jury-rigged a sort of Protest Central, including a tented shelter, where passersby can sign petitions against any cause that appeals: police brutality, mistreatment of farm workers, Spain’s inclusion in the European Union, capitalism in general.
The businessmen couldn’t care less about any the kids’ causes – but one. “Lechuga,” the less fat man with a full head of hair points out to the other, balder, fatter man. “Tomates.” The bald fatter man nods appreciatively.
In the border of dirt around the square’s historic fountain, where you might expect marigolds or sea grasses, the protesters have planted a vegetable and herb garden. Ostensibly, its purpose is to feed the squatter’s camp, but perhaps its location – steps from a Sbarro and a currency exchange place – is yet another form of protest. Tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, mint, basil and squash look unkempt but healthy in the scorching Spanish summer sun.
Signs are planted amongst the vegetables. One says, in Spanish: “Just water once a day.” It is an intimation that those who planted the garden may have moved on. But the idea of planting food instead of ornamental flowers is here to stay.
Here at home, Warwick in Bloom devoted eight of this year’s 63 planters to a food theme. The farmers market planters are filled with ornamental popcorn, dill, Swiss chard, kale, golden sage, red mustard, nasturtium and lavender. While the herbaceous planters exist in an eating-oriented setting, their contents don’t necessarily get eaten, said Sally Scheuermann of Warwick in Bloom. The South Street planters have the same mission as their flower-filled counterparts: they’re there to look good. Then again, there’s no law against taking a nibble.
Michael Edelstein, of Goshen, wants you to eat his garden. Edelstein’s half acre in Goshen Village is planted with edible pathways bordered entirely by fruit, including the boundary along the public sidewalk. “Anyone could nibble from the sidewalk,” said Edelstein, a professor of sustainability studies at Ramapo College and longtime leader of the organization Orange Environment. “Why not create a landscape that produces food?”
His method of plantings and plant selection ensure some part of his ever-diminishing lawn is in fruit much of the growing season. Some 100 varieties of fruit grow in his yard at the corner of Murray and Grant, like gooseberries, blueberries, blackberries, plums and cherries. Truth be told, Edelstein would love to have more raspberries; in fact he once imagined he’d have an entire half-acre of raspberries, but that plan was forestalled several years back by an ill-advised application of extremely local horse manure. That, however, is another story.
– Becca Tucker and Barbara Gref
When Penny McDougal’s husband, “Dr. Dan,” died of ALS last year, his family and friends kept a three-day vigil over his body, at home. On the third day, he was the first person buried in Maryland’s first green cemetery.
It felt so right that McDougal decid
ed to take the show on the road. She and friend Shelley Morhaim gave a presentation at Genesis Farm in northwestern New Jersey in May, to spread the word that while we don’t get a say in how we die, we do get to pick what happens next. Fifteen people showed up from as far as Vermont. Some were contemplating their own departure or a parent’s; some to talk about death, which doesn’t come up much in polite conversation in this country; a few disillusioned by dealings with the funeral industry; one who’d been deeply impressed when a friend’s son built a backyard berm in which to bury his mother; and one geologist curious about the potential of reclaiming marginally contaminated properties by turning them into green cemeteries.
The modern green burial movement started in the UK, where they never got as far away from it as we did. Dying in America has gotten expensive in more ways than one. Funerals cost $10,000, caskets are entombed in vaults to maintain cemeteries’ pristine landscaping, and we sink 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid like formaldehyde into the ground every year.
And we’d really rather not talk about it. “Our culture is in major denial of the fact that we’re going to die,” said Morhaim. “We only like death in slasher movies or weird videos on YouTube. We don’t like thinking it’s going to happen to anyone we know.”
For people who have tried to live lightly, said Morhaim, their last act being one of pollution feels wrong. A burial like Dan’s, at a green cemetery, costs between $1,000 and $4,000 (for perpetual care, opening and closing the grave.) The body is buried either in a shroud or a casket of biodegradable material like wicker, bamboo or banana leaf. Instead of a quarried and polished tombstone, the grave marker might be an inscribed field rock, a tree or shrub, or nothing at all. GPS will tell you where your loved one lies.
Historically, the funeral industry hasn’t spent too much energy hyping banana leaf coffins. “We’ve had a little bit of resistance, a little hostility from a couple of funeral directors,” said Joel Rabinowitz, director of Greensprings Natural Cemetery near Ithaca, which opened in 2006 and has hosted 97 burials. But prideful attitudes are thawing. There are 23 funeral homes in New York and New Jersey approved by the Green Burial Council to care for cadavers in ways that won’t degrades an ecosystem, like shrouding bodies for transportation to cemeteries and preserving them on the way with refrigeration or ice instead of embalming.
Green cemeteries:
Greensprings Natural Cemetery (pictured above)
293 Irish Hill Road
Newfield NY 14867
607-564-7577
www.naturalburial.org
White Haven Memorial Park
210 Marsh Road
Pittsford (Rochester) NY 14534
585-586-5250
www.whitehavenmemorialpark.com
Steelmantown Cemetery
327 Marshalville Road
Tuckahoe NJ 08270
609-628-2297
www.steelmantowncemetery.com
Hal May, Pearl's intern, mulches the "P" in "Love Peace + Goodwill"
- Pearl Fryar, 71, has started thinking about his legacy
It’s been extolled as folk art and celebrated as a living sculpture museum. But Pearl Fryar doesn’t think of his yard as anything that decorous. “I just started cutting up bushes,” he shrugs.
It’s been nearly 30 years now since Fryar, 71, began planting shrubs that had been thrown away by the local nursery. After working 12 hours at a soda can factory, he’d come home and work until midnight by the light of his lawnmower’s headlights. Using crude tools like a chainsaw, PVC piping, and plastic twists, he sculpted, shaped, and braided every shrub and tree in his three-acre yard. He doesn’t water, spray or fertilize, but digs trenches around plants and mulches with pine needles.
His neighbors in small town Bishopville, South Carolina, assumed he was unhinged. Even his wife thought he might be losing it. But over the years his pin oaks and loblolly pines, maples, Fraser firs, Leyland Cyprus, weeping hollies and Savannah hollies and dogwoods began to defy the rules of horticulture and grow into the shapes into which he’d painstakingly trained them. His vision – abstract, freeform, but complementing each plant’s structure – emerged in startling glory.
“If I could put it on canvas, I would, but I can’t paint,” he shrugs again.
In topiary’s long history, certain things had never been done until Pearl started pruning. “My success is because of my lack of horticultural knowledge,” said Pearl. “The book would say you can’t prune dogwood. That tree is over 20 years old,” he said, nodding toward a mushroom-shaped tree in full white bloom. Knowledge wasn’t important.
I was going to make the plant do what I wanted it to do.”
Pearl started getting major attention in the mid-90s and his reputation has grown like a healthy holly. Today, the garden hosts weddings and concerts. Coca-Cola is putting in restrooms and John Deere donated a tractor. Pearl has a scholarship fund for “c” students and is in high demand as a speaker at universities. Master gardeners trek from all over the country to hear Pearl say, “I’m not a horticulturalist,” then turn their education upside-down.
And Pearl, who has begun to think about his legacy, has an intern. On an April morning, 20-year-old Hal May is hard at work mulching the “P” of Pearl’s giant inscription, “Love Peace + Goodwill.”
Hal saw a 60 Minutes segment about Pearl when he was 10. Hal, a South Carolina native, is now a student at the Botanical Gardens horticulture school in New York, with a particular interest in the art of training trees to grow in minimized space. He was pondering where to apply for his required internship when he saw the documentary, “A Man Named Pearl.” He drove south, toured the topiary garden, and when Pearl asked if there were questions, Hal’s hand popped up: Can I intern for you?
“Because he was self-taught, he’s really the only person who knows his technique,” said Hal. “This is so new, so fresh… We’ve really never considered these topiary plants. But he’s found a way to make it work. There’s wisdom to be taken away.”
What has he learned so far? Well, says Hal, “it’s only my second day.”
dirt 