A philosophy of outbuildings: first worked example

In late 2019 I wrote a post called A Philosophy of Outbuildings, attempting to capture the lessons from 40 years of making and using utility structures ranging from outhouses to the awesome barn my parents built that we’ve been making cider in. One of the fundamental principles was that small outbuildings should be portable, so they can be moved to a more useful spot (or to get them out of the way of some other project). Since then I’ve built a couple examples of this, and thought I’d capture the results in case they are of any use to the greater internet community.

The purpose of the first was simple: to shelter a small diesel tractor that came to us from Five Islands. The tractor gets used for bushhogging, harvesting firewood, and moving mulch/gravel around the yard, and sits idle through the winter; it is approximately as old as I am and would deteriorate rapidly if left in the sun/rain, so it needed some protection. My model was the very successful open-front pole-barn that my father and grandfather built in the early 1980s that we used to keep the cider operation out of the rain in Cider Year Five, but I didn’t have firm plans for the land where I built it, so I wanted to be able to move the shed later if I needed to.

Expanding slightly on the dimensions of a single bay of that pole barn, I settled on a footprint 10′ wide and 14′ long, with about four feet of overhang on the open west end. The building would be floorless, open on one end, and sit on two 16′ 6×6 PT skids with chamfered ends, blocked up level on pads of coarse crushed stone. The closed back end of the building is built on a 4×4 cross-beam set on top of the skids and lagged down. The walls are framed with rough-sawed 2x4s from Five Islands, and diagonally sheathed with Hammond Lumber shiplap. I used a chevron pattern for the sheathing on the side walls, in hopes of providing the long 6×6 skids some structural support to prevent sagging. I did the project in a hurry with the winter of 2019-2020 closing in, so I don’t have great construction pictures; here’s the walls framed up at the end of the first long day:

Rafters were cut from 2x6x8′ rough-sawn, with something like a 6-pitch. Collars were likewise 2×6; 2×4 would do but I had thoughts of hanging a boat from them. The roof is strapped with 1x and dried in with dark green five-rib steel sheet. The overhang on the open end is supported by 4×4 diagonal braces, and the roof structure is tied together by a 20′ PT 2×8 ridgebeam. It got dark inside, so I used a large piece of salvaged plexiglass on the closed gable end up high to let in a bit of light. Here’s the ‘finished’ shed, with happy tractor inside:

The most obvious miss was that I should have extended the diagonal siding to tie in with the 4×4 brace poles that hold up the overhang; this was not obvious because I built the wall sections before fully thinking through the overhangs, but it would have made the structure stouter and also helped to keep weather out. The gable end of the overhang could also be sheathed to keep rain/leaves out, at the cost of some light.

At least until I further perfect the art of portable buildings, this was as large as I was prepared to go on a floorless open structure that I would hope to move with come-a-longs, pulleys, and small tractors/vehicles. My biggest concern was wracking/distortion, both from natural ground settling and also during any future move. To prevent in-plane wracking of the open end I added a pair of a-frame type diagonal braces that can be seen in the photo above, to tie the side walls and end collar tie to the ridgebeam; not sure how well they will work, but they look cool. There is also some small chance of a tornado or derecho-type event picking it up and blowing it over; it’s surrounded by mature trees so it feels fairly protected, but at some point when I put the last few boards on the gable end I should probably also cable it down to the bases of a couple trees for extra security.

In order to skid the building I would plan to temporarily add structure to tie together the skids at the open end, and also temporary internal cross-bracing or cabling to keep the footprint square. With just 5″ of undercarriage clearance, it would be interesting to see what it can skid over; I have a feeling that I should have done something to elevate the bottom of the back wall more – e.g. bandsaw an arch into the underside of a 4×8.

From an ecological perspective, other than the steel roofing (approximately 2lb/CO2 per square foot as calculated in the post linked above) and a handful of pieces of PT trucked up from the Southeast, the building is made from untreated locally milled lumber. The overhangs are decent, the skids sit on crushed stone and/or blocks, and the site is reasonably airy for being in the woods, so I am optimistic it will hold up well over time.

The next building in the series is smaller but more exotic – a kinematically-correct portable solar chicken coop.

On the use of land: A second look at Second Nature

At some point in college I came by a copy of Michael Pollan’s first book, Second Nature, about gardens and humans’ relationship to the natural world.  I may have stolen it from my parents’ coffee table, or found it lying around the cozy, fervent MIT cooperative where I lived.   Having been raised by former NOLS instructors on tofu, Thoreau, and Edward Abbey, and on the other hand undertaking at the time an intense education in technology, quantitation, and innovation (electronic paper, 3D printing, underwater drones, implanted medical devices…), the book stuck with me (‘planted a seed’, you might say), and played a part in leading me to these apple trees, this blog, and this post.

Briefly, ‘Second Nature’ presents contemporary environmental thinking about land as a sort of absolutist madonna/whore dichotomy between a few remaining preserved gems of ‘pure’ wilderness and the surrounding matrix of ordinary, ‘degraded’ territory, and Pollan pronounces this absolutist distinction barren – both literally and conceptually.  As an alternative he sets forth the garden as a more fruitful metaphor, both for feeding ourselves and for thinking about interactions between humans and the natural world.  Re-reading after over 20 (!) years, the book is thoughtful, engaging, and still has a good argument to make, one that resonates with my life.

Certainly Wilderness was a guiding star of my youth.  Though my parents were raised in or near cities on both coasts, they met high in the Rockies as mountaineering instructors, and mixed in among the ordinary homesteading tools there were strange artifacts about – wood-handled ice axes, oval carabiners, and hanks of rattle-stiff old goldline. Practically before we could walk, my sister and I had full-sized Kelty framepacks waiting for us, and I remember the pride of finally being (marginally) big enough to carry mine.  Many summers we road-tripped to Wyoming to hike high into the mountains, disappearing across the continental divide where sometimes we’d go a week without seeing another party.

And since my parents ‘settled down’ pretty far off the beaten path, my sister and I grew up two miles from the nearest other kids, as part of the broader back-to-the-land movement which was in conscious opposition to the industrial practices of modern life.  Growing up this way I came to see wilderness as Real, bracing and constant against the artificiality of television, plastic toys, and social cliques.  The mountains we trekked through offered arresting beauty in reward for skill and hard work.  The rock is enduring, the weather uncaring, the alpine trees strong and patient. Wilderness offers a tough but objective test – you either keep your gear dry or you don’t, you make it over the pass or you don’t, and the consequences flow directly from the nature of unvarnished reality. In wilderness it’s clear that the universe doesn’t care about you, but it’s fair and its rules are legible – in that way it’s far superior to junior high.

But, you can’t cultivate a rock.  You can’t eat a view.  As a species we are 7 billion people, ten thousand years down a one-way experiment in intensive food-making, culture-building, and technology-refining, and we’ve been pretty darned sophisticated at it for thousands of years.  For who we are, wilderness is an education, perhaps a vacation, but not a career – while it’s certainly a nice place to visit, we just can’t live there anymore.

Where we live is the industrial economy, and how we live there is mechanized agriculture and massive flows of energy.  The surface experience of modern life in the developed world often obscures this – our skills are transferrable, our communities virtual, our finances digital.  But this is, if not an illusion, an epiphenomenon of the stability, specialization, and efficiency of the underlying physical systems.  Until we upload our consciousness into silicon (as the Singularity squad devoutly wishes), we remain stubbornly physical creatures – to see this clearly look no further than last spring’s run on toilet paper.

The toilet paper thing is a sort of nervous joke, but I mean this in a broad and serious way. We don’t actually have a post-industrial society; we just got so efficient at manufacturing buildings and cars and appliances and electronics that as a society we have enough bandwidth for many of us to toodle around with apps and stuff. Nor in physical terms do we actually have a post-agricultural society – we just got so efficient at agriculture (efficient in economic terms, by using a ton of fossil energy) that we had enough extra wealth/calories to build an industrial society.  The foundation of the information age is hyper-efficient manufacturing, and the foundation of industry is hyper-efficient agriculture, and the foundation of all of it is cheap energy. And the fact that the environmental impact of our lives is largely hidden by offshore manufacturing and high-voltage transmission lines does not make it go away.

Grappling in a real and quantitative way with human environmental impact seems to be what Second Nature is missing. Published two years before Pollan’s book, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature introduced the US mainstream to concrete and present reality of global warming.  But Pollan doesn’t engage materially with climate change, or really with other large-scale environmental problems. Perhaps this is because he leans so heavily on the crisp dichotomy between wild and impacted land, which was at the very moment of his writing being ruptured by the all-permeating reach of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Pollan was right that wilderness is not a solution for sustaining 7 billion people, and that necessarily the way forward is to thoughtfully cultivate our world (enough of it to live on).  But his book has precious little to say about actually producing sustenance. After a promising beginning among the truck farms of Long Island, the book takes long excursions into the social class implications of rose varieties, the moralistic overtones of compost, and the excesses of seed catalogues, and in the end seems to be more about aesthetics than substance, more about landscaping than actually producing food, fuel, or fiber.  His primary concern seems to be how a well-read suburbanite can display his good taste.

This disappoints me because I believe that the actual physical substance of how we live matters.  To be sure, what we feel and proclaim matter also – aesthetics, symbols, and statements move minds, but minds are also subject to myopia, hypocrisy and wishful thinking.  Rock-bottom physical reality matters at least as much, because all the while as we think and symbolize and post and upvote, inexorably we eat, we heat, we travel (or used to), we buy, and we build, and the effects are real, quantitative, physical. Our microprocessors require electricity, our fingers quit typing much below room temperature, and our lofty professional and aesthetic goals are stubbornly dependent on a pound dryweight of bread, butter, and beans, daily with scant interruption.  We remain tied, physically and therefore ethically, to the land.

Where then should we live, and how should we live there?  Where? There’s no point getting prescriptive about it; we are 7.6 billion now, we take up a lot of space already, and this Covid time is no season to encourage folks moving around.  We should live in our communities.  Urbanites have their own clear paths to low-impact living: density, bicycles, and a thoughtful diet go a long way. For those of us who live in the countryside, the risks and possibilities are broader.

I live in Maine.  Because our state has the lowest population density east of the Mississippi, many of us live on sizeable chunks of land.  While most people in the developed world externalize the environmental impact of their lives, still land and sunlight are the ultimate sources of our sustenance, and the impact does not go away just because we can’t see it.  So for those of us fortunate enough to own acreage, it’s worth thinking about how our land could sustainably produce some of the basic stuff of human life.

I have written much here of my frustration with the consumer model of citizenship. Not that I want to live as a survivalist, guarding a field of turnips with an assault rifle, but nor am I satisfied to be merely a specialized cog in the global industrial machine. Because my life impacts the planet, because land and nature are the ultimate source of our sustenance, and because I have land, I am interested in stewardship.  Because the path humanity is on is not sustainable, I am interested in experimenting and modeling other paths – ways to be productive, physically, of vital goods in a sustainable way and at a meaningful scale.

I say ‘experimenting’ because generally this sort of project won’t make a whole lot of conventional financial sense; it’s more like a hobby with a larger purpose. Why? Food is cheap, real estate is expensive, and the cash economy is lucrative. When a small buildable lot of an acre or so sells for $50-$100k,  basically nothing (except cannabis) can be done agriculturally to match the economics of development.  Still there is a sadness in old farms going to forest or to subdivisions. To be sure, when the railroads spread across the nation, it made economic sense to move production of grain and beans from rocky New England farms to Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas, but nothing came to replace the vitality that went out of the places then. But should the gods of the market dictate next that the staff of life should move on further, to be produced entirely in Brazil or Mongolia, will we then clothe Iowa in condos, and keenly await the grain ships as the Romans did?

In this modern first-world life, our food, shelter, warmth, transportation, and electricity all come from the global economy, which is 80% fossil-powered.  Our land lies fallow as we heat our homes with petroleum, eat supermarket food grown with Haber-process nitrogen, and build with lumber trucked in from Canada or beyond. Those of us with the freedom to choose should contemplate instead how we might do better by thoughtful use of our land. What practices can I take up, such that if if my neighbors and my bioregion followed suit, the result would be a stronger community, a more vital countryside, and a gentler impact on the broader world? What sustenance and beauty could we bring forth, and what might that do for our health, our communities, and our planet?  

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One interesting consequence of the intersection of ubiquitous internet search and ubiquitous aerial imagery is that it isn’t hard to go looking and find places that would previously have remained literary abstractions.  So without much effort I was able to find the western Connecticut property that was the centerpiece of Pollan’s book.  And in 2021 only the barest hints of the hardscrabble dairy farm he describes are visible.  From the air and the street we have what appears to be a typical high-end exurban home in the woods, with more-tasteful-than-average landscaping.  The only hint of anything out of the ordinary is a few raised beds, heavily shaded by large trees. Like so many former New England growers, Pollan has picked up and moved west, and the forest has largely reclaimed his efforts. 

Book Review: String Too Short to be Saved

Not this Christmas but the one before, my parents gave me a memoir called String too short to be saved, first published in 1960 by Donald Hall, and I finally find some time to read most of it this winter.

The book describes Hall’s summers as a boy, spent with his grandparents on a small dairy farm in New Hampshire  in the 1930s.  The writing is good (turns out the author is also a former Poet Laureate of the US), and there are many heartfelt and beautiful passages, but the mood is persistently elegiac to the point of being depressing.  His grandparents are aging and struggling to maintain the farm, the agricultural economy is in terminal decline, and the colorful cast of characters around them are in varying states of decay which Hall paints unflinchingly, without cheap gestures toward redemption.  

Perhaps this is appropriate.  It has always struck me when I drive back roads in northern New England that many communities more than a few towns inland from the ocean appear to have had their best years long ago, with collapsing barns, peeling paint, and sleepy main streets.  But it had not occurred to me just how long ago those best years might have been.  Inland rural Maine and New Hampshire grew up around agriculture, but railroads opened up prime farmland to the west by the mid 1800s, and the industrial revolution pulled the population to cities and factories. The young people left, the old people died, and the fields grew up in birches and pines.  A passage from the book captures this diaspora:

“The hurricane of 1938 blew the pines over, and the great trees crushed the camps, the church, the meeting hall, and the ice-cream stand.  Soon after, the war took away the young men.  The dance in the evening ended, and the play which the young people put on. Old Home Day became a Sunday afternoon in August, when the old people met in the yard of a church.  When Old Home Week was established by Governor Rollins in 1899, these old people had been young… Old home week was the time for returning to the place you had left; even in 1899 the country was emptying,  By 1949 most of the survivors…didn’t even know they had an old home.”

And as go the rural areas, so go the small cities that once supported them.  Hall’s book reminded me of an essay by Paul Krugman from a couple years back, The Gambler’s Ruin of Small Cities. Krugman notes that while small cities served an obvious function when the foundation of the economy was farming, they had to reinvent themselves in various ways when industrial agriculture depopulated their surroundings.  With constant, accelerating waves of change driven by technology and globalization, many may eventually run out of luck – particularly if they are in cold, inaccessible places, without the benefit of a university or attractions to draw tourists.

I grew up in the woods, and I’m attached to the idea of people producing the vital substance and sustenance of life by engaging the natural world around them.  But I’m also an engineer and a realist; I know that technology and economics drive the changes that poets then write about.  Is it too much to hope that a transition to clean wind and solar power, which are by their nature as diffuse as loam and timber, could bring new life to rural northern places?

Grift, niche, scale

The more fortunate we are, the truer it is that we create the world through our actions.  Once we understand the scientific reality of emissions-driven global warming, and accept the moral responsibility to do something about it, the next question is, what to do?  And for those of us who are engineers, the further question arises – what to work on? To answer these questions, it helps to think about which solutions could actually be the change that we need to see in the world? – that is, which solutions can scale?

Ever since environmental awareness became a mainstream concept, there have been lots of ideas about how people can do their part – from composting household scraps and sorting recyclables to the self-serving notices in every hotel that we can save the planet by re-using linens.  My biggest beef with these ideas is their innumeracy – the idea that a right-thinking citizen can do their part by hanging up a towel, when their share of the emissions from the flight that brought them to that hotel could easily run a thousand times greater than the impact of the laundry.

As I pointed out in the previous post about the massive scale of human energy use, modern civilization consumes an absurd amount of energy to deliver the basic goods of our lives, and most peoples’ ‘environmentalism’ doesn’t recognize or grapple honestly with that fact.  In his phenomenal online book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, David MacKay similarly pokes this innumeracy, which lets people think unplugging a phone charger or carrying around a re-usable straw is an effective response to environmental challenges, while they flit about in jets, rumble around in SUVs, and eat a bloated western diet.

So what does work?  The question must be answered on a couple of different levels.  At the individual level, each person’s emissions and environmental impact is relatively straightforward to estimate, and it’s hard for me to knock anybody’s well-targeted efforts to reduce them.  Further, environmental sensibility, financial thrift, and physical fitness are often in very close alignment, a point repeatedly made by early-retirement blogger Pete Adeney., who points out that joy- and health-improving life choices can often save 75% of both cost and impact.  In a world where superhuman quantities of nearly-free energy are vomited out in every direction, this is not a surprise.

And so for instance a plucky, mechanically-inclined tribe (and small industry) has sprung up to collect used fryer oil from restaurants, react it with industrial glycerine to form a bio-derived fuel that is a fair (in fair-weather) facsimile of diesel, and use it to drive around (often in classy old Mercedes station wagons).  And my parents are clothed and shod essentially for free by the high-class leavings in the help-yourself shop at the Georgetown Mall – ‘satisfaction guaranteed, or twice your garbage back!”

Clever hacks of this type are admirable, and hard to knock.  But they are what I would call ‘niches’ – moves that are smart and efficient, but fundamentally can’t scale, because they depend on the massive inefficiency of the mass market of energy and stuff.  Free lightly-used name-brand apparel is only available because people in Georgetown buy and discard a ton of clothing, and fry-oil biodiesel only works because industrial agriculture has driven the cost of food down nearly to zero.  If everyone tried to adopt these practices, the supply would quickly dry up – that’s what makes them niches.  Similarly, hunting deer for meat in overpopulated suburban landscapes is a niche – highly economical and environmentally sound compared to industrial farming, but if everyone tried to adopt the practice, soon there would be no deer. And despite my attachment to it from the days of my youth, wood heat falls in this category as well – even at maximal sustainable production, the energy output of US forests could not heat US buildings.

Worse, there are also certain practices and products that are touted as environmentally beneficial but are actually useless or harmful.  Given the marketing cachet of environmental values, these I would term ‘grifts’.  The most egregious examples are the transparent ‘run your car on water’ sidebar scams that pop up every time the price of motor fuel spikes, or the sleazy ‘energy saver’ capacitor boxes that are marketed to save 10-35% on electric bills.  But green-tinted grift is everywhere.  Basically the entire bottled water industry falls in this category when any environmental claim is attached (e.g. recycled plastic in the bottles), since tap water is safe, often purer, and produces vastly less emissions than bottled. I described biofuel as a niche above, but as it tries to scale it becomes something else – according to some analysis, the huge US corn ethanol industry produces more emissions than it saves, and could be considered a giant environmental grift fueled by poorly designed subsidies; reportedly Brasil’s sugarcane ethanol industry is better.  And I would put most eco-themed travel in the grift category, when marketed internationally – whatever benefits may derive from locally-sourced produce and organic spa treatments are swept away in a category-five hurricane of airline industry emissions.  Local food itself is sometimes grift, particularly where fossil-heated greenhouses are used to grow low-calorie, high-value produce under LED lights. In order to figure out whether something is an improvement or a loss, you need to Do The Math.

What we really want are practices, products, and energy systems that can scale – that is, their benefits hold up even when adopted across the entirety of industrial civilization.  Niche technologies like biofuel fails this standard, because even if we turned all of our food into fuel we could not run our current fleet of vehicles (not to mention that 7 billion people would have nothing to eat).  Growing delicious tomatoes in one’s front yard is a delightful hobby, but except for those with huge lots and extreme zeal, it cannot materially reduce the dietary climate impact of its practitioners.  There is not a hard and fast line between niche and scale solutions; no one approach or technology will solve all our problems, and larger niches might end up as some of the smaller climate wedges – for instance, we might ask whether carefully-sourced biofuel might power a smaller, more efficient air transport industry.  The point is that we should focus most of our attention on approaches that are big enough to matter on a global scale.

In terms of generation of useful energy, historical data shows that clean power sources can scale at least to a material extent.  Hydropower already has scaled – to about 17% of global electricity supply. Further expansion in the developed world is limited by site availability and environmental impact of dams, but last I checked it’s still growing rapidly elsewhere – for better and for worse.  In the time I have been in the clean energy industry, utility wind turbines have scaled from nothing to about 7% of the US electricity grid (and similar numbers globally).  Solar is further behind, at around 2.5% of global electricity, but growing fast (on the order of 25% CAGR).  Nuclear has historic scale, but as a long-term, centralized, base-load technocratic solution, it is a poor fit to these times of tepid government investment, dynamic energy markets, and fear-driven public conversation.  Nor do I hear its proponents grappling honestly with the weapons proliferation implications of a massive global buildout.

For clean power to continue scaling, storage technology must scale likewise to manage the intermittency of wind and solar; similarly electric vehicles must continue their growth across another two orders of magnitude.  Fortunately our industry is tackling this challenge head-on, and market demand is strong.  Onward and upward!

 

 

Energy Enlightenment and the Better Angels of our Exotherm

When I was a kid, my mother always had a shelf of serious popular science books, and among the authors represented was Stephen Pinker, a Harvard professor and linguist.  I’m not the language zealot that she is, but I kept track of Pinker, who has come to prominence in the last 10 years for a pair of books about violence and the well-being of humanity.  In the first, (The Better Angels of our Nature) he argues – with reams of data – that violence has declined drastically in modern times, and explores some causal themes. In the second (Enlightenment Now) he further demonstrates a remarkable, consistent, and progressive improvement in the material, social, and intellectual well-being of humanity, and argues that that the primary cause of this improvement is the rise of Enlightenment values, including science and humanism, which took root in Europe in the 1700s.  

I am basically convinced with respect to the decline of violence and improvement in quality of life.  Two thirds of Enlightenment Now consists of a train of short chapters presenting data to show how longevity, health, wealth, knowledge, freedom, crime, safety, happiness, etc. have improved drastically in the last two hundred years.  It’s not a subtle book, and its triumphal tone is an odd fit to the mood of our times, but there’s a ton of evidence to support the argument that if one was forced to choose a time and place to be dumped – Rawls-fashion – into the world, ‘right about now’ would be a pretty good choice. Pinker does grapple with the existential risks of climate change and nuclear war, and acknowledges they are real.  Unsurprisingly, he argues that reason, science, and humanism are our best tools for overcoming them, and I agree.  

I am less convinced of the Enlightenment as the cause of this dramatic improvement.  I am not a historian, but my amateur sense is that there have been a lot of smart people working out principles of philosophy, logic, and the intricacies of the natural world for at least a few thousand years.  But something else started in the 1700s, accelerated sharply in the 1800s, and then exploded globally in the 20th century: the development of techniques to burn fossil fuel to liberate immense quantities of energy.  This suddenly enabled humans to perform useful tasks at superhuman scale, and I believe it is a much more powerful force than the achievements of any cohort of philosophers.  If this is true, it has serious implications for the future of the benign trends that Pinker celebrates.  

To understand the force of this argument, the reader will need a quantitative sense of energy at the human (and superhuman) scale. This is an essay that I have been meaning to write for some time, both because it ties together many of the themes that captivate my personal and professional interest, and because I believe the average citizen doesn’t understand how profoundly energy fuels and enables every aspect of life, both primitive and modern.

In simple terms, energy is a property that provides the ability to do work.  Work has a specific technical meaning, but for practical purposes it means roughly what blue-collar people think it means – for example, energy must be provided to do the work of hauling water from a well, pushing a vehicle along a road against the resisting force of aerodynamic drag, or driving a flow of electric current through a filament to create light.  Energy comes in a number of forms (kinetic, thermal, chemical, potential, etc.), and humans use it both to do physical work and to perform chemical and industrial processes, heat or cool buildings, cook food, etc. This diversity of uses reflects the fundamental importance of energy, which extends to our physical bodies – like all organisms, we require energy to survive.  Food is the fuel that allows our bodies to do work, and without it we quickly die.

Energy is universal and quantitative.  Universal because it cannot be created or destroyed, and because its various forms can be interconverted, subject to natural laws and practical limitations.  Quantitative because it can be measured, and certain tasks absolutely require a defined amount of it. If it requires 10 units of energy to get my electric car to the top of the hill, and my battery only contains 8, the car will predictably stop short of the summit.  

The proper scientific unit of measure for energy is the Joule (J), which is a tiny amount – about as much as is released when a sandwich falls off a table and hits the floor.  An iphone 5s stores about 20,000 J of electrical energy, an Oreo™ cookie contains about 300,000 J of food energy, and a gallon of gas releases about 120,000,000 J of thermal energy when it burns.  Because the joule is such a tiny amount, we have other practical units of energy that civilians are more familiar with, including the kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is equal to 3.6 million Joules.  

Is a kWh a large amount of energy, or a small amount?  The fascinating answer is: both, and this starts to get at the point I’m trying to make.  

On one hand, it’s a relatively piddling amount in modern terms, equivalent to the thermal energy in a few tablespoons of gasoline.  In a few minutes I can tap a kWh effortlessly from the outlet under my desk, and the most amazing thing is that Central Maine Power will only charge me fifteen cents for it.  

On the other hand, on the scale of a human body, one kilowatt-hour is a formidable quantity.  Imagine pushing a car up a steep grade for over a mile – that’s a kWh. I could pedal an apple grinder bike all day and struggle to deliver a single kWh worth of energy.  In fact, our entire pedal-powered cider operation with four bikes may only be delivering around 1-2kWh over the course of a Saturday – that’s less than 50 cents worth of energy at electric utility rates.  

To bulk up our intuition about energy at the human scale, it’s helpful to understand a related concept, Power.  While it is common in the civilian world to mix up Energy and Power, the concepts are related but distinct in an important way.  Specifically, Power (in the engineering sense), is simply the rate at which energy is delivered. If one joule is delivered per second, this is described as a 1 watt flow of power. So an old-fashioned 100W lightbulb consumes 100J of electric power per second, most of which is wasted as heat; a modern LED bulb might deliver the same amount of light while consuming only 15 J per second.  If the old-fashioned bulb is operated for one hour (3600 seconds), in total it will use 360,000 Joules, or 0.1kWh.  

It turns out that if you ask the average healthy non-athlete to pedal a bicycle (or climb a ladder, or some other efficient means of producing power at a sustained pace), you find that a human body can only deliver useful work at a rate of about 100W over a period of hours, and significantly less on average, since we require hours of rest and sleep.  And for hundreds of thousands of years, that was pretty much all the energy we had.  The Bible says “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” and back in the day that was pretty much the size of it.  The great majority of people foraged or toiled in fields to grow crops, and they did it pretty much their entire lives.  

Naturally the proximal source of that energy was the food they ate, but its ultimate source was the sun, which powered the photosynthesis that stockpiled that energy in the crops and livestock in the form of sugars, fats, starches, and the like. This was a serious limitation, because photosynthesis is relatively inefficient at turning sunlight into stored energy.  According to Wikipedia, typical crops are only about 1% efficient in turning the sunlight that strikes a field or forest into biomass, so it takes a lot of land (or a lot of time) to produce a given amount of usable plant energy. In many climates (e.g. deserts) the conversion is many orders of magnitude less efficient.

As a result, for millennia our ancestors were fundamentally limited by the strength of their bodies and the relatively modest efficiency with which crops could turn sunlight into food and fuel.  What about beasts of burden? The more fortunate among our ancestors had access to an ox or perhaps a horse, which can deliver a modest multiple on the power of the human body. But like humans, draft animals were solar-powered, and their calorie needs were likewise multiplied – a horse or cow required the output of several acres of land for its fodder, and this land could not be used to grow food for humans.  

Of course beasts can be eaten as well as worked, but here again, the amount of land required to feed a person on meat is far more than the cropland required to feed them directly on plant-based foods, which is why meat was (and probably still should be) considered a luxury.  

Worse, the most productive staple crops require cooking (more energy) to be readily digestible, and cooking was likewise done using wood, which required still more land.  Firewood supply was limited in the more populated areas – google ‘coppicing’ or ‘pollarding’ to get a sense for how the supply of precious renewably-grown combustibles was husbanded in those times.  Using land to grow fuelwood traded off against using the same land to grow food crops.  

If energy is universal and quantitative, and energy for humans comes in the form of food, it should be possible to relate the amount of food we eat to the amount of work we can do.  The typical human diet contains about 2000 Calories per day; the Calorie is an archaic unit of energy equal to 4180 Joules. So 2000 Calories is about 8,400,000 Joules or 2.3 kWh. To put our diets in Power terms, I am delighted to discover that typing “2000 Calories per day in watts” into Google yields the following:

2000 (kilocalories per day) =

96.8518519 watts

That is, we eat food energy at an average rate of about 100 watts, and this sets an absolute limit on the amount of physical work we can do; in actuality we’d be lucky to deliver 100W of work for 8 hours per day, with the other ⅔ of the calories given over to the business of living.  And because food is fuel, serious endurance athletes need much more – up to 8000 Calories per day.

To sum it up, in pre-industrial times our ancestors lived ‘land to mouth’. Life went along this way for hundreds of thousands of years, and though it changed in appearance and intensity with the invention of agriculture, the same fundamental limitations were in place. At best, people carefully husbanded a limited ‘working capital’ of stored foods, livestock, and standing timber; however, despite primitive tools it was all too easy to over-exploit the productive ecological base and get in an ugly situation, as Jared Diamond details in cases including Easter Island, Greenland, and others.  Life was nasty, brutish, and short in the myriad ways described in the ‘before’ section of Pinker’s books.

But things started to change in a serious way when people discovered that they could tap ancient energy reservoirs of stored sunlight.   For a fascinating early example, I recommend an online article called “Medieval Smokestacks: fossil fuels in pre-industrial times”, on the subject of peat as an energy source.  Peat is the remnants of plant matter that accumulates over millennia in wetland areas, protected from decay by the lack of oxygen – this is actually the first step in the much longer process that forms coal. Peat can be cut, dried, and burned to liberate thermal energy, and the author, Kris de Decker explores in detail how unique circumstances enabled the people of the area that is now the Netherlands to mine and burn massive prehistoric reserves of it, and thus to liberate themselves from the limitations of their annual allotment of sunlight.  The Dutch also mastered the craft of building windmills, which provided mechanical energy to complement the thermal energy from the peat. As a result, they were able to power an impressive array of proto-industrial activity, including glass, brick, ceramics, ships, sugar, salt, soap, spirits, and textiles. 

The ability to mine and burn fossilized plants changed the game for the inhabitants of the Low Countries in a material way.  By the 1600s, the per-capita annual consumption of peat amounted to about 16 gigajoules per person per year, or about 500W of continuous thermal power, compared with the 50W or less of labor they could manage on average from their own bodies.    And soon this region became far wealthier than neighboring regions, with 60% urbanization compared to the 10% urbanization of the surrounding areas less favorably endowed with peat. Sadly, the peat reserves were eventually depleted, and this combined with competitive coal-fired industrial production from the UK knocked the Netherlands from their perch – by 1820 the country was down to 38% urban population.  

Meanwhile, across the English Channel, the real fossil-fired revolution was spinning up.  Natural deposits of coal had been in limited regional use for hundreds or thousands of years for metalworking and local heating in coal-bearing regions.  But starting around 1700, a sequence of tinkerers, blacksmiths, and engineers invented and refined the steam engine – a machine that used energy liberated by burning fuel to create hot, pressurized steam.  That steam could be used to do work – initially to pump water, which was of great value in draining mineshafts and enabling more coal and other minerals to be extracted. But by around 1780 the engines were coupled to flywheels and rotary shafts to drive mechanized equipment that had previously been confined to locations with available water power.  The most prominent steam engine inventor was James Watt, who produced a uniquely efficient engine; the scientific unit of power was appropriately named for him. (Watt also devised the unit ‘horsepower,’ equal to 746W, as a product rating tool.  He sandbagged a bit so his customers wouldn’t be disappointed; the average horse could deliver somewhat less than 1hp on an ongoing basis).

To say that the invention of the coal-fueled steam engine was a runaway success is a vast understatement. By tapping an immense store of fossilized sunlight, it removed the limitations of plant-fueled musclepower and the vagaries of wind and water power, and catalyzed a chain reaction of growth, wealth, and innovation.  Pumping water from mines greatly increased the availability of fossil fuel and minerals. Engines ran blowers for blast furnaces, rolling mills, and a blossoming array of machinery that advanced manufacturing on every axis. In the early 1800s steam engines were adapted to power ships and to transform the rudimentary railways used in mining operations, making fast, convenient transport of people and goods possible.  In the following century, convenient liquid petroleum fuels replaced coal, compact internal combustion replaced bulkier steam engines, and mechanization spread to agriculture, with displaced farm workers taking jobs in manufacturing. An immense fossil-powered chemical industry sprang up, devising among other miracles the Promethean ability to turn air and water into nitrogen fertilizer, solving a major problem in agriculture (thanks to Holly for the book recommendation). And steam power found new life in giant turbines used to generate electricity, literally bringing light and entirely new axes of wealth and convenience – and eventually the information technology that allows me to write and publish this post.  

The power that fossil fuels deliver is amazing in both qualitative and quantitative terms.  For the reasons described above, in medieval times the average person’s access to mechanical power averaged scarcely 100W from the combined efforts of humans, beasts, and a scattering of weak water-powered mills, and perhaps a couple hundred watts of carefully-husbanded firewood.  (see discussion at http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Articles/ENERGY%20AND%20POWER.pdf).  By the dawn of the enlightenment, the leading economy of Europe had access to an average 500W of thermal power per capita from burning peat alone.  By 1900, citizens of the UK consumed on average over 2500W from burning coal alone. And in 2016 the average American consumes a whopping 10,000W of primary energy continuously.  This continual torrent of energy enables the amazing material abundance and variety that most of us enjoy, and the everyday superhuman miracles of modern life: I wrote the first draft of this essay in an airplane seven miles above the surface of the earth, blasting effortlessly across the continent at nearly the speed of a thunderclap. 

Is the amazing global surge in quality of life primarily due to philosophical advances, or is it primarily the result of discovering a singular lode of stored energy? It’s not that enlightenment values are irrelevant to the amazing advances in quality and quantity of life that humans have enjoyed over the last 200 years.  I am a huge fan of science, reason, and humanism, and I’m convinced that they have contributed in a central way to the technological progression outlined above – although it seems that early on a surprising number of advances were made by trial and error rather than systematic study and application of scientific principles.  But any discussion of improvements in quality of life over this period that doesn’t recognize the immense increase in available per-capita energy that fueled and enabled those advances is missing a critical insight.  

 I think the answer to this question really matters.  If Enlightenment philosophy really is the driving force, then it could be reasonable to expect that challenges around the sustainability and environmental impact of burning fossil fuels will look like minor matters when viewed from the future. In that case, energy historians of the future will conclude that while we used these fuels because they were available and convenient, had they not been there, we would have readily developed other sources of energy nearly as good, and industrial civilization would have developed more or less at the same pace.  According to this view, fossil fuel depletion and malign climatic influence are technocratic issues that can be expected to sort themselves out in due course. There may be some minor changes related to the transition to other sources of energy, but the transition can be expected to happen naturally as a result of market forces, and doesn’t pose a fundamental danger to the modern quality of life.   

But if, on the other hand, the quality-of-life advances are primarily the result of massive increases in per-capita availability of useful energy, then there is a real danger that the peace, prosperity, and broad-based human flourishing of the last 200 years are highly contingent results of a temporary windfall.  If so, their depletion could easily reverse those advances – just as the black rock desert goes back to the lizards and ants after the Burning Man festival. If benign progressive trends are primarily a result of a one-time windfall, a bonanza of nearly-free energy unleashed over the last 200 years, then an unwind over a similar span of time is likely to be less than congenial to those who think the arc of history bends inevitably toward justice.  If it taps out significantly faster, then all bets are off. Archaeologists point us to civilizations that have fallen; elaborate complex cultures that have disbanded, with their advanced knowledge lost to the nomads who camp in the ruins.

It doesn’t take much of a disruption of the material and economic flows of modern life to deflate the progressive instincts, long-term thinking, and warm-hearted embrace of diversity that Pinker celebrates in his book.  The 2008 financial crisis was mild by historic standards, but it severely blunted the flow of capital toward forward-looking clean technologies, and unleashed an ugly undercurrent of intolerance in the body public.  For those of us working in the clean energy industry this was strikingly clear, with strong popular and investor interest washed away in a torrent of underwater houses and ‘pocketbook issues’.  

The previous, more severe economic crisis of the 1930s came in an energetic time of plenty, yet it concluded in a global nightmare of genocide that ended in a nuclear arms race.  If fossil fuel depletion starts to bite faster than clean technologies can comfortably replace them, or if the global impact of carbon emissions relentlessly drives millions of refugees from major coastal cities, I have a hard time believing that the advances Pinker credits to enlightened principles will be secure.  

If this is the path we are on, then successfully executing a rapid, global transition to clean sources of energy is of supreme importance.  The growth of solar, wind, and other scalable clean technologies must continue and accelerate consistently. Energy storage and load shifting/management must both advance without a hiccup, and the electrification of transport must displace fossil fuel as quickly as clean capacity can be added to the grid.  Liquid fuels should be reserved to particularly thorny technical challenges like air travel, which may need to be curtailed until significant advances can be made in renewable fuels or the volume- and mass-efficiency of clean energy storage. With political leaders abdicating responsibility in the face of the greatest civic challenge in generations, it appears to be up to engineers and Swedish highschool students to lead the way to an enlightened future.

A philosophy of outbuildings

My family seems to have a thing for outbuildings.  It’s not that unusual here in Maine, but still I think we take it to an extreme.  Starting from sparse ledgy ground, over time the homestead where I grew up came to include ten useful, non-decrepit structures.  You could chock this up to my father’s love of building buildings, but my maternal grandparents’ property has 12 buildings (including outhouses), most of which he did not build.  So I seem to have the gene from both sides.

Outbuildings provide capacity (both volumetric and functional), but take time and resources to build, they take up space (physical, mental, visual), precluding other uses, and they require maintenance.  So they should be planned and managed carefully.  I’ve mulled this over, and here hope to articulate principles toward an optimal philosophy of sustainable outbuildings.

A small outbuilding should be portable.

My mother is a writer.  When my sister and I were small and tended to make a racket, she needed a place to get away to focus on her work, so my father built a trim 8’x8′ Writing Shack in the woods east of our house.  It had no foundation, siding, heat, or electricity, but my folks were used to that, and at the time my mom wrote with a fountain pen. It had nice big windows of used plexiglass, overlooking the Little Sheepscot river through the trees.

Later when we grew up and spent less time at home, for a while the Writing Shack sat idle.  Then, at some point we were in need of a dry place to store sails and paddles near my grandparents’ dock on the ‘other side’, so we lowered it onto skids and dragged it half a mile to the head of the dock, where it sits to this day, serving its new purpose admirably.  Its floor framing is made of untreated lumber, but it has always been held well up off the ground on concrete or PT blocks, and its roof has large overhangs.   My father may have replaced the asphalt roofing once, but otherwise it has needed little in the way of maintenance.

I believe the family record for moving and repurposing a building is four placements.  My grandparents originally built a handsome 2-holer outhouse for use with the Upper Cabin, and it stood for 30 years or more in the woods on or near the site of the big barn where we make cider.  When they built a year-round house with plumbing and moved up in 1983, the outhouse sat idle (excepting the occasional power outage), so at some point my father hauled it across the island and set it up at a spec house they were living in.  Later it moved to the homestead where I grew up, the holes were boarded over, and it served as a tool shed for Jake’s arborist tools.  Most recently it migrated to Bay Point, where it was fitted with a handsome set of double doors to serve as a small farm stand.

The large end of the small outbuilding category is fuzzy; the Upper Cabin itself moved to make room for my grandparents’ house.  It being 16’x24′ with cedar log siding and a long porch, that was a bit of a project, but fortunately it was built as a kit in 8′ wall sections, so it could be taken apart with some labor.  I was too young to remember exactly how the move was done, except that at some point my grandmother’s small bulldozer stuck fast in the mud at the new site (now within the orchard fence), and every come-along on Georgetown Island was borrowed and pressed into service to winch it out ahead of a hard freeze.

All the time I was growing up, the Upper Cabin served as sleeping quarters for my many cousins when they came to visit the grandparents.  Its missing outhouse became something of an issue, so at one point I built a small one-holer, entirely from used materials, diagonally planked for strength and with a treated lumber undercarriage.  That outhouse was itself moved as the orchard expanded, and the move was simplicity itself given the small size and sturdy construction – the small excavator bucket fit nicely through the open front door, lifting it cleanly off the ground and on its way.

At this point I hope that the value of portability in small outbuildings is amply demonstrated.

[Dave points out that small, light portable buildings tend to blow over in a strong wind, and should be anchored down, e.g. with earth screws.  The profusion of disposable portable buildings has made these screws a thing that can be found used or cast off in rural areas of late.]

A large outbuilding should be large.

As illustrated above, one of the issues with outbuildings is that they sometimes get in the way of later, more ambitious plans.  It’s a shame and a waste to tear them down; that’s why it’s important that they be movable.  What about buildings that are too large to move?  In that case I believe they should be built large, substantially larger than the initial primary use would dictate. That way you won’t wish you’d made it bigger later on, and won’t be tempted to glom a bunch of sheds or ells onto it, which is inefficient in terms of materials, makes the space less useful, and starts to look busy after a while.

This is an essay about outbuildings: non-insulated utility structures that will not be heated routinely.  I definitely don’t advocate for making a primary residence larger than necessary.  A larger house will use more energy (holding construction methods constant), and these days new home construction runs into the hundreds of dollars per square foot.  On the other hand, an unheated utility structure won’t consume any energy to speak of, and at least using our typical methods of construction can be built quite economically using locally-harvested timber milled on or near the site.

As an example, when my parents were contemplating the design for the (big, older) cider barn near the orchard, I knew that they were moving from the old homestead with a ton of utility buildings chock full of stuff, so I encouraged them to make the new barn big.  While they were skeptical, they had a lot of lumber around (I think a particularly tough winter had delivered a large pile of salvaged logs for the sawyer), and they settled on a fairly ambitious design, 36×60′ with a Corbusian forest of posts, a drive-through center aisle, and stand-up lofts running along either side.  Everyone was happy with the result, and before long the building was full of lumber, tools, staging, cider equipment, free boats, and more lumber.

The original concept for the barn included livestock, and separately they had it in mind to build a sugarhouse, which could also serve as a ciderhouse to keep the beverages separate from the manure.  So last winter they quickly whipped up another barn, this one 26×50′, in this case open inside from wall to wall.  Again the lumber was mostly salvage logs (the hemlock trees on the island have been decimated by microscopic wooly adelgids), and the building is a delight, with a rustic but airy feel.  I have no doubt but that it will soon be full.

One potential disadvantage of large outbuildings is the challenge of maintenance, which could easily get expensive (if hired out) or intimidating (if attempted on weekends).  This brings me to the next topic.

All outbuildings should be economical but built to last

Conscious or not, the thoughtful builder of a building makes a statement.  “This building is right and proper for this site.  It is worthy of the space, time, materials, and energy it takes up.  It deserves to be here, and those who come after will be grateful for it.”  Here I am channeling the spirit of Wendell Berry, that righteous old judge of rural places and uses, and in that spirit, every decision in design and execution is a balance between durability and economy.  Too fancy or too large speaks of ostentation and waste, while too small and cheap depresses the spirit and stinks of disposability.

What does this mean in practice?  Naturally it will differ from place to place, according to the local climate and materials, but in our climate, rot is the enemy, and the first defense is large overhangs.  By carrying rainwater well away from the walls and underpinnings, they extend the life of the building, and for single-story structures may eliminate the need for siding – a further economy.  Naturally, there is a cost in added wood and roofing, but I believe this is well worth it, at least up to the comfortable cantilever capabilities of the materials of construction.

Next, the underpinnings of the building should be well up away from soil, leaves, and duff.  This is easier said than done, for it is the fate of outbuildings to be neglected.  Years of leaves will pile up against the uphill side of a low-set building, and soon the tendrils of fungus are at work.  So too the splash of rain from the eaves is relentless at turning siding into moss.  Accordingly, buildings should be set well up off the ground – and all the more in the case of lazy owners, or buildings (e.g. boathouses) that by their nature are rarely visited.

For permanent structures this is most economically done with sonotubes filled with hand-mixed concrete – like the homestead I grew up in. This is expedient, durable in good soil, and moderate in the use of emissions-heavy concrete  – in fact, the $4 bag of sakrete should be considered one of the wonders of the modern fossil-powered economy.  This construction also makes for ample dry-ish storage space underneath, particularly when built on a slope.  The primary disadvantages are a less-than-trim appearance, and non-suitability for garages and other grade-level applications.

Permanent grade-level outbuildings on the smaller side (e.g. garages) are typically built on a floating slab, or a conventional 4′ concrete foundation in the case of larger buildings.  The site should be well-graded, and the concrete well up above the ground.  This does not sit entirely easily with me; it appears that concrete production emits about 400lb of CO2 per cubic yard.  Taking slab, curbs etc. as an average of 6″ thick, that amounts to 7-8lb CO2 per square foot. The US vehicle fleet emits about 0.9lb per mile, so 1000 sq feet of slab-on-grade building emits the equivalent of driving about 8,000 miles – not obscene, but material in the context of trying to live a low-carbon life.

Concrete slabs are useful, but it’s not clear they’re strictly necessary in many applications.  I’m intrigued by the prospect of using pole-barn construction with sonotube piers extending well clear of the soil, to keep the posts dry.  The problem then becomes how to seal up the necessary vertical gap between the sheathing, to keep leaves and snow from blowing in, without setting up a situation where the soil heaves the building or buckles the siding.  The Kaufmans built a small barn in Flagstaff and used reclaimed polycarbonate panels from e-ink, set on edge just inside the inner surface of the vertical board siding to keep the snow and squirrels out; I bet something similar could be done with reclaimed trex decking or some other less exotic inert planking or panels.

Portable buildings can also be set on sonotubes, but this might be considered extravagant, and liable to leaving obstacles/eyesores if the building is moved.  A reasonable expedient is to set small portable buildings on some arrangement of rot-resistant blocks – reclaimed cement, pressure-treated wood scraps, suitable rocks, or the like, provided that the building can be jacked and blocked level from time to time to account for the settling and heaving of the soil.

Smaller portable buildings are traditionally set on, well, pretty much anything or nothing, but this is why they are often found rotting into the soil.  Pressure-treated timber can delay this significantly, but it’s not what it used to be, no longer containing toxic chromium and arsenic, and even now surely has a much heavier environmental footprint than locally-sawed, air-dried lumber from salvaged logs.  That broaches the subject of materials selection more broadly.

Materials of Construction

Here again, judgment must balance cost and environmental impact with longevity and low maintenance (again, it is the fate of outbuildings to be neglected).  I have not done a lot of math on this yet, and have instead gone on intuition.  I spray pounds of copper on my apple trees in the spring as an approved organic fungicide (as the soil test said I was light on copper), so I’ve considered it reasonable to use the modern copper azole PT judiciously.  Still, PT is kiln-dried, pumped full of chemicals, and trucked heavy up the eastern seaboard, so it’s probably best not to use it indiscriminately.

For general structural use, the clear choice here is pine/spruce/hemlock lumber, sawed onsite from salvaged logs by a roving Woodmizer and air dried.  For a classier building, cedar shingle siding is relatively local and maintenance-free for decades, however I am not sure how sustainable eastern cedar forestry is.  The trend on the land recently has been toward vertical pine board and batten, with the windows carefully cased and flashed.

Regarding windows, doors, and hardware, decades of connections in Georgetown and my father’s scorn for waste can usually turn up something that will work for a small building, often with added charm.  Those less fortunate might cultivate a friendship with a local ecologically-minded builder who does remodeling.

Roofing is again a tradeoff between time, cost, and longevity. Surely wood shakes are the lowest impact, particularly if harvested onsite and cut by hand, but in our climate they will quickly rot. With unlimited time, a retired purist might split out pine shakes with a froe, install them with stout stainless nails, monitor carefully for the end of life, and painstakingly remove and reuse the nails.

Absent such fundamentalism, in the shade and raked of leaves, a quality asphalt roof will last decades, and is most economical for new buy, but it makes nasty waste when removed, an unholy mix of petroleum, fiberglass, and gravel.  Painted steel roof is more expensive but attractive and long-lived, which should factor into the calculations, the useful longevity of the building being a goal here.  It appears that steel manufacturing produces about 1.8lb of CO2 per pound, and 26-gauge steel is about 1lb/ft^2, so a steel roof accounts for on the order of 2lb CO2 per square foot (higher for steep pitches).  The lighter weight of steel on straps compared to asphalt may be a boon for portable buildings. [Dave points out that in snowy climates, metal roofing will reliably dump hundreds or thousands of pounds of snow under the eaves of the building.  This should be considered in tight quarters, and when placing doors etc.]

In the extreme of longevity, used corrugated aluminum from retired chicken barns has been in service on the homestead for over 40 years with no apparent wear.  I have not priced aluminum new, but understand that it is too spendy for reasonable use on an outbuilding.  However, if one were to procure aluminum roofing used and install it carefully on a locally-sawn wood building with wide overhangs that’s protected from ground-level moisture, it might be the closest thing to a permanent, ecological outbuilding.

If I am condemned by fate and genetics to be a builder of outbuildings, the least I can do is to be thoughtful about where, how, and of what materials I build them.

 

 

2016 pruning, remembering Poppy

Today was the day for the annual spring pruning, and it was a great occasion to remember my grandfather, who died peacefully earlier this week at the age of 95.  William F. Herman (‘Bill’ around town, ‘Poppy’ in the family) was a big part of my life as a kid, and his love of growing things inspired me to plant the orchard when we moved back east over 10 years ago.

Pops and my grandmother, ‘Ummy’ grew up and lived their professional lives in eastern Massachusetts, but spent a lot of time in Maine – her father was an avid rod-and-gun sportsman. In the sixties they bought a slice of land on a remote island in the midcoast, two miles beyond the end of the electric power lines near the village of Five Islands.  When my parents decided to settle down after some years of teaching mountain-climbing in the mountains out west, Um and Pops invited them to homestead on the land in Five Islands, and I grew up off the grid, surrounded by the natural wonders of the Maine coast.

In 1983, Pops retired from a 25-year career at Polaroid, and my grandparents joined us in Maine.  By then electricity had come to the North End, and my father built them a passive solar home.  Though rocky and overgrown, the land had been a farm until early in the 20th century, with stone walls, foundation holes, and odd bits of pottery and rusted iron in evidence. Over the years the family cleared land and planted gardens, berries, and apple trees, and some of my earliest memories of my grandfather relate to agriculture.  He kept a very neat vegetable garden, which he would weed in khaki pants and a button-up shirt (he’d shower and put on a jacket and tie for dinner every night until he was far along in years). He grew masses of vegetables – great sweet corn, bowls and bowls of shell peas, and so many cucumbers and tomatoes that he put a wooden box at the end of the driveway and wrote ‘Help Yourself’, to the joy of the neighbors.

The garden was surrounded by semi-dwarf apples – Cortland, Winesap, Rhode Island Greening, Red Delicious, and he showed me how to prune the trees.  There was also a big wild tree behind their house that was saved in the construction, and it gave great green apples that were my favorite kind when I was a kid. In the fall we would collect the fruit in bags, and Poppy, Ummy, Joanna, and I would press them using a hand-crank cast iron press that had belonged to my great grandfather – the same press that Alexis, Holly, Becky, and I used back in Cider Year 1.  I think he tried to ferment some a couple times, but it was a casual attempt in a plastic milk jug and I don’t remember anyone thinking it tasted good.

In all the years of living and romping around as a kid, I can’t remember Poppy ever raising his voice.  He became a respected character around town, serving as selectman and sometimes as moderator at the old-fashioned town meeting. An engineer by training, he loved to keep careful records – of the amount of firewood he burned each month of each winter down to the tenth of a cord, of the number of quarts of blueberries his waterfront bushes produced, and of gallons of maple sap we collected each spring.  He taught himself to play ragtime piano by ear, and made some pretty nice oil paintings in an engineer’s realistic style – I think he said Norman Rockwell was his favorite artist.

If I drank another pint of this 2014 cider I could probably go on all night, remembering Poppy teaching me how to build kites and drive a tractor, and ‘messing about in boats’, fishing for mackerel in the Sheepscot river out of a 13′ Boston Whaler – he loved the water though he famously would never swim no matter how hot the summer. As the years went by, Poppy’s world gradually compressed; the boat trips shorter and the garden smaller and weedier, but he stubbornly kept at it. I remember a couple years ago when I was working in the orchard, I looked back toward the house and saw him at the edge of the field, using his old-fashioned scythe instead of a cane – he’d take a couple of swipes at the overgrown brush, then lean on the tool to catch his breath.

As Poppy slowed down my parents increasingly picked up the slack, mulching and pruning the berries, planting the corn, and splitting the firewood. And in 2006 I asked him if I could clear some land off to the the south to start a new orchard for cider apples, and he was happy to let me get started. For as long as he could walk, he’d totter up the woods road to the orchard gate to see what I was up to, and we’d talk about trees and plans.  I’m grateful to my grandparents for the opportunity to grow up in a unique and beautiful part of the world, and for the sense that tending and caring for the land is a project that can last more than a lifetime, and build connections across generations.

 

 

Running the mighty Stroudwater

A couple of weekends ago, Emily, Andy, and Elsie came to visit, and Andy (who has done a lot more paddling than I) got the notion to run Stroudwater falls.

In dry times the river running through our front yard is little more than an overgrown brook, but when multiple inches of rain fall over a day  or more, it swells impressively.  Instead of sneaking around and through the abrupt ~1m rocky upper fall at low points in the bedrock, it rushes directly over the drop in a handful of weakly organized chutes into the millpond below.  We scoped it out and judged it (and the rapid below the ruined dam) doable.

Borrowing Joshua and Kelsey’s 16′ fiberglass canoe (not the beautiful cedar one his brother made for him), we carried upriver and put in.  The main channel in low water is a tight 180 degree bend at the far right, but we didn’t think we could maneuver that, so we went through the next largest chute, immediately to the left.  I half-expected we would end up swamping the canoe out of the knee-deep shallows below the fall, but although we shipped a few pails of water over the bow (which is not nearly as high as in some whitewater canoes), we passed without incident, and proceeded to run the rapid below the ruins of the dam and under the bridge, where Kelsey snapped some photos (see below).  Though these rapids were less imposing, we actually shipped more water over the bow, giving the boat a slow, plowing character in the flatwater below.  We pulled out on the  north side of the river shortly below the old bridge site and carried the canoe back over the bridge and home.

It made me wish the next half-mile or so of flatter water below the falls wasn’t so choked up with blowdown, so we could paddle to work – Pika Energy’s new home in Westbrook is similarly only a few hundred feet from the south bank of the Stroudwater, perhaps 3-4 river miles downstream.

The birch of Damocles; thinning south of the orchard

After the last storm blew through, someone in Five Islands noticed that a birch tree just to the west of the orchard had partially crumpled about 20′ up, and leaned over into a tall maple tree to the south, where it threatened to crash down on the orchard fence.  So while I was up for the holiday, Dave and I pulled it down and added it to the firewood pile.

The leaning tree was perhaps 14″ at the butt, one of a cluster of three, and all of them were dead or dying – we’d been watching them for some time, but obviously should have acted sooner.  We winched the two west-facing trunks downhill with a rope-a-long into a slot we cut in the underbrush, then skidded them out to the firewood area opposite from Um and Pops’ house.  The leaning tree was trickier – the trunk was flattened and bent maybe 15 degrees, with more than half of the fibers of the trunk broken.  The top was pretty well enmeshed in the maple it fell against, so it wasn’t likely to roll off to the west if we winched the whole tree that way; it could easily slide off to the east and crush the fence if we pulled the base out from under it.  There was enough dead wood in the top of the tree to make a serious headache for anybody standing too close to the base when it started moving. I considered just hooking the cable of the logging winch to the tree above the break and attempting to rip it off the lower trunk and drag it toward the northwest,but there was a chance that the lower trunk would force the top against the fence as it fell.  So we ended up with a hybrid approach, and in the end it worked out slick.  We put up a ladder and rigged chokers both above and below the break, and I put a little bit of tension on the cable.  Then Dave cut the tree at the base, leaving a hinge significantly stouter than normal, and cleared well out of the way.  Then I winched it over, with the chokers holding the two ends together after the wood broke, such that the whole mess just doubled up on itself and fell clear of the fence, landing with a big crash. It turned out the break corresponded to a giant hole that had been made by a pileated woodpecker, who was probably after ants in the soft core of the tree.

Then this morning we had an hour and a half free, so we went back over and started thinning in the woods across the stone wall to the south of the orchard, in preparation for finally putting up the woven wire fence to define the permanent southerly extent of the orchard.  We cut out a bunch of small maple and oak that had been topped over by the dominant trees; my thought is to thin down to the really nice specimens (mostly oak) closest to the fence, so as to let more light in, and then there are a bunch of nice maples a bit further south, so selectively thin that as sugarbush.  The route around the east side of the orchard is mostly high and dry, and gives good access to the woods to the south and further down the hill to the west, so someday we will probably use that access to improve the stand further afield.  But for now, keeping the orchard project moving forward is at least as much as I can handle in sparse free time.

Finally, a decent snow

After a brown holiday, and a couple of mangy frustrating icy attempts, winter came on in a satisfying way. We got five or six inches of perfect, fluffy snow to cover the crust and turn everything beautiful. Alexis had to leave early for a 24-hour stint in the ICU, so I got up and plowed out the driveway before traffic on the main road got too bad. The driveway was a sheet of ice from previous storms, and I didn’t have enough time to chain up the truck, but it did the job, just barely – had the snow been heavy it would have been a nightmare.

Nerves a bit frazzled with the sun not yet up, I put on my skis and broke in the perimeter trail on the north side, then Joshua joined for a second lap. On the way back we skied straight down the frozen river, which formed a perfect highway, both for us and for the deer. Back inside just after 8; for once I earned my breakfast.