Sure, I knew this house was going to be extra work, but the problem is you never know when that extra work is going to occur. Thursday night after a long day with 8th graders on a field trip, my husband invites me to a movie and dinner. Nice, right? Afterwards, I stop at the grocery store and he stops over at the neighbor's house, so that we arrive home for the day at about 9:00 pm.

I'm dragging the groceries up the stairs planning on getting in my jammies, checking my email, and relaxing. I open the door and hear this awful sound coming from the kitchen. It wasn't a broken dishwasher. I realize the sound is coming from downstairs. I drop the groceries and head to the basement. The sound is deafening and I look around to see how to stop it. I find a light switch and turn it off. The water pump stops. The noise stops.

I look around and see water all over the basement floor: all under the worm farm, soaking into the bag of sphagum moss, flowing under the toilet barrels. I'm starting to unravel the problem. The hose that is supposed to be running into the cistern is out on the floor, not pumping into the cistern. That stupid hose never stays where it is supposed to stay.

I run upstairs and check the garden hose in the solarium. It's off, but the cement is wet under it. And then I realize what must have happened. I glance down to the lower pond and, sure enough, the lower pond is over its banks. I remembered.

We had left the water running into the lower pond the night before. It had been a little low. Arrggg! So all night, all day----24 hours the water had been running from the hose and into the water, ever so quietly. If only the green hose had stayed in the cistern, we would have recovered the water. But no.

Curt walks in and I tell him what must have happened. He turns on the kitchen faucet and there is no water. We had drained our cistern dry. It is 9pm. I am so tired and sweaty, I don't want to do what I knew needed to be done, get water.

I gather the electric cords, Curt uncoils the garden hose and we go outside and down to the lower cistern. We haven't opened it all winter and when Curt pulls the door open, the door falls off its hinge. I roll my eyes. Curt opens the hatch in the floor to the cistern. There is 8 inches of ice on the top of the water. I start thinking I may have to dip water out of the fish pond for a shower! We start the pump, but nothing comes out, the hose is frozen into the ice. Time for some McGiver moves.

I pick up an old garden hose with an end cut off. Curt thinks he can use it. He takes the other frozen hose off and forces the piece of garden hose on. With skill he finds just enough of a break in the ice, he squeezes the hose through. Success. He turns the pump on again and I see water pumping out into the driveway. Yippee!

I run to catch it and attach it to the curly hose going into the house's cistern. That is cold water! Curt comes up behind me and we both try to connect the two hoses. Water starts flying everywhere. We are soaked. I wonder what the neighbors think of all our screaming and panting! We realize we have to shut off the water. We can't connect the hoses mid stream. Curt runs back down the hill and shuts off the pump. I screw the hoses together and then I shout for him to try it. (We didn't think we could make the water flow up the mountain that far. We thought we were going to have to take all the hose back down the mountain and get it running first.) It's working! The water starts filling the house's cistern.

We come in and check our email and wait. About 10:30 Curt goes to check to see how deep the water is. He guesses about 8 inches. He flips on the house's water pump switch. The pump starts pumping that same ugly sound. Curt let it pump. He comes upstairs. He turns on the faucet. Drum roll please. . . . . . . .
There is water! Ahhhh. A shower! I'm in bed by 11:00pm!

We figure we lost about 30 days worth of water in one day. Luckily it was spring and we had more water. But we have to make sure we don't make THAT mistake again. All faucets off before you go to bed.

Cleaning the pond

Okay, so who would have guessed this was going to be so difficult? But my husband came home from work and said, "I'd never have guessed that I'd find you fishing in the pond!" But yes indeed. It's true. I was trying to catch the koi that had survived the winter.

There was so much sludge and moss they could just dive into it and hide. So I got out the handy dandy wet vac. :-) I McGeivered a system to run the water through the stream bed and then outside to the shop vac, so I could sit and wait for it to fill and then tip the thing over and watch the water pour down the side of the mountian, snailes and all.

I waited for a fish to come through, but luckily it didn't happen. When the water was lower, I was able to catch them pretty easily, if you call laying on my stomach on the cement floor easy. Luckily there is a lower pond and I just released them in there.

I sucked and sucked and sucked that pond down to the very deepest end and then slowly, carefully, lowered myself in. And it was slick---let me tell you. That rubber pond liner with moss on it was impossible to stand on.

I thought better of it, crawled out again and got out the sprayer on the hose. I sprayed the sides of the pond and sent the hairy green moss sailing down into the deep end with the sucker hose.

I carefully climed back down in and started scrubbing the edges. What I really needed was a toilet brush or something. I wasn't sure how good to clean it, ya know? I knew I had to have some moss and algae in there for the fish to nibble on. So I finally declared it clean enough.

I turned on the hose to fill the pond again and went outside to clean up the shop vac. What I found was a little disturbing. There, down the hill, throughout the garden was a blanket of fishy smelly sludge----a nice smell for every starving bear coming out of hybernation. There was nothing I could do about it.

I closed the patio door but it wouldn't latch. I turned the knob again and again. Nothing. I looked up and saw the remnants of a smudge mark from last summer's bear visit. Yes, the door pushed open from the outside. If I didn't fix it, I could wake up with a bear in my house. I set out trying to fix it, but I was just getting frustrated. I finally decided that if a bear really wanted to come in, he would anyway, a small little latch wouldn't matter.

A couple of days later I found out that a bear HAD come into the neighborhood that night. He smelled paint balls from the neighbor's paint ball guns. He chewed on those and left me alone.

Good news: the latch is now fixed!

The first poop barrel!

Sounds gross, right? I was AMAZED! It didn't smell at all.

We moved in a year ago and turned the turntable on our composting toilet. Instead of a flushing toilet, we have an indoor outhouse. It has three 50 gallon barrels on a turntable in the basement, so that about every 6 months, we have filled a barrel and are ready for a new one. This is the story of emptying the first barrel.

It's not just all filled with human waste and toilet paper. No! We also throw all of our kitchen scraps down there. Each time we make a deposit of any kind, we add a scoop of sphagnum moss. The moss makes the worms feel more at home, I think. I add a pitcher of water now and then to make sure they have enough moisture as well. (We don't send our pee down there, it's too acidic for the worms. We have a pee separator, so the pee goes down a drain and outside.)

Yes, where would we be without worms? As soon as we start a new barrel, I add about 200 red wigglers to the bottom of the barrel. They make themselves at home and start doing their cosmic task: eating our waste and making dirt. When we turn the turntable, I add another 200 worms to the top of the barrel. Maybe I'm adding too many worms---but I'd rather have too many than not enough!

So we had come to the end of our three barrels! We had filled them all up. Now it was time to take out last year's barrel and see if it really was dirt or not. What if the worms had died? What if they didn't finish their job? What if I didn't add enough water and they died of thirst? I was filled with 'what ifs.'

We had purchased a dolly for this task. Curt got on one end and I got on the other and together we clunked the barrel down the stairs into the driveway. I donned my rubber gloves! :-) We tipped the barrel, but nothing would come out. Curt wanted me to start pulling it out with my hands. That was more than I could bare! So together we tipped it upside down and it came out with a thud.

There it was. A mound of poo! Or was it? This was the moment I had waited for and I dug in! (with my yellow rubber gloves, of course) Low and behold, it didn't smell. If I had to pick a smell, it would have been an earth smell. The worms had done their job! But it was very much like a clay. There were no worms left at all. I think that means they ran out of food and died. Sad.

So what did I find? I found the missing sink stopper. Somehow we dumped it down in there with the vegetable scraps, I guess. Should I re-use it? Hmmmm. I also found avocado peelings still 100% in tack --I found some stickers from apples, I found many, many beetle-type, silverfish-type bugs and I even found some tea bag paper. It was very interesting---kind of like an archeology hunt.

I did take a sample of the dirt and put it in the freezer so the university can tell me if it's safe to put on my flower garden. One thing I don't want is all the bears in the neighborhood to come over to smell my new dirt. Bears can smell better than we can, you know. So for now, I have my new dirt in a garbage can awaiting the time I will actually use the dirt.

Sterilizing dirt

It's spring! I need to start planting seeds. In the solarium, my lilac bush is leafing out, my geraniums have new leaves and even my lobelia, which I thought was dead, is blooming. It's time!

I put the fruit fly infested dirt outside to freeze. But when reflecting on fruit flies and their unwillingness to die, I decided maybe freezing them wasn't enough. So, yesterday I carefully brought in the containers of dirt with snow on top. I thawed them and then I started scooping the dirt into a nice Easter colored casserole dish. I popped the dish into the microwave like I was preparing some elegant mud pie and zapped it for 5 minutes. It came out steaming and hot, but it didn't really smell all that great.

I was sure that would do it and no new bugs could have lived, but I wasn't ready for what I found when the mud pie cooled. I started scooping that mud pie into the big, fresh dirt container. Yes, the smell. It was bad, but I assumed that's just the smell of freshly cooked dirt, or worm poop, depending on your perspective. Wanna know what I found at the bottom? Nice, big, fat red wigglers cooked to perfection. They were kinda transparent around the edges and really, really soggy worms. Somehow they had snuck through and ended up in the dirt pile instead of the worm pile.

I instantly flashed to my childhood and mom reading the book How to Eat Fried Worms. If I would have had a child near by to gross out, I might have picked it up and held it to my lips, but luckily, I was alone. I turned my head and scraped them into the fresh dirt pile. But. . .sterilizing dirt from now on, I know, will take nose plugs!

Living with pests

Monday, February 23, 2009


Who knew bananas would cause such a problem in our house. We were leaving town and there were two old bananas. What we do with all of our kitchen scraps is to dump them down the composter, which happens to be our toilet as well. When we came home, our house was filled with fruit flies.

Fruit flies are difficult to impossible to get rid of in a regular house, but in this house, it may just be something we living with. We've purchased fruit fly traps, sprays, left glasses of wine out, so they can drown. Almost everything.

Just when I thought things were under control, I went down to the basement to the worm farm (not the same as the toilet) to get some dirt to do some early planting. Fresh worm dirt is so nutritious for plants. Anyway, I had to sort the worms out of the dirt. A tickley, squiggly job, but kind of fun when you start finding all the stuff that worms won't eat---like the top of a pumpkin stem.

Then turning over the next section of composted dirt, I discovered hundreds of little white eggs. Yes, they were fly eggs. I'm at a loss of what to do. I don't want to throw out the dirt, but I don't want to bring dirt in the house with more fruit flies.

Right now it's outside freezing. How hardy are those little critters? I also have the idea of microwaving them. That ought to work, right?

Oh the trials and tribulations. . . . .or as son Keith would say, "The harder it is, the better the story is that you can tell!"

Just Do It! Take the Plunge!

Just Do It! Take the Plunge!

By Cindee Karns, Eagle River, Alaska

PUBLISHED IN "Loaves and Fishes"

Presbytery of the Northwest Newsletter

Sustainable living! We knew that we wanted to make a move toward sustainable living. When my husband, Curt, took the job as Executive Presbyter of the Yukon Presbytery, we decided that our move south to Anchorage from Fairbanks needed to be real change.

Our first thought was to buy a house downtown so that we could give up our cars, start walking and using public transportation. It didn't take long to realize that we would have to pay $400,000 for a house built in 1952 to even live in that area. We broadened our search criteria.

I googled "green sustainable housing" and found www.greenhomesforsale.com. Amazingly there was a green, sustainable house for sale outside of Anchorage in Eagle River. Sadly, it was way out of our price range at $500,000. I emailed anyway and said how much we would love the house if we only had a money tree. That random email opened a dialog that led to the purchase of the house.

Amazingly, it turned out that no one wanted to buy this house. It is a living house and it requires that the inhabitants live in harmony with it. "Don't buy it," everyone said, "it will be a full time job doing all the maintenance." We thought about it all fall. Still, no one bought the house. By December we decided we would tour it and make a very low offer.

In order to live in harmony, in order to be sustainable, shouldn't you have to do some work? Should you only live sustainably if you don't have to change your lifestyle? Only if it's convenient for you?

The house has no septic system and no well. It is built on the side of a mountain, so those traditional systems would cost an arm and a leg to install. Instead, the rain and melt water is collected and used over and over again in a closed water system that the previous owner/builder designed. That means that all of the water used in the house (not toilets) is cleaned and filtered and then is pumped into the house's own indoor wetlands complete with a fishpond. Both toilets in the house are composting toilets so that human waste is turned into soil.

Of course I fell in love with the house, not only the sustainability parts, but the view, the garden, and the idea of walking lightly upon the earth. The owners/builders, who had already moved, finally took our third offer because the house was going into foreclosure. I was thrilled! We had taken a huge leap of faith that we could really live here and manage it all. I am not an engineer. I'm not even a science teacher, but I thought I could learn this one-of-a-kind system. The house was calling to me. Could I use this house to teach others that you can live sustainably? …that it isn't so hard to walk lightly on the earth? ….that if I can do it, anyone can do it?

Little did I know about the political & financial blockades that were in front of us. Since the house was non-conventional, we couldn't get a conventional loan. In order to get a conventional loan, we would have to install a septic system and a well. What nonsense! We wanted to buy a house that was WAY cleaner and so much less damaging to the environment. It didn't make sense. Finally, with nowhere else to turn, I started writing letters to my state legislators.

After lots of negotiation, we reached an agreement with the lenders that if the former Lieutenant Governor, who is also an environmental engineer, would come and inspect the house, we could get a loan. We are so grateful to him. Without his approval, we wouldn't have gotten the house.

We are now learning how to live here. We are careful about chemicals that go into the system (It is a shame that the US government doesn't require cleaning agents to list their contents on the containers.), and we are also trying to figure out the best ways to use this house to educate others about sustainable living.

One thing is for sure, in buying this house, we took the plunge! And by the way, visitors are always welcome.

Stay tuned for part two: The Living House, the details.

The Living House: the details

By Cindee Karns, Eagle River, Alaska

“Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence.” (p. 7)

~ Fritjof Capra

The engineer who built this house calls it a bioshelter, "an integrated house/ greenhouse/ aquaculture system designed to emulate natural living systems in which the subsystems interact with each other to collectively create a self-regulating whole. The goal is to simulate the thermodynamic efficiencies of a complex ecological food chain." (Crosby, p. 1) What an idea: to live in a house that is supposed to be like a live system, like nature! I wondered what that meant exactly. Capra explains the properties of a living system as “properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts.” (Capra, p. 29)

How biblical, you might say. Did it remind you of 1 Corinthians 12:12? It did me. Even though that verse is talking about Christian community, the idea of the body as a natural system became a metaphor for the house in my mind. “You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you're still one body.” That's exactly what our house is: a whole body with many different parts. We live as parts of the whole within the house. Just like in a healthy body and in a healthy system, each part thrives and in our house we are thriving along side the gold fish, the plants, the gravel, the worms, the CO2, the micro-organisms and the thermal mass (earth).

The house was built on the side of a mountain facing the southwest and overlooking the beautiful Eagle River Valley, in order to collect as much passive solar heat and light through the front wall of windows as possible. Inside, the first ¼ of the house is an enclosed water garden complete with a goldfish pond and a small waterfall. Even though there are hardly any other windows, the rest of the house is supplied with natural light through the front windows and a skylight for natural lighting in the back of the house.

The garden space helps heat the house, acting as a buffer between us and the out of doors. It recycles our water and it brings smiles to our faces--especially in winter. We take good care of our garden space. Basically it's an insulated swimming pool filled with sand, gravel and topsoil that, in the deep end, collects water in a 5,000 gallon cistern. Sand, gravel and cement all collect heat: thermal mass. You know this from being in a basement in the summer. It’s cool because the ground surrounding it is cool. In the winter it’s warm, because you are heating the bricks and the ground stays warmer than outside. Our garden and the thermal mass beneath it helps heat our house in the winter and cool it in the summer.

Storing our heat this way has helped change our carbon footprint from 30 tons a year when we lived in Fairbanks and heated with oil, to 10 tons a year now. It is so significant that if we suddenly lost heat in this house at 70 degrees and the outside temperature was 10 above zero, the house would take a week to freeze. Check your carbon footprint at:

http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction/carboncalculator.

We wouldn’t freeze though. We have a Finnish fireplace, a wood-fired masonry heater, that stands in the middle of the house. The fire heats the bricks and they provide radiant heat for the entire house. These kind of heaters burn so hot, there is little carbon expelled into the atmosphere. Our back up heat is a small natural gas boiler.

This house breathes; it has a heat recovery ventilator. It mixes fresh air with inside air so that our house completely exchanges the air in the house every 3 hours. The fresh, dry air is ducted into the garden at the floor level and dehumidifies the garden ---it seems like it’s exhaling. At the top of the garden space, the air is inhaled into the rest of the house and the moisture picked up in the garden space humidifies the inside air.

Even though our water system is a closed system, we replenish our water supply by collecting water from a seasonal spring and from rain water. The fresh water is piped into the garden space where it trickles through the gravel and roots of the plants getting cleaned naturally before it is sterilized through a UV sterilizer and pumped into the cistern. While the average American house uses 70 gallons per person per day just on indoor water use, (Main, p. 68) we only lose about two or three gallons a day per person by drinking it and watering outside plants. The rest of the water is recycled. Check your home water use at: http://www.tampagov.net/dept_water/information_resources/Saving_water/Water_use_calculator.asp

When we use any water in the house, (not toilet) the water is cleaned, sterilized and reused. At each stage of the cleaning process, mirco-organisms help purify the water. First, it’s drained and filtered through three different 50 gallon biofilter drums in the basement, where more than 95% of the pollutants are removed. (To see the builder talk about it, go to: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F9XC7UoHQiE&NR=1 ) Then the treated water is pumped up to the garden space and into the goldfish pond, which is filled with aquatic plants that clean the water even more. If we have used any product that is not good for us to drink, we know. When the fish start gasping for air, we did something wrong: too much laundry soap, a new shampoo, etc. (No fish have ever died by using them as “canaries in the mine” --so far.)

Next, the pond water over flows into the gravel and topsoil, seeping down into the same collection pipe the rainwater ends up in and is sterilized and pumped into the cistern for reuse. We filter our drinking water one more time before drinking it, but the rest we use as is. Because it's recycled, we have an almost limitless supply of clean water here, something a lot of people in the world wish for on a daily basis. (To see the builder talk about it, go to: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN76_UDzdI )

So what about the toilets, you ask? We have two. One is a biolet, which anyone can purchase at biolet.com. It is electric, and turns waste into dirt every six months or so. The other is a home-made composting toilet which takes human waste and our vegetable scraps. After eighteen months and the addition of 250 earthworms, we have the best organic dirt you can get to use on our flowers and trees. (To see the builder talk about it, go to http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=FYXtSRgw2ZU )

So, we are learning how to live with our house and its systems, We would be glad to encourage you to come visit or build something similar, but what if that’s out of the question? What else can you do? Our next plunge will be solar power we hope. But until we have that figured out, I’m working on how to clean without all of the chemicals that pollute our lungs as well as the common water supplies, which are sold to us in our stores . I’ve figured out that I have brand loyalties (that are difficult to break) to Comet and Lysol, among other cleaning supplies used in my childhood. I'm trying to follow advice from Christopher Uhl in his book Developing Ecological Consciousness, Path to a Sustainable World, who points out that “to eliminate the concept of waste, all materials and products should be conceived of as nutrition…Humans must design things that, after their useful life, return safely to soil and rebuild it.” (Uhl, 266) Using cleaning supplies that can return safely to the soil is something I can do right now.

If you want to follow my lead, this year for Christmas everyone on my list will get microfiber cleaning cloths (not the antibacterial ones), a gallon of vinegar and a box of baking soda with a note that says, "Skip the cleaning aisle at the grocery store for the rest of your life!" I also know that our strongest voice for change is in our dollars. I give my dollars to the brand “Seventh Generation” found in most health food sections of Safeway. It’s good, if you don’t have a favorite green brand yet. Those are things that don’t take time, they take the ability to change. Look for something new each week that you can change to improve life for those “downstream” from each of us. What new steps will you take? You can do it. Take the plunge.

“There are as many ways to build a new world of living systems as there are creative people who want to do it! . . . Each person, as an imaginable disc, can contribute to the process of today’s metamorphosis in some unique way. What matters is that we all understand the Earthdance and the healthy features of living systems at their best. From there we need only the will and the love to create a better future for all living beings.” (p. 365)

~Elisabeth Sahtoris

REFERENCES:

Capra, F. (1997). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. Anchor Books.

Crosby. R. (2001). “What is a bioshelter?” Biorealis Systems, Inc. Avail. online at: http://biorealis.com/bioshelter/BioshelterNarr.html

Main, E. (2008). “H2O: One glass at a time.” Green Guide. National Geographic. P. 68-73.

Sahtouris, E. (1999). Earthdance: Living systems in evolution. Avail. online at: http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Erthdnce/

Uhl, C. (2004). Developing ecological consciousness: Path to a sustainable world. Roman and Littlefield.