Category: Sustainable living

LED lighting


There are five LEDs in these spotlights, in finned aluminum heat sinks.

LED light bulbs are still pricey, but the cost has been coming down, and the variety of bulbs available is increasing.

I wanted interesting lighting for my living room, which has a 21-foot ceiling and lots of planes and angles. My concept was to use spotlights for indirect light — not too bright — bounced off the walls and ceiling. I wanted fixtures that use bulbs with a standard base rather than odd bases that would lock me into high-priced and inefficient bulbs. When the house was complete and time came for the final inspection, I put ordinary 60-watt incandescent bulbs in these fixtures just to get through the electrical inspection — a total of 15 bulbs. So for more than two years, that’s what I’ve had, and of course they didn’t create the right effect at all. The power consumption also was outrageous — 900 watts when all the lights were on. So I very rarely used them. I was never able to find spotlight bulbs (as opposed to floodlights) in compact fluorescent. But LED spotlight bulbs have started to come onto the market at prices that are bearable.

Philips makes a line of LED bulbs that can be found at Home Depot. Amazon, and specialty retailers online, also carry a pretty good range of LED bulbs these days.

The color of light that you get from LED bulbs is not ideal, though some are better than others. My corner lights (each bulb is 3 watts) are too blue, but I decided that I can live with since they’re not terribly bright and since the light is bounced off of warm-colored walls. The three lights up at 16 feet (6 watts each) are a much warmer color. The warmer color lights tend to cost a bit more, and, per watt, they’re not quite as bright.

Now when all these lights are on, I’m drawing 54 rather than 900 watts. Of course I’ll use the lights more, now that they’re not sucking so much electricity.

It might be possible to justify the cost of LED bulbs now because of their long life and low power consumption. There’s a good chance that they’ll last me 15 years or more.


I have lights like this in each corner, nine feet up.


This fixture is 16 feet up.

Dying of consumption


Smike on his deathbed, dying of consumption — Nicholas Nickleby

It’s a dark pun, but the people of the 19th century, and we in our own time, are stalked by the same wasting disease that leads inevitably to ruination if not death — consumption.

Today is “black Friday.” The media (feeding the frenzy while pretending to cover it), is already full of horror stories. At a Walmart in Los Angeles, a woman shot pepper spray at 20 people so that she could grab the consumer goods she wanted first. At a mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, there was gunfire. Last year, as I recall, people were trampled in stampedes when Walmart opened its doors.

These people were not looking to feed their families. They were looking for stuff, stuff that will be in landfills in a few months.

And here is yet another story from the right-wing blogosphere on how ill-prepared Boomers are for retirement. Fifty-six percent of retirees have debt. Forty percent of Boomers plan to work “until they drop.”

Metaphorically, at least, they are dying of consumption. How can they know so little about personal finance? I was stupid with money too when I was young, but I came to my senses around age 40 when I realized that I actually would be old someday (young people think that growing old is impossible). And I realized that I did not want to work for the rest of my life.

Strangely enough, we could learn much about personal finance from our archenemy — corporations. I’m talking about honest corporations, of course, not those that are looted in leveraged buyouts or executive scams.

I was lucky to have worked for a good corporation for the last 15 years of my working life — the Hearst Corporation. Hearst is a private corporation, so it doesn’t have to worry about a stock price and kiss the behinds of Wall Street. It was cash rich and, at least I was told, never borrowed money. It always spent cash. It didn’t lease — it bought outright if it needed something. And I was told that it didn’t even buy insurance, because the corporation had enough cash to be self-insured.

For years, I had to create budgets for my department and get them approved. I was in San Francisco, but the main office in New York approved the budgets. I never ever, in my career, went over my budget, though other managers sometimes did. It was a point of pride for me — to be able to anticipate my needs for the next year, to budget for those needs, to justify the costs, and then to stick to it.

There is a very important principle in how corporations handle money that every household would do well to keep in mind. That’s the concept of expenses versus capital improvements. Corporations do it that way because of tax laws that don’t apply to households, but the principle is still valid.

Expenses are roughly equivalent to consumption. Expenses, for a household, are things like electricity, groceries, gasoline, clothing, gadgets, etc. You can’t live without incurring expenses, but if expenses are not controlled they will eat your income and prevent you from making capital improvements and prevent you from accumulating assets. Expenses are the money we pee away. Expenses drain our income and do nothing to improve our future.

Capital improvements have to do with things that last a long time and that improve your quality of life. One’s house is the main capital item. A car is another. Even a washing machine is a capital item. A Jaguar, though, is not transportation. That’s a luxury. When you spend capital, you determine what meets your needs and buy that much, no more. Where cars are concerned, for example, the right solution for me was a Jeep, which was a good San Francisco vehicle because it’s short and has real bumpers, and also a good country car, because I now live half a mile down an unpaved road, in the boonies. Similarly, a McMansion is not a dwelling, it’s a wasteful luxury. I have found that 1,250 square feet is more house than I need most of the time. Money well-spent on capital needs also can reduce your future expenses and thus help pay for itself — gas-frugal cars, for example; or energy-efficient houses; or an efficient new heat pump to replace an old, energy-hogging heat pump. In a corporate budget, a capital item must be “justified.” It has to make sense when you do the hard-nosed, cold-blooded number crunching. It has to get past the “bean counters,” as we called them.

If you look at how chronically poor people spend their money, you’ll usually find that they are pissing away their income on consumption and wasteful “expenses,” leaving no surplus for capital improvement and asset accumulation. And, when they incur debt to acquire a capital item, they tend to buy far more than they need because they bought what they wanted rather than what they needed and could justify.

It used to be, in this country, that the centerpiece of household finance was to buy a house with a 30-year mortgage, pay it off, and then retire in that house, mortgage free. The abandonment of that idea is one of the things that is killing the middle class. People started drawing on the equity in their homes to increase consumption. Even when they spent that equity on their homes, it was on stuff that cannot be cost-justified, like granite countertops. Thus they end up with no assets, debt that financed consumption, and out-of-control expenses for processed food, eating out, gadgets, gas-guzzler gasoline, cable television, and stupid luxury items that they saw on TV.

I often tell any young person who will listen the two most important things about personal finance that I ever learned: You must spend less than you make, substantially less when possible. And you must accumulate, else you will have to work forever.

And if I was made dictator for a few seconds, long enough to be granted one wish for my pathetic fellow Americans, it would be this: I’d cut off their cable. That would save them $150 a month while cutting off their access to propaganda and advertising. It also would kill a few corporations that deserve to die — Fox, for example.

But let’s learn from our enemy — corporations, the very people who sponsor the propaganda and the advertising. Again, I’m not talking about scam corporations like Enron. I’m talking about real businesses that actually do productive things and make money at it. They are usually very prudent and hard-nosed in how they spend their money. And that’s one small reason why they are rich and we are not.

Family heirloom bean seeds

My older sister and I have often lamented that the heirloom seeds that were used for so many years on my mother’s family farm have been lost. But my sister recently discovered that a cousin has been growing green beans from family seed for many years. That cousin sent me some of those seeds. They’ll definitely be used in my garden next year.

My mother grew up on a good-size family farm in the Yadkin Valley, a place that had been in the family at least since the days of my mother’s grandfather, which is as far back as living memories go (my mother will soon be 88). Most of the farmland has been split up and sold off, but a few acres remain in the family.

This farm — which I well remember from my childhood — was highly self-sufficient. It even had its own blacksmith shop. Most of the food was grown and preserved for the winter on the farm. Preserved foods were canned, dried, and fermented. Fermented foods included pickles and sauerkraut. The farm produced its own milk, butter, and ham. There were draft animals for farming (I can remember the mules), though of course tractors came into use later on. The farm could make its own corn meal, but wheat flour was one of the few staples that had to be bought, along with pinto beans. Flour and beans were bought in 50-pound sacks. The farm even made wine and moonshine. I believe the winemaking and distilling had shut down by the time I was a child, though there was a kitchen closet with the scent of wine that I was never permitted to open when I was a child.

My mother’s father took pride in providing for a generous and well-stocked kitchen. And my grandmother’s cooking is still the family standard that I and my siblings and cousins aim for.

Fall cookin'

I have a visitor from California, so the abbey kitchen is running at high speed, as it did while Ken was here. This is a green pepper stuffed with rice, cheese, and vegetarian fake sausage; mustard greens; a roasted tomato; turnips seasoned with toasted sesame oil and Greek yogurt; and abbey bread. All the produce came from my garden, except for the tomato, which came a friend’s garden near Asheville.

Asheville and thereabouts


I made a three-day trip to Asheville this week. This photo is from the Blue Ridge Parkway near Mount Mitchell


Warren Wilson college is an unusual college that requires work credits for its students. The college has a rustic campus that includes a 300-acre working farm.


Greenhouse on the Warren Wilson farm


The Warren Wilson blacksmith shop


A brick silo on the Warren Wilson farm


The running of the cows. The students are moving the cows from one pasture to another, using the main road.


A late rose in a friend’s garden at Black Mountain

Good news for Texas?


The red dot at the top left indicates that the severe drought in Texas this summer was an outlier event — not a trend. [John Nielsen-Gammon]

One of the things that made this past summer so scary was the extraordinary drought in Texas. This part of the Southeast is not all that far from Texas, and many of the same climate patterns apply. For example, La Niña is known to be related to droughts here in North Carolina, and the same is true in Texas.

So I have kept a fearful eye on Texas, desperate to know whether the Texas drought is an ugly new trend or an outlier event that will reverse.

John Nielsen-Gammon has crunched some numbers on this. He acknowledges that his crunching of the meteorological data is crude and preliminary, but it’s the best data we’ve got so far. His concludes that the 2011 drought in Texas is an outlier event and that thus it is highly likely that it will reverse.

Nielsen-Gammon also sheds light on a question that has puzzled me. Why do droughts tend to last for years? We know that La Niña causes short-term droughts that last a season or two or three. But what causes an entire decade of droughts?

Nielsen-Gammon says that the data shows that long-term droughts are related to long-term oscillations of surface water temperatures in both the Atlantic and Pacific.

Bottom line: If Nielsen-Gammon is right, then there is cause for hope that these clusters of hot, dry summers will give way to clusters of cooler, wetter summers.

Green pepper bumper crop

So far in September, six inches of rain have fallen here. That has made a huge difference in the cool-weather crops. The peppers, which merely survived during the hot, dry, summer, have become very productive and are even still blooming. The turnips, mustard and kale also are doing extremely well.

I couldn’t ask for better soil. It’s all about water.

In Ireland, it's cool to be a farmer again


The Irish Times

There are two dangers in not owning a farm: the belief that heat comes from the furnace and food comes from the supermarket. — Aldo Leopold

The Irish Times started a three-part series today on how family farms are making a comeback in Ireland’s depressed economy. In fact, farming is one of the most promising areas of the economy. Young people now see farming as an option. This, of course, is relocalization — a return to the land after people saw what the globalization of the economy got them.

What puzzles me is why that doesn’t seem to be happening here. Compare the story from the Irish Times with the link I posted yesterday to a New Yorker story about economic deterioration in Surry County, North Carolina, the county just to the west of Stokes County, where I live. Young people continue to move away, both in Surry and Stokes, while many old family farms sit more or less intact, but fallow. All too many family farms, however, have been chopped up into subdivisions during the past few decades, if they were near a population center or a main road.

I am speculating, because I don’t have nearly enough information to make such a judgment, but it is as though most people here are at an earlier stage in a process. They have perceived the downsides of the boom and bust and waste brought to us by globalization. But they’re not yet thinking much about what they could do, largely by themselves, with the resources that are close around them. I don’t know if it’s the truth or an urban legend, but one regularly hears that some children don’t know that French fries comes from potatoes. If that’s true, then the cultural connection to the land has been completely severed. Not to mention that education has failed. Maybe things never went that far in Ireland.