It is the end of the world and my cable went out
"Awesome like a million hot-dogs"
A solar storm from our sun is set to hit earth today. Or tomorrow. Maybe later this weekend. Scientists are saying it could disrupt electrical systems, make your cat act funny, maybe even provide some incredible looking atmospheric delights.
Worst yet, the internet might go out. People will say “oh, it’s because of the solar storm.” There might be a quip or two about how inconvenienced everyone is. The focus is that the internet goes out, no matter how it goes out, not on the fact that it could be felled by a COSMIC EVENT!
Somewhere along the line I think we’ve lost our ability to be awed by anything or washed over with complete wonder. There is no humility anymore. Humans are fucking awesome. Right?
We think that the universe should work to our standards. Really, it works the other way around.
When I was 14 my father would frequently drive me to school, dropping me off on his way to the bus station. This usually happened at some un-godly, pre-dawn hour. On one of these mornings, right as we turned the corner from Carr Street to Club Crest Avenue, the sun broke over the horizon. Nothing but the windshield existed between me and the very first light of that day. Light and heat from an infinite furnace was transmitted across a vast empty nothing for the express purpose of blinding me first thing in the morning. It lasted all of a second and I still think back to it.
It was incredible. It was awesome. It made me think about myself in a totally new way.
I hope the solar storm causes enough of a problem to have a similar affect on people.
Why have we lost our sense of awe? Maybe there’s enough science to explain everything. Maybe there is a sense of cultural shame that goes with succumbing to the absolute wonder of the universe. Perhaps there is a global mentality of “No, you impress me” rather than sitting back and allowing ourselves to be amazed by everything that surrounds us. If you know me at all, you know that I love compost and watching entire harvests rise from a single seed. I like it because I allow myself to be constantly wrapped up in the awe of it all.
To many, compost may be a pile of rotting food and leaves. To me, it is a deconstruction of fairy complicated remnants of something that was once alive, breaking down into something basic. This all comes from the soil, and returns to the soil, but I think the absolute wonder of it all is passed over by so many because it’s just dirt.
And the solar storms rage just a few million miles away from us. Far enough away so we aren’t incinerated. Close enough where a miscalcuation could destroy us. The sun has been burning for millions of years, for longer than any one of us can imagine. Meanwhile, on earth, we are caught up in the circus of who will lead us for the next four years.
Even if there was some kind of cosmic event that could change the world as we know it, would we know it was coming? Scientists tell us of the solar storm and give us a list of things we can expect. Maybe awe & wonder comes from the unexpected? From something we don’t have the tools or perspective to be able to wrap our minds around it with.
There is no awe anymore. As Eddie Izzard points out, we use “awesome” to describe hot dogs. Louis C.K. states that “Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy.” It seems only astronomers are able to be awed, and comedians are able to put that awe into a functional perspective.
I think it’s time for a cosmic experience. Nothing terribly destructive, but something significant enough to make us slow down and ask some questions about our goal here.
What are some things you’ve seen recently – daily or otherwise, that have left you completely awe-struck?
Like it? Love it? Sign up to get the best of Not Quite Hippie delivered to your inbox every week. Totally free!
read moreTiny Houses – how small is too small?
via tinyhouseblog.com
Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more attention given to the idea of the Tiny House.
It’s rather refreshing, especially in our McMansion era of homes with massive lawns and out-of-control utility bills, accessed through an endless network of asphalt at the edge of yet another suburban town.
Many find it nice, really, owning a home that they can call their own. Other’s take a Durden-esque criticism to it: a big house that you need to fill with things and keep from falling apart – debt upon debt upon debt.
But what if you weren’t living in a big house? Could you fit everything that was truly important to you within a few dozen square feet? Could you live in a Tiny House?
TINY: A Story About Living Small (Teaser Trailer) from TINY on Vimeo.
When I worked as a Ranger at Philmont several years ago, my existence was more or less that. During that summer everything I owned either existed in the back of my Jeep Cherokee or was skillfully packed into by Kelty. When I was on duty I’d hike about with everything from my closet to my bed to my kitchen pantry packed into a few thousand cubit inches. When I wasn’t, I was able to travel everywhere from Santa Fe to the Grand Canyon, always on a whim, still able to camp out or sleep in the back of the Jeep when it was time to retire for the day.
It was a true sense of freedom, which was ideal for a 20 year old. Sure, I’d be reliant on outside sources for things like showers and laundry, fuel and food. Beyond that my time was my own and my job was to guide Scouts through the New Mexican backcountry and prescribe them methods of not being eaten by mountain lions, dying of hypothermia, or getting really lost.
Point being: that summer, I could go anywhere all because I didn’t have the large, permanent things that typically tie people to one spot: beds, sofas, televisions, tax information, etc. However, I know that a lot of people like the idea of having a shower or a bed prescribed to them.
With the Tiny House idea, people are showing they can do so much more with so much less. By living in smaller spaces they are, quite literally, reducing their footprint. Tiny homes, many of which are portable, don’t necessarily have the power and water hookups that a typical home would have. Many of them run on solar power, have small reserve tanks for water, and use propane for heating and cooking.
Storage presents another challenge – meaning every purchase decision has to be considered. Where are you going to put the things you buy?
I’ve seen many Tiny Houses designed to be on wheels, built right on top of trailers. Depending on the skills and resources you have available, a well built Tiny Home could cost you a few thousand dollars. Significantly less, and far more earth friendly than the option of an RV. And, if you wanted you could build the house on a trailer and have it move with you.
I’m not entirely sure I could live in a Tiny House. It might be a part of the American sickness I could never shake: compartmentalization. A room with a reason, everything in it’s place. I’ve been working every day to make do with less. Use fewer resources, being smarter about acquiring things. The Tiny House idea revolves primarily around the idea of living simply through having less – the fewer things you own, the less you have to maintain, the less debt acquired. Still, it would take some getting used to.
And, frankly, I love the garden.While mobile gardening is possible, I’d rather have a plot of soil I can work with and enrich over time.
Could you live within a Tiny House? What are you doing to live with less?
Greening your resolutions
Think not only of how this year’s resolutions can better yourself, but how you can use them to better the world around you.
Taking resolutions one step further gives us options
What would happen if you took your resolutions one step further? You’d be surprised. Not only would you be doing your community a favor, but the resolutions stand a chance of surviving past January.Common resolutions look like the following:
- lose weight/ get fit
- save money
- more time with family/friends
- travel more.
- Curb your meat consumption. Ideally, all of the way down to zero. The word is out that meat isn’t great for you, is anything but awesome for the environment, and the meat that eventually makes its way to your plate is loaded with antibiotics. By moving meat from the center of your plate to an occasional side dish you’ll be taking about 1/3 off the top of your grocery bill. Those 10 pounds you resolved to lose? Dropping meat will definitely drop those. You’ll also find yourself with more energy to do things like, say, exercise! Or be active. Or, ultimately, sleep better.
- Consider the energy. From moving your car to heating your home, we spend a surprising amount of money on fuels. Everything we consume requires energy of some capacity to be produced. Keep this in mind when changing your consumption habits. Take shorter showers, modify your home so it is better insulated, ride your bike to work or consider working remotely a few days a week. I anticipate a lot more remote workers and telecommuting this year, its up to you to convince your employer that it is an option worth exploring.
- Cook at home. Sure, you’re saving money. But you’re also preparing foods that are better for you and you can cook extra to save for another meal. You also have the option of sourcing locally grown and organic foods – supporting your farmers and smarter growing practices. When planning menus and shopping for food, try to think beyond of “what do I want to eat” and more into “what is available?” Eat within reason by eating within season.
- Cultivate communities. Either through participation or facilitation, by just starting conversations about green and sustainable lifestyles works to change people’s minds and habits. This past year I’ve enjoyed hosting a few parties with food-based themes, showing off my garden, and working through this site to show both friends and strangers that living a more sustainable, self-sufficient lifestyle is well within everyone’s reach.
This year, think one step further.
Things I do which are not sustainable
Lucky's sorry. She'll do everything she can to reduce her carbon paw-print
While I feel as though I have come a long way from being the carbon-hogging consumer of yesteryear, there are still quite a few things I do on a daily basis which still has a huge impact on this here planet of ours.
I have a dog. Two, actually. And they are in no way sustainable or productive at all. I mean, they’re cute and fun to play with and are great companions. As the weather gets cooler they prove themselves to be excellent space heaters. But they also require certain foods, which arrive in bags I can’t recycle, and are made with ingredients that come from far away lands (they’re partial to the Alaskan fish varieties). They also poop, a lot. This results in the never ending task of disposing of the wastes. While dog waste can be composted, it is a far more delicate and complicated procedure than what I am able to do. For now, the cute dogs produce garbage.
This computer, like a lot of things, runs off electricity. So does the wireless router I connect to the internet through (not to mention the frequencies the router radiates, possibly ruining the livelihood of bees). So do the servers and data centers that the world’s websites sit upon. Right now, a little under half the world’s electricity is coal. A little under half is nuclear. The fraction which remains is produced through wind turbines, water turbines, and solar panels.
I’m online a lot of my day. Between producing words for clients and curating the Not Quite Hippie message, I probably use about twice as much energy as the typical person puts into their online experience. That doesn’t take into account the fact that for everything I produce, hundreds of eyes are also on their computers, online, reading it.
Is this justified? Partially. When working at home I make sure just about every light is turned off except what is absolutely necessary. I also try to spread the message about living a more sustainable lifestyle that uses less energy to my readers. Which reminds me, you should all take a second and shut off that light behind you.
The internet is killing our planet. From Create & Share
I’ll wait.
I am also working on a campaign to make this here Not Quite Hippie carbon neutral by figuring out how much carbon all of the internet activity we all conduct in order to be connected to Not Quite Hippie and then donating the difference to CarbonFund.org. That, however, requires math. And since I believe math is evil and unsustainable (maybe) I’ll have to figure it out and get back to you on it. Keep your eyes peeled.
Who doesn’t love a nice, hot shower? I know I sure do. And now that the fall is barreling into winter here in Denver, I probably love them even more. Yes, I realize the cost of a hot shower in terms of natural gas and water and sewage. But when you have a seemingly poor circulatory system as I do, it’s hard to resist. During the summer I enjoyed quite a few brisk, cool, Navy showers (the kind where you turn the water on only when you need it). But those kinds of showers are just about torture when the average temperature of the house is, say, 62 degrees – a temperature that always feels cooler than it is and you find yourself not trusting thermometers.
The grinder goes off in our house every morning. A few moments later the pot fills with rich, dark liquid derived from the beans which were grown somewhere on the other side of the planet. As an American, there is very little which is sustainable about coffee, yet it seems to be everywhere. As a freelancer, I more often than not find myself working out of cafe’s and coffee houses. With every cup I drink I know that no one who lives beyond 15 degrees north or south of the equator should even have this stuff. Thanks to the global market, I do. Thanks to the global market, coffee is a commodity. When things become publicly traded commodities someone usually ends up getting screwed.
Like the farmers who grow the beans.
Since it exists on such an unsustainable product, Starbucks is already looking for a way to diversify their coffee-based industry in order to weather the storm. Even though there are numerous fair trade, direct trade, and the Whole Foods brand “Whole Trade” beans available, we can’t forget that those same beans had to get to us somehow.
Solutions? I guess I could switch out to tea. I could at least grow tea in our climate. Or I could get around to building the greenhouse and keep it at a tropical temperature all year.
What are some things you do which aren’t sustainable? What can you do to change or offset the impact?
read moreThe Modern Hippie?
At first, the gardening led to a lot of assumptions about the rest of my lifestyle. So did the militant recycling, reduction of waste, and cultivation of compost. Doing the Towel Talk probably didn’t help. The accusations were becoming clear: this guy (me) is a damn hippie!
Said lovlingly, mostly, and it didn’t seem to drive anyone away. A lot of people have been free to throw around the word.
What does that even mean today? Hippie?
I have no idea how to play this
I live about a half hour drive away from Boulder, Colorado – a town that has been easily branded as a hippie town since lord-knows-when. Conversations about Boulder bring up the typical hippie charicatures: marijuana smoking, hemp-wearing, tye-dying earth activists who are a little too stoned to get anything done during the day.
The caricature of the hippie circa 1967 will probably never leave the cannon of popular culture. Long hair, free love, good drugs. Peace and love, man. That era of hippie collaborated over music, spoke out against a war, organized marches for equality among all races, genders and creeds. Sure, they developed a stigma of being the “crazy, stoner” people. But they managed to get things done.
The very word in itself, “hippie”, means a person who is aware of the world around them. Hippie, hipster, hip cats, and so on – throughout history the term has been self-acquried by subcultures who claim one thing: they are more aware than the mainstream.
What if the mainstream became the ones who were aware? What if we were all hip to what was happening?
Between what is happening on a legislative level, all the way down to the grassroot ideas behind farmer markets and urban agriculture, I feel it is nigh-time for a new definition of “hippie.”
I continually think back to meeting Annie Leonard – mind behind The Story of Stuff - when she said: “Bringing your own mug to the coffee shop, your own bag to the store, or carrying your own water container when you’re out of the house aren’t ‘green’ or even ‘eco’ things. These are things responsible people adults need to be doing.”
Survey’s say that a majority of American’s think alternative energy sources are key to the country’s future, as is lessening our oil dependence, driving less and developing more sustainable communities. Communities – everything from better kept roads and parks to the quality of our schools.
A lot of what I’ve been reading has a marked change in the context: we don’t necessarily want more, we want better.
What is the future of the hippie? While I think many of us will be small scale gardeners, fewer might replace our pet dogs with chickens and goats (unless dogs start producing milk or eggs, either of which mine is willing to do. I’ll keep her around just in case) but I don’t think that’s all we are going to be up to. I think enough traits of the modern hippie will be simple enough and logical enough to seep into the day to day life of everyone.
All it takes is a few people to do a few little things. Once the changes are noticed an avalanche of progress is set to go off.
Here is my proposed re-definition of the “hippie”:
A hippie should be about community. Whether it is helping cultivate the community you live in, voting on issues that matter, or cleaning up your curb – the small actions of a community can add up to something big.
A hippie should be nourished. With the purity of our food at stake, hippies the world around should care about the food they eat. Where it comes from, how it is prepared, how to make more of it, and so on.
A hippie should still be aware. Know the issues that affect everyone. Research. Learn new things. Learn productive and useful things
A hippie should know their place. Not: “know your place, and stay there.” But know that your actions, no matter what they are or how you direct them, affect everyone else in some manner or another. This includes showers – hippies should also be clean. Not necessarily sparkly, but clean enough.
What is the verdict then? Will the hippie stand to live a life of patchouli and hemp sandals? Or is there enough in our mainstream culture to incorporate everyone into the new definition?
read more