Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

For the past four weeks I have been trying to write this blog at a pace of five entries per week. Actually, I don't have adequate time to do quality work at that pace, so I am going to slow it down. This week, for instance, I am attending meetings in Indianapolis, so I won't have much time to write. When I am traveling, which is about a third of the time, I probably won't be writing entries. When I am home I hope to write about every other day. One day to think about what I am writing and one day to write. I'll try that one for a while. See you next week!

OK, I flew to F airbanks on business and had to miss two days in our potato patch. I usually end my evening walk in the potato patch, to check on the plants, pull a few weeds and enjoy the green space in which the potato patch sits. My evening visit has become one of those daily rituals that help me remember and enjoy the beauty of it all. After only two days, though, the cow parsnip was already nearly a foot tall! How can the weeds (I’ve decided a weed is any plant I do not want!) jump ahead so fast, but the potatoes grow so slow? I also realized that I had let the fireweed—which I don not think of as a weed, despite the name (it’s a flower, and perhaps a salad ingredient)—grow too closely to the potatoes. The fireweed was now so tall that it was overshadowing the first row of potatoes, and already that row of potatoes is behind in growth. So much change in two days! So I pulled some weeds and enjoyed my time in the potato patch. Permaculture is an effort at a...

I started this blog about three weeks ago thinking about how living in our bioshelter home is a spiritual experience. Since then I had a two-part encounter with a friend that has caused me to think further about living our lives as spiritual experiences. The first encounter was a comment my friend made. She said that she was jealous of all that the uniqueness of our home allows Cindee and me to live in a way that others cannot—she believed that we can live toward demonstrating a different, and more sustainable future, where others in more conventional homes cannot. The second encounter was a first-ever visit to her home. Although my friendship with John and Mary Charlotte has been slowly growing over the years, most of our encou nters were professionally related, until recently. As a result we had met in a variety of settings but never in their home. When I arrived there, it was a marvelous place. The house is, indeed a rather conventional home. As she had s...

One of the premises of permaculture is that there is no such thing as waste. All waste is a resource for some other organism or process in the ecosystem. Although this is generally true, it is also true that learning how to use every resource can be a challenge. Such has been the case with our cottonwood trees. When we bought our bioshelter home we made a list of pros and cons. The cottonwoo ds fell on the “con” list. We lived in a cottonwood grove before we moved, and had already learned that both of us were allergic to cottonwoods. And as if living with stuffy noses was not enough, the cottonwoods added insult to injury by constantly dropping junk in the yard that had to be picked up. There were sticky husks tracked in the house following the emergence fo the leaves, followed by blowing cotton that inevitably was sucked into the garage, followed by sticky seed pods, followed by branches that inevitably broke off in a windstorm. The cottonwoods seemed more t...

Some of the seemingly inconsequential activities of life turn out to be wonderful assets in relationship building. We discovered this last winter when Cindee and I decided to try making wine with one of the wine kits we had seen for sale. Cindee and I have grown accustomed to having a glass of wine together at the end of the day. It has become something of a ritual, allowing us to spend time together and talk as we unwind. It seemed natural, as we have talked more and more about recycling, to also talk about reusing wind bottles. We decided to try our hand at wine making. Our first attempt was a merlot wine kit we bought from a local vendor. The process seemed simple enough, and our ceramic stove fireplace came with a small wood storage chamber built into the brick façade, that turned out to be perfect for storing the carboy (what vintners call the fermentation vessel). All went without a hitch, and we soon had about 30 bottles of wine aging in our cellar. We even...

Living in our bioshelter home has caused Cindee and me to think more about the importance of a relational worldview if all are to have a chance at good life. A relational worldview requires that we are aware not only of relationships with our own home and family, but also of those around us who are not blood relatives. As we were thinking about such things our third summer in the bioshelter rolled around, and we realized that we didn’t even know most of our neighbors. We decided it was time to do something about it. We decided to hold a nei ghborhood party; after all one of the points of buying the bioshelter was to provide a place of hospitality. So we a big sign by the mailboxes: Prudhoe Bay Neighborhood Potluck Party at the Karns’ House (the bioshelter), and added the address, the phone number and the date. When the day arrived we wondered who would actually show up, and what kind of people they would be. Even though the decision to host a party had already been ...

The potatoes are up—at least most of them. We planted three varieties of potatoes and plants from two of the three varieties have broken the surface. It is somehow very satisfying to see the plants come up, even though harvest is still months away. Watching things grow, by a mysterious power we call biology, is a wonder. At the same time, the cow parsnip and the fireweed are up in the same garden space. As we have been working on the garden I have been trying to decide how to define what is a weed and what is not. Fireweed is beautiful and technically edible. Cow parsnip surely has its uses, too. Do we remove these plants? Some things that I used to consider obvious weeds are actually quite useful. Dandelions are a case in point. As a kid I remember digging dandelions out of the lawn with a knife. They were too prolific and tended to crowd out the grass (not a weed) in our lawn. Dandelions seemed to me to be pure weed. Later I learned that dandelions ...

I believe the issue of sustainable lifestyles will hit Alaska harder and quicker than much of the rest of the United States. At present it is estimated that 98 percent of Alaskan food is shipped to Alaska by barge or airplane—though that may not include subsistence activities in remote villages. The cost of transportation is skyrocketing, largely due to high fuel costs. Alaskans will no choice but to remember old ways, and develop new ways, of providing food for themselves. One of the permacu lture guidelines for landholders is to develop a 30-year plan for creating a sustainable living space on the land. Sustainable means working with the land and its ecosystems until the land sustains itself and its creatures permanently. Humans count among the creatures sustained by the land. The 30-year planning process helps landholders to become learner-doers. By this I mean that learning is a never-ending process. Though it is helpful to begin with some research on permacul...

The first few months after we moved into our Bioshelter home, I lived there alone while Cindee stayed behind to sell our old house. I decided that living in three rooms (kitchen, living room and bathroom) was a good way to begin, cutting down on cleaning and simplifying my life. I wasn’t going to have much furniture for a while, anyway, so I set up a bed in the living room and made myself at home. That first night I realized that I wasn’t so alone after all. I swear the sound of the house snoring kept me awake for more than an hour after going to bed. The realtor wasn’t kidding when he told us that a Bioshelter mimics a living creature. Actually, the sound I was hearing was the sound of an aquarium pump in the basement, set to move water from one water processing tank to the next through brief surges. The brief surges (less than 2 seconds for each, brief surge) keeps from creating enough of a current in the settling tank to stir up the sludge. And the sound of each ...

Energy is the great conundrum for sustainable life on this planet if it is to continue sustaining large populations of humans. We have been thinking about this as a part of the lifestyle, of our Bioshelter home, because this house is supposed to reflect sustainable living. Although it takes less energy to heat our home than a conventionally built home of comparable size, the fact is we still use fossil fuel heat and electricity from the grid. So we are wondering about the feasibility of renewable energy as future add-ons to our home. I am writing about this today, because today the Chugach Electric Association is voting on whether to buy energy from the Fire Island Wind Farm. It looks like the vote will be a “yes,” allowing the wind farm to be built over the next two years, assuming the state signs-off on the project. However, Chugach Electric is agreeing only to a very small amount of power, and the bigger utilities, most notably the (Anchorage) Municipal Li...

I intend to write this blog as I can. Because I travel a lot with my work, and blogging while traveling is not always practical, I don't want to commit to more than I can produce. When I am at home in Eagle River, I will mostly blog 5 days per week--at least for a while. Not so much when I am traveling. Today, I only have a minute to blog. My computer quit, so I am borrowing one to leave this notice. I will get my computer fixed as quickly as I can and , I hope, resume blogging very shortly.

Companion planting is the planting of different crops close to one another with the theory that the different crops help one another. Some crops draw nitrogen from the air and fix it into the soil; some crops drop deep roots and deposit nutrients near the surface that they have drawn from deep underground; some crops repel certain pests; and some crops even cause subtle changes in the flavor of other crops growing nearby. So last year we decided to give it a try and hung two upside-down tomato plants in the solarium. Since the tomato plants were hanging upside down, there was opportunity to plant something else out of the top of the hanging planter. In one of the two, we planted nothing in the top, and in the other we added a nitrogen fixer—a bean plant. Actually, both toma to plants did fine. Since we are not using commercially produced fertilizers, both could probably have done better with more knowledgeable organic fertilizing. But the experiment paid o...

We came very close to not being able to buy our bioshelter home. The fact that we are here at all is a story worth telling. In 2007 I moved from North Pole, Alaska to a small apartment in Anchorage to begin a new job. One day I got an email from Cindee (in North Pole at the time) asking if I had time to drive to Eagle River to look at a house. She had been googling “green-built houses” and something called a “bioshelter” came up. It sounded interesting, so I went to give it a look. Afterward I called Cindee and told her we could never afford a house like that, but I was certainly glad I had looked at it. I told her about the solarium, the water systems, the heat sink and the beauty of both the house and the landscape in the Chugach Mountains, and said it was a dream. But it was well out of our price range. We couldn’t even make a respectable offer. We, of course, continued looking. Little did I know Cindee had emailed the owner to contact her if the price ev...

“Waste not, want not” is an old saying worth remembering. In our bioshelter home we try to live by a more modern version of that saying: Waste… Not! We operate out of an understanding that, in the end, there really can be no waste at all. [1] I alluded to that in a previous blog when I described composting as a dirt-to plants-to dinner plate-to toilet-to worms-to dirt cycle. Every bit of waste is a resource for something else, and joining-in on the re-cycle process is a must for good human life. In our bioshelter, though, we have one area of human waste that has not recycled particularly well—our urine. Our method of composting toilets employs worms in the process, and urine is so acidic that it kills worms. To deal with that our toilet seat includes a urine separator that funnels the urine down a hose and out of the house into a miniature drainage field. We just haven’t found a good use for all of our urine. Two Views of the Urine Separator Guy...

Part of the reason we bought our bioshelter home was personal and part was public. The personal part had to do with the desire to personally depart from living in a way that is complicit with the currently unsustainable human way of life. The public part was to show the house to others, in order to encourage more people to enter conversations on how to live differently. Because of this, we are often inviting people over, and we are often asked to provide tours for various groups. One of the comments we often hear from visitors is how much time and work must go into main taining the systemic, living network that is the bioshelter. The first year, we were making that comment ourselves. When we bought the house, the previous owners assured us there would be an owners’ manual to guide us. It turned out the builder, himself, had to become the owners’ manual, because nothing had ever been written down. For over twenty years the house had been the builder’s home...