Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

As Alaskans, Cindee and I have always gathered wild berries, salmon and moose or caribou to provide for a significant part of our diet. Even so, we are really beginners in much of the processes of gardening and forest gardening. Only in the past two or three years have we begun to take more seriously the amazing variety of edible plants available all around us. Summer has therefore become a very interesting time of watching the plant life come alive and sampling the seasonal menu as each plant has its own time for fruitfulness. This summer w e are enjoying finding some of the new plants that are beginning to impose their presence on our property. A beautiful sour dock plant sprang up in the fruitful soil where we have been letting some of our compost age. Sour dock is a plant especially to flourish in northern climates and has long been a favorite of Native Americans and other Alaskans for preserving berries otherwise adding to diets. This year the chamomile also decid...

I have been grateful for help Cindee and I have received this summer from family and friends. Re-developing our bioshelter home and its lands according to the principles of permaculture has been particularly difficult fo r me because it has required entering into an extended season of visible messiness. I complain about this periodically in this blog, so clearly it does bother me. On the other hand, I have been trying to allow at least some of the messiness to become symbolic to me of what we are doing. We are deconstructing our old lives and reconstructing new lives. Construction (and deconstruction) is always messy. Some of the obvious messiness includes my garden boxes, only half of which are built, my garage workshop ,which I will not properly clean until all the garden boxes are built, Cindee’s composting and soil building equipment, the cut cottonwood logs and branches, which will require a week of hard labor for two peopl...

As Cindee and I plan and work with the different relationships that are a part of our bioshelter home, we have to be aware of two distinct perspectives of “time”. All the systems operate as if time were a cyclical thing. Summer follows spring, which follows winter, which follows fall, which follows summer. This means that time and existence must, to a certain degree, be regarded as a cyclical, repeating thing. This is true for nearly all of the bioshelter’s systems. The water system operates all year long, but every year there comes a time when we empty the cistern by using the water for gardening, replenishing it from a second cistern. [1] The passive solar heat system collects the heat in summer and gives it off in winter. The ceramic wood stove requires wood to be collected in summer and burned in the winter. The composting toilet requires emptying of a barrel every six months. As for gardening, there are seasons of the year for everything from collecting seeds...

There is a method to my writing, although I don’t follow it with great discipline. My writing tries to combine the passion and experience of living in a bioshelter home with the principles of permaculture and the theology of the Christian faith tradition. My Christian reflections are certainly biblical, but have also been heavily influenced by German theologian Jürgen Moltmann’s writing, especially in his book God in Creation ( God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. Harper and Row, 1985). Reading his book was life-giving to me. Unfortunately, Moltma nn’s writings are largely impenetrable to the average reader, filled with philosophical and theological jargon that is difficult for the lay-person to unpack. Although I read and understood much in his writing, allowing the new thought to take form in my life—that is an integrating sense of living and understanding—has proven to be hard work. It would be easy to read his book and walk awa...

There are moments when our connection with with both God and nature seem to leap to the forefront of our awareness. I once was in the village of Atqasuk, Alaska and went goose hunting with a friend and experienced one such moment. Goose hunting in Alaska is sometimes different than many non-Alaskans might picture it. In this case, the wind was gusting up to 30 mph, and it was snowing like crazy. In short, it was a blizzard—but those crazy geese were still flying! I, at least, was amazed. We traveled by snowmobile (Alaskans call them snowmachines) from the village to our hunting area, dressed in parkas and a white snowshirt over-layer. Then we waited for the geese to come. As we waited I looked at the snow drift in front of me, the grassy tundra behind me, and the bushes in the hollows. As I watched a stubborn brown leaf on one of the bushes, shaking in the wind, it occurred to me that all of this was here only because of God’s sustaining presence. The l...

I walked down the hill below our house to begin figuring out how to clean up the area where I was cutting cottonwoods a few months ago. Cottonwoods grow an amazing amount of branches and the cleanup is always more than I expect. As I looked at the newly cleared area the first thing I saw was a surprise. The predominant vista I expected was bunches of dead things—dead branches and logs waiting to be dragged away. T hat was the sight I expected, but that is not what stood out. What stood out were some of the tallest high bush cranberry bushes I had ever seen, and all of them laden with the early, green berries. I simply could not believe how much they had grown and developed in such a short time. By August we will likely have one of the most abundant cranberry crops I have experienced. It is amazing how life flourishes after a major watershed event, even a seemingly destructive watershed event like the cutting of the canopy trees. This year, and maybe next, ...

We have been very grateful for the visionary work Bob and Lou Ann Crosby, the original builders and owners, did in developing our bioshelter home. As near as I can tell, the Crosbys were motivated by several factors in developing the bioshelter. In various conversations with them, we have heard how they were influenced by the 1970s environmental movement, Bob’s work with HUD constructing less than ideal homes, people who influenced them from a variety of situations, and an honestl desire to make a difference in the world. Probably all of these played a part, but I suspect the full motivation is not something we can ever know. For one thing, since we can never communicate everything that is in our hearts and minds to others, even historians cannot give us the pas in full. For another thing, we never even know ourselves completely. We have enough influential experiences tucked away in our memories, and enough emotional or subconscious responses going on that we can ever ...

Springtime is a se ason when I am particularly motivated to cut down cottonwoods and certain other trees. I suffer from allergies to some trees and am especially affected during the spring time budding season, so I feel most motivated to cut when my allergies are most affected. So I was cutting down cottonwoods on our property this spring, making room for some fruit trees we want to plant someday, when a neighbor came by. I saw him watching me work, so I stopped to talk. “Clearing land to build something?” he asked. “No, I’m allergic to cottonwoods, so I’m taking them down to plant something else.” With that he looked up and down the rest of the mountain beyond my property, all of which is cottonwood forest, and asked, “Are you going to cut down the whole mountain?” Well, of course I don’t want to cut down the whole mountain—I only have rights to a little bit of it, anyway—and therefore my allergic reactions never will go away; I truly am aware of t...