Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

Thirty years ago, when we were newly married, Cindee was always grossed out by anything that had to do with manure. I think this may have had to do with the requirement she had as a child of shoveling out the horse stalls. But she hated manure along with spiders and bugs, and hated the thought touching any of these things. Even changing diapers was a bit of a problem. Perhaps the reader can understand when I therefore say, that one of the strangest days living in our bioshelter home was the day I came home and saw my wife with worms in her hands: red wigglers, actually. When I saw her smiling face and wormy hands I realized that this woman I loved was changing drastically, and that I would have to adjust. I was not surprised to see the worms. As I wrote yesterday, our house minimizes impacts on the environment through outflows into nature and therefore does not have a septic system. Instead we recycle the gray water and use composting toilets rather than convent...

One of the things we love about the bioshelter is how little impact it has on the world around it. Built into the mountain, it draws heat from the earth. With a south-facing wall of windows, it draws heat from the sun, which shines directly onto a great thermal mass situated directly in the solarium. Drawing its water from rain and snow, it does not need a well. And using composting toilets, it does not need a septic system. It does have both a ceramic wood stove (old technology, but very clean and very efficient) and a gas boiler for supplemental heat in the winter, both of which do put out small amounts exhaust into the air. There is also a drain to allow the cistern to overflow (clean water only) when we get too much precipitation. And I will blog on how the urine separator works on a different day. However, there is very little that flows out of the house into the environment. This low impact design marks a very different approach to living than most constr...

Our bioshelter home is very much a reflection of the couple who originally built it. Bob and LuAnn Crosby were the first builders of the house. Bob is an engineer and a co-founder of Biorealis Systems, Inc., an engineering company trying to change the paradigm for how we build and live in homes ( ht tp://www.biorealis.com/phpBB3/index.php ). LuAnn is an artist and interior decorator. The bioshelter home they built and lived in for twenty years reflects these two very interesting personalities, providing a wonderful marriage of functionality and beauty. The exterior of the house is more function than beauty. Although the house is built back into the mountain for efficient heating, the facade is fully exposed, appearing like nothing so much as a stark cube. The cube shape is very functional, though, because the front wall of the house is made up of windows pointing south. South is the direction for catching sunlight in Alaska, and that wall of windows provides an a...

We hadn’t lived in our bioshelter home very long before Cindee began teaching me about permaculture. In brief, permaculture is about a way of life where the land feeds the people, the people tend the garden in a way where gardening feeds the land without chemical fertilizers (more on this later—but some plants actually build up and feed t he soil, even while producing food), and where the waste from each process of life on the land becomes the resource for feeding something else. In short, it becomes a more-or-less self-sustaining system t hat cares for itself with relatively little labor on the part of the people. From my perspec tive the problem of permaculture is that it takes time to develop the plants and the land. This is especially true for us, because we had more than pure permaculture in mind. We are both allergic to cottonwoods, and our whole 1.9 acres is a cottonwood grove. Why not replace the cottonwoods with berries and fruit trees? We need some paths to go...

For Cindee and me, living in our bioshelter home is a spiritual journey. How could it be otherwise? The house mimics a living creature, with ventilation systems that allows the house to “breathe,” a water system that “drinks-in” rain and then "digests" (recycles) nearly every drop, a "warming" system based on passive solar heat stored in a massive thermal mass, and a small plot of land that increasingly provides both building materials and food. Participating in the life of this living system requires a relational awareness. Our home and lands join with us in a relationship of mutual care and responsibility. And although living in our bioshelter home is a reminder of what life is about, as a Christian I find it also reminds me of the basic truths lived-out by my Judeo-Christian forebears in order to pass it on to later generations. That truth: that we live in a wonderful web of relationships; and just as those relationships provide for...

There are so man ways to show solidarity and make a difference. Timeforclimatejustice.org has created a great video asking musical artists to go on record.

Today I heard an interview on NPR (Fresh Air), where the guest described the near extinction of bison in North America by hunters. After the interview I began to see that time as something of a metaphor for today. The truth is, the hunters didn’t think much about causing an extinction. They were just hunting for their own purposes—meat or profit. In their view nature was so expansive and so huge--and belonged to God and not to them, after all--how could they be concerned. Surely, small human beings couldn’t have that much impact on something as massive as these wondrous herds of bison that stretched clear across the continent. Today, I hear thinking much the same. So what if methane and CO2 contribute to global warming? Nature produces more methane and CO2 from rotting vegetation and volcanic eruptions than humans can imagine. What are human beings that we should consider ourselves powerful enough to have any impact in the face of these? And of course there was a time when th...