Musings from Mark

According to the US Energy Information Administration, roughly 22% of energy use occurs in our homes, 28% occurs in transportation (2/3 personal, 1/3 commercial freight), 31% in the industrial sector, and 19% in the commercial sector.  It’s easy to write off commercial and industrial energy use as outside of our personal control, but in reality all of our infrastructure exists for the purpose of sustaining individual human lifestyles.  A fertilizer plant is an essential component of the food we eat, and a tire factory is essential to our daily commute.

With that in mind, I present the United States energy pie.  As the creation of this pie requires life-cycle analyses and some arbitrary categorization, I make no claim as to the complete accuracy of this, though I will say it is based on research and reading and reflects a rough breakdown of our individual contributions to total energy use.

Of the energy we use in our homes, half goes to heating or cooling and to heating water.  An equal proportion goes to everything else – electronics, appliances, lights, etc.  Another slice of the pie goes into the food system: everything from agriculture to processing plants to supermarkets and restaurants.  We use another slice of our total energy getting ourselves around, mainly by car and plane.  Another slice – primarily heating, cooling, and lighting – goes to government and academic buildings, office spaces, hospitals, and malls.  An often-overlooked slice goes to maintaining infrastructure:  roads, airports, utility wires and pipes, communications hubs, and satellites.  Finally, a quarter of our energy use becomes “embodied” in stuff that we buy.  This is the energy required to build cars and homes and appliances and electronics, to sew clothes and ship them to us, to mine raw materials that end up in plastics and metals – a large proportion of the “industrial” energy use that we too often ignore.  My ¼ may actually be an underestimate here, as I did not account for the fact that much of the stuff we buy in the US was produced overseas.

How then can we make a difference?  We need to reduce energy use by 50-75% to begin to be able to meet our needs with wind, solar, and hydro in the near term.  To accomplish this, we have to take bites out of every slice of the pie by simplifying and downsizing our lifestyles.  Rechargeable batteries, fluorescent lights, and triple-pane windows are simply not going to cut it.  To reduce personal energy use by 50%, one need to only:

1. Buy 75% less (new) stuff.
2. Live in a house half the size, or double the number of people living in the house.
3. Drive and fly 75% less.
4. Buy local, unprocessed food.

Why 75% less?  Because some categories, like institutions and infrastructure, cannot be reduced by half if we wish to maintain a technological society.  There are many in the “peak oil” blogosphere who believe that we will not be able to maintain a technological society as fossil energy becomes scarce and that we are headed for some sort of collapse and dark age.  I don’t necessarily agree, though I do see it as a possibility.  I do think that rising energy costs will force us to collectively use less, and that we will be much better off if we choose simplicity consciously (tiny houses, intentional communities, bike commuting) than if we wait for circumstance to force it upon us (layoffs, conflict-ridden un-intentional community living, debt).

Some Specifics

In case you’re wondering what to cut back on first, here is a comparison of the amount of energy used for a variety of daily activities.  Activities requiring electricity have been multiplied by 2.5 to account for 60% energy loss at the (coal or natural gas) power plant.

Activity                                     Power (watts)         Hours per day      Fossil Energy(kWh)
Phone charger left plugged in                          1                                   24                                          0.06
Laptop computer                                              30                                    8                                          0.6
Microwave                                                      1500                                    0.25                                    0.94
Home lighting (CFLs)                                     100                                    6                                          1.5
Television or desktop computer                   200                                    4                                          2
Refrigerator                                                         40                                 24                                          2.4
Cooking (range + oven, electric)                 6000                                    1                                        15

Electric furnace                                           10000                                    5                                     125
Heat pump                                                      2500                                    5                                       31
Wood stove                                                            0                                    8                                         0

Showering (2.5 gal/min, electric)         23000                                    0.2                                    11.5
Showering (2.5 gal/min, solar)                       5                                    10                                       0.13

Clothes dryer                                                 5000                                    1                                       12.5
Line drying                                                           0                                    8                                          0

Driving (25 mpg, 30 mph, 30 mi.)          44000                                    1                                       44
Driving (50 mpg, 30 mph, 30 mi.)          22000                                    1                                       22
Electric bike (25 mph, 30 mi.)                     700                                    1.2                                     2.1
Pedal bike (15 mph, 30 mi)                              0                                      2                                         0

Some factors, like the impact of insulating your home, cannot be simplified to a table, so I recommend conducting an energy audit on your life to see where the largest gains can be made for the least cost.  Pay particular attention to situations where you can reduce energy use by a factor of two or more without buying new expensive, energy-intensive stuff.

Three years ago, I was gifted a used solar water heating panel.  Together with a used water tank laying around the property, some simple plumbing and controls, and a five-watt pump, I built a $500 system that allowed us to shower outdoors using 99% less energy.  As it turned out, showering under the sun (or stars) proved to be more exhilarating than simply showering with less energy.

This past summer, I found myself living just far enough out (seven miles from work, 13 miles from town) that biking became a chore and I was considering buying a car.  Instead, I electrified my bike, allowing me to commute almost as fast as driving while using 90-95% less energy (and at a fraction of the cost).

Our dream, once we can afford it, is to transition from renting energy-inefficient houses to living in a much smaller, energy-efficient tiny house as part of a community with shared common spaces.

I offer these examples to suggest that energy conservation can be more fun than sacrifice.  I love showering outdoors more than in a humid bathroom.  I love my half hour in the morning and evening air on the way to work much more than sitting in a stuffy car.  I love living in community in a well-used space much more than living in a big house with empty rooms.  I encourage all of my readers to envision ways that you can simplify and use less energy while also bringing more joy into your lives.

Resilience and Home Power

The first principle of sustainability is resilience, the ability to adapt and respond to perturbations in the environment.  Our fossil energy-based utility grids are sprawling, fragile entities, prone to interruption by weather, sabotage, or deferred maintenance.  As fossil fuels become scarce and the economy staggers through a transition from growth to steady state or contraction, there is good reason to believe that these interruptions will become more frequent.  This, along with a desire to obtain more energy from renewable sources, is a good motivation to produce some of our own energy at home.  For most locations, solar photovoltaics are the most practical, scalable, and affordable.  The most common type of grid-tied installation is of no use when the electric grid is down, so it is wise to spend a bit more for a battery bank and an inverter that can work without the grid.  Hydropower is ideal, producing  electricity continuously with no need for a battery backup.  Land with perennial streams and a sufficient drop in elevation can be hard to come by, and I expect that all such land will become prime real estate as the fossil-fired power grid becomes less reliable.  Wind is a wily beast, dropping to nothing for days at a time then blowing in gales strong enough to damage a turbine.  Nevertheless it can be a good choice in flat windy areas with no hydro potential.  Regardless of which option makes the most sense, prioritizing production of energy on a home or community scale can go a long way toward improving resilience and energy sustainability.

One terawatt (TW) is equal to one trillion watts.  It is an enormous quantity of energy, equivalent to the output of a thousand Bonneville Dams.  Nearly impossible to comprehend, but it happens to be a useful unit for measuring energy on a global scale.  Human metabolism, at 100 watts per person and seven billion people, comes to 0.7 TW worldwide.  Our energy use – all of the coal, oil, gas, uranium, and renewable sources together – stands at 17 TW and growing.  We use about 25 times more external energy than we eat with our food.  Here in the United States, we use about 3.5 TW, or 20% of the world’s energy with 4% of the world’s population.

Solar energy arrives on the Earth’s surface at a rate of 89,000 TW.  It is sometimes said that this equals more energy in one hour than humanity uses in a year, but such a comparison ignores the realities of how difficult and potentially damaging it would be to convert this energy to usable forms.  This is the sum total of the power of the planet:  searing desert days warmed from freezing nights, daily storms drenching tropical rainforests, hurricanes in the remote southern ocean, and blinding glare reflected back into space from Greenland’s endless ice.  We could not tap even 1% of this energy without throwing weather and other natural cycles into disarray, nor could we afford to build any infrastructure on that scale.

How much of this energy, then, could we realistically harvest?  While energy can be harvested from waves, tides, salinity gradients, and other flows, I will focus here on the four biggest players: hydropower, wind, direct solar, and bioenergy.

Hydropower is the cheapest and most-developed of the three, with a little over 1 TW of installed capacity providing about 6% of the world’s energy demand.  This could be tripled by building new dams and power plants around the world, though even with all of our rivers dammed hydropower would supply a relatively small fraction of our demand.

Available estimates of the power available in land and near-shore winds vary widely, but a recent conservative estimate suggests 18 TW (Adams and Keith 2014), with 0.3 TW currently installed.  Wind turbines have a capacity factor (the ratio of power produced to the rated power of the turbine) of around 1/3, mainly because the wind is intermittent.  This means that we would need to install 50 TW of generation capacity to capture all 18 TW of available energy.  At one megawatt per turbine, that would require 54 million turbines, and at roughly $1/watt installed cost, that would be $54 trillion or nearly two thirds of global annual economic activity.

To generate 18 TW of power from 15% efficient photovoltaic panels, we would need to cover 0.4% of global land area.  If we subtract mountains and glaciated lands, this equates to an average of four acres of panels per square mile, and it is similar to the amount of land (0.6%) covered by roads in the United States.  Solar panels have capacity factors around ¼ and currently cost at least $2/watt to install, so the cost of a solar-only solution would be substantially higher than the wind scenario above.

Global photosynthesis – global biological conversion of sunlight to chemical energy –  has been estimated at 80 TW, of which 40 TW occurs on land and 40 TW occurs in the oceans.  Plants store this energy in chemical forms (starch, fatty acids, proteins) that are of little direct use to us.  Producing a useful fuel like ethanol or biodiesel entails substantial energy losses and energy inputs, such that turning 100% of annual land primary production into ethanol would yield something on the order of 10-20 TW.  Furthermore land-based photosynthesis includes all of the world’s food production, most of which is essential, and all of the world’s ecosystems, which we value both intrinsically and extrinsically.  With this in mind, it is fair to say that biofuels cannot reasonably supply a large fraction of our 17 TW global energy demand.

These scenarios assume that we would have enough raw materials to build 50 million wind turbines or 225,000 square miles of photovoltaic panels.  In reality, some of the rarer materials (such as the neodymium used in generator magnets) will prove limiting, requiring substitution with more readily available elements at a cost of lower efficiency.  The take-home message in terms of global-scale sustainable energy is that while it would be theoretically possible to meet our current energy demand from renewable sources, such a transition would come with a huge expense both financially and ecologically, in terms of converted habitats, dammed rivers, mining of raw materials, and manufacturing.

It is thus imperative that as we shift toward sustainable energy sources, we also reduce our energy demand.  Before I discuss practical ways to reduce energy use, however, I need to touch on three important aspects of sustainable energy: EROEI, fossil fuel dependency, and conversion/storage.

EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested)

To tap any source of energy, from oil in the ground to wind on the prairie, some energy must first be invested.  This is the energy to drill the wells, to refine the oil to gasoline, to build and maintain the turbines, and to build the transmission lines linking the turbines to areas of power demand.  For any energy situation, it is thus possible to calculate a ratio of Energy Returned On Energy Invested, or EROEI.

As fossil fuel reserves are depleted, EROEI decreases as the remaining reserves require more energy to extract.  The first oil wells had EROEI close to 100:1.  This value declined to 30:1 by 1970 and 15:1 by 2005, and the much-touted shale oil “revolution” has an EROEI around 5:1.  Theoretically any value above 1:1 is an energy source, but because society cannot afford to devote more than about 25% of its total labor and energy expenditure to the procurement of energy, the cutoff value for viability is in reality higher than 1:1 – at least 3:1 or 4:1.

In most cases, the EROEI of an energy source is closely reflected in its cost.  The rising cost of gasoline over the last 50 or so years directly parallels the decreasing EROEI of crude oil.  Similarly, wind energy (EROEI around 18:1) is now sufficiently profitable to stand on its own feet while solar photovoltaics (EROEI around 7:1) still require subsidies to compete with electricity from higher-EROEI coal.  However, this cost-EROEI linkage can fail in a complex political economy, as exemplified by the corn ethanol boom in the US.

Depending on who did the study, the EROEI of corn ethanol is somewhere between 0.9:1 and 1.5:1, which if we take the average means we get slightly more energy out in the form of ethanol than we invest in the form of fossil energy.  The energy in the ethanol, of course, comes from the sun via photosynthesis, but the inputs are nonetheless necessary.  Growing corn on an industrial scale requires synthetic fertilizer (natural gas + oil) and tractor fuel (diesel), and only the kernels are harvested with the rest of the photosynthetic biomass left in the field.  Then these kernels must be transported to an ethanol plant (more diesel), ground into flour (electricity), fermented, and finally distilled (coal for heat).

Corn ethanol did not come into existence as a logical way to convert biomass to liquid fuel.  If that were the goal, we would be using a different feedstock – Brazil produces ethanol from sugarcane with an EROEI of around 8:1.  Corn ethanol appeared on the market because US farmers were growing too much corn and needed additional demand to boost the price.  The government got on board with subsidies allowing ethanol to compete with gasoline despite a much lower EROEI, boosters hyped up the new “green fuel,” and pretty soon everyone was burning 10% ethanol fuel with almost zero improvement with regard to our energy sustainability.

Fossil Fuel Dependency

The EROEI values for sustainable sources remain constant with time and may even improve somewhat with manufacturing innovations, while EROEI values for fossil resources are on an inexorable decline toward 1:1, the point at which more energy is required to extract and process the fuel than can be obtained by burning it.  Optimistic economists use these numbers to forecast a smooth transition; as fossil fuels become unprofitable, sustainable sources will take their place.  In a smaller, simpler society that would be true, but such a smooth transition is far from guaranteed today.

The problem derives from the following facts:

1. Sustainable energy technologies all require significant up-front energy investments.
2. Until sustainable energy makes up a larger proportion of our total supply, this energy investment must come from fossil sources.
3. Scarce, essential commodities like fossil fuels fluctuate wildly in price.

The fluctuations in fossil energy prices create a challenging environment for investment in sustainable energy.  When oil prices are high, it is politically difficult to prioritize sustainable energy manufacturing over meeting basic needs.  When oil prices drop, sustainable technologies cannot compete on a price basis with the result being bankruptcy or government subsidy.  This leads to an “energy trap” – a situation in which a transition to sustainable energy requires a large initial investment in fossil energy – and as fossil energy becomes increasingly scarce and valuable, this hurdle grows ever higher.

The solution to fossil fuel dependency is a “breeder” program that uses sustainable energy to produce more sustainable energy, thus freeing additional investment from the political and economic volatility associated with fossil energy.  Such projects have been proposed, particularly for solar installations, but to date nothing of significance is in operation.

Conversion and Storage

Liquid fuels are in many ways ideal energy sources.  Gases, like hydrogen, are too light to permit adequate storage density.  Solids, like coal or wood, are burdensome to handle.  Electricity, while easy to move, cannot readily be stored and must be produced at the rate it is consumed.  Fossil fuels come in gaseous (methane), liquid (oil), and solid (coal) forms.  We use the gases and solids primarily to generate electricity and heat, while we use the convenient liquids for transportation.

The three main sustainable energy sources – hydropower, wind, and solar – all generate electricity.  Reservoirs permit dams to match generation to demand, but wind and solar have no such luxury.  Furthermore, liquid fuels are in extremely short supply.  It would be theoretically possible – using grid-scale batteries, compressed air storage, and electrolysis – to replicate our existing infrastructure with sustainable sources.  However, all of these conversion and storage steps would require enormous investment of labor and energy, decreasing EROEI and limiting overall investment in energy generation.

Rather than attempt to “map” a sustainable energy infrastructure onto the status quo, it makes sense to adapt ourselves to a solar-, wind-, and hydropowered world.  What might this look like in practice?

• Smart grids, manipulating discretionary electricity consumption (e.g. electric car charging) to match supply and demand.
• Surprise vacations for students and factory workers on cloudy days, or days with insufficient region-wide wind.
• A return to wind transport sails on the seas.
• Much less (liquid-fuel-dependent) air travel.
• Land commerce transition from diesel trucks and trains to electric railroads with overhead wires.

This can seem harsh in a world where we are accustomed to using as much energy as we want whenever we want it, but I personally look forward to a time when we must tune our energy use to match the cycles and patterns of our planet.

For a more thorough treatment of sustainable energy on a global scale, see my 2012 essay “Our Energy Future.”  A few of my thoughts have changed since then, but I still stand behind it.

It is easy to philosophize about how a world powered by sustainable energy might look.  Charting a path from here to there is much more challenging and will require dramatic change on both personal and collective levels.  Next week I will focus on the personal level, examining which of our energy expenditures can be most easily reduced, eliminated, or replaced by small-scale sustainable sources.

I haven’t forgotten about the sustainability series, but as so often happens with my writing other projects have gotten in the way.  I promise the next installment within two weeks.

On Marys Peak this evening, a riot of cloud.  Too much moisture in the air and all is in fog.  Too little and all is clear air.  Just the right amount – temperatures a degree or so above the dew point – and every mountain, every eddy, every twist and turn of the air creates condensation.  Clouds hugging the hills.  Clouds drifting over mountaintops and down the other side.  Clouds bubbling up over the distant ocean.  Clouds above.  Clouds below.  And in between, the sun, moving almost imperceptibly northward as the pendulum begins to swing toward summer.  I love this mountain.

Fossil fuels are the primary driver of our current non-sustainability crisis.  We take it completely for granted that we can jump in our cars and drive, that grain from Minnesota can be delivered to China for a manageable cost, that our lights will come on when we flip the switch and our furnaces will keep us warm in the winter so long as we send out the monthly bill.  We cannot imagine what life would be like without them, so we either assume that we will find a replacement (fusion anyone?) when they run out, or that we are headed for an apocalypse as supplies dwindle.  Most of us are in a sort of confused denial; we realize on one hand that what we view as normal is in fact unstable, untested territory for our species, but we also know that we have grown too many and too ingrained in our ways to go back to the way it was before.

Fossil fuels did not start the industrial revolution, but the industrial revolution transformed oil and coal from geological curiosities into essential building blocks of society, the basis of trade and motivation for war.  The industrial revolution arose out of the Renaissance and a blossoming of science.  First we harnessed the rivers, grinding grain and sawing lumber with waterwheels, gears, and pulleys.  Then we invented the steam engine, freeing us from the limited sites and power of the rivers and allowing us to harness energy in any amount, anywhere, so long as there was something to burn.  Then we cut down the forests and ran out of fire.  We would have been forced to stop there, to work within the confines of the sun’s energy, had we not discovered coal.  The supply, in those first days, seemed limitless.  Mines burrowed deep and factories belched smoke, and the rest, quite literally, is history as we know it.

That story can seem perfectly natural to us, a straight arrow of progress that is bound to lead to something better, something that will allow us to continue with business as usual.  There is still a 200-year supply of coal, they say, so why worry if none of us will live that long.  Never mind that we are changing the climate and that fossil fuels are becoming harder to extract by the day.  Fusion, or something, is bound to take over when oil runs out, in the same way that coal came to the rescue when Britain’s forests were cut down.  Never mind that after fifty years of intensive research by some of the world’s smartest minds in billion-dollar facilities, fusion remains a laboratory curiosity with no projected roll-out date.

Just in case our current situation still seems normal to you, allow me to tell a different story, of a different people in a different land.

The Tapanui (ta-pa-NOO-ee), as they called themselves, lived in tropical forests.  Furry golden bipeds with prehensile tails, they possessed an intelligence surpassing all other creatures of the forest, and they formed gregarious, matriarchal groups.  Occasionally groups fought over favored fruit trees and hunting grounds, but usually the matriarchs resolved tensions before it came to blows.  Once each month, on the full moon, the matriarchs would gather and the eldest would speak the word of the Great Mother, telling tales of turning cycles, of ancient history, of the other creatures of the forest.  She would tell them where to plant the bitter annuna (a-NOO-na) seeds, so that the next generation might feast on the fruit.  She would warn them that they must not plant too many, for the other trees were as important to the rest of the forest as the annuna were to the Tapanui.

The men had rituals too, centered around the mysterious ike’san (EE-kay-sahn), the arrow-rock.  Rose-gold with a spectacular iridescence, ike’san was found deep beneath the surface.  On the same full moon nights, warriors would dig far beneath the trees, worming downward until, around sunrise, they would reach the solid ike’san and chip off enough for a moon’s hunts.  Ike’san was a rock that flowed.  It felt solid and punctured throats and hearts as well as any stone, but if you left it on the ground it would spread and flatten, and if you placed it in molds of annuna heartwood, over a moon’s time it would take the shape of the mold, a razor-sharp arrowhead.  Ike’san dissolved slowly with exposure to the elements, so every moon the warriors repeated the ritual of digging deep and loading the forms.

The Tapanui had no knowledge of fire.  Despite intense lightning storms, their rainforest never burned.  In one sockdolager of a storm the warrior Oribe (O-re-bay) was returning from a hunt when the annuna tree beside him was struck and exploded.  Splintered and steaming, it still stood tall against the roiling clouds, a lightning rod for the next bolt.  This one set the splinters alight.  In awe, Oribe picked up the burning sticks and returned to camp with his ike’san kill.  The warriors gathered around the flame, ike’san arrows and spears sparkling like fireflies in the mysterious firelight.  Oribe tossed in his arrows to feed the fire, and others followed suit.  The ike’san sizzled, sparked, began to release a liquid that flowed out of the fire and formed a cooling pool at their feet.  Oribe touched a finger to the viscous liquid and tentatively put it to his lips.  It was like nothing he had ever experienced.  Sweet, spicy, nourishing, refreshing.  The warriors filled a skin with old ike’san arrowheads and placed it over the fire, taking turns drinking the remarkable liquid.  The kill was forgotten and abandoned.

San’mel (SAHN-mel), they called it, rock-honey, melted from ike’san by the Eternal Flame.  Oribe and his warriors became high priests of the Eternal Flame, digging nightly for ike’san and stacking branches under cover to keep the fire going.  Every day they brought san’mel to the women and to other groups of Tapanui.  All rejoiced at this newfound nourishment, save for the matriarchs and especially the eldest, the one who spoke for the Great Mother.  Take heed, she said, for you know not what you do.  For all time you have been a part of the great cycles, eating of the fruits and animals and the energy of the sun above.  Ike’san is a part of the same cycles, but on my timescales, not yours.  When san’mel feeds you, you step outside of the cycles.  You become unstoppable, disconnected.  You forget about the annuna trees, the planting, the rebirth, your fellow creatures.  You forget about me.  You rejoice now, but both you and I will suffer in time.

The Great Mother’s warnings had little effect, for all were enrapt with san’mel and the Eternal Flame.  Oribe felt his power growing, felt himself channeling the mysterious energy within the fire.  We shall leave our forest, he said.  We shall cross the deserts and grasslands, the glaciers to the north.  Wherever san’mel flows, we shall follow, our power and creativity blossoming across the planet.

The warrior-priests, the Oribe’en (o-re-BAY-en), began to travel, carrying a torch in one hand and a skin of san’mel in the other.  To each group of Tapanui they found, they offered these gifts and preached the doctrine of the Eternal Flame.  San’mel is a gift to us from the divine, they said.  Not the old Great Mother with her endless cycles and annuna trees, but a new divinity, newly awakened in the fire.  He has chosen us to go forth and multiply, to have dominion, to spread san’mel to all portions of the world.  Nearly all accepted the gifts, for they had never seen fire or tasted san’mel.  A few resisted.  At first they were ignored, but as the demand for san’mel increased, the Oribe’en began rounding up all who fought to work as slaves in the ike’san mines, eating nothing but san’mel and toiling in deep darkness to feed the Eternal Flame.

Within two centuries, the entire planet had been transformed.  Tapanui settlements covered the deserts, the plains, the mountains, and the distant islands.  All ate a diet of san’mel with little else, though a few experimented with agriculture and hunting for variety and the occasional celebration.  Great viaducts and canals were built to carry san’mel from the mines to the coast, where tanker ships set sail for distant ports.  The mines themselves became wastelands, piles of discarded rock and miles upon miles of stumps, the trees cut to fuel the Eternal Flame, the great furnaces that converted ike’san to san’mel.

Science, literature, art, and music flourished, those Tapanui lucky enough to avoid slaving in the mines finding themselves with an abundance of free time and energy.  A complex society and economy developed, with san’mel the basis for all trade.  Generations rose and fell with the price of san’mel, as the miners dug ever deeper, opening new mines in the high mountains, beneath the glaciers, even tunneling beneath the sea with air piped in from high above.  The Oribe’en fragmented not long after Oribe’s death, their ranks growing too large and too disseminated to manage the power they wielded.  Each sect declared an Oribus, a high priest, and the sects fought over ike’san mines and trade routes, dragging whole societies to war in defense of their access to san’mel, the sacred liquid of life.

Some three centuries after Oribe discovered fire and san’mel, scientists began to issue warnings.  Earthquakes were occurring with greater frequency and intensity near the mines, fracturing the viaducts and creating worldwide san’mel shortages.  At the largest mine in the world, a seam opened in the crust.  Lava poured out in all directions, obliterating the mine and all Tapanui settlements within fifty miles.  At first, these events seemed like mere coincidences, but a pattern was starting to emerge.  Ike’san was found in greatest abundance near tectonic plate boundaries, and it flowed over time.  What if, they posited, ike’san served as a lubricant, allowing plates to slide past one another without creating stress?  What if, when the ike’san was removed, stresses built up over time, leading to earthquakes and cracks in the crust?  At first this was dismissed as an unfounded hypothesis, but experiments validated the theory.  Strain sensors placed at plate boundaries near ike’san mines reliably recorded more strain and more tremors than identical sensors near intact ike’san deposits.  Scientists agreed, and warnings were sent out to the Oribe’en, to the governments, and to all Tapanui on the planet.

Global summits were called, the crisis discussed in government halls and around dinner tables.  Most agreed that something must be done, the remaining ike’san protected, san’mel replaced by something less harmful to the planet.  Some yearned to go back to the old ways, to hunt wild game and harvest annuna fruits.  A few radicals symbolically turned off the san’mel taps in their treehouses, planted orchards and crops, and declared themselves san’mel-free.  The scientists, at the urging of the Oribe’en, sought a technical solution – a way to make san’mel without mining ike’san.  This proved possible in the lab; as they now understood, ike’san was formed by a reaction between biological materials and intense heat at plate boundaries.  Unfortunately, this synthetic san’mel required even more fires to produce the heat, and it was limited by the amount of plant material that could be grown in one year.  The limitless abundance of the ike’san mines was simply not achievable, and the Tapanui were no experts in agriculture, having come to depend on san’mel for the vast majority of their sustenance.

As the tremors and lava flows increased, the ike’san mines continued to dig downward and expand to all corners of the planet.  Generations of the former tree-dwellers lived and toiled underground, ascending  to the surface only on sacred holidays to view the Eternal Flame.  A new technology emerged, one that promised to keep the san’mel pipes full for another century.  Fire-cracking, the scientists called it.  The rocks adjacent to the ike’san contained some amount of san’mel locked inside, and this could be released by fire hot enough to boil the liquid and crack the rock.  Some mines hauled the rock into huge piles with fires lit beneath.  Others removed whole hillsides and mountaintops, shovelful by shovelful, and lit fires atop the san’mel-rich rock below.  Still others took the fire deep into the earth, pumping air deep down and san’mel back up.  Fire-cracking was a hellish process for all involved.  The fires consumed every tree and shrub within a hundred miles of the mines, and the san’mel ships which formerly returned empty now returned from distant lands with loads of logs to fuel the flames.  Forests and mountains became slag piles and eroded clearcuts, miner life expectancy dropped to under thirty years, and Tapanui in cities downwind of the mines experienced sickness and tumors never seen before.  Still the san’mel flowed, with promises that it would flow indefinitely.  The economy demanded it, and the Tapanui, even those who wished san’mel had never been discovered, could not imagine a life without it.  The sacrifices would simply be too great, the waters untested.  Could a civilization built on san’mel, dependent on san’mel, survive without it?

This, dear reader, is where we are at in our parallel story right now.  Climate change projections grow more extreme each year, with no sense that even the direst models will motivate us to emit less carbon.  The fuels themselves are running out:  oil now, coal and natural gas a few short generations later.  Hydraulic fracturing, an energy-intensive and environmentally-damaging method for forcing the last drops of oil out of solid rock, is touted as a shiny way forward.  Never mind that it will buy us at most 50 years of oil at our ever-increasing rates of consumption.

Energy, agriculture, economy, society, religion.  All are intertwined in our crisis of unsustainability.  We will examine each of these in turn, but we will start next week by taking a closer look at energy.  How much energy do we use?  How much energy does the sun provide?  Would it even be possible to replace fossil fuels with energy from the sun?  If so, how might we get started?

Sustainability.  Sustain-ability.  The ability to be sustained.  Sustained for how long?  10 years?  50 years?  200 years?  How about a million years?  If, for any reason, the lifestyle of our ape ancestors had been unsustainable on the scale of million years, we would not be here today.  And what exactly are we sustaining?  Our lifestyles?  Seven billion Homo sapiens?  Our fellow creatures?  Ecosystems?  The biosphere?

I will start with the long view.  Our planet has been orbiting the sun for 4.6 billion years.  That is, to our minds, an incomprehensible number.  Land plants and insects appeared 400-500 million years ago, and since that time our planet has looked more or less the same from space:  green forests, golden grasslands, sandy deserts, blue oceans.  For the 50 million human lifespans since, evolution and natural forces have shaped this planet, building mountains, reshaping continents, depositing coal beds, diversifying and finally annihilating the dinosaurs, leaving their feathered descendants to radiate into nearly 10,000 species of birds.  Earth is dynamic across all time scales from one-minute earthquakes to multi-millennial ice ages, and all who live here must adapt to survive.  Those who cannot adapt become evolutionary dead ends.  Resilience, or the ability to survive and adapt to change, is one of the core components of sustainability.

Every plant and animal across the depths of time has inhabited the same land and sea as we now farm, pave, and build.  At the same time, all life requires mineral nutrients which are neither created nor destroyed across millions of years.  Nutrient flows form a vast closed loop.  Rock weathers to release calcium, potassium, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, and other essential minerals, and these minerals cycle through the food web thousands of times before finally finding their way to the oceans.  There they are deposited in seafloor sediments, subducted beneath continents, and ejected as volcanic rock to start the process anew.  The processes of volcanic fertilization and rock weathering are imperceptibly slow on a human timescale, so in order for these minerals to remain available to living processes, they must be returned to their origin when each organism dies or is harvested.  Carbon and nitrogen have more complex cycles involving gaseous forms, but both are also closed loops.  As a second principle, sustainability requires closed loop flows for all materials.

Energy is not a closed loop on Earth.  If it were, the Second Law of Thermodynamics would require that entropy increases, concentrated forms of energy become diffuse, and complexity decreases with time.  Evolution would become de-evolution, and we would not exist.  Life can exist on Earth only because our Sun provides a constant influx of shortwave radiation (visible light and near infrared) at a rate of 8.9 x 10­¹⁶ watts, or 200 watts per square meter averaged across the Earth’s surface.  Almost half of this energy evaporates water, driving the global hydrologic cycle.  Most of the rest heats land and water, driving global winds.  A mere one tenth of one percent (80 terawatts) is converted into chemical energy by photosynthesis, and this chemical energy feeds all life on Earth.  Every energy conversion step incurs losses as heat, and ultimately all of the energy absorbed by Earth is re-emitted into space as longwave, far-infrared radiation.

It so happens that some of the chemical energy transformed by photosynthesis enters a longer geologic cycle, settling into seafloor sediments or compressed under deep layers of peat beyond the range of decomposing microbes.  Converted over thousands to millions of years by heat and pressure within the Earth, these biomolecules become hydrocarbons: coal, oil, and natural gas.  Just as the rate of mineral replenishment by volcanism and rock weathering is too small to be significant on a human scale, so too is the rate of fossil fuel creation.  We have discovered a “battery” of energy charged slowly over 400 million years and are intent on draining it to empty within 400 years, or one one-millionth of that time.  If any practice of ours can be confidently labeled as unsustainable, it is our reckless dependence on fossil fuels.  To use energy sustainably, we must fit our energy systems into the grand transformation of solar shortwave to outgoing longwave radiation that drives every natural process on Earth save for plate tectonics.  That is to say, the third principle of sustainability is all energy comes from the sun.

In short, sustainable systems are characterized by

1. Resilience in the face of change
2. Closed-loop flows for all materials, and
3. Dependence on solar energy, either directly or as transformed into wind, waves, hydropower, or biofuels

**Look for a new post in this series each Saturday.  At present it looks like there will be nine installments.**

It has always been a primary goal of mine to help right the imbalance between humanity and the planet – to do my part to ensure that we as a species can live more-or-less fulfilling lives on Earth until the sun dries us to a crisp a few billion years from now, or until Homo sapiens winks out in the grand story of evolution and another equally intelligent and self-aware species builds civilizations that we could not begin to understand.

Sustainability is, to use one common definition, meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.  It is a most-overused and heavily greenwashed word, coopted by the market economy to sell a great variety of ever-so-slightly-less-unsustainable products to consumers who then can say they have done their part.  It is still, however, a meaningful word, and I intend to use this series of essays to unpack it in some depth: what sustainability means to me and what a truly sustainable society might look like.

For four years I worked in ecology and conservation, attempting to understand the declines of birds, mammals, and plants and to preserve habitat to save species and ecosystems.  In doing so I came to see that the roadblocks were not scientific; we lacked not so much the understanding to preserve ecosystems but the social and political will to prioritize this in the face of a growing population and an ever-expanding economy.  For five years after that I researched photobiological hydrogen production, attempting to engineer cyanobacterial photosynthesis to produce hydrogen instead of sugar.  The goal was to create an abundant source of clean energy that could replace fossil fuels, but instead I learned a lesson about the limits of technology and the importance of working with, rather than against, evolution and natural selection.  For the past seven months I have worked for Wild Garden Seed, growing organic vegetable seeds by the hundreds of pounds.  Here I have learned the often-overlooked value of diversity vs. uniformity, the essentiality of soil fertility, and the importance of a local, human-scale economy based on food production and direct exchange.  I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do feel that my experience has given me a unique perspective on sustainability.

Over the next weeks, look for essays on:

–Principles of Sustainability

–Sustainable Energy: A Story

–Sustainable Energy: In Practice

–Sustainable Agriculture

–Sustainable Economy

–Sustainable Society

–Sustainable Population

–Sustainable Religion

October 8, 2014 marked the second total eclipse of a “tetrad” – a series of four lunar eclipses each six months apart.  In April, we stepped outside our front door just before midnight to catch a glimpse.  This time, the eclipse was scheduled to appear in the western sky, behind the trees and ridgeline of our hillside home.

October has been averaging 10 degrees above normal this year, and the weather on Marys Peak was 60 degrees with clear skies and calm winds.  So along with housemates Helen and Sean, I headed for the summit meadows with sleeping pad in hand.  We set our alarms for the start of the eclipse and drifted off to sleep beneath the full moon.

2:30 am, a bite out of the moon

Eclipses move slowly, so perhaps the best way to observe them is to drift off to sleep and wake up every 10-15 minutes or so to check on the progress.

A few minutes later. You can see the size of the Earth's shadow based on the curvature of the eclipsed portion.

~3:10 am, totality approaches

As the eclipse approaches totality and the brightness drops, the eclipsed portion of the moon becomes visible, tinged red from light passing through Earth’s atmosphere.  This time the moon passed through the edge of the Earth’s shadow, so one side remained noticeably darker.

Total eclipse. One-second exposure held as still as possible with camera balanced on binoculars on pillow. One of the stars close to the moon is actually the planet Uranus.

With the moon in shadow, the previously-muted night sky popped into dazzling brightness, and I found myself exploring the Orion nebula and the Milky Way with binoculars.  As the moon reappeared, I drifted back into sleep, awakening to the first light of dawn over the Cascades.

30 minutes to sunrise

Post-eclipse moon, close to setting

Cirrus clouds caught the first rays, lighting up the sky in hues of pink and orange.  These are usually impossible to capture on camera, but I got lucky this time…

Looking northeast 15 minutes before sunrise

7:19 am, first rays

Sean and sunrise behind Mt. Washington

My dad likes to rank things in terms of points – each day on a scale of 1 (blizzard) to 5 (beautiful), summing the whole year for an “enjoyment index”; each aspect of life quality summing to an index; etc.  I’m not as much of a points person, but I will admit that such a system can sometimes be useful.

I didn’t have a good idea what would be next as I finished up my Ph.D. at Oregon State – I only knew that I wanted to do something different, something outdoors, and something that produced a real product of value to others.  Thanks to housemate Helen and an unexpected short staffing at a critical time, I found myself hired by Wild Garden Seed – a small seed company associated with Gathering Together Farm, the largest organic farm in our neighborhood.  We had our first seed harvest last week, and it was satisfying to see the crop we carefully weeded and tended get threshed, sieved, and purified into a hundred pounds of beautiful, valuable, vivacious seed.  I feel much happier doing this than in much of my time at OSU, and it is time to revisit the 17 criteria.

Exactly five years ago in June 2009, I wrote a post musing on my life trajectory post-Carleton, my current situation, and an ideal situation based on 17 criteria of central importance to me.  I missed a few things – most notably the desire to have a life partner and the various dimensions that partnership has added to my experience – but I still feel that the 17 criteria resonate as true for me, and though they are not all of equal weight some value may come from a points comparison.  Here we go, with each one ranked from 0-10…

Work criteria:

#1: Low-stress/non-competitive. I have had enough of stress and competition in school and college. I am tired of having to prove myself in order to get recognition/admission/grant money/etc.

2009: 4 (flexible schedule but uncertain expectations, need to get grants for research funding, pressure to publish, etc.)

2014: 10 (work stays at work, seed crew is a collaborative, pressure-free experience)

#2: Discrete, reasonable time requirements. The work cannot require an unreasonable time commitment such that I am unable to lead a balanced, somewhat self-sufficient life. Ideally it will be structured such that there is a clear delineation between work time and my own time, so that I do not feel pressured to work during my own time.

2009: 5 (plenty of free time with flexible schedule, but absence of structure meant that work/school time was not clearly separated from my time)

2014: 10 (regular work schedule, 40 hrs/week, reasonable hours and break times)

#3: Environmental benefit. I will absolutely not work in a position that is harming the planet, and anything I do needs to make a noticeable difference in regard to improving the natural environment or our relation to our environment, ideally both.

2009: 6 (clear environmental benefit to end goal, but lots of fossil energy used to get there and low likelihood of attaining the goal as became clearer with time)

2014: 7 (producing open-pollinated seed for organic farming, of clear benefit to sustainable food systems but not addressing the fossil fuel problem – our farm burns plenty of oil)

#4: Tangible product. I need to be able to see what I have done, at least some of the time. This rules out positions that produce only ideas or involve transfer of abstractions (e.g. banking). My Arb guide was perhaps my best example of this, and I thoroughly enjoyed that project.

2009: 1 (no commercially viable end product likely, DNA and cyanobacteria are invisible without a microscope so day-to-day progress is not tangibly satisfying)

2014: 8 (very satisfying to see the seed at the end of the season and to hear feedback from those who buy and grow it; only thing better would be to be producing my own product from my own creativity rather than working for someone else’s business; my fledgeling mead operation could fulfill this desire eventually)

#5. Permanent or first-time product. I do not enjoy fighting entropy. Of course some maintenance is always necessary, but I do not want the majority of my work to be renewing something old that must be renewed on a regular basis (e.g. road construction). There is no creativity in that.

2009: 8 (working on cutting edge research; only drawback that an actual product was too far off and not guaranteed)

2014: 5 (each year is different, and we’re constantly developing new varieties; however a fair proportion of the operation involves growing the same varieties year after year)

#6. Not in a category. I do not want to fill a position that places me in a grouping of more-or-less interchangeable people all doing the same thing. This criterion alone rules out ~90% of available work. Basically this means I do not want to work for someone who hires me to do a specific thing, and who could hire anyone else with a similar skill set to do the same thing.

2009: 10 (only a few labs in the world working on similar projects; work is unique among friends, community, and family; work is self-chosen and self-directed)

2014: 7 (work is not particularly specialized, but “organic seed grower” is a much less common category than “farmer”, and the boss values all of the employees as individuals rather than bodies getting the job done)

#7. Variety. This means either a variety of tasks or discrete projects, or perhaps the same task applied to situations sufficiently different. At least some of the variety must be unpredictable. A good way of ensuring unpredictable variety is to work outdoors part of the time, since the weather is ever-variable and provides interest to even the most repetitive work. There is way too much repetitive labor in this world. This includes, among my experiences, vegetation surveys and mint-packing.

2009: 4 (variety of tasks involved in project, but work environment – lab, library, office – remains constant with very little unpredictable variability to respond to)

2014: 7 (outdoor work introduces weather variability and interaction with nature – birds nesting in the field, unexpected insects, etc. – and work changes dramatically through the season, but pulling bindweed and thistle can get pretty repetitive)

#8. Community. The environment in which I work should be brought together by common interest and managed as a collaboration between all involved. No bosses. No employees. At least not in the normal sense. No hiring people simply because they possess a skill set. Certainly different people will bring different skill sets, but the understanding must be that everyone has the capacity to be creative and to think for themselves. Ideally, financial compensation will be equal for all or at least based on a criterion (such as seniority) that does not value one type of work more than another. An ideal situation might be an intentional community united around a common goal.

2009: 1 (essentially no community or regular human interaction in the lab)

2014: 8 (traditional hierarchy – boss, manager, employees – still exists but in many cases the seed crew functions as a team of equals, with plenty of meaningful social interaction and connection during breaks and while hoeing adjacent rows; coworkers have quickly become good friends)

9. Fair compensation for a meaningful contribution. I am rather tired of being poor. My needs have always been met, so I have been happy with little money, but I would like to be able to afford my own home and reliable, green equipment and appliances. I would also like a little extra to set up a zero-impact energy system based on solar panels, batteries, and possibly hydrogen storage. That all takes money. I see money as society’s payment to me for my services for society. Therefore my services must be valuable enough to others that they feel satisfied paying me and do not feel that they are overcharged. This means not being paid out of tax money (not working for the government or off of government-supported science grants) and contributing something to society that others find valuable and are willing to pay for.

2009: 3 (relatively low stipend as a grad student, derived from taxpayer money rather than payment for goods or services)

2014: 4 (payment is from sales of a valued product, but pay is less; this is institutionalized across farming due to a societal mechanization and undervaluing of food systems that will prove challenging to change)

#10. Non-repetitive travel. There is very little that I enjoy more than plotting out a course to new territory and setting out to find it. I also enjoy having a firm connection to a “home,” so I don’t want to be always on the road. But I would like it if my life’s work regularly took me to new and unfamiliar places, perhaps to teach something, to demonstrate or install something (alternative energy device?), or to collect data on something (not as good since I am not contributing).

2009: 3 (no travel as part of the work, but I did make it to Sweden and Montreal for conferences)

2014: 2 (no travel so far two months in, but I imagine there will be some conference or outreach travel opportunities)

#11. Intellectual challenge. I enjoy thinking about problems and finding novel or optimal ways to solve them. This needs to be balanced with hands-on work, so that I am not over-working my mind. School and jobs related to school (e.g. professorships) provide intellectual challenge but without appropriate balance.

2009: 7 (plenty of things to think about, projects to plan, experiments to design, data analyses to optimize, but far out of balance with the hands-on aspect)

2014: 4 (mostly hands-on, but some intellect in planning bed space, prioritizing work, and keeping ahead of the weather)

#12. Outdoor work opportunity. I will not take a job that involves working in an office/lab/factory/other building all day every day. I have worked jobs that are outdoors all the time, and while I can do that I would prefer a balance. If the work is mainly indoors, it should at least have frequent opportunities to step outside to maintain a sense of connection to the changes in the weather and the cycles of nature.

2009: 0 (no outdoor aspect to work)

2014: 9 (all outdoors all summer so limited balance, though work moves indoors in the winter months)

Living criteria:

#13. No cities. I am not a fan of unnaturally large groupings of people, and I like to have my personal living space to garden, have bonfires, watch the stars, etc. Working in a town or city is fine so long as I can get there from my home in a reasonable amount of time (half hour or less ideally), and my home is in a rural or semi-rural setting.

2009: 7 (outside of city limits on an acre but neighbors too close for my liking and too much light/noise pollution)

2014: 8 (farther from town on 25 acres, dark and quiet and in the woods; still renting and limited open garden space)

#14. Progressive, environmentally-aware, spiritual culture. I would like to live among others with similar ideas and lifestyles, in a community based on sustainability, trust and mutual respect. This could be an island within a predominantly different culture (e.g. a neighborhood or intentional community), but ideally it will be a larger community. The presence of others with similar spiritual beliefs would be a big plus, and open minds are a necessity. There are a number of such communities across the U.S. Many are in big cities where I would not choose to live, but there are quite a few small, progressive towns with farmers’ markets, hippie-types, contra dances, community choirs/opportunities to make music together, bike commuters, etc. The first ones that come to mind are Asheville (NC), Ithaca (NY), Boulder (CO), Eugene/Corvallis (OR), Bloomington (IN), and Santa Cruz (CA). There are probably many more, including some small ones like Crested Butte (CO). I suspect that more places will fit in this category as society moves in this direction (hopefully), but for now I am attracted to such places.

2009: 6 (limited connection to others with similar spirituality, good community culture, too much dissonance within my household, no life partner)

2014: 8 (harmonious living community, engaged to wonderful partner of 3 1/2 years, still part of same larger community but with more connection to others through my work, still limited connection to others with similar spirituality)

#15. No oppressive heat. I do not enjoy being outdoors in 90+ degree weather. Folks in southern climes survive by living in air conditioned habitats. I would rather not do that. A few hot days are OK. Phoenix is not. I would prefer a climate without long winters devoid of life, but that is not a deal-breaker. I still have a love for the experience of deep cold and windblown snow.

2009: 9 (very few oppressively hot days in Corvallis)

2014: 9 (still living in the same climate)

#16. Rain. I need to be surrounded by living things, and to be able to grow things. I enjoy visiting deserts but not living in them.

2009: 8 (plenty of rain but almost none during the growing season so irrigation required, vegetation becomes dry and crispy)

2014: 8 (still in the same climate)

#17. Wilderness/natural areas nearby. I need to be able to set out alone to undisturbed lands with no people, in order to reaffirm my connection to nature and to the energies of this planet. That is, some would say, my version of going to church.

2009: 5 (Marys Peak and other areas nearby, but other people at these sites and none within walking distance)

2014: 9 (Natural woodland with native plants, birds, and a spring-fed stream behind our house; docked slightly due to recent logging disturbance but still an opportunity for my energy to spread out unaffected by others and connect with the land)

And the totals are (out of 170):

2009: 52 (work) + 35 (living) = 87

2014: 81 (work) + 42 (living) = 123

All of which is a fancy, arbitrary, numerical way of saying that I’m happier now with my current job and living situation than I was as a grad student in my previous household.  It will be interesting to see where I am at in another five years…

I’ve gotten behind on posting Homestead wildflowers.  The maples are leafed out now, casting the understory into shade and marking the end of the main sequence of ephemeral flowers.  There are still some new ones appearing, and I will keep posting them as they appear.  The garden is complete now, and Helen is working on a chicken enclosure.  One of these weeks I’ll get around to taking pictures of our projects.

I’ve been working with Helen at Wild Garden Seed since April 22, planting, hoeing, and weeding organic seed crops and spending days outside with a wonderful crew.  It has been a very welcome break from days in the lab and in front of a computer, and though the job came to me rather happenstance I am hoping to stick with it at least through the summer – long enough to reap what we are sowing and tending.

April 16-20:

White Fawn Lily, Erythronium oregonum.  The Oregon equivalent of the midwestern Trout Lily.

Oregon Grape, Mahonia aquifolium.  Very common on the forest floor, along with salal and sword ferns.

Vine Maple, Acer circinatum.  Our main understory tree, growing in graceful curves and arches.

Hooker’s Fairybells, Disporum hookeri.

Bigleaf Maple, Acer macrophyllum.  The dominant deciduous tree here, making up ~30% of the forest canopy.  The flowers produce abundant nectar for bees in April, though cool rainy weather often prevents them from collecting much.  This year we had enough warm weather during the maple bloom to get some surplus honey from the hives.

April 27: Last snow on Marys Peak.

It was a bad winter for snow on the mountain, and I never got in a good powder ski.  Many times it would snow from a dusting to a few inches and then melt, but it was a far cry from the 3+ foot snowpack of the last two years.  A cool showery pattern brought temperatures down enough for snow, and I convinced Liz to make the short trip to the top to see the last snow of the season.

Yellow Glacier Lily, Erythronium grandiflorum, poking through the snow.

May 3, homestead flowers on Michele’s birthday:

Three-leaved Anemone, Anemone deltoidea.  These are abundant, especially along the creek near the top of the property.

Western Flowering Dogwood, Cornus nuttallii.  An understory tree with big white blossoms like a magnolia, but always pointing upward.  When I first found one of these in the forest I thought I had discovered the White Tree, an exceptional anomaly of great beauty.  There are at least ten of them on the property, with green bracts that rapidly turn white in late April/early May, causing the flowers to “appear” almost overnight.

Salal, Gaultheria shallon.  Very common understory shrub related to blueberries and huckleberries, and with edible (though not quite as sweet or delicious) fruit.  One of these years I will make a salal fruit leather or a salal mead…

Western Starflower, Trientalis latifolia.  It took us a while to identify this one.

Oregon Iris, Iris tenax.  The largest and showiest of the spring woodland flowers, growing in spots where a bit more light shines through.

May 10-11:  Oregon Coast.  After a few weekends spent working on projects and too long away from the ocean, we headed west to Newport, camping at Beverly Beach, accidentally seeing some whales at Depoe Bay, hiking to Drift Creek Falls, doing our best to identify birds by their songs, and returning via our bees near Jefferson.

Ocean sunset at Beverly Beach

Southward vista from Cape Foulweather between Newport and Depoe Bay.

I’ve been putting off posting photos, hoping to have time to create a longer photo essay.  That’s probably not going to happen so let’s get some pictures online…

I didn’t have much planned for graduation celebration, but then Kelly called to suggest an adventure.  I said “Yosemite?”  She said “Yay!”  And so we planned a trip to Yosemite.

April 5 (Saturday): Liz dropped me at Albany train station, rode overnight in coach and arrived in Sacramento at 6:30 am.

April 6:  Kelly and Sara Taylor picked me up at the train station, we had breakfast with Katie and Hank (more Corvallis ex-pats living in CA), rented a car, and set off southeastward to Yosemite.  After stopping for food and to check out cool flowers (traveling with three botanists…) we arrived, our jaws dropped appropriately upon entering the valley of cliffs, and we a chose a mellow loop hike before dusk to Mirror Lake below Half Dome.

Sheer Half Dome cliff from below.

Hank and Katie took off, and we set up camp with the climbers in Camp 4.

April 7:  Yosemite Falls Trail day hike.

Upper Yosemite Falls, a sheer 1430-foot drop.

Bobcat!

April 8-9: Overnight backpack into Little Yosemite Valley, on the trail to the summit of Half Dome.

Crowded trail below Vernal Fall on the Merced River.

Nevada Fall, 594 feet and tons of water.

Snow at ~7800 feet on the trail to Half Dome (8839 feet).  This is a busy stretch in the summer, but on this day I only met two intrepid Canadians who took aim for the top but were stopped by snow on the slick cable section.

Half Dome from Little Yosemite Valley campground.

Canyon Wren!  These guys have a most beautiful song.

Vernal Fall (317 feet) on the way back down, fighting the crowds even on a Wednesday in April.

April 9: Sequoias!

We made a rushed hike into the Tuolumne Grove of giant sequoias on our way out the park.  Redwoods are impressive and huge, but they look mostly like regular conifers stretched way out of proportion vertically and horizontally – normal trees in a world where people are Liliputian.  Sequoias do not look like normal trees.  They look more like forests in the sky on huge elevated pedestals, with no branches for over 100 feet and then multiple parallel trunks reaching for the sky.  They grow in small, isolated groves of 20-60 trees, which only amplifies the feeling of walking into Lothlorien.  I need to spend more time with the sequoias…

We had dinner with Katie and Hank, stopped at a farm stand to buy 17 artichokes for $2, and caught our train in Sacramento at midnight.

Inside the Pacific Parlor Car.  We traveled in sleeper on accumulated Amtrak points.

We had a fun-filled weekend in Corvallis after returning, with potluck dinner and brunch, music with Rosalie and friends, and plenty of mead before Kelly headed back to the Hudson Valley of New York.