On the Lust for Water

After an hour-long ride from Gandhinagar to Ahmedebad, I am coated with dust and grit. I desperately want to wash my face. The building where Kalapi uncle lives is one of several in the Azad or “Freedom” compound. The rows of concrete buildings remind me of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. The first time I went to visit him, I thought, “My uncle lives in the projects?” Inside, however, the apartment is conspicuously clean and well-kept. Kalapi uncle asks if I want to freshen up as soon as I walk in. The two-bedroom unit has one bathroom. I turn the faucet and nothing comes out. Not a drip. There are two buckets filled with water in the corner. Water for the day. I want to take off all my clothes and dump both buckets over my head. I know that I can make do with a cup full of water to wash my face, but I want to consume it all.

My father and Kalapi uncle grew up in a small town together. My father became a physician and immigrated to the United States. Kalapi uncle stayed behind in India and worked for a bank. He was the artistic cousin-brother. In the apartment, he played a cassette tape of Hariprasad Chaurasia performing Megh Malhar while we drank tea. He sprinkled the conversation with verses of Gujarati poetry, which were lost on me. His daughter chose the science and engineering track, though. At the time of my visit, she worked with India’s space agency at their headquarters on Satellite Road. In the corner of her bedroom, I could see her computer. It looked like a second-hand 286, but she had it covered with a sheet of plastic to protect it from the dust. I could not make sense of their situation. How was it that they had educations, solid middle-class jobs, and just two buckets of water to last them a day?

Gujarat, the area of India where my family lives, was in the middle of two years of drought when I visited in 2002. Over the five months of my stay, I got an education in water scarcity. A whole vocabulary – water tanks, tube wells, bore wells, step wells, pumps, bunds, catchment ponds, Bisleri, and Aquafina. I came to recognize rivers where there was only a long stretch of cracked earth. Rows of eggplants where there was only a parched field. Temple ponds where there were only dusty, old steps. I memorized the times of day and night when the city would most likely let the water flow through the pipes, for half an hour or fifteen minutes. Sometimes the water never flowed. In 2000, the drought got so bad that water had to be brought in by a train and tanker trucks to the city of Rajkot, where my cousin Dr. Jatin G. Buch lives. People said it was the worst drought in 100 years. Wells that had functioned for generations no longer yielded water, because the ground water levels dropped and weak monsoons had not replenished the supply.

According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the average water use per person per day in India is 135 liters or 35.6 gallons, whereas the average in the United States is 575 liters or 152 gallons, more than four times the Indian rate. These figures mask huge variations. People in Phoenix, Arizona use more than 1,000 liters of water per day to keep their lawns green, more than seven times the Indian rate. Villagers in Gujarat, especially those in the Saurashtra and Kuchchh regions, use far less than 135 liters per day. Women there often have to carry their water on their heads to their homes. Carrying 1,000 liters for a family of seven on one’s head is out of the question. That would be 455 pounds.

There are tricky questions of how water use is measured, by person or household, domestic use or total use. The average single family usage calculated by the American Water Works Association is just 262 liters of water per day or 69.3 gallons, but that does not include water used in offices and commercial establishments – the water in the coffee at Starbucks, the fountain outside the office building, the beautified highway medians watered by automatic sprinklers.

I cannot stop at comparing averages. They are not enough for me. I am thinking of my family. I need to understand the material difference between my life and theirs. I stay with them in their homes. We drink tea and eat kakra together for breakfast. We eat pau bagi for lunch. We fold up our feet under our legs when a woman comes in the afternoon to sweep the floors. They ask me what I think of microwaves, if they really do help prepare food more quickly. We compare our lives relentlessly. You make more money, but we have the closeness of family. You have every kind of food available in the grocery stores, but it will never be as fresh as our market vegetables, as the ladiwalla’s karela. These comparisons are a fundamental part of our lives. A daily calculus even when we are continents apart. The comparisons give us insight into what it is that we even want from life, but they can crush the soul. Every aspect of experience is on the table – familial bonds, leisure, access to jobs, physical stature, mobility, water.

According to our own water bill, MaGreen, Grasshopper, and I each use 66 gallons per day at our home in Houston. I am not sure how I use my 66 gallons. We do not water our lawn since the green goddesses do that pretty well for us. Now that the baby is nearly potty trained, we don’t need to wash many diapers. My showers are not that long. No hot tub. I suspect that our regular use of the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the toilet flushing are the main culprits. None of my family in India use those appliances. The woman who sweeps does the dishes and the wash by hand. They used eastern, “squatting” toilets that take a small splash from a bucket to flush. (The toilets in the US seem to flush with a vengeance, as if the excrement must be made to feel that it can never return.)

During our last trip to India, I asked my cousin Malay how much water his family uses, but he does not know because they pump it out of a well. Though they live in a city, the municipality does not supply them water. Malay did show me was his rain harvesting system. The roof is slightly tilted to channel water into a pipe that deposits it into their well. “We live near to the sea,” he said, “so if we use too much water the entire supply will become salinated.” This civic sense seems to be missing in the United States, the idea that we all must take some responsibility for our shared resources.

I remember going on a trip with my parents to Arizona. As we drove by the green lawns, I criticized the gross misuse of water in the desert and I expected my parents, having experience water scarcity as children, to back me up.

They said, “The desert should be made green. Why leave it undeveloped? Gujarat should learn from Arizona. Environmentalism is fine, but they want to stop dams before India has a chance to develop.” Although my parents immigrated to the US over thirty years ago and have lived outside longer outside India than they did in it, I began to see that their sentiments were shared by many Gujaratis and that civic mindedness can be claimed by people on opposing sides of the same issue.

In 2006, the Gujarat government raised the level of its Narmada river mega-dam to 120 meters. The estimates of people displaced by the project range from a few thousand people to one million. Several villages of “adhivasis” or tribal people were submerged by the water. However, water is flowing through an elaborate canal network from the dam to urban centers and villages all over Gujarat. The government claims that the value of agricultural production increased by one hundred percent in a single year.

One river has been killed to revive others. The tribals have lost their ancient way of life, but the Sabarmati, which runs through Ahmedebad, flows all year now. I wonder what Gandhi, who was Gujarati, would think. Would he accuse us of lust for water? In Gujarat, he seems to be an unwanted conscience. An honored but resented memory. When I went to Gujarat during the drought, you could hear the lust for water. It was a gurgling sound in the empty pipes and under the dry riverbeds. How much water does it take to slake the lust? Is sixty-six gallons even enough? The logic of our lust for water is cruel. It is not to be measured by volume but in units of compassion and desire.

Water is supremely practical. It is a clean pair of pants. A glass of water. It is a washed, smiling baby. But at another level, I am not trying to secure adequate water. I want the water dripping from the woman in soap commercials on television. I want the mystique of water rushing through a machine, water splashing our already clean dishes over and over and churning our unstained clothes. I want the water in our water heaters hot even when I am miles away at work. I want to know that the damn is there, a sea of our own making. That we can transform the land, make it wilt or make it green.

I went back to India a few months back. My cousin Amit had bought a washing machine and installed Western toilets. He asked me if I wanted to freshen up and showed me his new bathroom. There was a bucket in the corner for taking a dhol bath. “We have a shower too,” he said. “And don’t worry about the water, you can take a shower like you would at home.”

I LOVE it when GOOD is EASY: A Tryptic

I.

Last few days I've been searching the web dressed in black because Laura at Lines of Lattitude turned me onto this:

>If Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of
>page views, according to calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year
>would be saved...[a guy therefore]created a black version of the Google search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version,
>but with lower energy consumption: spread the word-
>
>http://www.blackle.com/

I LOVE it when good is EASY. And when it makes me look hip and mysterious. So much so, actually, I darkend the whole computer yesterday. I use the Opera web browser and I chose a black skin for it, which turns out, is easier on the old eyeballs. Most of the places I write are still off white,but the surrounding areas aren't.

II.

Laura's socially responsible leadership doesn't stop there. She also turned me onto the New American Dream's webiste, and it's campaign to reduce carbon consumption by having people pledge to change one thing about their lives every month -- last month they shopped locally, this month they'll drive less, next month they'll "Junk Your Junk Mail", then they'll help "Break the Botled Water Habit", etc. etc. I like little one step at a time things that don't overwhelm me but that keep me on track. I hope I've mentioned how much I LOVE it when GOOD is easy.

If you make the pledge by clicking on the little icon below this paragraph it is possible you will earn GreenDaddy...the man so devoted this website that he posted a picure of his armpit (our most looked at greenparenting photo, by the way) in his quest to find a deoderant strong enough for bicyclers in Houston's August heat... a brand new bike. Because the C3 people are having a spread-the-word kind of contest.



III.

This last thing is GOOD and it is EASY depending on what you LOVE.

And since I've already been busy telling you how to be, I thought I'd actually point your eyes towards the little (unpaid, PSA) ad I put on the right side of the site a couple days ago. Click on it and see how the National Wildlife Federation has a campaign to get something like 10 or 20 thousand backyards certified as wildlife habitats, and what you can do to make yours one.

The process acutally isn't too difficult...I imagine many readers' yards already qualify, though we're only about halfway there. We might not get it done this year, but I'll definately keep the guidelines in mind and work towards them as our yard grows.

But you more naturally greenthumbed people can probably already certify, or just make a few changes to do it.

Material Differences

During our trip to India, I tried to pay attention to the material conditions that my family there live in and the way they choose to consume. Last year, the state of Gujarat, where my family is from, grew at a 10 percent rate. That is equivalent to China’s growth rate.

So the material conditions and choices I want to describe are those of middle-class Indians in one of India’s most prosperous states. The very poor in India consume a fraction of the resources used by people in the US, but what about the rising middle-class? Is the Indian middle-class copying American behavior? For example, George W. Bush defended his decision not to sign the Kyoto agreement by saying, "Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I couldn't in good faith have signed Kyoto," and claimed that the treaty didn't require other "big polluters" such as India and China to cut emissions. Indians were quick to point out that pollution rates per capita for India are extremely low. But even environmentalists in the US shake their heads and lament the thousands of new cars on the roads in Asia canceling out the virtues of those who buy hybrids in America.

What I saw was that the middle-class in India go to great lengths to conserve energy and resources. We ought to consider carefully how middle-class Indians live and actually compare, in a detailed way, their lifestyles with those of people in the US before we come to conclusions about what respective initiatives are needed by each nation. I wrote out a list of sustainable practices and design choices that I noticed in the homes I visited in Gujarat:

Multiple overhead fans strategically placed over seating areas that rotate at extremely fast speeds

Window air-conditioning units in specific rooms that are kept closed when the unit is in use, so that people gather in an air-conditioned part of the house rather than air-condition the entire home

Easy to open shutters that let breezes in

Marble or tile flooring that stays cool in the heat

Reupholstering of old furniture rather than purchasing new

Lines strung in the balcony for drying clothes

Long rows of switches that can turn off each light, appliance, plug, or electrical device so that nothing is left running on standby

Western-style, sit-down toilets with a knob that controls water coming from the pipes so you can flush using just the right amount of water rather than always having to empty the entire tank.

Bidets rather than toilet paper, so less trees cut and less water required to flush

Solar water heaters or small, gas water heaters that make hot bathing water on demand rather than the huge contraptions we have in the US that keep a big tank of water hot all day and night

Buckets in the bathroom for “dhol” baths

Rooftops that collect rainwater and channel it into wells, which prevents flooding, replenishes aquifers, and averts salination in seaside areas

Pressure cookers with stacked containers inside of them, which make the most of the energy used by their gas stoves

Wall-mounted water purifiers rather than bottled water

Numerous stainless steel canisters for efficient storage of dry snacks, lentils, grains, and rice instead of disposable containers

Scooters for small commutes and running errands

My relatives in India live in comfort. They have refrigerators, air-conditioning, washing machines, microwaves, gas stoves, hot water for baths, good drinking water, well-appointed living spaces, and their own transportation. And yet, they use a fraction of the resources that people in the US do. (My cousin said he would share his utility bills with me so I can back up my claim with some numbers in the near future.) When middle-class Indians – the so-called biggest polluters according to Bush – have gone to such efforts, how can we in the US demand “equal” commitments to reductions in emissions. The burden is on those of us in United States and Europe.

How the Sun Shines on the Soda Men

Two young male workers unload bottles from a Coca Cola delivery truck in Bangkok. Their shirts are a brighter red than the truck. The taller one is broad-shouldered and the veins of his forearms are thick. The shorter one has a Buddhist amulet around his neck. They are proud. They step out of the shade and pose for me in the full sunlight. They stare at the camera, but just underneath their serious looks are smirks. I want the picture to document how they collect used glass bottles while delivering full ones ready for consumption. In Thailand, as in India, soda bottles almost never go into the garbage. They are not melted down or remade. They go back to the bottling plant and are used again in their original form. You must drink your Cokes where you buy them. No sipping while strolling down the streets. No casual toss and clink of bottle against bottle in the garbage bin. I want the picture to be about recycling in Asia, but the picture is about something else. It is about Thai men who want the world to see how vital they are. I think they want their country to be seen shining, attractive, and modern.

Care of Objects: Guest Post by Cake

It is tempting for me to view people who are overly concerned with keeping things clean and in good shape as being materialistic. I often see people who are meticulous about caring for their cars, or who fuss over stains on clothes as being too fussy. After all, objects are meant to be used, not preserved.

True enough, but as I was preparing some baby clothes to take to my favorite consignment shop, I started to think differently. When I keep clothes and other items that I only plan to use for a short length of time (most baby items fall into this category) clean and in good condition, I prolong their lifespan.



I can take them to a thrift store or consignment shop, and someone else can use them and maybe even pass them on one more time. Sure, I can take stained clothes to the thrift store, and they will accept them, but will they actually end up getting used by someone else if they are trashed? Most of us who purchase used items want them to be in pretty good shape. This also holds true when I pass things on to friends. I don’t want to give away stained or torn clothes. It’s insulting.

So I have started to view the act of caring for our possessions as an ecological gesture--a form of resistance to the throw-away consumer culture. As a result, I’ve been learning about stain removal and I might even get around to washing the car one of these days.

Hungry for more Cake? Check out her very toothsome blog Whistling Leaf Blower.

O Quandary, Thy Name Is Electricity

I have been a Green Mountain Energy (GME) subscriber since before meeting GreenDaddy. I love getting the monthly bill that tells me that by using 404 Kilowat hours of wind electricity, I have saved 593 pounds of C02 Emissions from being released into the atmosphere -- the equivalent of 659 automobile miles not driven.

But in the excavation of our energy costs, it turns out we're paying a lot of money for the 100% wind energy. The average amount we pay, per month, is 17.2¢ KWh. If we went for the cheapest power company in Houston, we'd be paying about 11.2¢ KWh -- a difference of upwards of $40 per month or $480 a year.

So it feels good not dumping coal into the atmosphere, and bad thinking about how GME claims to cost the same as Reliant, the region's major power source. The truth is, there is no energy in Houston that costs as much as 100% wind from Green Mountain. I went to GME's website to research what was going on, and realized the deal that costs the same as Reliant is not 100% wind energy derived: it is 90% water/dam energy and 10% wind. Both are renewable energy sources, unlike coal, and if you sign up for a year contract, this plan is 14.3¢ kWh.


I would prefer dams to coal, but still. I hail from Utah, the land of many incredible, historic, unusual canyons erased forever by dams -- usually created to create recreational lakes. I grew up reading Edward Abbey. Dam energy isn't the renewable source I prefer...though, it certainly helps the budget out.

As a last resort to using dammed water, I sought out other electric companies in the area using 100% wind, thinking I wouldn't find any. But it turns out there are a few 100% wind plan offers including:

Commerce Energy: 14.8¢ kWh
Reliant: 15.4¢ KWh
Spark: 13.7¢ KWh

So my quandary is this:

I think:

Aren't these companies able to offer a reduced 100% wind rate because the majority of their sales are from coal, and the coal energy people offset the price of my wind?
Isn't it because of companies like GME, who invest money in alternative energy technologies, that these traditional providers are entering the green market?

And at the same time...Isn't it the goal of green energy to induce the mainstream providers to include green options...and eventually, to offer soley the green? So shouldn't I let these 'dirty' companies know I value their green options?

And at the same time...Shouldn't I support GME, who invests in soley green technologies. If they go out of business, what incentives do the others have to keep providing green solutions?

And at the same time...Shouldn't GME figure out a way to be more competitive in this market?

I don't know what to do. I do know we need to spend less on electricity. Of course, we're going to work on making the house itself more efficient, but I also want an efficient energy company.

So I'm trying to decide between 100% wind energy, my preferred energy source, from Spark and 100% renewable energy, mostly dammed water based, from my preferred provider GME.

Anybody have any information that might tip the scales of my indecision one way or the other?

The Innies and Outies of Interpreting BabyG

BabyG has become an expert at identifying her favorite words in the world around us. She spots miniature cat ornaments nobody else notices and screams: “Baicy! Baicy!” since she calls all cats after our own, Percy. In other people’s homes, she giggles wildly if she comes across a stuffed dog before addressing it: “woof woof!” or if she sees a picture of a cow: “moo! moo! moo!”

If you say, “BabyG, where’s your belly button?” she opens her mouth like you’ve reminded her of the most incredible idea in the world, hitches her dress up and points. “Bay bay!” she croons, hanging slightly on each of the ‘y’s.

In her picture books, she points at babies and says, “baybay.” Faster than a belly button, but the same word.

When she’s on the potty, or she has to go poo, she says, “bay bay,” only this time, the ‘b’s are very slightly sharpened…not quite ‘p’s yet, but on their way.

Finally, there is the word which, when she's in an enunciatory mood, may come out "bye-bye" or "bye" or "bay-bye" – but just as often comes out "bay-bay."

I figure she’s determined to use words to their full potentiality at this tender age. That she wants to reuse, renew and recycle syllables in order demonstrate the innate connection between the words we use and the way we use the world. And I am very proud of her for making such an intelligent stand at such an early age.

The only problem is that sometimes she drops whatever’s in her hands as if she’s been suddenly shocked by something she sees, points her tiny finger, and says, significantly, as if she’s introducing somebody to the queen: “Bay bay!”

And then you have to figure out what she’s pointing at: the potty, a baby, a belly button…or, God forbid, some new thing she’s decided should be signified by her favorite two syllables. Because not only does she want to point it out for her, she wants you to agree that she’s right by looking at whatever it is she’s found, pointing at it yourself and saying, “Yes, BabyG, Bay Bay.”

The other morning she was sitting in her highchair, eating some of her coveted frozen blueberries, when she began frantically pointing at the closed closet door and chirping: “Bay Bay! Bay Bay!”

“No, BabyG, there’s no Bay Bay, there,” I said, when I walked in from the kitchen to see what the commotion was about.

“Bayyy Bayyyy! Bayyyy Bayyyy! Bayyyy bayyyy!” she insisted, making the ‘y’s as distinct as possible.

By this time she was doing her best to jump up and down in her high chair, leaning as far out of it as she could (thank God that Svan is so well balanced). I stared into the door like you do at those 3D stereograms, and noticed she was pointing specifically at the closet’s missing door knob...

Which is, you will note if you take the time to move your mouse over the picture below...

quite clearly, an "innie."

Six Weird, Green Things (Zombie Limbs In the Compost & Organic Gothic)

Over at Busy Mom she wrote about 6 weird things because Wacky Mama and Motherhood Uncensored tagged her. I'm a fairly new blogger and think it might be not WRONG to live out another person's tag, but sort of UNCOOL. About anybody whose ever gone to Elementary, Jr. High, and High School with me will know what the blogging community might only be suspecting at this point: I am VERY uncool. Luckily, because I've decided to write about the 6 weirdest green things I’ve noticed since beginning this blog. To add to my potential blogging inetiquetteness, I've rearranged the order of the last three posts for clarity's sake:

1) Zombie Limbs In the Compost: Those beetle larvae beneath GreenDaddy’s composts may be saving the earth by chomping on all our leftover sludge but they look like a corpse’s translucent, swollen fingers, they move like accordions, their little legs look sharper and more evil than regular bugs’, and I don’t believe they are harmless. They sleep just fifty feet away from my bedroom window.

2) Organic Gothic: One Sunday afternoon -- when Westheimer, Houston’s hip/liberal/gay/tattoo/antique/coffee house strip is most busy -- I caught myself sauntering through all the hullabaloo dressed in the raggedy post-baby outfit I live in these days: black former-running pants with a hole in the crotch that I’ve closed with a safety pin, and a nursing top I’d love if it hadn’t inexplicably developed a fuzz ball colony on the the little panels covering my boobs, and nowhere else (a construction flaw, I’ll point out, not a byproduct of the boobs!). This is the outfit I live in. On this particular Sunday, my ensemble was completed by my three month old daughter hanging over my right shoulder in a purple and gold striped sling and flamingo pink sunglasses, and a brand new pitch fork slung:
a) Menacingly
b) Ridiculously
c) Provokingly
d) Unfashionably
e) All of the above
over my left shoulder. On the way TO the hardware store I noticed lots of people pointing and laughing at BabyG, because she was very cute in her sling and her hot pink sunglasses [picture forthcoming]; on the way home FROM the hardware store I noticed lots of people pointing and whispering at me.

...And now, it appears that aside from being uncool, I'm also too obsessive a writer to create a short list. MO LATER.

A History of Magic and Muck

In my last post, I satirized two attitudes that infuriate me. The first is good old American consumerism dressed up in green, saying in a deep, earnest voice that it is our duty to buy insanely expensive products that supposedly save the environment. The second is that there's no point in even attempting a green lifestyle because it is too expensive unless you want to be a dirty hippy. We should find a happy medium, you might say. Extremes are always bad, right? I'm more in favor of exploding the questions that trap us between two static poles. We should set a green agenda that is ambitious but not dogmatic, material but not consumerist, focused on individuals in families but engaged with the sociopolitical situations that we live in, and internationally-oriented without exoticizing the other. We've got to get beyond sheeshy green verses hippy green.

If you've been reading this blog consistently, you know I've made compost into a kind of metaphor for everything, a way of decomposing the familiar categories that hold us back, and coming up with something fertile. The following history is my way of suggesting an alternative, a third way of approaching green living.

******

Rivers and brooks crisscrossed the land. A half-man, half-goat played his flute in the woods. A hunter who ogled a nude goddess was turned into a deer. Garbage, as we know it now, was not practiced. People left their peelings, the uneaten innards from the hunt, and their own evacuations wherever they might. The world was their bathroom. If they turned their campsite into a dump, they moved on. They foraged somewhere else – the next meadow, another continent. The earth was its own waste management system. Then people took to agriculture and they built cities. That is when composting was first born. The earliest instances of writing – the clay tablets from Akkad, the capital of an empire on the Euphrates – mention the manuring of soil. Instead of moving their homes around, people carried their detritus out to the fields. As civilizations spread, so did composting. The Greeks, Early Hebrews, and Romans all described compost. The Arab Book of Agriculture describes the value of crushed bones, wool scraps, wood ashes, and lime in compost.

The invention of modern composting is attributed to Sir Albert Howard, an Englishman who lived in colonial India from 1903 to 1931. He promulgated the Indore Method, named after the state where he carried out his research, in a book called The Waste Products of Agriculture. The hallmarks of the Indore Method, and its many derivatives, are 1) the layering of nitrogen and carbon rich materials and 2) the turning or aeration of the pile. Hot backyard piles and industrial composting are largely derivatives of the Indore Method.

Sir Albert believed that the introduction of improved crops and better soil management could improve the total agricultural output of India. Unlike his peers in Europe, he did not look at nature as adversary, but as a teacher or the “Supreme Farmer.” Indian farms were just one step removed from the ideal of nature. He wrote, “The agricultural practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test – they are almost as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie or of the ocean.”

According to Louisa Albert, his second wife, Sir Albert saw in India a vast laboratory of composting, “a series of 100,000 experimental plots which were plain to the eye.” He traveled to Baluchistan and Kashmir, Sikhim and Nepal, and into Sri Lanka. He noticed that agriculture in the countryside was average but “where human excrement was daily deposited, was infinitely richer.” He lamented like other Englishmen that Indians did not use cow excrement to the same effect, but instead had to use it as fuel. Sir Albert was determined to use his resources as the Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore to develop a way of creating a manure from unused agricultural waste like cotton stalks, grass, hay, leaves, and urine earth, mixed with some cattle dung.



Louisa sums up her father’s genius, “The solution of the manurial problem of India was thus to be found in the combination of animal and vegetable wastes. Yet India herself, in spite of her 100,000 'experiments', could not provide the final formula of success.” But the story is only half-told. Louisa herself notes that Sir Albert named a co-author to The Waste Products of Agriculture, an Indian by the name of Yeshwant Wad. Ironically, it was Wad – the child of the mystical Orient –who provided the scientific rigor of a trained chemist. He carefully documented the nitrogen ratios in each of the composting experiments. For some reason, Wad is never credited as a co-founder of modern composting. He is given little more mention than the nameless Indian men and women who constructed the compost bin, stacked the cotton stocks, mixed in the manure, and carted out the soil to the fields.

I have focused on the fact that modern composting was developed in colonial India, because it reflects one of the central tensions I feel as a parent. I always seem to end up in India whenever I start to dig into alternative parenting and green living. This has to do, in part, with India’s important place in the world, the depth of its history, and the innovations of its people. Or am I imagining my way back to India? Am I searching it out? I could be obsessing over India because I fear that my daughter, who is half-White and half-Indian, will be lost to the homogenizing forces of American culture. Its feels so odd to discover my own cultural through European or White American reformers. This story of Sir Albert, Yeshwant Wad, and Indian peasants is odd. I want to bare witness to its oddity in all its fullness.

Sir Albert was ridiculed by his European peers for his faith in “magic and muck.” He must have been a strange gentleman to devote himself to the study of Indian waste. Consider Florence Nightingale’s one-year public health mission in India. This what she had to say by the end in 1870, “[Indians live] amidst their own filth, infecting the air with it, poisoning the ground with it,” and “polluting the water they drink with it...some even think it a holy thing to drink filth.” Nightingale’s sense of compassion, her famously tender nursing of and advocacy for British soldiers in the Crimean war, seems to have failed her in India. Whereas Sir Albert studied waste management in India with a keen eye and helped improve it, Nightingale saw her own prejudices reflected back to her. It is not Sir Albert’s fault that the historians of compost give no credit Yeshwant Wad. At least Sir Albert had the courage to work with an Indian chemist and list him as a co-author. To think that modern composting was invented through the partnership of elites and subalterns – a churning of science and tradition that defies the boundaries we too easily believe in – this is the type of story I want to tell my daughter.

How To Wash Cloth Diapers at Home

Many of my family and friends are surprised to learn that we wash Lila's dirty diapers at home. In fact, I was skeptical before we tried it. So I have put together this pictorial guide. It's ridiculously easy to wash cloth diapers if your baby is only fed breastmilk and you have your own washer and dryer.

Not everyone has seen what cloth diapers and diaper covers look like. Here's an unfolded "Chinese prefold” beside an empty cover:



You fold the insert and place it in the cover. There are many ways to fold the insert. We fold ours the way you do a letter and that works well for our girl.



The baby wears the diaper and soils it with either urine or breastmilk poo.



Put the soiled insert into a medium sized garbage bin with a washable bag. If the cover is dirty, put that in too. The size of the bin should accommodate about two days worth of diapers.



When you're ready to wash the diapers, empty the bag directly into the washer. That's right! Just dump them in. You do not have to rinse the poo diapers of breastfed babies. Breastmilk poo is 100% water soluble! (Wash the bag with the diapers.)



The diapers really do come out clean.



Put the wet diapers in the dryer. You might need to run your dryer longer than usual. (I'm in Houston where nothing is ever truly dry.)



If you follow these simple steps, you will have accomplished a feat that many people think is disgusting, vile, and beneath them. In case you are wondering, our water and electricity bills have not gone up by a noticeable amount. We use cloth diapers in combination with elimination communication. I highly recommend this combination if you can manage it. You save money, you save environmental resources, and you're more emotionally connected with the baby.

My Secret in the Backyard, Part II

It was a Sunday afternoon. I went out to look at the compost pile I started six months ago. About three feet high, the pile was covered by a mix of leaves – oak, maple, hackberry, and grass – in various states of decay. Also, littered here and there were: peelings from an avocado; weeds yanked from the yard; the scatterings of coal and hickory ashes from our tenant’s smoker; shuckings from corn we cooked with MGreen’s dad; green beans we bought at a premium organic price from Whole Foods but never cooked; bitter melon our friend Nicole bought us but that we were afraid to eat; curled tulip blossoms; and half an onion, its layers thrown in high relief from having dried out, separated, and pulled back, as if onions are tulips’ dark sisters, blooming as they decay.

I wasn’t back there looking at the compost pile for nothing. I had with me half a pot of brown rice and a container full of mashed yams, both too old to eat. Time to turn the pile, long over due actually, and add some new matter. I was excited to unveil the pile, not only for the physical labor my office body badly needs. Perhaps the sloughings and detritus from our lives -- MGreen's, BabyG's, and mine -- would reveal something to me, whatever it is I search for by light of day and never find. Each artifact brought back traces. An avocado sandwich MGreen made me, snatches of conversations from my in-laws’ visit, and an inane argument I tried to make-up for with flowers. Perhaps turning the compost pile would be like peering into the hippocampus and poking at memories unmediated, rummaging through the jumbled scraps of the past before they get reorganized into the Past and my Memory.

With the first scoop of my shovel, I saw a black beetle the size of my thumb tip scramble away. Then innumerable, tiny bugs (are they infants?) moving in every direction, their white bodies set off against the black rot. They disappeared. They seemingly dissolved back into the mound. I dug down deeper and there were dozens of white and tan roly-polies. The sweetness of the rot was in the air. The leaves lost all trace of shape, the rot had a consistency of its own. But even towards the bottom of the pile, I would encounter the occasional intact stump of a cabbage, a whole lime still deep green, or a cross-section of a sweet potato. Deeper down – where the rot was the rich black of mature compost – I came upon something astonishing. I didn’t know what it was. My heart raced. I rushed to the house with a clod of dirt on the shovel blade to show MGreen.

MGreen wasn’t even showing when I started that compost pile. BabyG weighed less than a pound. Composting was just one task in our greater effort to become green parents living responsibly in the urban beast called Houston. However, the compost became something more without my really expecting or understanding it. The expecting parent who does not carry the baby (i.e. the father, the other mother, the non-receptacle person, or what have you) carries the psychic burden of expectation and fear, but has no embodiment of that stress, no physical growth in the womb to focus on. The compost pile became my substitute womb. Baking cookies in the oven, remodeling the bathroom, building a crib – parents do all kinds of things to project their desire to control an uncontrollable process onto something that can be controlled. Compost has the advantage over these other activities of being biological in a way that is both scientifically explainable and yet mysterious, much like pregnancy. Compost incubates. Nine to ten months, in fact, is a typical length of time for maturation.

Parenting guidebooks usually acknowledge the stress that the non-pregnant parent(s) experience, but stop there. Some books and magazine articles tell you that it is your duty to work out your baggage for the sake of the baby. But an expecting parent can’t always be expected to work it all out in forty weeks. What if there is a history of incest, abuse, divorce, death, difficulty conceiving, or multiple miscarriages? What if one or both of the partners is in the middle of a crisis? Will the mother and child have a safe place to stay after the delivery and money during a time when she cannot work? But even when there are urgent matters to focus on, expecting a child has a way of turning the psyche. The mental exhumation is overwhelming. Memories unearthed. The fear of reproducing everything you loathe in relationships. Worst of all, the truths are always scurrying away into the recesses of your mind like tiny albino bugs. Your psyche keeps turning on itself even if you try to will it to stop.

When you turn a compost pile, you don’t figure the compost out. Compost is, after all, a mass of decay, not a time capsule or an analyst’s couch or a laboratory experiment. The unknowability of the compost’s totality does not keep you from turning the compost over. You turn it regularly, once a month if you don’t want the heat at its center to fizzle out. You turn the compost if you want it to become rich fertilizer for a garden. In the process, you might come face to face with the creatures that commonly live in compost piles – beetles, roaches, mice, rats, possum, worms – animals that will not kill you but that you might fear. You get over it. The possum and the rats move away if you keep the compost moist. The worms are good for garden soil. They leave casings. For me, the compost pile became a useful embodiment of what for me could only be an idea. An idea that I was to smile about at all times but that threatened to eviscerate my sense of self. Compost was an alluring metaphor for me precisely because of its productive darkness and mystery.

When I got back to the house with my shovel and clod of dirt, I opened the door and called for MGreen to come quick.

“I found something at the bottom of the compost pile and I don’t know what it is,” I said.

MGreen rushed over and looked down at the shovel blade. We were in the kitchen. In the middle of a black chunk of compost, there was a shining white ball about the size of a marble. It unfurled. The thing looked like an overfed, albino caterpillar as long and thick as my finger. There were many more where I found it. I was delighted that throwing my refuse in a pile could make a habitat for such a fantastic thing, but I felt bad exposing it to light. Could I be killing a future butterfly? Even a moth? MGreen took digital pictures and googled around the net. After some time, she shouted out, “I know what it is – beetle larvae.” The little white bugs were probably mites, which are actually arachnida and often thrive alongside beetles.

Was it disappointment that I felt? Wouldn’t it have been better if the larvae were meant to become beautiful creatures, not the hard-backed survivors of millennial ruin known as beetles. MGreen said she was terrified of beetles. She’s afraid of the compost now. When she said that, it became clearer to me that when I unearthed the shining larvae, I had experienced the sublime. Sublime in the sense that Edmund Burke had meant it -- the astonishing union of terror and beauty, danger and excitement, fear and awe. And what could be better preparation for the (hoped for) resurrection of the self that is called “becoming a parent”?

We Hauled out a Holly: Our Native Christmas Tree

Tree dilemmas are all over!  The two shrubby evergreens in front of
our house are wiping their brows for having survived this holiday season.  I found a merry holly at a store called Buchanan's (psst...here's a list my friend Julie gave me of native plant stores in Houston.).  I was looking for an oak, like GreenDaddy wanted,but unfortunately they're all basically branchless sticks at this time of year.  Only Ziggy or Charlie Brown would buy one and decorate it.  Luckily I saw the holly, perfect because it’s full of all these little red berries.

What I learned while decorating our Ilex Vomitoria, or Pride of Houston
Yaupon Holly:

1. Putting lights on holly is not the same as putting them on an evergreen.  You can’t just wrap them around the whole thing, you have to follow each of the main branches…our has about seven.  
2. Important to find symmetrically balanced tree. Otherwise you'll have to stick your heaviest knicknacks in the pot so it won't tip.
3. It’s hard to put lights on.  My dad always did it for us.
4. It’s a relief not to have pine needles, but squashing the red berries that fell all over the floor while I put up the lights might be its own kind of meditiation on the word Vomitoria.
5. When the lights are on, berries seem to glow of their own accord and are gorgeous.
6. According to GreenDaddy:  whereas only a real square would not have appreciated our unusual wedding cake, many people will be upset by our strange little tree.  

I think its lovely.  It looks prairie-like and sweet.  It is true that we can't get a good photo of it, though.  I’ll put one up, but be   
assured it looks much nicer in person than it does in photograph. (I almost decided not to share an image since the image doesn't do it any real kind of justice.)

What I learned after decorating the Ilex Vomitoria:

1. I thought I was buying the Ilex Opaca, which is a tree that grows 20 to 25 feet as is supposed to be a fabulous tree
2. Ilex Vomitoria is a bush that grows about 15 feet, but it draws lots of birds and butterflies.
3. Vomitoria does signify that the leaves, when boiled, makes a person vomit.  According to a website I read but can’t find again, Native Americans (which natives, I don’t know) used to eat its leaves in order to vomit as a means of cleansing themselves before hunting.

You would think either GreenDaddy or I would have noticed the difference between a tree and a shrub, and the truth is that we did.   GreenDaddy kept saying things like, “I just don’t see how these branches are going to turn into a trunk.”    Since I saw the picture of the tree in my book and it had a trunk and red berries, and since I saw the label at the store calling it American Holly Tree, I just figured this particular type of tree would look more like a shrub than a tree until it was older.  I think the man who put the tree in the car for me just picked up the wrong tree.  

Though you might pay more going to a local native plant store, their service is superb.  When I called to tell Buchanan’s about my sad tree mix-up, Donna (not the owner but “the other Donna” she said) told me I could bring my tree back in three weeks, so I wouldn’t have to undecorate it and redecorate it.   So I can still have a big tree to plant, like I had planned on.  

But also, I’ve just seen lots of pictures of the ‘Pride of Houston’ which can be trained into a tree-shape.  I think I like it better than the American Holly, which has the sharp leaves and grows in a conical shape.  So maybe I won’t even exchange the tree…though we’ll probably not use this tree to plant BabyG’s placenta.

Composting 101 – Compost Bins and the Third Eye

At first, burying things in the backyard, or trench composting as it is called, was fine. It’s basically free unless you need to buy a shovel. However, there’s a limit to how much you can bury. Burial is a good method for vegetable peelings and eggshells, but not for leaves, grass clippings, ashes from the barbecue, or whatever else. So MaGreen and I decided that we needed a bin.

There’s an overwhelming selection of bins at stores and on the internet that range in price from about $60 to $200. (Or you can have one designed and built to match your Japanese garden for $600 like MaGreen’s Aunt Patricia.) MaGreen and I, though, are cheap. And it seems a little counter-intuitive to me to spend money on a container to let things rot in. Maybe the “compost tea” that the expensive compost bins produce is the best thing since chocolate, but I would rather start out with something simple and FREE. We’d rather spend our money on a new organic cotton mattress or buy tickets for a vacation or donate to Oxfam.

Miah read somewhere on the internet that it’s easy to make a compost bin with shipping pallets. So we started looking for pallets on the side of the road, next to dumpsters, and behind strip malls. For about a month, we couldn’t find one. I’m not terribly skilled at scavenging. When my parents raised me they always discouraged me from using discarded or used stuff. “We can buy you a new one,” they would say. Having grown up in India right after independence, my parents saw scavenging as something people do to survive, not something that a person with an education and money should do for fun. It wasn’t until I started hanging out with artists, musicians, and writers that my third eye – the garbage eye – opened up.

Miah eventually spotted three shipping pallets in a lot close to our house. I shoved them in the trunk of the car – as in the dickey or boot for all you Brits and Indians - and drove them home. After that first sighting, we started to see shipping pallets everywhere just waiting for us. All of a sudden, the whole city seemed awash in pallets. Scavenging is sort of like birding. Once you’ve learned to spot your first hummingbird, you start to see them everywhere.

Well, to cut this story short, I picked a spot in the corner of the backyard to create the compost. I had to dig up an oleander bush, which MaGreen wanted me to do anyways because it is poisonous and she didn’t want our little girl to chew on the leaves. Then I dug little trenches to put the pallets into so they wouldn’t fall over. I made two four-sided bins with the neighbor’s fence as the backside. The front side swings open. I used an old plastic bag as a sort of hinge. I used the leaves from the dug-up oleander bush to inaugurate the pile.

Covet (and Love It)

If you’re anything like me, on a productive Saturday about fifteen years ago you might have gathered up the blue dress you never should have bought because you hated it in the store (but it made you look skinnier), and three or four T-shirts you don’t wear because you don’t wear T-shirts, and two or three of your Aunt Izzy’s old frying pans, and a grey wool rug, and the iron you retired since your husband came with a better one, and finally, some baseball hats your mother gave you so she wouldn’t have the problem that you do, now:  your give-away pile has sat in a dank corner for so long that you’re afraid to put your hand into the box holding it.  You fear worms might have moved in a few years back and started composting the textiles into a weird, nostalgic dust; or you fear something worse, something more spidery and venomous.  

Some people won’t understand this problem.  They send packages to far-flung friends and family whole weeks before important birthday and holiday deadlines.  They hoist their glass to glass recycling centers bi-monthly (instead of bi-decadely).  So it makes sense that these people, too, can collect give-away piles and distribute them in due time.  They just put them in the car and drive them to the nearest woman’s shelter;  maybe they even call up the Salvation Army and make an appointment to have the items picked up.  “What could be easier?” they ask. These are all good people.  But they aren’t like me, and they don’t understand my problems.  And the Freecycle Network does.

Freecycle is a grassroots organization devoted to reducing landfills by making it easy for people to give away what they might ordinarily throw away.  You join a local Freecycle network, which is basically joining an internet newsgroup/discussion list (directions are on the website).  I’m one of the nearly eight thousand HoustonFreecycle members, and also one of the 729 HeightsMontroseFreecycle members…and there are 2 million other Freecycle members in over 3 thousand communities throughout the world.  And incredibly, this group only started in 2003.  It grows astronomically.

This is how it works.  When you have something to give away you post an offer.  You’d send an email something like:

Subject:  OFFER: random box of books (Montrose Neighborhood)
Message:  Hi, I have about sixty books.  Half are gothic romance novels, some are early American captivity narratives, and there a bunch of reference books on writing.  Also one very surprising book for horticulturalists.  You need to take all or nothing.

If you want something somebody is giving away, you hit reply to their email.  And, by the way, most OFFERs are juicier than the above:  I’ve seen all sorts of furniture, washers and dryers, refrigerators, clothing, computers, gardening stuff (including trees & plants), party favors, pet supplies, and Star Trek memorabilia.  Sometimes something is broken and is given away for parts, and the OFFER’s author will let you know if that’s the case.  Some people post pictures.  I am, actually, this kind of person:  I fear stamps and mailboxes, but have no problem taking a digital photo, uploading it, and sending it off to Freecycle.  

There’s an art to writing a response to an offer that will procure you the offer, and the fun part is that it is a fluid art. That is, different people want different replies.  Some people would snarkily call your lengthy explanation describing why you NEED their IKEA couch cover a sob story and give it to the person who only wrote “I’m interested,” while others would call the latter poster rude and look for a story at least as sad as Old Yeller.  Still others don’t care what you write, they give it to the first person who emails.  But the point is, the offerer decides of his/her own accord who wins, and I think this is a good thing.  It’s unautomated and completely human, and unfair, and chancey.

Raj and I have given away:  an old sewing table (LOTS of crazy, beautiful, sad stories about why people wanted it…), hot curlers, Tupperware (I felt very guilty giving away all the plastic), unmatching flatware, an area carpet, a wardrobe, books, suits…lots of stuff.  When I first started, I found myself looking for things to give away.  It’s thrilling to do.  You choose somebody’s story, you email them and let them know they won, and then you have them come by your house and pick up their gift.  I’m often out, so I leave the item on my porch and it’s gone when I get home.  



This is an incredibly simple and fun way to be a Green Parent.  It’s something stay-at-home parents can do, even when infants are around...and on a side note, there are dozens of offers for cribs, strollers and baby-related things on the lists every day. It’s recycling in a fabulous way, that puts you into contact with your neighbors. It’s an ingenious use of the internet that doesn’t involve giving anybody any money, and that may involve you not having to go out and buy a brand new dresser (because somebody will give you one!).  

Composting 101 - My Secret in the Backyard

I have been going into the backyard at night with a shovel for two months now. Usually I go after dinner once the dishes are in the washer and MaGreen has gone into the computer room. Our backyard does not have much lighting and I walk out to the darkest corners where there isn’t any grass. I dig a hole that’s at least one foot deep. And when the hole is made, that’s when I dump our vegetable peelings in. OK, so I'm not burying a body or anything illegal. But you have to admit that whether you are burying a body or vegetables, both lead to decomposition, worms, and enriched soil.

I started burying things because MaGreen and I are a bit lazy. MaGreen always wanted a compost pile, but we just didn't get around to starting one. It was frustrating. Putting the peelings in the garbage disposal often clogged the sink. If we threw leftovers away, the garbage smelled after a day. Once I tried to dump our vegetable peelings out the window into a flower bed, but the next morning we were embarrassed to find them scattered around on the grass and sidewalk. Then on a short trip to Brooklyn, MaGreen’s friend Sarah showed us how she just buried stuff in a tiny patch of ground underneath the patio. It was like shortcut composting. If Sarah could do it in a tiny Brooklyn “backyard”, we felt we could do it in Houston.

Soon I found myself addicted to burying things. I tried to find excuses to peel more things. Cooking and eating at home became more appealing because then I would have something to bury. Since we don’t cook meat at home, just about everything is suitable. Eggshells, onion peels, carrot shavings, the scrapings of leftover food that it wouldn’t make sense to eat, or the Vietnamese food in a doggy bag that’s been sitting in the fridge for a week. I loved how the shovel slipped into the dirt more and more easily each night. It was astonishing how quickly stuff turned back into dirt. Once I went during the day and when I turned the soil, there were three huge earthworms, flipping around in a glorious panic.

“I saw three earthworms,” I told MaGreen. She was delighted.

“That means it’s working,” she said.

As the soil assumed a moist and black consistency, I was reminded that I wasn’t only burying things for the sake of burying them. We wanted to start an organic garden and that beautiful worm-laden decomposing trench was the beginning. Our child will eat vegetables picked just before they are served. She will see the cycle of life and death – not in some Disney flick – but in her own backyard. Maybe she will go with me one night soon. And I will hold the peelings as she works the shovel. The sound of a critter scurrying along the fence or a tree branch might alarm her, but she will concentrate on the hole.

Composting 101 - A Wormderful Intro Podcast

MaGreen's aunt and uncle give us a tour of their compost bins and share with us the joys of rot. Click on the title to hear the podcast.

Composting 101 - You Don't Have to Be Perfect to Let Things Rot

On one of our visits to Missoula, MaGreen’s Uncle Stephen and Aunt Patricia walked us out back behind their fence to show us their compost piles. They were neatly organized in a series of wooden boxes. Three or four of them, perfectly constructed, each one holding a mix of yard waste and food scraps in varying states of decomposition. Stephen described the system, but I couldn’t really follow it. He has that kind of voice you would expect from an respected doctor who sees cancer patients every day. Each of his words is enunciated and weighted at the end, inflected with erudition and wisdom. Like their cooking, their exercise regimen, and their communes with nature at Glacier National Park, I found their compost piles to be impossibly perfect. MaGreen and I could never do that. Their rotting waste was neater than our office desks.

And yet, when we got back to Houston, our guilt about throwing away massive amounts of organic matter grew, burdened us with the weight of all the clippings that we’ve ever thrown away. Everyday it seemed we learned something new about how bad it is to throw away your food scraps and yard waste. When organic matter decomposes in big city dumps, it combines with the surrounding garbage to make all kinds of toxic stink that seeps into the ground and the water supply. And there isn’t much space left in dumps as it is. And if you haven’t figured it out already, MaGreen and I have overactive consciences. Knowing we are hurting the world out of carelessness and inaction bothers us.

We were trapped by our feelings of inadequacy and our guilt. Did I mention our fears? What if we started our compost wrong? Would it attract cockroaches and rats? What exactly can you put in it? Should it be closed and made of plastic? Do we need the kind of compost that has red worms? If you make a hot compost, can it explode? It seemed there were so many ways of composting, we would need to take a class to figure out how to start. Ultimately, we got over our fears. As with our other greening attempts, MaGreen’s being pregnant has gotten us motivated. In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing more about composting. Before I get to the specifics, I wanted to acknowledge that the first hurdle, if you are like us, is to realize that composting is not rocket science. You don’t have to be perfect to let things rot.