Tiny House Envy

http://www.youtube.com/v/5VV2MBo-ZMM&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I've written before about the tiny house movement — a proposition for radically downsizing and building houses with a very small footprint – no larger than, say, 300 square feet. A lot of them are much smaller than that – less than 100 square feet – usually with a loft for sleeping and clever solutions for bathrooms, kitchens, and power.

Most of these houses are owner-built; some are constructed from prefab components; some from recycled or free materials; some are even built on trailers so that, like a turtle, you can take your house with you when you decide to live someplace else! All are just waiting for handmade innovations and off-the-grid, and low- or no-tax living.

As for many people, these buildings appeal to me not so much as a primary dwelling but for their hobbit-house-like coziness, their energy efficiency and environmental sanity, and the privacy of having one's own minimal but comfortable shelter in the woods. They seem like the epitome of less-is-more.

Lately I've been looking at what people have done recently, and I've found there's a lot more on the web about this than when I first got interested. The guru of the tiny house movement is arguably Jay Shafer, who has been building and extolling the virtues of these little houses since the late 1990s. His company, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, sells plans and already-built houses of less than 140 sq ft.

Michael Jantzen's blog Tiny House Design and associated newsletter, Tiny House Living, is the best place I've found to keep up with what's happening in this movement. For instance, here's a post on his design for a free house made from recycled pallets.

 The New York Times even got into the act recently, with this feature on small houses including a gingerbread cottage makeover of a hunting cabin (left) which is way too twee for me.

I was most pleased, though, (and amused) to see the video embedded at the top of this post, about Vermont tiny house builder Peter King. Peter is soooo Vermont, and it makes me happy to see and hear him extol the best of what makes/made my former home state unique.

Drowning

It’s time, I told myself. You really should read some of these reports in detail, not just the headlines. You should look at more of the pictures, read the eyewitness accounts. So this morning I did. Or at least I tried, until I got so depressed I couldn’t continue. That took maybe half an hour, maybe even less.

Over the last month, J. and I have been watching David Attenborough’s amazing multi-episode nature programs for the BBC, “Planet Earth” and its predecessor, “Blue Planet,” which is about the oceans. In both, Attenborough and his team made a conscious decision to focus on the beauty and wonder of the natural world rather than harping on the problems. Global warming, threats to biodiversity, endangerment, environmental pressure, habitat diminishment and species adaptation are all mentioned, but in the context of, for example, a near-starving polar bear having to range much much farther in her quest for food and becoming exhausted swimming in open water – something she never used to have to do. Still, the focus is on the creatures and plants themselves and the worlds they inhabit, which include many places few people visit and most of us will never have the opportunity to see. In general, I think it was an effective strategy: the despair and numbness I felt after only a few minutes of looking at environmental disaster is almost paralyzing, but look we must. What I’m thinking about this morning is the contrast.

“The Blue Planet” taught me, a woman who’s lived most of her life far from the ocean, so much about the seas. I watched in utter amazement as the videos revealed so much more than I’d ever known about the migrations of herring; the electric creatures of the blacks depths; the intelligence and play of dolphins; the songs and journeys of the great whales; the vast forests of giant kelp and astounding color of coral reefs; the teeming colonies of tube worms living on deep-ocean volcanic vents untouched by the light we always thought was necessary for life; the unbelievable camouflage that’s evolved to protect fish, crustaceans, invertebrates and given rise to creatures stranger than science fiction; the bloom of plankton so extensive that it colors the oceans when seen from space; and above all the endless struggle to eat and to reproduce in a ruthless watery world of hunters and the hunted. 

Last night I began reading “Champlain’s Dream,” a biography by David Hackett of the French explorer who mapped and greatly influenced most of the places I’ve lived in my life. The frontispiece of the book is a map of “New France” drawn by Champlain himself in 1612, and I noticed his labels and drawings off the coast, including figures of whales and cod along the Grand Banks. It reminded me of the teeming abundance of the untouched oceans, the wonder of the first explorers, and the almost immediate exploitation of that abundance by human beings convinced both that the resources were theirs for the taking and that whatever it was – fish, forests, seals — couldn’t possibly run out. Without any oil disaster at all, how much has changed off our own coast since Champlain’s time! How dare we have the audacity and hubris to disturb the complexity and balance of such an ecosystem? What’s happening in the Gulf is an underwater Hiroshima, and as much as I deplore the economic cost to those whose livelihood depends on industries like fishing and tourism, I can’t help but weep more for the creatures who live there, and who I’ve recently come to know and love even more.

The emotions we feel when we see a whale breach and dive, or a flock of seabirds lift into the sky, are not merely wonder but awe. And awe, I think, is an emotion that is meant to include recognition of our own smallness. How far we’ve come from both Old Testament fear and aboriginal wisdom! Our scientific and technological prowess allows us to think there’s always a solution, a mechanical finger for the leaking dike, but what I see this morning are waves crashing over our own heads, full of wrath.

Sad but not Despairing

I'm not going to write about the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla because I don't want to turn this space into a mini-warzone. Suffice it to say that I am deeply sad today. And heading out to draw. I refuse to allow the brutality of the world to suffocate my own soul.

And as for breathing: like thousands of other Montrealers, we woke in the night to the smell of smoke, blown into the city from the forest fires raging over thousands of hectares to the north, and today a smog alert has been declared as far south as Boston. So many of the earth's living things  struggling for the basic elements they need in order to live… may we all come to our senses while we still have them.

On Suffering (1)

We leave our warm beds, get dressed, and drive to our studio in the early, grey morning. It's as dark at 8:30 am as it will be in the late afternoon; this is the long dark trek through deep winter. Our boots clatter up the metal staircase and we unlock the loft; I make coffee and do some exercises and stretches, and then run up several flights of stairs, walking quickly down the long hallways. On the far end of the building a grimy window looks out over the city: white snow creating a rectangular patchwork of roofs; centre-ville in the distance; smoke billowing from industrial chimneys, and everywhere the tall verdegris spires puncturing the low grey sky, silent exclamation points rising from the hollow chambers of the enormous, nearly-abandoned churches that define each parish of the city of Montreal.

To the northeast of here, in a direction I can't see from the window, is a community of Haitians; I know one family, from the cathedral; the father is an Anglican priest, born in Haiti, who ministers to the French-speaking Anglicans in that part of the city. There are a lot of immigrants from the French West Indies here, and a number of them are Anglican. Today, looking out over these cold roofs in the opposite direction, away from the immigrant poor and toward the wealth of the city center and, further to the south, the United States, I feel their despair and sorrow like the brath of the incessant arctic wind on the back of my neck. I have read the deluge of predictable comments on Twitter and Facebook, tried to absorb the headlines and the awful pictures: "7,000 people have already been buried in a mass grave." I write a note to the person I know best in this family. Mostly, though, I'm numb.

People are asking why. They always do, when tragedy strikes, but it's a lot easier to package the story and wrap up our feelings when we read the biography of a deranged or angry killer and say to ourselves, "yes, I can sort of understand, he was traumatized, he was crazy, he went off his head because he lost his job and felt the world was against him" than when the perpetrator is the very earth under our feet.

Of course some have a ready answer. In Handel's Messiah, a few weeks back, I listened to the bass soloist singing words from the prophet Haggai, instructing the Jews to rebuild the temple after their return from captivity, and warning about the consequences of his wrath:

"Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts; Yet once a little while and I will shake the
heav'ns and the earth, the sea and the dry land: And I will shake all nations; and the
desire of all nations shall come."

The Book of Haggai was composed in 520 B.C.E., after King Cyrus of Persia had decreed that the Jews could be released from their captivity in Babylon and return to Judea. Handel, writing his oratorio in 1741 (the libretto was actually by Charles Jennens) knew little more than the ancients about the cause of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or violent storms; "Divine Providence" was to be thanked for safety and victory, and "Divine Retribution," meted out to nations in the form of natural punishment or defeat in war, was to be feared. Even though we know now that we sit on shifting geologic plates, whose movement causes these natural disasters, self-righteous preachers still claim God's wrath, prophesy the apocalypse, and infuse believers with a conviction that the victims somehow deserve their "punishment." It makes me crazy, especially so because the worst offenders are Christian fundamentalists, who have managed to tar the entire faith and, incredibly, still influence politics and education — even in the supposedly fact-based, "modern," and developed world — with their misguided, retrograde, unscientific and often hateful beliefs.

There is a clear scientific "why": it's because Haiti is located in a region of active tectonic activity that results in earthquakes, tsunamis, and violent volcanic eruptions. But the spiritual "whys" – "Why have so many people died there?" "Why have they died instead of me?" "What can I do to understand and respond to such human suffering?" -  which ought be at the heart of religious teaching and practice, have rarely been so since the time of Constantine, when the Church first became aligned with the power of the State.

More on both of these subjects in the following posts.

A Heavy Hoof on the Earth

This article at today's New York Times is mainly about the health cost of red meat consumption, but the statement in the second paragraph was a shock even to me:

Anyone who worries about global well-being has yet another reason to consume less red meat. Dr. Popkin, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina said that a reduced dependence on livestock for food could help to save
the planet from the ravaging effects of environmental pollution, global warming and the depletion of potable water.

“In the United States,” Dr. Popkin wrote, “livestock production accounts for 55 percent of the erosion process, 37 percent of pesticides applied, 50 percent of antibiotics consumed, and a third of total discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface water.”