RAIN is one of my favorite magazines. Published monthly in Portland, Oregon, RAIN calls itself “a monthly information access journal and reference service for people developing more satisfying patterns that increase local self-reliance and press less heavily on our limited resources.”
The 24-page journal carries no advertising. It is handsomely designed, and intelligently — and compassionately — written. I wish the folks at RAIN had as big a bankroll as the folks at the CoEvolution Quarterly. Except for the difference in size, the magazines are much alike.
RAIN gives access to “solid technical support for evaluating and implementing new ideas; ecological and philosophical perceptions that can help create more satisfying options for living, working, and playing; and up-to-date information on people, events, and publications.”
The three articles RAIN has graciously given us permission to reprint suggest the broad scope of the magazine. If you’re interested in subscribing, send $10 for a one-year subscription to RAIN, 2270 N.W. Irving, Portland, OR 97210.
— Ed.
The Third Pig Is Always Fattest
I think it was Roger Blobaum who told us the story of the Third Pig. A series of experiments were made, feeding one pig normal food, feeding a second pig only on the undigested food passed through the first pig’s system, feeding a third pig only on the unabsorbed food in the feces of the second pig, and so on. Amazingly, the third pig was always fattest! Enzymes in the digestive tracts of the first two pigs converted normally unavailable food into forms that could be absorbed by the third pig. The Third Pig is a useful image for a society that knows how to cleverly take advantage of the value remaining in cast-off wastes.
We’ve been a First Pig Society — getting everything custom-made to our specifications, yet always poor because we have to pay the high costs of providing exactly what we demand, and again to get rid of our unwanted wastes. Such trash still has a lot of the value originally put into it — a discarded water heater may have just been too small, or the heater failed but the tank was still o.k. Junkyard autos still have many good parts, or at least are a resource of excellent alloy metals. It takes different skills and resourcefulness to match our dreams to what can be made from what’s available, just as it takes different enzymes to release the food value remaining in our food wastes. But those skills allow a person or society to take advantage of work already done, and make living cheaper and easier. Looking back to growing up in smalltown America, I was always puzzled why the junkman drove the biggest Cadillac in town — now maybe I understand!
— TB
Back about 1973, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg explained in Io-Earth Journal that they were using a “lost technology” such as the impulse, or Pelton, wheel to power their homesteads. In the interview they mentioned how surprised they were that such ecologic techniques were gathering dust unnoticed on library shelves, lost to all except the most curious as progress leap-frogged over them. Most appropriate technologists can similarly recall when they first realized that much of the know-how and wisdom they needed was obscurely catalogued à la Dewey or locked up in the head of some old geezer-guru type who lived nearby. The point is that unless we pay attention to what we’re about and put heads into the space that allows new patterns to emerge from the old realities, we may fail to recognize what is directly beneath our noses. It is entirely too easy to miss one’s own milieu, to fail to perceive the commonplaces of life and livelihood.
Firch Zen
Such is the cosmic obscurity of the home scrap yard, junk pile, or, as those rural Texans among you might have it, the firch. The Zen aspects of firch are inherent in 1) the relationship of firch to our wasteful society, 2) the different quality levels of firch, 3) the acquisition of firch, 4) the operation and maintenance of the firch pile, and 5) the appropriate technology uses of firch. We’ll talk about each of these, some at length, some so cursorily as to beg response from the reader to fill in the still unnoticed gaps.
Fircher’s Paradise
Although America is daily more monetarily impoverished as it fails to switch to solar energy, there is still an incredible back log of waste material due to our incredible affluence. Even with an over-emphasis on “barrel drum” technology as people copy Steve Baer’s home or Brace Research Institute’s savonius rotors, the 55-gallon drum is still at large, if at $2-$3 each rather than 50¢ or $1. Indeed, the situation seems strikingly analogous to our 40-60% energy waste in buildings (our “energy conservation potential”) and is similarly “designed-in.”
Firch Quality
Just as no other society on the planet wastes energy as we do, neither can any other nation afford to:
— plan the timed breakdown of products
— leave “repairables” around unfixed
— classify slightly blemished products as “firch”
The U.S. consumer ethic has led to single standard quality controls, reinforced by government regulations and trade association agreements. Cosmetic blemishes and non-structural damage to a product turn it into waste, whatever its basically unaltered utility. The attitude is, “if you can’t sell it in carloads along with the rest, it’s no good . . . get rid of it.” Obviously this is a perfect situation for the fircher or anyone willing to live with invisible imperfections. Expensive glass patio doors to which the manufacturer’s logo sticker was not applied or which has a few tiny air bubbles in the glass are often scrapped or cheaply sold locally after transportation from thousands of miles away. Rather than our present consumer standards of “That’s okay . . . that’s not okay,” an efficient economy would classify quality, and price, along a range of quality and perfection as “A-B-C-D or E quality glass.” Much of this irrational pickiness, which prevailed in affluence, will not endure in an era of energy and resource shortages.
After “imperfect” new rejects come “perfect,” operable but used products which are rejected for status or out-of-date style reasons. Too often in America, hot water heaters too small to serve a growing family or a new dishwasher are not “cascaded” down to a smaller family in the neighborhood which can put it back to the use for which it was designed (obviously re-use is the highest level of recycling), but rather turned over to the plumber for removal. The dedicated fircher can find these behind local plumbing stores . . . they’re cheap. Those with burnt-out elements are free or even cheaper, since their destination is landfill burial, awaiting disinterment in 2020 A.D., and taking material to a municipal landfill costs money.
Increasingly the next firch quality level, “repairable,” used, is fading out as products are not only designed to break down on time but to be virtually non-repairable when they do. More and more products are simply replaced rather than fixed for another 10 or 20 years. Often this occurs because repairs, unless you can do them yourself, are so complex and therefore expensive that it is cheaper to throw it “away” (you’re right, there is no “away”) and buy a new one. When new black-and-white TVs cost less than the shop labor, overhead and markup on a new TV installed in an old set, no incentive for restoration exists.
Further down the scale, right above raw materials themselves, are partially formed or fabricated items which can, with the appropriate tools and repertoire of fircher skills, be converted into something. Advanced firching consists not only in re-use and repair, but also design and “making-to-serve-as” from sheet metal, glass and auto body steel.
Some of the most useful tools for conversion of this firch to useful items are: oxygen-acetylene welding-cutting equipment, blacksmith forge and tools, electric arc welding unit. Indeed, with these the raw materials themselves can be turned into simple or specialized tools. The best resources to consult, if you can’t find a local blacksmith class, are two books by Alexander G. Weygers, The Making of Tools and The Modern Blacksmith, both $4.95 from Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 450 W. 33rd St., NYC 10001. These are full of examples of how to make all sorts of useful items from such ubiquitous firch as car bumpers, auto coil springs, plow discs, cast-iron plumbing pipe and lawn mower blades.
There is much more to illuminate and legitimize about the art and science of firching. We’ll cover acquiring firch next, then the salvage yard as a process (from thru-put to final product) requiring some of your personal attention to its organization and maintenance and, finally, the relationship of firch to appropriate technology. If you’ve any revelations that ought to be included, send ’em along to share with the rest of us crazy firchers. Anyone want to organize a conference . . . scroungers, recyclers, toolmakers, appropriate technology’ers?
— Lee Johnson,
with help from David Katz, Ken Smith and Dexter Bacon
Pleasant Undertaking
We’re getting closer to a world where we can die in peace and be buried with dignity, affirming the miraculous dance of life giving way to life. Until the client got cold feet at the last minute, it looked like Philadephia was going to get a cemetery designed exclusively for organic burials. Malcolm Wells, the architect of the dream and the builder of underground homes and offices, tells about it:
We make so many mistakes, most of us, even when we’re trying hardest to do good, that simple, direct acts of gratitude toward life — acts like the return of our own bodies to the living land that produced them — seem, sometimes, like the only uncomplicated and selfless acts we can ever perform. And then we find that it’s virtually impossible even to arrange that final gesture without tearing whole families apart at their blackest hours. The simple act of organic burial is virtually denied us by archaic customs, by perversions of religious teachings and by existing laws.
The anachronism of our still trying to cheat death through the use of poisons, powders and waterproof vaults seems almost unbelievable today, especially when we see noble deaths — deaths for the sake of life — occurring all around us. Each radish we crunch, every steak we eat, even the drop of blood whisked away from our arm by a mosquito, dies in the support of this miraculous, continuing, fantastically interdependent life we share — something we can never say about human deaths caught up in the undertaker-graveyard ritual. Admittedly, “undertaker” and “graveyard” are now “funeral director” and “cemetery,” but the ritual goes unchanged, getting, if anything, steadily worse as more plastics and more phoniness creep into it.
But now, at last, the death-practices of the Seventies are showing faint but hopeful signs of becoming dying practices by 1980. The ecology movement and growing national revulsions against poisons and plastics are creating whole new industries and are changing some of the old ones. And funeral directors, those most conservative of conservatives, seeing greater social acceptance and undiminished profits ahead, are cautiously starting to test the wind.
In a Philadelphia suburb, for instance, a new branch building is being designed, to be used exclusively for organic funerals, by a big-name funeral home chain. All ceremonies at the new center (there will be no shortage of ceremonies) are slated to be positive, life-affirming, natural, reverent and, hopefully, on some occasions, even joyous. Instead of somber, muted organ music and hushed voices there’ll be tributes to the miraculous life-death-life cycle that produced the life currently passing through death. Instead of the body lying ridiculously on display in a grotesque comedy of shined shoes and tufted satin — instead of its being poisoned, powdered and painted in a futile attempt to make death look like sleep it will be wrapped in simple burial cloths and placed, for the services, on a slab just a few feet away from a great glass wall overlooking a wild landscape teeming with life. (The small mammals and birds on the grounds outside will be fed near the window to assure constant activity there; a life-spectacular that will positively astound those to whom it is unfamiliar.)
Instead of random, half-relevant Bible quotations, read by someone who in all likelihood hardly knew the deceased, he will be remembered through brief reminiscences by his friends, through biographical material, and through pictures.
Following the ceremonies at the memorial center, the guests will leave for the cemetery, where everything from the carrying of the wrapped body to the graveside ceremonies themselves will still further tend to emphasize the eternal miracle rather than the temporal tragedy.
And talk about organic gardens! The new cemetery will be a mossy woodland filled with the sounds of birds and other animals going about the business of life. Such a cemetery will never have to expand to make room for more and more concrete burial vaults; with well-spaced trees as the only grave markers, there will be almost no limit to the number of burials possible. Human compost, like other kinds, returns very quickly to life again. The new cemetery can quite literally become the transitional repository for an endless number of lives.
Potential in all this, of course, is the possibility — no, the certainty — that out of it, and out of the shared experiences of like-minded funeral directors all over the country, will come ever more meaningful burial practices to affirm the best parts of all religions rather than to deny them as is most emphatically the case today.
Life, to death, and back to life again; the miracle of the living world. It’s been the theme of artists, poets and philosophers for centuries. Moved by its spell, Walt Whitman closed his greatest poem with this tribute to life’s magic circle:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
But, ironically enough, Walt Whitman waits for you today in a Camden, New Jersey, tomb. A granite-walled house he designed himself, tucked away there as conventionally as any, with embalming fluid, casket, burial vault, and all. So it will be a long, long time before his body begins to grow from the grass he loved. Too bad he couldn’t have lived to see the beginning of the organic burial movement.
But maybe it was enough that poetry like his did so much to get it all started.
— Malcolm Wells
This report first appeared in the now-defunct Environmental Quality Monthly in August 1972. Malcolm Wells can be contacted at his architectural office: P.O. Box 183, Cherry Hill, NJ 08034, where he’s dreaming up the next step in gentle architecture.
We’ll also pass on the happy news we saw in a recent Not Man Apart: biodegradable coffins are now available, made of wood-like plastic that eventually decomposes into organic matter in the soil. Almost as simple as the real thing.
It’s becoming easier to avoid the expensive ministrations of undertakers altogether with simple burial and cremation, memorial societies and the like. The excellent Manual of Death Evaluation and Simple Burial is now available in its seventh edition, $1.50 from the Celo Press, Burnsville, NC 28714. Death information, how to obtain simple, dignified and economical burial, how to locate the increasing number of memorial societies and how they work, and how the dead can help the living through body, organ and tissue donation.
Technology Is Not The Problem And Not The Answer
A friend stopped by today to show us some information on an avant-garde suburb in California. It was doing all the “right” things — passive solar design, 50% reduction in energy use, compost toilets, narrow streets, participatory democracy in its planning and growth. And it stuck in my throat. It was still a dumb suburb. Nothing was really changed, and I began to wonder what really would have to happen before my stomach said, “Yes, this feels RIGHT.” Renewable energy sources and small-scale technologies are necessary changes — but if they’re still being used to do the same things, we really haven’t made any strides towards a better society.
We’ve been designing a house we plan to build this summer and have been asked by several people if we were planning to have electricity. Well, yes, we were, though we knew from experience we would be using rather little. Yet something started to rub, and we started thinking more seriously about it. We listed pretty quickly what we would lose — stereo, electric typewriter, lights, sewing machine, refrigerator . . . some had simple and workable alternatives — cold boxes, treadle sewing machines, kerosene lamps — yet there was something quite different it seemed, lurking underneath such losses of convenience.
One night the week before, I’d stayed on the land we’d bought and had seen the stars like I’d seen never before. So intense and brilliant my eyes ached. Stars upon stars upon stars, with smudges of more stars behind. Stars like diamonds on the branches of every tree. And the moon, telling time with its shadow, that I’d been separated from for so long by roofs and walls and streetlights. I remembered another night then, a year or so ago, when we arrived at Pragtree Farm late in the evening and walked across the field to Woody and Becky’s cabin. Woody was sitting outside on a stool at the edge of the field humming and playing his guitar in the peace and stillness of the moonlight.
To most of us, night is a forgotten and foreign thing — darkness something to be shut out at its first approach with the flip of a lightswitch. Yet there is more than the fearfulness of night — there is the calm and peacefulness that we miss — resting, taking a deep breath and letting go of the tensions and the activity of the day. We loose our chance when we flip on the lights and let the day go charging on into the night. We lose the daybreak in the same act, not slept out as if we’d gone to bed when day ended. The electric light gave us more day, but too easy and too much light — it took away the night, lost in the reflections in the window, lost with the tranquility of nightfall, lost with the stars that give perspective to our small frittings about, lost with the moonset and daybreak that enfold us with the ebbing and flowing rhythms of life of which we are part, but of which we have lost our consciousness.
Our losses from a technology never lie on the same dimension as our gains. We see the gains because they’re new, but they blind us to the slipping away of other things that may be of greater importance yet which never get measured in the balance.
Electricity — whether from the wind or the atom — gives us music in full living stereo. All the music of history. But too often, too much. It’s not special enough to really listen to. We only half hear the music, we miss the music of the wind, we lose the music of ourselves making music. We lose the music of the moment.
How we will build our house and how we will live I don’t know yet. But I do know that our changes to date are only cosmetic. They’re only dimming the lights so we can see beyond. They’re only getting up the courage to take the first real step, to learn to choose and say no, to give up that which loses to us the irreparable bonds of life and leaves only that gnawing emptiness that no lights or stereo or TV or other diversions can ever fill.
Our focus on technology, on the one-dimensional improvements in our material life, in the quantity or sophistication or ease of producing things, has a basic flaw which we have ignored. Yet it shouts at us every day. It shouts in the locked doors and barred windows of our cities. It whimpers in the lonely bodies behind every door. It shrieks in every rape and groans in the deadness of every bureaucrat trapped in a role and a structure that drains one’s soul and lifeblood.
Our actions are meant to sustain our relations with other people and the rest of our world, not just to produce the material needs of life.
The work we do and how we do the things that provide for our needs are carriers of these less tangible dimensions that are vitally more important than the obvious product itself. We see, and seek, and measure the product of work but not the product of work on the worker. We see the daily tally of crime and the unsuccessful efforts of a militarized police force, yet don’t see in the success of the unarmed British Bobbies or Community Patrols that moral authority is the vital power.
CoEvolution Quarterly ran a short essay by a convicted rapist on how to prevent rape. His suggestion was to charge a suspect with indecent exposure rather than rape. The rapist became a deviant rather than a hero to his friends. He received a heavier sentence, but more, the ridicule of his peers. The human dimensions — our dreams and fears and joys and uncertainties — are the real thing we’re after in all we do, and we’ve lost sight of it.
We’ve lost sight of how much of our activity is not to provide for our material needs but to sustain our social and spiritual needs. How much energy goes into love and courtship! And what a seemingly inefficient process. Yet it has enduringly proven a most effective means of forming the bonds that ensure not just the conception but the nurture and protection of our young. Cars and houses and jobs and friends, as any advertiser can rightfully tell you, are more important for their symbolic quality than their material ones. The status they indicate, the values and achievements they express, the respect and self-respect they generate are fundamental and real.
The real effect of most of our technology on these dimensions of our lives has been devastating. Most of what that technology has given us — easy work that neither challenges nor produces things of value nor makes us valued; TV that replaces interaction with other people with inaction; autos that take us away from difficult situations and challenges rather than giving us opportunity to overcome them — take from us far more in these ways than they give us in their obvious and superficial benefits.
The efficiency of how we work or produce things is in reality not usually very important. Much of what we produce is wasteful or wasted anyhow. Far more important, and far more ignored, is what happens to us or to our relations to others or to other things in the process of that work or producing these things. We’re technologically smart, but street foolish. We put the product before the process, whose real product is people — how we feel, how we relate to others, the part we play in the cosmic dance that gives both joy and meaning to our lives. It is these things we should be concerned with, and these by which we should measure the value of what we do and the technologies we use to do them.
— Tom Bender
