Admint Calendar

So crazy it just might work.

Being both a mint junkie and a anti-garbage saver of containers, I have on hand a bag full of little plastic disks that once contained mints. I've used some now and then for seeds, but consumption has out-paced re-use for a while now. This fall, however, inspiration struck my younger daughter and I, and we vowed to invent the Admint Calendar.

Decorating the tree. Painting and layout by the child genius.

After some discussion, we settled on cutting out a Christmas tree shape from a scrap of 1/4-inch plywood, painting it green, and attaching the mint containers. She determined the shape by laying out the containers to fit on the board we had; beginning a single one at the apex, her formula for subsequent rows was "add two, then substract one, then repeat." Making the tree took a few minutes, followed by an hour under a fan to dry it enough to do the next step.

Attaching the containers: over-engineering by the dad. (Not pictured: fat ring o' glue)

We have a genetic predisposition to build things to last, perhaps at odds with the surficial preoccupation of some crafters, and so we attached the containers with a glob-ring of gorilla glue and staples slammed deep into the board. Conveniently, the tops of the containers can be pulled off to allow the staple gun to do its thing.

Stashing the candy. Goodbye 'til Christmas day, Eggnog Chocolate.

All that remained was to snap on the lids and install the treats. Maybe the best thing about making your own Adventskalendar is that you get to put good candy in it. Not stuff that was made years ago. No opening up the door to disappointment. It turns out that Seattle Chocolates fit perfectly, and we happen to love them.

No product endorsement intended, but thanks for the glittery labels, whichever corporation markets this stuff.

So, there you have it. The Admint Calendar. The only one of its kind.

Silence of the Lions

 

  

All archaeologists must endure the ignorance of a populace that thinks we dig up dinosaurs (that would be paleontologists) or look for gold (leave that to geologists, prospectors, pirates, treasure hunters,...pretty much everyone except archaeologists, who chose their profession in part due a pathological aversion to wealth). But those among us whose work is basically to maintain compliance with historic preservation laws must also face a public that cannot fathom that something a mere 50 years old is considered Historic. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard, "But that's just trash" or "Well hell, I'm historic then," (think again, pal, you need to be dead and abandoned for 50 years), then I'd be rich, and might therefore have to give up archaeology.

On the other hand, we occasionally get to see some interesting, if not ancient, things. Like the moldering and abandoned maritime heritage of WWII, for example. My agency disposes of these things, obstructing our waterways or fouling the water, boats and floats that are beyond repair, of interest to nearly nobody; my job is to wring whatever information I can from them before they become actual garbage.

The boat above was launched in 1944. I don't have the full history yet, but it became a Coast Guard boat after the war, and eventually was sold off. This is the second boat of about this size and age that I've documented recently; the WWII boats that are left are not doing well for the most part, and before long all but a few beloved ones will be gone. Many are steel, but WWII still saw production of a lot of wooden boats.

Mass production, to be precise. My grand-dad was a teacher who spent summers in tidewater Virginia building Liberty Ships. These may be the epitome of mass production, but the more WWII-vintage vessels I see (tugs, dry docks, patrol boats, and so on), and the more of them I investigate, the clearer it becomes that the majority never saw any action. Many were never really mobilized, launched in the last year or two of the war only to sit idly until they were  sold as surplus for pennies on the dollar. Eisenhower, administrative officer extraorindaire, probably recognized the waste, speaking out as he did years later (as president ordinaire) against the perils of a military-industrial complex; before said beast was a threat to our economy and freedom, it was guilty of (mere) overproduction. But in 1944, neither Ike nor FDR nor any of the (finally) employed shipyard workers was about to object to padding the reserves and making a few extras if it meant the Emporer and Fuhrer (oh, and the Depression) would be defeated. 

But the fact is, many of these machines of war never did roar, or even approach the action. They sat. They collected dust and rust until they could be sold off. 

 

Other materiel was just cut loose, apparently. This photo is of a float that held up anti-submarine nets deployed in Puget Sound. Again, I lack a detailed knowledge of the history, whether this system would have really worked if needed, or when the sub-nets were abandoned. But the floats have lived up to their name, and bobbed around Puget Sound for decades. The heavily galvanized bolts that hold together the deeply-creosoted timbers can sometimes still be loosened, and although many are starting to fall apart, others are more or less like they appeared for years. Well, less, I guess, since one of the problems with these is that they leach toxic creosote into the water. That and their tendency to obstruct navigation and damage shorelines is why they are being removed. 

Yes, there were lions that roared during the war. Great guns on boats that laid waste to Japanese fortifications on Pacific Islands and German ones in Normandy, landing craft disgorged hordes onto beaches. But many of those were sunk or so heavily damaged that they do not survive today, or were so important that they became shrines, no longer used. The overproduction, on the other hand, escaped notice like the floats, or was repurposed like the boats. They saw no action, and lived to see another day. And another and another, until time and the elements did to them what the Imperial Fleet and Admiral Doenitz could not. So I walk around them and crawl through them, mostly in silence, taking photos and writing notes that may be their last words.

Green Tree?

Every year before Christmas, newsrooms in cruise mode revive the great Real Tree vs Plastic Tree debate. Every year as Hannukah kicks off, my college room-mate attempts to understand why so many goy insist on killing a fir tree every year. After all, Jesus only killed a fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22), and didn't do it again every year.

In terms of appeal, fake trees win only among the extremely fastidious and the lazy, for whom cleaning up a few needles is too much of an imposition, so the articles in recent years have often focused on the environmental aspect of the debate. Initially, the ersatz Tannenaum contingent had the upper hand, asserting that cutting a tree down every year damaged forests, whereas plastic trees last forever. 

But nearly all live (then dead) trees now come from farms like this one, just outside of Olympia. People like me come and cut trees, and the farmer plants more. A recent study shows that if the tree farmers don't kill the groundcover plants between trees, such farms are good for carbon sequestration--not as good as a forest, but still significantly better than fields of annual crops or pasture lands (and bonus: no cattle farts), which is what most Christmas tree farms were previously.

In my case--recognizing that this will not be true in all parts of the country--there's the added benefit that the round trip to get the tree consumed less than a gallon of gas. Plus, I'm supporting the local economy, helping a farmer make ends meet, and helping forestall the loss of farmland to development. Because this is an ongoing operation, new trees replacing old every year, it's a relatively stable habitat for birds, deer, and other critters that like something between grassland and forest. No, it's not pristine, but it has some ecological value, and it beats the hell out of a lot of the alternatives.

Meanwhile, fake trees are made of petrochemicals and metal ripped from the earth, processed in factories that consume more oil and create toxic waste, packaged in cardboard boxes (killing trees! the horror) and more plastic, and shipped from China the trucked to your locality. The carbon footprint is large, and the sequestration value zero. If these trees lasted forever, the footprint might be amortized, but fake trees make their way into landfills, not from generation to generation. 

[A Digression: The same goes for ornaments on the tree. If you are stingy and nostalgic like I was this year, then you have ornaments that have somehow stayed out of landfills for decades. A bunch are made from Christmas cards and chicken pot pie tins recycled when I was in second grade, waylaid from the waste stream for twoscore years.] 

All this should be famliar to those of you who reard or read reports on the Real vs Fake theme before Christmas, but what about after? Fake ones go back in a box or into the garbage, so making them less environmentally harmful is a matter of holding on for as long as possible before trashing them.

For real trees, the environmental impact can vary a lot depending on what you do after the holidays. At one end of the spectrum, you  could burn it. Torching a dry fir can be a great show, but it exhales the carbon it breathed in from the atmosphere for years right back into the air in a few minutes. You could douse the flame before it consumes the wood and bury the charcoal, in which case the carbon could stick around for tens of thousands of years. 

Many counties and municipalities have programs to mulch Christmas trees. Olympia even comes around to pick them up. The chipped trees become mulch in parks and in some cases may be sold or given to citizens; this extends the useful life of the tree, provides a local source of mulch with a lower cost and fuel use, and ends up in the soil. Sequestration time varies depending on conditions and from needle to branch to bole, but again something is better than nothing, and the breakdown feeds soil microbes, fungi, arthropods, and so on--it is carbon recycling, not emission. 

I'm stingy with biomass, and would no sooner give the city my tree than I would my compost. At some point in January, I take the tree outside, stand and all. This being the maritime Northwest, it can stay there looking green and alive until April or May, and in years past I have placed to to seem like part of the landscaping. Some years, as Spring comes round, I cut off the boughs and lay them among the blueberries as a nice acidic mulch; I may come back the next year and toss the skeletal branches aside. The trunk gets tossed in back for the native blackberries to clamber over, and eventually to return to the soil. Other years, I remove the stand and toss the whole tree in back. Birds hide in it, berries climb through, and the soil beneath gets better year by year. 

I rationalize habitually, but in this case I really do think that my choice of tree and my treatment of it after the holidays is as good a way to go environmentally as most of the alternatives. A live tree, planted out after Christmas, would be better, but I don't own any ground to plant in, and I don't know many people who have the space to do that year after year. No tree at all could be better, maybe, but it sounds like no fun. Besides, I want my local tree farm to stay in business.

Extinction of the Species

Most species were but are no more. Wiped out by vengeful gods or done in by inescapable facts. Knocked off by the competition, messed up by new world orders human and otherwise.


Most of the gone do not even live on in memory, but a few do. Dodos waddle through our lore trying to wag cautionary tails, but fail. Passenger pigeons do a little better, but their ghosts still topple out of the sky every time the enormity of their genocide occurs to them. 

We build dinosaur shrines in the world's great museums, more comfortable because we cannot be held responsible in their case. It's nice to believe that the forces that brought down these megafauna were maybe just culling the ungodly, that this kind of thing happened way before people walked the earth. Just how long before? Too many people have no clue, and I've met plenty who are unconvinced that humans and live dinosaurs don't overlap.


Such people are among those who remain unconvinced as well that there are any problems with human expansion, our appetites and wastes, and our vast creativity with chemicals and machines (unfortunately paired with a similarly vast disregard for the future of any other species). Much of the worst we apes have done has required that we burn the fossils of many species that if not extinct, have been dead for millions of years. A mass cremation of dead and buried plants and animals. A desecration? I've never heard people put it that way, but if it were my grandparents, I don't want them used for fuel.

Maybe I am not human enough, maybe I lack good old American invincibility. The kind that says we're the best breed, uniquely suited to rule the globe, unlikely to succumb like every other empire before us. When we are sure we cannot ever become extinct, that God chose us or we have a unique brain that will figure a way out of any jam, we're free do whatever we want, regardless of the cost. 

Like extinction of other species. We are now in the midst of a mass extinction so large that it will go down in geological history. People can argue, suddenly turn all scientific and demand to see solid unassailable proof, but really there's no denying that humans are partly to blame for the Holocene's (Anthropocene, if you're not orthodox) wave of extinctions. We may eat an entire species out of existence, or cut down its forest, cut off its river, fill up its swamp, take out its habitat. We may dump poop or dioxin until a place becomes unlivable, or pump the air so full of cow farts and smoke that we alter the ocean, atmosphere and climate. 

Many species become collateral damage in our campaign to cover the earth, but by and large we humans could care less. And we don't think it will ever happen to us. We humans can be cruel gods.

 

Taking Out the Garbage

 

A few weeks ago, the city dropped off the new trash can. Last year, some rats chewed a hole in the bottom of one, set up house, and were eventually relocated to the landfill. Maybe we called about it, or maybe it was just garbage can replacement week, but in any case, now there's this snazzy new receptacle that says I have a Waste Wise Home. I am wise about so few things that this makes me puff up with pride. 

But alas, I am a data junkie and a skeptic, so I have trouble accepting accolades without knowing I've earned them. A quick look on garbage day confirmed that for a block in either direction, there are only two or three of these little trash cans, so maybe I am generating less trash than a typical neighbor. (Rolling the tiny trash can back down to the house, my burgeoning sense of pride made up the difference in volume.)

I don't have reliable figures for how much garbage my neighbors produce, and I don't feel like going down the road with a scale to find out for sure, but the EPA reports that nationally, 4.3 pounds per person per day is the average. We Americans apparently make more trash than actual products. We may be the value-subtracted champions of the world. 

But compared to 30 years ago, we at least recycle more, an average of 34%, say EPA figures. This means that the average person only produces 2.9 pounds of outright garbage every day. More or less what we threw out 30 years ago, as it turns out, so we seem to have increased junk production to keep pace with the recycling fad.

I don't know how big or small a pile 2.9 pounds of garbage is, and estimates in the weight/volume conversion game vary. New Mexico cites a hefty 225 pounds per cubic yard, King County (where Seattle lives) lists 177 pounds per yard, and Honolulu a mere 100 pounds (ah...I remember the lighter garbage of the tropics). My Waste Wise can holds 20 gallons, which is about a tenth of the 202 gallons contained in a cubic yard, so a full load equals somewhere between 10 and 22.5 pounds.

Sounds hefty, but four people live in this house, and garbage pick-up happens bi-weekly, which means the weight of the full can must be divided by 56 to yield pounds/person/day. Run those numbers, and you get somewhere between 0.18 and 0.4 pounds/person/day. This is about 10% of the alleged average output. I have a little bit of a smug grin right now. 

How is it that my family can be an order of magnitude lower than average? A big factor is that we compost almost all of our food waste. Other than occasional fowl bones, it all goes out to the back corner the microbes and possum buffet. 

Another factor is what we remove from the garbage portion of our waste stream. Our recycling bin is about twice the volume of the trash can, and although I have no figures, the percentage that is recycled--by weight or volume--has to be well over 50%. The table below (also from EPA) shows paper, glass, metal, and plastics amounting to 54.5% of total output. Except for a small portion of plastic that is not recyclable, almost all of the weight in these categories gets recycled around here. 

Of the remaining categories, there are a few that never make it into a trash or recycling container. Olympia offers food and yard waste recycling, but I covet my biomass, and either compost it or feed it to the wild-ish area in back under the alders. Wood? I cannot remember there being an occasion for wood to be thrown out; trimmings and windfall stay in the yard (the occasional larger alder ends up as embers under salmon), old furniture ends up being sold or donated, and leftover lumber from projects either gets stashed for future smaller projects, or turned into kindling. Leather, rubber and textiles? Pretty unusual for them to reach the discard pile. 

What's left is mostly plastic. The un-recyclable lids of containers, plastic-coated paper, and packaging. Some of what any modern American brings into their house inevitably ends up as garbage. Lots of packaging has no secondary use. There are things that will never qualify as hand-me-downs. The best way to deal with these is just to avoid bringing them into the house in the first place. Minimal packaging is a criterion when I shop. By growing some of my own food, I eliminate a bit more, and one of the benefits of canning is that those jars can last forever (take it from an archaeologist), and each time I use one that's one less can inthe recycling bin. I really should start making beer again, so I can pull the same trick with bottles...yeah, that's it, making beer is good for the environment. 

So, that's the lowdown on garbage production at this residence. Well below average, but it does not take much effort. At some point in the future, landfills will be mined for the minerals and petroleum-based products they contain, but until then, it would benefit us all to aim low. 

How low? Think personal. By filling the garbage can 26 times, I am producing somewhere between 66 and 146 pounds of trash every year. The EPA's figures indicate most people are pumping out just over a half ton; Americans are getting fatter, but even that is way more than most people weigh. If everyone aimed to produce no more than their weight, we'd see an 80% or more reduction in trash going to landfills, which would benefit is all (except maybe those future garbage miners).

Occupy Walmart

One of the litmi of the Left is Walmart. "I Don't Shop at Walmart" stickers appear on bumpers of old Volvos, Prius's, and other awkward-to-pluralize brands preferred by progressives. Labor protests the poor wages (poorer still if you are a woman) and the anti-union stance of the company. Liberals smirk and giggle at that People of Walmart website.

And strangely enough, it works in the other direction as well. The Right--or at least the rank and file, the commoners with the votes, the LumpenRight--shops at Walmart. Scoop up them Asian goods, even though it meant your brother got laid off. Buy that beflaggled patriot wear and the disney princess crap. Squint and grunt at them commies who would let unions into Walmart. Swipe the card while Walmart swipes your paychecks. And for God's sake, vote Republican.

So, with this powerful symbol of piratical capitalism run amok, amidst every community with a 15 acre pad site and the critical mass of consumer households to offer, we are occupying parks? Parks?! Land that already belongs to the public?

Granted, marching into a Wall Street Bank or a Walmart Street retail establishment and setting up a tent invariably results in arrests, whereas most cops are just letting the protesters stay in the parks, entertaining themselves at the seeming cluelessness of some college kids, and the un-bra'd chests of others. Occupying private property is frowned upon in the US, and it's really hard to imagine Occupy Walmart lasting more than a few days, ending in the ozone and burnt hair aromatic aftermath of taser fests of the rent-a-cops and eventually the real ones.

But, we can protest outside. We can hold up signs about jobs outsourced and landfills bursting, about grandpa serving his country and working all his life only to be humiliated as Greeter because he cannot afford retirement. OK, that's a long sign, but you know what I mean.

And, stealthily, we can protest inside. Pick up something and replace it on the wrong shelf. Try on the maximum number of clothes every time, ask for assistance, do whatever it takes to make the workers work more, because that's the only way they'll get more hours and more cash, the only way Walmart will create more jobs (crappy though they may be). Get yourself hired there, and then invite in a union. Go in and apply stickers with "This Used to be Made in America" or some other clever shit I cannot think of right now.

Or not. You don't need to sneak and snivel. Get in their face. Rouse the rabble, yell crazy stuff or go all yippie-theater on them 'til they escort you off the premises, making everyone there a little freaked out, a little less inclined to hang around and spend more. You don't even have to go there physically, just write letters to the editor, blog, expend your own breath ranting and exhorting (or, if you are not a blowhard like myself, riffing reasoning). Talk to your Walmart-shopping friends about how the place sucks money out of localities (not just what you spend there, but jobs lost, taxes unpaid, resources expended on their behalf, not to mention that act that someone who works at Walmart is eligible for welfare because the pay is so shitty).

Occupy Walmart however you see fit. Squelching the flow of customers, shaming the company in the public eye (all you gotta do is tell the truth for that to work), or advocating for their workers. Whatever you want to do. Just don't buy anything there.

Decomposite Sketch

Remember wanted posters with sketches of criminals, composites drawn from multiple observations filtered by memory? The Unabomber in a hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses, his face telling you that he was a young middle-age white guy, if not much more. One day soon (or a few years ago, if you live in a major western city), there will be cameras everywhere, and no work for the person who sat and listened to witnesses describe hair, jawlines, noses, and scars. The idea of a composite will live on, as computers merge the traffic camera shot of a pedestrian with the Quickie Mart shot of his face and the cell-photo of the crime in progress.

Composites allow their makers and users to triangulate, to approach from various angles, to interpolate and make a sensible whole. A composited composition like the movie Ran can even let the audience appreciate, maybe negotiate. Most of the time, though, composites are presented as a single true thing, more easily approached than the incomplete components, more readily read than the manifold individual accounts.

Archaeologists deal in decomposite sketches. Something once whole, broken and mostly decayed, informed maybe by a faded historic account or tenuous analogy to something alive. Culture fragmented then mended, extrapolated from the durable leavings of people long gone. Black greasy dirt telling tales of people who cooked and ate, walked about barefoot, their waste and dander of their life becoming soil. Hiding in that matrix, clues: tiny frags of volcanic rock brought from elsewhere and used to oblivion (almost), chemical traces where once were plants and meat, motes of charcoal preserving cellular structure from which ancient forests may be regrown in the mind's eye.


From the soil, artifacts, and ecofacts, we draw our decomposite sketches. With any luck, we may be able to conjure forth a good story of a people long since gone or changed. In a good site, the decay is not so complete that all the nutrients feeding this process have been leached away. In a good site, decomposition has left us archaeological compost, from which sprout theories and culture histories.

Likewise with gardening, I am a decompositer. Plants that are whole and even thriving, but which offer no food, aroma, materials, or beauty--they get whacked. Chopped up and composted to feed something better. Same for prunings and dead annuals and the windfall of leaves, flowers, catkins and cones that drop to my soil--all the disarticulated organics sacrificed to the earth deity.


Why the relentless chopping, burning, carnage? Because more than anything else, I grow soil. What grew before must be decomposed to make what grows next come forth, whole and expanding.
 

NRB

The Natural Resource Building in Olympia was built recently enough that the landscaping is rife with native species, many with edible fruits. Pretty good set on the berries this year (more salal than anything, but no complaints here), and it looks like there could be a decent amount of huckleberries (evergreen) once the frost makes 'em, tasty.

There's some kind of small tree that pumped out blueberry-ish fruit earlier in the summer. Not quite as tasty as regular blueberries, but good for fistfuls of sustenance as I walked to work. And of course the Himalayan blackberry is invading the plantings with its alien deliciousness. Although the NRB contains numerous experts on resource management, restoration ecology, and native plants, they're not the ones maintaining the landscape, and inevitably it has degraded from a native species perspective.

Still, not bad for a place where the 'pristine' native flora was wiped out more than a century ago, and I really appreciate that there are edible species to be had in the concrete jungle.

And I think I may be the only one, other than that hippie girl I saw gorging on salal berries last summer. She looked guilty for a second when she saw that I saw, then broke into a bluetoothed (finally, the word used as it should be) smile when she figured out that I was not The Man. Otherwise, I seem to be the only one feasting on the landscape bounty, and I make only the smallest dent. Most of the berries drop to the ground or even dry up on the plant.

Why? Maybe because people think berries from the market are good, or even those picked in the woods, but not if they come from a city. But I've watched for long enough to know there's no spray, and the plants are safe. Could be that food in unexpected places is invisible. Or maybe my shamelessness outpaces that of the other bipeds roaming around, who wouldn't want to be seen stooping and picking, risking the scorn of the smokers perched 25.1 feet from every door. Especially for salal or plain old blackberries. Only a newcomer would get excited about that.