Post 4 – So Many Threads and Ideas

Right now is truly beautiful.  The sun is shining gently, there is no wind, the light is soft in the way that it is not long after dawn, there is visible moisture still on the ground, the birds can be heard singing but beyond that, there is silence.  I am truly grateful and I want to preserve this beauty but, lurking behind my gratitude, I feel this constant, low-level fear that we are too foolish to recognize that change is coming and too selfish to recognize that we need to act now to make that change something other than cataclysmic.

I said this blog was going to be about little stories from a small place so today I am going to write about what has happened in the last week or so since my last post.  First, an update on my worm farm.  About six weeks ago I fulfilled my long-standing plan to establish a worm farm so we wouldn’t send our food scraps to landfill thus adding to the methane problem but, instead, creating high quality fertilizer for the garden.  I will write more about the actual establishment of a worm farm later (parked) but today I want to report that those initial 2,000 or so worms have eaten through one working tray and are working on the next; they are fat and appear to be multiplying; and, they cannot keep up with the scraps we generate.  All good news but I am going to have to return to reference material to find out how to empty the castings and other slimy material from tray one without losing any worms.  I think the slimy material is scraps that got too wet and is now probably decomposing anaerobically thus producing the very methane I wanted to avoid but I’ll call the exercise a ‘work in progress’ as I refine what I do.  Overall, good news about the worms!

The second little, domestic happening from small place relates to our water re-circulator.   A few years ago, I installed a Grundfos hot water re-circulator to minimize the amount of water that we let run down the drain, while we are waiting for the hot water to come through.  I must say that it had never worked well until a few months ago when I had a very skilled plumber on site fixing a problem installation done by someone.  I asked him about the disappointing operation of the water re-circulator and he immediately knew that we couldn’t have the water re-circulator in place with a hot water tempering valve.  He removed the tempering valve, re-installed the re-circulator and set the temperature on the re-circulator to about 65 degrees Celsius which, I think, would have the same effect as the tempering valve.  He left it to me to set timer mechanism on the device.  Even though the device uses very little electricity to circulate the water, I was keen to minimize its hours of operation and so use as little electricity as possible.  I decided that it could be on from 8 am to 11 am  which should be enough time for any morning washing and 5 pm to 10 pm which should be enough time for any evening washing.  For the last few weeks, as the weather has got colder and I have been more interested in warm water for hand washing, I have been annoyed, in a low-level kind of way, that at various times it took ages for the hot water to come through, as I stood there watching precious cold water head down the drain.  I eventually got around to telling myself to stop standing there mentally complaining and ‘do something’ so I headed outside with a lever in my hand to lift the lid off the re-circulator.  I had a close look at the timer on the device and I realized that daylight saving time changes meant that my originally programmed times were causing part of the problem so I reset the clock and increased the overall on time by three hours.  The next time I turned on the hot water tap the water was a perfect temperature almost immediately.  Success!  Now all I need to do is create a reminder to change the timer on the recirculator every six months and, in fact, on all the timers in the house which I think is currently five.

Having dealt with these small domestic issues, the third matter I want to write about is two words that are becoming increasingly common in the discourse on climate change.  The first is mitigation and the second is adaption.  Many writers are commenting that we need to act to mitigate climate change but they are also saying that we need to adapt to climate change.  The need for mitigation seems obvious but is adaption needed yet?  It seems that it is.  We have already warmed the planet by 1 degree Celsius and there are consequences, such as increased drought and bad weather events.  The following recent article based on a report from the Australian Academy of Science makes the point.  If I reflect on the little actions I have just finished writing about, then my worm farm is a form of mitigation and the water re-circulator a form of adaption.  I think these are words and ideas that we will hear more about, as well as act on.

The final experiences from last week, which I think are worth commenting on, include another calculator which supports the significant, positive, mitigating effects of eating less meat and, indeed, keeping our overall calorie intake down; descriptions on where global population is heading (parked); a new name for the 20th century ‘The Great Burning’ which was coined by energy analyst Richard Heinberg and makes for very interesting reading; and, Pope Francis calling together important people from his world to, it appears, finalize an encyclical on climate change that commentators foreshadow will be more explicit than anything else a pope has ever said on the matter. Here is a link to the report Environmental Encyclical.

Well, I’ve now come to the end of this post.  All being well, I will write one more post this week and any spare time I have will be devoted to improving the functionality of the site so my increasing readership (now at three plus possibly a cat) will have a better experience.  Bye for now.  Jane