Strawberry Saturday

Strawberry Saturday

A Saturday post should be practical but relaxed, like the day itself, right? This post is about making jam, and if you have never had a jam-making experience you have missed out! It is a treat for all the senses, easy, fun and a connection to our ancestors.

Now that it is strawberry season it is the ideal time to start. There is something magic about strawberries, perhaps because they are the year’s first berries. Even more ideal is to have the whole experience, from picking the berries yourself on to the ladling the finished product into jars. The ultimate, of course, is picking wild strawberries on a sunny hillside, but wild strawberries are tiny, tiny little things and you need a ton of them. Also it is difficult to find the requisite hillside. The aroma and taste are exquisite and the color of the jam a joy to behold. When my mother used to write to say that she had made a dozen jars of wild strawberry jam, I would picture the warm sun on her back as she picked on the hill behind the house, smell the wafting aroma in the kitchen, see the pink froth on the kettle and the light shining through the finished jars lined up on the windowsill. I have to get my berries at the Saturday market, but going there is a fun experience in itself.

 Back home, with the jam at the boil, the house fills with delicate aroma while I admire the pale pink of the skimmed off foam and wait impatiently for it to cool so I can enjoy a first taste. Then comes the ladling into jars of the deeper pink sweet fruit itself. Some will be taken to friends and some will fill jam tarts next winter. But the first jar will be presented at Sunday morning breakfast and spread on toast. What better start to the year’s celebration of nature’s bounty can there be?

I said at the beginning that some posts will not be “green”, and this is one. On second thought, however, isn’t the enjoyment of nature a basis for all environmental concern?

Nature as Designer

Biomimicry

Asking nature for advice

What technology is so new you may not have heard of it and at the same time has been around as long as the green leaf and the termite? What technology uses the very latest man-made materials to do a job the way nature has done it for thousands of years? It’s called biomimicry and is defined on Wikipedia.com as follows: “Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a relatively new science that studies nature, its models, systems, processes and elements and then imitates or takes creative inspiration from them to solve human problems sustainably.” Or, as Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, put it in an interview  “I’d say that Biomimicry is asking nature for advice.” 

One of the fascinating applications of this new/old technique is found in Harare, Zimbabwe. The Eastgate Centre, a shopping center and office block built in 1996, is ventilated and cooled entirely naturally, using as a model the mounds built by termites. During the day heat is absorbed by the Centre’s materials, which have a high heat capacity. The temperature inside increases very little. At night, warm internal air is vented through the many chimneys, while cool air flows through cavities in the floor to cool both the interior and the building’s fabric. This passive cooling uses only 10% of the energy needed by a similar building with conventional cooling, saving the owners $3.5 million because there is no standard air-conditioning system, and leading to rents 20% lower than expected. The environment benefits also, of course, as fuel is not used for air conditioning and CO2 is not produced.
  It seems so obvious that if nature has figured out a way to do something successfully it would behoove us to copy it; after all, most of the rest of nature has been around a lot longer than we humans have. So why is biomimicry so new? I think it has to do with the cherished human belief that we are apart from nature, its masters and smarter. We think along certain technical lines; we create machines and chemicals that attack a problem, rather than letting nature work for us. Mimicking nature has been the furthest thing from our minds.

It must also be said that state-of-the-art technologies have played a part in both studying and mimicking aspects of nature. At present, another type of termite mound, located underground, with no obvious ventilation system but with constant temperatures and humidity, is being studied to gain information that should help us build energy-saving structures in harsh environments. This study would not be possible without computer technology.

Let us consider another manifestation of biomimicry. It is quite possible that you have a coat or a sofa fabric that makes use of the “lotus effect”. This is the cleansing effect observed on leaves, large-winged insects and water birds, in which drops of water remove bits of dirt as they roll off the surfaces of these living entities. Manufacturers are now making a water-repelling product that is applied to fabrics as nanoparticles. Water drops or staining liquids on the fabrics roll off, often carrying bits of dirt with them. This product replaces fluorocarbons, which were formerly used for making stain and water resistant finishes and which are harmful to the environment.

What is most exciting about biomimicry is that technology and nature are working together rather than fighting each other. Of course it must be asked why we need new technology – why don’t we simply copy nature exactly?

In the case of the Eastgate Centre, copying the termite mounds exactly would produce a building too fragile for us – we are after all considerably larger than termites. It would also require too much constant human intervention to be practical. The termites in their mounds apparently spend a good part of their day closing off and opening channels to maximize the desired effect. We need to relate to nature, not identify with it.

There is a larger lesson as well for us humans in the examples of biomimicry. Simply going back to nature would be neither possible nor desirable for most of us. We humans have, for example, developed to the point where we cannot drink water from most ponds and streams, as do other mammals; we need to clean up our drinking water. Seeing technology as the manifestation of the best of human imagination and putting it to work responsibly is an exciting and creative venture. Using nature willy-nilly for our own ends leads to crises like global warming. Nature strikes back. Working against nature is a losing proposition for both partners; working with it is a win-win situation for both. Let this be the new paradigm for a new age.

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Sources:

Interview by Patti Marxsen for Voices, a publication of the Boston Research Center for the 21^st Century, 2006

www.inhabitat.com

EcoPerson

EcoPerson: You are a strand in the web of life.

Every so often people ask me questions that make me think about my personal outlook on the environment. Quite different questions, some philosophical, some practical. One person, for example, asked if I lived my environmental beliefs and was I a rabid environmentalist? I try to live my beliefs, but no! I’m not fanatic about them. That would imply identification rather than relationship. And environmentalism is all about relationship. The first law of ecology is “everything is related to everything else”. There is a human feeling environment as well, and it is my belief that if each individual finds his or her path of interaction with the environment in a conscious, informed and healthy way, then we have a chance of keeping life on earth sustainable.

Environmentalism is an attitude, a set of values, lived out by each of us in an individual way. It’s having a sense of responsibility and acting on it.

At the practical end of the spectrum was a question concerning recycling. The friend who asked it said she’d like to be conscientious about recycling but finds it such a hassle; did I have any hints to make it easier? I realized that she already knows the facts about local recycling; she wants to work out her individual way of doing it. As we talked I mentioned that it is important for me to have large enough containers for glass, cans etc. so that I don’t have to take them to the pickup points too often. The notion of going to the grocery store fettered by one plastic bottle, a couple of tins and a battery raises resistance; the occasional grand approach with a whole bag of bottles or a large container of tins is so much more satisfying. A simple suggestion, but she realized that she’d prefer doing it that way too.

These two questions are at opposite ends of a continuum that implies that the individual’s personal feelings about the environment and his or her personal relation to it are important. And ultimately those are not the result of knowing all the facts about global warming, sustainability or the need for biodiversity; they have much more to do with knowing oneself. This is a level deeper than the intellectual or practical level usually addressed in environmental articles and it requires a different kind of input.

If you feel that your eco spirit needs some feeding to help you find your personal relation to the environment, I’d suggest you watch David Attenborough’s nature films. Originally made as TV series, Life on Earth, The Private Life of Plants, and The Life of Birds feature amazing photography and fascinating stories told by this passionate nature journalist. Attenborough has combed the world to find vivid illustrations of his subject matter, and he tells us about it in an engaging way that makes it clear that this man has found his rapport with the environment and is able to draw us into his stories for just that reason. Attenborough has gone on to make more films, including The Blue Planet - Seas of Life, The Living Planet and The Life of Mammals. All are now available as videos and DVDs.

And now for the other side of the coin. Just as Attenborough draws us into the beauty and complexity of healthy life, T. Coraghessen Boyle has presented a horrifying and believable scenario of what will happen to this intricate web if we don’t take care of it in “A Friend of the Earth”, a novel set in California in the year 2025. Searing heat, wind and floods of rain, rain and more rain characterize the weather, rampant species extinction means that there is little left to eat but catfish (and more catfish….) and the population is, understandable depressed and without hope. Boyle is far too complex a writer to create a novel that deals solely with ecological destruction, which is only one of the themes in this intricate story. But the environment of the story itself, the gloominess, hopelessness and misery, seeps into the reader’s bones. One feels the possible effects of global warming rather than learning about them.

So where do you, as a feeling individual, find your links in the web of life? For me the knowledge that my grandchildren will, I hope, still be alive for another 70 years or so is a strong motivation to do what I can to keep the environment as intact as possible. I don’t want them to suffer in Boyle’s scenes of misery. I do want them to enjoy Attenborough’s visions of health and beauty.

Hi BlogFollowers!

 

Hi BlogFollowers!

This is my first attempt at a blog and I am excited and fearful. What am I doing sending all these revealing thoughts out into the ether?

When I started thinking about a name for my blog, greenrudin popped into my head immediately. It is not original. When my older son was a three-year old he had an imaginary friend, a monkey called Green Rudin, who drove his green car to nursery school, wearing green diapers. This son is now a very environmentally-conscious adult, so the name seems doubly appropriate.

A confession - not all the posts will be “green”. As an American living in Switzerland I’ll also write about the differences in norms and values found in the two societies, and probably pop in a few personal chats or harangues as well. There will definitely be an emphasis on food! The blog’s shape and ultimate direction will only gradually become apparent, in other words, rather like life.

Several of the posts have appeared in the same or similar form in The Round Robin, the magazine of the American Women's Club of Zurich.