James Zike's writing projects: No Impact Challenge

As part of the University of Arizona's course, Our Human Footprint, the students were given the challenge of living for a week as close to having no impact on the environment as possible. The inspiration for this challenge was from the movie, No Impact Man. (If you haven't seen it, the link is to Hulu, where you can watch it for free.) This blog post is my report on my experiences during the No Impact Challenge and what it has inspired me to do.

I am choosing to do a blog post in a conversational, decidedly non-academic tone, because I am convinced that if we are going to make the changes necessary, we need big solutions, like already-familiar solar farms, innovative algae solutions for fuel production, and even the truly monumentally ambitious new projects on the horizon. However, there is a good chance we're all going to die (not to put too fine a point on it) waiting for big, expensive solutions that require political and financial support. So we're going to need a lot of small, personal solutions as well. I think we get the best small solutions from tapping into the tinkering power of regular people. To that end, I do not want to bury my own work behind the walls of an academic institution on something so important as fixing the environmental damage we've all done. I am really writing this post, not as a fulfillment of a final assignment of a class, but as the first step in a long journey; this is more of a personal commencement charge than a report. It is a necessary step that we're all going to have to take sooner or later.

So back to the challenge. The idea wasn't necessarily to replicate the Beavan family's efforts, but to really examine our own daily lives and find what we do that has negative environmental impacts that we don't need to do. The week was meant, as best as I understand it, to get a taste of what that life would be like to demonstrate that it isn't the end of the world or even particularly difficult if it is planned out right. If the Beavan family, in the heart of New York city, can turn their electricity completely off, give up cars, hand-wash their clothing, compost all their scraps, stop using plastic containers, eat locally grown food, and find low to no impact solutions to household and daily needs for an entire year, then we could try it for a week.

To begin with, let me just say, that for me the challenge was more or less another week (another part of the reason that I'm not trying to write a more scientific paper, my results would be statistically boring). What I mean is that most of the types of changes I would have made, I already did, but not for environmental reasons. I'm a "poor" veteran college student living in a family house that my wife and I fix up when we can as part of our rent. "Low-cost" has been our watchword for a few years now.

It is not that I live without electricity, but that I have to pay for it. The first thing we did when we took over the house was replace all the light bulbs with high-efficiency ones. We didn't throw away the old incandescent bulbs, but moved them into sockets we don't use that often. Eventually they will burn out, and we already have high efficiency replacements for them on hand. Someday we'll replace them all with the next generation of LED bulbs, and 30,000 operating hours and $50 of electricity later we'll check out the new, new thing. Our goal was to save money, the added benefit was that they help save the planet. Not turning them on for a week just meant that we switched to even cheaper LED flashlights, and cellphone screens when we absolutely needed light.

Shiny Things by Lindsay Zike
Found objects, acrylic paint (2011).
Private Collection.

I didn't have to worry about the 5-mile trek into campus; I ride the city bus because I couldn't justify a few hundred-dollars for the parking pass and gas. Our trash issues weren't that bad either as I found out back in March. One of the interesting things about being married to an artist is that she can find both a practical and artistic use for just about anything. Most of the trash-generating items that come into our doors gets collected and stored for later use, even more so since I took this course.

Food was a little different as we did have to think about our diets a little more carefully. Most of what I eat comes out of a can, box, or a plastic bag. Often times we choose food for convenience or cost rather than health or environmental impact. On this front, there wasn't much we could do, other than look at the food we already had on hand, and for the week, skip the frozen and refrigerated stuff. We also decided to skip meals we had to consume electricity to make. That meant a lot of bread-based foods (from a local bakery). It made that end-of-the-week pizza taste a lot better (I know, that is completely out of line with the spirit of the experiment, but I am beginning to suspect that humans don't handle self-restraint well).

Actually, I'm not far off with that aside. The mentality of economic thriftiness, a necessity of lower-class living, is almost identical to that of environmental thriftiness. It shouldn't be a big surprise either, since they deal with the exact same behavioral set: consumption. It is likely that our tendencies to consume resources at different rates according to our perceived social status is driving both our spending habits and our propensity to damage the environment. It is not surprising that thrift shopping happens to also be one of the three main tenants of the recycling movement (Reuse).

What happens as affluence rises is that we become less likely to see the need to be thrifty economically, and that lowers our ecological thriftiness as well. We all want to get the most bang for the buck, but when you have more bucks, the utility of a weak bang can be compensated with more bucks. Eventually, consumption becomes part of social expectations and competition. The same reason we have overflowing garbage dumps, the Great Pacific garbage patch / Pacific trash vortex (warning: graphic), and $3.8 million handbags, is that we are driven to compete in our ability to secure and display resources beyond all rationality. In a disposable culture the size of the trash dump is a sign of success. When one is on the lower end of the economic scales for whatever reason (like being a college student), the types of decisions one might make about products and resource usage happens to line up with sustainable living. The light left on in an empty room wastes money and increases carbon emissions.

So, really, for me this was more or less a normal week, except for one minor detail: spring in Arizona is officially over. Okay, so no, Spring technically lasts for another month or so, but here in the land of the Saguaros, 80 degrees is a cool day, and by the last week of April temperatures are pushing 85. On the first day of the challenge, I shut off the evaporative coolers that had been keeping the house at about 70-75 degrees. It took two days, but the internal temperature of the house hit 80 degrees in the mid-afternoon.

This required a solution because there was too much course work to be done to start taking siestas every afternoon to try to ignore the heat, especially since we turned off all the lights. The solution was amazingly simple, and mostly effective. I hung a sheet in the hall to block off the portion of the house we use the most (I had actually done this when it was cold to limit the area of the house I was heating), filled the bathtub with water, and used some twine to hang a towel into the water. The towel absorbed some of the water, which traveled up as it started to evaporate.

I had been inspired by an in-class lecture about the Amazon rainforest, and how the trees use capillary action to pull water up to their leaves (and this video). The basic idea is that water will defy gravity in a narrow space, like the fibers of a towel. When the water evaporates it pulls energy from the environment causing the air to cool. Within an hour the temperature in the bathroom was down to 70 degrees, the water in the tub was downright cold, and there was a noticeable draft. Just by using some basic physics, the few rooms we used the most were cooled without producing any carbon emissions. The rest of the week was rather pleasant.

Not wanting to mess with a good thing, I've left the setup as is, but have discovered that there is a limit to how effective this solution can be. As the outside temperature reached above 90, the inside temperature hit 80 again and the water has steadily risen higher into the towel showing that it isn't evaporating as quickly. My best guess is that the isolated rooms have hit an equilibrium of how much water the air will "hold" at a given temperature, although I'm not fully satisfied with that answer, and there is always more to read. Now that it is getting toward the muggy side, it might be time to turn on the external evaps, reflect on why they keep working when the bathtub did not, but while sitting in the cool breeze. Nonetheless, the short term solution worked well enough. If I were motivated to make it work on a longer basis, I might find a better long-term solution than a bathtub and a towel.

Still, this is the kind of tinkering solutions that I am convinced we need a bit more of if we're going to solve these really big issues. For the rest of this post, I'm not going to talk about my non-experience with the challenge, it was rather boring, but I'm going to tell you a bit about what it (along with the rest of the course) has inspired me to do. First, it is important to know that my wife is a fine-artist that works with ceramics and metals (as well as other mediums). Part of the reason we rent the house that we do is to make sure she has the studio space that she needs to do her art.

The major issue with both of those mediums is that they use a lot of energy. There are kilns that need to be heated up to 2380 F (1300 C) by either natural gas or electricity, smithing forges, welding units, acetylene torches ... It might not seem like it, but these are arts born of fire.

The issue comes if you want to be green about it. Currently, to my knowledge and hers, no one has found a way. It isn't a commercial problem. It isn't an industrial problem. It isn't a residential problem. There just isn't money to be made trying to figure out how to solve an art problem.

That is exactly what got me thinking. If there is a solution for something like this, and it can be made (cheaply enough that we can afford to do it), then we can show that other small solutions can work. Someone (Dan Rojas of Greenpowerscience.com) already laid the ground work. Every schoolkid knows that the sun + a magnifying glass = heat. The bigger the magnifying glass, the hotter the temperature.

It is clear that this kind of application of direct solar energy is exactly what we need for some types of our issues. We will be buying a lens and building a frame this summer. The heat generated is perfect for a lot of the metal working. We have also considered possible ways of using this to power a ceramics kiln. That is something we'll have to play around with until it works.

My goal isn't to make something that only works for my wife and me, I intend to make solutions for actual household issues as well (as low-cost as possible to make sure that no one is priced out). The big issue is then turning solar heat into motion and/or electricity. One solution to that is to start looking at technologies that were killed by the internal combustion engine.

Alpha type Stirling engine (Wikipedia)

One such device is the sterling engine. I'll let you do your own Googling, but the red is where you heat, and the blue is where the air cools down. The air volume expands when heated, contracts when cooled, moving the pistons and converting the thermal energy into mechanical energy. It is simple, really. There are a very large number of videos online of people that build these engines and run them off candles or propane burners. That is greener, but that is not really as green as it can get. Luckily, Rojas has already demonstrated a bit of the feasibility of using sterling engines directly powered by the sun.

With these two elements, if nothing else I can adapt an evaporative cooling unit to be mechanically driven by the sun. Running a belt to a salvaged alternator from a car will allow charging on 12 volt batteries. With a little more thought and study, this engine could generate a significant amount of the electricity for a single house. For my wife and I, we plan to use it to power and cool her studio. These are stupidly simple solutions that are relatively inexpensive and pre-date (for the most part) our use of oil as a primary fuel. Maybe they weren't used in combination like this before, but clearly, it can work.

When we're looking for solutions to these big problems, it might just mean looking for the simplest solutions we can find, even if they can only solve small problems. Global environmental change is not some problem that is happening "over there"; it is something happening right here and now. Each time we use electricity from the grid in our daily lives, we are driving the cause. Any solution to small issues, if widely adopted, will solve big problems without waiting for a magic bullet that may never come. We might have to change the way we live a little, but if it saves us money, and doesn't hurt the environment, then each one of us, as individuals, should consider the "stupid" simple solutions.