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Toolbox for Sustainable City Living | Associated Articles 2
February 9, 2009: "Tools for composting include worms," Albany Times Union
http://www.mercurynews.com/homeandgarden/ci11699093?nclickcheck=1
Tools for composting include worms
By Danielle Furfaro
Albany Times Union
Posted: 02/13/2009 12:00:00 AM PST
By Danielle Furfaro
ALBANY, N.Y. — Red wiggler worms are important
members of Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew's
household.
Because the creatures, which live in a box under the
sink, eat their weight in food every 24 hours and
multiply quickly, they can easily turn food scraps
into rich soil perfect for planting vegetables.
"It's odorless and very easy to do," said Kellogg, 34.
"The worms will produce soil for you year-round."
Vermicomposting is just one of the myriad
sustainable living skills Kellogg and Pettigrew have
picked up in the past decade. They've learned to
raise chickens in a city back yard, collect rainwater
and purify it for drinking and make biofuel for a
diesel engine, all with cheap, salvaged or recycled
materials. And all on very little land.
Their new book, "Toolbox for Sustainable City
Living" (South End Press, 242 pp., $16), gives
hundreds of tips for urban dwellers to gain control
of their living conditions and carbon footprints.
Time to change habits
Kellogg and Pettigrew's ideas would be considered
by many to be extreme. But they maintain that
modern conditions such as sprawling suburbs and
eating food shipped from thousands of miles away
are anomalies of the past century that have been
proved not only impractical, but also dangerous for
the health of humans, animals and the planet.
Changing the very basics of how we live, Kellogg
said, is necessary to the health and survival of the
human race.
"Very soon, this is not going to be a novelty," he
said. "It's going to be what we are required to do."
The book is divided into sections: food, water,
waste, energy and bioremediation. While it goes into
detail about the science behind their proposed
methods of sustainability, there are very simple
instructions for each practice.
Kellogg and Pettigrew are founders of the Rhizome
Collective, an Austin-based organization dedicated
to community activism and urban sustainability
education. For the past eight years, it has operated
out of an old warehouse in the industrial section of
Austin. The couple had been splitting their time
between Austin and Albany, but now they have
decided to put down roots in Albany, so they plan to
start a similar collective here.
Well before they thought of writing a book on
sustainability, they spent their days imparting
knowledge through workshops. Those workshops
evolved into the Radical Urban Sustainability
Training or R.U.S.T. program, which gave them the
impetus to write the book.
"We display ecological tools and technologies to
teach people how to be in control of their lives,"
said Kellogg, who also does consulting. "It's not so
much about being green as it is about building
community and taking care of our own needs and
being sustainable at the same time."
Kellogg's co-teacher for R.U.S.T. is Lauren Ross, an
environmental engineer with years of experience
cleaning up brownfields and Superfund sites. In the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, Ross and Kellogg
traveled to New Orleans to assess the level of
pollution in the ground and water at the behest of
grass-roots environmental organization Common
Ground.
They determined that the massive petroleum
contamination could be remedied with a simple
solution: They grew microbes that feed on
petroleum and had volunteers spray them in the
affected areas.
"We grew up big vats of it, all safe enough that you
could drink it," said Ross, 53. "The microbes you
grow are quite hungry, and fuel is good food for
them. They convert it to nontoxic carbon dioxide
and water."
Cleanup for less money
Ross said similar methods are used to remedy large
industrial spills, but that unlike government and
business, which could spend hundreds of
thousands of dollars on a cleanup, Ross did it for
less than $1,000.
"It's the difference between using affordable
materials and volunteer labor and paying a
consultant $100 an hour to study it in a 500-page
document," Ross said. "It's the equivalent of the
$250 toilet seat. What we are doing is challenging
the deeply rooted capitalist frame."
Which, in addition to saving the planet, is exactly the point.
"Radical sustainability is all about availability and social justice," she said. "The idea we hold in this culture is that only people who can afford it have the right to drink clean water. But this isn't about wealth."
Dylan Boyce is a longtime member of the Ironweed
Collective, an activist community based in Albany.
Boyce, who has run a series of skill-share events,
believes in what Kellogg and Pettigrew are doing,
but also believes it's necessary to use political
activism to make sure these projects are done on a
larger scale.
"When you are doing things on a much larger level,
you can make a bigger impact," Boyce said. "You
have to take your local government in your own
hands and get your city to adopt these policies."
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