My Backyard Microcosm

One of the things is has taught me how much of the waste I throw out is water. If I toss a banana peel, say, into a plastic garbage bag or even one of the city’s nifty green bins, the eighty percent of its total weight that’s made up of water gets hauled away too. But when it goes into my composter, that same water makes its way down to the roots of my roses and rises back up again — as nectar.

I’m always reminded of those medieval alchemists obsessed with turning base metals into gold. There’s no denying that the process appeals to my parsimonious Scottish soul: I put in garbage, it comes out stuff I now don’t have to buy. Often it seems to me that the economic benefits of my composter outweigh the environmental ones.

And there’s the message I’ve been angling at.

So much of what we let ourselves think of as waste…isn’t. It’s valuable, marketable stuff. We all know by now the chronic inefficiency of the internal combustion engine–that nineteenth-century technology that still drives millions of us to work while spewing out 80% of its energy as waste.

Every time you see a chimney billowing smoke, odds are its emitting a similar 80% of waste heat too. That’s a shame not just in the greenhouse gasses ratcheting up our global climate change, but also in the cost to our economy. We can capture that waste and put it to work.

There’s so much we can do in integrating renewable alternatives into on our energy grids.

It all comes down to taking the general principles I’ve learned in the microcosm of my backyard and putting them to work across our broader landscape. Follow through on that and we’ll end up with a macro economy that is more efficient because it works with nature rather than trying to impose its own rules. It all adds up to a safer world for my kids to grow up in and eat their vegetables.

Have a look at some of the actions proposed on the site, and start your own alchemy.

by Scott Gardiner