I’ve been wanting to get the carbon miles out of my tropical fruit addiction (bananas, mangoes, limes), plus grow life-enhancers like tomatoes year ‘round, all while giving the ducks a much-deserved outdoor pond in exchange for their fantastic eggs and top-notch slapstick humor. This, taken together, is called “aquaculture,” a fancy name for a greenhouse connected to a duck pond by circulating water pipes. The problem here is (no, wait, there’s no problems, only hurdles); the hurdle here is, that natural, glass-paned greenhouses are not only far more expensive, they’re considerably more labor-intensive than the triple-paned but potentially toxic polycarbonate “kits” one can order. The latter can evidently leech some of those bad chemicals commonly found in plastics that tend to end in “-phenol.”
My good friend and weekly hiking buddy KB is my “aquaculturist” (believe me, a prestigious field in the near-future). He’s gone to a few workshops on the topic on South Carolina. He also is one of those people with a genetic Green Thumb. He sort of glances at a yellowish tomato plant and a week later he’s got enough tomatoes for spaghetti sauce for the winter.
So I posited to KB on our most recent hike that just as I believe I survived a year of using the worst kind of plastic water bottles when I was training for a marathon a decade ago (those little bottles that come with hiking belts, no doubt as full of “-phenol” and other Latin names as any substance ever manufactured by humans), maybe the mind (and the plants inside a polycarbonate greenhouse) can decide to transcend some…materials issues. In fact, that period of intense distance running was when I was at my fittest – my body was running on all cylinders like no other period before or since. It was the high water mark for me, physically, and I’m getting ready to launch back into that level of training now that I can’t really claim paternity leave from personal exercise anymore after a year of fatherhood.
I thus have a fair amount invested in this philosophy. Namely, my health and my life. “If I know about bad chemicals in a product, maybe I can stop fearing them and sort of overwhelm them,” I said, sipping from a stainless steel if leaky ‘Kleen Kanteen’ bottle since I’m now afraid of toxic leaching from the “Bisphenol A” allegedly in the Nalgene plastic bottles that hydrated me on five continents for two decades. “Maybe my body can filter out the bad chemicals, especially when it’s engaged in such massive bio-processing during an intense training regimen like distance running.”
KB, who’s been having frustratingly intermittent digestive problems for several months, was dubious about mind-over-matter at this stage in his life. “Yeeaaah,” he said in a drawn out, polite, Western way that means, when combined with rubbing the brim of one’s cap, ‘No friggin’ way.’ “But maybe you survived the bad water bottles because of something specific in your diet at that time of your life, or maybe it was just luck, or maybe the bad stuff is still stored in your fat cells.”
“Lotta maybes,” I conceded. “That’s why I’m hopeful that in the end, I decide. I program my system that a certain water bottle is OK for temporary use, or that polycarbonate is OK for the Greenhouse panels until I can afford a pricey glass/adobe/solar masterpiece of ecological sensitivity.”
“I’d ask the plants, too,” KB said, working his brim again.
Which was a good point. But let’s face it, I’m not going to be drinking from this polycarbonate. I’m just going to be just reflecting sunlight through it to, wait a minute, grow my food. Will my banana trees know the difference? Will the wavelength of the sunlight coming through the synthetic material be organic enough to grow nutritious avocados? I mean, not to get too whoo-whoo about it (this is, after all, crystal-soaked New Mexico I live in), but studies show plants understand at least emotion when spoken to by us watering can-toters. Maybe if I sit the bananas and the limes and the mangoes and the tomatoes down and say, “Listen, guys, it gets down to eight degrees in January and up to 109 in June. I’m trying to cultivate an environment for you guys that is 70 degrees and moist, all day long, every day, just like you enjoy it. Can you deal with a little bit of Bisphenol A leeching and slight wavelength skewing in the name of this noble and delicious mission? Because we’re talking about a savings of about six thousand dollars here.”
Maybe they’ll say yes. I guess we’ll see in 80 years if I’m still robust and planning a return to distance running.
Because the main point here, of course, is survival. Ideally healthy survival. Of course, the secondary, though still important, point, is Avoiding Hypocrisy in as many facets of my life as possible.
A few days later I met KB for lunch at the local Chinese place, and he brought a printout of some research he had done online after our hike that turned up the fact that Bisphenol A (called BPA for Orwellian short) was soon to be banned for certain food usage in Canada. “So I hope your positive thinking works if we go with polycarbonate on the aquaculture project at the Funky Butte Ranch.”
“Well, no more than we’re testing the same theory in eating from this buffet,” I said, spearing some grease-dripping potstickers. At least I’d be driving on some of this oil. Fill’er up (the vegetable oil-powered R.O.A.T, that is) and fill me up while you’re at it. The difference being you can change the fuel pump on your vehicle when it clogs. But back to positive thinking.
I’ve been reading about brain plasticity lately: even as adults our neural networks physically re-form all the time to essentially meet our physical and philosophical needs. We convince our brain that the truth is Good and then the truth is Good. That mindset becomes reality. So what I’m left pondering this day is, do I seek a greater good (year ‘round local food) by way of a lesser polycarbonate evil, or do I play it safe, trust the Canadians, and avoid anything with “-phenol” in its ingredients?
Postscript on the local living theme: this nice woman named Karen Bayard is making local dairy-free organic ice cream in Salt Lake City. She wants to win a bike so she can be the carbon-neutral ice cream lady for a new generation of kids and kids-at-heart. So if you want to check out her scene and help her win the bike, check out Inspired Ice Cream, and then click on the “Madsen Bike” tab at the top of the page.
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9 Responses:
May 23rd, 2009 at 7:49 am
Trust the Canadians. There’s a reason that their country is more beautiful, and they are more mellow. Maybe it’s the phenol……..
May 27th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Gulp. I suspected the comments might trend in that direction. Why did we ever leave the Garden of Eden?
May 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
I married into a farming family. My grandmother-in-law has been eating veggies grown in plastic coated greenhouses much of her life, and she going to be 93 this September. She’s sharp as a tack, sometimes a little too sharp!
I think eating non-processed, fresh grown, pesticide-free produce way out benefits the chance that the plants are receiving off-gasses from the plastic. I share your concern for plastic bottles or tubing leaching chemicals directly into the water. There is direct contact between the water and the plastic. I think if chemicals are going to be released from the plastic into the air, it will be during the heat of the day and in the summer. When it’s hot, you’re going to be opening the vents of the greenhouse to let stagnant air out and fresh air in. Air flow is necessary to avoid botrytis, so there will be constant air exchange.
Our greenhouses are covered in plastic. We can’t afford a glass house. Although, that’s the eventual dream.
Good luck!
May 30th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Phew. That’s a relief. Though she started a long time ago, and all this leeching info has been coming out of late. I suppose phenol-ignorance can be a kind of mind-over-manner.
May 30th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I’m with Jen on this one. The major positive of growing your own more than offsets the off gas negative. It’s not in direct contact, so if there is any food contamination it will be minimal. Mangoes bananas, and limes get peeled too, so that should be even less. My theory is to do the best you can with what your wallet allows and to feel good about the choices you made.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:09 am
Have you looked at “harvesting” glass? As in reclaimed from old buildings or looting it from abandon sites? Something has to be getting torn down within a certain raduis to the ranch.
Rammed earth for walls is relatively cheap, but labor intense. rent a pneumatic tamper and some optimistic college students, you could have a respectable greenhouse in no time.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:28 am
All good comments, and very helpful. Falling into used glass, so to speak, is definitely worth looking out for. And I’m considering some kind of natural material for the superstructure. This is, after all, the Land of Adobe.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Hi Doug,
Loved you in Seattle, read your wonderful book, etc., etc. ! 
We made our lean-to greenhouse out of old sliding glass doors, with metal frames removed. We found a window shop that saved the old ones to use as windbreak in-fills in deck rails, and sold them pretty cheap. But I found them on the fifth call in my search. Better quality glass, etc. - and we couldn’t afford the 1/4″ we were considering., anyway. But we did use the ‘celled’ polycarbonate for the roof (we’re too old to heft glass up there