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. Read more…