Yurt Raising

Posted by Erin on 10 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: home



Our yurt!

Just before Halloween, we came back home. We were away six weeks. We visited friends and family we hadn’t seen in over a year. We gave slideshow presentations in Minneapolis, Seattle, Anchorage, Seward, Kenai, and Homer, nearly all of which were well-attended. It was fun, but I’m glad to be back, and glad to be working towards having our own home at last (in between ten million other projects, of course).

So on Friday, we took one gigantic step forward – going from a snow-covered platform to a full-fledged yurt in about a day. In the end, putting up the yurt was probably the easiest step in the whole home-setup process. Digging out the space and putting up the platform was certainly a lot more work. I expect everything involved in floor-painting, wiring, furnishing, etc… will also be a lot more work.



Sweeping snow off the platform, scaffold behind

Of course, I suspect the main reason for this is that with the yurt, we had Zeke (who works for Nomad shelter, and has put up a lot of yurts). He directed the whole process, did most of it, and scrambled fearlessly on the vaulted heights of the roof. For everything else, we have only our own inexperienced selves.

Here’s a brief photo-tour of yurt set up.



Erin on the deck, about to start




Lattice is up




Putting on the rafters




The frame is finished - where we stopped Thursday afternoon


The yurt showed up on the Thursday afternoon ferry, with Lee and Zeke from Nomad Shelter. Within the couple hours before dark fell (before 5 this time of year), we had the structure finished.



Feeding insulation through the roof hole




Putting on insulation




Arranging the roof fabric




Panda looking out through the lattice





Arranging the roof edge



Zeke descending the scaffold





Putting up the walls




Finished yurt


All done by midday Friday, about 24 hrs from the start. OK, it’s not quite finished. The roof is a bit too loose, so Nomad shelter folks will come over and switch it out soon. And we still have to get our stove (hopefully in a day or two), so we can start on the inside.

Just a few fun pictures of the views from here, and our growing next adventure…



From our backyard hiking trail




Getting bigger…



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Drill Baby Drill

Posted by Erin on 26 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: environment, video, sustainability



Packraft and Cook Inlet oil rig

As our financial system has crashed, and oil prices have crashed along with it, the “Drill Baby Drill!” slogan has been pushed into the background. But it’s an issue that’ll be with us long past November 4, and I’m still thinking about it.

What’s up with oil?

Compared to a lot of the other issues we spend our time thinking about, oil gets more than its fair share of attention. Why?

Because we buy it directly. Who knows how much copper costs? Or how much they’re using? But gas prices are listed on giant billboards strewn across every city and town. Other non-renewable resources (coal, metals, etc…) are hidden in the things we buy and the electricity we consume.

When prices skyrocket, people clamor for more drilling in more places. When prices fall, we go back to our gas-guzzling ways. Some people see oil drilling as a mascot – “energy independence”. Others see it as a scapegoat for all that’s wrong with our consumption habits and environmental footprint. Either way, people pay attention.

Oil’s importance


Seattle freeway

On the benefit side, oil is the most practical transportable fuel we’ve figured out so far, and our current system of moving people and stuff (via cars, planes, and boats) is based on oil. If we manage to prevent spills, oil drilling has a smaller footprint than most other mining operations.

On the cost side, oil exploration and transport comes with a major risk of catastrophic spills. The footprint isn’t zero even without the spills. And every bit of oil we use contributes to our ever-worsening problem of climate change.

Drilling as a red herring

Drilling for more oil fails to solve our short term economic problems, and it fails to solve our long term energy problems. Any new oil leases now won’t affect the global supply for decades to come, and won’t decrease prices significantly ever. More importantly, it’s not a solution to anything. It worsens the climate change problem. And even ignoring that – there’s not enough oil. We don’t have much in the U.S., and though no one knows exactly how much the world has, we’re clearly burning it much faster than geologic processes put it there. We’re going to run out.

And as we run out, we’re faced with getting energy somewhere. Maybe we’ll have efficient vehicles running on renewable electricity sources, carrying our energy in the form of batteries or hydrogen. Maybe we’ll take coal (a much dirtier, much less efficient, but more abundant fuel) and make it into even less efficient liquid fuel. The more energy we focus on drilling now, the less we focus on finding long term solutions that are positive.

Watch this YouTube Video that Connie Gannon and Carol Crooker made from an interview we gave on oil!

Also an interesting bit on oil addiction and recession from the folks at Sightline.

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Alaska Slide Shows!

Posted by Erin on 20 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: events, southcentral alaska



Slideshow screen

With the craziness of traveling and visiting folks, I haven’t had time to write anything interesting recently. Hopefully soon (I’m working on a post about oil). In the meantime, here’s our schedule for talks we’re giving in Southcentral AK on our way back home to Seldovia.


October 23, Anchorage:
Thursday October 23, 7PM
UAA - Fine Arts Recital Hall, room # 150.

October 25, Anchorage:
Saturday October 25, 7PM
UAA - Fine Arts Recital Hall, room # 150.

Oct 27, Seward:
Monday October 27, 7PM
Resurrect Art Coffeehouse, 320 3rd Ave
Sponsored by Resurrection Bay Conservation Alliance

Oct 28, Kenai:
Tuesday October 28, 7PM
Kenai Peninsula Community College, K beach road
Sponsored by KPC Showcase Series and Phi Theta Kappa

Oct 29, Homer:
Wednesday October 29, 7PM
Islands and Oceans Visitor Center
Sponsored by Islands and Oceans

Buttery goodness provided! Click on any of the links to download the pdf flier. Please spread the word!

You can also get this info on our Events page.


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Seattle Slideshow Tonight!

Posted by Erin on 08 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: trip preparation



Slideshow screen

7:00 PM, Wednesday October 8

at the Seattle Mountaineers building

300 3rd Ave West

Seattle, WA 98119

(206) 281-7775

Buttery goodness provided! Download the pdf flier. Hope to see all the Seattle area folks there!

We also have slideshows planned for late October in Anchorage, Kenai, Seward, and Homer. Visit the Events page for dates, times, and locations if you’re in one of those places.


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The Next Adventure

Posted by Erin on 29 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: events, home



Slideshow screen

Travel and Slideshows

This time, when we went from Alaska to Seattle, we decided to take a shortcut and fly. We’re currently spending 5 weeks traveling, bouncing between Seattle and Minneapolis, doing a variety of errands. The fun ones include seeing friends and family we haven’t seen in over a year. The less fun ones include digging through all the stuff we left in my mother’s basement, and figuring out how to get it shipped up to Seldovia.

We had a great time giving the keynote presentation at the gathering of the American Long-Distance Hikers’ Association, and we have a number of slideshow talks set up while we’re traveling: in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Anchorage (as well as Homer and Kenai, TBA). Visit the Events page for dates, times, and locations if you’re in one of those places.



Next adventure at 14 weeks (in August)

Next Adventure

There’s something I didn’t mention about that last backpacking trip. Hig carried almost all our gear, leaving me with a tiny school backpack holding maybe 10-15 pounds of stuff.

Have I grown suddenly soft?
Not exactly.

But I have been growing larger and rounder. Hig and I are expecting our first child in February. Given that this baby has already trekked about 500 miles in utero, I’m hoping he or she will grow up to be a good hiker.

We’re both really excited about this new adventure. I’m a little nervous at times, but I try and tell myself: “If we managed to pull off a major adventurous that nobody’s ever done before, we should be able to figure out one that billions of other people have done before…” Of course, we’ll have to put off more year-long expeditions for a little while, but other projects are brewing in my mind, and we have no intention of really “settling down” (for now, we’re starting to plan expeditions that can be broken into multiple pieces).



We have a beautiful yurt spot

Homebuilding

This new adventure has increased our desire to have somewhere a bit warmer and roomier to live in come winter (as much as we liked our silnylon pyramid). However, it’s a good thing that all we’re trying to build is a platform for the yurt we’re buying. For those who don’t know, a yurt is based on Mongolian nomadic houses, and is a round cloth structure on a wood lattice frame (ours will be 24′ in diameter and have insulation in the walls).



Hammering on Icy Bay wood

All we had to do was make a round platform. So we had to do was clear out an enormous amount of dirt, logs, plants, and roots, and rocks. Which we tried to do ourselves. Until we realized that cheap as we may be, hiring the backhoe was a better option.

And then we had to build the platform. Neither of us have any construction experience, so it’s lucky many folks around us in Seldovia do have it – and people were extraordinarily generous with their equipment, materials, and time.


Putting on insulation

In an attempt to make our footprint as small as possible, we managed to salvage nearly all of what went into the platform, except the smooth layer of plywood floor on top. Interestingly, nearly all the structural wood comes (via someone’s yard that it had been sitting in for 30 years), from Icy Bay.

The logging operation at Icy Bay was one of the most sadly wasteful we saw on our entire journey. In short: Alaska Mental Health Trust sells logging rights at a pittance to a Washington based company, which brings up workers and supplies from Washington without interacting with the Alaska economy, cuts down all the trees (not even clearcutting in patches), leaves most of them lying there, ships the best logs straight to Japan, loses many along the way, leaves a mess where it worked, and finally shuts down.



Salvaged plywood layer

During one period of this camp’s operation, Alaska had a “value added” law, forbidding that direct export to Japan. So they shipped the logs all the way to Seldovia, where they roughly squared them off, lost a whole bunch more of them, and then shipped them to Japan. About 30 years ago in Seldovia, Larry towed in the lost logs, had them milled, built his house, and left the remaining pile in his yard. He generously gave us part of his pile, and surprisingly, many of the 2×6s are still good today.

It makes me feel good to recoup a tiny bit of that waste by supporting my house on that very same wood.


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Greed

Posted by Erin on 23 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: environment, sustainability



Homes of the greedy

With pieces of our financial system exploding, while the government considers a massive bailout, it seems like a good time to take a moment to think about greed.

In Christianity, greed is one of the “seven deadly sins”. And Christian or not, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone saying that greed is a good thing. Yet we live in an economy and culture driven by greed.

People are easily consumed by short term rewards. Greed drives them to reach for those rewards and ignore any long term consequences. They want more… more… more… and they want to believe that there will always be more to get.

Financial Reality

In the financial crisis, people wanted more money.

Home buyers wanted more house than they could afford, and they wanted the influx of cash they were sure to get when they turned around and sold the house for a hefty profit. How could they lose? A few years back, folks were telling us we were stupid not to buy a house - whether or not we could afford it.

The banks, the investors, the financial industry… They wanted more money too. They wanted to throw their money at something and have it come back bigger and bigger and bigger. So they gave out more and more and sketchier and sketchier loans, and bought and sold them over and over again until their value was stratospherically inflated over the reality they were actually based on. The actual houses and the payments owners would make in the future.

Lots of smart people were blinded by greed. They wanted to believe that they could always have more - that there were no consequences or risks to ignoring reality. I’m no economist, and I have no clue what the government should do to fix the banking system. But in this greed and this crisis of financial resources, I see an analogy to how we’re approaching our natural resources.



Where the forests go

Physical Reality (natural resources)

We’re not just greedy about money. We’re greedy about everything. We want stuff. We want more stuff than we had yesterday. We want to have more stuff next year. And we want our kids to have even more stuff than we did. We want high tech gadgets, we want big TVs, we want seven bathrooms, we want cars, we want globe trotting vacations…

Whether it’s finance or consumption, we want to believe we can always have more. We want to believe in perpetual growth, and in growth without consequences. No consequences for the earth, for us, or for our children.

And we’re being blinded by the same kind of greed that creates financial bubbles. We’re leaving ever larger footprints on the earth, and not even looking at the consequences. Not just for natural ecosystems. Polluting our world and depleting our natural resources has consequences for our own health, for our future standard of living, for the rest of the world, for future generations… I think too many people assume that cute wild animals are all we are risking.

Most importantly, we’re not looking at the fundamental discrepancy between the overconsumption “bubble” and the underlying value that backs it up. In financial markets, we got in trouble because speculation got far ahead of the actual values of houses and businesses. In this, we’re getting far ahead of something far less flexible than house prices: The earth.

The earth’s forests, soil, fish, and minerals aren’t going to produce forever more just because we think we need it. Oil really is running out. Fish are vanishing. Soil is going away, as are the fossil resources that make fertilizer and pesticides. We are cutting down forests at a rate far beyond the rate at which they recover. We can’t wish ourselves into an infinite flood of resources, just because we always want more.

So we have to push towards sustainability. Anything else is just greedy.


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A short jaunt in the woods

Posted by Erin on 09 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: trip reports, southcentral alaska



Paddling into sunset

After spending an entire summer, fall, winter, and spring in the wilderness, perhaps it’s not suprising that we only got “out” once this summer. We’ve been outside of course – on any number of day hikes, picking berries for the winter, and scrambling to construct a platform for our yurt.

But only once backpacking. The realities of creating a new “more civilized” life, have eaten most of Alaska’s short-summer days, and fall seems to be upon us, with its copious crop of mushrooms, increasing rain, and ever-encroaching darkness. It’s the time of year when it gets dark by 9:30, and everyone ought to be going around with headlamps in their pockets, but no one is yet remembering to.



Parking Lot Planning

Unpreparation

“Where are our brown drybags?!” I shouted to Hig in desperation, upending his mother’s tiny house for the umpteenth time.

Giving up, we stuffed trash bags into makeshift and hastily-repaired backpacks. For people who just managed a 4000 mile expedition, we were woefully unprepared for a 4-day trip.


Rocky shore

Each time, we return from one of our grand adventures with nearly every piece of gear in tatters. Which means that a sudden decision to go on some short trip with friends turns into expedition prep all over again – sewing and repairing and creating all that gear we no longer have. I always swear I’ll never let it happen again. I swore that as soon as we finished this trip, we’d sit down for a grand repair-fest that would leave us with a gleamingly functional and super handy set of gear, ready at a moment’s notice.

Life gets in the way.

Land of Brush


Sunset in Coal Cove

Third in a line of five, I gave the devil’s club along our path a vigorous thwack with my walking stick. The enormous green leaves tumbled limply to the ground, along with their vicious armor of poisonous thorns. I cheered their demise. But stepping over the carcasses, I had occasion to wonder: After having seen so much of the state, why did we choose to live in a place that has some of the worst bushwhacking anywhere?

Between the devils club lurking under the canopy of spruce, and the thick band of alder and salmonberries that stands guard between the forest and the alpine, this is not a place where you move through country quickly. It’s a land for tricks: tricky routes to find meadows within the spruce, sneaky paths through gaps in the alder band, the major goal always to get between the ocean and the alpine as quickly as possible.



Lagoon

Luckily, we were five people (Hig, me, Hig’s sister Valisa, her boyfriend Sean, and our friend Sue). Hiking with anyone other than Hig puts bushwhacking at a much more relaxed pace. And with time to contemplate the thorny plants, rather than running into them full bore, I don’t mind bushwhacking nearly as much.

View from the Top

Always the first to turn in the fall, the bearberry plants glowed bright red against the white lichens, purple lupine, and dark green heather on the tundra. We picked king bolete mushrooms for our dinner, and tart alpine blueberries for a walking snack. In the clear air, the peaks of volcanoes posed for us across the inlet: Douglas, Aniakchak, Iliamna, Redoubt, Spur… Nameless local peaks and ridges surrounded us, picturesque and craggy.



Red bearberries over Port Graham Bay

On a short jaunt on this brushy tip of the Kenai Peninsula, it’s nearly always the alpine where you get your reward. We were lucky enough to be hiking on 3 of the 7 sunny days of the entire summer, and it was truly gorgeous.

Even after seeing so many amazing places, we never get jaded. Instead, we become connaisseurs of the wilderness, fascinated by the endless depth of details we might never have noticed a few years ago.

The Soaking



Alpine Sunset

A small shiny wet circle slowly formed on the outside of our sleeping bag. Rain thundered on our silnylon roof. Unable to sleep any longer, but unwilling to go outside just yet, I lay on my back watching the slow and steady drip near my right shoulder, marveling that our bear-destroyed, dental-floss-repaired, never-glued shelter didn’t leak any worse than this. It wasn’t even close to getting me wet.

A forest full of wet bushes in the blowing rain might just be the ultimate test of waterproof clothing. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen or heard of any raingear that can truly pass this test. Anything too cheap or too light tears instantly when exposed to actual bushwhacking, allowing water to pour in through the holes. Anything non-breathable is so heavy, and so clammy inside if you’re actually hiking, that you’re soon soaked with sweat so it might as well not be waterproof at all. Breathable waterproof fabrics do best, but even the best of them is only waterproof up to a certain point – none will withstand an all-direction rainstorm forever.



Sean overlooking the bay

That said, we have the best gear for cold and wet that we’ve ever seen. Our powerstretch fleece body suit still drains water and stays warm when wet after 4000 miles of use. More impressively, the hikeable drysuit we got from Alpacka was still far dryer than any of the gear any of our hiking companions brought along, even after having been beat up for at least 1500 miles of the trip (from Anchorage to Unimak)

A sodden forest is still a beautiful forest. A sodden blueberry still tastes delicious. A sodden meadow is as pretty and colorful as ever. But a sodden human is not quite as enamored of the outdoors as a drier one might be.



Tundra rest stop

Our original plan was to head up over another mountain pass, for another whole day of traveling and night of camping. But the valley beckoned us downward. We were close enough to reach town by evening, to reach dry clothes and a hot shower…

We walked meadows and bear trails through the forest, bounced our packrafts off the teeming crowds of half-dead salmon in the Seldovia River, paddled out the bay, and rejoined the indoor world.

There are things I miss about being on an expedition. The biggest is simplicity – no million projects on a daunting to-do list, no decisions to make except where to walk, nothing to worry about or plan for except getting to the next town before we run out of food. Of course, the flip side of not being on an expedition is the freedom to hike back home if the weather turns sour, and to thumb one’s nose at the rain from a cozy couch by a woodstove. And it’s not all bad. :)



Jewel moss

Lost Coast Bike Expedition

For a real expedition, check out our friend Eric’s Lost Coast bike expedition. He’s currently bike-packrafting his way from Yakutat to Cordova. Last November, that was one of the most difficult legs of our own trip, and as Eric walked Unimak Island with us in June, he grilled us on beach conditions and difficult crossings. Sounds like they had a tough time at Hubbard Glacier (a breeze for us), and breezed across Icy Bay (where we were stuck for a week). Go figure. I hope they’ve had less blowing rain than we had on Unimak, but given where they are, I wouldn’t bet on it. I at least hope they have enough food, and avoid any tent-destroying bears. :)

Sarah Palin – our Governor



Pond near Seldovia Lake

Shifting topics entirely, since I’ve ben spending the past week or two writing emails to folks desperate to know anything about our governor, I thought I might throw a little something in here.

Alaska has suddenly vaulted into the national spotlight. It’s kind of nice that the rest of the country suddenly realizes that we aren’t a small island off the coast of California. But given that no one ever noticed Alaska before (outside the ANWR debate), the governor and her family are now, for good or bad, the picture of all Alaskans (far more than the other candidates are taken to represent their states).

She’s a popular governor here. Not least because she replaces the truly despised governor before her: Frank Murkowski. But over her year and a half here, she really does seem to have been trying to get things done. Having a massive budget surplus from the high oil prices doesn’t hurt, of course.

On the national stage, I hardly recognize her. A governor whose short term has been all about a gas pipeline and an energy rebate is now taken to be all about abortion and religion and drilling everywhere. I worry that the political machine of a national party is enough to take the reasonable, compromising characteristics out of any politician, turning them into something far more frightening.



Rainy day return

But what do most Alaskans really know about Palin, anyway? Alaska’s always had a rather isolationist streak, and I’ve never heard anything about her thoughts on national or international issues. I wonder if she has thoughts we don’t know yet, or if she’s furiously working now to formulate policies? Maybe being in her state doesn’t really give us much of an insight into what she’d do as VP.

All this media attention over a potential VP and her family, with so little content… There’s nothing else in the Alaska news! As I hope Americans are too smart to vote for or against folks based on high school basketball nicknames, I think we’ll have to wait for the hubbub to die down – maybe for the debates – hopefully to see where she really thinks our country should go and how it should get there.

Seattle Talk

Soon, we’ll be heading south for a month or so… To anyone who’s been following us in the Seattle area, we’ll be giving a slideshow talk on our trip in October.

October 8
7PM
The Mountaineers Club
Seattle, WA

directions to come in a later post.


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Are we Against Progress?

Posted by Erin on 19 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: environment, southeast alaska, southcentral alaska, southwest alaska



Pebble Mine exploration camp

“You’re not against progress, are you?” asked Carl in the Lake Iliamna village of Pedro Bay.

“No, but…” Hig started to reply.

In the course of his life, our host had gone from delivering mail once a month by dogsled to running a post office supplied several times weekly by plane. For our part, nearly all of the 50 pounds of gear we carried between us was made of high-tech backpacking fabrics that didn’t exist in his dogsledding days: urethane-coated nylon, siliconized nylon, powerstretch fleece, dermizax, momentum, climashield, eVent…

But backpacking gear wasn’t the kind of progress he was referring to.



Scattered forest near Pebble site

He wanted to know what we thought about oil drilling proposals in Bristol Bay. We’d just finished explaining our concerns about the proposed Pebble Mine – the biggest issue in the region. Clearly, having qualms about oil drilling as well as qualms about a mine would brand us as hopeless luddites and tree-huggers.

We explained, truthfully, that we felt, on average, new oil drilling prospects were significantly less risky than large-scale mining in sulfide rock (as proposed for Pebble). But in the interest of harmonious interaction, we glossed over whether or not we actually thought new drilling was a good idea.

Fossil fuel extraction



Alyeska oil terminal at Valdez

Our modern world runs on the fossilized remains of ancient life. Coal, oil, natural gas, maybe methane clathrates in the future. Ever since we discovered this vault of ancient sunlight stored by long-dead photosynthesizers, we’ve been drawing down the account as fast as we can. Our rapid spending of this inherited energy wealth is what drove the industrial revolution. It’s what brought about the advancements our modern lifestyles are built on.

But this spending is not without its costs. Oil spills poison bays. Coal mining strips off mountains and pollutes the downstream rivers. And even if these accidents can be avoided, there’s the inevitable fact that on the other end, these fossil fuels get burned. Spewing carbon dioxide (and often other pollutants as well) into the air, our fossil fuel habit is rapidly changing our climate into something we’ll be much less comfortable with. Natural gas is cleaner than oil, which is cleaner than coal - but they all share problems.



Prince William Sound

And there’s no escaping that burning the accumulated energy of hundreds of millions of years in a few generations is fundamentally unsustainable. One drill hole more or less, it will still run out. We’ll have to move away from oil and natural gas… sometime later coal will run out as well.

In Bristol Bay, you have the rich marine life to protect, and the big storms and shifting sea ice to protect against. Combined with the fundamental problems of fossil fuel… I still think it’s probably less risky than a mine, but it’d be hard for me to come out in favor of that particular “progress”

Metal mining

So what about mining? We’ve long had concerns about the Pebble Mine, and strongly oppose its development. The combination of an enormous project, the poor track record of this type of mining, and a uniquely vulnerable area makes me pretty convinced that this one’s too risky.



Pebble Mine prospect drill rig

But surely we can’t object to all new mines? That would be silly.

The gold nuggets and the grizzled prospectors seeking them are both long gone. As we exhaust the richest resources, big mining companies are turning to lower and lower grade ores. Much of what’s left is in sulfide rocks – posing a high risk of acid drainage into nearby waters. I’m not sure whether it’s a problem of technology, regulation, or just slipping under the public radar - but the mining industry, both old and modern, has a terrible track record at protecting the waters around it.

Metals are a non-renewable resource, so some must be mined if we want to continue to use them up. But much of what we drag out of the ground is frivolously or wastefully used (I find it hard to stomach so much pollution for the sake of gold used in jewelry or stuck in vaults for investment, for example), and we don’t do nearly a good enough job recycling and reusing the rest of it.

The metals in the ground will still be there to be dug up later. And for a lot of projects, it seems like the mining industry needs to show that it can meet the commitments it makes before I’d feel comfortable getting behind that “progress.”

Logging



Icy Bay clearcut

What about trees? We need wood, and they regrow, right?

In some places, plantations of trees are grown and cut, and grown and cut again – farming wood. In fewer places, this is even done sustainably. Not here.

At least on the coast, Alaska sits at the northern edge of the rainforest ecosystem. Soil drainage, and topography make large trees rare. Climate makes them grow too slowly for a patch of forest to be loggable more than once since logging started here in the 1800s. Timber mining has rarely been economical without subsidies, incomprehensible loss-selling accounting practices, or at least near-giveaways of the trees.



Revillagigedo Island logging

A note on loss selling: “Native corporate logging in the 1980s was heavily subsidized by a unique tax break which cost U.S. Taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost federal revenue. Net operating losses (NOLs) are a loss of taxable income as recognized by the Internal Revenue Service. During the early 1980s, all corporations that lost money on business ventures were allowed to sell their NOLs to other corporations looking for tax write-offs. After 1986, Alaska Native corporations were the only ones in America allowed to sell NOLs, leading to a huge premium on the value of NOL “sales.” Some Native corporations in the rainforest region responded to the opportunity by selling their timber to a partially-owned subsidiary at a loss, selling the tax loss to other corporate buyers, and then reaping windfall profits when the subsidiary cut the undervalued timber.” - from http://forests.org/archive/america/privloga.htm

Sometimes, like in Icy Bay, wasteful dumping of all but the very best trees is the only thing that drives logging into the black. (We’re currently building our yurt platform out of 30 year old lost lumber salvaged from that Icy Bay operation).

And on the use end, Americans live in bigger houses than they need, and print on reams of paper that could be more efficiently made from some faster-growing crop.



Southeast Alaska rainforest

Even in the forests we walked through, small scale logging for local use could be sustainable. It’s the exporting of our last big old-growth forests dirt cheap that seems ridiculous.

Against progress

We don’t really disagree with everything. Each of these resource extraction projects has its own set of cost/benefit calculations. Some are a lot worse than others. Some we agree with. But on average, I’d have a hard time getting behind most new fossil fuel extraction projects, most new large mining projects (with current technology), and most new large scale logging of uncut forests.

So maybe we are against “progress.” But ‘d like the chance to redefine the term.

What is progress?

What’s progressive about large-scale resource extraction projects? Mining, drilling, logging… Bigger holes, bigger cuts, bigger pipes… More, more, more, as long as we can find just one more chunk of cash for the developers. That isn’t progressive. That’s the old-school way of doing things that has been destroying environments for centuries, and is pushing us up against the wall of a resource crunch.



Cottonwood sunset

Realistically, we can’t get rid of our dependence on all of these projects tomorrow. All those high-tech backpacking fabrics I mentioned at the beginning of this post are made of oil. The building I’m typing this in is made of wood. The computer I’m typing this on contains bits of copper and gold. Without simply disappearing, we can’t eliminate our footprint on this earth. But forging ahead with the unsustainable ways of the past is hardly progress.

Progress is a new way of doing things that is better than the old.

How about designing our manufactured goods to more easily extract and reuse those precious resources we usually throw away? (see Cradle to Cradle) Replacing our coal and oil with renewable energy? Designing our homes and lives and businesses to use fewer resources in the first place? Pushing humanity closer to sustainability in whatever way we can?

Those kinds of projects are progress.


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Trials with Logs

Posted by Erin on 09 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: southcentral alaska, home



Wrestling a stump

I’m sorry I’m late. I have been working on a nice blog post talking about some of the issues we thought about on our trip. For the last week. In between bits and pieces of time spent writing the book, doing some work with Nuka Research, working on the photo database we’ll be putting on the site, putting up salmon and picking berries for the winter, hiking with visiting family, and of course, trying to get ourselves a place to live not made of silnylon.



Canning salmon

Buying the yurt is the easy part. (we’re getting the 24′ one). Preparing the place to put it isn’t so easy. We knew we’d have to set up a platform, which means we’ve been spending time asking around town, scavenging lumber and pilings, and anything that looks useful from the dump. We didn’t anticipate quite the number of enormous logs and stumps we’d have to dig through to get to a place to put those pilings. As of yesterday, we’ve given up on the shovels and are hiring the more expedient help of a backhoe.

More interesting stuff to read soon. For now, here are a few pictures of my excuses. :)


Dog chasing spawning salmon




Hiking with Hig’s sister




Carrying lumber




Logs in the way




Our future home


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Is it Hard to Come Back?

Posted by Erin on 22 Jul 2008 | Tagged as: home



From calm sunny bays…

“Is it hard to come back?”

“Do you miss it?”

“How’s it going adjusting to civilization?”

We get those questions from nearly everybody. After all, a pair of people who’ve lived in the wild for a year must be at least a little bit feral – a little bit bear-like – a little bit wild themselves. How could we seamlessly integrate back into civilized society? The questioners look at me expectantly, ready for a tale of culture shock.



…to blowing snow…

Erin: “Everything’s going fine.”

I feel almost guilty in my answer, worried that I’m betraying the journey. I’m happy to be here in Seldovia. But not because I’m relieved to finally have the whole odyssey over with. The journey was wonderful. Life is wonderful. We knew how long we’d be – and the journey was exactly the right length.

“It must be nice to have it so quiet all the time.”



…to salmonberry thickets…

Screaming wind, the patter of rain on nylon, crashing surf, the chorus of bird songs… Even other outdoors lovers can have mistakenly romantic ideas about what it’s like to live outside all the time.

Simplicity

But there is a certain simplicity to the routine of wilderness travel. Each morning, we took down our 8′x8′ pyramid shelter, stuffed our belongings in dry bags, and placed our meager collection of items into their proper places in our backpacks. Then we walked. Or paddled. Or skied. We paused to eat, and sometimes to cook. We paused to take photographs. And at the end of the day, we set up our shelter again, pulled our bedding from the drybags, and fell into a deep relaxing sleep.



…to half-frozen rivers…

The To Do list was small. And it was completely impossible to forget the most important tasks: get to the next town before we run out of food, deal with the large brown bear approaching us, find shelter from the blowing snowstorm, navigate off the foggy mountain…

Transitions

But nothing was constant. With two gusts of warning, a calm day turned into a raging storm. With the swipe of a paw, our critical gear was lying in shreds. From the height of easy and pleasant travel, we stumbled onto steep cliffs, deep canyons, smashing icebergs, half-frozen bays, tangled bushwhacks, and frothing channels.

Our circumstances changed every day. And over weeks and months, we were pulled through the larger transitions of terrain and season. From roads and clearcuts to calm ocean passages, thick tangled forest, sandy beaches, frozen lakes, and windswept tundra. From sunbaked days and mosquito-ridden nights to misty rain, howling storms, bitter cold, and a nearly constant wind. From summer’s long light to the short blink of winter days, and back again.



…to rainforest waterfalls…

And every week or two, we had to re-enter civilization. We followed the outermost fringes of 4-wheeler or snowmachine trails, walking tino a town we’d never visited before, looking for a human. And for one to six days, we’d scramble to find a computer to post a blog post, an outlet to charge our batteries, a store to replenish our food supplies, a dry place to sleep, a phone to contact the outside world… We ran around organizing a slideshow presentation for the community, another for the kids in the school, talked to radio stations and podcast interviewers on the phone, and tried to make contacts in the next village on our route. We backed up photos and videos, and mailed our computer away, along with piles of glass balls, rocks, extra gear, used up journal pages and DVDs. We tried to figure out what gear and supplies we’d need in the coming weeks and months, ordering things online or asking my mother to mail them from the pile in her basement to the next villages along our way. In all the bustle, we frequently forgot to repair critical damage in our gear or to do more than glance at our upcoming route. And then we were gone again. Back into the wider world, where the tracks and trails of bears would reappear in place of the world of people.

Adaptability



…to giant bears…

Our “town life” is anything but settled. In the three weeks we’ve been here, we’ve stayed in two different houses. We’re working on building the shed we’ll stay in for the rest of the summer, and haven’t even started on our winter home. I just got a working laptop two days ago (allowing me to stop borrowing Hig’s computer), and we still don’t have a regular internet connection. I’m trying to balance working on my book with canning fish for the winter, working on this website, building the shed we’ll be living in, and living a healthy life.

At each village, town, and city, we jumped back into the bustle of civilized life – with a list of a million things to do in the few short days before we walked away again. Now that we’re in town more permanently, it’s kind of the same. No longer pinned by the need to progress to the next location before we run out of food, each day I have to choose between dozens of different things that need doing. The bustle is less intense, but longer lasting…



…to roaring campfires…

So, how do we adjust?

How did we adjust to the coming of the fall? To the sudden appearance of a hungry bear? To a storm pinning us down on a sand-dune island? To running out of food? To dashing in and out of unfamiliar villages?

When the storms of fall are upon you, it does little good to spend time thinking about how life is different than it was in the gentler days of summer. Wilderness travel is nothing but a constant adjustment to a world you do not control.

This life is different than the one we have led for a year. But this journey has trained us to be more adaptable people than we once were.



…and busy highways…

We can sew our lives back together with dental floss and aquaseal. We can adjust to life in Seldovia.


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