First Zero Carbon Move

 

By my loose reckoning, I just made my 21st move of my life so far. In the past, sometimes the move was as easy as throwing a few bags in the car, while others involved moving vans and extensive packing. With my wife, this is our fourth move, and the move is my shortest, going from our current one bedroom to a more spacious two bedroom a block away. 

I was inspired to try moving by hand first because it is great exercise, and second by things I have read and watched online, especially an extreme minimalist who made an entire cross-town move with his bike and bike trailer. At a time when many want to trade their gas car for electric and coal for solar, we really need to do less of both. There is no free lunch, and solar panels and electric vehicles are destroying the earth just in a different way. 8 billion people can't do much sustainably when driving cars and using lots of virgin resources while throwing things away, so the less we do of anything matters., Most of the world lives a far lower impact existence than we do. Often the ways things have been done for millennia if updated with modern technology can sometimes (not always) be more sustainable than the way we do them now. For millennia before the advent of power from carbon, cultures around the world innovated ingenious methods for doing many of the things we depend on today by using hand or animal power, gravity, wind and design that used the forces of nature to do work. In fact, the primary tool we used to move is basically an updated version of this modern replica of a medieval hand cart.

I recently watched a video of an architect explaining housing types in New York City. Describing the mid-19th century brownstones that have stacks of garbage out front, he relates how there was very little household garbage when they were built since most wastes were recycled, fed to animals, or composted. We can learn from the thriftiness of the past

 Moving without a vehicle in the U.S, where urban infrastructure is dominated by parking lots and roads and everything else is an afterthought; doing anything without a car can be challenging. Being a town mostly built on a traditional pre-car model, Williston is better than some of the suburban hellscapes that dominate much of the country, so it wasn't hard to do a car-free move here.

The apartment we moved to was one block away, allowing a move from ground floor sliding glass door to sliding glass door. As a veteran of moving, I know that moving everything out three entrances to the parking lot to load up a vehicle, driving it over, unloading it, and handling everything again is much more challenging than just going out the screen door. Since we are on a busy "stroad", parking a vehicle on the street wasn't allowed. Stroad is a pejorative name for city streets with heavy and fast traffic that are noisy to live next to and preclude other uses like biking or any human activity outside of a car....they are awful. 

One of my moves long ago took me to live on the Taft-Mcfee horse boarding farm in Hamel Minnesota in the Minneapolis suburbs. The Taft's, decedents along the famed line of politicians, had a modest facility compared to the nearby rolling hills and fences of the Piper's and Turnquists who I worked for sometimes. Situated in the tumescent tree covered hills of Medina, a western suburb of Minneapolis, the area was a mix of 150-year-old legacy farms, expansive hobby farms, estates of the rich, and small suburban-style developments. I spent two and a half years living and working on the farm before moving on.

 The farm had one of the greatest back-saving inventions ever created a Rubbermaid cart like the one pictured above. I used it every morning and evening to muck out stalls, fill them with fresh cedar shavings for bedding and carry 50–100-pound square bales. It was a literal back saver. It maximizes the ability to balance a heavy load and push or pull it with little effort. In addition, it can be tipped forward as a giant lever to lift and move things into its capacious bucket. The wheels act as a powerful pivoting fulcrum that magnifies the lifting power of the user. For hundred-pound alfalfa bales, I would tip the front end beneath them and then push down on the handles, easily tipping a backbreaker into the bucket for transport. Once I could afford it, I bought one of my own. I also purchased one for the Sitting Bull College Library ahead of our move to a new facility in 2009. It moves books just as well as manure. With this handy tool, we have moved everything in our house in just a few days.

 Even if we had been able to load everything into a vehicle, how much added time and handling would it have taken to load and unload?

 The second indispensable tool was a handy Rubbermaid 55 gallon garbage can on a two-wheel dolly. We have never used it for garbage; instead, it is the easiest way to bring in a car load of groceries after a shopping trip. The great thing about it is that instead of boxing a lot of things that are hard to box, we set them inside, carried them to the new place, and unloaded them directly without arduous boxing and unboxing. 

We live in an oil field, and it seems a bit of a pointless exercise, but it is more about the practicality and exercise of moving with carts, zero carbon is just a fun way to spin it.  I don't bother to explain to my kind, awesome neighbor who offers his pickup why we are doing it the way we are. No matter how nice, a guy who drives a Harley and a big truck and works in an oil field won't get the concept of zero carbon or why I need that much exercise. Surrounded by huge trucks and SUVs streaming down the adjacent stroad, I feel a bit like a microcosm of too few global efforts to stem climate change. A small man with his hand cart amidst a sea of belching behemoths.

As we were moving, we kept getting interrupted by lawn care. First, a kid came to spread fertilizer or weed and feed. Then another used a noisy string trimmer, followed by a big mower and then a blower. It is a cacophony that never ends in the city during the summer. All for what? In addition, we had to choreograph our move around the morning and evening sprinklers. All to keep a strip of green, dog shit filled grass going. Sadly, I am forced to pay for all of it as part of my rent and even taxes because it is all processed city water. All that chlorine and fluoride dose nothing for the grass. It is one of the most unsustainable activities of our wasteful culture. Still, the capitalism that pits rental properties against each other, waste is part of the deal to attract business. Another story for another time.

As an extra job to pay the bills while working at the Taft-Mcphee farm, I worked for a mowing company traversing the width and breadth of the Twin Cities and suburbs with all that equipment on a truck and trailer. It was a dirty and thankless job that had two of us traveling from fancy properties in Wayzata to run down rental properties in the inner city, engaging in the Sisyphean craziness of lawn care. The only good thing was that in the pre-Google Maps era, I got to know the backstreets of the whole city pretty well, and decades later they are still imprinted on my brain like the hippocampus of a London cabdriver.

Meditation on the meaning of mowing has me thinking of Paul Kingsnorth's essay Dark Ecology which revolves around the simple efficiency and low environmental impact of mowing by hand. Like simple apes sitting in our trees, we don't seem to have the capacity to act on much of a personal or collective level to bring about the amount of change that is needed. Like Kingsnorth, I ascribe to his "recovering environmentalist" philosophy of there being little more we can do because the system we are trapped in refuses to change. My petty virtue signaling of my zero-carbon move means nothing next to my daily hypocrisy of living within an unsustainable system from which I can't escape. As someone who gave up tobacco two and a half decades ago after struggling to quit, it is nothing more than a few days of quitting cold turkey before lapsing into daily dependence. I have learned to "stop worrying and love the bomb" to quote from the cold war classic Dr. Strangelove. Our civilization runs on carbon and there is a longer road to change than we have time for. Realism requires that we look at all the "hockey stick" graphs that are destroying the future and not just carbon. 

Overall, it was inspiring to try and do something without using the vehicles that dominate our lives to such a degree that when gas prices go up, parts or cars are in short supply, it threatens to bring life to a standstill. Everything we can do to try and liberate ourselves from the unsustainable and expensive modes of movement gives just a little more freedom not to be so dependent on something that controls us more than we control it.