Who’s Who in Green: The Dervaes Family

In response to genetically engineered food, grown thousands of miles away from where it will be consumed and doused in chemicals, a rallying cry spread across the country – a homegrown revolution. People have begun to realize that the ultimate way to take control over their own food is to grow it themselves – even if all they have to grow on is 1/10th of an acre in a town like Pasadena, California.

The Dervaes family – father Jules, son Justin and daughters Anais and Jordanne – have inspired people around the world to start their own urban homesteads with their ‘Path to Freedom’ project, which has transformed a humble home with a small, concrete-covered lot in the suburbs into a prolific organic farm that not only grows enough food to meet the family’s needs but to sell to area businesses, as well.

It all started with a simple goal: to reduce the family’s water bills. Jules Dervaes, who had previously grown food and raised bees on family properties in New Zealand and Florida, decided to rip out the dead front lawn and replace it with thick mulch and wildflowers in response to the severe California drought of the 1990s. Slowly but surely, the family began ripping up more grass and replacing it with edibles instead – fruits, vegetables, beans, herbs and nasturtiums.

Soon enough, the family began to see the project as a challenge: how much food could they grow? How much money could they save? They took on a voluntarily simple, self-sufficient lifestyle, dedicating themselves to living green. Today, their little homestead in the city – which boasts solar panels, a range of hand-powered appliances, a solar outdoor shower, a cob oven and an enclosure full of goats, ducks and chickens – serves as an inspiration for millions of people interested in starting their own urban homesteads.

The Dervaes homestead produces an amazing 6,000 pounds of food annually in their 66’x66’ backyard. They grow over 350 different vegetables, herbs, and fruits, gather honey from their beehives, and eat the hundreds of eggs provided each year by their chickens and ducks. The family’s carbon footprint is impressive – they brew their own biodiesel (for a car that rarely gets used), consume just 6.5 kWh of energy a day, eat seasonally (and vegetarian), make their own compost, buy secondhand and make almost all of their food from scratch.

Their website, PathtoFreedom.com, offers tips and information about small-scale farms as well as a journal that documents the goings-on at the Dervaes homestead. They have also created the site FreedomGardens.org, which offers freedom gardeners a place to gather, share photos and information and network with each other. The Dervaes also have an online store, the Peddler’s Wagon, where you can purchase many of the items they use themselves on a daily basis, and they’ve started their own seed company as well.

The family is also the focus of a new 52-minute documentary called Homegrown, which will be screening at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and has made their own 15-minute film entitled ‘Homegrown Revolution’ that will be screening at the Green Lifestyle Film Festival in LA (March 13th-15th). Check out the trailer, below.

Jules, Justin, Anais and Jordanne have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s entirely possible to subsist on what your own tiny parcel of land can provide, no matter where you live.

Dervaes Family’s Green Score: 38,998

On the Urban Homestead, Chickens are Pets

Chickens scratch around in a small pen among a pile of straw, eagerly devouring any bugs they find, as their owner gathers their eggs in a basket. But you won’t hear the sounds of a tractor here – just highway traffic in the background. On an urban homestead, chickens are kept as pets even in small backyards, for the eggs they produce, their voracious appetite for insects and for their companionship.

Urban homesteading was already gaining popularity before the economy started this downward spiral, and given the money-saving benefits, it’s no surprise that it’s continuing to attract attention. The term ‘urban homesteading’ refers to a back-to-the-land movement among city dwellers, who find creative ways to use their limited space to support a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Among the more well-known urban homesteaders are the Dervaes family of the Path to Freedom project, and Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, authors of the book ‘The Urban Homestead’. Both families keep chickens and often write on their blogs about how much of a joy it is.

From the LA Times:

“I used to think it would be so great to bring the laptop outside and just watch the chickens and work,” Knutzen said. “But I can’t get anything done when I’m out here because I can’t take my eyes off the chickens. They are hypnotic.”

Because neither Knutzen nor Coyne had kept chickens before, their venture began with lots of research on message boards and websites. They learned that it’s best not to name the chickens and get emotionally attached (they did anyway), and that chickens are social animals, so it’s better to have more than one (they have four). Then there was the whole question of constructing a coop to ensure maximum chicken comfort and safety.

“I was talking to a friend of mine who used to be an architect who keeps a lot of chickens, and we think that architecture students should have to design chicken coops,” Knutzen said. “It’s the perfect way to practice how to meet a client’s specific needs.”

More cities are beginning to allow residents to keep chickens as pets as they learn more about the realities of doing so. There are a lot of misconceptions about the smell, cleanliness and noise factors of keeping chickens – the truth is, it’s relatively easy to keep a chicken coop clean and hens merely cluck contentedly. Roosters are the noisy ones, and you don’t have to have a rooster unless your goal is to breed your hens.

Amy Gates of the popular blog Crunchy Domestic Goddess is currently working toward getting a city ordinance passed to allow backyard chickens in her town of Longmont, Colorado – you can read all about it at the blog Longmont Urban Hens, which has lots of info about chicken keeping. Green Frieda is another great blog that covers urban chickens.

Link [LA Times] via [The Huffington Post]
Photo credit: Cute Overload via Green Frieda

The Upside to a Total Breakdown in Society, Or Why Utter Chaos Might Not Be So Bad (For the Earth)

Gas stops flowing and the roads are all but desolate, as only a few vehicles are still able to run. Container ships from China stop pulling into port, grocery store trucks can’t deliver supplies and emergency services can’t answer desperate pleas for help. Governments fall apart as they fail to control an angry, hungry, rioting population which, after a long period of total anarchy, finally begins breaking into pockets. Civil wars arise over resources like clean water. Civilization in general returns to a simpler time when everyone was left to fend for themselves, depending on the land for survival.

It’s pretty much the worst-case scenario, whether it were to come about due to a terrorist strike on the oil market, a shutdown of the economy, war or some other extremely disruptive event. And, though it may seem like it comes straight from the mind of a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, it’s entirely possible that society will experience a major breakdown sometime in the next couple of generations. We don’t like to think about it, and that’s part of the problem – we’re totally unprepared.

EarthFirst has already delved into what would happen if there were an extreme, widespread, prolonged gas shortage –basically, utter chaos. There would be numerous repercussions. Many would die. Our lives would change drastically. Few people would feel safe and stable. We’d be thrown straight back to the Pre-Industrial Revolution era, with a strange mix of 21st-century ideas and technology thrown in. But, could there be an upside to the dissolution of our modern world?

Barring nuclear war, the biggest beneficiaries of a total breakdown in society would be the earth and all of the non-human creatures that live on it. Like it or not, the major decrease in the human population that would come part and parcel with a total breakdown in society would be the single biggest environmental benefit this world could possibly experience. None of us want to imagine our communities, our families, ourselves dying off in war, hunger, disease and lawlessness – it’s a nightmare. It would be hell on earth, for a while. But the remaining population would pick up the pieces and find a new way, and the earth would be better off for it.

Imagine: a dystopian, practically technology-free society where factories no longer pump pollution into the air, cars no longer idle in freeway traffic jams, and people are forced to re-use everything they can. No more endless processions of plastic junk down the assembly line, no more hormone- and antibiotic-packed Frankenmeat being raised in inhumane, environmentally damaging conditions.

As life became almost completely local, we’d be forced to take over growing our own food, effectively stopping the environmental damage done by factory farms. Since production would stop on synthetic fertilizer, farmers would go back to using organic solutions instead. That means no more constant streams of poison going from the cornfields of middle America to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River, expanding the ever-growing dead zone that threatens sea life. We’d no longer be shipping tons of food from one end of the country to another, or importing it from overseas. We’d be eating fresh, healthy, seasonal food and we’d make damn sure not to waste any of it.

We’d get incredibly creative with re-using items. People would pore through landfills looking for things once tossed away without a thought, but which would now be seen as still serving a valuable purpose. Since disposable items would be a thing of the past, every item would be used until it literally fell apart. With factory production at a standstill, we’d see a resurgence of nearly-lost arts like hand sewing, blacksmithing, woodworking and food preservation.

Walking onto a suburban homestead in this practically post-apocalyptic world, you’d see a strange melange of simple old-fashioned tools, whatever 21st century technology still works and plenty of green tech like improvised wind turbines and greywater systems. It’d be like Mad Max, without all the mullets and pleather.

With construction at a standstill, forests would remain intact and animals would get a chance to build their populations back up. In many areas we’d likely see wildlife taking over abandoned industrial sites, like something out of a disaster movie. Since humans would no longer be expanding into untouched areas like a plague, ecosystems would have some time to rebalance themselves. Perhaps some endangered species could even rebound from the brink of extinction.p

Let’s break down a few of the benefits, just in the U.S.:

• Over 300 million cars off the road in the U.S. alone. (238,697,097 vehicles were in use in 2005, the last year for which we have a concrete figure). The EPA calculates that each passenger vehicle in America emits about 5.5 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually, so in a year we’d save at least 16.5 million metric tons from entering the atmosphere.
• Power plants no longer pumping CO2 into the air. The consumption of electricity in America accounted for more than 2.3 billion tons of CO2 in 2006, with coal-fired power plants responsible for 1.9 billion tons. That number is undoubtedly higher today.
• Over 300 million cans of beverages per day no longer consumed. Americans use approximately 212,000 aluminum cans every 30 seconds, and only a small fraction of those cans are recycled. The rest end up in the landfill. If we stopped drinking soda, we’d stop mountains of trash from accumulating – and soda cans are just one small example of the disposable products that would stop piling up.

Sure, there would still be plenty of opportunity for harm to the environment. Governments, struggling to regroup, would hardly be concerned with policing environmental offenses like dumping trash in the ocean, or the maintenance of toxic waste sites. We’ve already done too much damage to be able to simply turn back the clock to a time when most of the world’s population lived far more eco-friendly lifestyles simply by virtue of living closer to the land. But in all honesty, the earth would still be a hell of a lot better off than it is right now.

It’s unfortunate that it could possibly take a catastrophic event to force us to live in a way that’s healthier for the entire planet – including our own species – so that we could extend our time on this earth and ensure that it remains a pleasant place to live. But, let’s face it. Without us, this planet would grow up around our ruins and return to the lush, diverse, amazing collection of life that it was before we began messing it up.

Photo credit: I Am Legend, Children of Men, Mad Max

Book Review – The Urban Homestead: Your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city

Ever since I happened upon the Path to Freedom website a few years ago, I’ve been very interested in urban homesteading.  I’m eager to drink in as much information as possible for use now, as a renter, and in the future, once I own my own home.  So, I was excited to read The Urban Homestead: Your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen of the ‘Homegrown Evolution’ blog.

Urban homesteading is all about reducing your dependence on our consumerist, mindless-television-watching culture.  When you think about it, many of us are incredibly reliant on grocery stores, the power grid, city water and gas-powered transportation.  Our food is typically grown thousands of miles away, so we have no real connection to it.  And, what would happen if the power went out, grocery stores closed down, ‘peak oil’ actually  happened, or any other scenario that left us without all of the conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to?  We’ve lost the power that our ancestors held, which has been transferred to faceless corporations.

As an urban homesteader, you take that power into your own hands by growing your own food, saving (and sometimes producing your own) energy, water catchment systems and plain ol’ riding a bike.  You can take it further by raising chickens and other animals, foraging for edibles and even making your own alcoholic beverages.  All of these things are possible in city environments, and The Urban Homestead explains how to do it.

What I love most about this book is the authors’ refreshing attitude about the amount of work it takes to be an urban homesteader (and the occasional joking references to using these skills in the event of a zombie attack).  From the outside looking in, urban homesteading is an awful lot of hard work, but Kelly and Erik make it seem far less overwhelming with a ‘work makes work’ and ‘just do what you can’ take.  It gives you the confidence to start your own journey toward self-sufficiency, even if you start in very small ways.

The Urban Homestead isn’t meant to be a one-volume instruction manual for every single skill you need to be more self-sufficient.  Rather, it gives an excellent overview of the skills you should learn – along with many helpful tips – and lists of resources where you can find more in-depth information on each topic.  Think of it as a primer that points you in all the right directions for each skill set.  It’s an engaging read, and it will get you excited about the possibilities of living a better, more self-reliant life no matter where you live.

Link [Homegrown Evolution] + [Amazon.com]