environment

(Finally) Going Solar

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

When my husband and I designed our current house, we did it with solar power in mind. The house faces north, the roof pitch is steep for better solar gain, and we had it pre-wired for solar.

Five years later, we’ve finally had the panels installed. And while I’ve been itching to have it done for years, I’m glad we waited.

Weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, the biggest impact we could make for ourselves and the environment was to get an electric car. So that purchase came first. We love the Leaf we bought, and it costs us about a quarter of what we were spending on petrol. Those fuel savings helped us save up for solar.

Additionally, the technology has both improved and gotten cheaper over the past five years, so what we are able to afford today is much better than what we could have gotten when we built the house. I’m sure if we waited another five years, we’d see more technological improvements.

But with so many people switching to electric cars these days, New Zealand’s electricity suppliers are more frequently firing up the coal and gas generators as our current renewables production falls behind consumption. So I’m thrilled to have our own solar array, for our own benefit, and for the benefit of the planet.

Living With Earth

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Coes Ford–open…just.

Nature is bigger than we are.

That’s been clear from world events the past few weeks—flooding in Indonesia, earthquake in Mexico, multiple hurricanes in the Atlantic.

We can pretend the natural world doesn’t affect us. We can do our best to engineer human structures and our daily lives so that, most of the time, we forget we are an integral part of Earth. But I think this is a terrible mistake.

On my way to and from town every day, I cross the Selwyn River. Normally, I do this at a spot called Coes Ford.

The Selwyn River floods. It’s simply part of the hydrology and ecology of the river. The low bridge over the Selwyn at Coes Ford acknowledges flooding. The bridge was never meant to allow passage over the river during a flood. It was meant to survive floods intact, and provide passage during low water.

The ford has been closed for several weeks, but reopened yesterday. The bridge itself is still underwater, but it’s passable.

To me, there is something right and good about an infrastructure that acknowledges the forces of nature and doesn’t try to control them. It is good for us to accept that, while we have great influence, we are not masters of the planet. At Coes Ford, we will be inconvenienced by floods. This is part of the natural order. It is part of what it means to live here. And if we are inconvenienced by floods, we will notice when the pattern of flooding changes. We will feel that something is amiss. Hopefully, we will do something about it. It’s not a coincidence that when the Selwyn stopped flooding and dried up last summer, the focus of the worry was at Coes Ford—that’s where the locals understand the river’s pulse the best.

If we are separated from the rhythms of the planet, we won’t notice when something is wrong, locally or globally. When we are separated from the rhythms of the planet, we may not notice problems with our life-support system until it is too late. Separated from, and ignorant of the rhythms of the planet, it’s easy to deny that there are any problems.

And so, I embrace the inconvenience of Coes Ford. I thank the engineers who chose to accept the Selwyn River for what it is. I hope that, as human technology advances, we continue to remember our interdependence on the natural systems of Earth. We must live with the earth, not on it.

A Sense of Place

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

IMG_0147 copyMy daughter’s homework today involved exploring the idea of gratefulness.

One of the questions asked her to photograph the thing she was most grateful for.

This is the photograph she took. It is of our property, and includes a bit of everything here—trees, paddocks, sheds, gardens, and art.

Her answer doesn’t surprise me, and I echo her sentiments. I, too, am grateful for this piece of land that feeds us, shelters us, and provides us the vast majority of our entertainment.

And though some parents might have wished for her to say that she was most grateful for her family, I am pleased that my daughter has put her roots into the soil. I am pleased that she has developed a strong sense of place. In fact, I would have expected nothing less from the girl who spends every waking minute outdoors.

We develop relationships with places, just as we develop relationships with people. Those place relationships help us shape our identity, and place us in context in the larger world around us. They provide us an anchor, a whakapapa (cultural identity), and a homeland.

Our sense of place gives us a solid foundation from which to explore and learn to love the rest of the world. It makes our relationship to the entire planet more personal.

In order to care about the earth in general, we must first care about a special place.

In order to understand the tragedy of the loss of a rainforest, we must first understand the tragedy of the loss of our favourite climbing tree.

In order to understand the magic of an unknown place, we must first feel the magic of our own special place.

And so, for today, I am most grateful for this piece of land that has rooted my daughter’s sense of self, family and community in the earth.