January 1980 RAIN Page 11 Gary Snyder tells the story in Four Changes of a monk and an old rr:aster who were once walking in the mountains. They noticed a little hut upstream. The monk said, "A wise hermit must live there." The master said, "That's no wise hermit; you see that let- . tuce leaf floating down the stream? He's a Waster." Just then an old man came running down the hill with his beard flying and caught the floating lettuce leaf. diagrams, working drawings, theory and how-to. These details of all the systems are an invaluable aid to anyone interested in how to live morelightly in the city. Appropriate technology has often been criticized as a back-to-the-woods technology that is irrelevant for the majority of people who live in urban areas. The Farallones have clearly shown in this house that that ain't so. The Integral Urban House is an exciting and workable vision of how to live-one whose pieces can be changed, elaborated, revised and adapted to the specific situation in other cities, climates and temperaments. Obviously the cost of the project doesn'trepresent what it would cost to reuse the ideas. Much of the cost has been in the work necessary to figure things out and pull them together. Others don't have to repeat that. But other people also don't have national experts in biological pest control or solar energy at their fingertips to fine-tune their systems, so possibly the results of this "research laboratory" won't be ~qualled in broader applications. Time will tell. Some of the things in the book, such as energy and water conservation, solar technology, waste recycling, and urban food growing are by now familiar to many people and might be found in more detail elsewhere. But other sections go far beyond what is commonly available elsewhere: details even on urine fertilizing of gardens, non-pesticide means of controlling bedbugs, roaches, rats and other household pests, problems of lead-poisoning from urbangrown food and how to deal with it, or how to recycle dead honey bees into fish. (A ring of vaseline around the bedposts will keep bedbugs from having you for a midnight snack.) There is an incredible amount of useful information in the book, ano it represents an amazingly successful first attempt to pull all these things together. Neither the house nor the book are perfectin typical California fashion, no solar or any other kind of space heating was worked into the original house design, and its functional organization is incredibly poor. The book could benefit from an examination of the problems of recycling pesticide-, fungicideand herbicide-doused suburban lawns into food production. Although the authors obviously understand well how the house's systems fit into the larger ecological systems, the graphics in the book frequently fail to communicate those links. And it would be nice to know how much time more of the systems involve. Like all of us, the Farallones folks are still learning. As thorough as their efforts to turn wastes into resources are, and as little as they do throw away, they were surprised one morning to discover that two neighbors were mining the Farallones trashpile and finding uses for what little they were throwing away! - Tom Bender Figure 14-2 . Yearly Energy Budget of a Lawn Compared to an Alfalfa Patch The front lawn feeds rabbits, the neighbor's flies feed chickens. Not even wastes are wasted. Grass clippings (95,000 Kcal) Trash can Lawn 20 square meters Labor (2.500 Kcal) Lawn Alfalfa Note: All notation represents annual totals. Fuel (10.000 Kcal) Energy Input, Kcal Energy Yield, Plant 15,000 95.000 5.000 110.000 15.000 Alfalfa 20 square meters 21 lbs rabbit meat (15.000 Kcal)
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