[Lapg] It's kind of easy being green LA Permaculture Article in Los Angeles Times ""GREAT """

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

CALENDAR WEEKEND 
http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-wk-cover22jul22_b%2C1%2C3910643.story?coll=la-home-style
It's kind of easy being green
  The renewable-resource lifestyle known as 'permaculture' is taking root 
in L.A. How green can it get in frenetic, car-crazed L.A.?

It's a whole new take on the talking heads
	
  	
It's kind of easy being green
	
  	

By Susan Carpenter, Times Staff Writer


Take a look at Jules Dervaes. A few years ago, he drove a VW van and lived 
in a standard Pasadena bungalow ringed with thirsty St. Augustine grass. 
Today the grass is gone, and in its place is a leafy, aromatic paradise 
overflowing with basil, thyme and tarragon, onions, beans and eggplants, 
strawberries and even coffee — altogether the yard produces 6,000 pounds of 
food each year. Five chickens and a couple of ducks are busy cranking out 
eggs. He's traded the van for a 1988 Chevy Suburban that he converted to 
biodiesel and fuels with recycled vegetable oil. The house is partly 
solar-powered, including a solar oven that he keeps parked in the garage.

"A hundred years ago this was considered normal," he says.

Actually, it's not so odd today, either.

Dervaes, 57, and his family are on the leading edge of L.A.'s green 
movement — part of the growing impulse to take the old "reduce, reuse, 
recycle" mantra to a higher level. The green movement tends to ebb and flow 
with the economy and political climate, and right now, it has plenty of 
steam: The Iraq war and a down economy have a lot of people contemplating 
the benefits of the self-sustaining, renewable-resource lifestyle (it's 
called "permaculture" these days), and trying to figure out how to make it 
part of their disposable, go-cup existence.

An amalgamation of the words "permanent" and "agriculture," permaculture is 
a 30-year-old Australian term that's only now coming into vogue — a sort of 
shorthand for closed-loop systems that take advantage of natural cycles, 
using the waste products from one cycle to fuel another. Think composting 
food waste into garden mulch, catching "gray water" from the kitchen to 
irrigate outdoor plants, converting discarded cooking oil into biodiesel to 
fuel cars.

But in L.A., the question is: How green can you be?

Recycling a plastic water bottle here, reusing a paper bag there — easy 
enough. But brewing biodiesel with used vegetable oil? Scaling a garage 
roof to install solar paneling? Retrofitting the plumbing to recycle 
kitchen water? There's green, and then there's really green.

The most hard-core greenies, such as Dervaes, are demonstrating what can be 
done. But the cost is high. Dervaes, like many of the most committed 
greenies, has given up his job to devote himself to running an urban homestead.

But there are some elements that are easily done, and if you can absorb the 
philosophy, there are even more changes that can be made almost 
automatically. For instance, permaculturalists refuse to buy excessively 
packaged and environmentally damaging products. They think in terms of what 
they need instead of what they want. They're reusing the stuff they have, 
recycling those things they no longer need and restoring what's around them 
rather than buying new. They're getting rid of their lawns, their air 
conditioning, even their cars, embracing edible landscapes, alternative 
energy systems and forms of transportation that don't rely on fuels formed 
over eons.

According to Bill Roley, president of the Permaculture Institute of 
Southern California, 10% to 30% of the population practices some sort of 
permaculture — whether it's growing some of their own food or composting 
waste into their gardens. The number of people living the philosophy with 
fully integrated, self-sustaining lifestyles remains small, but they're 
demonstrations of what's possible.

Eco housing co-op

"Should we eat in the street?" asks Joe Linton, 40, pulling two loaves of 
fresh-baked bread from his oven.

It's Sunday night, and the residents of L.A.'s Eco-Village are gathering 
for their weekly potluck. Carrying plates of gargantuan strawberries, pots 
of brown rice fresh from the stove and bowls full of tofu and organic 
spinach salads, the dozen or so people who've gathered for this vegetarian 
feast are not sitting by or near the street. They are sitting at tables on 
the asphalt just a few feet from the cars streaming to a nearby stop sign.

The potluck is a statement against car culture as much as it's a meal. At 
Eco-Village, an ecologically oriented housing co-op with a communal garden 
and bicycle workshop called the "bicycle kitchen," few of the residents own 
or drive cars. In return, they are rewarded with a $20 monthly discount off 
their rent. "Ecologically, vehicles are the biggest-ticket item," said Lois 
Arkin, who helped found Eco-Village 11 years ago.

Arkin, 67, wears only used clothes, which she washes with nontoxic soap. 
Her apartment is outfitted with used furniture, a mini fridge and 
energy-efficient compact fluorescent lights. She takes her own bags to the 
market and saves the thick stacks of napkins she receives (without asking) 
from restaurants in her Koreatown neighborhood.

"None of that holds a candle to the destruction we do by driving," said 
Arkin, who gave up her car in 1991. When she has to go somewhere, she said, 
"No. 1, I take my feet. No. 2, my bicycle. And No. 3, the bus. I'm rarely 
in a car, but every once in a while I am. It's a real treat."

Arkin is not poor. She lives this way by choice, having "seen what impact 
our living patterns have on people all over the world. I thought, gee, 
shouldn't we be doing something differently to mitigate our negative effect 
on cultures worldwide? Where is this all leading?"

Slow going

"Many people are permaculturalists and they don't know it," according to 
the Permaculture Institute's Roley. "More people are asking for edible 
landscaping. Many people are thinking about how to recycle their organic 
material into their landscape. Twenty-five years ago, it was only the 
smoothies for lunch bunch and granola crew that was interested in that."

More and many does not translate into most, however. Getting the masses to 
convert to a more sustainable lifestyle is a slow process, as people warm 
up to the idea, becoming more educated about its benefits and understanding 
how to incorporate environmentally friendly change into their life routines.

"A lot know there's a lot more to do but it's not yet within their reach," 
said Andy Lipkis, founder and president of Treepeople, an environmental 
group that's working with city officials to manage Los Angeles as an 
integrated ecosystem.

To Lipkis, living a more sustainable lifestyle is a mix of challenging, 
long-term projects like installing solar power and small, daily habits like 
using cloth napkins, buying bulk items, shopping at the farmers market and 
making his own yogurt.

"We've tried to always be a normal family instead of a sprout-eating, 
Birkenstock-wearing, spend-all-my-day-doing-this-stuff family. People just 
look at that and go, that's not me," said Lipkis' wife, Kate. "We wanted to 
do it in a way that people couldn't dismiss it. We have two kids. We've got 
a dog, a mortgage. Stuff that all Americans have."

Like his garden, Dervaes came to urban homesteading organically — a journey 
that began with the drought 14 years ago and continues as an ongoing 
experiment he tracks on the Web.

"The drought made me rethink whether it was worth saving that lawn to have 
that image. When it didn't cost me anything, I could let it go, but when 
they were going to have us pay more money if we used more water, I thought, 
'Why should we do that?' I'm kind of a penny pincher," said Dervaes, who 
lives and works with his four twentysomething kids.

A couple of water bills later, he tore out the grass, but looking out the 
window at the dry, barren dirt was more than he could bear. He "threw down 
some wildflower seeds just to give it some cover" and hoped for rain.

He got it with El Niño. Wildflowers were growing everywhere, so Dervaes and 
his family went into the edible flower business, selling nasturtiums to 
high-end restaurants, until they realized that man cannot live on flowers 
alone.

"We were cashing in the flowers and paying organic prices at the health 
food store, so I just went straight to the vegetables," said Dervaes, who 
proceeded to rip out his driveway. His front, back and side yards are now a 
stunning arrangement of garden beds sectioned off with old wine bottles 
from area restaurants, the broken concrete he pulled out of his driveway, 
and trellises he found by the side of the road.

But the Dervaes family didn't stop there. Five months ago, they got rid of 
their gas-guzzling van, bought an old Chevy and converted it to run on 
biodiesel, which they make in their garage using old vegetable oil from a 
local restaurant. At 70 cents a gallon, the price is right. But the process 
is something else again: picking up the oil, then converting it in a 
36-hour process involving lye and methanol. It's enough to scare off the 
best intentioned.

The car's got about 10% less punch than they're accustomed to, but they 
enjoy the added benefit of smelling "like someone's cooking" when they drive.

Dervaes admits his family's lifestyle isn't for everyone. Still, he's 
"surprised at how much response we get on the Internet," he said. "We're 
just regular people. We're new at this. I think that's why people aren't 
intimidated. If we had 20 years experience, people might say, 'Oh yeah, 
sure you can do it.' But being new, we appeal to a lot of people.

"I think people see it as a possibility, especially since they don't have 
to move anywhere," added Dervaes, who's received e-mails from all over the 
world. "Most people thought they'd have to first of all spend a lot of 
money and second, leave the city, which is where they grew up. We still 
need the city."

City-centered

Cities, after all, are where the action is. It's where economies thrive 
because it's where the people live. According to the 2000 census, 79% of 
all Americans reside in urban areas.

And that percentage is increasing. The population of the Los Angeles area 
alone is growing by 250,000 each year. As more people move to the city, 
fewer people understand how to work the land. But it doesn't have to be 
that way, urban homesteaders say. More people may be living farther removed 
from nature than ever, but they can still remain close to nature's design.

"People need to understand their place in the system. They're a piece in 
the puzzle rather than the puzzle," Roley said. "The values of natural 
cycles are really phenomenal, but you have to wait for them. They're not 
instantaneous video games."

In a culture that makes it faster and cheaper to buy new products than to 
fix the ones that are broken, a culture that encourages quantity rather 
than quality, technology over nature, and the individual over the whole, it 
can be difficult to slow down and smell the roses. Slowing down even 
further to actually grow the roses takes patience, but it's a practice 
permaculturalists find worthwhile.

Julia Russell has been living in her Los Feliz home for 30 years, slowly 
converting her 1911 bungalow into a lesson in ecological sustainability. 
Her "Eco-Home," as she calls it, features a drought-tolerant, native-plant 
xeriscape in the front yard and orchard and vegetable garden in the back. 
Recycled wood cabinets, water-based paints, linoleum flooring and a 
built-in countertop compost bin are all features of her remodeled kitchen.

Sustainability

When she does her laundry, she uses biodegradable detergent and hangs her 
clothes outdoors to dry. When she does her dishes, it is by hand, so she 
can recycle whatever water she uses to her garden. When she needs to go 
somewhere and it's within five miles, she rides her "freight hauler" — a 
three-wheeled bicycle with a basket.

"The idea is to live locally, to function locally, to find ways to sustain 
yourself within your own neighborhood," said Russell, an elegant 
68-year-old who's been car free for 15 years.

President of the Eco-Home Network, an organization that promotes 
Earth-friendly lifestyles through weekly tours of her home and a free 
telephone hotline for consultations on sustainable living, Russell said she 
was inspired to live green when she moved to L.A. 30 years ago.

"I thought the plane had crashed and I'd gone to heaven. It was so lush. 
That's when I realized cities could be full of life and beauty and 
sustenance," said Russell, who hasn't been back to New York City since 
coming to California.

"You don't have to live in a tepee in the country to live a green lifestyle."