The March Hare: Spring '03
Issue 36

Open Season for Visitors * Member Bio: Penn * Working on Sustainability * Ecovillage Search * Eco to Go: Time * Can You Help? * Nature Corner * The View from the Top of the Rabbit Hole

Working on Sustainability
by Penn Taylor

As an ecovillage, it's a central part of the mission and raison d'être of Dancing Rabbit to look for ways to make our lives ecologically sustainable. With that in mind, we set out in December of 2002 to determine which aspects of life at Dancing Rabbit needed work to bring them closer to our ideal of ecological sustainability. From that list of possibilities, we chose three that seemed as though we could address them within the next year: cooking fuel, vehicle fuel, and vehicle use. We termed these three issues our "eco-priorities" for 2003, and formed committees to explore each of the issues and lay out a course of action to bring our lives more in line with our ideals.

Vehicle Fuel
One of Dancing Rabbit's ecological covenants is a ban on petroleum-based fuels. For this reason, the three vehicles owned by the Dancing Rabbit Vehicle Cooperative run on a fuel called bio-diesel. This is a fuel made from vegetable oil that undergoes a reaction with lye and an alcohol, and can be used in any diesel engine. From the list of main ingredients, one can readily see that it's possible to make bio-diesel without using petroleum as an ingredient; thus, it seems like a great choice for adhering to our ban on petroleum fuels while still being able to use motor vehicles. Unfortunately, the system isn't perfect. It turns out that at low temperatures (below about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), bio-diesel gels and begins to clog fuel filters. When the temperature is low enough, it essentially solidifies and won't move through the fuel lines at all. We start running into problems with the fuel in October and have to switch to a blend of bio-diesel and "regular-", or "petro-", diesel. We run this bio-petro blend until about the middle of May, when we can switch back to using one hundred percent bio-diesel in the vehicles.

One way that we've tried to get around this situation is by installing a secondary fuel tank that is heated by waste heat from the engine (via the coolant system.) The idea is that in cold weather, the vehicle can be started from the main (unheated) tank which contains petro-diesel or a bio-petro blend. Once the heated tank gets warm enough, you can switch over to it and use 100% bio-diesel. There are two problems with this system: when it's really cold it may take half an hour for the secondary tank to heat up to operating temperature, and using the petro-diesel to start up the car is still not acceptable under the terms of our covenants.

The vehicle fuel committee has been looking into the situation and is researching various ways of modifying the vehicles and the fuel so that 100% bio-diesel can be used in colder weather. The committee is also looking into the possibility of replacing our diesel fleet with an alcohol-powered fleet. It seems unlikely that we'll completely solve this problem in the next eight months, but we hope that we'll at least be able to lessen the amount of petro-diesel that we have to use during the cold months.

Cooking Fuel
Another activity that is heavily affected by the ban on petroleum-based fuels is cooking. There are currently two propane-powered stoves in use at Dancing Rabbit. In the summer months, the largest food co-op, Cattail, does its cooking outdoors over a wood stove, but in the winter, they cook indoors with a propane-powered stove. Using a wood stove for cooking seems at first glance to be a more sustainable situation than using propane. But once you factor in the amount of wood you have to use to cook a meal, the local air pollution that is created (and with a whole village worth of people using wood stoves, that's not a small amount), the extra time it takes to deal with the wood, and so forth, wood begins to look a lot less appealing -- more sustainable than propane perhaps, but still not a pretty picture. In an effort to address the cooking situation, the cooking fuel committee is looking into safe alternatives to propane that don't take the extra time or produce the lung-irritating fog of smoke that accompanies wood stoves.

The committee has been researching the possibility of stoves powered by alcohol, bio-diesel, gasified wood, biogas, and solar electricity. At the moment, alcohol and bio-diesel appear to be the most promising possibilities.

Vehicle Use
In general, we at Dancing Rabbit use motor vehicles much less than the average American, but there's still room for improvement. The vehicle-use-improvement committee is looking into ways to lessen our dependence on our motor vehicles. One possibility they are looking into is purchasing a small electric car or something similar for use as a short-trip vehicle (where the round trip would be less than thirty miles). With such a vehicle, we could probably cut the use of our "normal" vehicles by half, since many of our trips are to Memphis, which is twelve miles away. This would save quite a bit of wear and tear on our other vehicles and would lessen our need for using the petroleum-based starter fuels in the winter. The committee is also looking into ways to encourage Rabbits to use bicycles more often, perhaps by providing bicycling and bicycle maintenance workshops, purchasing more trailers for use with bicycles, or purchasing a 3- or 4-wheeled cycle that has a canopy and can be used in bad weather or by those who have problems using a bicycle.

We hope that by the time you receive next winter’s issue of the March Hare, we'll have made noticeable progress in reducing our ecological footprint and bringing our lives more in line with the ideal of ecological sustainability.

Open Season for Visitors * Member Bio: Penn * Working on Sustainability * Ecovillage Search * Eco to Go: Time * Can You Help? * Nature Corner * The View from the Top of the Rabbit Hole