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For the past few months, I've been in the Oakland hills, staying with my friends, Marty and Chantelise, who have let me set up camp in their back house "hippie shack" (as I call it). It's a quirky little place, made out of recycled wood (a chicken coop found on Craigslist) and windows from an Oakland mansion that was torn down.
That the cottage is made out of re-used materials is part of a greater philosophy that, to my Los Angeles mindset, makes Marty and Chentelise seem like the ultimate Northern Californians. Beyond driving biodiesel cars, and growing their own food, they don't generate any garbage that isn't compostable or recyclable. They don't even use toothpaste because the tubes create gratuitous garbage. Instead, they've switched to tooth powder that comes in a recyclable box.
Much as I've integrated into non-chemical life here on "the farm," my days at the hippie shack could be numbered. I've decided to stay in the Bay Area an extra three months, and am still waiting to hear back about whether Marty and Chantelise want their cottage -- normally Chantelise's office and yoga space -- back. In the meantime, I've been scouring Craigslist. Today, I Iooked at a house for rent in the Rockridge district.
It was an uninviting craftsman with a large front porch and thrashed built-in cabinetry. I liked it. While the owner showed me into the kitchen, another woman came to see it, who immediately complained about the light, and asked much better questions than I did. Like, Would the tenant have to buy garbage cans from the city and pay for trash pick up?
I told them about Marty and Chantelise's packaging-phobic relationship to garbage, and how it had changed the way I think about throwing things out. The woman lit up. As it turns out, she'd had a roommate who'd saved all his garbage for a year as an experiment. "I've heard of that guy!'" I exclaimed. Marty had told me all about him, and cited him as one of his big inspirations. Now here I was talking to Marty's trash-guru's former roommate... What a small world.
I got home and googled Ari Derfel, who is one of two men who did identical year-long garbage experiments. The other is Dave Chameides, who I read about in a blog post written by Madeleine Brand, who happens to host the NPR show I contribute to (Day To Day). What a coincidence.
The world gets smaller. A good thing to remember when thinking about trash.
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