Spirit in Action
Paddle for the Planet
David Abazs is a moving force behind Paddle for the Planet, a 500-mile canoe trip from the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the Twin Cities where it concludes with River Rally between St Cloud and St Paul, MN, May 20-23, 2010 when everyone is invited to join in.
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Feb 2010
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- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing their song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing your dead song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll be speaking with David Abaz about an upcoming adventure, canoeing down the Mississippi River from its headwaters, a project called Paddle for the Planet. David is leading a month long expedition down the river in early spring, with students and staff of scatter good friends school, just after the ice is off the water. David models care for creation in so many ways. In his farm called Round River, an off the grid, very successful 20 year experiment in sustainable living, in his work with Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center, and with North House Folk School, and now with Paddle for the Planet. David Abaz is an impressive example of what one person can do when he takes seriously a concern for the wellbeing of all the sources, human and otherwise of divine light on this planet. He joins us from his farm in Finland, Minnesota. David, thanks so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. - It's great to be here. - Of course you're not here, you're there, you're up in Finland, Minnesota. Why are you up in Finland, Minnesota? You're in New York, boy, aren't you? - Yeah, originally a New York boy. We kind of got here by accident. My wife and I were on our honeymoon on the high desert research farm in New Mexico, and we're on our way back to care take a farm in Maine. She's from Southern Minnesota, and she had an epiphany moment where she woke up in the middle night and said, no, she didn't want to live in Maine, she wanted to live in Minnesota. And so I went to this little adobe library, checked out tree types, no fall, growing season length. And I came back and I said, well, okay, you want to change all our plans. The only place I'm willing to live is Finland, Minnesota. And she says, Finland, Minnesota, I don't know if there's any farms up there. I said, well, changing all the plans, that's where I want to live if we live in Minnesota. And so when we came here, having never been to Finland, Minnesota, we actually found our land on our first visit and purchased it within a couple of months. - Before you went there, did you know that they had 12 months of winter? - What we did know in a kind of picked areas with short growing seasons, because, and this was actually one of my wisest things for being so young, is I figured we would farm as long as the season would allow us to farm. And the season here now is about eight months with the beginning seeds to the ending harvest, all together, even though we have a very short, frost free time, as short as 33 days. But overall, it was to provide us those four months of winter to do other things. And so that was the rationale for picking a northern climate. - Well, of course, one of the things that you do or are going to do or have planned on doing is paddle for the planet. How did the idea for this canoe trip down the Mississippi, ending up in St. Paul? How did this start out? - About 15 years ago, I did a master 20 year plan. It included a trip down the Mississippi River with my boys before they would leave the home. And so it was part of a plan to kind of do one last adventure with the boys all the way down to New Orleans. And this trip has kind of changed over the years as the boys kind of told me, "Yeah, Dad, we'll take part because we know it's important to you," which was their comment. And so I realized, well, maybe we should change it a little bit. And at a good school, where my boys attend high school, they basically needed another trip going on for their senior Block 8 trip. And my trip was planned for later in the summer, and we ended up pushing it forward and shortening it to start at the mouth at Atasca Lake and then end in the Twin Cities. The idea of the trip is to kind of promote celebration and discussion about agriculture and energy issues and how they affect the river. So we're kind of using the river as a metaphor of the planet. Hopefully along the way as we come across people and we do presentations and stop along the way, we'll be able to get in that dialogue with folks and how the river is in their lives and how agriculture and energy currently and how in the future will affect the whole river ecosystem. It's kind of funny, David, because I think a lot of people think that the Mississippi River basically starts about St. Paul. That's where you're ending. How small, how big is the river before then? Is this, could a barge be going up it or is this really only canoe width? Well, the river actually at the mouth, you can jump over it. So the first day will be tricky because we'll have spring, fallen trees, a culvert. We actually go underneath a road in the Mississippi River through a culvert. So it starts out pretty small, but by the time it hits the Twin Cities, it's a substantial river. It's gone over 500 miles by that point. And the reason why the Twin Cities is considered is because the locks and dams start just above the Twin Cities and that's where you'd have your commercial barge traffic. So actually, this trip will be one of the prettiest sections to paddle because it will be the most remote and the most wild. Could you give me an idea, David, of some of the activities you're going to be doing along the way? The first part of the trip, because it is a rural, is really going to be a canoe trip where we all be doing journals, exploring travel at canoe speed, taking in the breaths and the cool spring air. It goes from river to lake to river to lake along the way. And we actually are starting pretty early in the spring. We're starting three days after the average ice out on the first lake. So we're hoping it's an early spring. There could be some adventures. So the first three weeks are really going to be a kind of inward journey, a group dynamics, doing research along the way, checking water quality, all the way down to the Twin Cities, both for agriculture chemicals, nutrients like nitrogen phosphorus. We'll be doing research on background radiation levels along the way, as well as water temperature. And there might be some other research questions that we want answered along the way. But we'll also be stopping, in a couple of towns, taking a breath, doing laundry, and doing presentations in the local church and school. We'll have two stops along the way before we get to our final river rally, which is in St. Cloud, where things get to be a little bit more urban along the river. And we finish the river, those 81 miles from St. Cloud to St. Paul, kind of as a group educational celebration of the river and all our lives and how they're affected by the river. Don't you know, I'm the one, I'm the one, up in the morning, for the sun, for the sun. Don't you know that I'm the one, up in the morning, for the sun going to break my back to the long days done, and the river going to carry me away. Carry me river, carry me river. To my home, to the wild love and the family, and the old home place going to set me free, and the river going to carry me away. When the sun goes down, the moon is high, and the moon is high, and the golden star. Out the midnight sky, out the midnight sky. When the sun goes down, and the moon is high, you're the star, out the midnight sky going to get me born. And I'm going to fly and the river going to carry me away. Carry me river, carry me river. To my home, to the wild love and the family, and the old home place going to set me free, and the river going to carry me away. [MUSIC] I don't know, but I've been told the streets of heaven, I paid with gold. I went to there, and I beat two damn old, or the river going to carry me away. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] So I'm going down, I'm going down to rivers, I'm going to rivers, I'm going to get me born. I'm going to ride, I'm going to ride. Going on down to the riverside, going to get me home. I'm going to ride, going to float on down in freedom. I'm tired, and the river going to carry me away. Carry me river, carry me river. To my home, to the wild love and the family, the old home place going to set me free, and the river going to carry me away. I sent carry me river, to my home, carry me river, to my home, to the wild love and the family, and the old home place going to set me free, and the river going to carry me away. [MUSIC] [APPLAUSE] That was A Little Rollicking Music by John McCutchen and Tom Chapin. It's called "River going to carry me." And that's what's going to be happening with my spirit and action guest David Abaz and the crew from Scattergood Friends School as they do a 500-mile canoe trip down from the headwaters of the Mississippi in early spring. It's called "Paddle for the Planet" and you can check it out on their site, paddlefortheplanet.net. Including information on how you can join in the canoe party as they go from St. Cloud, Minnesota to the Twin Cities as the "River Rally." You can also find a link on my site, northernspiritradio.org. This is a Northern Spirit Radio Production originating from my home at Radio Station WHYSLP, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, here today for "Spirit in Action" with David Abaz and "Paddle for the Planet." There's so much to talk about with you, David. But first of all, let's finish up some of the facets of this "Paddle for the Planet" adventure. You said you're going to be starting out this trip just a couple days after the average ice out for the river and lakes, the headwaters. So what happens if it's a late spring and they're still all iced up? Does this mean that you, what, get out and drag the canoes over the water or just what do you do? That's exactly what it means. It's very likely the river will be totally open. So what we'd be looking at is the lakes that we come across. Some might have ice on them. In all likelihood, if it's still quite deep, winter will be dragging them across the ice. The worst-case scenario, and one I hope we don't encounter, is if the ice is there, but it's not thick enough to walk on, and it's too thick to break through and create your own channel. And so I'm hoping we don't come across those conditions. But in all likelihood, the way trends have been going in the last decade, the lake should be open by then. So there's this possibility of ice traveling at this early point. I mean, you're starting basically right, you know, a couple days after Earth Day. Have you ever traveled canoeing in this kind of area before, at that point? I mean, are you up to it, David? Well, I think we are. And, you know, because it's going to have to be a group up to it. Move. We have some great students, really ambitious. Some older students are 11th and 12th grade. Some very experienced paddlers. The other adult from Scattergood, who teaches down there, Sam. He couldn't ask for a better partner in this. So I think that's part of the excitement. If it goes smooth, it'll be very nice and reflective. And if it goes rough, it'll be more memories. So I think we're up for it. And we're also open to the reality that, wow, we might get two days behind or three days behind, and then we'll try and hitchhike and get caught back up. So we're open to the idea of being a little flexible if we get in trouble on that. I'm also going to be spending a month with the students beforehand preparing them, and we're going to do drills. You know, canoe down drills where, what do we do? Because that water's going to be cold. And so we're going to do some safety kind of training where, okay, we'll pretend the canoe's down and how quickly can we get a fire? How quickly can we get that person in a sleeping bag? And so we'll be doing some of those safety practices. Hopefully, ones that we'll never use, but at least we'll have some training with it. You mentioned, David, that there's some technical-type things. You're actually teaching these students, the five students that are traveling with you, during this paddle for the planet event. What are your qualifications? Have you been a teacher before? Amistry involved? There's certainly alternative energy issues. What's your expertise? I'll be actually down there teaching a class before the trip for them as well. I've done a lot of teaching of all sorts. I'll be teaching tomorrow, fifth graders up at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. And I teach at Northhouse. I've taught college groups, but what I've never really done before is taught in the classroom without having a prepared program that I bring to the classroom. So I would go to a school and bring a wastewater treatment class, and we'd do the class. So this will be kind of interesting running through the month before in the classroom. Once we get out on the river, it's going to be a lot of learning shared as we experience it. Because most of the work we will have done on agriculture and energy, we're going to look at the history and how agriculture's affected the river. And we've explored the environmental issues of nitrogen in the water, which has made a dead zone at the Gulf of Mexico, which is larger than state of Massachusetts, because generally we don't regulate for nitrogen. We regulate for phosphorus because that's our limiting factor, whereas the Gulf has the exact opposite. So we're going to be exploring all of that in terms of renewable energy. You know, we've lived off the grid, solar and wind powered for the last 20 years. And so we have a lot of personal experience, and then I've been trained with renewable energy and conservation and I've gotten certification through the state and through classwork as well. So since I designed the trip, I kind of designed the trip around my expertise, agriculture and energy. So in that way, it made it a little easier. I'm glad we're not doing English lit. That would not be me. You mentioned in the course of the places that you've done teaching, you mentioned North House. And I'm imagining a lot of our listeners have no idea what you mean by North House. It's not just the rooms of your house on the north side of it. Tell them about North House. North House is a wonderful, it's called a Folk School, North House Folk School, and it's up the shore, Grand Marais. My wife and I have been teaching for them since the beginning. And it's classes, a lot of classes on boat building, on mushroom exploring, on timber frame buildings. I teach a stone building class. My wife and I teach a class on urban gardening where we'll take a yard in Grand Marais and transform it over a three day weekend with students into a productive garden and doing some classroom work and doing some applied and actually doing the physical work to create the new garden space. We do a sustainable living. We've been teaching wreath making. There's all sorts of things weaving and all sorts of things that North House Folk School does. And the reach is quite wide. In my last stone masonry class, I had a student from Texas and a student from California that flew in for the class. So there seems to be a great need for some of these cultural and folk arts. What was your expertise from college? I think you did go to college, you and Lisa. And, you know, so do you have a degree in addition to decades of expertise of actually living it? Yeah, it was great a few years back. I actually got a job that related to my degree. And that's what you mentioned chemistry as one of the things we'd be doing along the way. You know, my wife and I ended up with degrees in biology and cultural studies. And I ended up working for the water plan here in two harbors, setting up river watch and water testing, all sorts of junkyards, clean up. And so for seven years, I had the opportunity to work for the soil and water district. And we did exactly that, the chemistry type work, as well as wastewater treatment issues and things like that on the county level. That background certainly was helpful in getting some jobs along the way, but it also will help us on this trip here as we kind of move again into my strength as we explore the river watershed from an agriculture and energy perspective. Really, it's going to be a paddle for the planet. We'll be doing uplinks along the way to websites, but those first few weeks is really going to be a retrospective time, especially until we get down to St. Cloud, where it becomes more of a community festive type of event. And we should mention also that you're going to be calling in to me periodically on the trip. I'm going to be interviewing both you, Sam and the kids who are traveling on this paddle for the planet. Now, one of the parts of what you're doing, David, is that just a few days before you reach St. Paul, when you're right around St. Cloud, you want people to join you and en masse. You're going to canoe into St. Paul. What are the plans for this and what is the crescendo event? Well, what we're hoping as part of the celebration and as part of the fundraising is to get people, you know, two people in a canoe to join us in St. Cloud. We'd have an organizational meeting Wednesday night, and then we'd set into the water Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and arrive in St. Paul on Sunday. And along the way, we'll be doing some of our tests. We'll be eating communally. Hopefully, we'll have 20, 30 boats, each with sponsors per mile, that, you know, they've gotten before they join us. So you might have someone who just sponsors, "Hey, I'll give you a quarter every mile you travel and raise some funds so that the trip can be more about, you know, just us doing our river trip." But about raising some funds for the organizations in Minnesota and outside, that are working for agriculture and energy issues. So we wanted it to be kind of a give back. This four days, 81 miles, we'll be going by a nuclear power plant. We'll be going by some bigger towns as we get more and more into the urban center of the Twin Cities. And then it'll end with a celebration Sunday night with music. We might have someone from the Raptor Program showing a bald eagle, maybe some local theater, a festive time. It might be at the French School of Minnesota. They've offered their gym. So kind of a big celebration fundraising event for the river and the health of the river as it relates to all the important issues of how we live around on the river. The next day, we'll probably end up in the schools just for the morning, and then we'd be heading back. So it's a one-month journey with that big culmination at the end called the River Rally. And how big it's going to be, I have no idea. But I certainly hope we'll get at least a dozen or so boats and hopefully more and really make it a party of sorts. Because the river is an amazing vein. It just covers so much of our country's, the watershed for the country, 31 states, drain into the Mississippi. It's a major historical aspect and current aspect of our whole economy and has environmental issues. And so it's really a good time to kind of culminate and celebrate the river and our lives and try and make it a better place for the next generation. Your website is paddlefortheplanet.net. And of course, as always, I have links to my guests on my site, which is northernspiritradio.org. You can find David Abaz and the folks from Skatergood School who are going to be heading down the Mississippi at paddlefortheplanet.net. Do you want people who are going to join in the rally or be part of the music? Or should they be contacting you through that website? Yeah, there is a place on the website where they can click on River Rally and they can then read about what's involved and then email me and we'll be in correspondence. You know, we're probably going to be making some T-shirts and some bandanas and there'll be things that we can offer them as well for doing the journey. So if they want to get involved, certainly email me, give me a call. We'll get you signed up, so we'll count on your boat being there in St. Cloud. I really do hope we get lots of organizations involved and lots of boats because it's something that could really swell and become its own little event that really could turn some eyebrows as you see 50 canoes heading down the river, all celebrating the river and finding importance to the issues around keeping that river clean. You know, one of the things I tell students that I teach here at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center, we talk about water and watersheds and I say, "Well, you know, in New Orleans, if you're a fifth grader in New Orleans and you take a drink, that water's been through seven different human systems before it got to your glass." And so it's really important being upstream to really share that responsibility of keeping it clean as it leaves our community. And we're going to be on the cleanest sections of the river. It'll be really neat to have that transition as we head to the Twin Cities. Interestingly enough, Skatagood's really excited about this trip and there's talk of continuing it each year, but then starting from the Twin Cities and doing the next 500 miles and finishing the river over the next few years. It would take about five years, just under 2,500 miles. It sounds absolutely wonderful, David. Let's talk a little bit about the technology that's involved. I was wondering if you're going down, you're going to be sampling water, for instance, to see, you know, what kind of pollutants or maybe how pure it is. Hopefully, that's what we'll find, right? What kind of testing will you be doing yourself, what will you be sending out? I also understand, for instance, you're going to have a solar powered bike with you. What does that mean? Does that mean you're carrying an enormous PV cells over your head as you're biking along so you get shade while you're powering along? Well, what we are going to do is we're going to have a solar panel in one of the canoes that will be charging a battery, and that battery will be used to charge our camera for the trip, be used to charge the GPS, also our Wi-Fi so we can do updates on the web. Included in that charging potential is, for the River Rally, we're going to add some of the stuff that actually we live with here on our farm. We've had an electric bike that basically is a bike with a battery assist. It helps you maintain high speed, so I can go up hills like 18 miles an hour, and it's kind of fun to watch people check you out as you're going up a hill pretty fast and make it more of a commuting bike by adding the electric. The solar oven, we should have as well for the River Rally, and maybe we can cook some of our foods as we travel down the river, depending on whether it's sunny or not. So it's trying to celebrate again the ingenuity and all the incredible solutions we've already come up with for living on a greener planet, living with less energy use, living with agriculture systems that not only are benign to the environment, but also helpful in building diversity. So a bunch of these gadgets and tests along the way will have some of those things, and we'll add more for the River Rally, but it's more of a part of that celebrating what can be done with just a little bit of ingenuity. You're especially well suited because of the way that you've been living for the last, I guess, 20 years or so at Round River Farm. You've been off the grid, and I've been up to visit your place, so I've seen some of the technology, both simple and advanced technology that you've put together to make it possible to live sustainably up in Finland, Minnesota, which is pretty far north. I mean, some people think maybe you have to cart everything in. You did an amazing job. You have a CSA that you sponsored, and you were producing food in spite of the short growing season. You were able to provide through your CSA a lot of food for a lot of families. Talk about how you do a CSA when you're that far north and produce masses of food like you did. Well, it took many years to get our soil going. We used pigs to plow, we put in a lot of manure, we did cover crops. When we started digging here, we realized we only had two feet of soil, and I mean two feet of soil, that's two feet above bedrock. So it's like having two feet of soil on the nearby parking lot. And what we found is you can grow on two feet of soil in these harsh environment, but it takes a really tight management system. And what we've done to add a little bit of Iowa heat is we have hoop houses. So we grow all the things like tomatoes and peppers that require a little bit more heat degree days and a little longer season in hoop houses. And that's brought in a lot of food. So we're able to, a little bit larger than a half acre, we're able to feed about 40-45 families for the summer and two families through the winter. And again, one of the things that was striking me as we were living here, it just didn't feel quite right to live in this beautiful place and to put all this energy just to feed our family. And so it felt like a real desire to provide good food for other people as well. And so that's a big part of setting up the CSA. It's been running now 10 years. It's now running under Melinda who lives in our original house, a former apprentice is doing the bulk of the work. We still advise and help out a little bit along the way. But pickaxing for 15 years, this field has taken a little bit out of our back. So we're definitely welcoming the opportunity to pass the brunt of the physical work on to the next generation. I already asked you, David, a bit about North House folk school. You spoke about that. You didn't say much about what Wolfridge Environmental Center is. And you and Lisa have worked there. How big of a concern is this? I think it's pretty widely known, isn't it? Yeah, it has a good reputation throughout the state. It's a large residential environmental learning center. It'll hold up to 350 students. So every week when the students show up, our town population doubles. And it employs, it's like the second non-government largest employer. It's about 65 people are employed. And basically the students come on a Monday. They take classes all week. And then they'll leave on a Friday. They come from all over the state, a lot from the Twin Cities. And they're learning everything from algebra heritage, to rock climbing, to skiing, to fishing, stream studies, beaver ecology. So it's a really great outdoor hands-on educational approach. Not only will they learn about the subjects at hand, but they'll get an opportunity to be outside, experiencing the world directly. Given today's changes of computers and TVs and the sedentary life that many Americans have, it's a great opportunity for them to explore. So we've been teaching and running a gift shop up there. My wife runs the Wolfridge gift shop. And then I help out there when needed and also do some teaching on the busy week. Tomorrow I have a great schedule. I'm going to be cross-country skiing in the morning and doing a snowshoe, a peer review hike in the afternoon. So they get all types of experiences. Another element of what you're doing is this thing with Skatagood Friends School, which is down by West Branch, Iowa. Both your sons attend there. You want to say what that is, why are they sponsoring this class that's going up there? I mean, if it's a high school, doesn't that mean they're just supposed to be staying home studying in algebra? Well, Skatagood Friends School is an amazing boarding school in Iowa. We homeschooled our boys right through what we'd call junior high. And we traveled all the world as part of that homeschooling, so we'd go and study volcanoes in Costa Rica or study Wales and Hawaii. We'd do that one month each year. But it came a point after our final trip to Argentina where we caught down there for a year and the boys went to school for the first time in Spanish, that they were ready to venture off. And so we presented some options for them and they chose Skatagood Friends School. And being quicker ourselves, it was a great blend. The school is fantastic, it's kind of like the amount of tension the students get is kind of like the next step from homeschooling where it bridges the world quite nicely. They have been attending for one year now, one and a half years. They're doing really well. The school provides great academics, a lot of great social and spiritual nurturing for the students. There's also a farm at Skatagood. So a lot of the food that the students prepare themselves and eat on campus is from this farm. And so it provides a great opportunity for our students to transition towards college. It's a college prep school, if that's where they end up. How big is the student body down at Skatagood Friends School? They have a maximum of up to 60 students. Right now I think it's just under 50 students. What's another neat aspect is they have a whole bunch of kids from overseas. So I would say even probably 20%, 25% of the students there are from overseas. And so they get to learn from each other's experiences. If you have a world history class and someone is there from Ghana and someone from Korea and someone from Mexico, you certainly will gain a greater perspective on what world history is all about. Over Thanksgiving, the boys brought home two friends, Sabrina and Kia, one's from Korea and one's from India. And so they got to explore this northern environment. And Sabrina had never seen snow before coming to the United States this year. So it's all part of that whole educational dough that they get to play with as they bake their bread of learning. So it's a wonderful, wonderful location for our boys. And it's been kind of a shock for Lisa and I because we're kind of childless about four years earlier than we thought. Yeah, it's a loss and a win. I understand one of your son is amongst those participating in the battle for the planet. Yeah, Colby, he's a junior now and I'm really glad to have him as part of the group. Scattergood does is the juniors and seniors, they take the last block. They have eight block school system and they travel around doing different things. One group's going to be biking from New Orleans back to Iowa. Another group's doing a Washington DC trip. We'll look at the politics there, but then our trip down the Mississippi is the third trip being offered for the juniors and seniors. And we'll be traveling down the Mississippi, not quite all the way to Iowa, but the opposite direction of the bikers. The bikers are probably going to be in good shape, otherwise, because they're going far south to start the trip in April. We're going to the far northern port. And that'll add some excitement. A lot of excitement. Okay, so we've talked about your CSA. We've talked about Scattergood. We've talked about Wolfridge. We've talked just a little bit about North House folk school. Your farm is called Round River Farm. First of all, why does it have that name, Round River Farm? Secondly, I mean, you've got all this technology to power you since you're off the grid. Where does that come from? How big of a setup do you have? Round River Farm came from our college time, which we settled right after college, about the Round River. The first writings of a Round River was out of Leopold, where it talks about a never-ending target of life, and we wanted to have our name constantly remind us of what we're trying to set up here. To build sustainability, we realized we needed less linear movement of energy and more cyclical circles of energy, and the Round River continually reminds us of that. So we evaluate, you know, as we look at our technology, is it forming a full circle of energy? Is there waste? How can we avoid waste? So every decision we've made since living here, we've gone through both a technical, kind of question, query, and also a social or emotional level. So, give an example, our first shower in our cabin was to take a three-gallon bucket, warm it up, and then we'd both go out to the porch, you know, whether it's twenty below zero or seventy, and one of us would pour the bucket while the other one showered. And then we'd switch. Now, we love that time, especially the one who's getting the water poured on them, and it really was a nice time to be outside and cleaning ourselves outside. It really pleasant experience most of the time. The second person, when it was really cold, it was a little hard because ice would form on the deck, and it got a little slippery. But when we were looking at, well, how do we bathe in our future as we develop our site? And we looked at a sauna, and we thought, well, I don't know. We're bathing inside then. It's not so good. But in the end, as we explored it, we said, well, you have to go and stoke it three times. That's a good thing. You're outside having to go stoke it three times. And then what we realized as we used it, we're so warm and comfortable that we can go sit outside on the porch and look at the stars, steaming. And so we looked at technology and choices of our lifestyle in multi-levels as we explored to build that round river and to address some of the cultural aspects and our personal aspects. So in the end, as we developed this place, we've got it to a very low energy use, about 100 kilowatts per month, which is about an eighth of the standard American house. And that runs our farm and our house. We have a freezer. We have a refrigerator. We have a stereo and a DVD player. We have a washing machine. So we have what most people would consider a normal display of technology. But within those technologies, like our refrigerator, it uses about a tenth a power of a traditional refrigerator. It's a 19 cubic refrigerator that we have on our screen porch. Why is it on our screen porch? Because on average, it's cooler out there than inside the house. And so it also saves energy by being where it's placed. It's a screen porch so we can get to it without getting wet or dirty. And so it provides us refrigeration the summer. In the winter, we cut a hole through our north wall and put one of those college little refrigerators in it without the engine. And we run for six months a zero energy refrigerator. And so that means we have smaller space, but we don't have the produce from the gardens at that point. But we can access it from the inside. So each choice was deliberated quite a bit to try and minimize our energy needs and also make it a reasonable life to live. And overall, it's worked out really well. And we're actually feeling a little bit bourgeoisie where it's pretty easy, especially if we have all our firewood put up. But you put all your firewood up by hand, too. Don't you? You're not using a wrecking truck or I guess maybe you're using a chainsaw? For cutting of the wood, we've done some hauling with our draft horse, but the draft horse didn't have enough work. So we ended up selling her. So we've done some hauling from our local woods, but pretty much we get a logger to drop eight foot trees in a pile in between our house and barn by the wood shed. And then I take an electric chainsaw so we can only chainsaw on sunny days in the winter. So we don't draw the power down too much. This past two years I've committed to just splitting by hand. And so right now we're a little behind. So I'm going to be splitting and cutting for the next three weeks pretty heavy to get us back on top. Last year we had it all done and it was a real treat to just feed our stove and not worry about where the wood was coming from. So we try and mix the technology. That electricity has come from a wind generator and solar panels, solar PV panels. We have solar panels for hot water. For 14 years we lived without running hot water, actually 18 years. And we just put in solar a few years ago and now most of the year we have hot water. When it's not sunny, we have warm water. When it's not sunny for a while, we heat the water up on our wood stove and take bucket baths. So we kind of adjust to the environment. It's a funny story on that. We were having an evening gathering potluck and all the friends are here and neighbors are here and we've got food going in the kids. All of a sudden they're running around and they're turning off lights. We're like what are you guys doing? And they explained to us that they wanted to show their friends something on the computer. And they looked down at the power and it was only 49.4 volts. We have a 48 volt system and we have a little chart on the wall. 50 volts is party. 48 to 49 is basic conservation and below 48 starts real strict conservation and then below 47 is ration. And the boys were trying to get the voltage into the party zone so they could show their friends the computer game. And so it does take a little bit of a shift but it's one that we take that seems almost normal. Actually it seems normal to us but almost normal for everyone else. One thing you didn't mention is the amount of waste that you produce or what the average household produces. Do you know what the statistics offer the US versus what you put out per year? Yeah, I haven't heard recent numbers on the US. I know it's something like a football field every month or something like that stadium. We've really cut down on that doing things as much as changing the way we live to to cut packaging for food. So we used to get a lot of cheese which had its little plastic wrapping around it. But now by milk we had a dairy for 15 years but since the boys left we turned that over. Now we buy milk from a local dairy and we make cream sauces instead of cheese on things. So that's eliminated our waste to zero for the food. We still have ziplock bags that we freeze our vegetables in some of those things. But we pretty much we don't have garbage pick up. So occasionally when we're somewhere with a garbage can we'll drop our one bag in and continue on. So we reduced it greatly. The biggest waste addition is whenever we do building projects. If there's plastic involved or the wrapping they'll wrap the wood piles with plastic. Or some of our agriculture things where drip irrigation lines become broken or things like that. So it's more in the business aspect of our operation that will generate some waste. But the idea of the Round River is to eliminate that concept from the cycle where there is no waste only a resource. One of the places we've been successful with that is in our quote unquote waste water. I basically invented a waste water system that eliminated the concept of waste. And it provides a drip irrigation system that uses very little energy. Then we have to be careful with what we put in the water but we're able to use our waste water to irrigate orchards or greenhouse crops. And bring it into our resource category. And so our water system up here is pretty much fully the Round River. But there are some other systems that we haven't gotten there all the way. We're close. One of them is cooking. We cook with wood in the winter. We have solar ovens in the summer. We have electric burner for cooking when we have extra electricity. But we still use one of those grill propane tanks, one of those small white tanks, one or two per year. And that's pretty much the only fossil fuel left for our household use. And we're hoping to eliminate that over the next couple of years with some ideas we have. Well then maybe David, you want to mention some of the spiritual unpinnings of this. What motivated you to do this? Were you just a zealot from day one? I mean there must be some thinking or some wider societal values or spiritual values that are driving you to do all this extra work. Other people will just dump it and not think about how it affects the rest of the planet or the future generations. It's interesting. In terms of organized religion, I was a little turned off as a young person. My father was a Presbyterian minister. I liked what he was doing. But it didn't really feed me spiritually. When I got into college, I studied Buddhism and various other religions as I explored my faith. I remember one time I was at a Buddhist retreat in the mountains of Sri Lanka. I had this moment and I realized that my parents raised me to be a good Buddhist. When I went to the core of many of these religions, I found that the core of Buddhism and the core of Christianity is very much similar. There's a lot of externalities about the faith and the cultural aspects that create some intellectual and real challenges. But the core seems really solid. I remember several things happened throughout my life that just said to me, no, I can't be part of the problem. Unfortunately, I am still part of the problem more than I would like and more than uncomfortable. And I think that's okay to be a little uncomfortable. But my wife and I really go on the phrase of live simply so that others may simply live. It just is a matter of fairness and frankly, our big push on oil on consuming fossil fuels is that there are people dying today for our fossil fuels. And there's certainly many aspects of the environment that are suffering by the burning of fossil fuels directly and long term. When you think about those people that are being killed by shell oil in Nigeria, it's like, well, how can we do that? How can we know that and continue to consume it without thought? And so I think it's a consciousness, but I will say I am much more selfish than I should be in making my choices in life. And one of the things that did come across our feeling was we had built this infrastructure for our farm, and yes, we're feeding people, and yes, we're doing it with solar and wind. But there's still a lot of energy, embedded energy, in a wind generator, in a building, in plumbing. And it didn't seem right that just our family would live here, whereas we realized multiple families could live and share the same resources. And so we've had an effort to have other people join us. So in the summer, we have two other houses that are full. It uses the same infrastructure, the same well, the same things. And we thought that maybe, just maybe, if we had four households living on this farm, that would be at a level where everyone on the planet could live sustainably. And I don't know if it's true or not, but it's kind of an aspect of our journey that we've struggled with and explored to varying degrees of success and not. But it is a journey, and there is no clear way. And I think that's what's so frightening about the post-oil era. There's no magic bullet out there. There's no magic energy. It's going to do everything we want to do like we've been doing. And it's going to be a whole combination of energies plus a change of how we live, our resource use, and how much we consume. And so we've been kind of wrestling with this. And frankly, as a Quaker, to not wrestle with it, it'd be hard to call myself a Quaker. Because so much of what my understanding of the light and the light of everyone and everything is that we need to be conscious of everyone else's light and how our lives affect everyone else. And that needs to result in action. And this trip is just a moment in time and action to highlight the paddle for the planet to try and bring awareness to how we're all connected. You know, one of the big things is how are we connected to everyone else? I really think we're way more connected than we've ever let ourselves imagine. I remember this one example for me with how things affect another thing is I jumped into the lake behind our farm and it was cold and I popped back out. And what I hadn't noticed on the lake was incredible billions of little water bugs on the top. And from my hole that I made in the water, it started rippling the water bugs. And those water bugs ran into the next water bugs, ran into the next one. And I watched over the next 10 minutes the lake ripple away from these water bugs all being affected by my jumping into the water. And I think we actually live in that all the time, but we almost never see it. But it's happening, whether we know it or not. So that part of the exploration helps keep going. Keep me wanting to keep going to create a truly sustainable system where everyone on the planet can live. I don't know what the true motivation for that is underneath it all, but it's there. Well, it's a great lesson you're giving to us. I think there's one more thing I'd be remiss if I didn't have you share this with our listening audience. Your name is David Abaz, David and Lisa Abaz. And that Abaz is spelled in a very peculiar way. It's not a word anybody has ever seen before. You want to mention where it came from? Yeah, well, it kind of goes back to the beginning story that we started off with about we were heading to Maine. And my wife and I had studied our surnames. Mine was Bartlett and hers was Trexel. You know, what we realized was our names are all male names that have been carried for generations. So even taking my wife's name was a male name. And we wrestled with our name issue as we were about to get married. And we found a list of words from extinct tribe in Maine, which was the place we were planning to live and settle. This word meant trees and it was the sound of Abaz. So we don't really know how you would spell it, but we spelled it phonetically as best we could. And so it's A-B-A-Z-F. And when we got married, we took on that name as our name from then on. And so we both have made names and it gave us something that was kind of a symbol of our marriage as we moved forward. And trees for both of us have been a wonderful place to get strength and to nurture. And so we do a lot with trees up here in the north woods of Minnesota, and we carry that name with us. As you know, David, I met you after you got affiliated with Quakers. When you did your name change, you were not Quaker at that time. When Sander and I changed our last name to help meet when we took that name when we got married, we went through the same process. And it's so wonderful to see the openings that happen for people and how separated by states and continents, we come to this same movement in the direction of the light. And you're certainly a shining beacon of light. And certainly this paddle for the planet that you're going to be part of starting the end of April is going to be an awesome bit of light for the planet. I want to thank you for doing that. I want to thank you for joining me on Spirit and Action, being around River up there in northern Minnesota. You're doing so many good things. You're a joy to know. Well, thank you very much. It's a gift to be able to share a little bit of the story. Thanks, Ken David. We are crossing the water our whole life through. We are making a passage that is straight and true. Every heart is a vessel. Every dream is a light shining through the darkness of the blackest night. Oh, we are crossing the water our whole life through. We are making a passage that is straight and true. Every heart is a vessel. Every dream is a light shining through the darkness of the blackest night. Well, there is no shallow water, not but love to keep. I safely from the dangers and the devils of the deep, yet with every breath within us. We search forever more to find some peaceful harbor on that far off shore. And we are crossing the water our whole life through. We are making a passage that is straight and true. Every heart is a vessel. Every dream is a light shining through the darkness of the blackest night. For some it is a glory. For some it is a game. For some it is a story filled with emptiness and pain. But it's rising winds and chorus. We search for steady ground. There is only that before us. There could be no turning round. And we are crossing the water our whole life through. We are making a passage that is straight and true. Every heart is a vessel. Every dream is a light shining through the darkness of the blackest night. For there is no other journey. There will ever be the same. No second chance arising. And we'll call you by your name. When the welling waves wash your use. For stormy wind they drive. Give your heart a song singing loud and long. Keep your dreams alive and we are crossing the water. Our whole life through. We are making a passage that is straight and true. Every heart is a vessel. Every dream is a light shining through the darkness of the blackest night. Oh we are crossing the water. Our whole life through. We are making a passage that is straight and true. That was Bill Steins and his song Crossing the Water. David Abaz was here today for Spirit in Action preparing to cross the waters of the Mississippi River 500 miles of it at least. Go to his website paddlefortheplanet.net for more info on this wonderful environmental adventure and celebration. And remember you can also sign up to join in on the last leg from St. Cloud to the Twin Cities called the River Rally. Again paddlefortheplanet.net. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.