Bill Denneen didn’t set out to be a pioneer. Still, that’s the path he started on when he decided in the early 1960s that his life’s goal was to be completely self-sufficient by generating his own power, collecting his own water from the sky, and growing his own food.
A self-described activist, Denneen was born in Boston and raised during the Great Depression. His parents kept chickens, and his grandfather taught him gardening.
Today on his Nipomo homestead—where he’s lived since 1961—the 83-year-old said he’s accomplished what he set out to do all those years ago.
“I don’t know of anybody that’s doing as much self-sustainable living as what I’m doing, no matter where,” Denneen said. “I’m doing the maximum.”
In an era of rising energy costs, fears of global climate change, and concerns over lack of water and oil, sustainability is steadily becoming a buzz word among legislators and the general public.
While the average person is doing his or her part to “go green”—switching to compact fluorescent bulbs, buying energy-saving appliances, and driving more fuel-efficient vehicles—Denneen and others like him are taking an ideological step farther and going back to their roots.
Landscaping a harvest
About three years ago, Santa Maria resident Joan Ott and her mother Laura Sullivan decided to convert their front and backyard lawns to gardens and enlisted the help of Larry Santoyo, a Central Coast resident and worldwide lecturer on sustainability.
Santoyo and volunteers hauled in dirt and terraced the front yard, where they planted California native grasses, along with rosemary and basil, currant bushes, and blueberries.
Santoyo installed a tube from the rain gutter under the whole perimeter of the backyard. When it rains, the water gets recycled back into the yard through a drip system and nourishes the plants instead of going down the drain. This system allows Ott and Sullivan to produce most fruits they consume, including oranges, limes, grapes, plums, cherries, and peaches. They grow sugarcane, too.
Ott said when she’s out in her backyard, which is complete with a fish and frog pond, it’s like being in nature.
“It’s not all symmetric and rigid. It’s more informal,” she said. “We have the natural habitat for the good bugs that eat the bad bugs. We’re re-creating the food chain.”
As director of Earthflow Design Works, Santoyo has provided consultation for people who want to convert their lawns to vegetable gardens for 20 years. He says that lawns are worse than agriculture when it comes to water consumption—plus, they produce nothing but waste.
“The idea is that we’re going to use less energy, less water, and less resources than a lawn and get food for the entire neighborhood,” Santoyo said.
Converting a front lawn to a garden is a simple layered process that can be done in a day, he explained. First, the grass is allowed to grow tall. Then it’s covered with cardboard and mulch. The grass is smothered and gradually becomes the soil necessary to produce food.
According to Santoyo, the process mimics the forest floor and is modeled on the natural ecosystem in a technique known as “permaculture.” He calls the design science a revival of common sense.
“It’s only been a few short generations that we’ve been out of touch,” Santoyo said. “Some of our grandparents still have that knowledge, and I think that once we train our future generations to do that, we’ll see ourselves as the spoiled generation, the ones that were out of touch. I don’t see it as anything difficult. It’s very easy and very exciting.”
Proponents of edible home gardens say they’re nothing new, pointing to thousands of years of human agricultural history and, more recently, the victory gardens of World War I and II.
Garden designer Rose Keppler, who made a three-quarter-acre garden for a restaurant in Buellton and consults for clients looking to grow sustainable gardens, said she hopes people come to see home agriculture as less of a trend and more a source of pride.
“It’s just a regression back to the way things used to be before we had all these transnational imports,” Keppler said. “When you grow your own things, you’re more self-sufficient, and to me, being an American has always been about being self-sufficient, and unfortunately we’ve gotten away from it.”
Past, meet the future
California Secretary of Food and Agriculture A.G. Kawamura said he’s amazed at what’s possible in the home environment when both passive and high-tech agricultural advances converge with the old ways of doing things.
“Permaculture is that full circle of using your resources at your house, including your sewer water, so there’s no waste,” Kawamura said. “You’re seeing that take place in many places. It takes time. It takes energy and investment of that individual.”
Nipomo’s Denneen got rid of his front lawn 20 years ago, replacing it with native bushes and climate-friendly exotic plants.
In addition to the orchard and garden on his acre property, a chicken coop houses roosters and about 40 hens, which supply both meat and eggs. Four female goats provide him with milk. There’s also a pig he named “Sarah Palin,” who’ll soon be sent to market and end up in his freezer.
Denneen said he rarely needs to go to the store unless his goats aren’t providing him with enough milk.
“With the economic stuff that’s going down, when people lose their jobs, they can’t go and buy [food],” he said. “If they had a situation like mine, they’d be raising a lot of their own food.”
The upkeep of the property and animals rests with the hostelers who stay in Denneen’s home and perform chores in exchange for lodging. Hosteler Peter Hunter, from Canada, said he finds growing food to have a wide range of benefits.
“It’s straight from Mother Earth to your belly, and you really do feel better having grown it than had you gone to the store and bought it,” Hunter said. “When you’re the caretaker of your own diet, you know exactly what’s going into your body.”
Power from above
The road to total self-sustainability involves more than simply growing food. For those who are dedicated enough, the next step is to live off the power grid by generating electricity through solar panel arrays.
Mark Miller, a solar consultant with Atascadero-based A.M. Sunpower, who recently attended a green home show in Santa Maria, said he’s installed solar panels on local homes for people who don’t want to be tied to the electric company. He and his wife Alese live completely off the grid at their farm in Paso Robles, where they have a solar panel and battery system with a generator for backup power.
While he said that way of life isn’t for everyone, it’s easy once the system is up and operating.
“If you can jump start a car, you can live off the grid,” Miller said. “You’d be amazed.”
Alese Miller said when the city or state’s infrastructure goes down, they don’t lose power.
“It takes some getting used to,” Miller said. “You have to watch your energy usage.”
While dispensing with the electric company may seem like a good idea, it does come at a price. Startup costs to install an entire solar panel system can run from $20,000 to $100,000, according to Michael Emrich, president of Atascadero’s Solarponics Energy Systems, which also had a booth at the recent Santa Maria expo. The batteries used to store the energy can cost between $10,000 and $15,000 alone and must be regularly maintained.
Emrich said living off-grid requires more commitment and work than most people want to do, and because there are limits to the amount of energy that can be stored, homeowners who decide to take that route must learn to be conservative in their energy usage.
“Living off the grid takes physical and mental energy,” Emrich said. “You will still require a generator in most cases to back you up, because when you have sustained periods of cloud and rain, your batteries will most likely get down to a point where they need to be recharged, and you’ll end up running a generator, which is not a cheap thing to do.
“When we hurt enough we’re willing to change our ways,” Emrich said. “If it’s not painful, we just don’t pay any attention. There’s a whole educational thing to be done yet.”
While there are a few people living on the Central Coast who’ve decided to go off-grid for ideological reasons, most, like the Millers, do it out of necessity. Depending on the location, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company can charge up to $100,000 to run power lines to isolated homes and ranches in more rural areas of Northern Santa Barbara County. For people who live there, it’s cheaper to opt for generating electricity themselves through solar panels.
The solar switch is more cost effective for residents in suburban areas looking to generate their own power to go partially off-grid, relying on PG&E to store the excess energy generated by their solar panels. During daily usage, the sun generates D/C power to an inverter that converts it to A/C for home use. In the summer, when customers are creating more energy than they use, the excess is sent to the power company, spinning the power meter backward. Customers receive credit from the electric company that they can use in the winter. They bank the energy when the price is high and buy it when prices are lower during winter months.
In order to receive a 30 percent tax credit from the state for installing solar panels, customers must stay on the grid, according to A.M. Sunpower’s Miller. He said conventional power lines will eventually be replaced by solar powered homes because of the energy lost over lines during transmission.
“It’s an antiquated way of doing things,” Miller said. “Solar is a web that’s feeding itself during the day.”
Denneen, who worked to get a law requiring solar panels on all new home construction, purchased his first set of solar panels decades ago. When those wore out, he bought a new set of photovoltaic panels for $18,000—the state reimbursed him for half the cost—which heat the water in his hot tub and provide him with all the energy he needs.
Community effort
According to Santoyo, no energy crisis could make energy conservation and sustainability any more important than it already is.
“I think it’s always been important, and people have always tried to live this way,” he said. “We had vast, enormously culturally rich civilizations before oil. We’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do, not because we fear the future. It’s because we love things about the present is why we try to get people to be sustainable. It’s naturally the way to live. Everything else has been created to take us away from that.”
Santoyo, who is leading a two-week permaculture design course from June 14 to 27 in San Luis Obispo, said society is finally warming up to changing its over-consumptive behavior and must now rethink how to produce energy without using fossil fuels.
“Somebody has to be the pioneer species, and I think that’s been happening over the past 10 years,” Santoyo said. “When the fad is over, it will be considered necessary. People will see that it does make economic sense. It’s too bad that it’s a prescription rather than a prevention.”
Let’s face it. Not everyone’s cut out for living off the grid. Growing food, for example, isn’t feasible for some folks, Santoyo said, but teaching individuals how to network with others in the community who are experts at growing food organically is a reachable goal.
Ultimately, community and the food infrastructure are tied together, Secretary Kawamura explained, especially in times of food crises.
“There’s no discrimination, big or small, if we’ve got this unpredictable weather driving unpredictable harvests,” Kawamura said. “You’ve got to recognize that the whole structure is impacted or invested in it. If you’ve got your sustainable garden and a snap frost knocks almost all of it out, where do you go? You go to the store.”
Kawamura said the state’s biggest challenge is overcoming people’s “chronic amnesia” and teaching communities how to sustain their own local food supply.
“It’s hard when people have either forgotten or there wasn’t a lesson plan in school to try to remind them that these are old, old lessons that we unfortunately learned the hard way a long time ago,” Kawamura said.
As for Denneen, who will lead his last nature hike on April 26, he’s glad to see that people are finally beginning to agree with him, but fears that it all might be too little too late. As a career biologist who wrote his master’s thesis in sociology on population in 1952, he believes a self-sustaining lifestyle is the only hope for survival.
“I feel that our whole culture is over-consuming,” Denneen said. “We’re destroying and modifying our natural habitat so much that we are creating an environment that will not sustain humans, particularly at the rate we’re reproducing. Our way of life cannot continue the way it is.”
Contact Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas at jthomas@ santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 23-30, 2009.
