I'm Jeanine. I am a lecturer at San Jose State University. I am an ethno-ecologist.
This is Lousã. She's a min-pin. We live in The Champion.
I was living in Northern California. I was renting these beautiful places out in the mountains at
reasonable rates. I thought I need to switch this up. I remember this instant
where I was driving behind a shuttle bus and the shuttle bus was making a left
turn in front of me and I said, "that bus is good-looking. It's shiny. It's white. It
has these huge windows all around it. If it's a bus it must have its own air
conditioning heating system", and I had a bunch of leftover pension funds some of
the tiny little ones that weren't going to do anything because at that time the
stock market wasn't doing so great. Then I found a bus for exactly what my two
pension funds put together. I bought the bus and I drove to
Sacramento got a father-son team to put the floor in. I drove back to the place
I was renting at the time. I moved everything out in one week. I basically
took my studio bedroom and configured it to fit in the bus. As an ecologist I teach
environmental science. I teach climate change. I teach living
responsibly, living sustainably. I believe that I can't be an honest authentic
ethical teacher if I am not living exactly what I teach. Every year I've set
a new goal for myself to live more sustainably. The next logical step was to
live tiny, to live small. The thing with a lot of tiny homes is people build from
new, build from scratch. I wanted to recycle and the best way to recycle was to get a bus.
This is a Champion Challenger with an e450 engine. It's a Ford engine with a
shuttle bus chassis that would have fit I think 16 to 20 people and now it's
just me and a dog. This is a 45 watt panel connected to one battery which is
the house battery that came with the bus. It has a ton of windows which is what I
wanted it in my home. I wanted a lot of light. I installed screening all on one side of the bus.
All of this furniture used to be in my bedroom studio. This bed
which has been sawed to be half of its height. This screen allows me to keep all
of my windows open and only partially curtained. I want to wake up with light
and with being able to see all the trees that are around me, but I also want
privacy. Much of the artwork is made by different artisans from tribes and
tribal communities here in California. This is also from palmer lady who does
some amazing designs. This palm is special to me. It's Areca catechu which is a
betel nut palm and that's native to Southeast Asia and a third of my life is
spent in Southeast Asia which is why I have an adopted family of the tato a
clan of about 3,000 people. My dog Luca has her bed right down there and I also
have a walk-in closet which most women want.
This is my privy and it can also serve as a shower.
This is the minibar. It's a ladies traveling case and it has about 40
different liquors in it. This pantry is full of food. Most of my cooking is done
on an induction cooktop but when I don't have access to grid power I cook on a
bio light stove that is filled with little tiny chips of Redwood. I built
into my systems here there's Plan A and Plan B and sometimes there's even a Plan
C so if I'm hooked into the grid I can use my two electric lights. I can run my
electric heater and my induction stovetop. If I'm off-grid then I either use
my battery-powered lights or use the solar panel and I use wood fuel to cook
on. I made a decision to go with absolutely no propane because in
becoming carbon neutral I wanted to maximize how I could generate my own
electricity through solar. I didn't want to be reliant on natural gas or on
propane and also it's dangerous. I felt really nervous about having propane
around whether it was on the back of my bus or inside my bus. I have another
pantry and the Yeti cooler. You would think that you'd want to use this for
cooling but for me it's better to store food in it because I would otherwise
always have to be getting dry ice and this keeps my food more temperature
stabilized. And for those of us who rely on chocolate in the middle of the summer
either you have your chocolate in the refrigerator or you have your chocolate
in the Yeti so I have two. One Yeti here and one Yeti cooler there and
then I have a tiny little igloo fridge that is low enough wattage.
This cloth here is handcrafted by the weavers in the Manggarai region in
Indonesia where my adopted family lives and this is the harp that I am learning
to play. That little white canister; that is the amount of trash I generate in a
month to two months. The blue canister is dog food and the red canister are the
little red wood chips that power my Biolite camp stove.
This ficus tree is 17 years old. The mint is new. Every person should have aloe
to have aloe available for any sort of stovetop burns or if overexposure to Sun.
The first thing people said to me was, "where you going to park it?" and I was
this clueless save who said, "oh, that'll be no problem. I know some campgrounds
down along the coast where you can camp for 500 bucks a month, 600 bucks a month".
During the off-season...pretty much after March April it goes right back up. But
then when I realized as a professor I need to have a routine every fall
semester, every spring semester, in the summer session, I needed an anchor. It
took me a year to find a campground consortium where I can stay in these
campgrounds for free based on a membership for three weeks at a time and
then a girlfriend calls it renewing my visa but if I want to stay in the same
campground I need to go out for a week and then come back in again.
So then the challenge became okay where do I go for that week and because of the
place where I am there are always Fairgrounds there are state park
campgrounds within say about 20 mile radius of five or six different places
where I can be or I can simply put The Champion in storage and go stay with
some friends. Once I got over that initial hump of where can I be
geographically so that I can be geographically stable and do my
professional work, everything became so much easier. Every semester my students
do group projects that make a difference in the world and this semester my
students are helping me to become carbon neutral. We have set it up so that the
students came to my tiny home to my bus they audited my entire life they came up
with a range of figures of how many tons of carbon I am personally contributing
to the atmosphere which is always embarrassing but as human beings we are
going to contribute carbon. Once we crunched the numbers and figured out
literally how many tea trees how many certain palm plants how much bamboo how
much grass needs to be planted I will then get on the phone with my
tato family and say, "okay, here you go", and I will send the money over. I really like
the idea that becoming carbon neutral I am now absolutely practicing what I
preach. If I'm going to teach about climate change and how we humans are
effecting climate change then I sure better be carbon neutral and I get to
support my extended family in planting trees that will help build their homes
that will provide bamboo for their baskets.
Because of my background of having an adopted tribe as a family in Indonesia
one of the phrases these folks have taught me is the phrase 'All Our
Relations'. Initially I thought they meant everyone we're related to as our family
or perhaps being relating to all humans, but now I understand that it means all
living beings and so that phrase 'All Our Relations', which is something that you
say as part of a ceremony or ritual or prayer means that you are understanding
that we have a relationship with all living beings on the planet whether it
is microscopic sulfur breathing bacteria at the bottom of the ocean or it is a
Jaguar or a coyote or the forest or the waterway or the mountains. These are all
our relations and so that is my family that's who I care about.