More Thoughts on T24 for Lighting

My latest overly lengthy post on California's Title 24 changes received some comments from my excellent colleague Jay Shuler, CEO of Cool Lumens, a Santa Cruz LED startup. His comments are in blue, and my responses below.

1. Dictate results, not technologies or technological implementation. This is the Prime Directive of standards. Do not squelch innovation by limiting how people achieve your goals. 

I agree totally on technology neutrality. In my mind there are some problems with the current proposals in this regard. Tech neutrality should also be seen in the context of what's between the lines. It's always the stated intent in regulation, but very often things are wired so that only one technology can fit the regulatory goal. In the case of LEDs, this is true to some extent. But there is no real viable replacement on the horizon, and LED as a general class of technology is incredibly broad and has much potential. Where I see issues are in provisions that require integrated fixtures vs simple lamp retrofits. As I explained in my last blog, some of these issues speak to the tradeoffs necessary in achieving a balance between private profit and public good. 

I'm not worried about squelching innovation as a bad thing- I think we should squelch it and slow it down so that we can understand what we're doing better before find ourselves in RobotLand and the IOT is the oppressive global government, like in Brave New World.

2. Dictate results that matter, and be application aware. For example, color quality is important to a much different degree in different applications. Where visibility is the primary concern, CRI matters only to provide color contrast in addition to luminance contrast. It is obviously much more important in retail and hospitality, including home. A reasonable metric would provide minimum CRI standards for different applications. But don't get too strict... CRI is a matter of opinion, not science.

"Results that matter" should always be the goal of regulation and standards, it's just that we don't really have agreement on how CRI matters. There's a lot of science behind it, and once again, we don't have agreement on how the science matters. The relevance of color varies greatly in different applications, this is true. Most of the proposed T24 changes seem to recognize this and have been carefully considered according to different applications. The reasonable metric with minimum CRI is pretty much exactly what needs to be worked out, it's complicated.

3. Efficiency is incredibly important to global warming and other things that one could easily argue are more important than being able to see red a little better. However, given the need for color in many apps, a sliding metric that computes efficacy and CRi together might make sense... something like setting a minimum value for LPW x CRI. (low LPW x high CRI = high LPW x low CRI). 

Yes, efficiency is crucial and often overlooked and taken for granted in lighting today. The connection between quality and adoption however remains very clear to me, but unfortunately not to everyone. I appreciate Jay's being willing to take a look at different metrics or combinations of metrics. LPW and CRI are of course both important. I'm not sure if multiplying them will give the result, and there is a danger in using a single metric for everything, it simply can't tell the whole story no matter how accurate it is, especially with CRI. I like the idea of a "sliding" metric- more like a scale. I hope the CEC sees enough creative thinking here to develop a good approach- it's not obvious now what that might be, but that shouldn't keep us from trying.

4. Watch out for efforts to save the industry from itself... trust the market to some extent. In other words, crappy products will fail in the market; you don't have to disallow them. This has been the mission of the DOE for a long time, and it is laudable to establish voluntary standards of quality... a Good Housekeeping stamp of approval, if you will... but hesitate to be heavy handed. EnergyStar and DLC are great and laudable efforts, and good enough.

I really don't always trust the market alone. For one thing, it's moving too fast now for regulation to keep up. And this rapid movement results in dramatically increased inequalities- everyone's aware of these issues. The key thing is a healthy stable balance between markets and government- this kind of thing is simply too difficult for most Americans to envision. I'm workin' on that.

I would beg to differ about Energy Star and would argue that their efforts have come across as somewhat heavy handed. Heavy handedness is very much to be avoided, as it carries a serious risk of backlash. When overly zealous energy regulations are put in place at the expense of quality and other practical considerations, people start to hate the entire idea of regulation at all and the whole house of cards starts to fall. This is happening in Europe and all over the globe, I'm disturbed by it. As I see it, the biggest problem is the lack of coordination between industry, consumers, and government. Our interests can all align, it just takes more work, and in a society that often seems to be rapidly disintegrating and losing social cohesiveness, it's a lot more work.

5. Under "It's About R9" I have a few additional comments. The blue pump is usually but not always 450-460nm. The traditional LED phosphor is yellow, not green or red, although different formulations are emerging. Blue+Yellow = White (perceived). Blue + Green + Red = white (perceived) but with a better chance at high CRI and efficacy together. Blue leaks through not by accident but on purpose, to balance the Yellow (or Red + Green) to make the perception of white. LED spectrum is actually pretty smooth compared to other phosphor-converted sources, only lacking (or more accurately, weak in) Cyan and Red in traditional YAG phosphor products, and presumably smaller slices in RGB formulas.

Good comments. It is important to realize that most (certainly not all) LED spectra are smoother- this is good in general, although the spike that occurs in most is at the 450nm range in general, the wavelength to which circadian processes are most sensitive, quite an unfortunate accident. Personally I feel that LEDs have and will continue to advance rapidly enough that we can have basically any spectrum we want, from low candelight to noonday summer sun in Marrakech and anything in between. Cyan gaps have closed and R9 is up on many "blue pump" sources these days. Phosphor engineering is a fascinating field these days- I'm always impressed by what Intematix is up to, for instance. 

California's T24 - Weigh In on Residential Quality of Light

Revisions to California’s Title 24 2016 code now being considered. I know- you’d probably rather have a root canal than think about regulatory issues. And even if you are engaged in them, it’s basically impossible to learn everything you need to know in the time you have available. But…you do have an impact on this process, and it’s important that you know how to exercise this right.

I’ve appointed myself an independent advisor to any and all who will listen, well…read that is, to present my summary analysis of the main points of this pending legislation that will affect your professional and personal lives, and to give you guidelines on how to comment effectively. Disclaimer: although I am active in the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES), and the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD), my opinions and recommendations are presented completely independently of these groups. I am also greatly indebted to Jim Benya for his excellent comments and help. He's very actively involved in this effort, probably knows more about it than anyone on the planet, and has been at it for far longer than most of us, especially me. I’ve drawn heavily on his recommendations in making my own. I apologize for the length of this, but there's a lot to consider without serious oversimplification.

Regulation, Why Bother?
There’s much debate about the role of regulatory actions in the market- should they drive technology or follow it? This is a particularly pertinent question today with lighting, as technology is advancing so quickly that it’s impossible for regulations to keep pace. Maybe for now, regulations are following technology. Either way, regulations must allow for healthy innovation, energy efficiency, market development, health and wellness, and environmental justice without destroying the balance between private profit and public good. “Disruption” may be good for innovation (or not, that’s now quite debatable) but it’s not conducive to stable, participatory government. Poorly crafted regulation, despite the best of intentions, can do more harm than good.

I’ve limited myself to commenting only on parts of the Residential Lighting part of the code that I know enough about to form an opinion. As part of my effort here I attended the June 24 hearing at the California Energy Commission (CEC) in Sacramento.

But if you’re so inclined, I encourage you to comment on any part of the proposed changes to the code. Anyone from anywhere can comment, even people from other states or countries. Since California has traditionally been a leader in energy efficiency regulation, I think that looking towards how other regions and countries can apply our successes is important. By the same token, we in California don’t come up with all the great ideas and legislative practices - incorporating comments from outside our regional framework is healthy.

Public Comments Close July 23
The process of developing and revising codes, including Title 24, takes a long time and there are many stages during which different levels of comments, revisions, and review are incorporated. The comment period in question is for proposed changes to the 2016 code, and for now, the most important date is July 23, which is the deadline to send public comments to the CEC. After that, there will be more workshops and increasingly tight code language to review by the CEC, who will ultimately adopt it into the 2016 code.

Quality, Adoption, and Complexity
One of the many complex dimensions of T24 is that its primary purpose is to legislate energy efficiency, not “quality” per se- quality of life, indoor quality, or quality of light specifically. But the reason to include “quality” based measures, such as CRI, into the standard is that they dramatically impact the broad adoption of energy efficiency measures, especially in lighting. Efforts to improve CFL adoption, especially in residential application, failed- not because of poor regulation specifically, but because of poor product quality (actual and perceived). CRI is a key metric used to judge light quality, and it’s not necessarily a perfect metric, but in lighting we have few of those anyway, and legislation is not about perfection, it’s about results. I’ll talk more about CRI below.

A consistent refrain from those within my network who are inside the regulatory process is that there is not enough industry and user feedback. In regulatory affairs today, legislation is usually dominated by the few key players who choose to (or more importantly, in the case of well funded entrenched interests, can afford to) show up and mouth off. Participation in this process, as complicated and inconvenient as it may be for Ma and Pa Public and small businesses, is a “use it or lose it” right.

In any proposed legislation, especially that which deals with energy efficiency or environmental issues, the incumbent players’ first reaction is typically to proclaim in stentorian tones that tightening standards will be economically ruinous, imperil jobs, and hasten the demise of Western Civilization. And very often, well crafted legislation that is done with appropriate support and input from all stakeholders, including end users, overcomes these initial objections and achieves its purpose. In the current proposed changes, there is much that still needs to be worked out, and entrenched industry interests have some legitimate concerns, as do homeowners, manufacturers, industry groups, and practitioners.

Why Color Quality is Important
Residential lighting regulations are so important because in our homes, color quality in lighting is generally perceived to be more important than in public spaces. So even though residential lighting does not represent the largest percentage of overall energy use, it has a large influence on how the public perceives and supports LED technology in non-residential uses. The last breakthrough lighting technology (CFLs) failed in residential applications because quality was not a priority for manufacturers, and because incandescent light sources were not being banned. Now incandescents are being banned, and CFLs, while improved in quality, are no longer viable. LED is widely understood to be the technology of the future- fortunately it’s incredibly flexible scalable, and efficient. We will eventually enjoy much better quality of light at much higher energy efficiency.

It’s About R9
Not to be overly reductionist, but the biggest quality issue with LEDs so far has been color performance- both in temperature (CCT) and rendering (CRI). People perceive that LEDs are too blue. This is largely because most LEDs are made with a blue “fundamental emitter” or "pump"- the LED die itself emits blue light at approximately 450-460 nm, which excites the red and green (or yellow) phosphors in the LED package to create white light. Because the blue fundamental emission is used in combination with red and green to create white, a blue phosphor isn’t required – this makes the LED cheaper to produce. First generation LEDs settled for “broken” spectra, that don’t include all colors in light in balanced proportions, so the blue leaks through and shows up disproportionately (many newer LEDs, including Soraa’s especially, have improved spectral design and color rendering). This is similar to the color problem in fluorescent lamps, which also work by exciting phosphors. Because of their large surface area, a lot of phosphors are required, and manufacturers realized they could produce light cheaply by taking spectral “shortcuts”- leaving out large bands of the spectrum of white light. Both fluorescents and first generation LEDs suffer from low R9 values- the deep red part of the spectrum. This plus the high blue component of their spectra makes them look greenish or blue.

Most of the problems with LED color performance center on poorly balanced spectra and low R9- not enough red or deep red- not necessarily low CRI per se. It’s possible to achieve a high CRI value and still have low R9, as CRI is an average of all the R values. In order to look right to most people, electric light, including LEDs, especially in lower color temperatures (below 3500K), needs a full balanced spectrum and high R9 value. Even in higher color temperatures (above 3500K), full spectrum light is better, although we’re not used to it and don’t expect it because we don’t see it very often- few manufacturers make sources like this anymore.

CRI may not be the ideal metric for color, but it’s adequate for our purposes now, where it matters most, in lower color temperature residential lighting. It also has the advantage of being widely accepted and understood, at least by lighting professionals. It’s a standard that can appear on lighting product packaging- even though most of the public doesn’t understand it now, they will eventually.

Flicker, the Persistent Irritant
Manufacturers hate the flicker problem because it’s evidently so difficult to deal with. People hate flicker in LEDs because it looks unnatural, and there are health concerns. In my opinion we don’t know enough about how harmful flicker may be to have health concerns drive regulation, I’m sure many will disagree with me here. But like light quality, it’s something that will slow adoption, so must be dealt with in T24 for that reason.

Compatibility, Another Persistent Irritant
Compatibility issues with LEDs represent a widespread case of unexpected consequences –no one foresaw or wanted these problems. The entire electrical infrastructure of the US and most industrialized countries was built primarily for incandescent light sources first, in fact lighting was the primary driver for electrification in the US. And since LEDs are a technology fundamentally different from incandescent or fluorescent, they deal with power very differently and are much more sensitive to the inevitable variations in power that occur in any system like the electrical grid- it’s even more complicated than that, I’m only scratching the surface here.

In many cases, LEDs can be simply plug-and-play, changed out in existing sockets with no performance problems. In other cases, they won’t dim, they flicker, or worse, they just won’t work. Being fundamentally unidirectional, LED lamps are also necessarily configured differently than omni-directional ones- this contributes greatly to both their lamp and fixture efficiency. Unfortunately they often won’t fit in fixtures designed for incandescent or fluorescent sources. And dimmers, drivers, and other components designed for incandescent and fluorescent sources don’t always work with LEDs. This has slowed adoption, as people are used to simply switching out lamps, as was the case with CFLs, instead of having to retrofit the entire electrical system for a building just to get the benefits of LEDs.

The wide extent of compatibility problems is greatly exacerbated by the need to simultaneously embark on a replacement strategy, where many lamps are switched out for high efficiency sources, and to develop completely new components, controls, and infrastructure that are compatible with LEDs. To make things even harder to deal with, the pace of technology change means that something that works now will probably be completely outmoded in 2-3 years, when the building project you specify LEDs for today will be completed. In my opinion, the only way we can deal with these issues is to incentivize manufacturers to plan for flexibility, maintenance, and eventual obsolescence of any lighting components or system, a very difficult thing to envision, let alone execute. Still, compatibility problems will eventually be ironed out. Now the goal is to craft regulations that encourage both rapid, balanced replacement as well as innovation at the system level.

My Recommendations:

1. Revisit California Quality Lighting Initiative (CQLI)
Many of the proposed changes to T24 are the result of the CQLI, most of which I like. I recommend we take another look at the 90 CRI requirement, perhaps considering lowering it very slightly to 87, even 85, if this also includes the R9>50 (or greater) requirement. However, this may not be necessary. The EPA last year failed to include a >80 CRI requirement in the Energy star standard, claiming that the market would find a way to develop higher CRI light sources without being motivated by regulations. In fact this is what happened- most of the top LED manufacturers now offer high CRI products. I like to think that this happened because the market demanded it, and that some manufacturers foresaw eventual regulation toward this direction. In any case, the CRI requirement is one of, if not the most, important parts of the suggested changes, and regulation should be consistent with what the market is already doing, as well as make it easier for all manufacturers to offer high quality products.

2. Address Lower CCTs and Color Changing
In the 2013 standard JA8, LED lighting is required to have at least 90 CRI and a color temperature between 2700K and 4000K for indoor lighting. Because there is so much demand today for very low CCT sources, I recommend we lower this to at least 2400K. I also recommend we address color changing sources and systems, as they’re already in the market and will be a part of how we use lighting in the future.

3. Get a Handle on Flicker
Flicker mitigation is important in efforts to improve LED quality. One of the problems now is that there is no widely accepted testing and certification procedure for flicker. It’s also poorly understood, if at all, by consumers. I recommend not regulating it until we have a testing procedure in place that will support rating, certification, and labeling to consumers. By the time manufacturers begin to deal with this issue, a process should be in place. More about flicker here:

http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/print/volume-11/issue-4/features/developer-forum/proper-driver-design-eliminates-led-light-strobe-flicker.html

http://www.e3tnw.org/Documents/2011%20IES%20flicker%20paper%20poplawski-miller-FINAL.pdf

4. Ensure Dimmers & Transformers Are All LED Capable
Manufacturers are already making many new LED compatible transformers and dimmers. Regulations should require them, and allow for certification and labeling.

5. Support the Screw Base Proposal
Bans on conventional incandescent lamps are expected to mature by 2017, and everyone will need to begin replacing them long before that. Indeed, when LEDs become an obviously superior choice to consumers, as they surely will very soon, we need to not impede adoption by making it difficult to install LEDS in existing fixtures. The proposal to allow screw base (Edison) lamps to comply with T24 has wide acceptance, and should be supported. I’m in favor of things that make lighting consumer friendly, and Edison lamps are easy to use, as opposed to many types of connections. Connection standards in lighting should be more like the successful ones in consumer electronics, like USB, that are well designed, consumer friendly, and gain wide acceptance.

6. Review the Recessed and Enclosed Provisions
One of the proposals on the table is to require that all enclosed and recessed lighting be high efficacy and “hardwired”, meaning a dedicated fixture without removable lamp. I’m of two opinions on this. I wouldn’t support it because it does not in practice pass the “technology neutral” test, as “hardwired” fixtures, or integrated LEDs, have traditionally been expensive, and they’re a perfect example of something that will be outmoded soon after installation. With the appropriate fixture and lamp combination, you can do the same thing as an integrated luminaire for a lot less money, and you can swap out the lamp when you get a better one. However, the real reason for this proposed requirement is that there are widespread thermal performance issues with LEDs- even though they run cooler than incandescents, they can generate a lot of heat in enclosed fixtures and much more sensitive to higher temperatures. In recessed and enclosed fixtures they can pose a fire hazard. Also, integrated fixtures are becoming much more affordable, so until thermal performance issues are resolved with LED lamps, the rationale is that it doesn’t make sense to allow them as high efficacy sources in enclosed and recessed fixtures. Maybe we have to wait on this one.

7. Rethink Lifetime Expectations
This is a problem that I’m not sure I have a regulatory answer for. LED lifetimes claimed by manufacturers are largely irrelevant and don’t bear much relation to real-world conditions, for several reasons: 1.) Actual lifetimes depend on other components like drivers, which are not necessarily as long-lived as lamps, 2.) Actual lifetimes are difficult to predict, as the testing system depends on extrapolation- 50,000 hours of over 6 years of 24/7 use, 3.) LEDs don’t fail noticeably, they slowly degrade, so it’s difficult to tell when to replace them, 4.) Manufacturers often claim long lifetimes because they don’t often have much that differentiates their products, the initial high price of LEDs needs to be justified with long life, and consumers simply think that longer is always better, and 5.) LEDs will certainly improve dramatically, with lower cost, higher quality, and increased efficiency well within five years, and installations of current products will most likely be replaced anyway. The bottom line for manufacturers is that lowering lifetime thresholds will make LEDs cheaper, speeding up adoption, bringing down price, and saving more energy sooner. It seems counterintuitive, but maybe we could argue for lowering lifetime requirements.

8. Convene More Roundtables
In my opinion, ( and Mr. Benya’s) more industry roundtables on LED lamps, fixtures, and controls should be convened ASAP. Manufacturers should be invited and consensus should be reached on all proposed changed to the Standard. If you're a manufacturer, make sure you're represented at these meetings.

A Brilliant Future, If We Get it Right
Despite the formidable technical, economic, environmental, regulatory, and political challenges involved in the current transition in lighting, I believe that the future holds the very real possibility of better electric lighting everywhere- higher quality, cheaper, more flexible, and significantly more energy efficient. The new technology is too compellingly better in almost every way, but technology alone is not enough, nor is any single part of the process. Industry, government, consumers, and NGOs all need to work together to get the regulations right. If we don’t, we run the risk of delaying crucially needed energy use reductions and improvements in light and indoor environmental quality. You can play a part in this by making informed comments to the CEC.

How to Comment
The best contact method is email at docket@energy.ca.gov. Please include the docket number #2014-BSTD-01 and indicate 2016 Building Standards Update in the subject line. Please include your name and any organization name. Comments should be in a downloadable, searchable format such as Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Light...By the People and For the People

Kickin' it the Merkan way with my boy U-Sam in Troy, NY.
Snap by George Gruel.

In a recent LI discussion group post about the role of government regulation in lighting, one ornery contributor took issue with my use of the term “environmental justice,” referring to it as a “silly term” coined by meddlesome “statists.” This made me realize that perhaps some people out there may not see eye-to-eye with me about shaping the regulatory environment around lighting, could it be? So I thought I’d better explain myself on this idea in a forum where the shouting is somewhat more filtered out.

I love it when I’m deeply ruminating on something (in this case it was the entire idea of government and how we believe it’s generally irrelevant) and I read a piece that neatly sums up a position and conclusions I’m already coming to on my own and points to a path of action. In this case it was Nathan Heller’s brilliant piece on the current clash of real people and the invading technocracy in my hometown San Francisco, California Screaming in the July 7 New Yorker. Here he points out that government is pretty much the opposite of innovation (kissin’ cousin of the recently mortally wounded meme whose name is Disruption) and the exquisitely efficient transfer of information that has come to define our culture today. Government is slow, participatory, painful, endlessly iterative, analog, and frustrating, but it still works. (It does, OK? Who builds the roads and delivers the water?) The really radical thing for Silicon Valley companies and people to do would be to embrace and enhance government as it is rather than constantly trying to reinvent it, or turn it into software-driven private enterprise. Of course information technology has made many functions of government infinitely better, like paying parking tickets. That doesn’t mean that the idea of government is over, or dead. That’s basically what Ted Cruz and the Tea Party want you to believe.

EPA (an agency I’m not always in agreement with) defines environmental justice as “…the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Also, “EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across this Nation. It will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.” That works for me: equal distribution of income, equal protection, equal opportunity. If that’s silly to you, call me a communist, or worse, a liberal. But if you’re not participating, step aside. I’ve got work to do.

My radical idea is to consider the built environment, especially indoors, where we spend almost all of our time, as probably the most important part of the “environment,” especially when it comes to lighting. This is something we’ve never really done before as far as I can tell. I mean, sure, jungles and spotted owls and rivers are worth saving for future generations, but let’s also focus on buildings, cities, all the built environment in the public domain, and apply ideas of environmental justice to its financing, regulation, design, construction, maintenance, and use of materials, energy, and water.

We’re still at a global tipping point with lighting. We have suffered far too long from crappy lighting in most of the global built environment. Incandescent lights have acceptable quality, in fact they’re mostly what we still recognize as lighting when we’re not at Walmart or in general commercial office wasteland, but now we know they use way too much energy. Fluorescent lights have to go- we hate the way they make things look, and they don’t save enough energy. LEDs will provide wonderful light in the future, save a lot of energy, and solve most lighting problems, but only if we get the regulations right. With incandescents being phased out globally, manufacturers will continue to just make the cheapest LED lighting they can and consumers and businesses won’t have much choice unless we get involved. We won’t revert to incandescents and we won’t suddenly adopt more CFLs- that’s a dead technology. LEDS superior in all ways than incandescents are already on the market, it’s just a matter of how quickly they’ll be adopted. Rapid adoption of LEDs is good for reducing global energy use sooner, but their quality has to be as good as incandescents. It already is, most people just don’t know it yet. Regulation will play a catalytic role in making better LED lighting widespread. We all have to get much more involved in order to make this happen, and we have to believe that getting involved matters and that government works- they do, trust me. You can help, more on this below.

I started a Facebook page on July 4th last year: People Against Bad Lighting. It was tongue-in-cheek and part of a product marketing effort, but there was some real political purpose there beyond selling LED lights. In the process of doing this I got to riff on the Declaration of Independence, which involved actually reading it, something I highly recommend. Lately I’m realizing that on some level, I’m still proud of being an American and of the basic blueprint of our government, flawed and tenuous and constantly embattled as it is. In my mind the best thing about it is that it contains instructions for ongoing reinvention, retrofitting, and renovation. If that makes me a “statist,” one who believes in the idea of “states,” with participatory government, then I’m guilty as charged. I’m not exactly sure what the viable alternative to being a “statist” is today, unless it’s reverting to tribal nomadic social structure. Ghengis Khan did the nomadic thing pretty well actually, but he evolved into a statist, and one with startlingly modern notions about religious freedom and equal distribution of rights and resources. Besides, he’s been gone kind of a long time and there are a few more people on the planet now than there were in his time.

Environmental justice in lighting means that all people have the right to high quality lighting indoors and out, just as we have the right to high quality water and air indoors and out. Egregious violations of our basic environmental rights as humans with lighting may not seem as life threatening or heinous as water and air pollution and carcinogenic pesticides, but they’re still important- more so because they’re largely unrecognized.

There is global awareness of the problems of light pollution, overlighting, and encroachment in outdoor lighting- all exacerbated by the recent rapid adoption of high blue spectrum LED light, harmful to humans and other living species. Public outdoor lighting has historically often been highly contentious and politicized, as it should be. We’re trying to figure out the extent of negative health effects from poor quality indoor fluorescent and LED lighting, but it will be quite some time before we can draw enough conclusions to effect real legislation around this issue. In the meantime, the fact that bad indoor lighting is ugly and demoralizing as well as too energy intensive is enough to consider it a serious environmental problem.

There are other important benefits to encompassing lighting within the concept of environmental justice. From my experience in green building, I know that lighting retrofits are responsible for “jump starting” a huge number of energy efficiency projects, as lighting is the single most visible use of electricity. Projects that start with the “low hanging fruit” of lighting replacement very often go beyond that as people start to look at buildings more holistically. And while LEDs now may still seem to many to be too expensive and only for richer people and fancier buildings, the technology will soon become prevalent and widely available to everyone, in high quality. In fact it will also provide electric light for the first time to many who have not yet adopted incandescents or fluorescents, just as many people in developing countries who never had landlines now use cell phones.

For those in the lighting world, and for that matter anyone concerned with energy use, “resilience, “sustainability” and global warming, now is the time to weigh in on proposed changes to California’s Title 24 energy code around lighting. Here’s where to start participating http://www.energy.ca.gov/title24/participation.html. In addition, I and some of my colleagues will be providing summaries of the proposed changes and recommendations about how to comment. Do this even if you don't live or work in California, or the U.S. as the quality provisions being considered here will affect lighting far beyond the state.

The best example I’ve seen so far of true participatory “redesign” of government was the UK’s Government Digital Service’s revamping of government websites. This is inspiring to me as a designer, a writer, a marketing person, a web developer, a researcher, and a citizen. If we could have this level of effort and results in lighting regulation and the subsequent transition to a new lighting and energy infrastructure, there would really be justice in the world.

Day Light, Night Light, and Control of Fire

If "disruptive" lighting technology is the answer, what's the question? We know it's more than "how can we make lighting more energy efficient?"- CFLs did that at the cost of quality of light. Perhaps we can look at human evolution for some more interesting questions, and eventually, answers.

A 2009 book by Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire, presents a startling new theory: control of fire was the defining event in human evolution, as it led to cooking, which allowed us to absorb nutrients more effectively and led to big brains. Wrangham’s theory is particularly well argued and seems to be generally well received in the scientific community. One big fan (besides me) is food writer Michael Pollan, who cites the theory several times in his latest work,Cooked, which, among many things, explores how cooking impacts social cohesion.

Wrangham is mainly concerned with fire’s dramatic impact on human alimentary processes and the changes that followed from that. Cooked food is absorbed much more easily than raw (even wild animals prefer it), so it ultimately freed up time previously spent in chewing, digesting, and other tedious forms of processing raw food. Humans who adapted well to the control of fire obviously survived to evolve and prosper. What if we examined the evolutionary effects of fire on vision? If fire was indeed the evolutionary turning point, doesn’t it make sense to ask whether some of our behavior around light and energy use may be instinctive or genetically driven? Could we have a “fire gene” (or genes)?

We know that light has a strong impact on cognition, behavior, and emotional response. One rarely considered behavior that lighting impacts is how we use energy, as lighting is the most visible use of electricity, which can be seen as “sublimated fire.” We’ve lost a direct connection to energy since the electrification of the world. One way to understand energy in a very visceral way is to gather wood for cooking while backpacking in the wilderness- energy spent on acquiring fuel can be directly measured in the output of the fuel one gathers.

If we could incorporate an evolutionary biology perspective in research on light, what would that mean?

It may provide a new theoretical framework for understanding light and lighting, especially spectral design, in the context of new technologies- our current exposure to ubiquitous “broken spectra” light sources is analogous to the empty calorie diets we now consume, as Soraa CTO Mike Krames points out in his latest blog. Humans obviously evolved with only two types of light spectrum- daylight (in all its permutations) and “night light” (from incandescent sources). Exposing ourselves for long periods to light with unnatural spectra that deviate in basic ways from these two seems as unadvisable as ingesting pesticides, breathing polluted air, and eating a diet of overly refined industrial foods.

Research done from evolutionary perspective might give lighting design more and richer kinds of evidence upon which to strengthen practitioners’ role as “behavior modifiers” in the built environment. The best designers today operate equally well on both technical and aesthetic levels, but it’s the behavioral part of design that is least understood, and probably most important.

The revolution in lighting technology we are now undergoing provides us with unprecedented flexibility in designing lighting for healthier, more productive, and efficient buildings. Much more research is needed for us to develop a better understanding of the behavioral impacts of light on humans and other living organisms, so that we can finally apply optimal lighting on a wide scale in the near future.

Quality of Light, Quality of Life

Since I began working with LED startup Soraa in December of 2011, I've gotten a completely new perspective on lighting as a part of the built environment. In many ways it's something of a last frontier on innovation, because, like HVAC systems, few disruptive innovations have surfaced in lighting in recent decades, until now. Solid state lighting is truly revolutionizing lighting- this isn't really news, but the most recent technology development - native substrate LEDs, (GaN on GaN) as developed by Soraa - is a true disruptive factor in the industry.

What's significant about this development is how it focuses the discussion on quality of light. The last major shift in general lighting technology was compact flourescents. Though energy efficient, they have failed to be adopted widely, at least in residential use, because of their poor quality of light. Flourescent light is missing many key parts of the full spectrum we require to provide a satisfying, quality experience of light. Unfortunately, first generation LEDs were also deficient in light quality and ran the risk of not reaching full adoption for the same reason as CFLs.

The first commercially available LED light sources were based on light chips made with non-native substrates (typically GaN on silicon carbide or sapphire). These LEDs have impurities in the basic material that reduce efficiency and require relatively large areas on LED material to produce enough light. This is why you see many LED light sources that are clusters of little yellow things speckling whatever form that is chosen to deliver light- most are somewhat inelegant design solutions at best. Another key problem with these first generation LEDs is that they have a very high "blue spike" in their spectral distribution, which makes them appear overly blue.

Soraa's fundamental native-substrate approach solves both problems- it is smaller and brighter, and, in combination with a unique three-phosphor design, produces for the first time a real full spectrum LED light source. Smaller brighter light sources provide a clean, single beam with crisp shadows that is easily controlled and eliminates the need to extensive mechanical solutions to control and block excessive light that are the mainstay of almost all current lamp and fixture designs with incandescent, flourescent or other light sources. In the average lamp/fixture configuration today, it's not uncommon to have 50% or more (much more in some cases) of the light produced by the source never reach the intended destination. This translates into huge energy waste across the installed base of lighting all over the globe.

It is counterintuitive for most of to believe that products can be more energy efficient (or less fattening) without some kind of sacrifice or tradeoff.  I wrote about quality and eficiency recently HERE. Such tradeoffs are always present at the outset of disruptive innovations, but they often fade away as the technology improves and "commercializes". In the case of both LEDs and CFLs, early versions had many shortcomings that made their energy efficiency irrelevant. CFL quality has improved, but not enough for people to love them. With the advent of native substrate technology, LEDs have now reach an improvement threshold in quality that will allow their widespread adoption.

The bottom line is that LEDs now have the potential to replace incandescent and flourescent sources over a broad range of lighting applications, reducing energy use dramatically while also providing light that is of much higher quality in beam and spectrum. High quality lighting is widely understood to be connected to increased sales in retail, higher productivity in office environments, and better health and well being in all indoor environments.

A Machine for Light

When I was growing up in Southern California in the 1960s, my mother took me to see an exhibition of the work of the Bauhaus at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. The work was strange and vibrant, by turns playful, formal, and ironic. Along with other experiences, like the films and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, ideas from the Bauhaus made a big impression on me and must have lodged in my subconscious. Southern California at the time was ripe with experimentation- the predominant aesthetic model was modernism, expressed in the work of architects like Schindler, Neutra, and Eichler, summed up in Corbusier’s phrase “a house is a machine for living.”

Modernism never quite lost its hold on the Western American imagination, possibly because of its insistence in pure, geometrical, non representational forms and focus on the centrality of human endeavors as the primary way to create meaning. In the US, and California in particular, this was consonant with the self made, pioneer spirit, and found a voice in writers like Ayn Rand. The archetypal modernist shelter was the iconic expression of “prospect and refuge,” and nothing epitomized this aesthetic better than the above photograph by Julius Shulman of the Stahl House by Pierre Konig. Soaring over the sparkling grid of the Los Angeles basin at night, the picture of ease and elegance is cemented in my imagination by two elegantly dressed women who look precisely, exactly like my mother did in that era, down to the hairstyles and shoes. I can even smell her perfume! One of the enduring effects of images like these was to inculcate architects with the love of glazing. Sometimes it seems that they all decided, as I am fond of saying, that if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing. The aim wasn’t necessarily what we think of as “green” today, as in daylighting, it was more like they did it because they could, and it looked fabulous in the magazines. Still the effect was to suddenly flood homes and offices with daylight, for better or for worse (often both at once).

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the fundamental function of shelter through a completely different perspective, I’m beginning to understand the building not only as a strategy to stay warm (or cool) and dry, but also as a “machine for light:” a way of delivering appropriate light in appropriate, controllable levels. Architects must have understood this basic function intuitively ever since architecture has been around, but the relatively recent invention of electric manmade light ( lighting designer Jim Benya holds that all light is natural, it’s just that some of it is manmade) has had perhaps a more profound impact on building than we realize. Since manmade lighting is undergoing its next disruptive upheaval with the adoption of LEDs, we’re really beginning to look at light in a completely different way: we have an unique opportunity to reengage with it. So reimagining lighting naturally leads to reimagining architecture, yet again.

Because lighting technology is undergoing a massive disruptive change, we’re examining the technical, energy, design, and health aspects of lighting in great detail. We’re only beginning to understand the primacy of light, how it impacts circadian rhythms, cognition, mood, and behavior. If you examine lighting only, or initially, from a standpoint of energy efficiency, you realize that the impact here is on a very large scale, for instance, LEDs (in optimized systems) can eliminate 80% of lighting energy use across a wide range of technologies. Since lighting is perhaps the single biggest use of electricity in non-industrial buildings the potential scale effects of this level of efficiency are huge. Lighting is the most ubiquitous and visible use of power - lighting and electricity are inseparable. The history of electrification is the history of lighting- people’s desire for artificial light was the driving force behind the building of the electrical grid. With the emergence of whole building design practices, lighting has the potential to lead the design process, not only from an efficiency standpoint, but from a standpoint of total environmental quality.

But problems with current lighting design practice and technology are legion. For starters, it’s easy to believe that most buildings are not designed by architects (an assumption worth questioning- see this http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20081015/truth-in-numbers/). Certainly, of all buildings actually designed by architects, relatively few of them have lighting designed by lighting designers. So a very small percentage of all buildings have lighting designed by dedicated professionals. This appears to be borne out by a quick look at the built environment- most lighting really sucks. It’s glaring, too dim, too bright, poorly colored, wildly inefficient, and sometimes close to intolerable. (It’s hard to imagine any living organism surviving for long under those orange sodium vapor streetlamps). Most lighting is so bad, and we experience really good lighting in the built environment so rarely that we don’t really know what we’re missing. Fortunately, this is about to change.

Part of the reason for widespread poor quality of lighting has to do with the economics of building design practice. I know from personal experience that when building professionals put together project teams and budgets, special consultants at the end of the food chain (this unfortunately may include lighting designers) are likely to be eliminated - as architects see their profits drain away when budgets get chopped, they figure they can do the lighting themselves. Or electrical engineers do it, as they understand wiring and power use, but not necessarily good lighting design. Also, on big complicated projects, having fewer consultants to manage can be a very good thing for project managers. Electrical contractors or distributors may provide lighting design for free in order to get on projects. None of these practices necessarily incentivizes good lighting design.

The current state of design of lamps and luminaires exacerbates the problem somewhat. In view of the potential technological advances on the horizon, today’s technologies can seem somewhat primitive. In many key ways, lighting has not evolved much since the first Edison lamp. Often the cheapest, most ubiquitous lamps and luminaires are tragically inefficient or really ugly or both. There are significant color and spectral issues with many, if not most, classes of lamps. Performance varies considerably, and often falls well short of requirements across many technologies in terms of consistent lumen output, lifetime, starting, temperature, and other measures. The design of many lamps and luminaires involves what I call “provisional coping strategies”- often elaborate and inefficient schemes to overcome fundamental design flaws. To give two examples: omnidirectional lamps are routinely baffled, filtered, shaded, and otherwise diluted so that only a fraction of the light they produce actually gets delivered to us as usable light; and halogen MR16s use dichroic coating on their reflectors to filter out harmful IR and UV. Another key aspect of inefficiency is that many incandescent lamps (like the MR16) typically produce light outside of the visible spectrum, or light with highly unbalanced spectral signatures.

Of course, despite the many shortcomings of lamps and luminaires, the best lighting designers work wonders with current technology, and better design is certainly not all about new technology. This is very much the case with the HVAC industry, which also hasn’t really seen innovative new technical developments in a long time, and better design practices are perhaps needed there more than new technology. The lighting industry, however, is very different, as the LED revolution is now in full swing, and the big changes are based on a fundamental shift in technology.

There are really 2 classes of LEDs- what I call 1.0 and 2.0 (first generation and next generation). Many LED 1.0 products are just as bad, or worse than the technologies they are meant to replace in terms of light quality and performance, and LED 2.0 products are much better in those areas. While  LED 2.0 products are mostly still rather expensive compared to other lighting technologies, they’re going through what we might call a rapid maturation process, and because they’re based on semiconductors, we will see significant advancements in performance and a steady drop in price in the next few years, may be sooner. Although it won’t be anywhere near as dramatic as price/performance curves seen in semiconductors used in computers, forces are aligning to put the manufacturing technology and infrastructure into place to allow global scale production of affordable, high quality LEDS in the near future. We may not know what hit us until it’s well underway. LEDs are already utterly disrupting lighting, and the questions facing designers now are how to design with them, and how to make architecture more responsive to high quality lighting - how to expand the services delivered by the “machine for living” to include better light than we ever dreamed possible.

We need to see past the temporary high cost of this new technology, which will change very soon, and get our minds around what may be counterintuitive for most of us – the fact that LED 2.0 products can offer everything at once: energy efficiency, controllability, longevity, and quality of light. We’re used to too many tradeoffs and shortcomings in new technologies, so it’s kind of hard for us to believe that we can get it all: if ten or fifteen years ago someone were to describe to you today’s iPhone and all the functions it provides at its current cost, you couldn’t possibly imagine it, yet it doesn’t compromise on anything important, there are no real tradeoffs in quality, it’s all there. The same is becoming true with LED lighting (with the exception of high “blue spike” LEDs based on non-native substrates, which have had rapid and widespread market penetration). I’ll outline some of the ways I see this happening.

For starters, a lot of LED technology can be “plug and play,” that is, it can fit into the existing lighting infrastructure and work immediately, delivering better light at significant energy savings . This is not true of other classes of building services, like HVAC. Highly inefficient installed infrastructure is a pervasive problem today, as capital for financing building projects is still hard to come by. It’s much easier to build a really energy efficient new building than it is to retrofit an older one with deeply embedded inefficient HVAC equipment, a low performing building skin, too much glazing, and bad siting. Even if retrofitting is preferred to “greenfield” development, the overall costs of extensive HVAC retrofits are too high for most owners to bear. Lighting retrofits on the other hand are usually much easier to do. This is not as simple as it sounds, however- even though LEDs in optimized systems can use something like 70-80% less energy, the average building’s electrical infrastructure, like most systems, is overbuilt for the older incandescent or fluorescent technology, and overbuilt in general beyond that. Eventually, electrical equipment designed specifically for LED technology will work its way into the market and the infrastructure.

Next, LED technology allows for exquisite control of all the elements we care about in lighting: color, temperature, direction, starting, dimming, size of source, long life, and stable output. The efficiencies in LEDs come from many factors: they produce only visible light, meaning that energy is not wasted in delivering wavelengths that we don’t need and can in fact be harmful; they produce considerably less heat than other light sources, which means more energy goes into producing light; GaN on GaN LEDs (definitely 2.0) can now behave essentially like “point sources,” very bright and very small, so that beams can be controlled and directed much better, wasting much less light in spill and other non- beam areas; what is essentially digital light is much more responsive to many different control parameters, including dimming, temperature, occupancy sensing, and intelligent energy management. Since the spectral signatures of LEDS are also now much more controllable, we will be able to design sources specifically with better light for human health, friendly to our circadian rhythms, eyeballs, brains, and souls.

Smaller, more powerful, more controllable sources will aid in the decentralization of lighting, improving efficiency and light quality. Point source performance allows for much smaller, lighter lamps and luminaires, meaning that lighting can be considerably more flexible, less intrusive, and require a lot fewer accessories to control light – this aspect of LED 2.0 technology can have an amazing scale effect, where all kinds of things will change dramatically, starting with one little dot the size and color of the yolk of a hummingbird’s egg. Smaller sources mean smaller, lighter lamps, smaller fixtures, less material used for construction, more ceiling space, more usable space per floor, more floors per building, more building per construction dollar, smaller heat load from lighting, smaller HVAC systems, less energy use per building, fewer power plants, and on and on.

Since we’ve had very little time on an evolutionary scale to adapt to manmade light, we don’t yet know much about how it affects our genetic structure and physiology. We still envision daylight as the ultimate light source to replicate in manmade light, but daylight itself varies widely depending on time of day, direction, and a host of other factors. Sunlight contains lots of harmful UV radiation that we need protection from, hence architecture. We’re as intimately connected to our shelters as are bees to their hives, and clearly shelter provides the key way in which we manage our light intake. Ancient forms of architecture devised many ways to manage light without manmade electric sources: in modernism, suddenly many of these practices were forgotten, ignored or overridden, especially with the advent of overglazing. Part of making better, more sustainable buildings involves the rediscovery of older design practices for managing the delivery of light and other services. Decentralizing lighting and controls will help designers to effect better daylight balance in buildings and provide higher quality manmade light where it is most effective.

New, dramatically better lighting technology, the increased awareness of the primacy of light, and more intelligent design practices will redefine architecture, making it more adaptive to climate, energy use, shifting patterns of settlement, and human needs for health, wellness and security. Better buildings are essential for better light, and better light is essential to life.

Fat of the Land

My first pig. 

Several weeks ago I had my Michael Pollan moment and shot my first wild pig. For those not familiar with him, he’s best known for food activism of sorts, and for his many books which include The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which was actually recommended to me by a vegan friend several years ago). In this book he chronicles his quest to prepare a completely foraged meal, in the course of which he shoots his first wild boar. Around that time I had become quite interested in the pursuit of such, and his blow-by-blow account of the hunt clinched the deal for me. Still, it took another year or two for me to get around to it, mostly because I’m usually too busy hunting ducks or fishing when I’m not indoors working. Hunting pigs is on another level entirely, and I quickly learned much about hunting and preparing bigger game and quite a few other things along the way.

My experience was quite different from Pollan's, maybe because I'm more familiar with hunting than he was, but in any case my hunt was by all accounts a supreme success: this had as much to do with the skill and experience of our guides as with my mental preparation and visualization. Before the hunt I spent quite a bit of time at the range with my rifle, a nice little 7mm short mag Winchester, a flat shooter. I knew that rifle shooting was very different from shotgunning, which I’m used to from hunting waterfowl and upland game. Different in one very good way at least, in that you have time to think about your shot, to zero in and really feel the target, which unlike most waterfowl is large and not moving in an unpredictable course above your head in the rain at 40-50 mph. Still I knew there would be unique challenges in finding and stalking a pig, getting off a shot, and making a clean kill.

My excellent friend Roy Howell had a spot open for me on a hunt with Rhinos Guide Service, an outfit with property up in the mountains west of Cloverdale in southern Mendocino County, south of Booneville, near Malliard Redwoods State Park. We met in Cloverdale for lunch on a Friday afternoon in late April, then caravanned out to the property, following logging roads for 30 or 40 miles into the remote backcountry, legendary for the cultivation of primo bud, and, as it turned out, pig hunting. After passing several locked gates and crossing some beautiful clear steelhead spawning streams, we arrived at the hunting camp, situated by a creek in a clearing in one of the many canyons that run through the property. Here we unloaded, camoed up, and prepped for the hunt, which would begin that afternoon.         
                                                                                                                 

Kerry Griffith of Rhinos Guide Service

I met with our guide Kerry Griffith, the owner of Rhinos and a consummate outdoorsman. He gave us many invaluable pointers on stalking the pigs, staying quiet and upwind of your quarry, and optimal shot placement. Wild pigs have a highly developed sense of hearing, and an even more highly developed sense of smell, but they can’t see very well at all. This last deficiency turns out to be a good advantage when stalking them. Most of the time, the pigs are constantly moving, browsing and feeding. In the late spring, when the woods and meadows are filled with young delicious sprouting things, they’re gorging on things like wild oats, rattlesnake grass and clover. They basically live in a huge supermarket of free food, and they grow fat, prosper, and multiply. Kerry also explained that we were to carefully pick our pigs, and avoid shooting nursing (or wet) sows, as doing so would not only deprive several piglets of nourishment and condemn then to probable starvation but would create a messy field dressing situation.

One tasty item on the Pig menu- rattlesnake grass.

We teamed up three to a guide, on quads and ATVs, and I went with Roy, and his son David, who I’ve known since he was a baby. David, like me, was on his first pig hunt and was hoping to get a large boar. We drove along a gravel road at the bottom of a canyon, following the creek for a few miles upstream before heading north to climb a ridge, from which we would gradually work our way downhill back toward the creek on vehicles, then on foot, as we scouted for pigs. We stopped several times as we spotted them grouped up hundreds of yards off in the distance- the black, grey, or brown specks of the sows and boars and the piglets much smaller specks swarming around the wet sows.

Scouting for pigs.

We eventually got out of our ATV and headed downhill on foot, the evening light fading to dusk along the gently sloping, intermittently wooded slopes of the canyon, through fresh green meadows and stands of oak and buckeye and madrone. We knew we were likely to encounter groups of pigs in cover, and we did our best to tread lightly as we entered the oak glades. We heard a deep booming call coming from a stand of Oaks, and our guide stopped , puffed out his chest, and flapping his arms like a rooster, silently signaling “Blue Grouse.” I had heard this call before, but thought it might be a boar. The presence of game put us on alert, and we glanced down at our feet occasionally to avoid snapping twigs. 

Suddenly we spotted a large group of pigs browsing within range in a small open meadow between stands of oak. We stopped and waited, as we assessed the situation. Several pigs were in range, but we needed to get our shot (or more than one if we were very lucky) set up, which meant picking out an appropriate pig, then getting into position for a clear shot. I had brought a barrel mounted pair of shooting sticks to provide stability for my rifle-these were very good but were also designed to be used sitting down. I tried to sit and to move into position, scooting on my butt, trying to be quiet and get set up, but it wasn’t working. Roy and David were also trying to get a clear shot, and we wanted David to have the first shot, but he wasn’t quite ready to commit to a shot yet. Several times I would site in on a pig, only to have it wander behind a tree or boulder, or turn out to be a wet sow. It was a difficult, tense situation as we tried to stay quiet and set up a shot. At one point, one pig to our left stopped munching, lifted his head and stared right at us, sensing something. We all became statues, barely daring to breath, until he went back to grazing.

I knew I had to make a supreme effort to relax, but as all hunters know this is a real challenge when you’re on game- the adrenaline is pumping and you have to find your Zen moment and focus on your breathing, as this affects your aim, especially with rifles. I was laser focused, clearly visualizing my shot, in a state of hyper awareness, thinking about the delicious meals I would be putting on the table in the future. In a corner of my mind I also begin to contemplate death in a strange way, and I thought about the scene in the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven (one of my all time favorite films) where the trio of hired guns is stalking their prey and is hiding behind some boulders in a gully, just as we were. It’s a supremely un-heroic moment, and to me perfectly captured the prosaic, squalid, bumbling way in which we kill with guns. I knew I was about to take the life of a fairly large animal with a very powerful weapon, but beyond that, there was not much to think about. Kill animal, eat. All good. It’s not accurate to say I don’t feel remorse, I do feel something for the game I kill, and my own particular reverence for life does not preclude taking it when appropriate. When hunting I experience the full clarity of focus and purpose: it’s liberating and calming and thoroughly normal all at the same time. I could say it’s hard to describe, but I just did, so there you are.

After perhaps 20 minutes of our trying to set up shots on several different pigs, our guide finally pointed out a young non-wet sow and whispered to me “you can shoot that pig.” I agreed and was just barely able to get her in my scope- I think her head was behind a tree, but I had a clear shot at the point just behind the right shoulder that is the ideal spot for the bullet to enter. I got up on my knees, and aimed without any extra support on my gun. My aim was steady, and as I have learned to do, just felt the connection with the target somehow- I knew when the moment to pull the trigger was right. My gun flashed fire in the twilight, the pigs all started running, and as the smoke cleared I saw my pig sprint for about 20 feet and then roll over dead. A near perfect shot, clean kill.

Pigs constantly root for food, regularly tearing up
large swaths of the landscape.

After the shot, our guide immediately gave a startlingly realistic pig call. To my amazement, the fleeing pigs all stopped in their tracks, giving us potentially another shot. But David and Roy were unable to get one set up, and eventually set off to follow another group of pigs just beyond us in the next glade after the current group eventually dispersed. (David eventually got his Monster Hawg-see below) our guide and I went down into the clearing to look at my pig. She was a black, sleek young sow of about 125 pounds, perfect for eating. our guide showed me how to gut the pig, lightly scorng the skin on the belly, opening it up and removing the innards. Her stomach was about the size and color of a soccer ball, firmly stuffed with wild grasses and clover. Our guide finished the field dressing, saving the heart for me. I would have saved the liver and kidneys, but it was getting dark and we needed to get back to camp and I didn’t have any plastic bags to carry them in. He showed me how to slit the pig’s tendons above the ankles to make a hole for rope to go through so he could drag the pig by its hind legs to the road, where he would pick it up later in the ATV.

We met up with David and Roy, who weren’t able to get another shot at pigs. We hiked along the stream at the bottom of the canyon in the soft darkness of early evening. As we came to a bend in the stream, Kerry suddenly stopped and pointed with his flashlight to a large group of pigs across the stream in a flat meadow- there must have been 40 or 50 of them, boars, sows and piglets, happily feeding. They moved off slowly from our flashlights but didn’t seem overly concerned. Our guide began talking to them in pig talk, and they gradually approached us again, grunting and chattering away. We stood in the darkness there for 20 minutes or so, chattering away with them before moving on and hiking back to camp.

Hanging the carcass.

Back in camp we hung the pig up by the hind legs and began to skin it, starting at the hind legs and working our way down. After the pig was skinned, we let the carcass cool overnight in the crisp night air of the canyon. Around the campfire, Kerry told the story of Cookie, his pet wild boar, from whom he learned Pig Talk. Cookie, orphaned as a piglet on a hunt one day last year, was rescued by Kerry, who fed her a mixture of cookies and milk, which she hovered up right out of his palm- hence the name. He took her home and raised her in a pen. He said that after being around her for enough time he learned to imitate her sounds, and that he eventually was able to have extended conversations with her. As I experienced firsthand, Pig Talk comes in quite handy in the field. Kerry also demonstrated a masterful ability to imitate many other animals both domestic and wild- a skill I’ve always considered to be essential and worth practicing at any opportunity.

The next day, after tagging along with Roy and David in the morning hunt, we quartered my pig and packed it in ice and plastic bags, helpfully provided by Roy and his friend Bruce. I thanked my friends and the guides, and drove home with a cooler full of top quality pig meat. Along the way I stopped to pick a few large handfuls of fragrant wild fennel that I knew I would use to cook up the first taste of boar over the barbecue.

Roy and David scouting for pigs.

When I got home, I was faced with the task of breaking down the carcass of a medium sized pig- it was a somewhat daunting task, but I took stock of my tools, got some fresh hacksaw blades, and set to it with my filet knife and hack saw. I’m familiar with dressing waterfowl, fish, and rabbits, as well as chickens, upland birds, and other crittters, but pigs are simply on a different scale. I generally cut as close to the bones as I could, looking for what seemed like logical cuts, and keeping the meat in large clumps as much as possible. I sawed the ribs in half lengthwise, then separated them from the spine, creating four sets of rib cuts. I kept the shoulders and hams whole, thinking I would perhaps make a lonzino or cured ham, or at least a larger roast or two at some point. I sawed the hooves off the shank bones, knowing I would braise the shanks for a long time in a Dutch oven for a wild boar osso buco style dish, Parts that ended up smaller and scrap like, I vacuum packed together, as I knew I would be embarking soon on an extended sausage making binge. The leftover spine and neck bones I sawed into short pieces for stews and stock.

I did not do a perfect job of butchering, far from it, but when I was finished I ended up with quite a respectable pile of excellent meat. I did not use any of the head or skin, for obvious reasons- too difficult to deal with in the field. I had originally intended to take everything to a butcher, but I’m glad now I jumped right in and did it all myself. I will definitely study butchering more thoroughly before I shoot another pig and break it down, but it wasn’t that hard really, and I really enjoyed learning about the pig anatomy and about breaking down carcasses. Grilling up the first cuts of pig produced a tasty preview of many fine feasts to come.

Morning light in the canyon.

The entire experience of the hunt involved very much thinking and learning about what the pigs are eating, understanding their habitat, movements, behavior, and even language, and gave me a much deeper appreciation for how we connect with animals in an environment where we don’t intervene much- how they find and consume food, and how we find and consume both similar food and the animals who do this work for us. The Mendocino mountains in late spring are an exquisite landscape that is filled with things to eat for opportunistic, highly adaptable, wily species like pigs, who are a prime example of what I call a “revolving door” species- they go in and out of domestication repeatedly, and have for thousands of years. We have co-evolved with them and many other species in a deeply interconnected way. Tasting the wild oats and rattlesnake grass, I could understand why the pigs gorge on it. Sometimes when I’m fly fishing on a river I eat the bugs that the trout are feeding on to get a more complete idea of what they’re going after.

Mr. David Howell with his trophy boar, one of two he shot.

Killing larger game also has changed my attitude about hunting. When you hunt it’s very common to be competitive with your fellow hunters- in fact if you’re not, something’s wrong. This natural tendency, plus the practices both of catch and release and trophy hunting, contribute to a concept of hunting as something we do not do primarily for food. I specifically chose a smaller pig because I knew it would be tastier, but I also wanted a bigger one, well…just because. I still practice catch and release fishing, but am increasingly conflicted about it, especially after I learned that it’s banned in Germany and Switzerland and can often do a lot more damage to fish than we realized.

As my friends and family know, I dearly love to cook, and hunting and fishing have a deeper meaning for me than simply sport- since I do it so often, I’m basically filling my freezer as appropriate with hormone-free high quality meat and fish. Michael Pollan certainly has influenced me in my thinking about food in general, but the guy who has really turned me on to wild game cooking is Hank Shaw. I met his girlfriend Holly Heitzer last winter duck hunting at Delevan, but at the time I didn’t realize it was she who has been Hank’s partner in crime for so many years. Hank’s book Hunt Gather Cook came out in the last year- I highly recommend it. His website Hunter Gardner Angler Cook is an awesome achievement and something I refer to frequently for some of my favorite recipes. Although I’ve never met him, he’s like my soul brother in his passion for hunting fishing and cooking, and he has done it all and taken it to a completely new level.

The more I learn about hunting and foraging the more I realize that there’s food everywhere for the taking, all you have to do is keep your eyes open. When it comes to certain species like deer, turkeys, and pigs, hunting is actually a crucial part of the ecological management. These species are all experiencing population booms, and controlled harvesting of this wild game can only be a good thing in my mind. Hunting is not an atavistic artifact of pre-industrial society, it’s a vital way for us to be in touch and in balance with our environment. Unfortunately because of the prevalence of the industrial food supply chain and the increasing urbanization of society, we’ve lost touch with it as a way of life-overly politicizing gun issues isn’t helping either.

For me harvesting wild food has become much more than a hobby or purely sporting or recreational pursuit, it’s kind of a holistic practice because it involves ensuring that I collect and process by myself the highest quality food I can find. I love nothing better than to share my game with friends and family in a big feast, where some may be tasting wild game for the first time, ideally complimented with some foraged greens or other treats. To those who don’t understand our connection with wild animals and wild food, this is the best way to begin an explanation.