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Urban livestock -- Raising squab for fun and food first and then profit

nooil_ed — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:59:39 -0700

Is anyone interested in raising doves and pigeons in their backyards? I had intended to go to a farm to learn about raising chickens, but I thought that there may be difficulties raising chickens in a city setting (those nasty laws. My motivation is first to learn small animal husbandry and secondly to eat them.

I don't own a backyard, so if there is anyone interested please give me a message.

My plan is:
1) Learn how to build a dovecote or dove coop and then build one.
2) Raise an inital popluation of mating pairs.
3) Raise doves for squab meat.
4) Learn how to dress them.
4.5) Make good dishes out of them.
5) I know a network of people who would be willing buyers for squab, so we can get some cost recovery.
6) Make additional small income by breeding and selling mating pairs, consulting on the raising and the building of dove coops.
7) Setup and nuture a local network and industry of urban squab farmers and profiting from the growth of such an industry.

Post Carbon Oakville

What you "can do" Lists

grahamia — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 06:14:59 -0800

A list posted on www.theecologist.org at http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=432 30 STEPS TO AN OIL FREE WORLD Our addiction to oil is not inevitable. We can all take steps to kick the habit:

1. Walk, cycle, take public transport or consider a car-pool whenever possible.

2. Reduce your travel by air.

3. If you need a car, buy the most fuel-efficient (currently Toyota’s Prius and Honda’s Insight – both hybrid cars that use petrol and electricity) or one that runs on bio-diesel or natural gas.

4. Service your car regularly – keeping the engine tuned and your car tyres at the maximum recommended air pressure saves petrol.

5. Live as close to work as possible.

6. Shop locally rather than in out-of-town superstores.

7. Buy regionally and seasonally produced organic food whenever possible.

8. Switch your investments away from fossil fuel to renewable energy companies, or exercise your right as a shareholder to pressure energy companies to make the transition to renewables.

9. Boycott the products of companies that are obstructing the transition to renewables.

What the government can do:

10. Lobby your political representatives to press them to act, and vote accordingly.

11. Accept a target of phasing out oil & gas use within 50 years.

12. Discontinue all direct and indirect subsidies to the oil & gas industry.

13. Refuse licenses for the exploration and development of new oil & gas reserves.

14. Provide investment, grants, and tax breaks for the development and purchase of clean renewable alternatives to oil and for energy efficient vehicles.

15. Increase investment in public transport.

16. Pedestrianise city centres and introduce congestion charges in cities.

17. Require car makers to ensure an escalating proportion of their vehicle fleet sales consists of petrol-free vehicles.

18. Increase minimum energy efficiency standards for vehicles.

19. Change tariff policies on imports to support the local consumption of goods (particularly food) that have been produced locally.

What businesses can do:

20. Phase out subsidies to industrial food production, which is petrol-intensive, and support conversion to organic methods instead. 21. Oil & gas companies should commit to converting themselves into renewable energy companies, and redirect their investments accordingly.

22. Car makers should commit to mass-manufacture cars now that run on hydrogen fuel cells or other renewable fuels, and that use lighter materials.

23. Companies should convert their truck and car fleets to the lowest petrol-consuming vehicles available.

24. Companies should provide incentives for employees to leave their cars at home and use public transport instead, reduce air travel, and promote telecommuting.

25. Companies should site their offices close to public transportation.

26. Retailers should adopt a purchasing policy that provides preference to goods from short supply routes and regional markets.

27. Companies should shift freight out of trucks and onto rail and waterways.

28. Farmers should convert from industrial to organic farming methods.

29. The plastics & packaging industries should replace their use of oil with corn, soybean, potato starch or limestone derivatives. 30. The clothing industry should use vegetable starch and natural fibres, such as wool and cotton, instead of oil derivatives in their products.

Post Carbon Oakville

local food sources around Oakville

lucy segatti — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:24:24 -0800

Until we’re able to produce our own food in our backyards, here are a few websites listing CSAs, farmers' markets, and other regional initiatives that support local food.

2006 Guide to Organics in Ontario (Vitality Magazine)

http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/annual_guide_to_organics

The Ontario Natural Food Co-op (ONFC) is an co-operative federation of retail food co-operatives, food buying clubs, and non-collectively structured retailers. The ONFC serves as a member-owned and directed wholesaler for its members.

www.onfc.ca

“Local Flavour Plus (LFP) is a non-profit organization that brings farmers and consumers to the table to share in the benefits of environmentally and socially responsible food production. We are committed to building and fostering local sustainable food systems by certifying farmers and processors and linking them with local purchasers. We are a national organization. However, the current focus of our work is Ontario, and in particular the Greenbelt around the Greater Toronto area.”

www.localflavourplus.ca

Post Carbon Oakville

salvaging suburbia?

lucy segatti — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:53:50 -0800

Many people write off suburbia as unsalvageable. But given the growing human population (let's not forget displaced climate-change refugees), can we afford to give up on the suburbs?

Retrofitting and redesigning the suburbs might help to keep suburbanites in their neighbourhoods instead of moving to the countryside or into high-density cities.

What could suburbia look like in the future? Various scenarios are described at Raise the Hammer's "Suburbia Project":

www.raisethehammer.org/sections.asp?sect=Suburbia_Project

Post Carbon Oakville

Dion Knows about Peak Oil

grahamia — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:20:24 -0800

http://canada.theoildrum.com/story/2006/12/3/121020/783

Stephan Dion knows about Peak Oil. Why is he not talking about it?

Here is why :
Report from theoildrum, posted by Pascal Gagnon, of Roberval, Lac St Jean region, Dec 2006.

He came this summer in our city and the journalist told him about me and my report about peak oil. He told the journalist (and then me thereafter) that he read the following books : Twilight, Beyond Oil, The Party is over and many other reports.

I personaly sent him a copy of the french report I made and he told me it was one of the few french document available in Canada at this time.

So I think he will steer the party and the politics toward the talking of this problem, which is yet to be done here in Canada, especialy in Quebec.

For those who know french, this is from Pascal's site

Bienvenue à Roberval

Nichée au coeur des grands espaces et seule ville de la région située directement en bordure du lac Saint-Jean, Roberval vit en totale symbiose avec le majestueux plan d'eau qui baigne ses rives.

Au gré des saisons, ce lac - qu'on dit vaste comme une mer et beau comme un océan - offre à la ville et à ses 11000 habitants une étonnante diversité d'activités et des paysages sans cesse renouvelés!

Contact: gagnon_pascal at cgocable dot ca
Homepage: http://www.ville.roberval.qc.ca
Bio: Pascal Gagnon, Bsc CS, undergoind a MS in management. Involved in many aspect of Roberval city life. Working to make our place ready for PO

Post Carbon London (Ontario)

Documentaries to screen

Toban Black — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 10:53:52 -0800

Are there any documentaries that Post-Carbon London should screen? The Post-Carbon organizers could use suggestions. Some of us want to set up screenings, but we're not sure what films to show.

It should be easy enough for us to set up screenings with the library, and the local chapter of the Council of Canadians will probably help us to organize the screening events.

We plan to screen The Power of Community soon and we'll screen Escape From Suburbia when it becomes available. We're also going to try to screen Manufactured Landscapes soon (trailer here). Otherwise, there are no plans at this point.

A Crude Awakening isn't available. Maybe Peak Oil: Imposed by Nature would be worth ordering and screening (here's a clip or a trailer).

A lecture-style piece called Climate Change, Despair and Empowerment has been suggested.

Someone else has suggested that Seeds of Change be screened -- possibly with help from another local green group. This film doesn't seem appropriate to me though.

Another possibility is The Oil Factor. This film would bring out the politics of oil, which people need to become aware of; yet, there are important considerations associated with raising oil politics (like interfering with attempts to create the perception that ecology somehow transcends politics).

Koyaanisqatsi is probably appropriate (clips here), but I haven't seen it for awhile. I worry that this one might present naive ideas.

As I understand it, Darwin's Nightmare presents a problem -- "invader species" -- that could be addressed through relocalization. In other words, I think this one might implicitly promote relocalization somewhat.

Another possibility, which I know nothing about, is Out of Balance.

Post Carbon London (Ontario)

Walmart/Sprawl Not Our Future

grahamia — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:27:48 -0800

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Sustainable Burlington

Kunstler's best statement of the Post-carbon Agenda

grahamia — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:14:32 -0800

February 5, 2007
The Agenda Restated (see www.kunstler.com)
Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.
Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

* Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

* We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

* We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami....) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

* We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.

* We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

* We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.

* The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).

* We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.

* We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

* Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Post Carbon Oakville

Shock Doctrine

grahamia — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:39:22 -0800

Richard Heinberg, Oct 2007, "Individuals and families should take to heart the advice given prior to every commercial airline flight: “Secure your oxygen mask before helping others.” In other words, see to your own survival prospects first. This is not necessarily selfish behavior: communities and nations in which individual members are prepared and relatively self-sufficient will fare much better than those in which everyone is dependent and unequipped. If no one is prepared, who can teach others what to do? Learn the life-skills of the pre-fossil-fuel era; know how to use and repair hand tools; know where your water comes from and how to compost wastes; grow food."

Now surf to http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film to watch the quickest expose of modern conservative economics (neo-con) and start waking up. As Klein says, getting informed in the only way to protect ourselves from the systemic shock treatments being planned, aided or abetted by the economic elites.

yes.

Ian

Sustainable Burlington