APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

Growing Vegetables on City Rooftops

Bruce F — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:33:20 -0700

Hi,

I'm posting this because I think it's relevant to many of the discussions here. Rather than copy the whole thing, I'll just give a few paragraphs and you can click on this flickr link to learn more........

Last summer, my friends (Art and Heidi) and I grew heirloom vegetables on our respective rooftops in Chicago using homemade Earthboxes (tm). We were drawn to their model because it more than "doubles the yield of a conventional garden using less water and fertilizer". The results are scalable and they've got a pdf to back up that claim.

And no, this is not an ad.

Heidi would come over every few weeks and take some photos of my plants, which she then sent me along with some shots from their roof garden. I rearranged them and added this commentary.

We're trying to show what's possible using cheap, readily available components and also to learn from anyone who wants to share what they know. We're amateurs compared to the Path To Freedom people, but love their approach. Check out this ~~guy's~~ Distinguished Professor's site for some really creative, low cost ideas on how to grow plants in containers.

[snip]

continued at http://www.flickr.com/photos/7458996@N06/sets/72157603652656573/

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

APPLE Bloomington and Permaculture Guild Meeting

Keith Johnson — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:29:44 -0800

Special Notice to APPLE Bloomington Relocalization Members and Crawfordsville Members: Please join us if you can this Saturday the 26th for a joint meeting with the Bloomington Permaculture Guild plus a movie and potluck. This will be the first opportunity for local APPLE members to get together and meet and collaborate with strong allies.
Agenda will be to MEET each other and plan our next meeting. Beyond that, we're free to make it up as we go.

BPG agenda:
12-1 Set up/informal gathering
1-3 movie: I thought I might introduce how we came to show the movie, briefly define permaculture/the guild, and explain the day's agenda.
3-? community discussion (I imagined that people will need a chance to react and also that we might gather together information about initiatives in this area that begin to respond to what is presented in the movie) -- possibly create a working group to support other initiatives?
?-5 meeting/potluck -- this means the community at large would be welcome to stay for our meeting.

Noon to 5PM
What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire by T.S. Bennett. Showing in the first floor auditorium, Monroe Co Public Library. This 123 minute film is a fast-paced look at the synergy of challenges facing humans today -- especially Americans. For some of us it is familiar, but seeing it all put together visually is valuable. For those that are just beginning to think about these issues, it is eye opening. And it is a challenge to all of us to think of how to move forward together in community. For this reason, we want to bring in as much of the regional community to watch it and discuss as possible. After the film, we're hoping to do some brainstorming and talking together.

Post Carbon Crawfordsville

Ecovillage Design Curriculum

Keith Johnson — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 12:23:03 -0800

Ecovillage Design Curriculum

We live in a rapidly changing world that is transforming before our very eyes. Humanity is now being challenged as never before to grow in wisdom, maturity, and understanding.

A plethora of deep and pressing concerns is calling for our immediate attention, concerns such as: Earth's environmental degradation, including the loss of precious topsoil and forest cover, the encroachment of deserts, the depletion of fisheries and aquifers, the loss of habitat and the extinction of species, etc.; the glaring and increasing disparity between rich and poor leading to exploitation, poverty, and the associated regimen of malnutrition and over-population; the disintegration of families, communities, even entire cultures; unrestrained urbanization resulting in social alienation, displacement, and feelings of disconnection with the natural world; the dimming of a sense of spiritual awareness and purpose; global warming and ozone depletion; etc. And now, looming on the horizon is “peak oil,” with its coming adjustments and retrofits, including the probability of ongoing conflict over access to the remaining energy reserves.

All of these problems are quite real and, by now, well-documented; but gaining awareness of the extent of the problems is only half the project of becoming educated these days. Amidst these intense challenges, and largely catalyzed by them, lies the prospect for tremendous growth in human potential and consciousness.

People and communities all over the globe are coming together to reclaim responsibility for creating their own living situations – at local and regional levels. In the process, they are overcoming prior limitations and developing new talents, skills, knowledge and approaches. Paradoxically, many of the most innovative solutions rely on a timeless, perennial kind of wisdom that seems to have been disregarded recently. The potential for a refreshed, renewed, revitalized humanity goes hand-in-hand with meeting the challenges of our present Age.

The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) believes the most promising and effective way to deal with all these issues is through education – not a typical education but a new kind of global education, specifically designed to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century:

This is an education where a thorough and objective assessment of the state of the planet is followed by regional, community, and place-based solutions;
an education that empowers individuals and communities with the knowledge for shaping their worlds and becoming more self-reliant;
an education that is universal in scope but local in application, directed toward preserving precious cultural diversity;
an education where investigating theory is followed by practical application;
an education that imparts useful and instrumental life-skills as part of the curriculum;
an education relevant to peoples of both developed and developing countries, rural and urban regions;
an education focused on the complexly interwoven, transdisciplinary issues pertaining to the transition to sustainable culture;
an education promoting and facilitating healthful planetary evolution;
an education exploring and expanding the perceived limits of human potential;
an education identifying and reconnecting all these essential considerations to a meaningful, dignified, high-quality life for all the world’s people...

This is the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) – an education preparing the way for a sustainable future. The EDE is being introduced to the world at this time to complement, correspond with, and assist in setting a standard for the United Nations’ “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development – 2005-2014.” Download the complete 7.46MB PDF Ecovillage Design Curriculum document from which this was excerpted. More info at Gaia Education

The
Ecovillage Design Curriculum has the endorsement of the United Nations
Institute for Training and Research- UNITAR and is an official
contribution to the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development- UNDESD.

Download Gaia Education Report and find out all about current trainings around the world and future trends...

Download the Gaia Education 4 Keys book on Social Design- Beyond You and Me- Inspiration and Wisdom for Buildin

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

New blog entries at Permaculture & Regenerative Design News

Keith Johnson — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:58:42 -0800

New entries at my Permaculture Blog

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

Permaculture & Regenerative Design News: News about Permaculture & the Design of Sustainable Ecologies & Economies

Keith Johnson — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:29:07 -0800

I haven't posted much to this blog lately but I've been very active on my other blog at http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/

Here's a few of the topics considered:

+ WHEN PEAK OIL MEETS GODZILLA ...
+ Seriously folks, you all need to think about growing some food and getting good at it.
+ What the World Eats, again
+ They Rule
+ Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth: A Quechua Christmas Carol
+ Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
+ 101 things you can do about peak oil & climate change
+ Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See
+ Potenco’s Pull-Cord Generator
+ Bioneers: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the Earth
+ Science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and Permaculture
+ Downloadable Audio and Video recordings from the 8th International Permaculture Convergence in Brazil
+ The Biorock® Process Accelerates Coral Growth
+ Farming the Future By Kenny Ausubel
+ Our Decrepit Food Factories
+ Tools, Books, and Equipment at Permaculture Trading Post
+ The Story of Stuff
+ Two new photo albums at Picasa

Alliance for a Post Petroleum Local Economy (APPLE) - Elgin, Illinois

6th Annual Two-Week Design Course in Paoli, IN

Keith Johnson — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:14:07 -0800

Start: 2008-06-01 12:30

End: 2008-06-15 17:00

Sustainable Cincinnati

Weekend Series Permaculture Design Course in Columbus, Ohio

Keith Johnson — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:01:28 -0800

Start: 2008-02-22 09:00

End: 2008-04-13 19:00

Sustainable Cincinnati

The Permaculture Activist

Keith Johnson — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 10:50:34 -0800

Geographic scope:
North America and International Address:
PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47407 USA Website:
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

Urine / Liquid Gold Poll

Keith Johnson — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 08:29:39 -0700

For all of you who wanted to do something different than peeing and pooping in clean drinking water, the following books will give you direction and incentive to change your ways. There's no need to keep contributing to huge ocean dead zones, toxic red tides, acid seawater, brain damaged marine mammals, and dying coral reefs. One solution to these problems is dealing with our own shit, etc., and these will give you the tools to transforms our wastes into food.

Kudos to those who have already started harvesting your homegrown liquid gold.

You can order these books at
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/food%20wastecycling.htm

Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants by Carol Steinfeld
Pee=fertilizer. Witty, practical, liberating! Grow with the flow! Urine charge. A golden opportunity. Every day, we urinate nutrients that can fertilize plants that could be used for beautiful landscapes, food, fuel, and fiber. Instead, these nutrients are flushed away, either to be treated at high cost or discharged to waters where they overfertilize and choke off aquatic life. Liquid Gold details three ways to use urine hygienically and productively for plant growth, with studies that show the science behind this practice. Several advocates of urine diversion and their gardens are profiled, demonstrating that using urine for fertilizer is a feasible, safe, and cost-saving way to prevent pollution and save on fertilizer costs.

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph C. Jenkins Learn how to deal with your own shit. "Stop trying to change the world. Toilet-train the world and you won't have to keep changing it."(Swami Beyondananda) Here's all you need to know to make sewage treatment systems obsolete. Answers all the questions you never dared ask!

Composting Toilet System Book: A Practical Guide to Choosing, Planning and Maintaining Composting Toilet Systems by David Del Porto & Carol Steinfeld
An impressive, comprehensive, reader friendly, and practical guide to choosing, planning and maintaining composting toilet systems for those seeking an alternative to traditional sewer and septic tank systems. David Del Porto and Carol Steinfeld collaborate to explain the technologies, sources, applications, graywater issues, and regulations relevant to a composting toilet system for the home, whether manufactured or site-built.

Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands, Vol 1: Guiding Principles by Brad Lancaster
First of a 3-volume work, this book lays out an integrated approach to capturing water in landscape: swales, pits, diversion drains, urban runoff, and roofwater. Essential for drylands, useful everywhere.

Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds by Art Ludwig
Covers water system design and construction of storage both in and above ground. Comprehensive, concise information about water quality, potential difficulties, and how to avoid them while creating your own supply for domestic use or fire control. With instructions for making ferrocement tanks.

Creating an Oasis with Greywater: Your Complete Guide to Managing Greywater in Landscape by Art Ludwig
An extremely practical and thorough primer detailing 18 systems that work and how they might fail; parts, design diagrams, operating and maintenance tips. Clear, logical, easy-to-read. The definitive guide.

Builder's Greywater Guide by Art Ludwig
How to fit greywater systems into the code with tried and tested methods. Thorough, precise, well-documented, with explicit building code references and diagrams.

Branched-Drain Greywater System by Art Ludwig
Gravity and carefully laid plumbing can diffuse greywater safely with little expense or maintenance. Details a cheap system that meets most meeds.

http://www.permacultureactivist.net/booksvid/food%20wastecycling.htm

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

Keith Johnson — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 15:43:32 -0700

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 15, 2006, New York Times Magazine

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states
had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I
received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food
business. "I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of
RadSafe," he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of
food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even
so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to
bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very
soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate
the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That¹s exactly
what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces
was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor
and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat ‹
sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our
food. Why? Because it's easier to find a technological fix than to address
the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of
industrial capitalism (to take its failings and turn them into exciting new
business opportunities).

We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the
produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the
Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of
regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry (something along the
lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp,
pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of
beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually
unregulated. "Farmers can do pretty much as they please," Carol Tucker
Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of
America, said recently, "as long as they don't make anyone sick."

This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you
realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety
on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food,
both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few
decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans
every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing
5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this
latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed
to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand
around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to
turn a cow¹s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can¹t
survive long in cattle living on grass.)

Industrial animal agriculture
produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides
being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high
concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can
tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn¹t be,
rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also
actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than
fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them
onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution (the one where
crops feed animals and animals' waste feeds crops) and neatly divided it
into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution
problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution,
however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the
first problem (chemical fertilizers on the farm). As yet, there is no good
fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and
overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these
solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than
what it is:

a fact of industrial agriculture.

But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has
spread it far and wide.

We don't yet know exactly what happened in the case
of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was
contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the
sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great
deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at
that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to
contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million
servings of salad every week. In effect, we're washing the whole nation's
salad in one big sink.

It's conceivable the same problem could occur in your own kitchen sink or on
a single farm. Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we
started processing all our food in such a small number of "kitchens" did the
potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.

Surely this points to one of the great advantages of a decentralized food
system: when things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, fewer people are
affected and, just as important, the problem can be more easily traced to
its source and contained. A long and complicated food chain, in which food
from all over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be
processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can be
impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain devilishly
hard to follow and to fix.

Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E.
coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers' market, and
at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach
appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn¹t
think twice about it. I guess it¹s because I've just always trusted these
guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed
that morning or the night before (it hasn't been sitting around in a bag on
a truck for a week). And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly
who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I'm sure there is some, it seems
manageable.

These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk
about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food
in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what¹s going on at the
farmers' market (how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot
is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root;
how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect
through these foods and their growers to the natural world). Stack all this
up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can
sound a little. . .sentimental.

But there's nothing sentimental about local food (indeed, the reasons to
support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic).
Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system,
vulnerable to accidental (and deliberate) contamination. This is something
the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy
Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004,
he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of
me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food
supply, because it is so easy to do."

The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. "The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry make them "vulnerable to terrorist attack." Today 80 percent of America¹s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy (and at the moment they are thriving) is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies (to the farmer
selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef) is,
of all things, the government's own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the
industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants
(the ones that local meat producers depend on) are closing because they
can't afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly
imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour.
The industry insists that all regulations be "scale neutral," so if the
U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an
office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing
plant that slaughters local farmers' livestock will have to install these
facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the
farmers' market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are
seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have
become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them
operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.'s perspective, it is much more efficient
to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour
rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.

So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers' market when the F.D.A.
starts demanding a Haccp plan (daily testing of the irrigation water, say,
or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology)? When we start requiring
that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always
fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting
the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a
larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to
accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in
the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue
Heron Farms (in technologies rather than relationships).

It's easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from
farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a
rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an
ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be,
as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots
did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent
much the same sort of pre-problem solution (elegant, low-tech and
redundant). But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other
ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but
also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author most
recently of "The Omnivore¹s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals."

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

APPLE - Bloomington - It’s a Small World After Oil

Keith Johnson — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 11:13:35 -0700