How to build a chicken tractor: version 2.0
Chicken Tractor Version 1.0 was damaged enough to warrant building an entirely new portable coop. So I broke out the long list of change ideas I had been collecting and designed a new tractor.
Act: Inspiration
We need freedom of action to confront peak oil
In the third video in the series “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” from The Nation and On The Earth productions, co-editor of The Automatic Earth, Nicole M. Foss, explains how energy relates to the economy and what our impending energy crisis will look like. Foss discusses the issues associated with peak oil in financial rather than environmental terms, because she finds that peak oil has much more to do with finance than it does with climate change.
How do I love thee?
How can we be required to purchase what already belongs to us? Such a plan was not part of the election campaign and has no public mandate, but how might resistance be most effectively organised? …my suggestion is that we lobby our local authorities to revive our ancient woodland rights.
Rocky times ahead: Are you ready?
So here’s the point: you must not face the future alone. Find your own “reality support group” (we’ll tell you how below). This year, make a resolution to deepen your relationships with people around you with whom you can face what’s coming down the pike.
Is Transition still “going viral?”
Reviewing the numbers on the Transition U.S. and U.K. sites is a useful indicator about its future growth and just how “viral” it is. Brownlee’s comment led me to peruse these sites. They show an initial increasing rate of growth and then a decelerating rate of growth
Cool ideas – Jan 21
-Fueling the Food Revolution: CoFed to train New Generation of Student Leaders
-How Sweden turns human body heat into useful energy
-Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse — And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy
What if we stopped fighting for preservation and fought economic growth instead?
There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet.
Art, activism, and permaculture
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is not an institution or a group, not a network nor an NGO, but an affinity of friends who recognize the beauty of collective creative disobedience…Creation and resistance are the entwined DNA strands of the Lab’s practice. It sees art and activism as inseparable from everyday life. Its experiments aim not to make art but to shape reality, not to show you the world but to change it together.
Sauerkraut
In all its forms, [cabbage] remains one of the best crops for the Irish climate, as for similar climates like the Pacific Northwest, but it grows in a wide variety of climates. It’s a famous staple here in many of its forms, the basic vegetable of many dishes. Amazingly, though, few people we know here make sauerkraut or kimchi, methods used in other parts of the world to preserve cabbage, make it easier to digest and to give it flavour. You can make sauerkraut very easily at home, and it will be much tastier and more nutritious than the canned variety.
Microcredit: The good, the bad, and the ugly
For more than twenty years, microcredit has been widely heralded as the remedy for world poverty. Recent news stories, however, have sullied microcredit’s glowing reputation with reports on scandals, exorbitant compensation to managers, skyrocketing interest rates, and aggressive marketing schemes.
Energy security
So what should we do? We must be explicit about why we want good domestic climate and energy policy. Let’s say that it is needed to achieve peace and stability. Let’s say that climate change and competition for dwindling energy reserves are both causes of instability and violence. We should make it clear that there the other causes of instability and violence – like nuclear proliferation and inequality – need to be dealt with too. Finally let’s be very clear that our vision for renewables and good domestic climate policy is totally inconsistent with the dominant approach to security.
How we designed our solar greenhouse
In good ol’ permaculture fashion, we set out to enhance sectors and conditions that would improve our growing season (sunlight, heat) while minimizing those that we considered detrimental (cold, hail, frost). We quickly determined that a passive solar greenhouse was just what we needed and we set out to design one for our backyard.
