Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
US public education has been retreating into an ever-narrower curriculum for several decades, and the early casualties have been programs that involve kinesthetic experiences and the manipulation of materials: arts, physical education, music, and particularly crafts like woodworking, nutrition and food preparation, drafting, sewing, and metalworking.
We are told that in the US, the food on our table has traveled an average of 1500 miles and consumed 9 calories of energy for each food calorie on our plate. In a time when “oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil prices have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity”[1], we need a way to mitigate the near certain risks of much higher impending food costs.
Most of the people who take Adapting-In-Place, reasonably enough, are doing so because they intend to stay where they are or fairly nearby in the coming decades. They know that they may not be in the perfect place, but for a host of reasons – inability to sell a house, job or family commitments, love of place…you name it, they are going to stay. Or maybe it is the best possible place for them. But I do think it is important to begin the class with the assumption that everything is on the table.
Laura Allen gives an intimate tour of a home-built composting toilet in her Bay Area urban home. The nitrogen-rich composted “humanure” is used to fertilize the lush edible-food garden, and doesn’t waste precious drinking water like flush toilets. The co-founder of Greywater Action shows the throne-like toilet compartment whose distinctive feature is a urine diverter. Pee and poop are collected in separate containers beneath the toilet, and are accessed outside the house. Sterile pee is watered in at the base of plants, while poop is collected in barrels and aged for a year or more until it has composted fully. What a way to go!
As we struggle to fashion a livable future from the crumbling disaster of industrial civilization, we will need a general guide — and specifically, perhaps, a guiding document. This is my attempt at fashioning such a document from the accumulated wisdom of our great teachers. I invite (implore!) others to improve on my efforts. I feel this might actually turn into something that helps — something lasting and important. Heck, it’s worth a try.
In this time of transition, two stories run through the culture. One is about continual growth and ascendancy. It’s mainstream culture’s story, the everyday world we’re familiar with. The other is the as yet little known story of radical change and descent as we enter the time of necessary simplification – reskilling, retooling, relocalizing.
Growing your own food can be a way to increase the security and health of your family in a world facing the multiple challenges of peak energy and resources, unpredictable and more severe climate, and financial uncertainty. At the same time, gardening may become more difficult due to the strange and shifting weather and uncertain consequences of peak oil. You can increase the resiliency of your garden in order to help deal with rapid changes in the economy, environment, and energy landscape.
Pollan posits the existence of a social movement geared to transforming the food system. He emphasizes that it’s loose, internally conflicted, and nascent — but all the same, “one of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years.” People have been talking about the “food movement” for a while, but I don’t think anyone has articulated its existence so clearly and in such an important publication.
-Why America should thank BP
-Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
-BP oil spill: Shares fall further
-BP’s OTHER Spill this Week
-The real cost of cheap oil
-What Will it Take to End Our Oil Addiction?
-The Food Movement, Rising
-Economics and the nature of political crisis
-Being Realistic
-Educating for Democracy: What Motivates Children to Learn?
-Converging Crises: Reality, Fear and Hope
What makes a mild-mannered biology professor call for a planned collapse of the economy? Canadian scientist Bill Rees would know. He was an inventor of the ecological footprint concept, and has been measuring our impact on the planet for decades. Now he’s worried about survival. Ours and all living systems.
Two months ago the PBS show, “NOW,” examined the issue of hydraulic fracturing and its apparent environmental and health impacts. PBS built its story around the exceptional efforts of Josh Fox, the maker of the recent award-winning documentary, “Gasland.”
