Building Community

A guide for the perplexed, bothered, bewildered and outright resentful folks hitched to a wanna-be farmer

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Now I realize that some of you will look at any advice of mine on this subject with skepticism – after all, you may even blame me (quite correctly, perhaps), for your loved one’s going bonkers and talking about sheep and nut trees all the time. And yet, I do feel your pain. Or rather, my husband does, and he’s happy to tell me all about what it is like to look over at the person you love and wonder why on earth she’s babbling about soil.

Portland Spaces: Collectively Green

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The Bouwes house is part of a wave of forward-thinking building that is redefining Cully, a sleepy and sometimes forgotten northeast Portland neighborhood, as a miniature hotbed of sustainable construction…At the same time, and not coincidentally, Cully is in the grip of a social lifestyle revolution of middle-class, multigenerational families creating a new breed of society. At the moment, that revolution is playing out in the Bouweses’ dining room.

A Day in the Life – Part 1

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In June, we wake up at 5 am when the sun rises. It’s important to get our outside work done before the heat of the day. Since we can’t afford A/C, we try to take siestas, or at least not move much, from 11 to 3. The ceiling fans help, and we’ve found that our bodies are getting used to the absence of climate control. I’ve seen a lot of lovely sunrises in the past few years from getting up at the crack of dawn.

To plan for emergency, or not? Heinberg and Hopkins debate

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At the Transition Network conference, Richard Heinberg gave an online presentation looking at the concept of Emergency Planning for Communities … For a while now, Richard and I have been discussing the tension between longer term planning for resilience and the more immediate and pressing responses demanded by sudden and rapid change. It is still an ongoing discussion, but … What follows is the series of email exchanges we have had since late last year.