Sustainable Society

Used salsa containers filling up landfills needlessly

2012-05-12T18:22:00.001-07:00

These salsa containers will be used once then thrown away to sit undecomposing on a landfill for a couple hundred years. Is that right?? It's really goofy from my perspective. The alternatives are 1)) we bring the things home to drop in recycling bin. 2)) the restaurant uses compostable alternates, or reusable washable things.

Review: Urban Roots - farming in the heart of a major U.S. city

2012-04-27T23:34:00.000-07:00

What do you do if your city turns into a burned out husk of its former glory, abandoned buildings for miles upon miles, etc? This is happening in several cities around the world. Former hubs of massive commerce and industry, turn into crapped out urban blight when the tides of corporate success change. I have an amazing movie to recommend that takes a close look at one of these cities,

2012-03-10T19:48:00.000-08:00

The following is an amazing video of a group of people in Seattle experimenting with reviving sailboats for commerce within Puget Sound. Prior to powered boats, there was zillions of sail powered ships ferrying stuff back and forth across Puget Sound, but today there are highways and trucks and large ferry boats and bridges and other paraphernalia of the modern transportation infrastructure.

Arsenic found in baby formula? Grow your own food!

2012-03-01T09:41:00.001-08:00

I saw the interesting juxtaposition of tweets below that appeared side-by-side in my twitter machine. The first tweet is a "Food Safety" concern. Generally, finding poisons like Arsenic in food is a big concern, that is currently known as "Food Safety", which has to do with various chemicals that find their way into the food we eat. The second tweet is a simple reminder that gardening season

The mysterious rash of tree murders sweeping our nation

2012-01-20T09:49:00.001-08:00

A rash of tree murders have popped up in my neighborhood. Trees, 6 feet or so tall, primarily of pine ethnicity, cut down in the prime of life, reportedly the corpses are put on display for bizarre rituals while the tree carcasses are still fresh, and then the dead trees are dumped unceremoniously on the street where cleanup crews have to work extra shifts to clean up the carnage. We hear

Best Rocket Stove Design Ever - UPDATE

2012-01-19T21:26:00.000-08:00

Another Rocket Stove video, this time with a little design tweak. The best rocket stove design just got better! Airflow was an issue with the original #10 can rocket stove design. I cut some two inch wide "flaps" and pushed them over the top of the rocket stove. This helps keep the top on and allows great airflow. Now the rocket stove is really rockin'.

How to Make a 16 Brick Rocket Stove

2012-01-19T21:21:00.000-08:00

Here's another Rocket Stove video, this time showing how to make one with bricks rather than used coffee cans. Dr. Larry Winiarski makes a clean burning rocket stove using 16 adobe bricks at the Rotary International-sponsored Integrated Cooking Workshop in Tlautla, Mexico

How to Build A Rocket Stove, Step-By-Step

2012-01-19T21:16:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what a Rocket Stove is or what is their advantage. I understand that it has something to do with efficient fuel usage. In any case the following video is interesting. Build a Rocket Stove Step-by-Step. Building a rocket stove is quick and easy. You will need one #10 can and four small cans (soup, corn, beans, etc.). Seeing how to build a rocket stove is much easier then

One way to have a drought resistant lawn

2012-01-18T22:14:00.000-08:00

Out here in the Western U.S. we have an issue with little amounts of rain. In Northern California we kind of ignore the real effect of the lack of rain, and continue growing lawns with grass as if we lived out east where it rains all the time. Regular grass just doesn't make ecological sense here because we don't get rain for most of the year. Most years the rain starts around November and

Who says you have to watch everything on your DVR? Keeping television watching in perspective

2012-01-18T21:32:00.000-08:00

Who am I, a guy that hasn't owned a television in over 15 years, to tell y'all how to handle your television watching habits. eh? Don't answer that and listen to the story ... In the most recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts the guy started off by saying that he and his family had "cleared some of the backlog on their DVR" and watched some particular TV show he wanted to talk about

Who'd have thought you could reinvent the shovel?

2012-01-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

The humble shovel has existed in one form or another for thousands of years. This means it is a very successful design that you might think cannot be improved upon. But ...

Does growing plants truly sequester carbon? Or does it just delay the release of carbon?

2012-01-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

In the game of decreasing the atmospheric carbon levels thought to be a main culprit in global warming, one effort underway is to grow plants in an effort to sequester the atmospheric carbon. Basically plants breath in CO2 and breath out O2, meaning the carbon stays in the plant. Generally speaking there is a harmonic balance between plants and animals where animals breath out CO2, plants

Permaculture - a Quiet Revolution

2012-01-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

A nice introduction to Permaculture that's also an overview of the Permaculture Congress held in Brazil a few years ago that's also nice examples of Permaculture operations in practice. For example a tour of collecting the feces from pigs and sheep into a pond, that goes into a biodigester, to produce natural gas, that runs a turbine to generate electricity, and the effluent from the

Genetically licensed crops interfering with farming practices, stealing and privatizing our cultural heritage and threatening food safety

2012-01-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

A dream about genetically modified livestock just woke me, and the events in the dream was so haunting I had to come to the computer at 3AM to write. In the dream some farmers were talking about whether the genetics license agreement under which they bought their pigs would allow them to breed pigs they'd bought, and then sell the pigs they'd bred. Breeding livestock is a normal every-day

If Greece is going through a Cuba-like meltdown, what will be their chosen route forward?

2012-01-11T13:24:00.000-08:00

I'm reading this article on the NY Times website, With Work Scarce in Athens, Greeks Go Back to the Land, and it's making be think of the meltdown in Cuba and as well makes me think of the prediction many are making of a societal collapse from one or more of a variety of causes: stresses induced from climate change, stresses induced from peak oil, or stresses induced from inability of the

When businesses are killed by developers plans gone awry

2012-01-10T17:04:00.001-08:00

Near where I live in Mountain View is this empty lot surrounded by a chain link fence. It formerly housed a small strip shopping center that had a single business selling specialty ethnic food. Here in Silicon Valley we have lots of ethnicities to serve and by all reports this store was very popular for its community. But the developer wanted to put the land to other uses and razed the building

Why is the FDA going after small time raw milk sellers? Corporate greed?

2011-12-26T21:28:00.001-08:00

In the past a farmer would buy a cow or two, have milk for his family, and sell any excess to neighbors. This tradition is under attack from the FDA because of raw milk scares and the supposed urgency to pasteurize everything. There are a couple risks here. First, many people see many health benefits from raw milk. When treated and handled correctly raw milk is safe. But the FDA knows

Do we really want soul-sucking essence-demeaning career choices?

2011-12-10T08:36:00.001-08:00

The Dilbert comic strip does such an excellent job of capturing the essential despair of working in modern corporations. The modern corporation is built in a top-down hierarchy, boss-men at the top (usually the boss-men are actually men) working through layers of captains and lieutenants, whose job titles are "Director" or "Manager", to dictate what the company does. This leaves the people at

Put your backyard to work with the books: The Backyard Homestead and The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals

2011-12-04T14:38:00.001-08:00

Do you eat food? Do you eat food every day? I'm sure you probably do, or you wouldn't be reading these words. Perhaps you're aware that the quality of your food is important to your health. After all your body is built out of the nutrients in the food you eat. What you may not know is the corporatized globalized homogenized pasteurized agriculture system that gives us the food in the

Putting the cart before the horse, Businesses Pledge 'Healthier Choices' for Customers

2011-12-02T09:02:00.001-08:00

NPR ran a nice story this morning about the obesity epidemic and a movement to ask Businesses to provide us with different, healthier, food choices. To an extent the obesity epidemic is about food choices, supposedly, maybe, and just as supposedly different healthier food choices will decrease obesity. Of course the modern food system is rife with ridiculous food-like substances and we as a

Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment - open source distributed DIY solutions to gardening even in apartment buildings

2011-12-02T08:09:00.001-08:00

Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious. To find out more about the project: http://

Transition Primer 2.0, US Version

2011-11-30T14:20:00.001-08:00

Transition Primer US v2.0 (function() { var scribd = document.createElement("script"); scribd.type = "text/javascript"; scribd.async = true; scribd.src = "http://www.scribd.com/javascripts/embed_code/inject.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(scribd, s); })();

What is the "buy local" idea / movement, and why should we buy local?

2011-11-20T19:24:00.001-08:00

"Buy Local" is a meme that's beginning to gain traction and is one of the pillars of creating sustainable healthy communities. Like many slogans however it's kind of vague and subject to interpretation and misinterpretation. In particular the MegaCorporations have noticed the "buy local" trend and are attempting to co-opt the movement claiming that they're supporting local commerce. It leads

The Occupy protests have supposedly re-ignited the "buy local" idea, as a counter to globalization

2011-11-20T18:20:00.001-08:00

A part of the Occupy issues is concern over globalization and the effects of MegaCorp's upon our lives. An article today on stltoday.com (St Louis) explores how/whether the Occupy movement has reinvigorated interest in the "buy local" meme. Though, to be honest, I thought "buy local" was such a little known idea that "invigorated" is a better word than "reinvigorated". In any case here's a

Does "buy local" mean buying at the local Target or Walmart or other megacorporation owned store?

2011-11-19T17:43:00.001-08:00

I'm a little surprised that this is a question, but let's make something clear. The purpose of "Buy Local" is to buy locally made stuff from locally owned businesses, this way more of the money you spend buying the widget will stay in your local economy. "Buy Local" is meant to keep your local economy healthy by keeping more money circulating within a 50-mile or so distance of where you live.