Running UrbanWorkbench and writing  is something I enjoy doing, but I do try to cover my costs through advertising and affiliate links. Here is a selection of the companies supporting UrbanWorkbench. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank my regular readers and their encouragement. I’d also like to point out the links at the bottom of posts for sharing. These are simple ways to post to twitter, facebook, digg, or stumbleupon, or email to a friend – sharing is caring!

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This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com © 2008.

A Big Thanks – July Sponsors

Technorati Tags: Canada, Castlegar British Columbia, Digg, Facebook, real estate, StumbleUpon, twitter, U.S, wordpress

When we bought this property in Castlegar, we we’re really considering the prospect of it as an Urban Farm, but now that we have been here for three summers, the property has become defined, in my mind at least, as our Urban Farm. This is despite the City’s snail pace decision making on the issue of hens in residential areas, and the fact that they laughed at our suggestion of permitting Pygmy Goats in a yard such as ours.

Saying that, we are well on the way to better understanding our soil, the patterns of the seasons, pests and predators and skills such as tilling, crop rotation, harvesting, seed saving, storage and preservation. We are busy working out how to improve our production and conversion of food from human energy on our property, and are finding the balance between effort and abundance. Last year we grew wheat, oats and amaranth in our yard among other crops, all of these grew successfully in Castlegar, which seemed to surprise some people. But the effort required to process these grains without industrial scaled machinery, made the exercise very time and effort consuming. Instead, we doubled our subscription to the Creston Grain CSA, where we procure most of our grain needs.

As the summer rolls around, leaving the cooler nights and dewy mornings of late Spring, the fruits plump up on the trees and vines, the sprinklers keep the ground moist and the bees collect pollen like kids in a candy store. We are a long way from self sufficiency or sustainability or any of those catchwords, but many of the choices we make are rooted in a sense of personal responsibility for our food and environment. That is a large part of writing here at UrbanWorkbench, sharing our experiences and findings, and keeping a record of what has worked or challenged us along the way.

Thanks for reading.

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Our Urban Farm

Technorati Tags: agriculture, Amaranth, Castlegar, Cereal, Community-supported agriculture, Crop rotation, Kootenays, Oat, Self-sufficiency, Soil, Wheat

Summer in the Kootenays is often a time of abundance – if you know where to look. This year the cherry harvest around Castlegar has been amazing, as long as there aren’t any worms in the ones you are picking. Here’s a pie Robyn and Eden made with some of our local fruit.

I am amazed at how quickly the fruit comes onto the cherry trees, and just how laden with fruit they are. Next up will be the apricots, then the peaches, apples, plums, of course there will be huckleberries, blackberries, and rhubarb as well. The amount of fruit in a good year is astounding.

Tonight Robyn just returned from a “Harvest Rescue” down the road – more cherries. This is a group of people who pick fruit for people, and use the principle of thirds, a third to the land owner, if they want it, a third to the food bank, and a third for yourself. A document that seeks to detail some of the benefits, issues and challenges of urban fruit picking has been released out of Sheffield in the UK. This is called the Abundance Handbook, which can be viewed online as a pdf or printed as a booklet. This is an excellent effort from a  group of dedicated locals who harvest local fruit in the region, and discuss issues such as mapping, pollution, storage and preservation of fruits.

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Abundance

Technorati Tags: Apricot, Blackberry, Cherry, Food bank, fruit, harvest, Harvest Rescue, Horticulture, Kootenays, Plum

While considering the history of Rossland, I was struck by the fact that at it’s peak population last century, there were about 6,000 people living in the mountain community, mainly because of the quantity of gold being extracted from under its feet and the surrounding mountains. Since that time, the community has waxed and waned, becoming a tidy downtown tourist destination, with a rocking hardcore ski hill. Will this be enough for the community to survive in the future? The City of Trail, just down the hill relies extensively on Teck Ltd’s Lead and Zinc smelter operations for employment and taxes, will they be around forever? The City of Castlegar has a pulp mill and non-operational lumber mill, both of which rely on international buyers for the bulk of their products.

Without significant change, none of these small rural centres will survive another generation in anything resembling their current form. Small communities need to be one of several things to survive. These are described below in order of importance.

An Employment Centre

First and foremost, a town or city needs to be a source of employment. Diverse economies promote diverse culture and provide fertile ground for support service industries. Reliance on single large industry has been commonplace in British Columbia, with Mines and Forestry forming the backbone of many communities. Trades, goods and services that are locally useful have in recent years been outsourced by big business and cookie-cutter industries. As the tide of globalization rolls back, these forms of employment and the necessary skills that accompany them will be in increasing demand.

A Junction

Not all junctions are created equal. Highways, railways, airports, rivers, mountain passes, political borders and industries have all formed junctions of one type or another. Traditionally, The more overlapping reasons for a junction to be formed, the more likely that the town will grow. Likewise, as the economy becomes more localized, opportunities for travel will likely be reduced and the more important junctions will be the centers that survive, making use of trade routes and geographic features to their benefit.

An Agricultural Centre

A Destination

I include this fairly unwillingly. What purpose is a town as a destination if it is none of the above? A seaside village might be a popular tourist destination, but can it exist in true resilience outside of tourism? What about a ski resort? It is conceivable that some of these “destinations” will remain viable towns in the future, but I believe that only the best and most convenient or unique will survive well into the future as oil prices rise and availability declines

Closing Thoughts

Places such as towns, villages and cities around the world survive and thrive for many different reasons, but these are the boundary conditions that encourage resilience as a community. The ability to remain viable as a community is largly dependent on that communitiy’s usefulness to itself and the world around it. If there is somewhere easier, closer, cheaper, or safe, community competition will come into play and the concepts of emotional attachment or sunk costs are all that may keep some places alive.

Is there an easy way to improve the value of place? I’d suggest that encouraging small scale agriculture and local enterprise for employment are easier that manufacturing a junction or destination out of a community that may not be either of these in the long term. The model of Transition Towns gives hope for communities to develop their own path to resilience within a framework of knowledge and reasonable predictions. If you haven’t read about transition towns, check out this site for a primer.

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This post was written by Mike Thomas for UrbanWorkbench.com © 2008.

The Value of Place for Small Communities

Technorati Tags: British Columbia, Canada, Carbon footprint, Castlegar, Economic growth, Kootenays, Rossland, Ski resort, Tertiary sector of the economy, Transition Towns, U.S

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In an amazing change of direction, the US is considering market intervention for speculative buying of energy futures. Hang on, I thought the act of participating in the market was speculative to start with?

U.S. Ponders New Curbs on Speculators – NYTimes.com

Reacting to the violent swings in oil prices in recent months, federal regulators announced on Tuesday that they were considering new restrictions on “speculative” traders in markets for oil, natural gas and other energy products.

This comes at a time when those in the markets are willing to place the blame on anything, two years ago people would have been saying, “keep your hands off”, now they are saying things like…

“It is the regulatory authority’s business to make sure the markets work,” said Edward L. Morse, head of research at LCM Commodities, a brokerage in New York. “If there’s a lesson of that last few years, it’s that the markets haven’t been functioning as well as they should have been.”

Analysts said regulators face huge challenges in distinguishing normal volatility, which is always high during a chaotic economic period, from speculative swings propelled by investors seeking purely financial gains who end up distorting energy prices.

US Regulator To Limit Commodity Speculation

Prior to 2005, mutual funds and retail investors looking to invest in oil did so by buying the shares of oil producing companies. The volatile futures market was left as a preserve of actual oil producers and consumers looking to hedge their exposures, and to a handful of cowboy hedge funds and individual speculators who provided liquidity for such trades to occur. Futures were deemed too risky a proposition for mutual funds and too scary for most retail investors.

But with the introduction of exchange-traded funds, fund managers and retail investors alike were effectively introduced to a new investment asset class. Traded on the stock market, commodity ETFs provided a proxy for direct commodity investment. In 2005, China was on the move and commodity prices were on the way up. Direct commodity investment became a more direct means of hedging against inflation, and of speculating on now rapidly rising commodity prices. Oil, as one commodity, became the speculative plaything of hedge funds and retail investors and a mandatory asset class for pension funds. The once steady and relatively closed shop of oil trading was suddenly opened up to the herd.

I’d love to hear what free market economists think of this one. Is regulation of the oil and gas futures market necessary. Considering these are products we should really be weaning ourselves off of – surely there is a better way to manage the problem of fluctuating prices, which inherently are caused by fear and greed. Any ideas?

Emanuel Balarie, managing director of Chicago-based Balarie Capital Management called the CFTC proposal “pretty vague’’ and said “speculation is what makes markets efficient.’’

The volatility of oil trading is not likely to to go away with heavy handed regulation, more feasible is increasing prices, decreasing supplies and a nervous public that waits for the government to do something serious for them regarding our oil vulnerability.

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Oil Speculation

Technorati Tags: Business, Commodity, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Futures exchange, Hedge fund, oil, Oil and Gas, Oil Prices, peak oil, Speculation, U.S

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Tar Sands

Technorati Tags: Alberta, Andrew Nikiforuk, Athabasca Oil Sands, Civil Engineering, Fort McMurray, Oil Sands, Syncrude, University of Calgary

As a child, the world is only as big as you can imagine it to be. For many years, growing up in Sydney, my world consisted of the immediate neighbourhood surrounding our house, the local shops, my grandparents house and the occasional visit to the “city” or away to a coastal holiday destination. The fact that around me were about 4 or 5 million other people in Sydney didn’t factor in my imagination – it wasn’t important, these people didn’t have any function in my life, or so I believed.

Growing up, you begin to realize just how interconnected we all are in terms of the goods and services we provide, and that the only reason that we could live in Sydney was that a whole lot of other people lived there too, and gave my father the opportunity to practice his skills at producing advertisements. But even beyond that with the rise of globalization, all of the consumer goods we purchase, clothing, and even everyday food items come from abroad.

But something is happening to this world. Your world is getting a lot smaller a lot quicker than you imagine. Yes you still have the internet, Amazon, CostCo and can spend hours browsing through the mall – store after store of goods made in faraway lands. However, the recent economic crisis has rubbed some of the shine and glitter off the consumer model of spending. More and more, I am hearing terms like “resilience” and “buy local”, farmers markets are springing up, our local freecycle network is pretty busy, and websites like Bhubble in Rossland provide an alternative to the traditional means of buying or trading goods.

It’s almost as though community has become important again. I’m not sure if it is just a function of supposed tougher times, or if the general population is understanding how tenuous much of our social and economic context is without a strong local economy and community groups that care and are forgiving of others that are trying to make the best of the situation.

My world is shrinking, we moved from a city of a couple of hundred thousand people to a rural town of 7,500 people – it is called a City, (but so is Rossland, and that only has 3,500 people). You see people, you recognize them and their kids. You have lazy summer evenings fishing for Rainbows on the river with a couple of realtors. You know the shop owners, the librarians, you even know the City Council, and the staff. We’ve been here in Castlegar for about two and a half years now. The Kootenays are like a back-eddy of BC, a great place to go fishing and get out of the hustle and bustle of the main current. That is not to say that there isn’t opportunity here – maybe things have quietened down since the second home market crumpled like a paper-mache house – but there are honest people making an honest living in community.

Some of this shrinking world that we are experiencing  is intentional. We wanted to live and work in a smaller community, we wanted to shorten up our food-miles and we wanted to live somewhere where we wanted to be. But other parts of it are out of necessity. We don’t travel a whole lot any more, the travel we undertake is intentional and typically planned to make the most of the journey. Even short trips, like those to Nelson just 40 minutes away, have multiple objectives. This is entirely counterculture to the Canadian dream of pickups and SUVs and we regularly feel the dissonance between our choices and those of friends, neighbours and work colleagues. We may or may not be able to transition or undergo an energy descent in place here in Castlegar, but for the moment, that’s the plan and we’re running with it.

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My Shrinking World

Technorati Tags: Australia, Canada, Castlegar, City council, Energy, energy descent, future, Kootenays, New South Wales, Oceania, Rossland, Sydney, Transition, Transition Town

More posts next week – I’ve been fishing on the Salmo River and Erie Creek. Here’s a photo of the Salmo Hotel and Erie Creek, just up a forestry road near Salmo.

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Gone Fishin’

I write often about community resilience here at UrbanWorkbench. Resilience is the ability of a system to absorb change and still function. In the sense of community, this is the survive and thrive through change mentality. Most people would agree that resilience is a great thing for a community, but I’m finding that people have different expectations with regard to what areas or themes are involved in measuring resilience.

How open a community is to examining the risks and threats that it faces with a critical lens is at the heart of how resilient that community will be in the future – you can’t predict everything, but you can prepare for anything.

In my mind, resilience rests on the principles of adequate health care, food and water security, gainful employment, local economy and cultural innovation. If these exist and thrive across the community spectrum, chances are that any other issues such as transportation or education will be resolved. Communities should start evaluating themselves for resilience, using indicators of health, food security, employment, local economy and culture.

Resilience is not the same as sustainability – these concepts dovetail, but are separated by the idea of change. Sustainability projects a continuum, almost a steady state. Resilience accepts and bounces back from change.

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Resilience

Technorati Tags: Education, environment, Health, Health care, Health Policy, Medicine, Resilience, Sustainability, United States

I’ve been working on some graphical presentation of the water storage for Rossland, and one of the best tools is Google Apps. It can create a timeline graph with annotations for comments. I started collecting data last year for this project and now that Ophir Reservoir is almost full, I think it is time to go public with this data. Entering data for this graph is as simple as measuring the drop in water level from full for the two reservoirs, something that is done at least weekly, and a spreadsheet calculates the approximate percentage of full storage that is available in each reservoir and immediately publishes this to the graph. A link to the raw data as an html file is available here.

This is a work in progress and will be published on the City website soon.

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Rossland Water Supply