May 7, 2010
Hi there!
Helen wanted more clicks and buzzes. What can we tell ya.
So we’ve upgraded to a smarter version of WordPress. If you’re here, it’s because you’ve followed a sustainabilityandbeyond link – the address you want is:
Everything you see here is also there, along with lots of nice links, reading material, quotes, vids and so forth!
Happy browsing.
H&C
May 5, 2010
Hi everyone!
My last post was about growing soil; nice new, healthy rich humus, to sequester carbon and to work against the trend regular farming has of losing 83 billion tonnes of arable soil per year.
This week, I’ve been reading more Bill Mollison (bedtime book) in the form of Permaculture One. Here are a couple of his thoughts on soil:
Soils are the subject of much discussion, research and dogma. Their improvement, creation and destruction has been instrumental in the rise and fall of cultures throughout the world.’ p72
Being part of the biosphere, soils are complex ecologies, rather than non-living systems.‘ p72
Of course, tilling or ploughing the soil weakens it, and upsets the ecology of it, equaling a more and more impoverished soil, far more prone to erosion. In just the same way, pesticides and herbicides wipe-out the living element in the soil: this is akin to ripping the engine out of a car – leaving you going no-where.
The life forms in the soil do all the soil-making work. For example, worm mucus binds particles of soil, adds enzymes and holds water. As they move along, eating, the passages they leave allow roots to zoom along behind them, and let oxygen into the soil.
You can find out great stuff about the ecology of soil in the Growing Power Youtube videos and on Dr. Caroline Jone’s Amazing Carbon site, to start you off. If you have information you’d like to share, please tell us in the comments!
Some more Mollison on site and soil (this was heartening to me, considering the impoverished, shaley, rocky, sandy soil of soil we have on our Cygnet mountainside),
In site planning, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the soils. However, soils are not considered to be the limiting factor that many people seem to think. Although the physical character of soils may be a reasonably long-term aspect of the land, the soil ecology which supports plant life is readily changed and improved.’ p61
At Growing Power, they import 80,000 kilos of food waste a WEEK: it includes scraps from local restaurants and offices, fruit and veg in boxes never sold at markets, the cardboard boxes from anything and everything, brewery waste, mildewed hay, coffee grounds from local cafes, eggshells, and woodchips to name a few. This they compost in massive piles, or in windrows, or in large wormeries. Worms are the key to making this otherwise ‘landfill’ into rich, valuable soil. First and foremost the CEO Will Allen says, Growing Power is in the business of growing soil (and that’s Will below on one of his compost mountains!)
Allen says:
The simple truth is that it all starts with the soil. Without good soil, crops don’t get enough of the nutrients they need to survive and when plants are stressed, they are more prone to disease and pest problems. That’s why we grow our own compost and vermicompost – 6 million tons of it a year. That compost goes onto every growing bed we raise crops on. Because we know what goes in to the compost, we aren’t worried that the soil is contaminated with lead or other chemicals that humans just shouldn’t eat.’
A vermiculture business in Australia adds animal manures (cow, sheep, chicken) as well as animal parts from the slaughter business. They compost this with hundreds of thousands of kilos of spoiled hay, all manner of vegetable farm ‘waste’ (like straw, rotted crops, brewery hops, coconut husks, cocoa shells etc etc). Yuk, you might think, about the animal parts – but we’ve all used ‘blood and bone’ and this is just a ground-up, dried, refined granule form of the same thing – animal bodies. To compost the remains seems better than any alternative (where their bodies are incinerated and wasted).
So, all the ‘waste’ we produce can be turned, by worms and bacteria and enzymes (a workforce of billions who ask no wage) back into top quality, life-giving soil. Bring it on! Give us a little time to get to OzEarth HQ and we will be doing a similar collection of any local goodies we can get our hands on in the Huon Valley, in Tassie, and turning it into the black gold! (We have a tractor and a 10 tonne truck already, which helps!)
OK, I shall stop waxing lyrical about the planet-saving characteristics of growing soil and bid you a great day!
Love
C
Ps. You can click on the ‘links’ and the pictures, to take you to the pages they were pinched from!! oxoxo
May 2, 2010
Word has it that, as a planet, we are allowing 83 billion tonnes of arable soil to erode or blow away a year. Ploughing is the main culprit. As the soil washes away, we keep reproducing like a virus. Whilst eating up resources like voracious locusts. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where we’re headed…
Of course, it doesn’t have to go that way at all. The earth can be healed, and the soil can capture umpteen times more carbon than can forests. At OzEarth, that strikes us as amazingly good news! Soil need not take hundreds of years to build up a couple of inches; organically teeming, super-fertile soil can be created in a couple of years. Then your food-growing activities can enrich it year in, year out. With just a little know-how. Equestrian Peter Andrews (a total hero) through a system called Natural Sequence Farming has built up one meter of soil per flood event on his land in Australia and totally rehydrated his farm into a green, lush oasis – see his gut-crunching, soul-singing epsiode on Australian Story – awesome!
Bill Mollison, in his Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual and the Permaculture Research Institute offer detailed, practical and gloriously hopeful methods of growing soil. (You can get huge doses of Bill on Youtube for free, as well, explaining lots of his methods…) Mycologist Paul Stamets has a wealth of info on how to harness mushroom ‘Mycelium Running’ to super-boost health soil formation too. Check out his fab soil-constructing mushrooms at Fungi Perfecti.
Each of us can do a lot to turn this potentially suicidal situation into a super-soil success story. You can make soil – see next paragraph. If you have no land, no garden at all, not even a balcony, you can still make soil: by buying organic; composting your food scraps; and by buying locally from producers who are farming the soil as a number one priority (it has to be organic – all those chemicals obliterate all the good bacteria in soil). You have ‘Pound-Power’ – you can vote with your wallet. Add all our shopping baskets up, and that will make millions of tonnes of new soil – a vast difference.
Reproduce worms, by giving them great places to live, with lots of kitchen scraps to chow down on. A kilo of worms needs a kilo of food a day, according to Will Allen, at Growing Power. They have a stable of seven super-soil-producing worms, and you can read his stuff to get the champion worm names. Check out his astonishing NGO set-up in Milwaukee (and Chicago) via the link above. You can also Youtube his videos: including lectures, aquaponics (fish and greens), bees, eggs, veggies, composting, and of course the vermiculture. I have applied to do a 3 months intership with Growing Power and am in negotiations now – please cross all fingers and toes for me!!!
Last year, Helen and I got muddy up to the oxsters bagging up an amazing number of wonderful soil-building worms together with very well rotted horse poo. We shovelled about 80 bags of it into feedsacks – exhausting! Bagged it, carried it across two fields to a van, then trundled around to our back garden and turfed it onto a bed of hay, in raised beds. We had GUNS to die for! Wormy horse manure gave us the best veggies ever. The three nice horses live about 2 km from our house – but it still was a commitment in energy to get their droppings to our garden!
An interesting article here on soil building. You might also like to look at the cool stuff Dr. Caroline Jones is doing at AmazingCarbon: she is an extremely diligent, knowledgable grassland ecologist and has proven ways of making denuded, ruined grazing land yield better results, whilst regaining its health.
I am now collecting weird worm facts… like worms love bananas, I discovered from Will Allen. Rotten, black squishy ones. Our local magpies are smart little buggers & now daily dig up all the spoilt bananas I get from the end of the local market, because they gorge on the hundreds of baby worms squirming around in the sweet decay. If you have vermiculture know-how, I’m dying to pick your brains.
Now I have that children’s song repeating in my head:
‘The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out,
they crawl in thin
and they crawl out stout…’
So, that is my little wrigglers post. Every time I move a pot, or pull back a handful of soil, I see them and it makes my heart sing!
Love
C
PS: H says ‘Gross!’ but she doesn’t mean it – she loves them too.
April 29, 2010
I’m going to try not to cross-post content too often, but sometimes something is too germane to resist.
Thanks to Alex Steffen of Worldchanging: Bright Green for this insight into my objectionable objections dilemma. He writes:
Some older environmentalists (most prominently, James Lovelock) have suggested that the fact that no future now awaits us in which our planet is not greatly depleted means the game’s over. Lovelock in particular seems to enjoy saying it’s too late to do anything to save humanity, …but he’s not alone among his generation. These “it’s too late” doomers look ahead and see a world full of deserts and empty oceans, dying forests and dead coral reefs, and they say, “we tried to warn you…” and walk away.
The problem is, the children of 2050 will look at that future world, with all its problems, and see home: and they’ll look at the choices they have in front of them, and see the future. And since the choices we make in the next forty years will decide what choices our descendants are left with — a thriving society engaged in centuries of restoration and planetary repair, or a gradual desperate retreat towards the poles — giving up now because we don’t like the choice set we face is pathetic cowardice.
In fact, it’s worse: the writing off of the future (especially on the part of those who bear the responsibility of cultural authority) actually directly supports the work of those who are destroying the future; those that are stripping every last shred of profit from the planet’s biosphere while they still can. The idea that there is no future is a club used to beat people into submission and acquiescent participation in the unthinkable.
The planetary crisis we face may be made up of machinery and market failures and sheer masses of humanity struggling to live, but I’m more and more convinced that it is not at its core really a material crisis at all. Rather, the planetary crisis is a crisis of vision; we see a growing and darkening void where our future ought to be. The average person, presented with accurate information about the state of the world, can see no way forward at all. The path we’re on appears to end in darkness and a swift, cataclysmic drop. Most folks, entirely understandably, choose not to look.
… The irony is, we already have the ability to solve or at least address the planet’s most pressing problems. We don’t have every solution we’ll need, not yet. We do, though, have the technological capabilities, the design genius, the scientific ingenuity, the entrepreneurial zeal, the policy acumen, the community-building skill, and the educational and cultural wisdom. It is not that we are not capable of sustainable prosperity. We have never had more or better ability to build a better world. What we seem to lack is a belief that we can actually use those powers to change anything, and we lack that belief precisely because the future has been ripped out of our cultural debate.
That’s why if we care about the planet, the most important thing we can do is start showing how good a future we still can have. That’s why, right now, optimism is a political act, and a radical one at that.
See the full article here.
Speaking of optimism, I read in the comments for Alex’s post that Lovelock hasn’t actually “walked away” – in fact, he’s working on a project called A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Gaia, described by his collaborator, Andy R Worboys, as “An independent feature length documentary that aims to set out his ideas for our future. A positive look at what can be done and what we really can do to make our lives better”. Watch this space.
So, I will be endeavouring to keep my substantial chin up! Hope your chin’s up too.
April 26, 2010
So, another thread of our action toward a more sustainable life is… sewing! For about 15 years, I have been a second-hand shop addict, getting the huge majority of my clothes (and other things) very cheaply from charity shops. There is a great tradition of bargain hunting in the UK: a sense of delight in getting a great pair of jeans for three quid and boasting about it. I think that is why we have a national addiction to car-boot sales too – it’s how we assuage our hunter-gatherer instinct! We peel our eagle-eyes and pit our wits against the other snoopers…
However, second-hand hunting has proved insanely difficult in Holland; that make do and reuse culture is almost non-existent. Everything is pitched into the tip before it’s barely warmed up, because a bigger better one is in the shops. The huge windows used to be about Calvinism, proving your good character: now they are the showcase to show off consumerist-one-upsmanship: look what I’ve just got! (Helen reminds me not all Dutch people are into conspicuous plastic crap consumption & that I mustn’t generalise!)
Anyway, back to the sewing: during the last two days, I have made Helen two shirts. One in 90c/m calico, the other in a 2E/m wine-red cotton. Next will be trousers, more shirts, jumpers and skirts.
Why make our own clothes?!!? Well, there are a few reasons…
* to get the kind of well-made clothes we like, at a more reasonable cost
* to know we are not contributing to human slavery in sweatshops
* to stop our contributions to the insanity of homogenous high street retail corporate stranglehold on another aspect of our lives
* because ‘fashion’ sucks – it is another spell that binds; another layer of cement that makes us believe we cannot be self-sufficent
* because we think cycling to get cotton from a massive bolt involves fewer fuel-miles than taking that fabric to the sewing halls, then packaging it, then taking it a depot, then taking it to a shop, then buying it and taking it home (via the car) in another plastic bag. To be chucked out when the fashion changes the next season.
* we have begun to find out the devastating ecological cost of cotton & viscose, etc. In terms of farmland ruined, huge herbicide and pesticied dousings, and water wastage to name a few. The cost to the health and well-being of Indian or Chinese or other workers is also extreme.
* and finally, because we get a kick out of saying ‘I made that myself!’
So the next step would have to be sourcing local hemp or cotton fiber produced organically, with no chemical input. That is our goal. We’re starting with making our own togs from now on. (Wait until I post about sea-salt making, which I’ve been researching. Cannot wait to try that on a scale large enough to serve the local community, as well as ourselves: for all that preserving!)
Adios for now,
C xoxo
April 26, 2010
Our policy at OzEarth is to be positive. We want to be solution-oriented and optimistic.
Sometimes, however, the reactions of people to what we believe the future holds, and what we’re planning to do about it, are often so scornful that it hurts.
Admittedly, and against our better judgement, we proselytise. Sometimes we are emotional (or, as some have put it, “hysterical”). Frequently, we are repetitive. We cannot be silent, in spite of ourselves, fully aware that to mention the action needed to secure any kind of future is just as likely to alienate and annoy as it is to enlighten. We are voices in the desert because everything is at stake.
Here’s a sample of the sort of thing we get to hear in response:
I am out of ideas as to how to deal with denialist, defeatist, hedonistic, self-deceiving excuses. Worse, I find myself in a judging rather than a compassionate place.
I would like help… How do you answer these objections? Are there answers? Is there a better way of getting the message out, so that it’s more palatable; so that it inspires action?
Love to hear from you.
Cheers
H
April 24, 2010
See also: Leg 1: Permaculture for how we’re going to build and grow sustainably.
Just because we’re in favour of localised systems and living simply, it doesn’t mean we want to do everything the hard way. In fact, we’d prefer to be as lazy as possible, within the bounds of still being able to give back more than we’re taking from the world. We are, in fact, fiercely pro-technology. What we are is anti-industrial. We think that an industrial framework which promotes centralised mass manufacture of anything is outdated, world-killing thinking.
This may seem like a contradiction; it’s not. Technology that is implemented sustainably, renewably, and on a small scale, is very important to what we’re planning. When we say small scale, we mean bicyclable: that is to say, you can ride your bike to it, and you can ride your bike to everyone who’s using it. Things like water pumps, trucks / tractors, wind turbines, and information sharing networks, will all play a big role in the plan.
There are two main kinds of centralised structure which are relevant to this entry: government and private enterprise.
In the case of government, we think there are major limits to what big government can actually achieve. This is because politicians are mainly concerned with surviving in government beyond the next election; so what gets done is typically what’s popular or what will appease the powerful, rather than what’s good or important. We see little evidence that political parties of any stripe have the slightest eye for the long view or for the urgency of the issues which occupy C and myself. We think that there may yet be some benefit to engaging local government (as recommended by, for example, Geoff Lawton here) to try and implement some local Transition / Permaculture / LETS sort of initiatives, but we think it’s a pretty unwise idea to rely on any more centralised source of welfare, infrastructure, security or stimulus for innovation, because – frankly – we fear these things will dry up and blow away as soon as the going gets tough.
The other set of big centralised structures is the private sector. At the moment, we rely on centralised sources for our food, water, clothing, power, building materials and machines, and we hate it. The move to Tasmania will give us a wonderful opportunity to be free of many of these ties.
We want this freedom because we believe that corporations can’t be trusted. They can’t be trusted because their financial, procedural and personnel structures can’t be known, and they are specifically set up so that no single person of group of people can be held accountable for any damage they do. All we can know for certain about any corporation is that its prime responsibility is to the profits of its shareholders. We aren’t saying that every corporation is evil, but there are an appalling number of examples which bear out our fear that a lack of personal accountability, coupled with the will to profit, gives rise to corrupt, exploitative and polluting business practices. If this all seems far-fetched, we invite you to watch the movie-length documentary “The Corporation“.
We’ve talked in previous entries about how we plan to meet our food, water and shelter needs with minimal recourse to current industrial structures. This entry is about machines and power.
A lot of the things we want to do will be greatly aided by machinery. Establishing a Permaculture garden will involve importing manure and digging swales, which suggests the need for a truck and /or a tractor. Building our shelter, even if we’re using only onsite resources, will still require enormous amounts of lifting, transporting, digging etc – which again suggests at least a tractor. Clothing manufacture will be a lot easier with some kind of spinner and loom. Processing food for storage might also be a lot easier with machinery of one sort or another.
Another thing to consider: we will certainly start out with a lot of machinery, but what happens if things break? What happens when the batteries fail, or the solar panel falls apart? What will we do when the spring in the gas compressor snaps, or the tractor tyres are so perished that they’ll no longer inflate?
In order to remain truly independent into the future, we need to do two things:
We’ve been following the work of Open Source Ecology with great interest. Among other innovations, OSE has come up with a number of cool designs for things like self-build tractors with modular power units. Their other ideas include an automated compressed earth brick press, a sawmill, a programmable torch table, modular greenhouse and housing units, a forge, a lathe, an adaptation of a 3d printer to produce plastic parts. They also have a varied toolkit in development for producing power – everything from pyrolysis to solar combined heat and power. The OSE model aims to be modular, infinitely replicable, and to produce everything anyone might ever need, not just for survival but in order to actually thrive, on a local scale.
What’s particularly appealing is not just the goodies that OSE is developing, but the fact that their design brief is for small communities, coupled with their core Open Source philosophy – a free exchange of information, available to all, to be adopted and adapted at will.
So impressed were we by the OSE concept that we were on the point of becoming financial supporters via their crowd-based funding system, but then some really odd blog traffic from their site prompted me to dig deeper…
It is with quite some sadness and frustration that we’ve concluded, having read the forums, that while OSE has some extremely compelling ideas – in fact, it seems to us to be one of the only outfits addressing the whole spectrum of developing appropriate technologies for small resilient communities – the execution of these ideas seems to be stymied at regular and alarmingly frequent intervals by ideological and personality conflicts. We do continue to hope that these issues will be worked out in the future, and will put our money where our mouth is as soon as ever we’re confident that they have.
In the meantime, we would be delighted to hear about other outfits that are attempting the same sort of thing – locally-based technological independence.
We’re more and more inclined to focus on passive rather than active solar systems. Our home design uses solar passive and thermal mass techniques for comfort in both cold and warm weather. We may also incorporate passive solar hot water heating pipes into our design. We also have plans to extend our growing season with some sort of greenhouse solution.
Why not solar panels, like on an Earthship? Well, the more I’ve read about the inefficiency, embodied energy and expense of PV technology, the less convinced I’ve become – particularly in Tasmania, where insolation isn’t at the fabulously high levels you see in other parts of Australia, it can well be argued that PV systems just aren’t worth it. I live in hope that microdot or some other much-touted technology will take off, making PV power cheap and readily available… I have a similar hope for non-polluting, high-capacity, long-lived batteries. But should collapse occur before these technologies have matured, we want to have other, more low-tech options.
Wind power has the advantage over photovoltaics that it’s relatively low-tech: you can build a wind turbine yourself out of scrap metal. No, it won’t be as efficient as a highly engineered, centrally-manufactured one, but we have heard of home designs that have produced power whenever the wind blew, without maintenance, for 20 years. That’s the kind of design we want.
Hydro is interesting for similar reasons, plus one other really significant one: hydro operates continuously, whereas wind power needs batteries in order to be continuous. Now, I have no doubt that we will be using batteries, but it’s something we’d like to move away from as soon as we can lay hands on lower-tech, lower-embodied-energy, less polluting, longer-lasting alternatives. Input is more than welcome.
Jean Pain‘s amazing compost heap produced not only plentiful, continuous hot water (enough to shower under and also to heat his conventional home for a year and a half), but also produced gas for cooking and fuelling his car. He did this using a chipper, some black hose, a metal canister, and some tyre inner tubes. His process is documented online here.
This, again, has the virtues of low-tech, continuousness, and that greatest of all Permaculture goods: multiple outputs, in the form of hot water, gas, and wonderfully rich compost at the end of the heap’s heating cycle. Better still: methane gas is a storable resource. We are aware that methane has attendant issues (it’s a powerful greenhouse gas, and of course its combustion, as well as the process of composting in general, produces CO2), but our plans certainly involve sequestering enough carbon through other activities to more than offset the CO2 produced by our gas use.
We have been fantastically inspired by his system and will, at the very least, be heating our water using compost.
April 22, 2010
Hello Everyone!
It’s Earth Day… Hope you did something refreshing to celebrate!
Helen and I signed another Avaaz petition. Avaaz ROCKS – they are super organised and are getting superb results, on things like keeping the worldwide ivory ban, trying to stop the reintroduction of GM into Europe, campaigning against human trafficking, stopping corrupt politicians allowing new pulp-mills, voicing against anti-gay laws in Uganda…
Currently they are trying to stop whaling restarting globally, by getting 100,000 signatures.
Please sign up with them – they make it so easy to add your voice to each campaign – it takes about 10 seconds! And it changes the world!
So, happy Earth Day, love from us
C & H
