The alternatives are 1)) we bring the things home to drop in recycling bin. 2)) the restaurant uses compostable alternates, or reusable washable things.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Used salsa containers filling up landfills needlessly
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.
The alternatives are 1)) we bring the things home to drop in recycling bin. 2)) the restaurant uses compostable alternates, or reusable washable things.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Review: Urban Roots - farming in the heart of a major U.S. city
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, Detroit, and what some of the Detroit citizens are doing to take some control over their lives and rehabilitate their city.
The movie? Urban Roots. It takes a look at the Urban Farming scene in Detroit, in several variants of the practice, and it does a great job of making small scale farming look highly appealing.
First, what is Urban Farming? It's actually one of those misnomer phrases like that joke about "Military Intelligence" being a contradiction in terms. "Urban" refers to a certain geometry of building height, setback from the sidewalk, and streetscape that we would immediately recognize as "city". You can have a small town, that has an "urban" core and two blocks away is houses with front yards. The geometry of the urban core is no front yards, and buildings taller than 3 stories high. When you take the buildings away it is no longer urban, but something else.
However, this is a bit of a nitpick, and what this "Urban Farming" is focusing on is the repurposing of land within the city limits of a large city, and placing some of that land to the use of growing crops. In other words, a farm located within a city.
In the case of Detroit there has been many decades of flight away from the city, growing blight from mile after mile of abandoned buildings, squatters, drugs, violence, crime, and more. I've never been to Detroit but what I hear it is or was pretty bad. Yet that area of Michigan is home to some of the largest corporations in the world. GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc are all headquartered there, and the suburbs around Detroit tend to be some of the richest in the world.
A statistic in the movie is that in the 1950's Detroit was home to 2 million people, today it's under 800,000.
The normalthink paradigm of cities is that each city continually grows in population, and cities do not shrink in population. However the reality is that many cities, such as Detroit, shrink in population. What happens to a city whose governmental infrastructure is sized to support 2 million people, but the population shrinks to less than half of that, and the economic base of the city craters? Half the number of people means drastically smaller tax revenue for the city. How can the city pay for the police and fire and other services it is responsible for on a drastically smaller tax base?
Basically, Detroit has lots of problems.
What the movie, Urban Roots, shows is a movement of people who see all the empty land -- that is, all those blighted neighborhoods full of vacant burned out buildings? The city went in and razed all the buildings so that at least the drug people couldn't squat in the buildings and do their drug gang violence thing. But, that resulted in many blocks with one house left per block, and oodles of vacant spaces between the houses. The feeling of these areas became rural, and some people saw this empty land as an opportunity.
The city government likely sees that vacant land as a problem, because there's no businesses or houses on the land there is no tax revenue for the city. However the people in this movie sees the land as an opportunity to garden, grow food, rehabilitate the land, get back in touch with the land, etc.
One of the people interviewed talked about the people of West Africa, who became the Slaves that were brought to America, those people in Africa have a rich agricultural heritage, which is why those people were prized as workers for farms in the Old South. Many of the people interviewed in the movie were African Americans in Detroit, and the speaker talking about the African agricultural heritage likened this to a reawakening of their cultural heritage.
However, many of the young African Americans had to overcome a stigma that farm work was tantamount to slavery. The African American heritage of being slaves has stigmatized, for them, the idea of manual labor. The cure for this stigma is to separate "Working For The Man" (manual labor where someone else gets rich) versus "Working to Build Something for Your Own Benefit" (manual labor, to grow your own garden, grow your own food, that you don't have to buy from a store).
Another thing in the movie is a concept of ad-hoc people powered eminent domain. That is, suppose you live in these neighborhoods, you want to grow a garden, and there's a vacant lot next door? Is it correct to just go and plant a garden in that lot regardless of the wishes of the land owner? Many speakers in the movie were proudly preaching that we should just inhabit the unoccupied fallow land, and put it to good use, consequences be damned.
I rather disagree with that tactic. Someone owns that land. The land owner should have the say over what happens on the land they own. Perhaps it is the city which owns the land that had been abandoned by previous land owners?
Which leads to another issue discussed in the movie. Zoning and other city regulations. The land we're talking about primarily was zoned for residential use, where houses were the expected common thing. The role of a city is to design the fabric of the city, and Zoning regulations are the means to do that. However in Detroit the people were just going and doing what they wanted, with the city having little ability to exert enough control to enforce Zoning. City employees, the current Mayor, the former Mayor, etc, were interviewed talking about the role of the city, the zoning regulations, and how the people in these small urban farming operations were working at too small a scale, under the radar, for the city to keep up with them. But that these small urban farming operations also were not in conformance with the zoning regulations.
Again "What do you do if your city turns into a burned out husk of its former glory, abandoned buildings for miles upon miles, etc?" If you want to ponder these ideas, I highly recommend the movie.
The movie? Urban Roots. It takes a look at the Urban Farming scene in Detroit, in several variants of the practice, and it does a great job of making small scale farming look highly appealing.
First, what is Urban Farming? It's actually one of those misnomer phrases like that joke about "Military Intelligence" being a contradiction in terms. "Urban" refers to a certain geometry of building height, setback from the sidewalk, and streetscape that we would immediately recognize as "city". You can have a small town, that has an "urban" core and two blocks away is houses with front yards. The geometry of the urban core is no front yards, and buildings taller than 3 stories high. When you take the buildings away it is no longer urban, but something else. 
However, this is a bit of a nitpick, and what this "Urban Farming" is focusing on is the repurposing of land within the city limits of a large city, and placing some of that land to the use of growing crops. In other words, a farm located within a city.
In the case of Detroit there has been many decades of flight away from the city, growing blight from mile after mile of abandoned buildings, squatters, drugs, violence, crime, and more. I've never been to Detroit but what I hear it is or was pretty bad. Yet that area of Michigan is home to some of the largest corporations in the world. GM, Ford, Chrysler, etc are all headquartered there, and the suburbs around Detroit tend to be some of the richest in the world.
A statistic in the movie is that in the 1950's Detroit was home to 2 million people, today it's under 800,000.
The normalthink paradigm of cities is that each city continually grows in population, and cities do not shrink in population. However the reality is that many cities, such as Detroit, shrink in population. What happens to a city whose governmental infrastructure is sized to support 2 million people, but the population shrinks to less than half of that, and the economic base of the city craters? Half the number of people means drastically smaller tax revenue for the city. How can the city pay for the police and fire and other services it is responsible for on a drastically smaller tax base?
Basically, Detroit has lots of problems.
What the movie, Urban Roots, shows is a movement of people who see all the empty land -- that is, all those blighted neighborhoods full of vacant burned out buildings? The city went in and razed all the buildings so that at least the drug people couldn't squat in the buildings and do their drug gang violence thing. But, that resulted in many blocks with one house left per block, and oodles of vacant spaces between the houses. The feeling of these areas became rural, and some people saw this empty land as an opportunity.
The city government likely sees that vacant land as a problem, because there's no businesses or houses on the land there is no tax revenue for the city. However the people in this movie sees the land as an opportunity to garden, grow food, rehabilitate the land, get back in touch with the land, etc.
One of the people interviewed talked about the people of West Africa, who became the Slaves that were brought to America, those people in Africa have a rich agricultural heritage, which is why those people were prized as workers for farms in the Old South. Many of the people interviewed in the movie were African Americans in Detroit, and the speaker talking about the African agricultural heritage likened this to a reawakening of their cultural heritage.
However, many of the young African Americans had to overcome a stigma that farm work was tantamount to slavery. The African American heritage of being slaves has stigmatized, for them, the idea of manual labor. The cure for this stigma is to separate "Working For The Man" (manual labor where someone else gets rich) versus "Working to Build Something for Your Own Benefit" (manual labor, to grow your own garden, grow your own food, that you don't have to buy from a store).
Another thing in the movie is a concept of ad-hoc people powered eminent domain. That is, suppose you live in these neighborhoods, you want to grow a garden, and there's a vacant lot next door? Is it correct to just go and plant a garden in that lot regardless of the wishes of the land owner? Many speakers in the movie were proudly preaching that we should just inhabit the unoccupied fallow land, and put it to good use, consequences be damned.
I rather disagree with that tactic. Someone owns that land. The land owner should have the say over what happens on the land they own. Perhaps it is the city which owns the land that had been abandoned by previous land owners?
Which leads to another issue discussed in the movie. Zoning and other city regulations. The land we're talking about primarily was zoned for residential use, where houses were the expected common thing. The role of a city is to design the fabric of the city, and Zoning regulations are the means to do that. However in Detroit the people were just going and doing what they wanted, with the city having little ability to exert enough control to enforce Zoning. City employees, the current Mayor, the former Mayor, etc, were interviewed talking about the role of the city, the zoning regulations, and how the people in these small urban farming operations were working at too small a scale, under the radar, for the city to keep up with them. But that these small urban farming operations also were not in conformance with the zoning regulations.
Again "What do you do if your city turns into a burned out husk of its former glory, abandoned buildings for miles upon miles, etc?" If you want to ponder these ideas, I highly recommend the movie.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
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.
However, those of us who know about Peak Oil etc know that it's likely in the not-too-distant-future that those highways and trucks will be useless. Hence, sailing ships could well become important again.
Sail Power Reborn - Transporting Local Goods by Boat - Peak Moment 208: "We are revitalizing an ancient form of transportation using just the power of the wind and the tides to move goods and people," says skipper Fulvio Casali. In their CSA (community supported agriculture), the Salish Sea Trading Cooperative uses nearly no petroleum to transport organic produce and other goods from the north Olympic Peninsula to northwest Seattle. By sea they use community volunteer sailboats, and by land an electric delivery truck. Come on board with cofounders Casali, Kathy Pelish, and Alex Tokar, who are patiently redeveloping the skills and infrastructure for the return of "a whole fleet of sailboats blanketing Puget Sound" in the post-petroleum era. [www.salishseatrading.com]
Audio and transcript of this show at http://www.peakmoment.tv/conversations/?p=477
However, those of us who know about Peak Oil etc know that it's likely in the not-too-distant-future that those highways and trucks will be useless. Hence, sailing ships could well become important again.
Sail Power Reborn - Transporting Local Goods by Boat - Peak Moment 208: "We are revitalizing an ancient form of transportation using just the power of the wind and the tides to move goods and people," says skipper Fulvio Casali. In their CSA (community supported agriculture), the Salish Sea Trading Cooperative uses nearly no petroleum to transport organic produce and other goods from the north Olympic Peninsula to northwest Seattle. By sea they use community volunteer sailboats, and by land an electric delivery truck. Come on board with cofounders Casali, Kathy Pelish, and Alex Tokar, who are patiently redeveloping the skills and infrastructure for the return of "a whole fleet of sailboats blanketing Puget Sound" in the post-petroleum era. [www.salishseatrading.com]
Audio and transcript of this show at http://www.peakmoment.tv/conversations/?p=477
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Arsenic found in baby formula? Grow your own food!
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 is starting. It may not be obvious, but the second (gardening, and growing your own food) is a solution to the first (food safety concerns like arsenic).
How? To my mind the issue with food safety is the industrialization of the food system. Maybe a food processing factory is having to spread arsenic to kill rats and the like, and then the arsenic finds its way into the food being processed in that facility. On the other hand, when growing your you control what goes into that food. Of course the gardening supply store does have a selection of poisons whose niceified name is "pesticide", so even growing your own food you can pour various -cide's (a.k.a. poisons) on the garden. Doing so is your choice, and alternatively its your choice to use organic gardening practices. The thing about industrialized food is you don't have any choice, because the choices are made by businesses who don't have your best interest in mind.
Let's remember some history. The Food and Drug Administration came into being because of food safety scandals over 100 years ago. Businesses at that time proved over and over they were willing to sell poisonous crap food to people, while paying off inspectors to stamp the food as safe even when it wasn't.
What isn't clear from the "Arsenic" article linked below is the amount of Arsenic found in food. Is the amount well below the level the FDA considers to be safe? That is, for all these extra bits finding their way into food, the FDA has safe levels. Scientists have found that, supposedly, small amounts of poison are safe to eat, while large amounts are not. It of course varies on the poison in question.
Even so, there are doubts over the actual safety of the levels the FDA considers safe. Chemicals have a way of bioaccumulating, not just in our own bodies but in the environment. If we eat foods laced with tiny amounts of poison, some of the chemicals bioaccumulate over time to build up to a dangerous amount. The bioaccumulation occurs in the environment, as chemicals find their way into rivers or lakes, are eaten by the animals there, who in turn are eaten, each time the chemicals laced into this animals bioaccumulate to dangerous amounts.
How? To my mind the issue with food safety is the industrialization of the food system. Maybe a food processing factory is having to spread arsenic to kill rats and the like, and then the arsenic finds its way into the food being processed in that facility. On the other hand, when growing your you control what goes into that food. Of course the gardening supply store does have a selection of poisons whose niceified name is "pesticide", so even growing your own food you can pour various -cide's (a.k.a. poisons) on the garden. Doing so is your choice, and alternatively its your choice to use organic gardening practices. The thing about industrialized food is you don't have any choice, because the choices are made by businesses who don't have your best interest in mind.
Let's remember some history. The Food and Drug Administration came into being because of food safety scandals over 100 years ago. Businesses at that time proved over and over they were willing to sell poisonous crap food to people, while paying off inspectors to stamp the food as safe even when it wasn't.
What isn't clear from the "Arsenic" article linked below is the amount of Arsenic found in food. Is the amount well below the level the FDA considers to be safe? That is, for all these extra bits finding their way into food, the FDA has safe levels. Scientists have found that, supposedly, small amounts of poison are safe to eat, while large amounts are not. It of course varies on the poison in question.
Even so, there are doubts over the actual safety of the levels the FDA considers safe. Chemicals have a way of bioaccumulating, not just in our own bodies but in the environment. If we eat foods laced with tiny amounts of poison, some of the chemicals bioaccumulate over time to build up to a dangerous amount. The bioaccumulation occurs in the environment, as chemicals find their way into rivers or lakes, are eaten by the animals there, who in turn are eaten, each time the chemicals laced into this animals bioaccumulate to dangerous amounts.
Thu Mar 01 16:31:37 +0000 2012
Thu Mar 01 17:13:05 +0000 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
The mysterious rash of tree murders sweeping our nation
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 reports these murders are going on not just in our town, but around the country, and perhaps, if reports are correct, around the world.
Who knows why these tree murders are happening? It's a puzzling mystery that is now several years old. Looking back in the records we see similar flurries of tree murders every year. It's not clear even how long this has happened or even what the real purpose is.
What we do know is that, if our numbers are accurate, and we hope they aren't, the slaughter numbers in the millions every year. How can so many trees be brutally slain every year and nobody says a peep?
We hear reports these murders are going on not just in our town, but around the country, and perhaps, if reports are correct, around the world.
Who knows why these tree murders are happening? It's a puzzling mystery that is now several years old. Looking back in the records we see similar flurries of tree murders every year. It's not clear even how long this has happened or even what the real purpose is.
What we do know is that, if our numbers are accurate, and we hope they aren't, the slaughter numbers in the millions every year. How can so many trees be brutally slain every year and nobody says a peep?
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Best Rocket Stove Design Ever - UPDATE
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'.
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
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
Dr. Larry Winiarski makes a clean burning rocket stove using 16 adobe bricks at the Rotary International-sponsored Integrated Cooking Workshop in Tlautla, Mexico
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