Positive Enviro News reading

Residents embrace terrace farming in Kochi, India

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:41 GMT

Collecting cherry fruits from a terrace organic farm garden in Kochi. Photo by Dr Sageer.

Around 500 families will be provided with seedlings

The Times of India
May 15, 2012

Excerpt:

KOCHI: Giving thrust to organic farming and self-reliance in vegetable cultivation, a terrace vegetable farming initiative was inaugurated here on Monday.

Jointly organized by the Ernakulam District Agricultural Society, Horticultural Society, Ernakulam District Resident Association's apex council, residents association apex council and the Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council Keralam ( VFPCK), the programme was inaugurated by district collector Sheikh Pareeth.

Nearly 2,50,000 seedlings were distributed in the city. The aim is to distribute seedlings to 500 families before Friday. The second phase, which aims to bring one lakh families under the programme, will be implemented in Tripunithura, Kakkanad, Maradu, Kalamassery and Thrikkakara.

Organic methods will be used for this green endeavour, and though the primary experiment began in Kochi, people from Alappuzha and Thrissur can also join the initiative. As part of the drive, guidance will be given to people. There will also be a follow-up along with a 50% subsidy to select families. The implementation committee headed by the collector as chairman and the monitoring committee chaired by the joint director of agriculture and deputy director of horticulture will check the progress of the programme and make necessary amendments.

Read the complete article here.

Urban agriculture behind the Altenheim senior residence in Forest Park, IL

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:08 GMT

Urban farmer Jessica Rinks.

Purple Leaf ‘mini-farm' will sell fresh produce, flowers at farmers market

By Jean Lotus
Forest Park Review
5/15/2012

Excerpt:

Jessica Rinks, president and founder of the Forest Park Community Garden, is turning over a new leaf. She's also turning over 12,000 square feet of sod behind the Altenheim senior residence and creating a pesticide-free vegetable and flower garden this summer – to sell produce at the Forest Park Farmers Market.

Rinks contracted with the village to lease a 240-by-50-foot sliver of Altenheim land to grow fresh produce for the market. She's calling her venture Purple Leaf Farms.

“I've done market growing before but not with a lot of space,” Rinks said. The plot will be situated west of the buildings abutting the cemetery, and probably will not even be visible from Van Buren Avenue, she said.

“I want people to know that I'm going to be offering really local, pesticide-free stuff that's grown in Forest Park.” When she says local, she means grown 100 yards from the market itself. That guarantees it'll be fresh. “This is a little dream of mine,” she said.

The board voted Monday to lease the land for $300 plus 7 percent of Purple Leaf's net profits.

In an unusual vote, Mayor Anthony Calderone voted with commissioners Chris Harris and Rory Hoskins to approve the vote 3 to 2. Commissioners Mark Hosty and Tom Mannix voted against the resolution.

Both opposing commissioners said they did not want to set a precedent of leasing portions of the Altenheim land because it might interfere with its sale. Hosty said allowing one lease was, “the camel under the tent.” He warned that Illinois real estate law prevented landlords from evicting farmers until all crops were harvested.

Read the complete article here.

See Purple Leaf here.

Thailand – Mapping urban farming

Wed, 16 May 2012 07:49 GMT

Urban agriculture forms close to a fifth of the world's food production. Image by Stephane Brelivet/IRIN.

“Developing urban agriculture is crucial, given demographic trends.” – FAO

IRIN – Integrated Regional Information Networks
Humanitarian news and analysis, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
BANGKOK, 16 May 2012

Excerpt:

A Geographical Information System (GIS) is being used to map vegetable production in the greater Bangkok region, seat of Thailand’s capital, to analyse how urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contribute to food security in the city of more than 14 million.

“UPA produces around one-fifth of world’s food, with 800 million people involved in it. Our project aims at giving decision-makers more elements to harness this potential,” Yingyong Paisooksantivatana, the associate dean of the agriculture faculty at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, told IRIN.

The V-GIS (vegetable-GIS, or “veggies”,) project is a computerized information system that analyses data gathered on the ground and via satellite about crop species, production, land surface and workforce, launched in April 2012 by Kasetsart University and the German University of Freiburg, with funding from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Researchers, urban planners and policymakers can access the information for free, said David Oberhuber, the GIZ country director in Thailand.

“The cultivation of fruits and vegetables inside Greater Bangkok is necessary for many inhabitants but very little is known about it,” said Narin Senapa, a research and training assistant at the Taiwan-based NGO, AVRDC-The World Vegetable Centre (AVRDC), previously known as Asian Vegetable Research Development Centre, which is participating in the project.

Read the complete article here.

A Time Out Box for Quail

Wed, 16 May 2012 04:00 GMT

In this week's guest blog post, Nancy Klehm tells us about her unique way of dealing with pesky quail:

It is a beautiful, lush rainy spring in Chicago and all my birds get a large bouquet of fresh weedy greens everyday to supplement their feed: chickweed, dandelion, clover, shephard’s purse, garlic mustard, stinging nettles.

Besides chickens, I have been raising quail for the past four years – I have both Coturnix and Bobwhite quail. Quail need to be enclosed and can’t ‘free range’. They are top choice of any urban predator: raccoon, possum, stray cat and raptors.

After almost a year of this particular constellation of individual birds living peacefully, unrest flared. Recently, ‘B.B. Curious’, the largest of all the quail became exceedingly aggressive towards the others. She was chasing them and pulling their back feathers out causing periodic frantic scurrying and distressing calls from the others. I checked her body and health. I stepped up their seeds and protein in case it was a protein deficiency causing this. I created visual baffles with extra flower pots (quails love to niche themselves).

And so, after nearly a week of this behavior, my friend Sarah built this ‘quail timeout box’ in a jiffy from scrap wood and a milk crate she found. Needless to say, B.B. Curious, settled into it comfortably and after a few days, was released to rejoin her bevy much more at ease.

On construction, cake, and local economic regeneration: why we should start with the materials

Wed, 16 May 2012 02:37 GMT

What might we learn from the construction, between1438 and 1448 of the Hospital of St. John in Sherborne (see above) that might shape the way we think about construction in the 21st century? While the bulk of the building was built using local oolitic limestone, it was dressed with Lias stone from Ham Hill, some 12 miles from the building site. However, in those days, without the internal combustion engine, 12 miles was a long way to carry stone (you try it). The meticulous accounts kept of the project at the time show that the cost of transporting the stone by cart cost more than the stone itself. As Alec Clifton-Taylor says in his seminal ‘The Pattern of English Building', “it was the great difficulty of transporting heavy materials which led all but the most affluent until the end of the eighteenth century to build with the materials that were most readily available near the site, even when not very durable”.

I often use the analogy, in terms of food, of a cake. Until recently, local production provided the cake (the bulk of our needs) and what was imported was the ‘icing' and cherry on top, nice to have but we didn't depend on it. What cheap energy and globalisation has created is a situation where now the cake is imported from wherever in the world it can be found cheapest, and local production is just the icing. In the same way that for food we need to urgently reverse this, for many reasons that will be only too familiar to regular readers of this blog, the same can be argued for building materials.

In the case of these alms houses in Sherborne, it literally was the building's ‘icing' that caused the difficulties. With about 30% of UK road freight now due to the movement of construction materials, many of which already have a high level of embodied energy, I'd like to argue here that we need to think about construction in the same way we are starting to think about food, specifically in the context of the Atmos Project, a community initiative I am involved in in Totnes.

Historically, as well as being the only option people had, the use of local materials also led to the evolution of vernacular styles of building, so that each region had its own distinct styles of building, rooted in materials, culture and tradition. As John and Jane Penoyre note in ‘Houses in the Landscape' “in these simple buildings the available materials are the principal dictators of style”. Mark Gorgolewski writes in The Green Building Bible:

“… as materials closer to their natural state will tend to have had less processing, which often means less energy use, less waste and less pollution. Local materials can reduce the need for transport and benefits the local economy and community”.

Christopher Day writes that “local materials minimise transport energy, suit local climate, support local employment and society and reinforce locality identity, anchoring buildings into local culture … so roundwood instead of sawn, adobe or brick instead of concrete”. As well as having far less embodied energy due to requiring so little transportation, they also often have far less embodied energy in their manufacturre, as the graph below showing overall CO2 emissions by weight [kg] released by production of 1 kg of twenty-four common building materials demonstrates (source). Note that those materials on the right hand side actually lock up more carbon than they emit (depending on how far they are transported of course, a strawbale house in the UK built with Turkish bales would clearly not qualify):

Then there's also the aesthetics. The other day I was in Marlborough in Wiltshire, and took a walk around the town. It is easy to be nostalgic about old buildings, and to assume that they are so characterful and attractive simply because they are old. I would argue that the ambience that comes through in some of the photos below has more to do with the materials than with the age of the building.

The combination of brick, timber and cobbles is far more attractive than just one single material.

Clay wall tiles that were fired in kilns with variable temperatures produced tiles of a range of colours, from black to orange, which gives the tiled surface much more richness.

This timber frame house is a beautiful example of how the materials available locally dictated the design of the building and its character.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the use of natural and local building materials in recent years. Cob building, strawbale, lime plasters, roundwood timber, hemp, clay plasters, have all experienced a renewal of energy, but are still almost only ever used in self build projects, and have yet to cross over into mainstream construction. Yet, as Gill Seyfang points out, they are still very much in a niche and what is needed is “scaling up the existing small-scale, one-off housing projects to industrial mass production”. She argues for the natural/local building niche “adapting itself to resemble the regime”. Key to that will be scale.

Of course, running alongside the discussions about materials is the need to create truly low carbon buildings, in their construction, their inhabitation and eventual demolition/recycling. The Larch and Lime houses built recently in Ebbw Vale are passivhauses (Larch House right), that is they are built in such a way as to require no space heating. When I talked to the architect behind them, Justin Bere, he told me that most of the materials were local (stone, slate, locally made Rockwool etc) but hadn't veered too far into the world of very local and natural materials. Part of the reason for that is that for the kind of accurate modelling needed for passivhaus certification, data for many of these materials doesn't yet exist. I would argue that this is a pressingly urgent area for new research.

Enter the Atmos Project. For the past couple of months, as well as my Transition Network stuff, I have been working a day a week on the Atmos Totnes campaign. Atmos has been running for the past 5 years, since Dairy Crest closed their 8 acre site next to Totnes station, and since when it has sat and become more and more of an eyesore (you can read the story so far here). The Atmos Project, as it became known, due to it being home to a building built to house Isambard Kingdom Brunel's experimental ‘atmospheric railway', has sought to bring the site into community ownership to develop it as a catalyst for new businesses in the town and as a demonstration of Transition in action.

The initiative did a lot of work, raised bits of funding to do design work, business planning and so on, but seemed to be getting nowhere due to the site's owners' unwillingness to engage seriously with the community. So a couple of months ago we started a campaign, aimed to bring sufficient pressure to bear on the site's owners. We gathered voices from around the community, got a lot of media exposure, got people in the town out for a big photo opportunity and for a public meeting, and a couple of weeks ago, had a very positive meeting with Dairy Crest, and all of a sudden the project is moving forward with an energy that is a delight to see.

The tagline for the campaign has been ‘the heart of a new economy', and it is seen as a development that in all that it does is focused on skills, training, the creation of new businesses and the boosting of the local economy. It is of a scale where it can do some very exciting things in terms of construction. One of the founding ideas is that the place that the development starts its very first question, is what are the local materials that we have to hand? In the same way that I always used to teach on permaculture courses that the question should be “I'm going to cook a meal, what's in the garden”, rather than “what's in the fridge?”, that same principle could and should apply to building materials.

So, as the first part of the design process, and as part of what will form a key part of the brief for whoever ends up being the project's architect, will be a list of the local materials available to such a project in Totnes. We have commissioned a specialist in this to draw this up, including the places locally where they would be sourced. My initial list off the top of my head is:

Timber: for construction grade timber, internal studwork, window and door frames, roofing shingles, laths, panelling, flooring, wattles, wood fibre insulation.

Clay: for rammed earth construction, cob walling, daubs, clay plasters, cob bricks, clay paints

Hemp: for use in hemp/lime construction, to make insulation, for hemp/lime or hemp/clay plasters and bricks

Slate: for roofing

Stone: for foundations, walls,

Reed: for thatching roofs, and also to make ‘reedboards’, an alternative to plasterboard

Lime: for plasters, mortars, renders, as well as in construction systems such as hemp/lime

Straw: baled, and used in ‘straw bale building’, chopped as an ingredient in plasters

Sheepswool: insulation

Horse hair/other fibres: used to strengthen plasters

Recycled Materials: newspaper processed as an insulation product, car tyres, recycled bricks

It used to be that when a cathedral was built, a temporary village was built around it, with a stone masons' quarter, a timber framers' quarter and so on. On the scale of something like the Atmos project, it may well be possible to do something very similar, processing the timber needed on site, making cob blocks, even hand-making tiles for external cladding. If done skilfully enough, integrating training and apprenticeships, it could be a vitally needed new approach to development, especially when combined with the potential for the community to invest into the development.

Panels at Charing Cross tube station in London showing the various trades associated with the construction of Charing Cross in the late 1200s.

A development that from the outset seeks to source it's metaphorical cake locally. As the Euro crisis continues to unravel at a pace, as the academics are telling us that the only thing that will halt climate change is a massive economic downturn, or at least a huge rethink about how we make economic activity happen, we need a new approach to development.

Work in progress: Cob walls, hemp plaster on the walls, clay plaster onto lath on the ceiling, local timber window frames...

Could it be that we could create new housing, and new work spaces in such a way that each new development produces houses that lock up a lot of carbon in terms of their materials, generate very little carbon during their inhabitation, which create a diversity of new enterprises and livelihoods, show what deep public consultation in relation to development really looks like, all kinds of trainings, opportunities for people to invest in and benefit from the development, which create a huge sense of excitement and anticipation, invites the local community to get involved at regular stages and which create buildings and developments that feel timeless, rather than bound to a particular short-lived era of architectural fashion? I think so. I think the time is right for that, and that's what we want to do with Atmos. Watch this space.

My Urban Farm – Chris Thoreau

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:22 GMT

Meet your Urban Farmer – Vancouver BC

By Shaun Mavronicolas
Creative/Technical Director
Fire and Light Media Group

Meet Chris Thoreau of My Urban Farm in this second short film in our Meet your Urban Farmer series. This is the extended interview version.

Chris is a creator, papa, urban grower of sunflower, pea, and buckwheat shoots which are then cut and pedaled to you within hours of harvest, bike-powered. Chris likes soil, compost, and microgreens.

From 2001 to 2006 Chris operated Influence Organics – a small, certified organic farm, on Vancouver Island. “Too much work”, he thought, “I'm going back to school”. He now holds a BSc. in Agroecology from UBC where his studies focused on soils, urban farming, and plant breeding. Chris still works too much, but that's ok.

Link to Fire and Light here.

My Urban Farm site here.

Rooftop education program in São Paulo, Brazil

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:06 GMT

15 beds, each 15 feet in length. In Portuguese.

A salada vem do telhado

Quer umas verduras? Vá buscar lá no telhado. O agrônomo Marcos Victorino, vem desenvolvendo projetos de hortas sobre telhas em espaços pouco valorizados da metrópole, como lajes, quintais e terrenos de imóveis comerciais e residenciais. As hortas foram plantadas em varios locais da cidade de São Paulo, como exemplo na foto acima, no campus da Faculdade Cantareira, no bairro do Belém-São Paulo Capital, sobre uma laje no telhado.

A produção das hortas trás a participação dos alunos de escolas, e tem como objetivo ajudar na mudaça do hábito alimentar a ao mesmo tempo servir de uma sala de aula em campo aberto para a construção do conhecimento e valorizar as atividades transdisciplinares, transformando a educação em um processo agradavél para o professor e para as crianças.

Esse é apenas um dos benefícios! Os vegetais vão direto da terra para o prato e conhecimento para a vida toda.

O método da produção nas telhas pode ser adaptado a qualquer espaço, desde que haja incidência de sol. As telhas da foto, por exemplo, têm quatro metros e sessenta centimetros de comprimento, e cada uma custa em torno de R$ 250,00. Fora isso, há ainda o custo com terra e sementes, normalmente encontradas a um preço acessível.

O que barateia a horta suspensa é que a própria telha garante uma impermeabilização adequada, até porque é feita para isso mesmo. O escoamento de água é feito diretamente para uma calha ou ralo que já exista no local.

Como hoje a tendência é a busca da sustentabilidade, estamos trabalhando no reaproveitamento da água drenada para retornar no sistema de irrigação.

Read the complete article here.

And see school video here.

Sediment Management Strategic Plan Open for Public Comment Until May 30

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:55 GMT

20-Year Planning Quantities and Remaining Capacity at Sediment Placement Sites (Source: LADPW)

On the heels of a critical piece of writing by Emily Green on the state of sediment management in Los Angeles (published in the May 14th edition of High Country News), the L.A. County Department of Public Works has completed (as of April) its draft 20-year Sediment Management Strategic Plan for 2012-2032 and is currently soliciting public comments until Wednesday, May 30th. The enormous document (524 pages) is available for download at www.LASedimentManagement.com (the downloadable document entitled “Community Meeting Boards” is a conveniently concise summary of the larger plan).

In short, L.A. County plans on removing 67.5 million cubic yards from reservoirs and debris basins in the next 20 years. Currently active Sediment Placement Sites (SPS) have a remaining capacity of 48 million cubic yards. This discrepancy requires the identification of new facilities to receive the remaining 19.5 million cubic yards and a few novel approaches, including the filling of abandoned pits in Irwindale and the use of sediment for landfill cover, have been identified as options for sediment placement.

A matrix of sediment alternatives compiled by the LADPW. The alternatives that were determined infeasible are in grey. (Source: LADPW)

What is not discussed in the Sediment Management Strategic Plan is a longer-term solution to the current sediment management regime that will require the acquisition of new Sediment Placement Sites in perpetuity. For those who remember the story of the Arcadia Woodlands, this unsustainable reality will inevitably lead to the destruction of local wildlands. Mountain canyons will be filled, native flora and fauna will be displaced or destroyed simply because there will be no remaining space for sediment placement in the basins that comprise the megalopolis of L.A. It is a Sisyphean cycle of holding volatile slopes back only to be thwarted by the unstoppable force of gravity. Until mountains reach the sea once more, through a restored network of floodplains, the last remaining wild places in Los Angeles will be threatened with premature burial.

LADPW has acknowledged the unsustainable nature of the current flood control network explaining its future plans for developing a Long Term Flood Control District Vision Plan in the following bullet-point list (extracted from the 20-year Sediment Management Strategic Plan):

The Long Term Flood Control District Vision will look beyond the 20-year Strategic Plan to investigate the potential
to implement more sustainable alternatives to the current flood control system as a whole.

The Flood Control District and the Advisory Working Group are working together to develop a plan for the Long
Term Flood Control District Vision.

Public participation is a critical component of the Long Term Vision as it aims to reflect collaboration between the
District, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the public.

To be sure (and fair), the LADPW faces an incredible challenge ahead. In the coming years, the agency will ~~likely~~ hopefully reinvent itself in response to new public mandates for more sustainable watershed management practices. It has performed its dual mission of protecting the public from the threat of floods and securing water supply rather well throughout the last century. In the interest of protecting the natural heritage of Los Angeles, it is time to aspire to a more holistic mission.

Your input on the 20-year Sediment Management Strategic Plan is critical to this ongoing process and with two weeks left there is not much time to respond. Any comments can be submitted to SedimentMgmtPlan@dpw.lacounty.gov. Many thanks to Emily Green for her eloquence and accuracy.

What does a cage-free, free range egg look like?

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:24 GMT

Got urban chickens but still stuck buying eggs from the store? This is an awesome six-minute video from The Lexicon of Sustainability that demystifies the marketing terms of "cage-free" and "free range" for what they really mean (gimmicks at best).

Watch The Story of an Egg on PBS. See more from The Lexicon of Sustainability.

Great to see Alexis Koefoed of Soul Food Farm, among others, show just what the literal term "Pasture Raised" means to both us as consumers and our hens as producers

Robinhood Tax Week of Action Begins

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:39 GMT

Yesterday marked the start of a week of action in support of a Robinhood Tax (Financial Transaction Tax) that would put a tiny tax on the financial sector and generate billions of dollars, pounds, euros that can be put towards fighting climate change and poverty. Some 350 organizers were involved in similar local events roughly a year ago (the photo to the right is from Cairo, Egypt), and now is the time to dig out those robinhoood suits again.

The week of action is planned to coincide with with the G8 leaders summit at Camp David in the USA (May 18-19th) and a meeting of European leaders (May 23rd) where the Financial Transaction Tax is on the agenda. Activities are planned in over 30 countries. A huge rally of nurses dressed in Robin Hood hats are marching on the streets of Chicago, Robin Hoods are gathering on Mount Fuji in Japan, outside Big Ben in Britain, in Italy, India, Brazil, Zambia, Malawi, Belgium and more.

Check out the infographic and video below for more background about the Robindhood Tax, and visit www.robinhoodtax.org for more information about the week of action.

The Changing Face of Urban Farming in London

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:00 GMT

Site for Vauxhall City Farm in 1978. Source: Vauxhall City Farm.

Urban farming is so much more than adorable animals and markets; it is a symbol of modern London's approach to making sustainable food sources and community spaces.

By Idroma Montgomery
Sustainable Cities Collective
May 14, 2012
Idroma Montgomery is a freelance researcher and earned her M.A. in Culture, Globalisation and the City from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Excerpt:

Recently I've noticed that London embraces urban farming in a way I haven't seen in other cities. Last month, I attended the Oxford-Cambridge Goat Race at Spitalfields City Farm in East London, a popular annual event that raises money for the farm. It is housed on a side street off the trendy and boisterous Brick Lane, and like many other city farms in London, offers a study in how to effectively utilize small amounts of urban space.

Spitalfields City Farm resides alongside a small park and a residential area, including council flats and primary schools. The sound of the Overground is ever present as trains rush past, visible behind the small playground and vegetable patches. The farm contains a small menagerie of rare breeds, a weekend community market, a greenhouse and small plots for non-professional gardening. It is a farm that is connected to its community and surroundings. Throughout the week, people can easily buy a range of eggs, plants and compost, as well as other locally made goods. Most of the other urban farms in the area follow a similar template, acting as hubs of community activity and knowledge exchange across central and greater London.

Read the complete article here.

8 Extraordinary Greens by Jenna Spevack

Tue, 15 May 2012 08:29 GMT

An urban agricultural design project

Jenna has designed an efficient, sub-irrigated system for growing energy-packed plants (microgreens) in small, urban spaces. Her aim: to provide healthy greens to extraordinary people with ordinary incomes.

As an urban agricultural design project, she envisions a way to grow food in an anthropogenic landscape for all strata of citizens, but as an art project, she hopes to facilitate conversations about different values: convenience vs creative effort, regenerables vs disposables, neighbors vs strangers.

This participatory exhibition, which includes a series of “domestic microfarms” and a “farmstand”, explores, through interactions with gallery visitors, the value placed on food, community, and creative effort.

See more here.

The Incredible, Edible Jenna Spevack: 8 Extraordinary Greens

Amy Sung
Brooklyn Cleanplates
May 15, 2012

Excerpt:

Brooklyn-based Jenna Spevack is an artist, foodie and sustainability advocate who combines all of these passions simultaneously in her work.

Her ideas are conceived in a studio residing in a corner of a 45,000-square-foot space on the top floor of the seven-story building known as the Metropolitan Exchange, or MEx, on Flatbush Avenue. The building’s rich history boasts a variety of creative entrepreneurs who let their genius juices flow.

Read the complete article here.

And more here.

Shibori Challenge Proves Challenging

Tue, 15 May 2012 05:00 GMT

So it's May 15 and I have not met the terms of the Shibori Challenge. I have been playing with both natural dyes and shibori techniques, but have not yet made anything worthy of being sewn up into a cocktail napkin.

I think I'll have declare my challenge a little over-optimistic. As it when I start any new craft, I'm hitting various walls and spinning around trying to figure out what's what. But that's okay. Our motto around here is Go Forth, Embrace Failure, and give Her a Big Kiss.

The foraged, plant-based dyes I've been working with are only producing pale tones for me, even with mordants. I've made a sort of olive grey out of mint and a light sage out of artichoke and a beige out of coffee. These shades are fine in themselves, especially if you want to dress like a hobbit, but not really strong enough to show off shibori patterns. I know it's possible to get strong colors out of common plants--it seems other people manage it--but I'm beginning to understand why indigo is the classic choice for shibori techniques.

Wanting to play with shibori and having no luck with local plants, I experimented with turmeric. Turmeric is a "fugitive dye" -- a phrase I love -- meaning it will fade fast. It fades especially fast in sunlight. Nonetheless, it's nontoxic and makes a bright, deep yellow with no fuss. And I just happened to have a big container of stale turmeric just wasting away on the shelf. I tried some shibori techniques with that, with some okay first time results -- though also with plenty of beginner mistakes.

In the pic above, the white cloth with the yellow lines on it was done by folding the cloth into accordion folds, like a paper fan, then folding that shape into a stack of triangles, then clamping the resulting bundle together and dropping it in the dye bath. Only the edges dye. Supposedly. In mine, the middle edges of the bundle hardly dyed at all, and I'm not sure why. I'll do a separate post on this with pics soon.

Next I took some old white napkins and twine wrapped parts of them to make the classic spiderweb pattern. That I'll also cover as its own post.

I've decided to do my cocktail napkins with indigo. Interestingly, natural indigo dye is activated through a fermentation process. Love those fermentation processes! Nowadays indigo can be made quickly with chemicals of different sorts, and there's a very easy to use artificial indigo available, but if you want to make your life hard--and smelly--like me--you will want to make a natural, old-fashioned fermenting vat. Out of stale urine. Yep. There's also one made out of ammonia and bread yeast which might smell a little better. A very little. But whichever I choose it will take a little while to get the ferment going, and if we choose urine, it will take a while to collect all that urine. So it will be a while before the indigo experiments begin.

If you are curious about the urine vat, check out this nice lady's account of her own, until I get back to you with more adventures in dyeing.

Transition Town Cheltenham using the Transition Ingredients card game

Tue, 15 May 2012 04:21 GMT

One of the key outputs from the creation of ‘The Transition Companion' was the ingredients card game which was launched last October. Each card represents a different ingredient, a different aspect of the process of creating Transition in your community. We have had good feedback from different events where people have used them, and so I was very interested to see this short film of their being used at Transition Town Cheltenham‘s recent AGM:

What they do is to allow a group to celebrate the things it has already done, and to reflect on possible parts of the process that it hasn't got round to. They can be used to lay them out to tell the story of the initiative so far, with reflection on the cards left unused. They also get away from the idea that Transition is a linear, prescribed process, rather an organic, place-specific assembling of ingredients. What has been your experience with the cards? The activities we have come up with so far can be downloaded here … have you developed any other ones? My thanks to Transition Town Cheltenham for sharing their reflections.

Getting our money back

Mon, 14 May 2012 20:17 GMT

On May 10th, 350.org joined with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Keith Ellison to launch a new bill that would cut $113 billion in subsidies to the coal, oil and gas lobby over the next 10 years.

Almost everyone in the country opposes handing cash over to big oil, big coal, and big gas—the numbers are in the 70% range among Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. That means that we'll be working to get all sorts of people on board with this fight, maybe even that cranky uncle of yours who doesn't believe in global warming but wants to cut government spending.

This won’t be any normal legislative push. First, that’s just not how we do things here at 350.org. But more importantly, we know that if we confine this effort to Capitol Hill, the fossil fuel industry will just drown us in dollars -- they could spend $100 billion fighting this thing and still come out on top. So, we’re going to have to find other currencies to work in: our creativity, energy, and grassroots organizing power. This needs to be a people’s bill through and through.

Stay tuned for photos, video and more info coming in soon!

The latest on Keystone XL

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:35 GMT

I haven’t written you about the Keystone Pipeline for several weeks, because I haven’t known quite what to say. But many things are moving, and here’s how the situation seems to me right now:

1) TransCanada, as expected, re-applied for a permit last week from the State Department, and just as they said last November — State said they would have an answer sometime in 2013. An open question is whether or not the State Department will do a real review, and aggressively investigate the climate implications of tar sands oil, which they punted on last time.

Another open question, of course, is whether after the election the President -- whomever it may be -- could just give the pipeline a green light no matter what. It's important that between now and then we strenuously and continually emphasize that building this pipeline means more tar sands oil burned, and that the climate change implications of that are unacceptable.

2) The fossil fuel lobby in Congress keeps trying to approve the pipeline without any review at all. Members of the House said they won’t approve the new transportation bill without Keystone in it; happily, the Senate conferees, have pledged not to put the pipeline back in play just to get a bill. (But we're always a bit wary of Washington pledges).

3) We also found out that the climate-denying, union-busting, radical billionaire Koch Brothers will be among the prime beneficiaries of the pipeline. It was revealed by intrepid investigative reporting that Koch Industries has been masking their investments in the tar sands, while pumping millions into efforts to push this and other pipelines. None of us deny that some union jobs would be created by this pipeline, but it's now clear that many more will be put under attack as Koch money pours into the coffers of the radicals seeking to destroy both unions and our climate.

We frankly don’t yet know how this all is going to play out—and it’s frustrating as hell.

Leaders in the Senate and the White House have given assurances that they won’t OK the pipeline—the administration even issued a veto threat over the transportation bill if it included Keystone. We’ll see how good those assurances are in the coming weeks, and we’ll let you know if there are politician’s offices we need you to call, email, or occupy.

Of course the Southern leg of the pipeline is already on its way to being built - something our friends in Texas are doing all they can to fight, even as you read this.

Meanwhile, science marches on. Dr. James Hansen reiterated the case against tar sands in the New York Times last week, pointing out that the deposits contain "twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history." If we burn them on top of all the coal and oil and gas we're already using, "concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era" - a wildly different and likely unlivable earth.

And politics marches on too. We’re coming to think that it’s at least as important to tackle the fossil fuel industry directly as they try to tackle our win on the Keystone pipeline. Last Thursday Thursday Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would strip $113 billion in subsidies from coal, gas, and oil companies over the next decade. That’s enough money to weatherize more than half the single family and mobile homes in America. We hope you’ll help: www.350.org/subsidies

I don’t know how Keystone is going to come out—but whatever happens, the organizing we manage to do together will have a lot to do with the final result. We’ve learned an awful lot together about how to take on the bad guys. We’ll fight them pipeline by coal mine by fracking well— and surely call on you for more rapid-response actions when the need arises — but we’ve also got to go after the core of their power. That’s what we need to make the next year all about.

Thanks,

--Bill

Two photos from Texas...

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:32 GMT

...that show us how much we need to connect the dots.

The photo on the left is from Austin, Texas -- here's the story behind it:

Almost one year after severe drought conditions contributed to wildfires that burned 96% of the 6,600 acres of Bastrop State Park, the park is showing signs of rebirth, which is good news to my dogs, Dylan and Sophie. (Photographer Credit: Mary Priddy)

And, the photo on the right is from Georgetown, Texas -- here's what local organizers had to say:

We lost thousands of "century trees" in Central Texas due to the record-breaking Drought of 2011 -- a worse drought is predicted this year. (Photo Credit: Bonnie Stump)

In Gunma, in Japan

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:20 GMT

they picked up trash that washed down the rivers during recent floods.

In central Japan, we're having hotter summers, colder winters and more
unpredictable and severe weather in between. This spring sudden
downpours damaged crops, and washed garbage down river (which we did our
best to pick up). This particular "dot" we labeled. It was nothing to
the freak tornado that devastated part of Tsukuba, the hail storms
(marbles and golf balls), and the killer lightening storms that plowed through three prefectures just afterwards,

From Daegu in South Korea

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:16 GMT

Here's the note they sent: With the rising cost of rice due to increase rain, in the future, many of these

people may have to forgo traditional lunches of duboki and kimbap!

Next Meeting - May 27

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:58 GMT

Backwards Beekeepers meetings take place on the last Sunday of every month.

The next meeting is scheduled for Sunday, May 27 at 11am. As always, we'll be at the Atwater Crossing arts complex. Here's what we have planned:

Kirk takes questions from new and aspiring beekeepers
A representative from the County Agricultural Department will talk about bee legalities and regulations. Nobody will be arrested.
Break out into smaller groups based on interests - starter strips, rescue, legalization...

Upcoming meetings (mark your calendar!):

June 27
July 29

Location:
Atwater Crossing
3265-3191 Casitas Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90039-2205

There is ample free parking in the complex parking lot - PLEASE park in the lot so the residents of the neighborhood can park near their homes. There is also a cafe that sells beverages and tasty flatbreads if you'd like a snack during the meeting.

Map link

Closest freeway exit is Fletcher off the 2 freeway
Casitas is between Minneapolis St & Silver Lake Blvd…
1 long block SW of N. San Fernando Road (across the railroad tracks)
1 ½ blocks NW of Fletcher Drive
2 ½ blocks SE of Glendale Blvd

See you at the meeting!
Anne & Gwen