Peak Oil Hausfrau

Seven ways to "green" your event

2012-02-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

Whether you are organizing a potluck, seed share, film presentation, or a conference, you can take steps to share your values of conservation and sustainability in a very obvious way: by designing your event to be environmentally friendly.

Whether large or small, your event is a prime opportunity to let people see, in person, what "green" looks like, and an opportunity to enhance the credibility of your organization and your message. Sometimes, modeling green and sustainable values can take more time, effort, and cost, but on the other hand, being green can inspire your event to be more creative and can save you money in the short or long term.

As you begin planning your event, be sure to include sustainability in your goals. For larger events, you may even want to appoint a special "Green" committee or volunteer.

Here are a few ways to design an event that models environmentally-friendly values and actions:

1. Location, location, location

As you are deciding where to host your event, workshop, or even a simple get-together, evaluate the environmental aspects of the location. Is it located near public transportation? Was it designed to be energy and water efficient, or use renewable energy? Does the venue offer recycling, composting, and caterers that will use tableware and local food?

LEED-certified buildings that have passive solar and highly energy-efficient features or buildings that have some green significance, such as a historic train depot, can be good options. These venues are often happy to host an event for free or cheap in exchange for the publicity that will be associated with your event, or simply to support organizations that share the same goals.

Consider incorporating a tour of the "green" features of your location as part of the event. Many people would welcome the chance to see and learn about gardens and fruit trees, xeriscaped landscaping, rainwater tanks, solar panels, geothermal HVAC system, solar oven, clotheslines, and composting bins.

Choosing an outdoor location is one way to allow your participants to enjoy the sunshine, the smell of the wind, sounds of the birds, and the shade from the trees. Even if your event must take place indoors, you can select a location that will allow you to incorporate a nature walk, urban hike or tour of the gardens - helping refresh your participants and remind them of the reasons behind the event.

2. Donate, recycle and compost

If you are serving meals or trays of food, unserved meal portions may be able to be donated to a local food bank, so be sure to coordinate this before the event.

Even if your facility doesn't offer composting and recycling, take the extra effort to recycle and compost the waste of your event. For small events, this can be as simple as providing specific bins for recycling and composting and taking them home with you. For larger events, environmental groups are often willing to perform this service in exchange for free tickets and meals, or for being listed as a program sponsor or partner.

Post signs explaining why your group is going to the trouble to recycle, reduce waste, and compost - these will emphasize the reasons behind your actions, educate the public, and can be re-used at other events.

3. Offer vegetarian food

If food is a part of your event, be sure to offer (and label) vegetarian and vegan options. This can be as easy as a veggie sandwich, mushroom pizza, pasta dish, or bean chili. Not only is this inclusive of a variety of diets, but vegetarian options are often healthier and more environmentally friendly. Trust me, your vegetarians will notice - and thank you.

4. Use local, organic or near-ganic food and drink

Depending on the location, season and local foodshed, local food can be take a little effort to incorporate. However, there is almost always a way, unless your venue contract locks you in to an uncooperative caterer. You can "potluck" the event with local food dishes, choose a caterer who offers local food, ask your caterer to work with a local food vendor or farmer, or just offer a dessert table of local fruit from the farmer's market.

If you can't offer local organic or "near-ganic" food, then organic food is a good second choice. Don't forget the local beer and wine! And be sure to label your local food with the farm's name - this increases the visibility of the farmer.

5. Encourage environmentally-friendly transportation

As you market your event, you can highlight the closest bus stop and ask participants to car-pool or bike. You may even opt to specifically choose an event location that is close to public transportation or easy to bike to - especially if you are trying to attract an environmentally conscious or lower-income group of people.

6. Use sustainably grown, recycled and re-purposed materials

You will undoubtedly need materials and tools for your event. Consider planning so that you can re-use these repeatedly for a variety of future events. If you don't have much funding, you could consider partnering with an existing organization and borrowing materials from them. In the case that you need to create art, signs, displays, etc., consider using re-purposed materials. After the event, find a way to save, re-use or give away the materials.

When offering giveaways, try to make them symbolic of the goals you want to achieve. For example, you can give away seeds, vermiculture bins, or CFL bulbs. If you will have T-shirts for sale or giveaway, you can use organic cotton in your T-shirts for only a small additional fee. Flyers and posters can often be printed on recycled paper.

7. Reduce waste

Use re-useable glasses, plates, silverware, and napkins when possible. Not only do these create less waste, but they are classier and tougher than disposable tableware. If you are using a caterer, ask the caterer to avoid disposables (and include it in the contract, if you have one). If you are planning a small one-time event, you may be able to borrow the necessary tableware. If you plan to host numerous events, consider investing in a larger quantity that can be used repeatedly for your events throughout the year. Tip: be sure to arrange for a volunteer dishwasher!

Don't offer bottled water - instead, get water coolers, dispensers and ice chests and re-usable cups. For larger events, you may be able to offer one or more water stations. If possible, avoid using single-serving containers of anything (beverages, condiments, snacks, meals).

Instead of a direct-mail campaign, use social media and websites, networking, press releases, listservs, and public service announcements to attract participants to your event.

Bonus: Offset your carbon consumption

While carbon offsets are no excuse to ignore conservation, they can be a way to fund worthwhile projects that reduce carbon - and remind people that virtually all our actions have a carbon effect. Consider calculating the impact of your event (transportation, electricity, heating, etc.), and purchasing a reputable carbon offset, or simply making a donation to plant trees. You may even be able to find a local environmental group to sponsor or perform the offset in exchange for publicity.

If you don't want to purchase a carbon offset from a third-party, you could incorporate a tree planting into your event or post-event activities, or offset the carbon from all your events on a yearly basis by planting trees, perhaps with a local organization that owns some land, or with your local Neighborhood Association. Over time this plan will result in many beautiful shade, fruit and nut trees planted in your area.

Summary

As you plan your event, you may be surprised at all the opportunities you can find to share your environmentally-friendly values. Taking the time to plan a greener event will reduce the negative impact of the event, increase your green credibility, and demonstrate how to take concrete action to improve sustainability. Seize these opportunities when you can, because your event participants will remember them, learn from them, and sometimes, even be inspired to bring these actions into their own lives.

For larger events and more tips, see this article on Green Conferences and Hotels.

Sometimes it takes a few years

2012-01-23T07:34:00.001-08:00

Have you felt frustrated trying to communicate the importance and urgency of the end of the age of oil? We all want our loved ones and close friends to be prepared for emergencies, protected in case of market crashes or job loss, and emotionally ready in the case of black swan events - like an oil shock. Yet the majority seem stubbornly oblivious to the economic and energy disruptions coming our way.

You may have discovered that a full-frontal assault of peak oil hysteria isn't overwhelmingly effective. Even plain and simple logic may not be too effective, as logic is directly counter to the prevailing assumptions of our era. Maybe you switched to more soft-ball and indirect techniques, like encouraging gardening (without mentioning peak oil), giving Richard Heinberg books as Christmas presents, or telling everyone how you lost forty pounds biking to work.

Like most people who become peak oil aware, I am concerned about the well-being of my friends and family in the case of food, energy, or financial disruptions, or just the problems associated with the long energy descent. Several years ago, I had a (gentle) direct discussion with my parents, who responded quite well and now have a large garden, strict energy efficiency habits, an emergency woodpile, and even some food storage. They pay attention to their health and shop locally.

Other family members and friends were not as responsive. Some seem to understand the problem without taking concrete action to address it (the "not taking it personally" problem) and others just blew it off (the "someone would have told me if our entire way of life was completely unsustainable" reaction). I can understand those responses without being judgmental.

I know what it's like to not have any mental bandwidth to address anything more than dragging myself out of bed and going to work, or just getting through another day with a cranky young child. In our society, without a decent safety net or social support, any problem can loom so large that it consumes all our time and mental energy. So many people are depressed, anxious, isolated, sick, unhealthy, overwhelmed, dealing with parents with Alzheimer's and kids with chronic infections, and on the edge of bankruptcy or unemployment that I surely don't want to be the one who pushes them over the edge into a full-blown breakdown.

So, after an initial push of information, I decided to simply be a model and a reference - taking the actions we all recommend, generally being open about what I think, and being available to answer questions. In other words, planting seeds of ideas and knowledge without preaching.

But is this effective? Is this enough?

Sometimes it seems hopeless, and our children, parents, brothers, cousins, best friends will never, never respond to the Just in Case book we gave them three years ago for Christmas or get all the hints we are dropping about food storage.

But then - you might get an e-mail like the one I got from a relative on Friday. Here's the actual text:

1. Can I buy ground beef from you? If not, next time we would like to be in on a cow purchase!

2. What is in your car for emergencies?

3. What is in your emergency backpack in the house?

4. Where do you keep your important documents? (In a fireproof box, safe deposit box, etc.)

5. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector? Where is it located in your house?

If you ever get an e-mail like this, you can respond with all the information you no doubt have at your disposal and rejoice that your patience has been fruitful.

Or you might get an e-mail like the one my husband got after a conversation with our friend, who is a hedge fund manager in another state. He sent us a list of the food storage that our friend's friend had accumulated and asked us about the top 20 survival items. Apparently, the word is getting out. And if you've dropped enough lines in the water, some people will start to bite.

Riot results: cutting consumption by 50 - 85%

2012-01-09T09:32:00.001-08:00

The Riot 4 Austerity 90% Emissions Reduction Project challenges participants to cut their negative environmental impact in seven different categories: transportation energy, electricity, other fuels (i.e. natural gas for heating), water, garbage, food, and consumer goods.

As individuals, we may not have "much" impact, but the point is to model these positive changes for others, share results and tips, and work together to make the changes needed for society to follow. Hopefully, the changes each family makes will not only result in less environmental harm but monetary savings, greater life satisfaction, and improved health through more exercise and better food. Cutting consumption is not only good for the environment, but also helps prepare us for a world of declining energy and resource availability.

I should first state that I do not feel deprived of anything that I or my family want or need. We maintain a regular middle-class urban/suburban 2000 square-foot household with two parents, one child and a small business on-site, and everything looks rather... normal. My point is this: we use 50 - 85% less in most of the seven categories, without much of what I would consider a sacrifice. It really isn't "austerity" at the level at which we have been participating.

There are various rules and regulations (all voluntary, of course) for playing the Riot game. I put together a handy spreadsheet to compare our usage to the average American household (per Riot and other sources of statistics). The specific data are below, and feel free to do fact-checking on the averages, but first let's look at an overview of how we did in the seven categories.

Water: Our water use in 2011 was much higher than in prior years due to drought and heatwave conditions (63 days over 100 degrees last summer), but at 68% less than the American average, and growing a garden in a year of drought, I would call this a success. (Note: I used the average American consumption reported by the American Water Works Association for comparison).

Energy: Although we used only 28% less electricity than average, our house is completely electric. When we add in our (lack of) natural gas usage, our total energy use is 80% less than average. Also, we are on OG&E windpower.

Gasoline: If we count our 4-year old as a person who consumes gasoline, I estimate that our household use is 59% less than average. Since *most* of the trips I have to take are specifically for his benefit, and involve driving many miles (to grandmothers every week for childcare so I can work part-time), this seems fair. We also live in Oklahoma City, which incidentally ranks 48 out of 50 cities in the national "Walkability Score". I wish our family did better than a 59% reduction, but I'm not willing to sacrifice more trips for both economic and family reasons. Perhaps when we replace our 13-year old Jetta with a Prius or other more efficient car we can improve in this area.

Garbage: We use about one trash bag per week, weighing in at 4.5 pounds (I rounded up to 5 pounds to account for weeks that are greater than average). After adding in the occasional "big bulky" item we place on the curb, our garbage disposal is about 85% less than average. Frankly, it's hard for me to believe that the average American household disposes an average of 40 pounds of garbage per week. But that's what Riot statistics report.

Food: We did not measure food, as the rules for the Riot are complicated and hard for me to track. However, I do buy local eggs and grass-fed meat directly from a local farmer, visit the Farmer's market weekly, grow a lot of food in our garden, and buy organic most of the time. We also eat meat an average of only once per week (a leftover from my vegetarian cooking days).

Consumer Goods: Another one we did not track. Generally, we buy used clothes, cars, toys, books, and furniture and furnishings, get most of our books from the library, give service gifts when possible, and purchase online music rather than hard-copy. However, we have purchased several electronics gadgets over the last few years, replaced our old carpet with wood floors, purchased a (heavy) energy-efficient fireplace insert and a steel tornado shelter, and bought assorted other consumer goods. I'm not sure I'd call this category "successful."

Summary: The details are available for your leisurely perusal below, but overall I'd have to say that I feel satisfied with our Riot participation. We came close to the 90% figure in several areas. We invested money over the last six years to improve our energy efficiency, and our investment is now being repaid every year. We save quite a bit of money - I believe that the money we spend on quality food reflects in our lack of medical bills (although good food is only one aspect of health), and the money we invested in our Prius and weatherization saves us money on gas and electricity. And all these savings were achieved without feeling deprived.

As I mentioned earlier, there are other steps that we could take to cut consumption even further. We could turn the thermostat lower than 66 degrees / higher than 78 degrees, refuse to take trips to see family, abstain from participating in community events, quit buying fresh fruit that is not in-season, and other sacrifices that we are not currently willing to make. If we had a convenient bus system or sidewalks in our neighborhood, we could walk, bike and bus more. If we had more land, or if I plowed the front yard, we could grow more food. And if I were tougher, I'd hang laundry outside in the dead of winter.

Still, for now, we'll keep looking for the little ways to consume less, save more and enjoy living a little lighter. In the meantime, I'll share some tips on how we cut our consumption (and ask for your insights as well) in upcoming blog posts.

Spreadsheet analysis (average statistics are from Riot 4 Austerity and American Water Works Association):

Water
Average American household use		127,400	gallons
Patton use (2011)		41,000	gallons
Water saved compared to average:		86,400	gallons
Water saved as percentage of average		68%	less than average

Electricity
Average American household electrical use		11,000	kwh
Patton use (2011)		7892	kwh
kwh saved compared to average		3,108	kwh
kwh saved as percentage of average		28%	less than average

Natural Gas
Average American household natural gas use		1000	therms
Patton use (2011)		0	therms
Saved		1000	therms
As a percentage		100%	less than average

Total Household Energy use (with therms converted to kwh at onlineconversion.com)
Average American household energy use		40300	kwh
Patton use		7892	kwh
Energy saved compared to average		32408	kwh
Energy saved as percentage of average		80%	less household energy than average

Gasoline use*
500 gallons per person per year average		1500	gallons
Patton use	est. only	616	gallons
Gas saved compared to average		884
Gas saved as percentage		59%	less gas use than average

Garbage disposal
Avg: 40 pounds per household per week		2080	pounds
Patton use	5 lbs weekly	260	pounds
Additional disposal on big trash day		50	pounds
Total		310
Garbage saved compared to average		1770
Garbage saved as a percentage		85%	less garbage use than average

Putting on my oxygen mask

2012-01-04T13:44:00.001-08:00

I had many plans for 2011, but what I actually ended up doing was spending an excessive amount of time helping launch several large Transition OKC events and supporting many other TOKC efforts through Facebooking, Constant Contact-ing, and updating our website. And attending a full-length Permaculture Design Course.

And serving on my neighborhood Board, including writing the newsletter and helping organize the neighborhood Halloween Spooktacular, Litter Blitz and Summer Social.

And joining the Board of Sustainable OKC.

And of course, raising a four-year old and running a small business.

I wouldn't call myself burnt out - but my feet might be smoking, just a little.

So I didn't get too much done on my personal list of goals, and I even neglected some things that are important to me. Dear readers, I realize this blog was one of the casualties. I have noticed that my posting has dropped off... a cliff. One of my resolutions this year - well, goals, really - is to rediscover the joy of writing.

In light of last year's mild problem with over-commitment, I am stepping down as co-chair of Transition OKC at our retreat later this month. After three years, I need to pass the torch so that some fresh faces can take over leadership. Although I will still stay involved, I am going to put on my oxygen mask by spending more time with my family and my garden and paying more attention to my health and my writing.

I hope those of you who are still with me will enjoy some more frequent posting. See you soon!

Vampire coalition unveils "Save the Humans" program

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

October 31, 2014 -- WASHINGTON D.C. --

The International Vampire Alliance for Human Survival tonight announced their most drastic and unprecedented move yet - the overnight conversion of hundreds of influential political, business and media figures, and many of the 2014 Climate Summit delegates, into bloodsucking creatures of the night.

Since they publicly announced their presence five years ago, vampires have been lobbying for significant and legally-binding carbon emission cuts, along with water, topsoil and biodiversity conservation measures. The immortals are personally invested in the future of the planet, as they can live thousands of years, or until staked in the heart, or exposed to the sun for a significant length of time, at which point they become black and crispy.

Newly converted spokes-vampire Colin Powell said, "Considering the abysmal record of past Climate Summits, and the complete impotence of our midnight rallies and protests, we vampires concluded we had no choice but to step it up a notch and create leaders who have a vested interest in something more than the next campaign. Even if the new leadership does happen to drink blood."

Vampires were quick to point out that climate legislation would be good for humans. "Of course we care about the environment," said eight-hundred year old vampire Neills Carson. "But mainly, we care about humans - they're our primary food source. And if you guys are all crowded up around Siberia and Canada, fighting for space and getting drowned in tsunamis and dying of malaria and famines in fifty years or so, well, let's just say that things are going to get ugly. I sure as hell don't want to live through another century of the Black Death - do you?"

Some pundits called the mass conversion "overkill," while political analysts called it "the epitome of the international coup d'etat." Vampires repudiated these labels, claiming their Save the Humans project simply aims to "increase conservation of human populations and the ecosystems that support them."

Vampires also responded to allegations of forced conversions, stating that all of the converted were consenting adults. An anonymous vampire source confided, "Seriously, do you think this is how I wanted to spend my weekend - sucking blood from schmucks who didn't have the balls to stand up for their grandkids' future? Jesus, I hope it was worth it - I'm going to have to spend all next month de-toxing Viagra and Lipitor out of my system."

The Climate Summit is scheduled to proceed despite the scores of representatives who have been "changed." Summit meetings and votes will now be held between 8 p.m. and dawn, while human delegates volunteered en masse to offer personal blood donations, which reportedly are rather pleasant.

Vampire ecologist William McGreer, Ph.D, commented on the critical importance of the outcome of the Climate Summit. "Saving humans is vital to the vampire food chain. If humanity experiences a serious population decline, other species will survive, perhaps even thrive, but not us." He concluded, "It's painful to admit, but even as a far superior species, with all our power, technology, immortality, indefatigable strength and speed, and supernatural beauty... unfortunately, we still kind of need them."

Ten ways to turn from a consumer to a producer

2011-10-27T19:00:00.000-07:00

Growing up in America, my generation was taught that any and every need could be met by a particular product or service, all of which were just waiting to be purchased. To afford these purchases as part of a "lifestyle," the proper career path for middle class people was to attend college, learn an intricately detailed specialization in order to make a salary, and buy whatever we might need or desire, from childcare to lawn services to fast food to psychiatric services.

While specialization can certainly make economic sense, the pendulum swung too far. We grew up to be thoroughly knowledgeable in a very narrow field, yet helpless and unempowered in every other walk of life, at the mercy of a cheap-energy growth economy supported by underpaid or slave labor and ongoing environmental destruction. While we grew up believing that having the money to purchase all of our needs equaled independence, many of us have learned that we've inherited a thinly-disguised dependence on the vast, complicated systems needed to support us.

In order to reclaim skills once lost, regain a sense of control over the process of your life, and withdraw your support from the often-immoral, often-unsatisfying industrial economy, consider becoming a producer of the things you want and need - in your home, your garage, your workshop and your garden.

If you'd like to produce a few things of your own, here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Gardening and Farming

Grow your own food! From peaches to tomatoes, some things just taste better when home-grown. And when you can measure the age of your produce in minutes rather than weeks, you are sure to retain more nutrition. Not only that, but you can grow your food organically for cheaper than Whole Foods prices, while forgoing the wasted packaging that comes with commercially-purchased products.

You don't have to move to the country to start growing plants. A few semi-dwarf fruit trees in your yard can yield you hundreds of pounds of fruit. And once you become a gardener, you'll also gain automatic entrance to a community that loves to talk about plants, soil, weather...while slipping each other some canned peaches and fresh chard.

2. Growing Medicinal Herbs

Western medicine and pharmaceutical companies depend on a distributed, just-in-time supply chain with manufacturing facilities around the world, along with an insurance industry dependent on denying care in order to increase profits. Many pharmaceuticals have never proven to be better than placebos, and are often laced with under-communicated side effects. Alternatively, many herbs have been shown to be highly effective in treating problems and supporting health. Consider learning how to grow and preserve the medicinal plants that do well in your climate. Yet don't make the mistake of believing that all 'natural' drugs are harmless - consider the toxic effects of nightshade, hemlock and yew, for instance.

3. Home brewing

Brewing your own wine, beer, or cider makes sense because you can save some money, learn a skill, create a superior unique product, all while helping the environment. If you brew your own, you can reuse the same bottles over and over while not needing to spend gas and carbon transporting the full weight of the liquid. You can start with commercial brewing kits while learning how to grow hops, grapes, grain, and other raw materials for your brew.

4. Preserving food - freezing, canning, dehydrating, pickling

You don't have to purchase industrial jam and sugar-laden dried fruit - you can preserve ingredients purchased in-season, picked at the height of flavor, from local farmers who use ethical and sustainable methods to grow food. You can start small with the excess from your garden, with vegetables like home-grown tomatoes, or with your favorite fruits and vegetables like peaches and blackberries.

5. Cooking & Baking

The decline of the home-cooked meal is a sad byproduct of the specialty age, a lack of cooking skills, two-income families with over-scheduled children, and a plethora of cheap and easy alternatives such as fast food and frozen meals. As a result, child nutrition and health have withered along with family connectedness and communication.

Yet cooking a simple, nutritious meal is no harder than driving to a fast food outlet. With practice, that is. If whole foods are unfamiliar, start with easy stuff. If fresh foods seem expensive, try cutting down the meat, or grow a few pots of herbs and a cherry tomato plant. Save money, improve your health, and hang out with the family while you cook -or while the kids cook. If you have to pick just one, this might be the place to start.

6. Health services

So-called "alternative" medicines are usually practices that have been in use for thousands of years, and need little energy, materials, or infrastructure. These types of health-supporting modalities include massage therapy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, yoga, mindfulness meditation and physical therapy. If you have the time and ability to learn these healing arts, they can easily be practiced in a spare room of your home. Not only can these skills benefit you and your family, but they can be an income source when many "jobs" are gone.

7. Small crafts

Whether you make trellises from grapevines, sew clothes, craft soaps and candles, weld tools and frames, or build custom carpentry, you can make your workshop work for you. Consider adding simple, repairable hand tools to your arsenal of complex, battery powered tools, and think about finding local sources for your materials.

8. Repair work

Sewing and mending, re-upholstering, shoe repair, fixing bikes and small appliances. Repair work will be a growth industry, as we turn from a throw-away to a fix-it economy. When it becomes more expensive to purchase, or unreliable to find, new products, repair work will return to being a profitable profession.

9. Garden support

Plenty of gardeners don't know how to save seeds, grow transplants or plant a garden. There is money to be made in providing seeds, transplants, compost and fertilizer to gardeners, along with consulting services such as permaculture design and labor services like constructing raised beds.

10. Small livestock

Bees, chickens, ducks and rabbits provide a plethora of benefits to your home ecosystem. Aside from the obvious edible products of honey, meat and eggs, small livestock can consume scraps, patrol for insects, provide pollination, and produce fertilizer. And if you don't want to eat them, they make fun (and educational) pets.

*********
So choose your favorites, and get started on an adventure! Each skill will have a learning curve, and you may not have success at every turn. Don't be afraid of failure - occasional mistakes are better than the alternative of forever continuing to consume, consume, consume.

Moving Planet OK

2011-09-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

September 24, 2011 - Cyclists, skaters and walkers gathered at the new Womb art space in preparation for a people-powered caravan to Oklahoma City Hall on September 24, the 350.org international day of action called Moving Planet. Students, families and health and environmental advocates from all across the metro area checked in and lined up, ready for the journey to support the goal of becoming a top-10 state in health and sustainability.

Oklahoma and Oklahoma City, you see, rank at the very bottom of all national lists of health and sustainability, classing us as one of the most unhealthy and most unsustainable places in America - with more and earlier deaths, more hospitalizations, more health expenditures, and in several respects, a lower quality of life. We wanted to call attention to the key links between health and sustainability and the positive efforts of our community partners to improve our rankings.

Despite the serious goal, the atmosphere was festive. How could it not be, in a neon-colored building with an art installation by artist BigFoot and pink and green balloons floating around the space? Excitement built as more and more students, families, and teams arrived at the Womb and then set out on bike, on foot, and on skates for City Hall.

As participants arrived at the Municipal building, they had the opportunity to sign a "leaf" with their hopes for health and sustainability and place it on our sign, which then became a photo magnet for our community partner teams and the whole group.

When the caravan arrived back at the Womb, they were treated to sandwiches, local watermelon and apples from the Urban Agrarian, and local beer from COOP, along with live music, a seed giveaway, and art activities. Unique fused glass ornaments were available for sale as a fundraiser and as a way to create art by placing them on the "Bike Dance" metal sculpture. Participants also had the opportunity to learn about our community partners - non-profits and businesses working in our city and state to promote local healthy food, energy efficiency, fitness and health, and environmental protection.

The event was topped by remarks from Dr. Ed Shadid, Oklahoma City councilman and physician, who discussed the connections between our health crisis and sustainability. His remarks introduced the auction of the "Bike Dance" metal sculpture by local artist Bill Byrd, to benefit Closer to Earth, a non-profit group that empowers youth through urban organic gardening.

An event of this size and complexity takes some effort and resources to implement. Sierra Club, Transition OKC, Sustainable OKC, and the University of Central Oklahoma worked with community partners to create buzz and support for the effort, and designed the action-art-festival to accomplish many goals at once: connecting the health and sustainability communities, participating in 350.org's international day of action, promoting the need for a top-10 state, and providing a fun way for citizens to exercise their democratic right to expression - all while raising money for a cause.

Moving Planet OK also offered a model for more sustainable events. We used local food, local beer, local artists and artisans and promoted their involvement. To minimize waste, we employed re-usable cups and recycled and composted. We offered vegetarian options (a rarity in Oklahoma City). Our T-shirts used organic cotton, our printed materials used recycled paper, and our artists used scrap and found pieces for our art auction.

The energy of the participants and dedication of the volunteers made all the planning and preparation - and chaos and heartache - worth it. Organizers from four different organizations met weekly over an 8-week period and almost daily through the final two weeks as we pulled together Facebook, website and media, community partners and sponsors, metal sculpture and glass art, signage and educational displays, activities, location, food and beer.

We encountered numerous complications along the way, resulting in many interesting conversations, compromises, and the need to move on to plans B, C, and D. Beer, that most important of celebratory ingredients, proved to be incredibly tough to get approved. Fortunately, after sixteen phone calls and four personal visits, tenacious organizer Whitney P. finally wrestled the ABLE commission into granting a permit.

Thank goodness for teammates like Whitney, who keep going through the weird, twisting tunnel until we finally reach the light. Many thanks to Vicki, Whitney, Marcy, Susie, Debbie, Amy, Randy, Lindsey, Tricia, Doug, Bud, and Tim, who hung in there with me until the fun-filled end. Cheers!

Closer to Earth

2011-09-14T06:00:00.000-07:00

Long-time environmental advocates often become overwhelmed with the scope of community transformation needed to carry our society through the energy and environmental challenges we face. Overwhelmed and underfunded, we can sometimes become bitter, burnt-out, or even turn away from our calling to build community, sustainability and resiliency.

Not Allen Parleir, founder and coordinator of Oklahoma City's Closer to Earth, a non-profit youth group that empowers teenagers through urban organic gardening.

Allen reports that in his thirty-plus years of working with youth, he has never been as enthusiastic and positive as he is now. As with most grass-roots projects, Closer to Earth does a lot with a little - accomplishing many goals all at once - teaching respect for the earth and for all the inhabitants of our planet, sharing skills of composting and gardening, promoting healthy choices and actions to stop climate change, and facilitating zero-waste practices by composting food from events like the annual Slow Food Picnic and the Peace Fest.

Closer to Earth, founded in 2007 as a partnership between several local organizations, focuses on developing leadership skills in the twelve interns and about 350 students per year who participate in community service and volunteer events. Teenagers learn to transform their lives by mentoring other youth and by taking responsibility through active decision-making. In turn, they transform the places they care about.

In a model Allen calls "growth through responsibility," teenagers are immediately tasked with teaching skills to other students, public speaking, and making all the key decisions needed to run a non-profit, including schedules, wages, and hiring decisions. Students are empowered to communicate effectively and to work through differences peacefully in the community garden sanctuary where they experience a sense of safety, respect, and belonging.

Although the model is crucial, Allen says that there is "just something about getting their hands in the dirt" that connects the students with the larger world and helps them feel a part of a community. Growing food also allows them to experience the empowerment that comes with providing fresh food for their families, giving the food they produce to food pantries and selling vegetables to local restaurants and stores.

With a critical grant running out at the end of 2011, Closer to Earth needs funding to pay the youth interns and a part-time coordinator, and to purchase a van for transporting students to the garden sites. However, you'll only hear this if you ask, as Allen firmly believes in practicing "attraction" rather than promotion. Although he freely shares information with anyone who inquires, Allen believes that if the group focuses on the work they are accomplishing, the universe will provide what is needed. In fact, his faith in the community has been borne out several times, most recently last week when an unexpected benefactor drove across the country to drop off a free 2009 pick-up truck for their composting operation.

Allen Parleir's faith is yielding fruit once more. Participants in the Moving Planet Oklahoma action-art-festival on September 24 will be creating and auctioning an art piece to benefit Closer to Earth. The auction will top a morning of fun, festivities, and education located at Wayne Coyne and Company's new Womb art space in Oklahoma City. The event is designed to promote and publicize the goal of becoming a top-10 state in health and sustainability - ranked highly in clean air and water, clean energy and energy conservation, walkable and bikeable communities, and local food.

Moving Planet OK is free and registration is encouraged. You can also invite your friends through the event Facebook page. Show up, bring friends, and have fun promoting health and sustainability and raising funds for a great cause.

Rich Sweetness 132: One tough cookie

2011-07-31T13:40:00.000-07:00

You may be aware that Oklahoma is suffering a scorchingly dry summer, record-breaking in it's magnitude, miserable for the animals, humans and plants living through it. We've had temperatures consistently above 100 degrees - sometimes soaring up to 108 and 109 - for the past six weeks, with only two short bursts of rain. Farms and gardens across Oklahoma, along with much of the American South, are yielding perhaps 20 - 40% of their normal crops. Even my heat-loving okra are wilting, the sweet potato vines scorching. Nothing wants to grow.

Except.

My Rich Sweetness 132 melons, which apparently thrive on misery. Looking for a small melon, I found this heirloom variety from the former Soviet Union in the amazing Baker Creek Rare Seeds catalog last year. Intrigued by the funky striped appearance and the promising description of "very productive all season long," I planted four hills around a home-made watering olla in one of my crop circles in the six feet between my neighbor's driveway and my own, not sure what to expect but hoping for something tough, as that site gets one hundred percent sun, all day long, and is surrounded by concrete.

I thought I might have a winner when the vines began to explode out of the circle, despite the already-stifling drought. Like the rest of my garden, the crop circles are fed in spring with compost and then covered with newspapers and straw mulch after transplants are placed and seeds have sprouted. Still, despite the compost, mulch, and olla, I've had to water the garden every day, as we are getting no natural precipitation and are enduring 100+ daily temperatures. (Perhaps next year I'll try soaker hoses.) In late June, I began to see what appeared to be tiny watermelons dotting the vines, soon turning to a striped red and gold, like miniature Tiggers sitting patiently on the mulch.

When I could smell their rich melon aroma, I began to harvest them. Since then, the Rich Sweetness 132's have just kept coming. The flesh is white, with a milder taste than regular cantaloupe and less sweetness than a watermelon. Reactions vary - some people are bored by the mild flavor, some rave about the creamy taste and heady fragrance.

My favorite attribute (aside from the fact that the fruit are actually producing, and that they are unusually cool-looking) is the small size of the melons. Their single serving snack size means that I don't have to have a crowd at my house to eat one, nor do I have to stuff myself with cantaloupe and then wrap the rest up in plastic and put it in the fridge, consuming precious shelf space. Instead, I can easily eat one in a sitting, much like an apple or a peach.

After the performance of this melon this summer, I'm encouraging all my friends to save the seeds from the heirloom RS132s that I've been giving them. They are not the most flavorful melons in the whole wide world (to my taste - as I mentioned, some people love them), but I have a feeling we are going to need plants that can thrive in desert-like conditions. Rephrase: we ALREADY need food plants that thrive in desert-like conditions.

In fact, we've harvested so many of these cheerful little melons that I decided to haul a small load to my favorite local food seller, Matt Burch of the Urban Agrarian. I planned to give them to him for free as a fun attention-attracting eye-catcher for his market booth, but he insisted on trading me a dozen eggs and five medium sized tomatoes for fourteen melons, which we priced at $1 each.

I hope his customers love them; he had sold four already in the quarter hour I spent checking out his wares, which included eggs, a variety of meats, Earth Elements baked goods and jams, and watermelon, okra, garlic, tomatoes, zukes and cukes. Matt parks his Veggie Van out at Cheever's every Sunday, disregarding the ridiculous weather to deliver fresh food to the good people of Oklahoma City. Thanks Matt!

Dilithium Crystals 'most likely' to power next generation

2011-07-11T17:00:00.000-07:00

June 18, 2012 -- CAMBRIDGE, MASS --

In a Gallup poll released today, Americans chose dilithium crystals as the "most likely" fuel to run future cars and power plants, with 84% of Americans choosing the crystals over other options including nuclear, hydrogen, corn ethanol, shale gas, and photovoltaic solar panels. Respondents indicated that dilithium crystals are popular for providing quiet, clean energy, with a proven track record of seven-hundred twenty-six episodes in four different Star Trek television series.

Professor Stephen Palmer, of MIT, claims that dilithium crystals have "literally unlimited potential" for the future of energy, reporting, "Based on my research, which includes careful observation of over ten thousand hours of Deep Space Nine and Voyager re-runs, dilithium crystals have a virtually infinite capacity for power generation."

Palmer explains, "The crystals provide power for starship warp drives by channeling electro-plasma released by the mutual annihilation from extremely high temperatures and electro-magnetic radiation. And since Spock and Scotty solved the problem of gradual decrystalization during their time travel mission to the twenty-third century, all we have to do is harness this energy, and BAM! - we're set for the next five thousand years."

Results from the poll led several U.S. Senators to call for increased funding of NASA, which has languished in recent years due to budget cuts. Anthony Baden (R-NY), said, "According to several popular television shows, dilithium crystals are the fuel of tomorrow. Our only problem seems to be obtaining the crystals from the planet Rura Penthe in the Klingon Empire. If we can get hold of a warp drive, maybe from the Chinese, we can pop these dilithium puppies in our nuclear plants by the next election cycle."

Although some skeptics called the crystals "unproven technology," a majority of respondents identified environmentalists, big government, and big oil as the top culprits preventing the United States from switching to this low-carbon fuel. Sarah Train, a student in Massachusetts, said, "Permanently free power? Seems like a good idea to me. So I'm not really sure why we're not using the crystals yet, but I'm pretty confident it involves treehuggers or bureaucracy. Maybe both."

Transition US, a grass-roots sustainability group, called dilithium crystals "science fiction," instead suggesting that communities re-localize in the face of the energy and financial crises that have plagued the U.S. since 2007. Raven Baker, spokesperson for TUS, says, "Don't wait for the government or corporations to deliver a miracle at some undetermined time in the future. Grow some food. Build low-tech, distributed energy solutions. Conserve. Reorganize cities so travel is less necessary."

Joe Burns, an engineer in Atlanta, scoffed at these recommendations. "Community - ha! Somebody explain how I can fill up my SUV's 40-gallon fuel tank with community. And growing a garden, c'mon. Who do they think I am, an immigrant?"

"I need a realistic answer to my problems, and dilithium crystals seem to fit the bill. So if I have to sit on my butt while the government spends half a trillion dollars and thirty years chasing a pipe dream until every other option has evaporated ... well, I've gotten pretty good at that."

Permaculture: Design, Practice, Evolve

2011-06-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

Way back when I first learned that cheap oil was the underlying foundation of our economy and lifestyle, and that oil was due to peak and begin a decline somewhere between five and twenty-five years, I searched for signs of hope.

The picture was grim. I found that industrialized agriculture depends on oil and fossil fuels, and people across America have forgotten how to garden, farm, preserve food, bake, even cook. I realized that most cities are designed for cars, not people, and so people live far from their work, entertainment, and shopping, making them car-dependent. Our collective health was declining in a crisis of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, with health and insurance costs ratcheting up every year. Our financial system, based on an ever-increasing cycle of debt and bubbles, seemed poised to explode. All the environmental indicators - topsoil, water, bio-diversity, ocean life, pollution - were (and still are) in a downward spiral.

Yet even amidst the signposts of doom, hope was working quietly in the wings in the form of grass-roots re-skilling movements, organic agriculture revitalization, localization, small-scale appropriate technology development, environmental and social activism, and permaculture.

Permaculture, a sustainable design system based on working with and harnessing the forces and processes of nature, rather than fighting them, seemed to be the most revolutionary. Permaculture's foundation of ethics and principles make it applicable all around the world, in a variety of different climates, eco-systems, and cultures. Ever since I encountered this system, I have been searching for a way to take a full-scale permaculture design course, but every course I found was far away and would require an extended time away from my family.

My luck has changed. Now, Transition OKC is bringing Scott Pittman, of the respected Permaculture Institute, to Oklahoma City for a full-scale, 72-hour design course, taught alongside guest instructors including Oklahoma City's own rebel permaculturist Bob Waldrop. The course will be spread over four weekends in August, September, October, and November of 2011. Class topics include design principles for sustainable living, permaculture techniques, natural building methods, dryland restoration, renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, food forests, community building, and more.

Transition OKC has even been industriously seeking out grants and funding to cut the cost of the course to make it affordable during a recession. Because of these grants, the cost of the class is only $750 if you register one month before the course begins on August 4th, $800 thereafter. Applicants who want to apply for a half-tuition scholarship from Sustainable OKC should act NOW - applications for the four scholarships are due by June 30th.

In my view, permaculture could be a vital contributor to a transition to a more sustainable and resilient system of living, working, and interacting with our communities. Knowledge and application of permaculture will make a difference in a world with less energy, fewer resources, and increasing inequity - the difference between poverty and sufficiency, the difference between continuing to degrade our habitats, or the ability to help heal them.

But permaculture, despite the potential, cannot be learned overnight. Learning permaculture requires work, study, practice, and customization to each eco-system. I'm looking forward to my opportunity to continue learning with Scott Pittman this fall, in Oklahoma City. The sooner we start, the better.

Retired Marine opens ninth Peak Oil Boot Camp

2011-06-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

Jan. 1, 2013 -- Somewhere, Texas --

Retired Marine Master Sergeant Jasper Sweet today announced the opening of his ninth Peak Oil Boot Camp - this one in Somewhere, Texas. During the opening ceremony, Master Sergeant Sweet spoke about his calling to open the Camps. "After thirty-two years serving my country, I realized America needed people every bit as tough as soldiers - she needed farmers. And by God, I'm going to give them to her, even if I have to wipe the snot off the nose of every last pansy-a$$ juvenile delinquent in Texas."

Parents send their frequently over-priveleged, occasionally criminal, teenagers to the camps to learn specific skills such as growing food, scavenging parts, first-aid care, and baking bread, along with fundamentals like hard work, cooperation, and planning. They pay handsomely for the service, which boasts a success rate of 93% felony-free graduates three years after completing the program.

John Franks, a mid-level manager from Connecticut, confided, "I knew my son needed to learn a few things when I realized he was afraid of earthworms. And roly-polys. Maybe this camp will toughen him up a bit - right now, the only callus he's ever had is from gripping his Wii too tightly."

During the four-month program, camp attendees build a passive-solar house, plant a fruit and nut orchard, start and maintain a garden, and learn how to jerry-rig everything from washing machines to windmill-powered battery systems to blenders. POBC recruits rise at 6 a.m., practice calisthenics and strength training, attend classes and work, clean camp, and go to bed at 10 p.m., after a dinner grown and cooked by recruits on-site. Until the first group house is completed, the group sleeps on the ground outside, huddling together like puppies for warmth.

Drill Sergeant Eric Harrison, who teaches in Camp Wakeup, Alabama, discussed the content of the intensive permaculture, organic agriculture and perennial polyculture courses studied by all recruits. "Pesticides? Herbicides? If you know anything about peak oil, you know that $#it ain't going to be around in twenty years. Besides, until I see some Monsanto m#$%&*%^$#&s swig a big gulp of that $#it they're selling, I'm not spraying it on food eaten by my kids."

Scholarship graduates of the camp, which includes room, board, and health care, spend two years of service working to build community gardens, mini-farms, and community centers in cities across the country - all of which are prepared to weather blackouts, tornadoes, ice storms, heat waves, oil shocks, currency devaluations, hyperinflation, economic collapse, and hell or high water.

"You've got a lot of sheep out there still living in denial," said MSgt. Sweet. "They're still clutching their entitlements, their comforts, their cushy jobs where they sit on their a$$es all day. What are they going to do when the $#it hits the fan and sprays all over their comfy assumptions? Come running for help, that's what, and we've got to be prepared to give it to them. Because this is America, by God, and I'm not going to stand by and watch three-year olds starving in the streets."

While some criticize Sgt. Sweet for his take-no-prisoners style and particularly foul mouth, Boot Camp graduates stand by their founder with pride. Murphy Bryant spoke from her office in Virginia, where she recently opened a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. "Three years ago, I didn't know an artichoke from an...um, armpit. I was clueless in every sense of the word. Physically, mentally, emotionally. I couldn't even spend half an hour away from my iPhone without withdrawal. Now, I can plant an acre of fava beans without breaking a sweat, harness ten different kinds of power, organize a crew of forty farmworkers, and bandage a tractor wound."

Ms. Bryant concluded, "And maybe most importantly, I CAN handle the truth."

Live Webchat on Energy Bulletin

2011-06-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

On Monday, June 6th, Kurt Cobb and I will be co-webchatting (not a verb in the Oxford dictionary...yet) on Energy Bulletin about presenting peak oil with humor and fiction. Kurt is the author of Prelude, a novel about peak oil, and a founding member of ASPO-USA. He blogs at Resource Insights.

Energy Bulletin asked me to join Kurt on the chat for my work in the fictional short form, including the A Day in the Life series and my Onion-style satires: The Gathering Hordes, The iFinger, Radically Honest Man Tarred, Feathered, and Hell Announces Pilot Colonization Program.

If you've got a burning desire to ask me or Kurt a question about presenting peak oil with humor and fiction, act now! Submit your question to Energy Bulletin before the live webchat, or just join us on Monday. Toss me a few softballs, ok?

Winner of Edible Front Yard book

2011-05-18T19:35:00.000-07:00

Random.org has pronounced Commentor #16, Christine Robins, to be the winner. Congratulations!

Christine, please comment in with your (U.S.) address, e-mail and phone number and I will send you a copy of Ivette Soler's The Edible Front Yard. Your comment will not be published. If I have not heard from you by the end of Friday the 20th, I will give the book away to another commentor.

Have fun with all your edible landscape and front yard garden adventures!

Giveaway - Edible Front Yard

2011-05-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ivette Soler's new book The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-less, Grow-more Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden is lush with pictures and full of design advice, color combinations, attractive edibles, and hardscaping ideas. Ivette (a.k.a. The Germinatrix), a garden designer and writer, insists on beauty and style in her front-yard edible landscapes and gardens. She advises "Beauty matters...your front yard is a greeting to the world."

Ivette advises us that "Growing food in your front yard is a courageous expression: you are telling people that you care about what your family eats," then continues with ways to draw inspiration from your home's style, regionally-adapted favorites, and edible choices that deliver multiple benefits - visual, herbal, edible, and structural.

Ivette shares her list of "Supermodels" - plants she has selected as the most attractive for the full growing season, as well as "Helper" plants - attractive, evergreen or structural ornamentals that are also medicinal herbs or useful in some way (for example, aloe, yarrow, agave, and daylilies). These helpers create a backbone for your garden to look good year-round, instead of merely during the planting season.

Ivette's eco-friendly vibe is strongest when recommending environmental choices such as urbanite and other easy-on-the-budget hardscaping choices, or when recommending ways to organically maintaining your front yard without the use of Round-up or pesticides. However, you won't find much information on attracting beneficial insects or wildlife, or techniques like swales, ollas or rainwater barrels. Instead, Ivette strongly recommends installing a permanent watering / irrigation system.

Her garden designs, and her plant lists, rely mainly plants that do well in her climate (Southern California), which is dry and hot - similar to ours here in Oklahoma, but with a bit less frost. Gardeners in cold, wet, short-season climates may not find the book as useful as those in hotter climates.

The Edible Front Yard, as well as Rosalind Creasy's classic text Edible Landscaping have wonderful pictures, great lists of attractive edibles, and useful design advice. If you are designing your own front yard garden, combine these books with a permaculture manual like Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden. To enter the giveaway, leave a comment stating which the book you would like - Rosalind Creasy's book or Ivette Soler's The Edible Front Yard. I will pick the winner via random drawing on Wednesday the 18th.

Happy front yard gardening!

Note: This is an unsolicited review; I have not been compensated in any way.

A call for front yard gardeners

2011-05-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Although food gardening is making a comeback due to concerns about the economy, the health of our families and viability of our food systems, many gardeners won't consider gardening in their front yard - even when the back yard suffers from excess shade or other problems that make growing food difficult.

Objections to front-yard gardening seem to fall into three categories: 1) fear of what the neighbors will think, 2) fear that food will be stolen, and 3) fear of code enforcement. Yet often, these fears can be addressed with a few precautions and proper design. Let's get over our fears of neighborly gossip and petty theft and bring on the front-yard gardening!

Not only will expanding to the front provide us more space to grow healthy food, and reduce the need for the chemicals, water and mowing usually needed to keep a lawn looking so exquisitely monocultured, it can help demonstrate the practice of growing organic food and build community in our neighborhoods. The time is ripe to move from our back yards to our fronts, throw conformity to the wind, and plant some food.

Demonstration

America has been dominated by the expensive and chemical-intensive lawn culture for far too long. We desperately need other examples of beauty outside of the "lawn + hedge + one tree" formula in our neighborhoods. Why not showcase an edible landscape, designed to be both beautiful and productive?

If you don't want to plant tomatoes in your front yard for fear of sprawling plants exploding out of their cages, there are plenty of attractive vegetable and fruit options. Plant some beautiful edibles: blossoming fruit trees with glossy leaves, evergreen thyme, rosemary and purple sage, groundcovers of watermelons, pumpkins, and sweet potatoes, or peppers with their fruit dangling in the breeze.

Plant easy-care lovelies like daylilies or salvias around your garden areas, and include plenty of blooming flowers to attract beneficial insects such as bees, ladybugs and parasitic wasps. Plant a few evergreens so your landscape doesn't turn a harsh, bland brown in the winter. People will soon get the idea that gardens don't have to be ugly places.

Including beautiful ornamentals such as roses, along with mulch and attractive hard-scaping such as weathered brick, flagstones or ornamental boulders, will give your front-yard garden a finishing touch and distinguish it from the unmowed, weedy lawns that attract disapproval and code-enforcement calls.

Community

Front yard gardens force us to spend time in our front yards - watering, weeding, harvesting, pruning, thinning, admiring the fruits of our labor. Neighbors will naturally be curious as to your activities. Those who have green-thumbs will stop to ask you about your favorite tomato varieties and see if you need any extra Swiss chard. While not all neighbors may approve, plenty will admire your chutzpah and want to meet the bold edible landscape owner (you).

In this easy way, you can meet many of your neighbors who just happen to be walking by with their dog or baby stroller. You may develop a gardening network of neighbors who exchange peaches for okra and watermelons for squash. Who knows? Maybe this could be the start of a gardening club, book club, green living group, or home-brewing cooperative.

Education

By siting a demonstration garden in your front yard, and spending time out there meeting your neighbors, you have a prime opportunity to educate your community about organic gardening, permaculture, the benefits of growing your own food, the need to provide habitat and food for birds and bees, the purpose of rainwater barrels, saving seeds, supporting local farmers, and so on and so forth.

The design of your garden can support your educational efforts. Incorporating flowers that attract beneficial insects, therefore reducing the needs for pesticides, using deep mulch techniques and swales to cut the need for watering, featuring a rainwater barrel in your front yard (perhaps covered with a vine), and planting a diverse variety of different edibles in permacultured layers - all these techniques offer opportunities to share knowledge.

Education can extend beyond your immediate neighborhood. You can reach out to the sustainability, permaculture, gardening, local food or environmental communities and give tours to various groups who are eager to see design put into action - especially in an attractive, neighbor-friendly kind of way.

I have twice transformed my front yard from grass to perennials, and both times the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. In Denver, I designed and planted a xeriscape that needed virtually no additional watering after getting established, and here in Oklahoma City, my partially-permablitzed front yard has four fruit trees (two peach, one apple and one persimmon) and has sported watermelons, summer squash, winter squash, thyme, oregano, mint, and peppers. Rather than find fruits and vegetables horrifying or bizarre, most people find food plants to be fascinating.

Luckily, I don't live in an area with restrictive HOA covenants or strict municipal codes that might torpedo my efforts, but I still try a little harder to keep the front neat and attractive, keep the flowers blooming, top off the mulch every year, and remove the weeds and the fallen fruit. I'm not always successful at keeping it tidy, but this extra care and attention helps make a front yard garden an attractive model to emulate, not to avoid. The work is repaid when my edible landscape inspires conversation, helps me meet other gardeners, attracts butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees, and produces so much fruit I have to give it away.

So if you need room for more garden, and want to expand to the front of your home, forge on! Work through the worries of neighborly disapproval, code enforcement, and pilfered produce. It's quite possible that not every single one of your neighbors will love your new yard, but so what? You can be a catalyst - a model for many front yard gardens, all cutting the need for chemicals, gas-powered mowers and excessive watering. All, cutting the need to import produce from Chile, Mexico, and China. All, symbolic of the world we are working for - a world of healthy local food, strong communities, bountiful biodiversity, and the simple, and subversive, act of sharing.

References:

Gaia's Garden, 2nd Ed. Toby Hemenway

Rosalind Creasey's Edible Landscaping (series)

The Edible Front Yard, Ivette Soler

Great Garden Companions, Sally Jean Cunningham

Six Strategies for Nonprofit Shoestring Budgets

2011-04-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

Do you feel a pressing need to help your community transition to a more sustainable and resilient economy and agriculture, but don't think you have the money needed to fund a Transition project or nonprofit organization?

If you are willing to work for free, fear not! You can start your own Transition initiative - workshops, film screenings, networking events, and permablitzes - with only a shoestring budget. There is one vital prerequisite: you need a core group of dedicated volunteers, ideally people who have a variety of community connections and are willing to donate their time to organize and market the group's events and other offerings. These people are the foundation of all your efforts and the heart of your organization.

Six strategies that will help get you started with a minimum budget include:

1. Partner with an established organization

In the United States, nonprofit organizations can obtain special 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from the IRS, which has obvious money-saving benefits, but requires an extensive amount of time and hassle to achieve. If you have a vision and mission aligned with a nonprofit organization that already has 501(c)(3) status, and they agree to sponsor your efforts, you will have avoided a lot of delays and paperwork headaches. These groups often have a budget to get you started, and resources are available to 501(c)(3) groups that are not available to other organizations (for example, discounted software and special bulk mailing rates). Additionally, if your sponsoring group has an established membership, you will automatically have a pool of contacts to notify of events, projects, and volunteer needs.

If you do decide to partner with an established 501(c)(3) or other organization, be aware that part of your efforts will likely go toward maintaining communication with their board, supporting their efforts (fundraising and otherwise), requesting permission for expenditures, and may require some compromises on your part. In most cases, if your relationship is collegial and the board lets you operate autonomously, the time spent is well worth the rewards.

2. Take advantage of free and low-cost marketing

You can design and market workshops, film screenings, fundraisers and other projects using Facebook, Twitter, and Constant Contact. Facebook allows you to create "events" and invite your friends, who can then invite their friends, and so forth. Constant Contact enables you to e-mail attractive event invitations to hundreds or thousands of people without automatically being relegated to the spam box. Facebook is free, while Constant Contact has a free starting promotion, which you can upgrade once you reach a certain number contacts.

Find your local listservs, which are e-mail groups that allow people to share information and ask questions about common topics of interest. There may be local food, environmental, peak oil, health, emergency preparedness, gardening, permaculture, or sustainability listservs in your area that you can use to spread the word about your group's offerings.

Note that online marketing will inevitably miss a portion of the population. If you are marketing to older people, or those who can't afford computers, be sure to include alternative marketing strategies such as posters and fliers in appropriate places, announcements in printed newsletters, etc. However, if you are not using Facebook to market, you will most likely be missing out on the younger (under 30) population, who may expect that all experiences will have an associated Facebook event.

3. Get free training or help from community or government organizations

Organizations and even governments in cities across the nation offer training, printing services, and help writing grants to small nonprofits. The organizations usually have names like "Community" or "Neighborhood" in them. Your state Department of Environmental Quality or city Sustainability Office may be able to provide you with materials, supplies, printing, or other helpful resources. Find these organizations and departments and use them.

You can also contact a group with a similar purpose (such as a Transition group) in a nearby city to see if they will help you get started, either via sharing resources (like marketing materials or presentations) or simply by helping you find the local government and other associations that assist small nonprofits.

4. Co-sponsor, co-sponsor, co-sponsor

Does your 501(c)(3)organization have limited funds? If you are organizing an event, try to find co-sponsors with common interests who will help pay for food and supplies, provide free space, loan you equipment, or help you market your event. Co-sponsors may also be willing to serve on your event team or help design the event. Co-sponsoring not only offers a way to obtain resources and supplies, but also increases the "reach" of your marketing, as your co-sponsors will be invested in helping your event achieve a successful turnout.

Volunteers in your core team will likely have contacts at art galleries, local co-ops, government groups, other nonprofits, universities and schools, and religious organizations and schools, all of whom tend to be sympathetic to the needs of other small nonprofit groups. Ask for the ideas and contacts of your group, and take advantage of them.

5. Easy fundraising

Fundraising often invokes images of gala events. But if your organization only requires a little money, you might not need something so complicated. If you, your core team and co-sponsors can front the money needed to pay for a film screening, or for event food / alcohol, you might be able to recoup much or all of your investment via a donation jar, especially if it is labeled "Funding Future Events," or by simply charging a small fee ($15 - 50) for workshops. This type of small donation could meet your funding requirements until you need and are able to get grants, larger donations, or hold larger fundraising events.

6. In-kind donations

If you have already gathered a dedicated group of talented volunteers, they are usually eager to contribute their talents - writing, graphic design, web design, organizational skills, and teaching skills such as permaculture or canning.

Volunteers or board and committee members are also often willing to "potluck" events by loaning the equipment and supplies necessary (such as glasses and tableware, tables, audiovisual equipment and laptops, etc.) and bringing a small item such as food, wine or beer, flowers, etc. This strategy allows each person to provide a small expenditure to fund an event - rather than having to spend time and effort fundraising to make the event possible.

And, of course, your group can request in-kind donations such as food, plants, prizes for raffles, space for meetings and events, and services from the very local businesses that you are likely promoting. This generosity is usually rewarded with ample recognition during your events or on your marketing materials, as well as a nice thank-you card and, hopefully, patronage from your core team members.

Transition OKC

We have used all these strategies at Transition OKC to be able to hold a training, informational events, several film screenings, over a dozen presentations, several workshops and networking events, and fund an e-newsletter, website, Facebook page, brochures and other marketing materials, with only a few hundred dollars of out-of-pocket expenses (paid by our sponsor Sustainable OKC as well as donations from the local Sierra Club Cimarron Group).

As we grow, we may need greater funding to accomplish our goals and may need to dedicate more effort to obtaining grants or donations. But up until now, through the dedication of my co-chair Shauna Struby and the generosity and ingenuity of our core team of volunteers and sponsors, who have donated their time, talents, resources, connections, in-kind donations, and money, we have been able to focus our energy on grass-roots education, awareness and networking rather than needing to spend inordinate amounts of time fundraising or writing grants.

Viva la volunteer!

EVOLVE Local Food Challenge

2011-04-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

Oklahoma City chefs will be creating tasty local food treats as part of Sustainable OKC's EVOLVE juried art exhibition and fundraiser, and our first Transition OKC juried Local Food Challenge this Saturday, April 23rd. Six notable chefs will be judged by a panel of foodies as the public enjoys their local creations and votes for the People's Choice award.

Check out the EVOLVE / Local Food Challenge Facebook event or buy $25 tickets (or individual sponsorships!) online here or at the door.

Local art -- food -- fun

Art exhibition jurors
Randy Marks, Groundwork
Stephen Kovash, Istvan Gallery

+ Oklahoma City's first juried Local Food Challenge
Who will use the most local food? Chefs, caterers & restaurants compete for a $500 grand prize.

Local Food Challenge contestants
105Degrees
Chef Kurt Fleischfresser
Chef Kamala Gamble
Prairie Gypsies
Chef Ryan Parrott
The Wedge Pizzeria

Local Food Challenge Jurors
Carol Smaglinski, food editor, Oklahoma Gazette
Chef Jonathon Stranger, Ludivine
Linda Trippe, The Lady Chef

+ YOU vote for the People's Choice Aware $1 raffle ticket = 1 vote

tickets $25 @ the door or online @ www.sustainableokc.org

Local Food Challenge organized by Transition OKC, a program of Sustainable OKC, www.goinglocalokc.org.

Music by thespyfm.com

Local Food Panel Discussion

2011-04-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked to moderate a Local Food Panel Discussion for an Earth Day event. Supposedly, this was targeted for a group of people that weren't already knowledgeable about local food. It didn't exactly work out, but the preperatory work was already done, so.... here it is, in case you ever need to throw together such an event.

I'm known for being extremely prepared, so this includes the introductory text as well as questions for the panel experts. I recommend reading whatever speech you write out loud once or twice, as grammatically correct text doesn't necessarily sound right when spoken aloud. There are also some decent tips here on moderating panel discussions.

**********

Welcome to the XXX Earth Day Local Food Panel Discussion! Thank you for coming, and please take a moment now to turn your cell phones off. Kathy will be available throughout the panel discussion to take your written questions, so feel free to give your index cards to her and we will take several questions from the audience at the end of the panel.

We have a trio of knowledgeable, experienced and passionate local food advocates here today to discuss the meaning and importance of local food, the latest developments in the local food movement, and how you can find and use local food for the health of your family and the environment.

Before we begin, let’s take a quick survey of the audience: Who here feels very familiar with what the local food is all about? Who is here to learn more about HOW to buy and use local food? Who is here to learn more about WHY to buy local food?

To start this discussion, what is local food and where did this movement come from? In the last decade, the popularity of books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, and films such as Super Size Me and Food, Inc., began inspiring citizens to question the dominance of the anonymous corporate food chain and to re-discover the value of fresh, humane, beyond-organic food grown and raised by local farmers and ranchers. Growth of local food since then has been phenomenal - the number of Farmer’s Markets has tripled nationwide since 1994, while our own Oklahoma Food Coop has increased from 36 members in 2003 to almost 4,000 today.

Local food has now taken a place as a key pillar of the sustainability movement, but the appeal is not limited to environmentalists. Fresh and healthy food appeals to mothers and fathers, physicians and ministers, and social justice advocates. Whether you lean left or right, whether you consider yourself liberal or conservative, we all have to eat. And to be healthy, we need to eat healthy food.

Our panelists today are Ryan Parrott, Stephanie Jordan and Chelsey Simpson. Ryan Parrott’s cooking career began at age 15, and he is now the head chef at the Iguana Mexican Grill, where he features local ingredients in many of his signature dishes. Ryan is also the founder and head chef at Table One, where all meals are designed around ingredients that are local and in-season.

Stephanie Jordan has a wide range of local food experience. She serves on the board of Buy Fresh Buy Local and as a local food advocate on the Sierra Club’s Executive and Conservation Committees. In her career as personal chef, she cooks primarily local food dishes sourced from the Farmer's Market and the ingredients available from Rose Ranch Jones. And most recently, she and her husband Doug began operating a transitional farm and ranch in Jones, OK.

Chelsey Simpson is the President of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. The OK Food Coop, started in 2003, delivers over $1 million per year of fresh local fruits, vegetables, grains, eggs and meat – straight from the farms to the consumers. For her day job, Chelsey works at the national Farm to School network, which connects schools with local farms in order to serve healthy meals and improve student nutrition. She recently returned from a trip to Vermont, where she explored their latest farm to school innovations.

Welcome to our panelists!

This first question is for all the panelists. What does local food mean to you and why do you support eating and using local food?

This next question is for Chelsey. What ideas or inspiration have you drawn from the local food movements of other cities and states? What are the missing links that we need here in Oklahoma City to grow and strengthen our local food system?

This question is for Stephanie. The average age of an American farmer is fifty-seven, and we need a new generation of farmers to replace the ones we are losing to retirement. What are some difficulties or obstacles you encountered as you began farming and how have you overcome them?

This question is again for all of the panelists. What do you see as the difficulties or downsides in using local food? This could be difficulties for farmers and ranchers, individuals, restaurants, businesses, etc.

This question is for any and all panelists. How does supporting local agriculture benefit our economy in Oklahoma City?

This question is for Ryan. You mentioned earlier that you use % local food in your restaurant. What changes would you have to see in our local food system infrastructure or supply in order to be able to double or triple that percentage?

For Stephanie and then anyone else. All the recent food movements - organic, vegetarian, school nutrition, and local food - have been accused of being elitist at some point. Is local food elitist? Why or why not?

What are the most important steps that our Oklahoma City or Oklahoma State governments could take to support the local food economy?

And finally, again for all the panelists, how would you recommend that someone new to local food begin? What one or two steps could they take?

And now we will take a few written questions from the audience.

Thank you again to both our audience and our panelists for your attention and participation, and thank you to our sponsor, XXX for organizing this panel. If you are interested in more information on local foods feel free to talk to the panelists after the session, take a Buy Fresh Buy Local guide, or visit the Sierra Club booth here at the Earthday celebration.

And now, if each panelist could share where they can be found online for further information. To start, I’m Christine Patton, co-chair of Transition OKC and facilitator of the Going Locavore local food networking and strategy group. We invite everyone to join us at Sustainable OKC's EVOLVE Local Food Challenge on April 23rd, which will feature creative in-season local food offerings from six local chefs. Transition OKC can be found at our website http://www.goinglocalokc.org/ and our Transition OKC Facebook page.

Ryan? ...Stephanie? ...Chelsey?

Force Multipliers

2011-03-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

Most approaches to "solving" our climate and resource crises focus on technology: replacing fossil fuels with a different technology (solar, wind, ethanol, nuclear), or increasing the efficiency of our current technology. We focus on increasing the efficiency of things which would then be used in the same way - adding insulation to single-family homes, or doubling the efficiency of single-user cars that sit idle in the garage and parking lot for the vast majority of their lives, or harnessing renewable sources of energy that would then continue to be used unnecessarily and wastefully. While these solutions may marginally slow the velocity of an economic and energy descent, they can't seriously apply the brakes to the very unpleasant net energy freefall that may be in store for our society.

Among the various solutions proposed to our predicament, the most promising innovation may be social innovation. Over the past one hundred years, we have manufactured vast amounts of things - houses, buildings, infrastructure, cars, machines, equipment, supplies, computers, networks, and so on. But these things - our already built resources - are often underutilized, or inefficiently used, due to our social customs, norms, habits, and expectations, and the psychology of status, privacy, and entitlement.

In our current situation, as we face resource depletion and burgeoning environmental crises, with little time to prepare and in the middle of a financial and economic downturn, with incredible debt burden and deficits, we need to multiply the effectiveness and utility of the resources we currently have. With little money to throw at these problems, we need to multiply the effectiveness of our conservation efforts (usually acknowledged as the biggest "bang for the buck"). This could be immediately technologically feasible, but would require social force multipliers: new (or renewed) attitudes and norms.

A force multiplier, in military terminology, is a factor that dramatically increases the effectiveness of an item or group. Military examples include troop morale, reputation, training, and so on. So a social force multiplier in this context would be an attitude, social expectation, or behavior that multiplied the force of conservation or efficiency efforts - or made a conservation or efficiency policy possible. These social multipliers would need to essentially reverse the last century of developments that have made all our conservation and efficiency technologies moot via Jevon's Paradox.

For example, how could we immediately, drastically increase the energy efficiency of a home, with virtually no investment? Instead of spending thousands of dollars upgrading appliances and HVAC systems, insulating and weatherizing, just to achieve a 25% savings, we could instead almost double the energy efficiency of a home just by doubling the number of occupants (new attitude and behavior). Most homes built in the last two-three decades have adequate room to provide several families and kids with their own room, possibly their own bathroom, so families could even maintain a sense of privacy.

This would have other environmental and personal benefits aside from a reduction in electricity usage. Two families (or multiple singles) in one home could reduce a need for consumer goods, because they can be shared by the families, could reduce fuel use through carpooling, and might decrease out of pocket payments due to cooperation in activities like babysitting, gardening, and cooking, even cutting the monthly rent/mortgage payment in half. It can also be fun to have other people around, cooperating and hanging out, rather than an socially empty house with each inhabitant communing separately with their electronic devices.

Simple, cost-effective, yet so massively unattractive under our current value system and cultural expectations that it is only considered as a last resort, after savings have been run down, unemployment exhausted, and foreclosures completed. To join forces by moving in with parents, siblings, or others (except in certain "allowable" instances such as college roommates or aging parents) is to have become a failure, to give up hopes and dreams and positive social identity, to be subject to ridicule and potentially lose the chance to mate. It is also to encounter serious personality conflicts, the necessity of getting along with people you may not always agree with, and finding methods to resolve problems in a way that doesn't make someone the loser. Ask any intentional community - it's hard work.

Another example: without any capital expense or technological improvement, we can increase the efficiency of a car by a factor of three if we carpool. Simple, cost-effective, but unattractive under our current value system which prizes independence, convenience, "freedom," and status over cooperation and environmental stewardship. It's also difficult in neighborhoods where community has disappeared and many people don't know more than one person on the block. For many people, the cost savings even at $3.50 a gallon isn't worth the trouble of having to find and coordinate rides and put up with the quirks and schedule conflicts of their fellow riders.

Other simple and effective (yet currently unthinkable) measures could have even more widespread multiplier effects. For instance, a Post Carbon Institute article examined a reduction of the speed limit to 34 mph. A lowered speed limit has many positive effects, some obvious, and some not so obvious. First, an immediate savings in fuel and CO2 emissions, a reduction in traffic accidents, plus an increase in demand for better and faster public transportation. Not so obvious, a speed limit this slow would allow many people to feel safe when walking or biking - which is, of course, an almost 100% reduction in fuel and CO2 emissions.

Again, a measure that requires no new technology or investment, but massively unattractive in a world of our existing infrastructure of suburbs, exurbs, and norms that value and in fact, demand speed and convenience over health, safety, or environment.

These simple ideas are not new or original. Many of these measures were popular during World War II, and are still common in other parts of the world. Yet if they were quickly implemented in a widespread way, instead of being despised as the lunatic fringe, these types of changes would go a long way to addressing the crises we face in the short term and would buy us time and money to make other investments in a sustainable future. Still, it seems that they have little hope of execution until a fiscal necessity or severe and prolonged energy shock forces them upon us, individual by individual.

Instead of waiting for a crisis to force these changes upon us, kicking and screaming, could we use social force multipliers - new attitudes, expectations, and behaviors - to transform these "unthinkable drastic measures" of conservation and efficiency into positive social ideals? Could American Joe and Jane embrace community, cooperation, reciprocity, interdependence, social interaction, health, and a future for their children as primary values instead of material goods, money, status symbols, convenience, independence, privacy, and "freedom" of consumer choice, as their prime motivators? Could we make sharing and cooperating a point of pride instead of a mark of shame?

Behavioral change is the most difficult kind to create, which is why I believe it hasn't gotten a proper focus: it's easier to promote the next new technology, gadget, or green energy source than to suggest a fundamental change of expectations and attitudes. Behavioral change also has a low profit margin, if any at all, which automatically decreases the marketing budget for it. But the next new technology doesn't have nearly the multiplicative force of a social innovation. So let's consider putting our money and attention where it counts the most. Could it be time to make the unthinkable - thinkable? The undesirable - desirable? Could it be possible to turn our lemons into lemonade, and have a really good time doing it... so everyone else will want to join the fun?

Small actions amid chaos

2011-02-21T07:52:00.000-08:00

Riots and toppling governments in the Middle East, states taking drastic measures to balance their budgets, oil and food prices rising. The implications of all this turmoil are enough to make me start breathing into a paper sack. I can't affect what happens in Libya or Wisconsin, but I can take action where I am, not only on my (semi-) urban homestead but also in my neighborhood and city.

Our neighborhood is beginning to organize, starting with small, simple actions like setting up a Facebook page, organizing a LitterBlitz, having regular meetings and newsletters with helpful information (weatherizing programs, useful resources, encouraging community action), and applying for trees for a tree-planting. We also hope to set up a neighborhood patrol. Eventually I hope that these baby steps with will result in greater community cohesion and trust that can be leveraged to build resilience.

Transition OKC continues to work toward supporting and expanding our local food capacity - the ability to feed ourselves. We have been facilitating meetings of a group of local food advocates for the past six months to help strengthen the existing network of local farmers and food entrepreneurs. Our TOKC team is also planning to host a Permaculture Design Course in the fall. I have wanted to take a full permaculture course for many years and I'm excited to finally have the opportunity.

On a smaller scale, a group of twelve of our friends is working to develop our own small gift economy. We have banded together to help each other become more sustainable and resilient through this extended recession, with more trouble on the horizon. We plan to support each other with growing, preserving and storing food, improving our homes, helping each other build our small businesses, and sharing and gifting items among ourselves. It's comforting to have this group to depend on during uncertain times.

Could chaos in petro-states lead to oil shocks, rapidly rising prices, economic shutdown, oil rationing? Could states slash budgets to the bone rather than raising taxes on wealthy corporations and individuals - condemning millions to homelessness, hunger and even worse? These are distinct possibilities, possibilities that we can deny, avoid, become angry or anxious and depressed, or do something about.

Although the scale and scope of changes that are coming are probably beyond our imaginations, even small actions can help ourselves, our families and communities deal with the future. We may never be 100% prepared, but any preparation is better than none. Any food storage, gardening practice, practical skill learning, any cash savings, is better than none. Any community building is better than none. You don't have to have a perfect plan or the perfect urban homestead or the perfect group to get started. Just get started - or take your plans to the next level. Today.

7 Ways to use Greek Yogurt

2011-01-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

Because I have potlucks to attend three or four times a month, and all my friends make food from local sources, I try to keep local ingredients on-hand ready to make potluck desserts and meals. One product that has saved my bacon many a time - when I fail to plan ahead - is Wagon Creek Creamery 's luscious Greek Yogurt, which can be incorporated into an amazing array of dishes.

At $6 for 32 ounces at the OSU-OKC Farmer's Market (and somewhat more through the OK Food Co-op), it's not too expensive - comparable or cheaper than the Fage brand available in stores here. Wagon Creek Creamery Greek Yogurt is made from milk from their own pasture-fed cows, which means that, according to many sources, it has a higher nutritional content - more CLA, Omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins.

Taste tests conducted by the Okla-vore showed that the low-fat and full-fat versions had equivalent flavor; and the low-fat version has no bizzare fillers as commercial low-fat versions sometimes do. So don't be afraid to get the low-fat greek yogurt - it's quite tasty.

And it's incredibly versatile - substituting for both sour cream or unsweetened yogurt! Use it plain to substitute for sour cream, or add some honey or sugar to make it sweeter. Here are just a few ways that you can use this healthy dairy:

1. A main ingredient for dips - tzaziki sauce, raita, herb veggie dip, and pumpkin dip come to mind.

2. A tangy, tasty topping for pancakes, waffles, muffins, oatmeal, or granola.

3. An ingredient for creamy soups.

4. Makes a great snack combined with fresh or dried fruit, or used in a fruit smoothie.

5. A great base for sauces like creamy curry sauce or for creamy pasta dishes.

6. A general sour cream substitute in dishes like seven-layer dip.

7. A handy ingredient for desserts or dessert toppings (like Peach Yogurt Pie or Bulgarian Yogurt Cake, for example).

As you can see, it's vital to have some on hand at all times.

More ideas and recipes are available here. If you live in Oklahoma, you can order the Wagon Creek yogurt (and other locally made products) from the Oklahoma Food Cooperative or find it at the OSU-OKC Farmer's Market (open year round on Saturdays). In case you are curious as to my fascination with this product, I have not been paid or been given free Low-Fat Greek Yogurt to write this post. I just like the stuff, and want Wagon Creek to stay in business... by the way, their butter is pretty darn good too...

PurBlood sales drop amid criticism, competition

2011-01-17T06:00:00.000-08:00

July 1, 2017 - - NEW ORLEANS --

PurBlood stocks took a tumble today after tepid sales during the second quarter and amid criticism of vampire elitism, falling $1.45 to close the day at $24.67 per share. Anthony Baker, blood activist and head of the non-profit organization Blood Equality, released this statement: "The very name PurBlood implies there is something wrong with the blood of some of us humans. We demand equal vampire treatment for all humans, regardless of what we eat, what we've been exposed to, what drugs we take, or what we've been doing for the last thirty years."

PurBlood spokesman Alexandar Conquel vigorously denied charges of enabling discrimination. "The PurBlood concept is that vampires can now accept donations from any consensual human donor, regardless of how polluted their blood may be. The PurBlood filter removes over 15,000 toxic chemicals from blood donations, including heavy metals, legal and illegal drugs, and even excessive cholesterol. It is an effective way to achieve blood that smells and tastes good, while eliminating the chemical additives inherent in modern human blood."

Some vampires credit the PurBlood filter with increasing their health and energy. London vampire Claudia van Huston says, "For decades, blood just tasted worse and worse and my energy level dropped to like, zero. Americans started to taste like McDonald's hamburgers left out in the car for a few days - with a side of ashtray. But now, it's like drinking blood from the Amish! I haven't felt this good since 1920. And my skin looks great."

Others report that the filter isn't worth the trouble. "With some vamps, the PurBlood filter is popular," reports 140-year old vampire Caroline Chamberlin. "I just can't stand it, though. Takes all the fun out of drinking, like drinking baby food, or a nutritional shake." She confides, "Plus, the blood donors don't like it either. A needle, hose, and blood bag is just not as intimate as a bite."

Some vampires who enjoy drinking in public have had difficulty adjusting to the PurBlood process. Nicholas Pellican, author of Tainted Blood: You've got to run away, shared his tips for vampires eating on-the-go. "Vampires don't have to go to Boulder, CO, to enjoy a night out on the town. I mean, a little tainted blood is not going to kill anyone. I just tell my readers, hey, when you get someone with bad blood, you can stop. You don't have to keep sucking to be polite. Thank them politely and just walk away."

The PurBlood filters also face stiff competition from the popular Blood Detective kit. Mattias Sandia, a Mexican vampire, uses the kit, which includes a health intake survey and a blood evaluation test that can be mailed off for an analysis, guaranteed to return in one day, or your kit is free. "Yeah, it takes a little bit of the spontaneity out of the whole process," says Mr. Sandia. "But these days, you have to be careful. I mean, really bloody careful."

Many vampires believe that these commercial products don't address the root of the crisis. Some groups, such as the Sanguine Conservancy, encourage humans to live together with the vampires as partners in green communities. Conservancy members live "off the grid" far from power plants and industrial manufacturing, grow organic food for their human blood-donors, and avoid products containing parabens, BPA, and other common chemicals. In exchange for enduring a thorough de-tox and adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle, human partners receive stipends, completely expense-free living, and guaranteed retirement.

Sanguine Conservancy spokesvampire Jessica Houston asserts that their approach is more beneficial for humans than a simple filtration product. "Essentially, we are helping humans reduce their body burden from what we call the "Toxic Trifecta:" toxic environment, toxic food and toxic lifestyle. Not only does this make you tastier, but also less prone to health problems, sickness and disease."

However, a powerful and well-funded new lobbying group, the Vampire Alliance for a Healthy Blood Supply, argues that lifestyle adjustments are not enough to protect humans from contamination. Robert Miller, head of the VAHBS, says "We are calling for strict regulatation of all new and existing man-made chemicals, especially the chemicals allowed in food and body products, and a clean-up of the toxic residues in the air, water, and soil. It's not only about what's good for us. After all, it's your blood, too."

PurBlood CEO Brendan Waters supports the proposed VAHBS regulation, but doubts that it will ever pass. "Legislators didn't regulate these extremely profitable toxins when child cancer rates increased. They didn't regulate them when the human breast milk studies came out, proving that mothers were passing on the poisons in their own bodies to their babies. If vampires think that Congress cares about their health, they've got another think coming. Then again, vampires do have the accumulated wealth of five thousand years. If anyone can make this happen through sheer brute force campaign donations, it's them."

2011: Living in interesting times

2011-01-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

Some economists have high hopes for 2011. The stock market has broken 11,000 and many predict GDP growth. I don't necessarily see a rising stock market and GDP as indicators of economic health, especially since the vast majority of stock market gains goes to a very small minority of people. The stock market may zoom, GDP may grow, but what will be happening to the majority of people - considering the forces and trends that are in play? Maybe it's my pessimistic side, but I continue to have some major concerns about the economy:

1. Municipal, county and state debts and expenses

States and cities are having trouble meeting their financial obligations (read: paying the bills), even after an influx of federal stimulus funds and some budget cuts. State revenues plummeted by 31% in 2009 from $1.6 trillion to a total of $1.1 trillion. Some states, like Illinois, are six months behind on payments of over $5 billion.

The states also owe an enormous amount in health care and pensions to their retirees in the Boomer retirement avalanche that started recently. Collectively, public employee retirement obligations are underfunded by $1 trillion. Eight states (including my own, Oklahoma) are underfunded by over a third. How's that for conservative fiscal management?

On top of the plummeting revenues and unfunded liabilities, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our infrastructure a "D" in 2009, and civil engineers estimate that governments (including state and city) must spend $2.2 trillion over the next five years to shore up the condition of our roads, sewers, water treatment plants, dams, bridges, and other infrastructure.

How will states, counties and cities meet their obligations to pay current employees, finance a cascade of retirements for another 25 years, and maintain our infrastructure, which is over 50 years old in many places? One hint: Meridith Whitney predicts fifty to one hundred "sizeable" municipal bond defaults worth billions of dollars over the next few years.

In addition to the aforementioned defaults, choices may include declaring bankruptcy, deep cuts in services, increasing fees and taxes, and cutting wages and benefits of employees and pensions of retirees. And, of course, continuing to let the infrastructure deteriorate.

2. The housing market

Although home prices have fallen over 20% over the last three years, median home prices have not fallen to the long-term "trend line." Some analysts have predicted further value decreases of 20 - 40 - even 80%. With homes forming the bulk of the assets of the typical American family, further price falls are likely to cause pain across the board: consumer spending, municipal tax revenue, lack of mobility to move to new jobs, ability of retirees to fund their retirements. Etc.

Interesting twist: the legality of the foreclosure avalanche is also now under serious scrutiny. With banks pulling all sorts of blatantly illegal shenanigans - robo-signing, fake witnesses, failure to transfer ownership documentation, etc. - will they be able to kick people out of their homes? We'll see how this plays out in 2011.

3. Employment situation

The U3 unemployment figure is officially 9.8%, or 15.1 million Americans. After adding people who would like jobs, but haven't looked in the past four weeks, and people working part-time but who would like to work full-time, that figure transforms to U6 - 17%. Additionally, the mean length of unemployment is the highest since 1948 - 35 weeks. And do these numbers even attempt to measure the impact of the recession (which is reportedly now over) on the millions of independent contractors and self-employed who have seen their revenues cut in half?

The real stories are those of people struggling to hang on, of people who are losing jobs, homes, and hope, of people who don't yet realize that life may never again be what it was - for them or their children. These problems have always existed, but are increasing in number as the middle class becomes hollowed out.

Hiring may improve, but it would have to improve quite markedly to employ even a fraction of the people who lost their jobs during the recession along with the new graduates hunting for a career.

4. Energy peaking and prices

2010 was the year that the International Energy Agency reported that peak (conventional) oil happened back in 2006, but continued to predict that our energy demands would be met by a combination of other energy sources, most of which are of lower-quality, riskier and more expensive to extract.

Oil prices are up around $90 per barrel again. In my opinion, still too cheap for the value of the energy we get from oil, but possibly beginning to push the envelope of what our extremely dependent economy can finance. Will prices cool off again, or will sustained high prices result in another economic crash? High energy prices have often preceded major recessions and depressions, so stay tuned.

Coal, just as much as oil, is fundamental to our economic and household systems. The assumption that coal could continue to fuel our way of life (via electric cars, for example) is implicit in many of the plans for an energy transition, especially if that energy transition has to happen in the next five years, since solar and wind produce only a very small fraction of our total electrical capacity. Now China is reporting that they won't be able to continue growing their coal production, resulting in potential increase of Chinese coal imports. Peak coal is now on the horizon.

5. Food prices

Food prices are again reaching the highs set back in 2008 due to a series of crop failures caused by extreme weather around the world. In 2008, rocketing food prices caused riots and social unrest. What will happen this year?

Food prices might be more of a cause for concern for the world's "undeveloped" countries, but food banks in America are also hard-pressed to meet demand, and one in seven Americans, or 43 million people, are already on food stamps (aka SNAP).

Conclusion

All that, and I even managed to avoid mentioning the $14+ trillion federal deficit! To be sure, we are living in interesting times, and 2011 could be one extremely interesting year. The economic, energy, and environmental indicators that I follow are negative, and the leaders of our world are not responding in a constructive way. As Jared Diamond observed in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Succeed, it's our response to crises that decides our fates.

Rather than acknowledging the true extent of our predicament, our leaders are fiddling with the deck chairs while they hold their breath for a deus ex machina - hydrogen cars, dilithium crystals, alien saviors, economic revivals, miracles. Like the rest of the world, I don't know what surprises 2011 has in store for us. But rather than hoping for the unsustainable to miraculously become sustainable, or a benign government to sprinkle fairy dust all over us, we need to get ourselves in gear and start creating communities, food systems, and economies that will hold the center, come hell or high water.

2010 Year End Evaluation

2010-12-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

2010 was a year of disasters - the Deepwater Horizon, Haiti, Pakistan, Russia, and some unpronounceable volcano in Iceland. Something new and incredibly depressing came along about once a month to top off the old and incredibly depressing - peak oil, climate change, economic inequity and financial instability. Despite that, we keep chugging along with our family and community preparations; trying to build fun and joy into our lives along with sustainability and resiliency.

We spent a fair amount of time trying to finish the house, preparing backup plans to heat and cook with an unreliable electric grid, and learning to cook with more local food. It seems like we will never be "prepared" enough, and sometimes I awaken with crushing anxiety that I've missed some critical piece of the puzzle, or that I'm spending my time in all the wrong ways. Still, I accomplished many of my 2010 objectives, though not all.

At least with family preparation I can cross goals off my list as I finish them. With community work, it's often the case that I don't quite know what I've accomplished. Was someone inspired enough to store some food, prepare for an oil shock, start biking to work? Without a good feedback loop, it's hard to evaluate. But I've been inspired enough by the efforts of other people - some of whom will never realize how they've changed my life - that I can have faith enough to keep trying.

What did we accomplish?

Garden/orchard

- Used a permablitz to upgrade the weedy spot in between driveways to a mini food forest with three fruit trees, herbs, and edible flowers. Watermelons and black futsu squash planted in "crop circles" out-produced my ability to use them, resulting in lavish giveaways.

- Preserved melons, 164 pounds of peaches, pesto, and okra via jamming, drying, and freezing.

- The tomatoes in the lasagna garden were a massive disappointment; possibly because of the shade in the fall, they did not recover from the usual mid-summer downturn. No tomato preservation this year.

Local food

- Purchased a freezer to enable us to buy a side of grass-fed, pastured beef from a local rancher. The freezer is so efficient we have not noticed an increase in our electric bill.

- Learned how to cook meat once per week. I was a vegetarian (pescatarian, really) for nine years and I have never really cooked beef.

- Purchased a super-insulated grill to cook steaks and allow us to cook during summer blackouts. Stocked an extra 50-lb bag of charcoal, but the grill will also work with wood fuel.

- Enrolled in an Egg CSA.

Home improvements

- Installed a Lopi wood-burning fireplace insert with a small cooktop (will hold a 6-inch pot/pan and a small kettle). Put in a stock of two ricks of wood. We have had an ice storm and a blizzard in the past four years and it makes sense to have a backup source of heating, including fuel.

- Installed bamboo floors, replacing worn out carpet.

- Replaced roof and gutters destroyed by a hail storm with a hail-resistant, lifetime warranty roof. In Oklahoma, that means maybe fifteen years.

- Still have paint samples on the walls from 16 months ago in my living room and kitchen. Still need to install a new mantle, since our old one had to be removed to satisfy code requirements related to the Lopi fireplace insert.

Finances

- Met our family's financial goals.

- Transferred savings account from large institution to local credit union.

Community

- Began facilitating the Going Locavore local food strategy group.

- Became the newsletter writer/editor of our neighborhood association.

- Held an educational Permablitz and a fall gardening workshop.

- Started getting together a small group of friends to help each other become more sustainable and resilient.

- Continued co-chairing Transition OKC - maintaining & upgrading the website, writing Facebook posts, revamping our bookmark, upgrading our OKC resources page, hosting a Discover Transition event, helping put on a Transition Training, participating in Sustainability Demonstration Center meetings, giving a few presentations, attending lots of meetings, helping promote events via Constant Contact e-newsletters, etc.

Enjoy myself

- Attended more delicious potlucks last year than in my first 30 years combined.

- Read an embarrassing number of pulp fiction novels.

- Wrote several satirical blog posts, which are fun to write, and hopefully make other people laugh.

- Went hiking.

How about you - how was your 2010?

Wheat Berry Buckets: The gift that keeps on giving

2010-12-21T12:03:00.000-08:00

Need a last-minute Christmas gift? Do you happen to have perhaps one too many 25-pound buckets of wheat berries laying around? Why then, you're all set! I admit that wheat berry buckets might not be the first thing that jumps to mind when you think "special holiday present," but here's my list of why WBBs are the perfect gift:

5. You can breathe a little easier knowing your friend / family member now has a start on food storage. Wheat berries can store for 20 - 30 years if kept properly protected; and 25 pounds of wheat berries ground into whole wheat flour can make about 75 loaves of bread. Not only can you grind the berries into flour, you can cook them like rice and even sprout them for extra nutritional value.

4. Although a WBB won't fit in a stocking, it is about the same price as a stocking stuffer.

3. You can't wait to see the priceless look on your brother's face when he realizes what his very large present actually is.

2. The buckets are reuseable: use them to carry compost, as an emergency sanitation station, to mix grout, or to catch shower water for your garden!

And the number one reason is...

1. They definitely DON'T already have one.

All joking aside, I brought a WBB to a Dirty Santa party and it was THE most stolen gift. Nine times, by four different people, by my count. The party was a Transition OKC party, with people who actually know what wheat berries are, but still - that's pretty popular! So, if you do have a family member who keeps meaning to start storing food, but just never gets around to it... or an adventurous friend with a yearning to find ways to cook more whole grains... well, you know what to do.

Bee havens

2010-12-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

Grist has a fairly damning article of the EPA's role in the epic honeybee decline over the last decade - the rise of colony collapse disorder and the decline of free pollination of thousands of crops, one of the many services that Nature provides. Apparently, the EPA granted Bayer "conditional registration" to sell the profitable pesticide clothianidin, despite warnings from the EPA's own scientists that the pesticide was "persistent" and "toxic to honeybees."

Scientists have not fingered clothianidin as the smoking gun of colony collapse disorder. No doubt loss of habitat, mono-cropping, other pesticides, and a host of other factors play a role. But does it make sense for the EPA to allow a pesticide that is extremely toxic to honeybees to be sold on the open market, even when the pesticide residues are expressed in the pollen and nectar of the flowering crops? Only in a world where we don't want to eat oranges, apples, pears, peaches, and plums, to name just a tiny percentage of the fruits we eat that are freely pollinated by bees.

So, as with most environmental issues, saving the bees is a matter of saving human food (although hand-pollination is an option, and even practiced in parts of China where the bees have vanished, it is hard to imagine.)

How do we "save the bees?" It seems like giving the EPA a swift kick in the behind might be a good start, but for all you non-political types (like myself), you can also do something at home. Here are three steps you can take to support bees - at least on your own property.

1. Create a bee-friendly environment by offering them plants that flower throughout spring, summer, and fall:

- Plant an insectary with flowering plants that bees love: lemon balm, borage, tansy, goldenrod, echium, mint, heather, salvias, lavender, coriander, thyme, elderberry, heirloom rugosa roses, and willow. Many of these are also medicinal or herbal plants.

- Plant a clover lawn, which has the added benefit of needing less fertilizers, pesticides, and mowing.

- Perhaps you could even let your dandelions flower - they are an important source of nectar and pollen early in the season, as well as being an edible medicinal "weed."

2. Stop using pesticides that harm bees (and encourage your neighbors to avoid them), and

3. Become a beekeeper. Bees don't need a lot of room, since they roam freely; and you have the added benefit of excellent pollination of your own crops and a steady, renewable, organic source of sweetness.

At my home, we have only taken the first two steps. We have a clover/dandelion backyard filled with flowering medicinals and herbals, and a front yard that has peach trees, catmints, salvias, and thyme. We don't use any bee-toxic pesticides on our property. At this point, I can only aspire to become a beekeeper. But who knows what 2011 might hold? Honey would certainly be a space-efficient, highly tradeable, multi-purpose, and valuable food to be able to produce.

An easy first step: community newsletters

2010-12-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

Are you planning to "build community" next year to help your community face the problems of economic downturn and energy decline? Here's a simple, time-efficient, way to start: take advantage of your existing neighborhood newsletter to promote your ideas. The newsletter published by my neighborhood association is distributed to over 600 households - people who are living near me, people I definitely want to be prepared and "skilled-up" for the future.

Contributing to an existing neighborhood newsletter is fairly simple to do, if you can get permission to write the articles. In my case, I happened to know the person responsible for the newsletter, who was really not interested in the job and had accepted it only under duress. He was happy to let me write the newsletter, and your local newsletter editor might very likely feel the same way. I now have the opportunity to share valuable knowledge and resources four to six times per year with all the people living around me.

Here are some ideas for useful, non-controversial topics:

Emergency preparedness,

Tornado / ice storm / hurricane safety,
Traffic / driving safety reminders,
Useful phone numbers,
Crime reports and statistics,

Saving money through energy conservation,

Community spirit / cooperation,

Gardening,

Free local resources (compost, mulch, trees, etc.)

Planting trees,

Neighborhood security / patrol,

Car-pooling,

Upcoming events, block parties, speakers, workshops, etc.

Offers for free homeowner assistance from government / non-profit agencies,

Supporting local food/economy.

So if you've got something to say, contact whomever is responsible and offer to write a quick few articles for your paper. I try to keep my contributions short, non-partisan, useful, and away from any controversy (peak oil, cough, climate change, cough). Here is a sample of three articles I wrote for our recent newsletter:

Neighbors Helping Neighbors

The economic downturn has affected many of our neighborhood residents, but economics are not the only reason to help a neighbor. Getting to know your neighbors, and helping them when possible, creates a much friendlier and safer neighborhood atmosphere. You will benefit as well!

What are some ways to help our neighbors? Here are a few ideas to start:

- Loan your neighbor a tool (table-saw, tile-cutter, etc.).

- Let them know they can borrow a cup of sugar or some milk rather than running to the store.

- Share extra produce, fruits or herbs from your garden.

- Carpool with them or offer to share rides.

- Are you handy? You could help insulate or weatherize their home to cut down on heating bills and uncomfortable drafts.

- Offer to shovel the snow from a neighbor's walk, or help them plant a garden.

- Keep an eye out for suspicious activity around your block.

Have you been helped by a neighbor? Share your story at X@gmail.com!

Are you prepared for the next ice storm?

The Ice Storm of '07 knocked out power for several days and caused property damage all over the city, and the Christmas Eve Blizzard of '09 snarled traffic for day. Are you ready for the next big one?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has these suggestions to prepare for a storm:

- Winterize your home: Insulate, caulk, and weatherstrip to protect for the cold.

- Winterize your car: Keep your car properly tuned and keep all fluids filled up; consider carrying sand for traction on ice as well as emergency items such as cold weather clothing and some food and water.

- Stock up: Make sure you have at least two weeks of food and water on hand, adequate fuel (i.e. wood or propane) for cooking and heating without power, plenty of warm clothes and blankets, and batteries for lights and radio.

FEMA has these suggestions to weather a winter storm:

- Listen to weather reports about severe storm activity.

- Avoid overexertion when shoveling snow; and be careful when walking on winter ice. Overexertion can lead to heart attacks (a leading cause of winter storm-related deaths), and falling on ice can break bones and cause concussions.

- Use extreme caution and maintain ventilation when using kerosene heaters.

- Watch for signs of frostbite and hypothermia.

Don't be caught unprepared! For more information and tips on emergency preparedness, visit http://www.fema.gov/.

Local Food Year-Round

Summer season for local produce is over - but don't worry, you can still get food fresh from your local growers! There are several options for finding local food in the fall and winter:

1. The OSU-OKC Farmer's Market is open year-round on Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm at 400 N. Portland Ave.

2. Oklahoma Food Co-op members can order from the Co-op online at oklahomafood.coop every month.

3. The Local Food @ Market C offers a selection of locally raised meat, eggs, freshly picked produce, and baked goods at 401 NW 23rd every Sunday from 11 am to 3 pm.

Resilient Gardener Winner

2010-12-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

And the winner chosen by the Random Number Generator is...

Number seven, esp! Please comment in with your name, address, and email address (which will not be published), and I will mail you a copy of Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener. If you do not comment in by end of day Thursday I will feel free to do another drawing.

You may be interested to know that Amazon named The Resilient Gardener one of the Top 10 Home and Gardening books of 2010! If you would like your own copy, or a gift copy, you can order the book for yourself from your local bookseller, from Amazon.com, or directly from Chelsea Green, which is holding a 35% off sale with free shipping on orders over $100. FYI.

Happy holidays!

Resilient Gardener Book Giveaway

2010-12-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

Finally, a gardening book written for gardeners dealing with the realities of peak oil and unpredictable weather! Carol Deppe's book The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times describes how to grow, store and cook "the five crops you need to survive and thrive - potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs." Ms. Deppe covers these topics in a way that details, as she puts it, how to garden to "the appropriate level of sloppiness," using just enough time and effort to get the desired results, instead of how to garden to a fossil-fueled vision of perfection.

Carol Deppe, a Harvard-educated biologist with over thirty years of plant-breeding and gardening experience, has distilled an incredible store of knowledge into this book, which tops the scales at over three hundred pages long. In the book, she discusses:

- Growing food in an era of unpredictable weather

- Gardening with little to no irrigation or store-bought inputs

- Keeping a flock of ducks/chickens and growing most of their food

- Saving seeds and breeding plants

- Storing crops

Ms. Deppe's unique perspective, which sometimes goes against conventional wisdom, kept the book both amusing and interesting. How often do you find gardening books with sections entitled "Why I Hate Drip Irrigation," "Why I Don't Compost Anymore," and "The Power of Pee?" She is also not afraid to take a stand on nutritional topics, and although I found the chapter on celiac disease a little distracting, I can see that the information might benefit many people.

Her discussion of diet and nutrition related to the five main crops, and especially her discourse on the specifics of storing foods and saving seeds, seems particularly versatile. As Ms. Deppe said in an interview with Makenna Goodman on Alternet, The Resilient Gardener is as much about storing and using food as it is about growing it, which makes the book as helpful for people learning to cook and use local food as it is for gardeners. While the sheer volume of information related to some of the topics was overwhelming at times, I think these sections may be worth their weight in gold when they are needed.

As usual, I found myself wishing that a gardening book had been written by someone who lived in Oklahoma. But can I really fault the author for living in Oregon, which has a very different climate than we have?

To sum it up: The Resilient Gardener covers a wide range of subjects, in great detail, that will interest people who plan to garden in a post-peak, unpredictable weather kind of planet. Carol Deppe is not afraid to defy conventional wisdom, and is brave enough to discuss some taboo topics. The Resilient Gardener also garnered rave reviews from Toby Hemenway (author of the permaculture classic Gaia's Garden - one of my favorite books) and Gene Logsdon (author of Small-Scale Grain Raising and Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind).

So if you find yourself intrigued by this review, sign up to win a copy of The Resilient Gardener by leaving your name in the comments (no anonymous or non-U.S. lower 48 registrations, please). I will announce the winner on Wednesday morning. And if you don't happen to win... this book might make a great (i.e. useful) gift for the gardener in your life.

Final note: Because of the series of posts I wrote on resilient gardening, Chelsea Green mailed me a free review copy of The Resilient Gardener, however, I am keeping that copy for myself and sponsoring this holiday giveaway on my own dime.

Income to rise 564%, predicts Int'l Economics Agency

2010-11-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

* Commentary for Peak Oil Review (Does not necessarily reflect ASPO-USA's position.)

Nov. 15, 2010 - PARIS -- The International Economics Agency today released their World Income Outlook, which predicts an incredible 564 percent increase in the median world income over the next three months. IEA Chief Economics Officer Brandon Blighted reports, "Our meticulous research clearly shows that an overwhelming majority of people, especially the Chinese, want more money - a lot more, in fact. With demand for income rising, it appears that the economy has little choice but to produce more well-paying jobs and excessive bonuses. That's what we're assuming, anyway."

According to projections, and despite a combined under and un-employment rate of 17.6 percent in the U.S. in October, the yearly median world income will increase from 5,000 to 27,500 by the end of this year, with the median income for American households increasing from 30,500 to 167,000. When asked what currency the figures are in, IEA spokesperson Hope Hillston laughed. "Dollars, yuan, pesos, euros, what's the difference? It's all money."

IEA authors divided the skyrocketing income gains into several categories. The "Existing income from existing jobs" category has been steeply declining for the last several years, with average continuing declines projected at 8.3 percent. The largest category, "Projected income from currently non-existent jobs," steadily increases to compose an astronomical 90 percent of income by the yer 2020, when the average Chinese peasant will be making 95,000.

Some people reported confusion surrounding the charts. "I don't get it," engineering student Jon Sherwood said. "Are they saying that these cushy jobs will magically appear just because people want money? Did they take their methodology straight from The Secret, or has someone been dropping a few too many hits of acid before work?"

Economic experts were confident in the WIO. "Your average schmo on the street doesn't appreciate the intricacies of economic forecasting, especially the part where we examine bloody, eviscerated pig entrails," commented Economics Professor Phillipson Lumpy Jr., of Wharton University. "But as I always say, why look a gift horse in the mouth? I can have complete confidence in this fantastically optimistic report without any nitpicky factual discussions. Let's pop open the bubbly, shall we? Jeeves!"

Government officials were visibly relieved by the news, which seemed to temporarily alleviate mounting demands from constituents to "do something, as long as it doesn't involve austerity," about the failing economy. Most members of Congress were reluctant to discuss the details of the "Unconventional income" category, which is rumored to consist mostly of organ sales, gambling, and infant surrogacy. However, many Congresspersons appeared confident that the economy could indeed produce heretofore undiscovered, yet incredibly lucrative, careers from new and exciting technological advancements in the next three months.

Congresswoman Barbara Baker (D-CA) was especially exuberant. "Look at the possibilities for upper middle-class jobs... Moon Base construction engineers, hydrogen car marketing managers and Fountain of Youth development chemists. Just think what we can do with the payroll, state income and sales taxes from these new industries. I can't wait to build some much-needed highways. And a corn ethanol processing plant!"

Alternatively, analyst Stefan Stanislavsky at the Association for Economists Waking up and Smelling the Coffee (AEWUSTC) was openly skeptical. "In many ways, this report is an improvement over prior years: at least the IEA is not predicting a $5.5 million median income like they did in 2006. Unfortunately, we don't believe that a 1,347,000 percent increase in the number of hedge fund managers is a viable way to grow the economy. And frankly, the inclusion of $48,500 quarterly bonuses for Burger King cashiers in the income projections seems somewhat unrealistic. If that happens, I'll eat my hat."

Inside sources at the International Economics Agency expressed some reservations about the jubilation surrounding the Outlook. "I'm not sure the mainstream media understands the whole 'income has peaked and we're not sure what will fill the gap' thing. I'm a little disappointed, because I thought someone might have gotten the hint from the category we named "Income generated when monkeys fly out of my butt," but evidently not. Maybe they just haven't seen Wayne's World."

He confided, "When reading this report, you need to crank up your bulls*^t detector by about five notches. Then crank it up another ten. That's where it should be when you start interpreting projections that we created specifically to keep from getting lynched by a pitchfork-wielding, suit-wearing mob, while still trying to avoid frying in Hell for perpetuating the assumption that we can indefinitely expand the economy."

The IEA insider added, "It's a tough balancing act, kind of like mud-wrestling three rabid pitbulls while playing a Tchaikovsky violin concerto. Seriously, man -- I'm freaking exhausted."

Hell announces Pilot Colonization Program

2010-11-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

December 12, 2011 -- Ninth Level of Hell, Expansion Division

Hell today announced a new Pilot Colonization Program to relocate demons, devils, incubi, succubi, and Damned Souls to the surface of the Earth, starting as early as 2012. Lucifer Jr., Senior Executive Vice-President of Hades, explained the rationale behind the new program: "From our perspective, warming Earth temperatures offers an infernally perfect solution for the overcrowding we've been experiencing in Hell for the last 66 years. As the planet heats up, Earth will present a terrific opportunity for Hell's growth and expansion."

A vocal group of protesters, including the Vatican, immediately filed suit in national and international courts to prevent the colonization program. A representative of Pope John Jacob II spoke forcefully against the plan. "A demonic occupation would be a disaster for humanity. Demons are notorious for soul possession and for corrupting government and business officials, plus Greed, Lust, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Violence, and Sloth. And don't even get me started on the problems with projectile vomiting."

However, legal experts say that Hell's colonization of land owned by various Satanic holding companies is all perfectly legal. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, an avid property-rights advocate, observed, "Some people say that Demons belong in Hell. I tend to agree, but Satan has purchased this real estate through legitimate and proper channels. What would happen if we tried to just nullify all the contracts that we didn't like? Chaos, that's what!"

Several sources in Hades appeared skeptical about the colonization. Lesser daemon Beelzebub Cramer said, "Upper management is trying to portray the surface as some sort of 'Land of Opportunity' where ambitious young devils can set up Eternal Punishment shops to alleviate the population pressures we've been having in Hell. But why can't our Soul Recruitment Department just lay off a bit? If they would scale back their notoriously aggressive quarterly soul targets, it would solve the problem pretty quick."

Some advocacy groups point to Hell's nefarious plan as simply one more reason to slow, and reverse, the effects of climate change as soon as possible. Groups like 350.org have proposed many practical solutions - renewable energy, transitioning to a steady-state economy, increasing public transportation, systematically redesigning walkable cities, and radically increasing the energy efficiency of buildings.

Others call these proposals "unrealistic and expensive." Economist Julian Stein commented, "Sure, the prospect of having one's faced gnawed off by a demon might be frightening to some people, but that's far off in the future, like next year. We need to deal with the here and now, and that means stimulating economic growth at any cost. We really don't have any choice - no matter what the grisly consequences might be."

Peak oil offers a tiny glimmer of hope for those uneasy with the planned demon colonization program, as recent reports from the U.S. Military have indicated that oil production will begin to fall within a few years, and remaining oil and coal reserves will be less profitable, of lower quality, and generally harder to extract. Non-profit groups, such as the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and the Transition Network, have pointed out that Hell's Colonization Program is simply one more excellent reason to immediately cut our use of fossil fuels while transitioning to a more sustainable future.

Chief Climate Enhancement Engineer and resident of the fourth level of Hell, Asmodeus Dimon, describes the Hellish dilemma: "At this point, only the toughest and hardiest Demons can survive on the surface. We need the Earth to warm up several more degrees to accommodate our Denizens. But will we be able to achieve our target level of heating with the lower-grade, harder to extract, and more expensive oil and coal that's left? We're betting we can. And you know what? We invented betting."

Lilith Jones, head Project Manager of the Pilot Colonization Program, said of Hell's acquisition of thousands of square miles of tar sands, deepwater oil, and shale deposits, "First, speaking on behalf of my fellow demons, I'd like to thank you humans for the excellent job you've done in laying the groundwork for this project. Without your child-like stubbornness, complete lack of foresight, and disregard for the health of your fellow humans, this Program would simply not be possible."

She continued, "But in the case that fossil fuel exploitation becomes unprofitable and you humans lose your appetite for destruction, we stand ready to burn every last drop of oil and every last lump of coal we can get our claws on."

Archangel Micheal spoke from his corner of Heaven, where an unprecedented number of prayers was waiting in his inbox. "Look, I sympathize with your predicament, but God likes to help those who help themselves, if you know what I mean. If you want to hop on the clue train, here it is: QUIT BURNING FOSSIL FUELS. And plant a few more trees, while you're at it."

The Archangel concluded, "You've got a choice - continue your short term pursuit of an indecently inequitable, prodigiously polluting, and irrationally growth-obsessed economic system and face an Eternity in the new Hell on Earth, or use your imaginations and make another leap of evolution. Although some of us advised Him against it, God gave you free will - now, you make the call."

Radically honest man tarred, feathered

2010-10-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

December, 20, 2010 - Oklahoma City, OK ---

Police removed local geologist Matt Price from the Petroleum building where he was hanging for two hours after being tarred and feathered by disgruntled former friends and colleagues. Patrolman Derrick Quinn reported, "We had to wait for the angry mob to disperse. Man, do they hate radical honesty."

Anonymous sources confirmed that the incident began a little after 5:45 pm, when Mr. Price abruptly commandeered the podium from the Keynote Speaker at the State Department of Energy conference. Reportedly, he asked conference attendees, "You think you'll be drawing a pension in ten years after the state pension fund defaults?," and going on to say, "Infinite economic growth on a finite planet is impossible. The fact is, we're all going to be poorer than poor. This is the beginning of the end for America... I just hope we can keep the water running and the lights on."

Assistant Vice President Wendy Bingham observed the tarring and feathering but did not participate. "I didn't feel like the mob would respect my authority if I told them to stand down," she said. "First there was the shouting and stripping, and then someone got on Twitter and all of a sudden there were like ninety-five people here. Some of them had torches. But I have no idea where the tar came from."

"I'll say this for Matt - he didn't go down without a struggle. Last thing I heard, he was yelling something about humanure."

Mob participant Andrew Jacobs appeared sheepish after the incident. "At first Radical Honesty wasn't so bad. It was like, 'your breath smells like wet dog,' and other funny s%^t. Then Matt started reading some whacked-out website called TOD or LATOC, or something. That's when he started talking about NINJA loans and net energy returns and Export Land Models. I wouldn't have minded too much except he always turned out to be right. Why couldn't he understand that too much reality is painful?"

Crowd member and college roommate Jason Brinks was still pumped from the excitement of the event. "Whoooo, that feels good!" he reported. When asked how Mr. Price had antagonized him, Mr. Brinks said, "Well, mainly he suggested that inviting my thirty closest buddies to Vegas for my bachelor party was going to create enough carbon emissions to drown a couple of children on some island somewhere. Man, I don't need that on my karma. But I really, reeeeeally want to go to Vegas."

Matt's cousin Monica was also spotted in the crowd, although she claimed to be an innocent bystander. "I have to give him credit. Matt wanted to improve the world with his Radical Honesty, because he had some idea about not being able to solve problems if we couldn't talk about them first. I could handle the info about resource depletion, unprecedented species extinctions, frightening levels of topsoil loss and imminent planetary eco-cide. But then he started talking about all these kinds of 'flations, telling me there wasn't going to be any retirement left and no college for the kids. That's when it all got too serious, and I had to block him on Facebook."

After being removed from the flagpole off the second story of the building, Mr. Price admitted that the Radical Honesty program was "considerably flawed." He went on, "Dr. Blanton says that you need to be totally honest to be in real relationship with other people and that lying is the primary source of modern human stress. Basically, that turned out to be BS. My wife left me after I was radically honest about my attraction to her sister, my parents still aren't talking to me after I said they'd be dead in five years if they didn't lose sixty pounds each, and frankly my prospects for promotion at this point are looking pretty slim. Also, being tarred and feathered was highly stressful. Way more stressful than lying."

Close friend and closet prepper "John Smith" was credited with preventing a lynching. "That mob was hungry for blood, but they eventually settled for torture and humiliation," he said. "I tried to warn Matt this would happen. You can't really be truthful about this stuff with people who wouldn't know an exponential population curve from a hole in the ground. It's too far out of their experience, it's too overwhelming. That's why I go with sugarcoating and manipulation. Positive spin, that's how I roll."

When asked if he would continue with the program, Mr. Price replied, "Hell, no. I thought people would respect me for my principled, honest assessment of reality, but it didn't turn out that way. So now I'm going back to regular old silence and deceit - right after I get someone to clean this tar out of my crack."

The iFinger

2010-10-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

February, 2012 - - - East Coast Federation, United States

Apple today announced record sales of the recently released iFinger implants. Although smaller than the iBellyTop and the iForearm, the iFinger continues the concept of a wafer-thin chip-screen embedded in the human body, available around the clock and at any location for viewing Internet, videos, and music. Apple proclaimed, "The iFinger technology will change life as we know it across the planet forever in every way possible."

The iFinger, like it's implant predecessors, continues to be attacked by some consumer activists. Public Interest Research group spokesman Brad Wither criticized the iBody line of technology, saying, "Reports from consumers clearly show that the nuclear battery is prone to leakage, which could be a major carcinogen both in the body and the environment." Apple headquarters refuted this assertion, claiming, "None of our studies have shown that nuclear leakage has led to cancer, in humans, yet, as far as we know." Since the chip-screen technology has only been released in the last 6 months, it is unclear which federal department regulates the nuclear-powered implants, and currently there is no government oversight on the production or disposal of the technology.

With the million-iFinger mark passed on Monday, it's clear that consumers are embracing the progressively smaller media implants. Local consultant Seth Godead exclaimed, "I'm totally the coolest person at my office! Aside from the other fourteen people who have one."

The iFinger has experienced some consumer backlash, however. About 5% of consumers report that the implant leaves their fingers itchy, red, and twitching. Others report excruciating pain at the implantation sites. Apple's public relations department commented, "We sympathize with our consumers and are actively working on advancements to address this concern. In the meantime, that's what Oxycodone prescriptions are for."

Some companies are not as enthusiastic about the chip-screen implants their employees have adopted. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a national marketing manager reported that all his iBody employees were "drugged-up zombies who make annoying clicking sounds when they type and can't complete a sentence," and continued, "Thanks for nothing, Apple."

The United States leads global iFinger sales even as unemployment passes 29% and foreclosures continue to break records. The iFingers, which are much less expensive than the iBellyTop or the iForearm, have proven popular among the homeless, who otherwise lack access to mediatainment. Apple salesmen report that their homeless clients appreciate the nuclear batteries, which don't need recharging, and the associated cochlear implants, which have been reported 88% effective in drowning out snoring.

It remains to be seen whether the iFinger will live up to Apple's promise to change life as we know it across the planet forever in every way possible. Despite advances in communications, information, and entertainment over the past decade, some believe that recent technology improvements have contributed little to the quality of life of the average person. A growing grassroots movement demands that corporations and government redirect their attention to address "critical issues" such as the massive economic crisis, climate change and peak oil, claiming that all available resources need to be focused on finding effective solutions for these problems.

Others deny a connection. NYU freshman Simon Barknut III, Jr. , asks, "OK, but, what do something change and peak whatever have to do with my Constitutional right to implant nuclear technology in my finger and my God-given freedom to watch Internet porn whenever I want, whether I'm in McDonalad's, the library, or driving home drunk from a frat party? Nothing, obviously!" He added, "This is precisely the kind of freedom our troops are fighting for in Overthereistan."

Five Reasons to Plant Trees Now

2010-09-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

To some people, planting a tree is the epitome of the environmental cliche. Planting a tree seems so simple, so easy, so... low-technology. In the midst of the economic upheaval we are experiencing now, in the face of massive challenges such as peak oil and climate change, why should we plant trees? What good could it possibly do?

1. We will soon urgently need trees for fuel.

Space heating uses 30 - 40% of the energy consumed in our homes. Our current heating sources are primarily heating oil, natural gas, and electricity (from natural gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric dams). Heating with these sources is dependent on having an affordable supply of these fuels as well as an economy with decent wages and a safe and dependable infrastructure (pipelines, roads, extraction operations) to deliver the energy around the country. All of these - supply, economy, and infrastructure - are becoming less reliable.

In most of the non-industrialized world, wood is still the primary source of heating and cooking fires, and has been for thousands of years. Certain characteristics of wood give it an advantage over other choices: it can be stored and used as needed, it requires little up-front investment or special technology, it can be produced locally in most places, it can be renewed, and before deforestation arises, it is often relatively cheap. As the production of fossil fuels wane, and their cost waxes, I believe that wood will eventually return to dominance as the heating fuel of choice in our part of the world as well.

Ideally, we would all have Earth-sheltered or passive solar homes that require little to no heating fuel. However, without proper initial design or timely retrofits, most people will heat with wood again in the long run - hopefully in a sustainable and healthy way, by reducing our need for heating fuel and by using efficient technologies and forestry practices. If an area has an abundance of forests, wood from trees may be able to be harvested sustainably. If not, the area will likely experience deforestation (with all the problems that entails) and will have to import fuel, or may even be eventually abandoned.

2. Trees provide food.

Trees produce many different types of fruit (apples, peaches, pears, oranges, plums, figs) and nuts (pecans, almonds, chestnut, walnut), which offer an important source of fat, nutrition, taste and sweetness. Unlike annual crops, trees only need to be planted once, minimizing soil and nutrient loss, and are easy to integrate into an urban landscape.

Using permaculture techniques, a "food forest" can integrate trees with shrubs (blueberries, blackberries, raspberries), perennial vegetables and herbs (thyme, oregano, mint, rosemary, etc), and even annuals. This approach to food cultivation creates a more stable and diverse ecosystem, since the soil does not need to be plowed and planted every year. It also yields a significant amount of food per square foot.

More and more people are beginning to recognize that industrial agriculture is unsustainable due to the massive quantities of fertilizer and oil required to lubricate the system that is destroying our biodiversity, our topsoil and our wildlife. If we want to have fruit in a post-peak world, we may need to grow it in our own neighborhoods - or within a few miles.

3. Trees can be a source of income.

Local food and fuel are poised to return to the prominence they enjoyed for all of human history (except the last forty years). Someone will need to provide that food and fuel, but many people in densely populated cities don't have room to grow their own fruit, nuts, and firewood, or they simply don't know how. People who have the space, the knowledge, and the foresight to plant now can help meet the critical need for non-fossil fuel subsidized food and fuel.

Trees can provide income year after year. A well managed forest can yield wood not only for personal use, but also for sale as firewood or lumber. An orchard can provide food for the family and for sale or barter. Anyone who plants trees for these purposes now could be investing in a source of income for years in the future. The simple act of planting a $10 tree can yield hundreds of pounds (and dollars) of produce for years thereafter, with only a little yearly pruning, thinning and harvesting.

4. Trees can mitigate the effects of severe weather.

The effects of climate change are already being seen. Scientists, farmers, gardeners, and people who live in canary areas (the poles, islands) are witnessing the effects of drought, habitat change, and ice melt. Over time, the changes will become increasingly more obvious, probably in the form of more severe weather.

Trees can help mitigate the effects of many types of severe and more extreme weather. They hold the soil to prevent erosion from downpours and flash floods. Holding the soil (and decreasing the soil temperature via shade) also prevents desertification and duststorms. The shade cast by trees decreases the effects of harsh heatwaves, and trees can usually survive drought much better than smaller plants. They can absorb carbon to help prevent the worst excesses of climate change, and they can provide habitat and food for other species that make up our ecosystems.

5. Trees make an area more liveable.

Our lives are going to become more local. Perhaps we should start to pay attention to what "here" looks like, feels like, and can provide; pay attention to whether the places we live are places worth living. Trees help cool an area, cut electricity use and cost, and soothe the eye - all while providing the benefits mentioned above.

One of the easily anticipated effects of an unraveling economy and a declining supply of oil is a need for cheaper modes of transportation, namely biking and walking. If we are to transform our urban areas to be walkable and bikeable, we will need to make them more pleasant than the baked scrubby Bermuda strips that now predominate (in Oklahoma City, anyway). A helpful, but perhaps overlooked, way to encourage pedestrian transport is to plant trees.

Trees not only provide shade, but in groups and clusters, they cool an area down. The difference between walking down a shadeless street vs. a shady street in 100+ degree heat can be more than 10 degrees - the difference between walking and staying at home, in my experience. Various sources estimate that trees shading a home can cut air-conditioning costs by 30-50%, which will also decrease the strain on our aging electrical grid.

When air-conditioning becomes unaffordable (or electricity becomes unreliable), shade from trees could make a place bearable. And shade is not just a matter of comfort, as many people (elderly, infants, people with health issues) can suffer from heat distress, and even death from heat stroke in extreme cases.

Not only are trees useful, but they are beautiful. Their green soothes the eye. Their spring blossoms remind us that winter's harsh reign is almost ended, and their multi-colored fall leaves remind us that the baking heat of summer is over. We will need beautiful places to live once we can't escape to info-tainment all day long and a seaside/mountainside/forested vacation several times a year.

Any one of these reasons should be enough, but all of them together make planting urban trees, food forests, and managed woodlots an important part of any resiliency effort. Trees aren't a cliche - they are a keystone of the environment, and therefore, our future. Since trees take many years to reach maturity, we need to plant a variety of fruit, nut, and shade trees now, wherever we can feasibly and safely do so. For food security, for heat in the winter and shade in the summer, for income, taste and nutrition, for a place worth living, plant a tree this fall.

The Gathering Hordes

2010-09-02T07:01:00.000-07:00

Rome, Italy - CE 400

Proponents of the so-called "barbarian invasion" theory today warned of the "potentially disastrous" effects of hundreds of thousands of Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals plundering the imperial capital, including death, despoilment and dismemberment of the populace, and destruction of the city's ancient architecture and temples.

Senator Titus Claudius scoffed at the authors of the Foreign Barbarian Invasion: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management report, saying, "Obviously, these people have warned of barbarian invasions before - and look - Rome is as rich and prosperous as ever." The Senator went on to proclaim that because of the unlimited amounts of land left to conquer and the unparallelled might of the Imperial army, no barbarians could ever pierce the walls of Rome. Additionally, the Senator said that preparing for an imminent invasion would divert needed funds from temple building and wine production.

The Foreign Barbarian Invasion report is the most strongly-worded warning yet about the conquering hordes problem, and was issued by a respected think tank commissioned by the Roman Legions to study the Barbarian issue. Lead author Consul Maximus Romeus comments, "We don't know the precise date at which the barbarian horde(s) will invade. We do know, however, that other cities in the empire have been sacked and burned, and that barbarian forces maintain a quick, mobile force on the edges of our imperial reach. An attack on Rome is inevitable. The effects of such an invasion are so severe that we should begin to prepare for when the barbarians decide to attack."

Consul Maximus Romeus goes on to list recommendations such as planning for strategic evacuation of the populace, limiting further imperial expansion, land reforms for farming sustainability, and a halt to the building of additional temples, public baths, coliseums, and palaces which have drained the treasury and taxed the peasants into extreme poverty.

Foreign Barbarian Invasion is the third report concerning destructive invading hordes released this year. Other reports from the Vestal Virgins and the Apollonian Order were issued in the spring and were similarly downplayed by the Senate.

Several high-profile Roman groups commented on the report. Roman Empire Research Associates (RERA) issued this: "We refuse to believe that Rome could be invaded, despite any overwhelming so-called evidence to the contrary. Rome is the center of the universe, blessed by the Gods, and has never been conquered in modern history. Rome cannot fall."

Another respected group, the Roman Defense Institute, had a different perspective. "Although the threat of barbarian invadors is real, we simply need to expand the army and build higher walls. These innovative steps will address the problem without disruption to our way of life or economy."

Representatives of Transition Rome, a small but growing group of citizens concerned about the "barbarian invasion" problem, commented, "This paper only confirms testimonies which have been gathered from across the empire. While we don't know when the barbarians will invade, our low levels of grain storage, depleted farmland and treasury, expensive costs of maintaining a standing imperial army, and high levels of debt and poverty make Rome more vulnerable than ever to attack, and so it only makes sense to prepare for the inevitable. Plus, preparing for an invasion will be fun."

Harvest fresh salads all winter!

2010-08-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

Photos courtesy of Trey Parsons

Want to harvest fresh salads all winter? In Oklahoma City's mild climate, a little protection will often enable you to grow lettuce, kale, spinach, carrots, beets, kohlrabi, and a whole range of cold-hardy crops far past the first freeze, even into the spring.

Transition OKC recently hosted a workshop for gardeners to share tips for fall and winter gardening. The workshop was facilitated by Joseph Glosemeyer, Master Composter and Biodynamic Gardener with over 30 years experience, and Shauna Struby, successful winter gardener. Shauna presented her how-to tips from the previous two winters, when a sheet of plastic held up by a simple stake system enabled her family to save $236 on organic salad greens each year. Participants donated $5 to support the work of Transition OKC and Sustainable OKC.

The gardening group examined the many advantages of fall gardening, such as less labor (watering, weeding), fewer insect problems, increasing the use of your garden real estate, and of course, harvesting fresh salads all winter. Workshop participants discussed vegetables that perform well in our Zone 7 fall and winter, including garlic, bok choy, kale, arugula, mesclun mix, and Egyptian onions. Other topics included planting times, watering tips, and types of protection such as deep mulch, plastic and floating row covers, cold frames, miniature hoop houses, and the tricky question of where to find freshly harvested bamboo. After the discussion, the group adjourned to creating a miniature bamboo hoop house.

Host Christine Patton readily admits that the miniature bamboo hoop house is an experiment based on diagrams sourced from Eliot Coleman's Four Season Harvest. The mini-hoop house is a simple construction of green bamboo bent into hoops and secured by the edges of the raised bed (and possibly industrial sized staples if the edges don't keep the bamboo in place); a floating row cover or plastic, and bricks to secure the row cover. Bamboo was selected because it is a renewable, local, low-energy, non-toxic and free resource; but if it is not available, PVC or metal hoops can also be used.

If winter protection seems troublesome or confusing, don't let it stop you from planting your fall garden! You can be harvesting fresh salads until December in our mild climate, even without a hoop house, cold frame or floating row cover. Check out this handy document for fall planting dates, or pick up a planting guide from Horn Seed!

Fall Garden Incoming

2010-08-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

Oklahoma gardens look like hell in August. Scorched, blistered, and withered - despite mulch and constant watering. The two bright spots are my okra plants, which are still pretty and prolific, and the crop circles that we installed during the Permablitz, which have exceeded my hopes. The two watermelon and two Black Futsu winter squash vines have gone wild and covered almost the entire 300 square foot area between my driveway and our neighbor's driveway, and quickly growing watermelons and squashes dot the plants (shhh ... don't tell the squash bugs!).

Luckily, every year, while the garden is burning up in August, I can look forward to September, when we plant the fall garden. I love fall gardening in Oklahoma. A lot fewer weeds, a lot less watering - a lot less effort overall. And then, when frost nears, we can protect the crops a la Four Season Harvest and harvest fresh salads all winter.

Actually, I confess, I've never protected the fall garden before - just watched as the kale survived and everything else perished in the snow. This year, however, will be different! We are building a miniature bamboo hoop house to cover the crops and, based on the experience of my friend Shauna, we'll be eating well through the winter. Although Shauna used insulating cold frames covered in plastic, we'll be using row cover held just above the bed to extend our season. Closer to winter, we'll cover the hoops with plastic instead of row cover to provide more protection. I hope this will do the trick - like most of my gardening, it's an experiment.

I have one garden bed that we will be planting with fall and winter crops that like cold weather. I'll plant garlic, onions, bok choy, three kinds of lettuce, spinach, carrots, kohlrabi, Chinese mustard, arugula, beets, and maybe some kale. Last year everything loved our fall weather and grew easily until frost. After frost, only the kale survived over the winter to explode with growth in March. This year, we'll protect everything with the miniature bamboo hoop house over our garden bed except for the garlic, which doesn't need protection.

My husband and I harvested the bamboo for the hoop house from our friends who live four blocks away. The bamboo is an experimental substitute for the metal and PVC hoop houses that I've seen. Bamboo is strong, not to mention free, local, renewable and toxin-free. The smaller bamboo poles are more bendable than the larger ones, and we've already installed them in the beds so that they will dry in the hoop shape.

Then, in the spring, I'll replace the plastic winter covering with netting. I use netting to protect my seeds in the spring from birds and squirrels. In the past, I've used simple stakes to keep the netting off the plants - but they do tend to poke holes in the netting, so I hope that the bamboo hoops will work better. Stay tuned for pictures next weekend!

Burgundy Okra

2010-08-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Okra is coming in by the handful. The "Burgundy" variety okra plants are beautiful, with burgundy stems and creamy yellow flowers, and crimson-veined leaves. They make a good front-yard garden plant, if your backyard garden space has reached full capacity.

Besides the beauty, I also love okra because it is pest-resistant, a major plus in an area wracked by squash bugs and spider mites. Did I mention the drought resistance, which means that I only have to water them every four days instead of every day in the middle of this August dry spell?

Okra is also quite nutritious. It contains the antioxidant glutathione, important for the immune system and liver detoxification, and contains more fiber than cereal - 4 grams per 35 calories (about one cup). All that, and quite a lot of protein for a vegetable - 3 grams per cup! According to Jonny Bowden's "150 Healthiest Foods on Earth," calorie for calorie, "Okra is high in calcium, magnesium, potassium, vitamin A, vitamin K, and folic acid."

But despite the beauty, nutrition and toughness of okra, many people are not familiar with this easy-to-grow-in-Oklahoma vegetable. What DOES one do with okra? Here's a short list:

Skewer and grill them whole with Cajun seasonings (I took this to a potluck recently and people were swearing off fried okra forevermore)

Roast sliced okra in the oven / Sun Oven

Add to minestrone

Use in gumbo

Use in Indian-inspired dishes and curries

Saute okra, pepper, and tomatoes and serve over rice

Freeze it for use in the winter and spring

Pickled okra

What are your favorite ways to cook okra? Ah, ah ah - fried okra doesn't count!

Locavore stories

2010-08-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Our Going Locavore group wants to expand and support our local food movement, and we have a plethora of ideas from our brainstorming session. But.... which ones would be the best investment of our time/attention/money? Which ones would have the greatest effect?

One of the ideas that evolved from our meeting last month was to sponsor a "Transition to Ten" percent local food purchases, similar to this challenge sponsored by Transition Colorado. I also like the 80/20 challenge, sponsored by a Transition group in Britain, which promotes buying 80% local and 20% organic and fair trade - for both local food security and international solidarity. That one may be too ambitious for us, though.

When I think about my own (partial) transition to local food, I realize that it took me several years just to increase our percentage to 15 - 30% local food (eggs, beef, in-season fruits and vegetables, wheat flour, cheese, yogurt, honey, beer). The main factors in my transition were:

an increasing awareness of the importance of local food, (motivation)
realizing that many of my friends were dedicated to local food, (social support)
expanding my own garden and mini-orchard, (skill/knowledge)
learning to preserve some food, (skill/knowledge)
learning to eat more seasonally, (skill/knowledge)
finding a local source for eggs and beef, (supply) and
a much improved farmer's market (supply).

So my question for you is: How much local food do you eat? Is there something that encouraged, inspired, or supported you to make the transition to eating locally? What did you have to do to make the transition?

Easing the pain

2010-07-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

Food processing season is upon us. Lately, I've been making pesto, dehydrating and freezing peaches, and freezing chopped okra. Yesterday I attempted sun-dried tomatoes in the Tulsi Sun Oven and baked banana bread in the Global Sun Oven. The sun-dried tomatoes didn't dry quite evenly, so I popped them in the Sun-Oven-cooked ratatouille for dinner (delicious). Those Sun Ovens came through for me yesterday!

But getting to my point: I don't necessarily like spending hours in the kitchen chopping and processing food by myself. I'd much rather be reading a book or taking a walk or cruising the Internet. Luckily, I've discovered a solution that makes food preservation much easier, virtually painless, almost....enjoyable?

It's simple. My solution is: listening to Peak Moment Television while I work. I like to hear about positive actions that people all over the country and world are implementing: permaculture, urban homesteading, and building community, and I enjoy listening to interviews with our beloved peak oil authors and activists. Time, which might otherwise crawl or limp, just flies by. And I feel rather virtuous for accomplishing something rather than just sitting in front of the computer. So go on - get started on that applesauce, tomato canning, or pesto! Peak Moment TV is standing by to keep you entertained during your labors.

Transition OKC gets rolling!

2010-07-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging as much as I used to. That's due to all the exciting Transition OKC projects that have been going on and ramping up. Our coordinating team spent several months laying the foundation for our work - discussing the Transition Handbook, hosting a Training for Transition, and getting guidelines and Constitution in place (neatly stored in PVC-free binders, thanks to Shauna Struby). And finally, when our team gained consensus on our mission, vision, and goals, a tsunami of creativity and energy was unleashed. Let me fill you in...

Going Locavore

Although our local food champions are very active, they don't often have a chance to get together to discuss strategies, share updates and success stories, and plot ways to expand the local food market. Enter TOKC, which has started sponsoring Going Locavore happy hour potlucks to get these fabulous people in the same room. After one meeting and some intense brainstorming, our next meeting is slated to focus in on the most promising of the hundreds of ideas and start serving up some local food projects!

Sustainability Center

The indomitable Susie Shields gained massive inspiration from the "Hands" portion of Rob Hopkins Transition Handbook and vowed to create a Sustainability Demonstration Community Center. She has gathered a diverse team of architects, permaculturists, sustainability pros, and industry and government folks to forge a way forward with this dream. The Education and Programming and the Site Selection subcommittees have already been brainstorming and researching. Yes, we have subcommittees!

Reskilling Videos

The members of our TOKC coordination team all agree that reskilling workshops are a great way to spread the ideas of Transition. Valuable skills, education, not-so-subtle hints about the end of the world as we know it (just kidding), networking, food and/or beer and wine - all rolled into one! But what about a way to spread reskilling beyond the 10 or 20 people that can make it to a workshop?

Luckily for us, Trey Parsons of Enersolve is ready to take on the challenge of creating a set of short reskilling videos to share information about how to cook with local food, install a rainwater catchment system, weatherize a house, use a Sun Oven, grow a garden, make pesto and peach jam and sun-dried tomatoes, and more! I'm excited about working on this - it will give us the chance to run around all over the metro asking questions of interesting people and maybe learning a few things ourselves.

Movie Night

Several of our team members - Vicki, Marcy, and Susie - are working to get a quarterly movie night started at OCU. Movies raise awareness about environmental problems, the economic crisis, peak oil, climate change... and start a conversation about how to address the issues. The Sierra Club has been having movie night for a long time, but the new quarterly schedule and larger venue will allow TOKC to market to a wider audience and increase participation.

Permaculture Design Course

Randy Marks of Land+Form and Shauna Struby are in the early stages of working with Permaculture teachers to design a course for Oklahoma. I can't wait - I have always wanted to take a PDC but have never been able to take two weeks off to go to Oregon or Florida or upstate New York. Permaculture offers an integrated, principled way of thinking about the world, which will be so valuable to us as we re-think and re-design a system that currently is based on extracting resources and destroying ecosystems in order to maximize profit for a few people as fast as possible - in short, the opposite of sustainable.

Outreach and Media

Our Going Local OKC website has been enhanced with completely new navigation, new look and a lot of new content. Shauna, Trey and I redesigned it to be more user-friendly and, well, just more friendly overall. Plus, we needed to expand it to be able to contain all the new info we'll be posting on our projects (see above), as well as our handy OKC Resource pages (six at last count). Check it out!

We also tie our continually updated media, like the Fresh Greens blog, the Sustainable OKC Twitter feed, and our TOKC Facebook into our website. Thanks to TOKC and SOKC volunteers for keeping it fresh and updated.

But wait, there's more!

Susie just created a Buy Fresh Buy Local Farmer's Market guide and she and Marcy are working on the complete "Big Book" guide. We are planning to redesign our printed materials, offer a fall and winter gardening workshop, and continue to spread the word with speeches, presentations and facilitated discussions.

So there you go. The whole team - Shauna, Vicki, Marcy, Susie, Trey, Adam, Jim, Joseph, Chase, Randy, and moi - have all been working hard. If you are in our area, I hope you are able to join us at our next workshop, join our Facebook or follow our Twitter! But I promise, I plan to keep blogging along here at Peak Oil Hausfrau, the only place I get to express my doomy side. :)

Dreamweaver

2010-07-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

A hard rain began to fall in the middle of last night.

I had been having a fairly unremarkable dream about touring a McMansion with a ridiculously large number of rooms, which recently had been redecorated. I couldn't believe it had a music room, and a play room, and a gymnastics room, all for the children.

When it begins to rain, I look out the window. I have a huge picture window that allows me a clear view up the very steep hill that we live on, and I can see that the house a few hundred feet above me on the hill is in poor repair. With all the storms we've been having, and the hail, there are large holes in the roof. I wonder why they have not yet been patched, or at least covered with a tarp. It looks dangerous to live there. The storm is breaking over us, the rain coming in violent waves. Aren't they getting wet in the rain?

Just then a ferocious crack of thunder makes a section of the roof cave in, and part of the walls begin to fall. A brick breaks away, slowly tumbling down the hill and narrowly missing my house. Oh, God! I wonder if they are OK up there.

I wonder if I should run up there and help my neighbors, and if so, what I can do. As I'm staring up the hill, with a phone in my hand, considering dialing 911, I can see a girl trying to climb out of the house, where dust is still rising from the rubble of the partial collapse of the roof and the wall. Bits of the house are still rolling away from the wreckage.

The girl manages to get up on top of the rubble, when suddenly she slips and falls. She starts to tumble. She hits a jagged rock and careens downhill. I stare, frozen, as her body crashes toward me. She lands directly outside my window, her bloodied head facing my way, her eyes open. I can see that she is barely a teenager. She's dead.

At that point, I realize this: when that disintegrating mansion falls, it will slide down the hill and completely obliterate my own house.

I wake up crying.

Documentary of hope

2010-07-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Many people who have seen the End of Suburbia, Collapse, or Food, Inc. can tell you how their thinking, even the course of their lives, have been changed by these films.

One movie, especially, has been inspirational to many people interested in peak oil - The Power of Community, a documentary that showed how Cuba was able to survive during their "Special Period," when oil supplies were cut by half and food supplies were cut by 80% to this tiny island nation. It has given many people hope after discovering the reality of the tumbling crises of peak oil, depleting resources, Ponzi economics and climate change.

We now have a chance to see if the process of re-building resiliency can occur on a completely different tiny, impoverished island nation - Haiti. A new documentary, "Hands that Feed," will explore "the agricultural collapse in Haiti, its role in the post-earthquake food crisis, and the emerging grassroots development models that seek to restore Haiti's food supply and environment."

The burning questions: can Haiti escape the dependency trap of international aid and "gifts" of seed from Monsanto? Can they turn a deforested nation into one of food self-sufficiency? This may be their last chance - international aid will not be around forever, and what will happen to them if they haven't developed their own food systems by the time the money runs out?

So check out the Hands that Feed film concept at their funding request site. A film like this could be an inspiration for many of our own community transitions. As humbling as it is, we too have lost the ability to feed ourselves without long, drawn-out, oil-dependent agricultural supply chains, and I bet we have something to learn from the process of reinvention going on in Haiti right now.

I hope that Josh, Matthew and Ketty will be there to capture the unfolding events that are happening right now - but they won't make it without a little help. They have 113 "backers" (angel investors) excited about their project, but they need more if they are going to reach their funding goal in time to film the critical events. Take a look!

Note: I don't personally know the filmmakers, but I believe this film has a lot of potential to benefit Transition groups, community builders, and local food movements around the world. So I will be making a donation - and if the film gets produced, I'll get a free copy as thanks for my gift!

My ah-ha moment for the year....

2010-07-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

According to this graph, sourced originally from Dailyfinance.com, 10% of the people in America controlled 90.3 % of the wealth in stocks, bonds and mutual funds in 2007. Wonder what that percentage is now? They seem to be on track to control 100%, leaving nothing at all for the rest of the 90% of the people - except for housing equity and cash savings, and we know how much of that there is going around.

Interested in an enlightening talk about the relationship between a Ponzi economy, deflation, depression, and peak oil? Check out Stoneleigh's presentation (minus the slides) to the Transition conference. Yes, you do have to listen an hour + presentation without visual aids. Buck up - I did it, and it was worth it.

Not New, But Improved

2010-07-15T06:58:00.001-07:00

After a year spent nursing my son in this rocking chair, it developed some issues. Namely, a small tear in the seat, which soon widened when it caught the fancy of my toddler. We simply could not persuade him that pulling stuffing out of chairs was not fun.

But otherwise, the rocking chair was still comfortable, if a little worn after thirty years of service. Soooo.... my husband, who is a very Handy Man, dismantled the chair and removed the seat. We bought a yard of faux leather to cover it for $10 from a fabric store, and asked Pop to recover the seat (mainly through liberal use of a staple gun, but also with some nifty rolling edges).

Voila! We spent $10 vs. an estimated $250 to purchase a new chair, and prevented the old one from ending up in a landfill. We also saved time and hassle because we spent less time recovering the old chair than the time it would take to shop for a new (or used) one.

After starting to read the Story of Stuff last night, I'm extremely glad we repaired our old chair. In the condition it was in, even the Goodwill might have kicked it to the curb. So by keeping it, we saved thousands of gallons of water used to produce the raw materials, prevented toxic chemicals used to process the material from ending up in the groundwater, kept metal mines from destroying ecosystems and polluting streams, and drastically cut transportation fuel for shipping the raw materials and final product.

Even if we eventually decide to replace the chair, it would now be sent to the resale market instead of ending up in the landfill. Not bad for a $10 investment.

Peachy Keen

2010-07-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

It's peach season, and peach season means delicious tree-ripened peaches - and lots of work.

We have two semi-dwarf peach trees (JH Hale and Hale Haven) which ripen mostly in tandem for about three to four weeks. Not all the peaches ripen at once, so I squeeze the little fuzzies every day when they start to turn tawny to catch the ones that ripen early. If they give slightly, they are tree-ripe, the sweetest kind. However, I pick some of them before they are fully ripe so that I don't have to spend a marathon few days picking them when they are completely tree-ripened (which would KILL my shoulder). Even though we have semi-dwarf trees, I still have to use a ladder to reach about half of them. Ah, the benefits of being 5'2".

We eat them fresh, with oatmeal and for snacks, and give the prettiest ones away to neighbors, friends and family. I usually give two grocery bags to Granny, who will can them up and then share her sandplum jam, cucumber pickles and canned green beans with us. I always include this caveat - "I don't spray, so cut them up before you eat them. :)"

Lately, I have also been spending about an hour every day dehydrating my harvest to make peach chips, which my son absolutely loves to eat, and which I love to feed him, because it's not a food-substitute like animal crackers or goldfish. Strangely, I don't make many peach cobblers or other peach desserts in-season. I think it's because I am too tired after spending an hour peeling and chopping peaches for my Nesco dehydrator. A load of peaches takes about 12 - 14 hours to finish drying, and amazingly, translates to only slightly more than a pint when completely dried.

Despite the hours spent thinning the peaches in the spring, and a later rough hail which knocked many immature peaches off the trees, we have another bonanza crop this year! I am weighing the harvest from my two trees, and have recorded 102.5 pounds so far - not counting the first two sets of dehydrated peaches I made. I estimate I have another 50-75 pounds still on the trees. In years past, I have frozen and canned them and canned peach-pie filling. This year I will be satisfied with just making peach chips and peach jam. Right now I have six grocery sacks of peaches sitting on my kitchen floor. I gave my shoulder and forearms a break yesterday, so it's back to work today!

Peach trees are a commitment to properly care for, to harvest and preserve, but I have to admit that NOTHING else I grow even comes close to the bounty I get from them. 150 - 175 pounds? Not small change in my world. If I were to preserve all these peaches, instead of giving them away, it would be enough to keep us in constant peaches year-round. Plus, the trees are beautiful when they bloom and beautiful when the peaches ripen. So despite the commitment, and the work, I love my peach trees. I'm growing them for the food security of my family, for the taste of organic peaches year-round, as a demonstration/example for our neighborhood, and also, because it's really kind of fun to run a mini peach farm in the city.

Hot and bothered

2010-07-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a strong believer in having AT LEAST six months savings available to pay for emergencies, for everyone who has the capability to do so. That has proved helpful in the past, for example when I was starting my business and had very limited wages. This last month, all that saving sure proved to be a blessing after a series of unfortunate, bothersome events.

A few weeks ago, we had to have some expensive plumbing repairs performed. Which, actually, only involved unclogging a drain. Yet it was a particularly critical drain, located between the kitchen sink and the washing machine, which received a lot of traffic. The drain wasn't completely clogged, but it was clogged enough so that every time the washer drained, the kitchen sink backed up with fetid slime. I could put up with that, but it was also overflowing at the site of the washer and it started to erode our drywall. I began to worry about mold. So, the problem had to be fixed.

Of course, the drain happened to be a kind which is tricky to unclog (it even has a special name which eludes me at the moment). Three visits from the plumber, one repaired ventpipe, two plumbers on site, one rental of a special plumbing camera, three holes cut in the drywall and the kitchen cabinet, and three visits to the roof later, we had a clear drain. One plumber jigged some celebratory "you da man's" while the other smiled modestly. And there went $800.

NEXT. We started out on our weekend getaway, my first vacation in a year. Halfway to Tulsa, the Prius began to show some belligerent signs of uncooperation. The brake light came on. The car shifted into neutral. And the A/C stopped running. I shall file the three hour return journey, in which we had to stop the car every five miles to let the car cool down, in 95+ degree heat with an unhappy two-year old, under "character-building / third-world-living experiences."

I can't blame the Prius, which had been giving us signs of anxiety for a few weeks in the form of giant red warning lights on the dashboard. I DO blame a certain Toyota dealership for not fixing the problem after two visits to their shop AND an oil change, all of which was done before we left on our getaway. Thanks for nothing, Dub Richardson. And there went another $650 and a vacation that didn't happen.

Finally, the computer, which began emitting a strange smell last Monday. At first I thought it was my toddler playing with matches. The smell was somewhere between sulphur and chlorine, and later proved to be a very abused DVD writer that had blown a fuse and shut down my five year old computer for almost a week. It was an interesting lesson in e-withdrawal for someone who is used to being connected to e-mail, blogging, and doom-news all day long. Thanks to my husband's co-worker hardware genius, we now have a working computer (temporarily, at least).

So there you go - accidents happen. Things wear out and break, repairs need to be made, appliances need to be replaced, and not necessarily in nice tidy affordable three-month increments. Sometimes they all pile upon you at once - and you might suddenly realize that the property taxes and car insurance are also due that month. That's when it pays to have some cash in the bank... or some really, really, nice relatives.

Of course, at some point, these repairs will no longer be affordable for many of the formerly middle-class, and that's when workarounds start to become permanent. Families will learn to share one car instead of using two; people will start line-drying their clothes because the dryer died; occasionally some will have to haul water by hand when the city can't repair the water line for two months; and others will become quite glad they have a cell phone, all their important information backed up or printed out, and a library - because they can't afford to replace the computer that just gasped it's last, wheezing breath.

Until then, I'm glad I'm a saver.

Frau's Garden June 2010

2010-06-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Deepwater Horizon event continues to depress me. However, since I can't seem to do anything about it aside from reduce my own dependency on oil, and continue building community / raising awareness, I'll just keep gardening...

The 13 tomato plants in my garden have made a startling comeback from the hail downpour last month and are setting fruit like crazy. This is good, because they typically shut down and stop producing during the heat of the summer - which is usually much of July and August. The exception is the smaller varieties like cherries and Juliets, which just keep going... and going....

Unfortunately, the tags for most of the tomato plants mysteriously erased themselves, leaving only blank white markers. So the plants that I raised from seed are currently incognito, although the five I bought from Horn Seed as insurance have been neatly labeled. However, most of the varieties are somewhat unique (Black Cherry, Carbon, Orange Banana) so I believe I will be able to identify them once I start harvesting. Since I hope to save seed this year, it will be important to know which plant is which.

My Burgundy variety okra are looking lovely. They are just toddlers here; eventually they will get to be eight feet tall and I will have to bend them halfway over to harvest them. I planted them between a butternut squash (which has two squash already) and an Orangeglo watermelon so the long vines could run in between the tall okra. Will this work out? Stay tuned....

Like the tomatoes, I may have gone a bit overboard with the okra. I planted eight or nine plants this year, because last year I didn't have enough to freeze and I missed their mucilagesnous-ness in my soups all winter. Fried okra is a Southern favorite, but I don't fry. Instead, I use the okra in soups and curries/Indian dishes. I hear a local chef also grills them whole, and since "you haven't had okra until you've had her grilled okra," I will just have to learn that method, too.

Here, a cantaloupe is flowering in a front yard crop circle near the echinacea. I hope no one runs over my cantaloupes - I will endeavor to keep them out of the driveway.

Right now, we are harvesting the end of the kohlrabi (a very underappreciatd vegetable), a daily handful of blackberries, and gearing up for the peach harvest. Because of the hail, it may not be a bumper crop. But mark my words, there WILL be peach jam.

Local Food Fair

2010-06-16T02:25:00.000-07:00

An evening of local food (and don't forget local beer) at a cool local landmark is this Thursday - the annual OKC Local Food Fair! Local food will be on display for sampling and purchasing. I went last year, and there was a lot of smiling, music, kids running around, and yumminess.

What: Local Food Fair, hosted by the Sierra Club and Buy Fresh Buy Local

When: Thursday, June 17th, 6:00 - 9:00 pm

Where: At the barn of the Harn Homestead, 1721 N Lincoln Blvd, Oklahoma City

Cost: $5 for 18 - 64, free for veterans and other age groups

Transition OKC will be tabling, so drop by and see us!

New Reports Page

2010-06-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

Please note the new page at the top of my blog - Reports and Resources (the font is so dark, it's easy to overlook). I plan to make it a repository for the most authoritative and educational materials available to persuade your friends and families that they need to ACT, and act soon, to prepare for the current and incoming financial/economic/energy upheavals.

Currently, it includes presentations from Chris Martenson and Stoneleigh about the relationship between finance, the economy, and energy/oil, as well as reports from the U.S. Joint Forces, Lloyd's of London, etc (sources that people view as authoritative and credible). This won't be a comprehensive listing, but a very selective one. Your average Joe doesn't know who Richard Heinberg is, but do they know the United States military? Yessirree bob.

I plan to add reports from Roscoe Bartlett and Matt Simmons, among others, and may create a Climate Change section as well. I'll be expanding it over the next few weeks, and hopefully this will become a handy resource for you. Feel free to submit your suggestions for additions (authoritative/high-profile and educational) in the comments. Thanks!

Mother Earth Award Belated Acceptance Speech

2010-06-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

I was honored over the weekend by the Oklahoma Sustainability Network, who presented me with the 2010 Mother Earth award for Sustainability Education, in recognition of Peak Oil Hausfrau and my work with Transition OKC. Naturally, I had no prepared remarks and so I mumbled something ridiculous about thanks and please head over to http://www.goinglocalokc.org/ for more information about Transition.

Please, forgive me my deer-in-the-headlights moment, because what I meant to say was THIS:

*****************************************************

First, thanks to my nominating committee of Shauna Struby and Vicki Rose, who spent a significant amount of time on my nomination. Knowing that you cared enough to write such lovely things about me is just as important to me as a formal award. Thanks to Shauna for reading my blog and recognizing that I was itching to get out behind from my computer and into the community. All it took was an invitation.

Next thanks to my wonderful husband, whose support, encouragement and (ahem) income allow me to spend so much time doing something so financially unproductive. Much like having a child, writing a blog and starting an unfunded non-profit community project are very rewarding, but not monetarily. Dear hubby has also never complained once about the dust bunnies that accumulate while I write (shhh - don't tell him they're there!).

Thanks to my only child, who despite not actually helping me with either of my projects, is very motivational. When my son was born, I realized that I held his life in my hand with my decisions. Should I prepare for the certainty of declining energy and economic turmoil? Or should I stick my head in the sand and embrace the pleasant fiction that all will be well without any personal effort to insulate my family against rising food and energy prices, uncertain food supply chains and unemployment? The responsibility for my son inspired me to greater heights of preparation.

Thanks to the bloggers and others who have listed me on their sites, including Crunchy Chicken, Sharon Astyk, Chile Chews, and Energy Bulletin, and all the other people who have listed me on their blogrolls, given me or nominated me for an award (i.e. Uber-Amazing, Fun to Read, Sunshine Blogger, Environmental Nutjob), posted a link to my site, Tweeted / Facebooked me, or just told a friend to visit. I appreciate you for spreading the word - and I enjoy reading your blogs as well!

And finally, thanks to you, my readers. Sitemeter informs me that people are visiting, whether or not they leave comments (HINT ;)). I started this blog as a way to help people by sharing information about the things I've learned in my preparation for peak oil - about solar cooking, gardening, useful books, rainwater tanks, food storage, paying down debt, etc. But it is also a platform for harsh reality checks, a forum to debate and share ideas, and a place to support each other in our transitions to a vastly different way of work, play, and living.

Dear readers, in the last two years, I hope I've amused you:

What's Your Letter?
Dear Universe
So God walks into a bar....

offered some inspiration:

A Day in the Life - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Overcoming Doomishness
Retrofitting the Suburbs

caused a controversy or shared a different perspective:

What is UNsustainability?

Magical Thinking

Myth of Efficiency

Power of Dissent
Turning Peak Oil Upside Down

provided a helpful resource:
Tips for Living Lightly
A Simple Plan
20 Low-Energy Entertainment Activities
Preventing Deforested Moonscapes - Part I, Part 2, Part 3

and perhaps even interested you enough to read a reaaaaaaaally long post (one of my claims to notoriety):
Infrastructure: Priorities and Painful Decisions
13 Ways to Promote Consumption
Resilient Gardening - Part 1, Part 2

Thanks again to everyone! I appreciate your help, support, ideas, and recognition!

10 Ways to Identify a Closet Prepper

2010-06-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Prep-dar n. Informal 1. The keen observation skills and attention to detail which allow you to identify other people who are aware of, and covertly preparing for, peak oil. 2. A shortened version of "prepper radar".

************************************************
Although an increasing number of people are adapting to the realities of more expensive and declining energy, and a permanently depressed economy, many are still... shall we say, circumspect, about their activities. They may have been driven underground after encountering ridicule or denial from friends and family, or perhaps are just are leery about random people showing up at their door when crunch time arrives.

So how do we find these fellow prep enthusiasts, so we can join forces, help each other, and make our communities stronger? You could check out your local Transition initiative, or search online for a peak oil meet-up in your area. However, some of these undercover peak-oil-preparers may be people you already know.... friends, acquaintances, work buddies, even family - you just have to figure out who they are. To help you find them, here are the top ten clues that should set your Prep-dar buzzing. You might know a closet prepper if he or she:

10. Gives you a Bo-Go flashlight, first-aid kit, or copy of Just In Case: How to be self-sufficient when the unexpected happens for Christmas.

9. Knows the difference between the IEA and the EIA; and/or calls the EIA "the most incompetent bungling liars in the government."

8. Is overheard exclaiming "But Sharon Astyk/Richard Heinberg/James Howard Kunstler/Dmitry Orlov/Matt Simmons/Gail the Actuary says ____________!"

7. Sends you articles published by The Oil Drum, Energy Bulletin, or Life After the Oil Crash , "FYI."

6. Stores any type of food in a bucket.

5. Is fired after a happy hour at which she tells the boss he'll be doing hard labor when "TSHTF."

4. Privately admits to cashing out their entire 401(K) to purchase gold, ammunition, and prime farmland.

3. Complains of marital discord arising from arguments about the number of chickens that might fit on a quarter-acre lot, or the excessive amount of lawn which has been converted to okra production.

2. Tends to use terms like Cantarell, TEOTWAWKI or Hirsch Report after a few glasses of wine.

and finally.....

1. Offers to share seeds, teach you to can tomatoes, help you compost, build a raised garden bed, plant a fruit tree for you, car-pool, chop firewood, give you fresh eggs, set up a rain barrel, or show you how to use a solar cooker.

In that case, who cares if they know about peak oil - you want to be their friend!

Resilient Gardening - Part II

2010-06-02T05:58:00.000-07:00

Growing your own food can be a way to increase the security and health of your family in a world facing the multiple challenges of peak energy and resources, unpredictable and more severe climate, and financial uncertainty. At the same time, gardening may become more difficult due to the strange and shifting weather and uncertain consequences of peak oil. You can increase the resiliency of your garden in order to help deal with rapid changes in the economy, environment, and energy landscape.

In the first installment of this Resilient Gardening two-part series, I discussed two ways to increase resiliency in your home gardens - diversity and localization. In this part, we'll cover feedback / knowledge and backup plans (redundancy).

Feedback / Knowledge

Knowledge of design systems like permaculture can help us create gardens to be resilient and less prone to failure, and knowledge of local gardening can help us create gardens that are well-adapted to our particular conditions. Tight feedback loops can help us respond quickly to changing conditions in our weather, economy, and environment.

A good start to resilient design is observation. Have you observed your property to find the best places to site trees, raised beds, the chicken house, pond, rainwater tanks, and the herb garden? Build resilience by choosing locations for these elements of food production where they are less likely to fail - out of the way of harsh winds or flooding or too much shade. You can also build resilience by arranging these elements so that they form relationships. Let nature do the work, reducing your level of effort so that any key maintenance is not neglected. (See Toby Hemenway's book Gaia's Garden for more).

Expand your information gathering to the wider community. Consult with the local long-term gardeners, and native/indigenous people in your area. What methods have they developed to bounce back from garden adversity? What weather extremes have they seen, and what were the results? What changes have they noticed recently compared to past conditions? Are there vegetable or fruit varieties they've noticed which do well under all kinds of conditions?

After your garden is designed and built, be sure to develop effective feedback between you and your garden / orchard. A gardening aphorism is "The best fertilizer is the gardener's footsteps." Your attention can help develop your understanding of the best way to improve / change your garden as time goes on as well as catching pest/disease problems early so that you can deal with them.

Information and feedback can assist in adapting to changing conditions. No one really knows what to expect as the effects of climate change become more apparent, but the Arbor Day foundation has shown that our traditional zones have already moved North; and more severe weather is expected as a result of climate change, hence the term "global weirding". This type of rapid change will be difficult to adapt to, as planting dates will change, some fruit trees won't get enough chill hours and will stop bearing, and plants will be subjected to new harsh conditions.

Noticing weather changes as early as possible will help you adapt your techniques to the new reality, instead of sticking by your tried-and-true methods. This means constant observation, along with monitoring and tracking data about your garden and the weather so that you can identify changes early. Start a garden journal, and record weather conditions, dates of planting, blooming, and harvesting, varieties planted, amounts of the harvest, pests and diseases. Record how you dealt with challenges and how well your strategies worked. This will help you identify changes as they occur, effective responses to change, and which varieties adapt well.

Another way to adapt to increasingly warm and weird weather is simply to learn about gardening in other, warmer zones. What do/did they grow there? What are their usual planting dates? What will you have to do to weather the harsher summer temperatures? How can you take advantage of the milder winters? This could help you adjust to gardening in a different zone.

Backup Plans / Redundancy

Redundancy is often seen as inefficiency in our efficiency-worshipping culture. In many cases, with cheap energy-dense oil easily available, the most efficient food option (although not the most tasty or healthy) is just to buy pre-packaged food from the grocery store or fast food outlet. With quickly changing conditions, peaking oil, decaying infrastructure, and bankrupt governments, it may not pay to rely on the system that provides high-fossil fuel density food that is grown, processed, packaged, and shipped from far away.

A backup plan is something which is not necessarily used all the time, or relied upon completely, but which we already have the infrastructure, tools, knowledge and experience to use - and hopefully, which has been practiced and tested. Backup plans can be both within and outside of your garden.

The idea (but not practice) of "having a garden" is a backup plan for some people - but keep in mind that gardens and fruit trees take time to grow. For a garden to function as a backup plan, the soil should be built up, the seeds and tools available, and the gardener should have a ready knowledge of planting dates, gardening techniques, and the rhythm of gardening. Ideally, a garden or edible landscape would be designed, planted and observed for several years before it was really needed as a food source.

A simple, but not necessarily easy, form of garden backup is to just plant extra. An old farmer saying goes something like this: "One for the birds, one for the bugs, and one for me." In a large garden, it requires work and seeds to plant extra, but in a small garden it also requires a lot of ingenuity to plant extra of this when you need space for that.

One strategy for planting extra is to use the permaculture principle of valuing the margins. Is there a 2x2 sunny spot where you could fit a container on your patio, or could you fit two tomato plants up against a fence? Could you espalier a fruit tree against the wall? You can fit a lot of additional plants by tucking them in here and there. Gardening books about using small spaces help with this principle - even if you already have a fairly large garden, it can help you optimize your growing area.

What's your backup plan for total plant destruction? Some people grow extra vegetable transplants just for this purpose - to replace plants that have been killed by pests, weather, etc. You can also keep some seeds in reserve, instead of planting all of them. In many years, the effort of growing extra transplants may be "wasted" - although you could give or sell the plants to neighbors - but in other years, you will be glad you bothered. If a fruit tree is severely damaged by the weather and appears to be dying, you might try to preserve the variety by grafting branches onto another tree (for example, to ensure healthy pollination for your other fruit trees).

Having several months of food storage creates resilience - not only to crop failures, but also many other kinds of disasters (job loss, illness or disability, supply chain breakdowns, hyperinflation, etc.). When all else fails, the fruits and veggies from last year have been dried, fermented, canned, frozen, and stored in the root cellar, and the bags of wheat, beans, and rice are still there. Which brings up a related topic - resilience in cooking and food preservation - which I won't get into here, but which you can investigate through Sharon Astyk's extensive website.

Another form of backup plan is having a way to get cheap food if your garden is doing poorly and you have few funds. Freeganism - urban foraging from dumpsters - has gained attention in recent years, with some people pronouncing it to be disgusting, while others think it's simply good sense to use perfectly good food that will otherwise be wasted. Novella Carpenter, in her book Farm City, describes how she uses dumped food from restaurants to feed her urban pigs. Other people arrange to pick up the vegetable waste from restaurants, or used grains from breweries, to feed it to their livestock or turn it into compost.

There are plentiful books, videos, and classes available to help you learn how to hunt, fish, and find edible "weeds." There are even online resources in some cities that point out the locations of fruit and nut trees. A lot of nutrition (if not calories) can be had from lambs quarters and dandelions, and bamboo is both a food and a great trellis system.

Outside of your personal garden, what does your neighborhood "foodshed" look like? You could benefit from having more people in your neighborhood who are growing food and who can share seeds with you, and who have the ability to ramp up their own production if needed. Gardeners often naturally exchange produce - butternuts for watermelons, peaches for plums - helping gardeners with little space. Starting or supporting community gardens, school gardens, church gardens, and hyper-local food production like CSA's can all be ways to develop the foodshed in your area.

It may be worth your while to develop resilience outside of your nuclear family and personal property and in your community. How are your relations with your neighbors, friends and family, a church? Have you helped them start a garden, or given them some excess produce? Are you on good terms with them? Have you established a foundation of trust and reciprocity? Community help can be invaluable in helping a family deal with hard times or disaster, especially if that family is seen as a valuable asset to the community. (See Dan Chiras and Dave Wann's book Superbia! for ways to create sustainable neighborhoods.)

Relocation is another, more final, backup plan, and is worth thinking about for many reasons. If you realize that food production in your area is ridiculously difficult, or even outright unworkable, you may want to have a secondary home in mind. This may seem extreme, and there are definite downsides to relocation, but knowing when to hold 'em - and when to fold 'em - will be a key skill in a rapidly changing environment.

Summary

A resilient garden would not be complete without a resilient gardener. In order to recover after a catastrophe, you need the will to go on - to replant, to rebuild, to try again after poor results or failures. But a resilient attitude is one in which you not only have the tenacity to persevere, but also have the ability to notice and discard what is no longer working, and start experimenting instead.

So notice what may be prone to failure as peak energy occurs - our oil-dependent, industrialized food system and our growth-based economy. Prepare for change as our climate gets weirder. Re-localize your food production into your garden and local foodshed, use diversity and redundancy in your gardening, pay attention to conditions as they change, adapt and adjust your techniques, and have a backup plan (or two or three).

I hope these ideas to increase your garden resilience will help you weather the storms that are coming. Please contribute to the effort by adding ideas and thoughts from your own experience, and may your garden bounty become legendary!

Sources:

Special thanks to the authors whose ideas inspired these posts.

Rob Hopkins - The Transition Handbook
David Holmgren - Permaculture Principles
Richard Heinberg - Food and Farming Transition
Sharon Astyk - Casaubon's Book, The Chatelaine's Keys, A Nation of Farmers
Toby Hemenway - Gaia's Garden
Eliot Coleman - The Winter Harvest Handbook and Four Season Harvest
Sally Cunningham - Great Garden Companions
Novella Carpenter - Farm City

Ben Sherwood - The Survivors Club

Dan Chiras & Dave Wann - Superbia! 31 ways to create sustainable neighborhoods

Resilient gardening - Part I

2010-05-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Hail. Gale-force winds. Torrential rains. Blistering sun. Droughts. Late freezes. Flooding. Squash bugs, deer, squirrels, raccoons, tomato hornworms, spider mites. In any year, gardening can be a sheer exercise in will. With increasingly unpredictable weather, and zones that are already shifting North, it becomes almost an exercise in prayer.

At the same time that gardening is becoming more difficult due to factors such as climate change, declining resources, colony collapse disorder, etc., it also becomes even more necessary as we begin to rely on our food gardens for financial and economic reasons. Because of that transformation from hobby to necessity, I've become very interested in incorporating resilience into gardening. The concept of resiliency can be variously defined as:

- The capacity to keep functioning in spite of shocks to the system,

- The ability to recover quickly from misfortune, and

- The ability to adapt and respond effectively to disturbance.

Evidence is accumulating that, due to peak oil/resource depletion, climate change/environmental disaster, and our ongoing financial upheaval, we will be experiencing an increasing level of "disturbance" of many different kinds. How then can we reduce the chance that disasters will destroy all of our food production capacity?

This post focuses on backyard gardens, since they represent a very localized form of agriculture, and they are the one with which I have the most experience. Over the next two posts, we'll cover some ideas, compiled from various sources, to help add resilience to your gardens in four ways:

Reduce dependence on external inputs (localize)
Diversification
Backup plans (redundancy)
Feedback, knowledge and observation

Reduce dependence on external inputs (Localize)

Growing a garden / orchard is one key way to reduce your need for the oil- and financial-system-dependent food supply chain. But external inputs to the garden (such as seeds, transplants, fertilizer and chemicals, mulch and compost) may themselves become more difficult to obtain if money becomes scarce, demand overwhelms the system, or supply lines are strained.

A first step is to go organic - build your soil to nurture your plants rather than using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. To reduce dependence on regular inputs of external fertilizers (even organic ones), you could adopt some of the following strategies:

Front-load fertility by building up your soil now (importing manure, cover cropping, etc.)

Make your own compost

Use perennials, which can draw fertility from deep in the soil

Incorporate animals such as rabbits or chickens, and use their manure

Store fertilizer (bone and blood meal, greensand)

Use diluted human urine for a good source of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus

Plant nutrient accumulator plants which can be used as mulch/compost (comfrey)

Rotate beans and peas (legumes) throughout the garden

To reduce dependence on purchased seeds and transplants, you can save your seeds and grow your own vegetable transplants. Saving seeds from your best plants has an added benefit in that, over time, the plant will adapt itself to the particular conditions in your garden. In order to save seeds, you should choose plants whose seeds will "come true", i.e. open pollinated and heirloom varieties, not hybrids. (See Suzanne Ashworths's book Seed to Seed for detailed explanations.) If you don't want to grow your own, transplants are also often available at Farmer's Markets.

To reduce the need for fossil-fuel based chemical pesticides, you will probably need to take a multi-pronged approach. First, build your soil and treat your plants right (watering, weeding, fertilizing) so that your plants are healthy and can repel infestation. Other ideas include:

Plant flowers that attract beneficial insects like ladybugs and parasitic wasps

Create an environment friendly to insect eaters like bats and toads

Hand pick off some insects (tomato hornworms)

Pay attention to your plants to catch infestations early

Use row covers to protect against certain insects

Use organic treatments like soap sprays

Use chickens or ducks to eat slugs and insects (be sure to protect your seedlings!)

Plant varieties that are pest-resistant

Many organic gardeners don't use much gasoline, although some rely on a once-a-year rototilling. Gasoline stored for this purpose won't last too long, although you can use additives to extend the life of the gas. If you do depend on machines for key parts of your food production, you might consider what hand tools you could use instead, and store those - or start transitioning to another way of gardening. Another option might be finding a way to make, or buy, locally produced biofuel.

Shovels, hoes, watering cans, hoses, trowels, gloves, and rakes are key to gardening. A good tool can last a long time, so buy quality tools, learn how to take care of them, store extras, and learn how to fix a broken tool. If you still plan on having a lawn, consider a reel mower, which needs no fuel to run.

To reduce the need for externally-supplied water (in case of drought restrictions or supply breakdowns such as a power outage on your well, or a broken water main), you might want to adopt multiple strategies, since water is so vital to a garden. Here are some to consider:

Mulch deeply

Use swales (level depressions) to catch and store water in the soil

Add organic matter, which retains water, to your soil

Use water catchment such as rain tanks or cisterns

Re-use greywater from your home

Plant some drought-resistant or tolerant crops or vegetable varieties

Incorporate perennials, which need less watering after the first year

To reduce the need to buy feed for your animals, you can choose varieties that forage well and can grow some of their feed on-site (depending on the size of your land). You can also store extra feed in case of emergency, or arrange to pick up vegetable matter from restaurants or breweries as a source of feed.

Diversify

Another powerful strategy is diversification. As we know, weather and pests can and do destroy crops. How can we reduce the overall damage? There are many ways to diversify - through time, through space, and through variety.

First, we can diversify over time. Sowing certain seeds multiple times - staggered every two weeks - will extend the life of your harvest and insure against complete destruction if birds / squirrels get the first set of seedlings.

You can also grow food throughout the year, instead of just in the summer. Adopting a four-season harvest approach insures against depending solely on the summer garden, and also supplies fresh greens in the winter. Year-round gardening can be done cheaply by using simple row covers and hoop houses to protect cold-hardy crops like spinach, broccoli, carrots, etc. (depending on your zone - see Eliot Coleman's Four Season Harvest and The Winter Harvest Handbook for more information).

We can also plant veggies and fruits that bloom and mature at different times, for example so that one late frost won't destroy all the fruit. This can also spread out the harvest to make the preservation task less difficult. Instead of planting three of the same peach tree, think about planting three kinds that mature at different times. This way, you can have peaches throughout the summer rather than a glut at any one time. If you have space, you can also plant unusual fruits that tend to be less pest-susceptible like persimmons or jujubes.

Consider installing a variety of food production. Not just annuals such as tomatoes and lettuce, but also perennials such as vines, fruit trees and shrubs, nut trees, rhubarb and asparagus, and even animals, which yield protein and fat (or honey) as well as eating pests, pollinating plants, and yielding manure. Consider using the principles of permaculture, forest gardening, or edible landscaping in your design (See Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden for more information).

Within each type of crop, we can plant multiple varieties. Different varieties tend to do well under different conditions - some are resistant to heat and drought, some do well even when waterlogged, some resist the blight when it arrives unexpectedly, some repel squash bugs.

Diversification through space is another approach. In Oklahoma, a tornado can completely flatten one house while leaving the next untouched. You could have gardens in many locations - your back yard, the one down the street with the elderly gentleman that you give 30% of the produce to, the community garden, your parent's garden two miles away.

Another approach to diversification through space is avoiding planting all of one type of vegetable in one place (i.e. monocropping). In small gardens, it may not be feasible to separate your tomatoes among several different areas - but in larger gardens, it might. This can help prevent bugs/diseases from getting all of your prize plants in one year. You can also separate plants by using an intercropping method that mixes several different kinds of plants in the same area (e.g. the Three Sisters approach).

Summary

Using the strategies of reducing external inputs (localizing) and diversification through time, space, and variety can help increase your garden's resilience. Some of these approaches will work well in certain localities, but not in others; it depends on many factors - climate, location, garden design, etc.

One warning: because our culture has long worshipped maximization of one variable (profit), rather than paying attention to stability and survival, these strategies may feel odd at first - inefficient, troublesome, redundant. It may take time - or even disaster - to realize the value in some of these efforts. But many of the strategies will have immediate benefits aside from resiliency, such as extending your harvest, reduced work, and reduced expense.

Please contribute ideas and examples from your own experience! Next post: Backup plans (redundancy) and feedback / observation.

Hail damage

2010-05-17T05:09:00.000-07:00

Tennis ball sized hail

A nasty hail storm rolled through Oklahoma yesterday afternoon, leaving thousands of holes punched in roofs and entire parking lots full of shattered windshields. My husband and I have lived in Oklahoma for over 25 years, and have never seen a hailstorm like this, although one rocked the South side of OKC just a week ago. Luckily, we escaped with just a broken garage window, pockmarked car, and oh yeah - completely shredded garden and orchard.

The peaches are a good size at this point, and so we lost at least half of them. Many of the ones still on the trees are now dented, and won't live long. I hope we can still get a good crop from them - if 25% remain, we will still have enough to dry a few to make my son's favorite snack, "peach chips." The apples, plums and persimmons were damaged as well, but those trees aren't as big and neither were the fruits, so the damage was not as extensive.

I'm saddest about my tomatoes, which were all heirloom varieties such as Arkansas Traveler, Black Cherry, and Yellow Pear. They had been in the ground about a month. When I planted them, many of my homegrown ones looked spindly and yellowish. But by yesterday, they had greened up beautifully, grown to about two feet tall, and were setting blooms.

No longer. Now they appear to have been run over with a chainsaw. All 13 are still standing, but they've all lost leaves and limbs, which are now lying dismembered around them on the soil. I've seen plants recover from trauma before. But this? I can only hope. And of course, it wasn't just the tomatoes - but also the broccoli, peppers, salad garden, and beans. Luckily the watermelons, cucumbers and okra really haven't done much, so they will probably recover just fine.

Although I am sad for my own garden, I have to be sadder for all the people who depend on growing food for their income whose crops/gardens/ranches were damaged. What a difficult task raising food will be in the years ahead as fertilizer and gasoline prices increase, as the weather gets weirder and weirder - destroying entire crops, and less financing is available for new startups. Here's to farmers, who brave all this uncertainty to get food to my table. If it weren't for you, I'd be realllllly distraught right about now.

Vulnerability

2010-05-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

Pregnancy was a strange time for me. My belly got bigger, breathing got harder, my gait got waddlier. My ribs dislocated occasionally, I had to eat constantly to avoid heartburn, and my ligaments began to send shooting pains into my legs whenever I walked. Towards the end, I could no longer mow the lawn by myself, climb on ladders, reach things on high shelves, carry heavy objects, or even walk across the street at a normal pace. I had no energy to weed the garden in 100+ degree heat. In short, I became slow and needy.

I had never been truly sick, or injured, or disabled, or elderly, and I didn't remember a time when I was so slow. I had always been - if not exactly strong - then at least self-sufficientish, able to paint and tile and mow and garden and for God's sake, at least be able to shave my own legs! How uncomfortable it is to need other people to help you! How annoying it is to need other people to do things that you want to do for yourself! How exasperating to move along like a drunken snail!

Pregnancy gave me a small taste of what it is to be vulnerable. Sadly, I had not been one to be overly patient with others, compassionate of weakness and need. Walking a mile on swollen feet in pregnancy shoes set me straight. I wish everyone could have this experience - if not pregnancy, then trying to live on minimum wage, caring for kids without a support system, living alone when all your friends and family have died before you, or trying to get by without all the advantages that comfortable middle-class people take for granted.

As a pregnant woman, I didn't want pity. But a little understanding, a little leeway and help was welcome. As I began to resemble a watermelon tacked onto the middle of a pole, I realized how frightening it is to need, and not be able to meet one's own needs, to not meet our cultural expectation for speed and independence, to not exactly measure up. At the same time, I saw how important it is for us to protect and help people who are experiencing vulnerability while letting them keep their dignity.

I had "known" this before my pregnancy, of course. But I had not FELT it before. Actually feeling every painful step, every sleepless night, and awkwardness with every lumbering about-face - that gave me a much better understanding of what it is to be vulnerable.

In our current economy, many middle class people are struggling to hold on to their comforts and expectations, and for the first time, failing. They finally feel what it is to not know where their next meal will come from. Some of them cry, "It's not my fault! I'm a hard worker! I did everything I was supposed to do!" They don't want to be identified with those undeserving poor who only make minimum wage or who are unemployed - who should just get a job, or an education, or an abortion, and who should just serve the master class for crumbs while eking no pleasure out of their existence whatsoever.

So - will this economic experience nurture compassion for those who have long been struggling to provide for their families with limited resources, education or support? Or will the experience of vulnerability only bolster contempt for those who need help - those who have fallen even further than before?

Signs, signs everywhere signs

2010-05-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

Back in February, John Michael Greer, he of the Long Descent historical viewpoint, predicted an imminent collapse in the making.

At that point, I suggested that everyone who is transitioning to a more sustainable and/or resilient way of life might want to pick up the pace a bit by "pretending" that they needed to prepare for that transition in the next six months or so. Order your seeds and prepare the garden, stock up your woodpile, store a few months of food, learn important skills, look after your health, get your house prepared, meet your neighbors, etc.

Since February, signs have been everywhere - for those who choose to see. Here's just a small, selected example of the many alarm bells that have been clanging in the past few months:

In March, Oxford University reported that global oil reserves were over-estimated by one-third (!!!), and predicted an oil peak by 2014-1015. One of the authors commented "The belief that alternative fuels such as biofuels could mitigate oil supply shortages and eventually replace fossil fuels is a pie in the sky. Instead of relying on those silver bullet solutions, we have to make better use of the remaining resources by improving efficiency."

Also in March, Le Monde published an article reporting that the US Department of Energy "considers a decline of world oil production as of 2011." Chris Nelder found a chart from the EIA that shows that they have no idea how supply could increase after 2012, and in five years, the shortfall between supply and demand would equal Saudi Arabia's current production.

And perhaps most alarming to many Americans, the U.S. Joint Forces of Command issued a report that warned "By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” with serious economic and political repercussions.

Finally, at the end of April, the Deepwater Horizon platform burned and toppled, and the deepwater well is currently spewing 210,000 gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, signaling that perhaps, trying to drill our way out of peak oil is a fool's strategy. Perhaps, it's not so clever to try to delay the inevitable so we can party for just a few... more.... years.

Come on, what more do you need than a thousand-foot burning bush, whoops, I mean rig? Especially one that can be seen from miles away.... with an oil slick that can be seen from space? What's it going to take? People, do you really need GOD'S HANDWRITING IN THE SKY????

Beauty of homesteading

2010-04-29T06:56:00.000-07:00

This is the year that I realize how much work an urban homestead will take. When I first planned out our little quarter? sixth? of an acre, I just wanted to pack as much productivity into the area as possible. You know, so we could have food after the financial/economic/peak oil Greater Depression :). I didn't give too much thought to how much work it would be.

Planting, thinning, watering, and landscaping have been consuming most of my free time in the past weeks. And when the persimmon, cherry, kiwi, and pears finally grow up enough to fruit, it will take even more. But right now I don't care because it is so lovely to be outside in the fresh air, sunshine, flowers, and lots and lots of green, with birds swooping by my head and squirrels racing around chasing each other. Beats sitting at a desk.

Our semi-urban, semi-suburban property is starting to look like a homestead, and this time of year, it's beautiful. Our perennial herbs have popped up - thyme, lemon balm, mint, chocolate mint, rosemary, purple sage, and oregano - and our back "lawn" is covered in white clover.

The fruit trees and vines have baby fruits dangling and shaking in the breeze - peaches, apples, plums, and grapes. Apparently the self-fertile plum really is self-fertile! It just took four years to find out. Our miniature woodpile is surrounded by blossoming irises and thornless blackberries (Apache, Arapaho, Navajo), which are so pretty I may plant more in our front yard.

And finally, I love our new front-yard edible landscape, which we Permablitzed last weekend with the help of twelve fabulous volunteers. In time, that will yield us cherries, Granny Smith apples, Nikita's Gift persimmons, Desert King watermelons, and Black Futsu squash, along with more mint, oregano, purple sage, thyme, and daylilies, which I've been told taste like cantalope. Who knew a little hell-strip had so much potential?

Permablitz in action

2010-04-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Got an area of your landscape you need to transform from pointless to productive? Have you considered a Permablitz? This weekend, we held a Permablitz hands-on permaculture workshop at our house in Oklahoma City. Working together, in one day we transformed a 300 square foot Bermuda / mud / weed strip between driveways into a front-yard edible landscape with three fruit trees, culinary and medicinal herbs, edible perennial flowers, and "crop circles" (miniature raised beds made of old bricks) that will hold annual vegetables like watermelons and winter squash.

The idea for the project came from three problems I was encountering: no more space for fruit trees, no more space for rambling squash / melon vines, and a weedy, muddy area that served no purpose in our front yard. That strip between driveways required mowing and edging, but we got no enjoyment from it. It was also difficult to deal with (and presented some design challenges) since it was not near an outlet or a faucet, but was near a narrow strip where we keep our trashcans on the way to our only backyard gate. I think of the site as embodying the permaculture principle "Value the marginal" - because it borders two properties and is quite narrow, and previously, got no love at all.

Although I'm by no means a permaculture designer, and don't have a permaculture design certificate, I tried to design the area using permaculture techniques and principles from Gaia's Garden, by Toby Hemenway, and then consulted with Randy Marks of Land+Form sustainable land design for feedback. I selected mostly perennial plants with multiple functions and designed the area to serve many purposes. Eventually, the landscape will yield over 100 pounds of fruit, shade our driveway, channel runoff from our roof into an irrigation stream, provide beautiful flowers, and serve as a showcase for front-yard gardening/edible landscaping.

On Saturday, thirteen motivated people came to learn, share food and ideas, and work on the 'Blitz, which was led by Randy and benefited Transition Town OKC and Sustainable OKC. The group really put a lot of effort and care into the project. Our efforts were rewarded at the end - as we sat in the garage and shared apricot beer brewed by my husband, a downpour began and we got to watch the swale-stream in action. Thanks to everyone who worked so hard!

Ruthless

2010-04-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

In nature, things happen when it is their time. Babies come when they're ready, flowers bloom at their leisure, and peaches need thinning when they are marble sized. (Side note: With modern technology, all these can be hurried and disrupted.... usually to our detriment.)

So, it's peach-thinnin' time. We have two peach trees, a J.H. Hale and a Hale Haven, planted about 20 feet apart in our front yard. In the years since they began bearing, they have never failed to deliver a bounteous crop of lusciousness, albeit slightly wormy lusciousness that needs to be cut open instead of eaten whole. This year, as always, the branches are loaded with tiny green fuzzy baby peaches.

60 - 70% of these helpless fuzzies must be eliminated before they grow large enough to crack the branches. Thinning the peaches also lets the others develop to their full size. In the past, I've put off the thinning, or pursued it lightly, or didn't thin the upper branches enough because I didn't want to climb a ladder, and later lived to regret it. Last year, there were several emergency thinning sessions in late May when I noticed the branches literally curved in half. It's soooo much easier to thin baby peaches than adolescent ones. For one thing, they are lighter. For another, they take up less space in the compost pile (which is overflowing, and I haven't started a new one).

The key word is.... ruthless. Follow this rule: thin to one peach every six inches. A slight twist of the peach is better than a yank, which can result in an entire twig ending up in your regretful hand. And remember, peach thinning starts with good pruning.

Pruning should be done several months earlier, in the early spring / late winter, to open up the inside area of the tree to allow easy thinning and harvesting, and allow good air circulation to prevent disease. You DON'T want twigs poking you in the eye while you're harvesting, and you don't want to spend half an hour thinning peaches off branches that shouldn't even be there!

It takes some time to do it right, but on a beautiful spring day out in the fresh air, peach-thinning is actually quite pleasant... if you don't do it so long that your trapezius cramps up and your neck develops a twitch. It's even pleasanter if you remember to put suntan lotion on so you don't get a wicked sunburn, and if you have good company to chat with and some music playing. Add some birds tweeting and it's positively idyllic.

I recommend spreading the thinning out over several days. Most people aren't used to looking up and reaching up for hours at a time. For me, a relatively slow and judicious picker, it probably takes about two hours a tree, considering the time it takes to move the ladder around our fifteen-foot high tree. I spread that out over four or five days, and I'm RUTHLESS so I won't have to do it all again in late May when the peaches start to gain their teen weight.

Now, this only reflects my experience, with these particular peach trees, in this climate. Other people may do it differently, but this system works for me and my trees. How about you?

This is your brain on insomnia

2010-04-21T01:26:00.001-07:00

One problem I have with traditional economics is that it makes numerous incorrect assumptions in order to facilitate the creation of the economic models. For instance, traditional economists usually assume that people are rational. Indeed.

Earlier today......

Brain: That looks like a fudge truffle.

Me: Yes, that fudge truffle is a present for your mother-in-law.

Brain: It looks tasty. Real tasty.

Me: Let's have an apple. How about some hummus?

Brain: I think I'll have that fudge truffle.

Me: That very large truffle has approximately 900 calories. It is not on your Paleolithic whole-foods diet. It is not on your Okinawa diet. It is not on your High-School Reunion diet. It is not on any diet at all!

Brain: (forcing hand to reach towards chocolate)

Me: Noooooooo!

Earlier tonight.....

2:17 a.m. Click.

Brain: PERMABLITZ IS SATURDAY! PERMABLITZ IS SATURDAY!

Me: (Sleepily) What the %$#? Go back to sleep. There's nothing we need to do right now. It's the middle of the night.

Brain: So much to do! So little time! So much to do! So little time!

Me: Go back to sleep. We can deal with everything in the morning. There's really not that much left to do anyway.

Brain: But what if it rains? Then everything is ruined! Then we have to put it off for another week!

Me: Shhhhhh. It's all under control. We talked to Randy about the plan. The landscaping materials are all ordered. We got the plants. We e-mailed our workshop confirmations yesterday. We e-mailed out the rain date. There's nothing we can do about the weather.

Brain: When are we going to get the big rocks? What if that doesn't work to hold in the mulch? What if it looks funny? Maybe we should have gotten an apricot tree instead of the Granny Smith apple. Maybe we should have gotten another cherry tree instead of the apple. We already have two apple trees you know. We could still go down to Marcum's nursery before Saturday.

Me: Granny Smith apples stay good forever and don't have to be processed. And they are tart, good for pies and salads. Oh crap, I'm arguing with my brain. Ommmmmmmmmmm. Ommmmmmmm.

Brain: When are you going to work on the permaculture handouts? When are you going to make those copies? Maybe we still have time to get a videographer? Who's going to record this for posterity?

Me: I told you, it's under control! It's all on the to-do list! This workshop is not a big deal - just chill out and relax! CRAP. I'm arguing with my brain again. Inhale... 1, 2, 3. Exhale.... 1, 2, 3. Inhale... 1, 2, 3. Exhale.... 1, 2, 3.

Brain: Don't ignore me! Get up, get up! Get to work!

Me: If I don't go to sleep now I'm going to be useless tomorrow. Is that what you want?

Brain: So much to do! So little time!

Me: I'm going to get up now. But don't think I'm going to work on the Permablitz! I'm going to write on my blog and drink a cup of chamomile tea with valerian and then do yoga! SO THERE!

Brain: :)

***************

Does that sound rational to you? I rest my case.

Sunshine Blogger Award

2010-04-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Sharlene T. for the Sunshine Blogger award! I'm honored!

As a part of receiving this award, I am supposed to select and post 12 bloggers that inspire others and show positivity and creativity.

Unfortunately right now I am trying to organize a Permablitz hands-on permaculture workshop, put in my garden, go to a wedding, and prepare to put down a bamboo floor in our house, and I have no time!

Until a later date when I hope I can fulfill my duties, please check out some great solar cooking resources at these blogs:

Solar Cooking for Mainstream Cooks

and

Solar Oven Chef.

They are inspiring me to break out my own solar oven (GSO) and put it back to good use! Thanks ladies, and thanks again to Sharlene at Solar Cooking for Mainstream Cooks for the award!

To meat or not to meat

2010-04-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

"Beef containing harmful pesticides, veterinary antibiotics and heavy metals is being sold to the public because federal agencies have failed to set limits for the contaminants or adequately test for them, a federal audit finds... Even when the inspection service does identify a lot of beef with high levels of pesticide or antibiotics, it often is powerless to stop the distribution of that meat because there is no legal limit for those contaminants." Full USA Today article here

About ten years ago, I stopped eating meat (except fish) because of:
1) the cruelty of the factory-farming system,
2) the health problems associated with the standard American diet,
3) the social problems with factory-farmed meat - increased prevalence of certain types of deadly e.coli, reduced efficacy of antibiotics, and conditions of the factory workers,
4) the carbon / methane emissions and water intensity of raising and shipping beef,
5) the ecological problems of raising the (primarily genetically modified) corn /soy, including clearing of rainforests and use of petro-chemically based fertilizers and pesticides, to feed the beef; and
6) the gigantic manure lagoons /water pollution from the CAFOs.

My husband stayed an omnivore, but he is aware of the ethical implications of eating meat.
So after my husband and I watched Food, Inc, we decided to find a source of sustainable meat for my husband and son to eat. We found Rose Ranch, and the proprietor, Vicki, invited me to visit the ranch and observe the living conditions of the animals. After that trip, it seems that buying meat from Rose Ranch Jones is about as guilt free as it gets.

As Joel Salatin says, the cattle at Rose Ranch Jones are allowed to fully express their "cow-ness." The cows are 100% pasture-raised, with no corn supplements, in an area large enough so that it won't be degraded by overgrazing. The cows/steers aren't fed routine antibiotics, hormones or other crap like cow brains. Because of their diet, the beef from these cattle is higher in many nutrients like omega-3 fatty acids, etc. The animals are "processed" (euphemistically speaking) at a local processor - not shipped days away to a slaughterhouse in a truck without food or water as is done in the factory farming system. And, to top it all off, Rose Ranch is only about 10 miles from my house. Basically, the RR method addresses the vast majority of my concerns with eating beef.

So, after ten years of not eating meat (except fish), I have started to occassionally eat meat again. I've eaten RR meat five or six times since we bought a side of their beef in January. I've started calling myself a Roseranchetarian (ha, ha), since I have only eaten meat from their ranch. After being a "pescetarian" for so long, I prefer vegetarian meals, but on balance, it seems that an occasional grass-fed beef meal won't hurt me.

The majority of Americans haven't changed their meat-eating habits after thirty years of available information on the unhealthy, polluting, unsustainable CAFO operations - but maybe, if they had another option besides eating meat vs. not eating meat (i.e. eating healthy, sustainably raised meat), we could create more change in the system. Since my husband and his family are going to eat meat anyway, maybe I can help support that change by buying beef from a local, sustainable, humane ranch.

Although I didn't ask, I imagine that the cow that became our beef probably would have prefered to live out it's natural lifespan - but at least it lived a sunshine-filled, stress-free, free-ranging, natural-food life. I'm happy that we could support ranchers who are creating an alternate to the confined-animal operation model that is degrading our planet's resources, treating animals so cruelly, and sending contaminated meat to our kids.

Just numbers

2010-04-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? If not, here's a spoiler (warning!): at the end of the movie, the hero/anti-hero blows up all the financial institutions. Without all the little digits, all the bits and bytes floating around in the cyber-air representing the vast sums of money incarcerated in digital bank accounts around the world, people return to being just people.

As an aside, being a former risk management auditor, I know that financial institutions have all those bits and bytes stored off-site as well, probably in multiple locations, probably directed off-site simultaneously with the recording of the initial event. In my experience, financial institutions usually had the most interest in protecting and recording their data correctly and securely. So, you know, the Club would have needed to track down those mega-storage units as well. Maybe an EMP would have worked for that.

Getting back to the thread. Sometimes I marvel at all of it - the fact that we are all running around pretending that we have REAL assets, when in fact they are just little numbers flying around in the air. The checking accounts that we live off of - just numbers. The savings account for the kiddo's college education - just numbers. The retirement assets you've worked to save for the last fifty years - just numbers, subject to random manipulation and mutilation and erasure. People paid millions of dollars just to pass these numbers back and forth and rearrange them to make them look better than they are.

If I think about it too much, it makes me a little giddy. Like looking out of a plane at the ground before parachuting out. I guess it's just one more symptom of our mass mania. We pretend that we can grow forever. We pretend that we know what we're doing when we stimulate the economy this way and pump it up that way. We pretend we're doing the right thing when we collectively accumulate a debt we can never, and will never, repay.

Why not pretend that we have actual things called money, which represent actual value, sitting in vaults somewhere, instead of digital numbers which represent decisions in a banker's head to loan money into existence out of nothing? As long as we all pretend, and all agree, on the existence and relative values and worth of our digits, the hallucination holds firm. But if we stop agreeing....???

Register for Permablitz

2010-04-07T07:06:00.001-07:00

If you happen to be in the Oklahoma City area, you could sign up for the Permablitz! Here's the promo e-mail we are sending out today.

Heal the Earth... while growing food!

Conventional landscapes use a lot of harmful chemicals - fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and gasoline to run lawn machines. With permaculture design, you can turn your landscape into a productive oasis by channeling the forces of Nature: the flow of water, power of soil-building organisms and longevity of trees and perennials.

You can grow food without using polluting chemicals, using less water, less work and less energy, while also helping the planet by building soil and creating ecosystems. Make gardening easier and heal the Earth at the same time! Find out how... at the Permablitz!

What: Hands-on permaculture workshop led by Randy Marks, owner of Land+Form sustainable landscape design. Learn some basic principles and techniques of permaculture while transforming a barren Bermuda desert into a productive mini-forest garden.

When: Saturday, April 24th 9:00 am - 3:30 pm (potluck lunch)

Where: NW Oklahoma City home near Penn Square Mall (that's my home ;)

Cost: $15 via PayPal or by check

How: E-mail your name and phone number to info@goinglocalokc.com to secure your spot in this limited-space workshop, then visit www.goinglocalokc.com to pay your $15 tuition via PayPal. You also have the option to mail your registration and check (information at www.goinglocalokc.com). Registration closes April 20th.

After we receive confirmation of your payment, I will e-mail you the workshop details and a short pre-workshop assignment.

Note: Space is limited, please register early to secure your spot.

Emergency water cleaning

2010-04-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

How to disinfect water

(Seen in National Geographic's recent special issue - Water: Our Thirsty World)

1. Locate plastic (or glass) water bottle.
2. Tear off the label.
3. Fill with any water source that's not too murky/cloudy.
4. Place the bottle on a piece of metal, in full sun. Do not disturb.
5. Wait six hours.
6. Drink, or store in the bottle to prevent recontamination.

This Swiss-engineered water-disinfection program is called SODIS, and their studies demonstrate that six hours in the sun will kill viruses, bacteria, and parasites (giardia and cryptosporidia) in the water, making it safe to drink. Although I assume it won't clean out other types of contaminants such as heavy metals or industrial chemicals, this method of water disinfection could still save lives in an emergency when regular tap water was not available for an extended period.

SODIS is now being used all over the (extremely poor parts of the) world to provide drinking water for people with no access to purified drinking water sources, dropping rates of diarrhea and cholera. Since over 4,000 children die every day from diarrhea, this is no small deal. In fact, according to the Swiss research team, the World Health Organisation (WHO), UNICEF, and the Red Cross have recommended the SODIS method as a way to treat drinking water in developing countries where access to fuel for boiling water is very expensive.

Interestingly, the SODIS researchers also found that, when used properly, using PET plastic bottles for solar water disinfection was safe (did not release harmful chemicals into the water).

Of course, if I needed to pasteurize water I would use my Katadyn filter, or boil it in my Sun Oven/campstove/fireplace insert. SODIS, however, looks like it is a life-saving method of water disinfection for people who are stuck without another way to clean their water.

Rookie Mistakes (I Have Made)

2010-04-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

Growing up, my family lived on two acres outside of Tulsa. My parents attempted some gardening, even keeping some chickens, until our dogs killed the whole flock in one fell swoop. I think my parents had ambitious homesteading dreams after living through some tough economic times in the late 70's (my father still curses Carter's name). I remember some huge tomato plants from elementary school, but my parents gave up the gardening efforts after the chicken debacle.

So when I started my gardening / edible landscaping adventure a few years ago, I didn't know the difference between a cold season and a warm season crop. I didn't know what to plant from seed, from plant, from set, from bush, from tree or from crown. I had to learn everything from scratch - which, of course, means making a few mistakes here and there. Since there may be a few of you who are just starting out, here is my top six list of "rookie" mistakes I've made as I work towards learning how to grow just a bit of food. I hope you learn something from my embarrassment.

6. Site Misplacement

When we moved in to our home in Oklahoma City, we had a blank landscaping slate. Bermuda grass, bermuda grass, and more bermuda grass. Wait, and two gigantic pecan trees which cast shade over much of the yard. The first landscaping project we did was to build a brick patio out back, right next to the house.

Later, I realized that our lovely, back-breaking and time-consuming- to- install brick patio was sitting right in the middle of the best sun of the yard - the spot where I should have placed my garden. While it was not a complete disaster, because there were still other places to put my garden, I have much less gardening area than if I had sited my patio correctly. About 50% less. Whoops!

5. Tree Matching

As an amateur orchardist, I was surprised to learn that some fruit trees require two different varieties to pollinate correctly - plums, apples, pears, and some peaches, to name a few. What! You mean I can't just get one of every kind of tree I want? I have to make sure they bloom at the same time? For months, I pored over the Raintree Nursery and Burnt Ridge Nursery catalogs, in combination with my site plan, before finally placing my order.

Yet somehow, I managed to order an European plum and an Asian plum tree, which don't happen to pollinate each other. So, two years later, I had to buy yet a third tree to pollinate at least one of my plums. After that, one of the trees grew a few puny plums that fell off the tree before harvest time. That was when I realized that plums don't do all that well in Oklahoma City. Now, I can't bear to cut any of them down.... the trees are nice and strong, even if they are not giving me (much) fruit.

4. Anger management

So there it is - my first garden bed, so nicely planted with seeds. All that research, all that work, to build the bed, fill it with soil, choose the seeds and plant them. Now I can finally go to bed and sleep soundly knowing I am on the road to self-sufficiency.

Wrong. Next morning, and for every morning thereafter, I see that SOME thing, SOME dastardly critter has completely destroyed my seedbed. I wanted to wail. Honestly, there might have been some wailing. How am I ever going to grow a garden if the mysterious squirrel-bird-coon keeps killing the seeds before they even sprout? I vow revenge, and start planning to buy a trap. Or a shotgun.

Then I discovered the easiest solution, which has worked without fail until this day. Whenever I plant a seedbed, I stake the four corners and then cover it with netting, anchoring it with bricks. The netting allows the sun to reach the soil and is easy to water through. After the seeds are a good size, I can remove the netting without fear. And all without any squirrel bloodshed.

3. Record-keeping (or lack thereof)

As I mentioned earlier, I ordered quite a few trees early on in my urban homesteading experiment. Apples, pears, plums. In my hurry to get them in the ground, I planted them and removed the tags. I recorded their locations on my site plan. But yet somehow, that site plan has disappeared. Now, I know I've got a Liberty and an Enterprise apple tree, but which is which? Which plum is which? Heck.

2. Plant abuse

Well, I can't claim ignorance on this one - just plain forgetfulness. I know that seedlings need to be "hardened off" - that is, you need to toughen them up by exposing them bit by bit to the cruel outside world after their sheltered young existence. Otherwise, it's a shock to their system when they are used to constant inside temperatures. Usually, I put my seedlings out for several hours for four or five days in a row, taking them in at night, before finally planting them in the soil.

Earlier this spring, I planted out some broccoli that I had raised from seed without first hardening them off. Of course, they all died.

1. Failing to plant is planting to fail

For several years now, I've meant to plant a huge winter garden like my friend Shauna, who harvested salads all through the winter with just a plastic sheeting to protect her lettuce and greens from the cold. I just never got around to protecting my fall garden with a cold frame or row covers. Instead, I "experimented" by planting a fall garden and then I let the plants fend for themselves (Result: kale and collards live; pac choy and mustard die).

Another planting failure: Year after year, I wait too long in the spring to plant my early crops, especially spinach, onions and lettuce. Then, they wither from the heat or bolt early. And I'm not even going to mention all the times I tried to plant my tomatoes early before the crucial April 15th date...

Bonus mistake: Going it on my own

Over the years, I have done a whole lot of research. I found many web resources, read a lot of books, participated in a permaculture workshop, and took an online class. I wanted someone to help me with a permaculture design, but couldn't find any local designers at the time (2005). What I didn't do was find people who were already doing this type of stuff locally, see what they were doing, and learn from them. That would have saved me a lot of time and given me a lot of new ideas - maybe even saved some money. But I was shy, and didn't know anyone in the sustainability crowd. So I missed out on the wisdom of the local experts.

Lessons learned: My gardening education and landscaping experiments have taught me something: start small, be flexible, plan ahead, and learn what works in your area. Perhaps most importantly, just get started...and keep trying through the inevitable failures.

So don't make my mistakes - go make your own!

Spring fever

2010-03-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

Peach tree in bloom

It's spring! The peach trees are blossoming, daffodils and dandelions are nodding, and the bushes are starting to bud out. Early planting season was about a month ago, but now I'm starting to get that spring fever itch. Time for planting another round of lettuce and onions, cilantro and peas, arugula and radicchio. Time to get a little dirt under my fingernails and get the first blush of sunburn on my neck.

Seriously, the tomatoes are getting out of control. I'll never try to "get a jump on" the tomato season again by starting them so early (10 weeks out). I had to transplant them again because they are getting so big, they didn't fit under my growlight any more! I'm worried that they are getting a little spindly even in a South-facing window. This is my first year to grow from seed, so I don't expect to be perfect, but I hope that my mato babies do OK when I transplant them into the garden. In another week or so I'll start trying to harden them off by putting the pots outside for a few hours every day. I'm crossing my fingers for the countdown until April 15th.

Tomato trees

I found another way to plant tomatoes if I run out of room in my new lasagna garden. My parents and I went to the new Organic Gardening place on NW 36th and Penn, Organics OKC, on Saturday. They just happened to be having an open house, and I got a free sample of this cool thing called a SmartPot.

The manufacturers claim that the SmartPot is superior to other types of pots for container gardening because of the better drainage, reduced heat retention (a benefit in our climate), and better root aeration. I can't comment on that, although there are some linked studies on the SmartPot site, but I am willing to try it out with a tomato plant. My problem with tomatoes is that I am always running out of room for them. There are a limited number of garden sites that are both sunny and which were not used for tomatoes or peppers in the last two years. So I'll give it a go and let you know how it really performs.

How's your spring coming along?

Book winner is...

2010-03-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

Commentor #9: anthy! You have won the book Newspaper, Pennies, Cardboard, and Eggs--For Growing a Better Garden: More than 400 New, Fun, and Ingenious Ideas to Keep Your Garden Growing Great All Season Long.

Please comment in with the address where you would like the book shipped. If I don't hear from you by Tuesday evening I shall draw a new number from the Random.com number generator.

Ironically, my own garden was covered this morning by a late March snow storm. Hopefully the hardier seedlings will survive.

Full disclosure: To date, Peak Oil Hausfrau blog giveaways have not been sponsored by any authors or publishers, but financed by yours truly as thanks to all my readers for your interesting and thoughtful comments.

Gardening on the cheap giveaway

2010-03-17T07:18:00.000-07:00

The gardening season in OKC is starting to swing. My tomato transplants are getting unreasonably huge, early-season seedlings and seeds are planted out in the garden, the lasagna garden has been uncovered to warm up the soil, and our peach trees have been pruned. (Still have to prune the other trees). I am counting the days until I can plant my tomatoes - I fear I may have to transplant them to larger containers again before April 15th!

As high gardening season approaches, you may have a list of things you need for your garden. If you are like most Americans (and me), you tend to buy things that were made specifically for one purpose, and that includes gardening. This is a mindset encouraged by our consumer culture, a need for convenience, and our current home aesthetic.

Now, I do firmly believe that the right tool can make a job 1000% easier (for example, a tile cutting machine vs. a manual tile cutter makes a world of difference). However, it is often less expensive to use what you've got around the house - or "waste" products from other people - for garden chores rather than buying specifically-made items. Plus, you are recycling something instead of using more of our resources to manufacture a new item.

At least for me, it takes a while to get in the creative recycling mindset. But "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" - that mantra of our great-grandparents may be coming back in style.

Hence, my giveaway today! In honor of the resurgence of gardening and to help you garden for cheap, I present Newspaper, Pennies, Cardboard, and Eggs--For Growing a Better Garden: More than 400 New, Fun, and Ingenious Ideas to Keep Your Garden Growing Great All Season Long.

Want a (possibly used) copy? Comment in! I will draw winners on Friday.

Designing events to engage

2010-03-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

After a year of giving speeches, presentations, teaching classes, and hosting events about Transition Town OKC, we decided to mix it up a little by changing our typical format to something more interactive. We hosted a 1 1/2 hour event called Discover Transition, which was designed to be an introduction to the Transition Town model for people interested in starting their own initiative, or considering attending our Training 4 Transition event on April 10 - 11.

At past events, we've used a Power Point, tried to encourage some audience participation, and occasionally included some kind of "envisioning a positive future with less energy" activity. This time, at our first TTOKC-hosted public awareness evening, we took a few cues from the Transition Handbook on how to engage with people. Our schedule proceeded like this:

- Start with a prop: one cup of oil launches the introduction.

- Power Point: The Transition Town model

- Activity in teams: "All of these things are like the others," examinining items in a bag to see what they all have in common (they are all made of oil-derived polymers)

- Power Point: The need for an energy transition

- Activity: In partners, discuss three things you will miss about the cheap oil age and three things you will look forward to about an age where oil is no longer cheap

- Power Point: 12 steps of transition model (with examples from Transitions around the world)

- Activity: In partners, design a tour of an OKC that has $20 / gallon gasoline but is thriving because we have completed our energy transition

- Power Point: TTOKC activities, ideas for change, resources

- Activity: Post-it note wall with four colored post-its for each person (One thing I can do, One thing TTOKC could do, One thing city govt. could do, One other thought)

You can see we changed pace and activities frequently to keep things flowing. An hour and a half was definitely cutting it close for this amount of information and interactivity, but people seemed to stay engaged and interested.

As far as logistics go, we had cake, cider, and water available, fresh flowers for the sign in table, name tags, bookmarks and registration forms to hand out, Post-its for the Post it activity, and an email sign up list available. We also had our props: a cup of used motor oil in a glass jar and two bags full of oil-derived objects (plastic toys, polyester clothes, CDs, nail polish, Tupperware, etc).

We were able to offer this event at very low cost to ourselves (no cost to participants) due to the generosity of our local Sierra Club, who loaned us the space and their projector, by providing refreshments ourselves, and using low-cost marketing tools. Marketing was done via our website, our Facebook page (which we recently started), through Constant Contact mailings to our email list, and the Sustainable OKC listserv.

I enjoyed not having all of the attention be on ME throughout the evening- letting people chat, network, and generate ideas with each other was great. I think we'll use this revised format again.

Magical thinking

2010-03-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

Peak Shrink has an interesting post on The Tyranny of Positive Thinking, a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In it, she expresses the same frustration I've felt when dealing with our cult of positivity.

I believe that I can improve situations by the way that I think about them and how I interpret them. I believe that, by envisioning a positive future that INCLUDES the harsh facts about peak oil and climate change, I can work toward that future by coming to terms with the massive changes that will be occurring and taking steps to prepare for it. A positive vision helps keep me motivated.

However. There is a pathological brand of positive thinking that demands that we be happy at all times, that we neither admit nor experience pain, unhappiness or depression. In order to achieve this type of happiness, the high priests and priestesses of the cult of positive thinking make recommendations like "don't read the news" and "get rid of negative people."

In other words, deny reality, hide from reality, and don't let your friends and family experience any real emotions. You don't want to hear about their difficulties with cancer and death, financial troubles and lost jobs - it'll just bring you down. Without all that negativity, you can float about in a bubble of pretense, your life padded on all sides by smiles and affirmations.

That same cultish positivity goes a step further to promote the idea that "wishing makes it so." While research that I've read seems to back up the effects of positive goal-setting and mental envisioning, these people believe that you can magically conjure up riches and wealth just by imagining it - hard enough. Not imagining and then working towards it - but just by being positive and believing.

The dark side of this is that you can then blame people who are poor, unemployed, sick, injured, or diseased for their own misfortune. Nothing to do with the realities of the physical world, history, biology, or sociology. Nothing to do with the unjust and environmentally harmful systems that are built into our society. It's just that they must not be thinking the right thoughts! Those Negative Nellies are bringing all that cancer/genocide/war/infertility/poverty on themselves! If they'd just get with the program, they'd be healthy, rich and happy.

I have one friend, for instance, who hates it when I talk about problems like oil depletion. "Enough of that doom and gloom!" she cries. "Let's talk about solutions!" Well, excuse me, but until you understand the depth, breadth and scope of the issue, you can't even begin to imagine the magnitude of the changes that are going to have to occur - and which we are going to have to work towards.

Someone who doesn't understand the fundamental facts around peak oil is likely to think that we can just slap a PV solar band-aid, or some electric car Neosporin, on the problem. Someone who does understand the problem knows that we've got serious gangrene in our system and we're looking at radical amputation of our car culture, entitlement thinking, and globalized industrial consumerism.

From what I've read about survival and trauma, one of the keys to dealing with a trauma appears to be avoiding the feeling of helplessness. In that case, in order to deal with the traumas we are experiencing now, and will experience in the near future, we have to believe that we can actually achieve good things by taking action. If positive thinking - looking on the bright side and finding the opportunities - helps you and those around you to prepare for the collapses we are facing - then look on the bright side. It helps me.

But if positive thinking causes you to shun all news and discussion about peak oil, unemployment, bank failures, and environmental catastrophe, then you are only setting yourself up for failure. If positive thinking causes you to avoid your friends and family who want to discuss and prepare for these "depressing" issues, you've shot yourself in the foot. And if positive thinking causes you to think that these problems are all going to go away without any investment or energy on YOUR part, then you really are doomed.

Sticking your head in a hole, no matter how bright and shiny, isn't a long term success strategy. Short term happiness (from oblivious ignorance or denial) is no substitute for long-term happiness (survival, healthy relationships, and peace of mind knowing you have helped preserve our future and a future for our children). Choose wisely.

Mato babies

2010-03-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

Tomato transplants

This is my first year to raise tomatoes from seedlings. There was an effort, last year, that was abandoned due to poor planning. This year, I'm serious. I got out my grow light and my timer, and started my seeds about three weeks ago. Yesterday I transplanted my initial seedlings from small pots into these larger pots, which I had saved over the years of buying tomato and other plants from Horn Seeds.

Originally, I thought, why not just start the seedlings in the big pots and save myself the trouble of transplanting? Then I found several sources that suggested that the act of transplanting was actually beneficial to the plant - the shock strengthens them somehow.

I've got 2 or 3 plants each of:

Egg Yolk

Homestead

Royal Hillbilly

Arkansas Traveler

Carbon

Black Cherry

Orange Banana

I've got quite a variety of tomato plants - and I'm growing more transplants than will fit in my garden. I've got yellow, pink, red, orange, and purple/black. I've got cherry, paste, jumbo, and medium sized tomatoes. I'm very eager to see how they compare. And since they are all heirloom, I plan to save seeds from the best of them - another skill I want to learn this year.

All the seeds are from Baker Creek Rare Seeds; some are from prior years and some I ordered this year. My old seeds I keep in a crisper double-bagged inside two plastic bags. I was pleased that all the old seeds (from 2 years ago) sprouted, especially since I gave quite a few of those seeds away to friends at various seed swaps. Wouldn't want to be giving away sub-par performers!

April 15th is our traditional tomato planting date. I wonder how large my tomato babies will be by then?

Permablitz

2010-02-25T07:04:00.001-08:00

Subtitle: Turning Nothing into Something

Every year, I try to transform more of my property from unproductive Bermuda grass to productive fruits and veggies. This year, I want to transform the desolate, wind-swept, 7 x 40 grass strip between our driveways (mine and my neighbors) into a luscious food forest. I am working with Randy Marks, a renowned local Permaculture and LEED certified landscaping expert, to complete the design. How I wish he had lived here four years ago so that I could have consulted with him then!

Currently, the design includes an existing one-year old persimmon tree, adding two pear trees (probably European but possibly Asian), cooking and medicinal herbs like thyme and lavender, edible daylilies, and three of what I'm calling "crop circles." As there is no faucet near the area, we plan to direct an existing downspout from my gutters into a swale-like streambed in order to water the plants (in addition to hand-watering). The pear trees will cast shade onto my driveway in the afternoon, reducing the glare and heat island effect of the concrete.

My "crop circles" are simply small circular raised beds - around 2-3 feet in diameter - that are designed to hold melons, zuchinni, pumpkins, or winter squash. Because these plants tend to ramble, I will only have to maintain a small, intensely managed planting area (the crop circle) and just let the vines wander on top of the wood mulch in between the pear trees. Since pear trees don't bear until late, I think I will have harvested most of the melons by the time the pears are ready to pick.

By planting these crops in this area, I won't have to take up valuable bed space in my back garden or build vertical structures to train them on. If you want to integrate some sort of raised bed for annual vegetables in with the perennials, evergreens, shrubs, and trees in your front yard, these crop circles might do the trick. I'll let you know how they work out.

An edible landscape may also serve as a demonstration for my neighbors - showing them that growing food and herbs can be attractive as well as functional. Lavender and day lilies are pretty plants, and personally, I like big melon flowers. Since the crop circles are small, there won't be a lot of bare dirt in the winter when the annuals are gone. And because thyme is evergreen, there will always be a nice green accent to the area, even in the winter (preferable to yellowish brown Bermuda!).

I hope to implement this plan via a Permablitz. A Permablitz is a kind of garden barn-raising. In our case, I want to offer a day-long, hands-on workshop that allows participants to simultaneously learn the concepts of permaculture, such as water use (ex: swales, storage), forest gardening, attracting beneficial insects, and so on; while also actually creating the design (seeing how the concepts are executed in practice). I'm intensely curious to see a swale created. Luckily Randy has volunteered to guide the permablitz - I am excited to learn from his expertise!

Ideally, this project would expand virally into some sort of network where people work on several blitzes, and then are able to submit their own permaculture plan to the group and have the group work on their project. Many hands make light work - and a lot more fun. Plus, participants would then be able to draw on the knowledge, creativity, and resources of the whole group. Or, perhaps someone will take up the idea of permablitz workshops and offer them regularly.

I've asked Sustainable OKC and Transition Town OKC to sponsor the project. I'll be purchasing the plants and materials; Randy will be providing the education, and I hope that Sustainable OKC / TTOKC will help with promotion, taking registrations, and providing a videographer. Since the Permablitz will be pretty limited in space, we'll probably limit the class size to 8 or 10 people. So far, interest seems high - the blitz may fill up fast. I also hope that we can make a short documentary out of the project and post it online.

I'm terribly excited! I've wanted to transform that area for years, and this seems an opportune time. I purchased way more watermelon/squash varieties than my back garden can hold - Desert King and Orangeglo watermelons, a Chanterais melon, and Butternut and Black Futsu squashes. I need somewhere to put them all. Can't wait till April!

Opportunity Knocks

2010-02-16T09:58:00.000-08:00

The coming energy descent, and the associated impact on our financial and economic systems, is probably a change that you didn't request. Knowing that our society will, at the very best, have to completely transform the way that we live, work, and eat can make anyone nervous and anxious. At the very worst... well, you've probably already encountered the die-off websites. Possessing the knowledge that an incredibly disruptive change is on the way can be both a heavy psychological burden - AND a lucky opportunity as well.

There's always a silver lining. Those of us with this advance knowledge, who accept the idea and implications of peak oil and peak energy, have the opportunity to prepare and to reinvent ourselves in a way that will get us through what may turn out to be a very rough transition. We have opportunities that billions of other people don't, and won't, get.

Consider these three questions* to find the silver lining in our current situation:

1. If anything could be GOOD about peak oil/energy/economy, what would it be?

2. How can I take this situation and turn it to an advantage for myself, my family, my loved ones, my community?

3. What opportunities will peak oil create (or has already created) that I could take advantage of in a positive way?

*These questions are borrowed from the book AdaptAbility by M.J. Ryan.

Although I sometimes wish I hadn't taken the peak oil pill of knowledge, I never doubt that I am better off because of it. The key is finding a way to accentuate the positive, decrease the negative, and take responsibility for your actions in responding to this huge change in our world.

In truth, despite my occasional yearning to spend my time, money, and attention on something BESIDES preparing for peak energy/finances/economy, this situation has opened a creative outlet for me (my blog), offered an opportunity to connect with sustainability folks in my area (meet new friends), and introduced me to the joys of tomato varieties and hauling compost (reconnect with nature, learn new skills, and get healthy exercise). I thank my lucky stars that I became acquainted with peak oil. It has given me the possibility to change before the floodgates open - and the chance to help others, if I can. How many people get that kind of karmic opportunity?

What positives and opportunities have you discovered - if any?