Transition Initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of the community in question beyond its present‐day dependence on fossil fuel. Our primary focus is not campaigning against things, but rather on creating positive, empowering possibilities and opportunities. The generation of new stories and myths are central to this visioning work.
2. Help People Access Good Information and Trust Them to Make Good Decisions
Transition initiatives dedicate themselves, through all aspects of their work, to raising awareness of peak oil and climate change and related issues such as critiquing economic growth. In doing so they recognize the responsibility to present this information in ways which are playful, articulate, accessible and engaging, and which enable people to feel enthused and empowered rather than powerless
Transition initiatives focus on telling people the closest version of the truth that we know in times when the information available is deeply contradictory. The messages are non‐directive, respecting each person’s ability to make a response that is appropriate to their situation.
3. Inclusion and Openness
Successful Transition Initiatives need an unprecedented coming together of the broad diversity of society. They dedicate themselves to ensuring that their decision making processes and their working groups embody principles of openness and inclusion. This principle also refers to the principle of each initiative reaching the community in its entirety, and endeavoring, from an early stage, to engage their local business community, the diversity of community groups and local government authorities. It makes explicit the principle that there is no room for ‘them and us’ thinking in the challenge of energy descent planning.
4. Enable Sharing and Networking
Transition Initiatives dedicate themselves to sharing their successes, failures, insights and connections at the various scales across the Transition network, so as to more widely build up a collective body of experience.
5. Build Resilience
This stresses the fundamental importance of building resilience i.e. the capacity of our businesses, communities and settlements to withstand shock. Transition initiatives commit to building resilience across a wide range of areas (food, economics, energy etc) and also on a range of scales (from the local to the national) as seems appropriate ‐ and to setting them within an overall context of the need to do everything we can to ensure environmental resilience.
6. Inner and Outer Transition
The challenges we face are not just caused by a mistake in our technologies but are a direct result of our world view and belief system. The impact of the information about the state of our planet can generate fear and grief ‐ which may underlie the state of denial that many people are caught in. Psychological models can help us understand what is really happening and avoid unconscious processes sabotaging change. E.g. addictions models, models for behavioral change. This principle also honors the fact that Transition thrives because it enables and supports people to do what they are passionate about, what they feel called to do.
7. Subsidiarity: self‐organization and decision making at the appropriate level
This final principle embodies the idea that the intention of the Transition model is not to centralize or control decision making, but rather to work with everyone so that it is practiced at the most appropriate, practical and empowering level, and in such a way that it models the ability of natural systems to self organize.
Permaculture is a design process for creating sustainable living systems. Through careful observation of healthy natural systems, we design patterns that create abundant systems of food, energy, water, shelter and community with minimum labor and pollution. Permaculture teaches how to droughtproof where you live. Permaculture can be practiced by all people, regardeless of location, economic status, or educational achievement. Practical permaculture offers a rich and abundant future.
Permaculture means “permanent agriculture” that allows for a “permanent culture.”
Permaculture teaches us how to simplify our lives and lead a more satisfying lifestyle. Permaculture teaches us how to quickly reduce reliance on fossil fuels and industrial systems that are destroying the earth’s ecosystems. Permaculture is more than a new way of gardening – it’s a sustainable way to live on planet Earth. We create permaculture wherever we live.
Bill Mollison (co-founder of permaculture in 1978 with David Holmgren) describes permaculture as the “conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems and the harmonious integration of landscape and people. The idea is to be able to look out your backdoor and see your friends gathering food.
Permaculture is an integrated, self-sustaining system of perennial agriculture . . . which involves a large diversity of plant and animal species. It is completely self-contained agricultural ecosystem that is designed to minimize maintenance input and maximize product yield. In permaculture, little wheels or cycles of energy are set up . . . and the system virtually keeps itself going! Essentially, it’s a living clockwork that should never run down . . . at least as long as the sun shines and the earth revolves.
I like to call permaculture a “humane technology”, because it’s of human dimensions. By that, I mean that it deals in a very basic way with simple, living elements . . . so it’s available to every man and woman. Permaculture doesn’t involve some sort of complicated technology, as does even an electricity-producing windplant. Instead, it’s a bio-technology . . . which people can intuitively handle . After all, permaculture deals with living systems . . . and since man himself is a living organism, he can readily comprehend it.”
A permaculturist’s skills may include building a house that uses almost no energy (my electric bill is $5 a month), or installing a greywater system and pond. We may have created an edible food forest. We may have set-up a rainwater harvesting system that collects and stores the rain that hits our roofs, or turned our fences into a food source. All this and more is part of a design concept that takes its cues from nature, while creating systems that take less work than conventional agriculture and are wildly abundant.
The good news is you are probably already practicing some permaculture principles.
Permaculture Defined
1. From Bill Mollison:
Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human environments.
2. From Drylands Permaculture, August 1987, Cathe’ Fish and Bills Steen. Reprinted by Permaculture Drylands Institute, published in The Permaculture Activist (Autumn 1989):
Permaculture: the use of ecology as the basis for designing integrated systems of food production, housing, appropriate technology, and community development. Permaculture is built upon an ethic of caring for the earth and interacting with the environment in mutually beneficial ways.
3. From Lee Barnes (former editor of Katuah Journal and Permaculture Connections), Waynesville, North Carolina:
Permaculture (PERMAnent agriCULTURE or PERMAnent CULTURE) is a sustainable design system stressing the harmonious interrelationship of humans, plants, animals and the Earth.
To paraphrase the founder of permaculture, designer Bill Mollison:
Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things. Each component in a system performs multiple functions, and each function is supported by many elements. Key to efficient design is observation and replication of natural ecosystems, where designers maximize diversity with polycultures, stress efficient energy planning for houses and settlement, using and accelerating natural plant succession, and increasing the highly productive “edge-zones” within the system.
4. From Michael Pilarski, founder of Friends of the Trees, published in International Green Front Report (1988):
Permaculture is: the design of land use systems that are sustainable and environmentally sound; the design of culturally appropriate systems which lead to social stability; a design system characterized by an integrated application of ecological principles in land use; an international movement for land use planning and design; an ethical system stressing positivism and cooperation.
In the broadest sense, permaculture refers to land use systems which promote stability in society, utilize resources in a sustainable way and preserve wildlife habitat and the genetic diversity of wild and domestic plants and animals. It is a synthesis of ecology and geography, of observation and design. Permaculture involves ethics of earth care because the sustainable use of land cannot be separated from life-styles and philosophical issues.
5. From a Bay Area Permaculture Group brochure, published in West Coast Permaculture News & Gossip and Sustainable Living Newsletter (Fall 1995):
Permaculture is a practical concept which can be applied in the city, in suburbia, on the farm, and in the wilderness. Its principles empower people to establish highly productive environments providing for food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs, including economic. Carefully observing natural patterns characteristic of a particular site, the permaculture designer gradually discerns optimal methods for integrating water catchment, human shelter, and energy systems with tree crops, edible and useful perennial plants, domestic and wild animals and aquaculture.
Permaculture adopts techniques and principles from ecology, appropriate technology, sustainable agriculture, and the wisdom of indigenous peoples. The ethical basis of permaculture rests upon care of the earth-maintaining a system in which all life can thrive. This includes human access to resources and provisions, but not the accumulation of wealth, power, or land beyond their needs.
Characteristics of Permaculture†
Permaculture is one of the most holistic, integrated systems analysis and design methodologies found in the world.
Permaculture can be applied to create productive ecosystems from the human- use standpoint or to help degraded ecosystems recover health and wildness. Permaculture can be applied in any ecosystem, no matter how degraded.
Permaculture values and validates traditional knowledge and experience. Permaculture incorporates sustainable agriculture practices and land management techniques and strategies from around the world. Permaculture is a bridge between traditional cultures and emergent earth-tuned cultures.
Permaculture promotes organic agriculture which does not use pesticides to pollute the environment.
Permaculture aims to maximize symbiotic and synergistic relationships between site components
Permaculture design is site specific, client specific, and culture specific.
†Source: Pilarski, Michael (ed.) 1994. Restoration Forestry. Kivaki Press, Durango, CO. p. 450.
The Practical Application of Permaculture
Permaculture is not limited to plant and animal agriculture, but also includes community planning and development, use of appropriate technologies (coupled with an adjustment of life-style), and adoption of concepts and philosophies that are both earth-based and people-centered, such as bioregionalism.
Many of the appropriate technologies advocated by permaculturists are well known. Among these are solar and wind power, composting toilets, solar greenhouses, energy efficient housing, and solar food cooking and drying.
Due to the inherent sustainability of perennial cropping systems, permaculture places a heavy emphasis on tree crops. Systems that integrate annual and perennial crops—such as alley cropping and agroforestry—take advantage of “the edge effect,” increase biological diversity, and offer other characteristics missing in monoculture systems. Thus, multicropping systems that blend woody perennials and annuals hold promise as viable techniques for large-scale farming. Ecological methods of production for any specific crop or farming system (e.g., soil building practices, biological pest control, composting) are central to permaculture as well as to sustainable agriculture in general.
Since permaculture is not a production system, per se, but rather a land use and community planning philosophy, it is not limited to a specific method of production. Furthermore, as permaculture principles may be adapted to farms or villages worldwide, it is site specific and therefore amenable to locally adapted techniques of production.
As an example, standard organic farming and gardening techniques utilizing cover crops, green manures, crop rotation, and mulches are emphasized in permacultural systems. However, there are many other options and technologies available to sustainable farmers working within a permacultural framework (e.g., chisel plows, no-till implements, spading implements, compost turners, rotational grazing). The decision as to which “system” is employed is site-specific and management dependent.
Farming systems and techniques commonly associated with permaculture include agro- forestry, swales, contour plantings, Keyline agriculture (soil and water management), hedgerows and windbreaks, and integrated farming systems such as pond-dike aquaculture, aquaponics, intercropping, and polyculture.
Gardening and recycling methods common to permaculture include edible landscaping, keyhole gardening, companion planting, trellising, sheet mulching, chicken tractors, solar greenhouses, spiral herb gardens, swales, and vermicomposting.
Water collection, management, and re-use systems like Keyline, greywater, rain catchment, constructed wetlands, aquaponics (the integra-tion of hydroponics with recirculating aquaculture), and solar aquatic ponds (also known as Living Machines) play an important role in permaculture designs.
From ATTRA -National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service
“The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children,” Bill Mollison, 1990.
“You can fix all the world’s problems, in a garden. You can solve them all in a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems, and all your supply line needs in a garden. And most people today actually don’t know that, and that makes most people very insecure.” Geoff Lawton
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Contact Cathe’
For more info: contact practicalpermaculture (at) gmail (dot) com
You will learn the quickest way to start a sustainable garden that will feed your family indefinitely year round with the lowest cost and the least amount of work. This is not a normal garden course. This course is designed specifically for those who want to thrive after peak oil — not just survive.
Here are the questions that will get answered during the course:
SEEDS AND SEEDLINGS
How do you select seeds for sustainability?
What do you need to know about special kinds of seeds: open pollinated, hybrid, determinate, non-determinate?
Which vegetables should you plant as seeds or seedlings?
How deep should you plant seeds?
How do you save and store seeds?
VEGETABLE CHOICE
What are cool weather and warm weather crops?
How long do vegetable plants live?
How do you select companion plants?
GARDENS
How do you make the land you have the right spot to grow food?
What are the creative and unusual places to plant effective gardens?
How do you make garden beds?
How do you prepare the soil?
How do you get water to your garden?
How do you quickly make a sheet mulch garden?
SUSTAINABLE GARDENS
How do you encourage your Soil Food Web for long-term nutrition?
How do you feed the garden sustainably?
How do you make perfect compost?
…AND MORE
How do you tell when vegetables are ready to harvest?
How do you store your vegetables for longest life?
How do you deal with critters?
YOUR OWN GARDEN BRINGS PEACE OF MIND
Having food in the house that you grew plus the knowledge that you can grow more brings some certainty to uncertain times. Some other benefits you’ll get from the course are:
Learn the most valuable things quickly
Learn how to grow food without petroleum or petroleum-based products
Save time and money by doing it right the first time
Involve your whole family
INSTRUCTOR
Cathé Fish
Master Gardener, Permaculturist and Educator
Cathé Fish has been a successful gardener since 1971 when she planted her first kitchen garden in Oakland CA. In 1987, she became a Permaculture Sustainabilty Designer and Teacher. Cathé has been an active Master Gardener through the Cooperative Extension Service since 1988. She was a newspaper gardening editor for years.
Cathé has taught hundreds of classes and workshops, in the USA and internationally. She teaches gardening in Master Gardener Workshops, at the County Fair, and in her many classes. Cathé doesn’t just talk about it, she does it, too. She has created and implemented edible landscapes and sustainable permaculture designs on properties from suburban back and front yards to 40 acre farms. She is a fanatic about growing plants.
Cathé has been an inspiring pioneer in sustainable permaculture education in the US. She was the founder and original editor of the Drylands Permaculture newsletter which later became the Permaculture Drylands Journal.
Since 1980, she has been a member of the Arizona Solar Action Team traveling around the state of Arizona conducting Passive Solar Greenhouse Workshops. She has taught her Passive Solar Greenhouse slideshow at Arizona State Master Gardener Conferences, as well as many Master Gardener and Permaculture classes.
She is a member of the California Native Plant Society, NAFEX North American Fruit Explorers, California Rare Fruit Growers and Bioneers.
She also lived for 25 years in the high desert town of Bisbee, Arizona where she planted a ¼ acre of food gardens and a food forest. She says, “Wherever you live, build sheet mulch gardens to grow vegetables, and make water catchments so you can plant fruit trees.”
Cathé currently gets her electricity from the sun, drinks water from her solar water distiller, and cooks her garden vegetables in her many different types of solar cookers and solar ovens.
WHEN AND WHERE
March 26, 2011 at 2pm North American Pacific Time (Convert to other time zones.)
This is a 2-hour long online course so you will need an Internet connection.
You will want a good long distance plan or calling card or you can use a service such as Skype.com.
Most people have a pumped water supply. Pumping water around the country is such a high user of electricity that should the grid fail, you will not get water out of your tap. (The sewage systems often rely on pumps, too.)
In fact, in California at least 6.5% of the state electricity is used for pumping water, over 15,000GWh each year. That’s roughly equivalent to the total yearly output of two 1000GW nuclear reactors.
For a particularly sobering view of what life will look like when the grid fails, see this National Academies congressional testimony. The relevant part is reproduced below:
“While the report does not speculate on the extended consequences of such an event, I have been asked to do so here and so offer this as personal opinion. Because our critical infrastructure is so completely integrated, with the power out for even a day or two, both food and water supply soon fail. Transportation systems would be at a standstill. Wastewater could not be pumped away and so would become a health problem. In time natural gas pressure would decline and some would loose gas altogether. Nights would be very dark and communications would be spotty or non-existent. Storage batteries would have been long gone from the stores if any stores were open. Work, jobs, employment, business and production would be stopped. Our economy would take a major hit. All in all our cities would not be very nice places to be. Some local power grids would get back up and so there would be islands of light in the darkness. Haves and have-nots would get involved. It would not be a very safe place to be either. Marshal law would likely follow along with emergency food and water supply relief. We would rally and find ways to get by while the system is being repaired. In time, the power will start to come back. Tentatively at first, with rolling blackouts and then with all it glory. Several weeks to months have passed, and the clean up would begin. This is one man’s opinion.”
The testimony above describes what would happen with an infrastructure breakdown caused by a determined team of terrorists, thus it assumes the grid will come back up once the damage is repaired. But what do we do when the grid is too poorly maintained to come back up? Capturing, storing and filtering water will become very important.
If you have access to a rooftop, you can redirect rainwater to some sort of storage vessel. If you can’t bury the vessel, it will have to stay above ground. With some water barrels, you’ll require a Siphon Pump and possibly a 10′ or 25′ fresh water hose.
You may want to consider installing a greywater system that allows you to reuse water from showers and sinks for other purposes. Don’t confuse that with reclaimed water, which comes from sewage systems.
Make sure you have a water filter and plenty of replacement filters in case your tap water becomes unreliable.
Right now, just 2% of the U.S. population grows all of its food, and only 12% of the population is actually making things. These numbers will undoubtedly grow as the energy from oil is removed from the system.
Oil is an extraordinary substance. Not only is it used in countless plastic and pharmaceutical products, it’s very energy dense. A single U.S. gallon of gasoline contains about 36,000 Wh of energy. That’s the equivalent of a person working three weeks, eight hours a day!
Another way of thinking about the energy we get from oil is to consider that a few cupfuls can bring a 3-ton vehicle up a small hill. How far could you push an SUV, even on flat ground?
Every year, each U.S. citizen uses, on average:
8,000 pounds of oil
5,150 pounds of coal
4,700 pounds of natural gas
1/10th pound of uranium
If one “person-power” is 0.25 hp or 635 Btu/hr, this is the equivalent of 300 people working around the clock for each of us.
Now you can see that as fossil energy is depleted, people and not machines will be doing a lot more work.
Assess your existing skills. If you think there will be a glut of them (with a plummeting economy, it’s not likely that the 22% of the economy currently devoted just to moving money around will need all those financial advisors, bankers and stockbrokers), move quickly to the productive side of the economy. In most cases, that means learn to make or repair or grow something.
Skills Needed in a Post-Peak World Here are some of the skills that will likely be needed:
medical treatment and nursing
welding
growing food
plumbing
carpentry and green building techniques
sewing
converting cars to use electricity
installing and repairing renewable energy systems (don’t forget solar hot water)
installing rainwater catchment systems
transporting goods without using fossil energy
installing residential and commercial backup energy systems
appliance repair
set up and run a food co-op
build and operate a community oven (baking is very energy intensive; not everyone will be able to afford to do it every day)
Start learning your chosen skill now and, if necessary, perform the first few projects for free so that you can build your resumé of successful projects.
A Simple Plan (By Christine Patton, a fellow blogger who is helping her community prepare for Peak Oil) Check out her blog at: http://peakoilhausfrau.blogspot.com/2010/01/simple-plan.html
I first learned about peak oil on the red-eye flight home from my honeymoon. I read the entire book Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight on the plane and almost woke up my sleeping newly-wed husband to force him to discuss it with me. Later, I read the Life After the Oil Crash website and discovered how close we really were, and how serious the problem really was.
That fall, we moved back to Oklahoma City. In some ways, there’s no worse place to be than here ;). The sprawl! The droughts! No public transport, no bike paths! We just got organic food in our grocery store in 2009! But in other ways, it excels. We are near both of our families, have cheaper costs of living and a smaller mortgage, and land here is affordable.
There are many different approaches to preparing for peak oil. Some people like homesteads, others focus on preparing financially. Personally, I think there’s no ONE single best way – but many ways that will work for people in different circumstances with different strengths and needs. My particular “plan” focuses on three major time periods with three associated strategies. Those are:
1. Short term / Fast crash:
Preparing for emergencies is good to do regardless of peak oil: you may need many of these strategies to deal with ice storms, blizzards, power outages, quarantine, tornado, hurricane, etc. You might want to consider finding a place to go in case the local situation becomes severe. For example, my parents moved to our house when their electricity went off for 10 days.
– Emergency planning
– Backup plans
– Evacuation plans
– Food storage
– Water storage & filtering
– Home defense
2. Medium term / Economic crash:
Many people now see the wisdom of these tactics, but before the recession they would have been seen as ultra-conservative or inefficient. In particular, no one wanted to hear about reducing expenses or debt since this was seen as reducing the ability to have all the latest toys, bells, and whistles.
In the long term, I think we are all going to have to move in this direction, although there are many different ways to approach a sustainable future. And along the way, there will be many bumps. Unfortunately, just as we realize that we need to take these actions, our capacity to do so may be reduced due to government regulations, economic conditions, competition from still-cheap and subsidized fossil fuels, etc.
– Site selection (finding a good place to live and work),
– Growing food,
– Energy efficiency in home and transportation,
– Powerdown,
– Alternative energy,
– Grow community,
– Learn new skills (gardening, farming, post-peak career),
– Support local farmers and economy
That’s a high level look at one way to approach preparation (as I said, there are many ways). In a later post, I’ll summarize what I’ve done to prepare in the above categories over the last five years.
10 Ways to Identify a Closet Prepper
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”.
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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!
Vegetable gardening in Tennessee can be broken down into two planting and growing seasons with warm-season vegetables and cool-season vegetables. Warm-season vegetables are planted in the spring after any danger of frost and before July, and cool-season vegetables are planted in the fall to benefit from the winter chill; many cool-season vegetables can also be planted in early spring.
Fall Planting of Cool-Season Vegetables
Cool-season vegetables are planted in the summer and fall between July 1st and September 30th for fall and winter harvest. This allows them to take advantage of the cool fall and winter temperatures to germinate and grow properly. Cool-season vegetables are relatively shallow rooted and sensitive to drought, so careful monitoring of water is critical. Examples of cool-season vegetables that work for planting in this time frame in Tennessee are broccoli, cabbage, Chinese cabbage, cauliflower, collards, pickling cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, mustard greens, Irish potatoes, icicle radishes and spinach.
Spring Planting of Warm-Season Vegetables
Warm-season vegetables grow in warm soil and ambient air temperatures which allow them to germinate and develop properly. They are planted between the first week of April and the end of July. Warn-season vegetables and their seeds will be damaged by any exposure to frost or temperatures within 15 degrees of freezing. Unlike winter-season vegetables, they have long, deep roots that make them drought resistant even in the heat of summer, though still requiring watering to grow. For spring planting, consider bush beans, snap beans, pole beans, runner beans, lima beans, cantaloupe, sweet corn, pickling cucumber, slicing cucumber, eggplant, okra, peas, sweet peppers and tomatoes.
Spring Planting of Cool-Season Vegetables
You can also plant cool-season vegetables in the spring in Tennessee between early February and the end of March. Cool-season vegetables that can be grown as spring crops include beets, broccoli, savoy cabbage, round green cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, collards, kale, kohlrabi, butter crunch lettuce, iceberg lettuce, mustard greens, bunch onions, sweet storing onions, English peas, sugar snap peas, Irish and Yukon gold potatoes, white icicle radishes, spinach, Swiss chard, rhubarb and turnips.
Water is an incredibly important to the existence of life on earth. We humans use it for a number of activities in our day-today life. We drink, cook, wash, bathe, and clean all with the help of water. However, even with all of the importance water holds in our lives, many of us know very little about the water we use each day.
All of us know that drinking impure, contaminated water will invite a host of diseases. Hence it is must for us to drink pure water. Further, we assume that bottled water is the purest form of water since it is hygienically prepared and sealed to avoid impurities. The $60 billion global bottled water industry has shown tremendous growth in the recent years. Advertising for bottled water suggests that drinking water in plastic can make you thin, sexy, healthy, affluent, and environmentally responsible. Water bottles have become a fashion accessory. Think again!
It is actually the other way round. Drinking from plastic bottled water is not only damaging to you but also to the environment.
Here are some myths about bottled water:
Its safe: Many people think bottled water is safer than tap water. There is no such guarantee. A man reported getting sick from drinking bottled water because it had high levels of coliform bacteria in it. A study revealed that most bottled water is roughly equivalent to tap water in terms of germs and chemical makeup. Another study determined that at least 25 percent of bottled water (including top brands) is actually filtered tap water.
It is healthy and tastes better: Vitamins, minerals, herbs, protein and all the other additions to water are really nothing but a marketing ploy. Enhanced waters usually contain sugars and artificial flavorings to sweeten the deal.
It’s pure: The labels on many bottles have the words “natural” and “pure” on them can be misleading. Ahmedabad based Consumer Education and Research Society (CERS) conducted a detailed study on the 13 major brands of bottled water and found that as many as 10 brands had foreign floating objects in clear violation of norms. The study also found that none of the brands was free from bacteria (not of the harmful kind), and two of the big brands contained toxic heavy metals much higher than permitted levels.
Not only these myths, but there are further reason why you should avoid bottled water:
It is dangerous to the environment: Every year about 1.5 million tons of plastic go into manufacturing water bottles for the global market, using processes that release toxics such as nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide and benzene. These bottles are composed of a plastic called polyethylene terepthalate (PET), which can take as long as 400 to 1000 years to degrade. In addition, more than 80 percent of the PET water bottles are tossed in the trash instead of being recycled. Besides landfills, many bottles end up in oceans, posing a risk to marine life. Furthermore, the manufacturing and shipping of bottles means extra carbon emissions. 60 Million plastic bottles a day are disposed of in America alone!
It impacts the water resources: Bottled spring water is taken from water that flows naturally to the surface of the earth from an underground formation. Thus there is reduction in the underground water resource. Sometimes, bottled water comes from the glaciers which is even more damaging to the environment. Moreover, during filtration, it is estimated that two liters of water are wasted for every single liter that is purified.
Hidden cost: It requires 3 times as much water to make the bottle as it does to fill it. it is an exceptionally wasteful industry. We use more than 17 million barrels of oil to make plastic bottles. This could generate electricity for more than 2.5 million homes or fuel 1 million cars for a year. And this doesn’t include the fuel required to transport the bottles. We are literally drinking up oil in our quest for clean water.
4. Health Cost: Bottled water contains the dangerous chemical, BPA.Numerous studies indicate exposure to low levels of BPA causes a range of serious health effects in laboratory animals, particularly when exposures occur in utero (Maffini 2006). According to Scientific American, BPA is essentially a synthetic hormone, acting much like estrogen, so it’s possibly affecting our bodies in a myriad of ways.
The first is breast cancer. According to a new article just out in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (and also released from The Breast Cancer Fund), there is evidence that suggests a link between increasing instances of breast cancer and BPA, especially when women are exposed to BPA at a younger age. Their advice is that women who are pregnant or nursing limit or eliminate their exposure to BPA. Children especially are susceptible to the adverse health effects of BPA, since their brains and bodies are still developing.
BPA has also been shown to decrease sperm count in lab studies, as well as impact testes development. And in this article published in TIME, BPA might also be causing diabetes, aggressiveness, heart disease, and decreased sensitivity to chemotherapy in cancer patients. The EWG lists these studies showing the adverse health effects of BPA:
A study showing that BPA exposures lead to an error in cell division called aneuploidy that causes spontaneous miscarriages, cancer, and birth defects in people, including Down Syndrome (Hunt et al. 2003).
An investigation demonstrating that low doses of BPA spur both the formation and growth of fat cells, the two factors that drive obesity in humans (Masumo et al. 2002).
A study linking low doses of BPA to insulin resistance, a risk factor for Type II diabetes (Alonso-Magdalena et al. 2006).
A preliminary investigation linking BPA exposures to recurrent miscarriage in a small group of Japanese women, made potentially pivotal by its concordance with lab studies of BPA-induced chromosome damage that could well cause miscarriage (Sugiura-Ogasawara 2005).
What should I do?
There are a lot of things that you can do to not be a part of this lunacy:
Fit a water purifier in your house; drinking filtered water is a much more economical practice than drinking bottled water.
Choose tap water over bottled water whenever possible.
Use a refillable bottle with tap water.
Don’t use plastic bottles.
Convince other to do the same.
So now that you know there is no actual difference between bottled water and regular one, head to your tap and have a sip. If you want to drink water that is 100% pure and provides a healthy lifestyle for you and your family, get a good purifier system. All that you need to do is a touch more research and you may find a tap water filtration system that will save the environment and your wallet. It’s now up to you.
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Water Documentaries that are worth watching:
Tapped is a condemnation of one of the most ubiquitous acts of consumption today, the purchase of bottled water. The scathing new documentary reveals a litany of damaging effects as it follows this environmental scourge from production to “disposal,” including the Pacific Ocean’s floating continents of plastic debris twice the size of the continental United States.
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FLOW – Irena Salinas’ documentary is about the global crisis we face as Earth’s fresh water supply constantly diminishes. The film presents top experts and advocates to show us that every aspect of human life is effected by pollution, wastefulness, privatization and corporate greed as it relates to a natural resource that’s more valuable than oil.
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Blue Gold, Water Wars – The current ways water is being used and exploited by private interests all over the globe is seen having long-term consequences in this documentary about water resources.
The Food System and Resilience
Posted by Jason Bradford on January 26, 2010 – 10:10am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience Alliance
For something as critical as food, it is common sense that society should design for resilience. Reliability in food production in the face of change requires a system capable of rapid evolution. Resilience is therefore a core principle of sustainability. Unfortunately, our daily bread relies on a food system that is not resilient. As I have explained before, this state of affairs is an outcome of government policies, financial pressures, cheap fossil fuels, and market forces in play over the past several decades. The result is a food system dominated by relatively few large actors, which creates conditions of rigidity and brittleness.
This post is a brief review of:
the basic science of resilience,
how our current food system lacks a resilient structure, and
an overview of what a more resilient food system would be like
Food Webs
Resilence is a concept from the science of ecology. Ecologists study what are called food webs, which are feeding relationships among populations. A simple food web might be a plant eaten by a browsing animal, which is eaten by predator. When animals die a scavenger eats those bodies. And the poop is eaten by microbes that make the nutrients available to the plants again.
Diagram of a simple food web with lines indicated feeding relationships among populations of plants, herbivores and carnivores. A low diversity food web has strong connectivity between parts. Therefore, the loss of one part (as shown by the red cross mark through the herbivore) has big effects on other parts of the food web.
Ecologists have found some important relationships between food web structures and their properties. When food webs are very simple, meaning they have few parts that are connected to each other in straightforward ways, the system often shows unstable dynamics, such as widely fluctuating population sizes. It is easy to see how this happens. If a predator is dependent upon one prey, a decline in that prey will starve the predators.
An early and classic study of a low diversity food web. With only a few, strong connections, volatile dynamics result.
By contrast, diverse food webs have many parts, and often the relationships among parts are weak and not so simple. For example, instead of a few plant species there are many, and there are several herbivores that have a choice of feeding on different plants. The same is true all the way up the food chain, with predators being able to feed on a variety of prey. More diverse systems are more stable because if any particular plant or animal population goes into decline, feeding relationships are plastic and can adjust so that the loss of one part doesn’t cause havoc with others.
High diversity food webs have weaker connectivity among parts and therefore built in redundancy. This permits parts to adjust to losses, effectively buffering against volatility.
The Low Diversity Food System
Farms in the U.S. have become highly specialized to produce a narrow range of products. In the Midwest, for example, corn and soy dominate. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, grass seed is king.
In 2009, 71% of U.S. cropland consisted of just three species (source USDA).
Low diversity at the farm level is magnified by low diversity all along the input and supply chains. Because of consolidation, few seed companies remain. And when it comes to getting paid after harvest, there are fewer buyers for farm commodities, and fewer distributors and retailers too. Few parts with strong connections among them preconditions the system for high volatility.
Seed industry consolidation 1996-2008 from Phil Howard of Michigan State University. Reaction to this issue via antitrust litigation is now occurring
A Context for the Future
The fundamental emergent properties and core functions of a resilient system remain stable even as rapid change is occurring, whether from external forces or the ebb and flow of individuals and populations that make up an ecosystem. For the food system this means being able to produce, store and distribute food even when critical conditions alter dramatically, such as a credit crisis, energy shortfalls, or extremes in weather. Cheap transportation fuels have obviously been key in the development of our current food system, which emphasizes producing crops with high regional comparative advantages in yields, labor, or mechanization, and exporting them.
If we foresee a future with continued and possibly greater economic, resource and environmental volatility, then reconfiguring the food system for resilience is a smart strategy. Principles for doing so can be found by studying the structure of ecosystems.
The Resilient Farm Strategy
Natural systems are inherently resilient but just as their capacity to cope with disturbance can be degraded, so can it be enhanced. The key to resilience in social-ecological systems is diversity. Biodiversity plays a crucial role by providing functional redundancy. For example, in a grassland ecosystem, several different species will commonly perform nitrogen fixation, but each species may respond differently to climatic events, thus ensuring that even though some species may be lost, the process of nitrogen fixation within the grassland ecosystem will continue. Resilience Alliance
A resilient farm has diversified operations to buffer against volatility. The benefits of diversity accrue in many ways.
Organic and especially agroecological farms are less dependent upon outside inputs that can change in price rapidly and unpredictably. Crop rotation plans include many species of plants and animals that are complementary in functions, such as legumes fixing nitrogen, grasses building soil carbon, and animal manures making nutrients more readily available to plants. Instead of buying mechanized services or fertility inputs, the farm integrates the functional diversity of life to create synergies.
A farm layout and field rotation pattern based on agroecological principles. Colors represent different classes of production: green is pasture, brown is legumes, yellow is grains, red is cover crop, and blue is other seed crop. Each image shows a different year of land-use.
Inherent diversity means no single crop failure will ruin the farm, and soil imbalances are prevented. The focus is on soil health, with all fields going through periods of planting in perennial and deeply rooted species to build soil organic matter and mobilize minerals such as phosphorus from deep layers. Fungi associating with roots locate source rock and solubilize minerals that are trans-located to leaves. Topsoil fertility is therefore built from below.
Landscape structure is created to provide habitat for native and naturalized species that participate positively in the farm food web, such as pollinators and predators. No need to buy pesticides when raptors have homes in the trees, predatory wasps have nectar sources, frogs can breed in clean water, and ground beetles have zones of refuge from tillage, for example.
While the emphasis is on letting the biology do the work, renewable energy infrastructure also creates resilience. Farms are often ideal places for wind and solar technologies, and on-farm biofuels are likely to have positive energy returns.
The many differences between conventional and sustainable farming systems are compared.
Food System Resilience
Most farms in the U.S. operate for purposes of exchange, not self-reliance. A resilient farm therefore needs to consider how it connects to the rest of the economy. Do farms have few or multiple choices in the sources of seeds, fertilizers and other inputs? Do these inputs come from far away mines and seed companies, or from local businesses? Are farmers beholden to a dominant buyer or do many potential buyers exist for their products?
To have a resilient food system the associative farm economy needs diversity too. Since this is typically not the case anymore, transforming the food system, both on and off farm, takes time, coordination among actors, patient financial investment, and the ability to adapt.
Different economic arrangements are competitive at different periods of history. I believe we are entering a time when the diminishing returns on previous investments will open up opportunities for new actors. Because of economic volatility, what works going forward will be different than what worked in the past. This is an age of great innovation where agroecological farming and local food system development will emerge as a natural and smart response to pressures of resource depletion, protection and enhancement of natural capital, and financial and job insecurity.
What will this new food system look like? It will be organized akin to an ecosystem, or food web. Farms and renewable energy infrastructure occupy the level of primary producers, with businesses acting as conduits for feeding omnivorous humans. In contrast to our current food system, which is linear in structure, the future food system will cycle nutrients back to the farm. This structural constraint will mean that much more food is grown for local populations.
Nutrients will still leak from landscapes, and so maintaining long-term fertility will require replacing what is lost. In forests of the Pacific Northwest, salmon migrations brought the mineral wealth of the ocean back to the land. Restoring migratory fish habitat therefore aligns with the needs of agriculture. Harvesting of kelp deposits on beaches and salt deposits from tidal zones and transporting them inland is another viable means of supporting the mineral richness in soils.
Bernie Winters of Clare Island, Ireland, harvests kelp from rocky beaches to remineralize the soils on his farm.
I hope this post has clearly framed the issue of food system resilience and the general principles involved. Many examples exist that align with the goals of resilience, including novel distribution systems, farmer training programs, and specialists on soil restoration. Please share other examples you know of, and discuss aspects of the challenges involved in more detail.
