Photo credit: Kim Seng, via flickr Commons
At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP. We can just as easily have a future that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.
—Paul Hawken, Commencement Address, University of Portland, 2009
A turtle among the Roman ruins at Pergamon, Turkey. Photo by Nick Leonard, via flickr Commons
Nothing protects us but our constant awareness and rededication to embody our values as much as we possibly can, and to be gentle with ourselves and others when we fail in this.
This weekend was the big Building Resilient Communities Convergence in Hopland, CA. I was excited to be there for part of the action.
A highlight was the mycology skillshare, during which Fungaia Farm‘s Levon Durr demonstrated several methods for home mushroom cultivation.
Teaching how to cultivate oyster mushrooms at home using the stem butt/cardboard technique to grow your own spawn. Sweet!
I didn’t know until recently that shrooms actually are a source of protein. This makes me even more determined to try cultivating my own.
I thought Levon was going to levitate when he got to the part about mycoremediation. His enthusiasm is not misplaced: Mushrooms can clean petroleum from drainage ditches and aid in riparian zone restoration. They even eat heavy metals and bacteria.
The practice of using fungi to clean our beleaguered earth of toxins is one of the most hopeful stories I’ve heard. It is also the subject of an upcoming guest post from Radical Mycology, so stay tuned.
From the neighborhood resilience files: Over on the Irvington Development Organization website, I recently guest blogged about our mailman Louis, who is absolute treasure.
Our mailman Louis, the superhero
Excerpt:
I think of Louis as a secret superhero ever since I heard that he tried to chase down a kid he caught kicking in a neighbor’s back door. I don’t know what color his tights are, or what exact powers he possesses, but I think he might keep his cape in that mailbag he carries.
Check out the IDO site to read the full post.
Guest post by Lisa Boyles
My vision is to give purpose to a vacant lot. Where once stood abandoned houses, there will be a reflection space with a labyrinth and a community art installation.
In June 2013, we brought light to this space on the longest day of the year with a circle gathering and a modified sun salutation series. The children at this gathering helped decorate a stepping stone for the labyrinth entrance.
Since the summer, various people have joined me at this lot on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis. We have prepared the ground, moved bricks, unloaded wood, and removed trees. It is enlivening to get in touch with the dirt and have ruddy cheeks from working so hard outside.
Gordon removing an invasive tree.
The transformation from empty lot to Rivoli Park Labyrinth is primarily funded through a community action grant from Peace Learning Center‘s Focus2020 initiative.
The vision of Focus2020 is to create an engaged and inclusive city. I was one of several grant awardees at the beginning of September. The collective effect of these grants will be seen throughout the city over the course of the next year. The Peace Learning Center offers workshops so that more people can become Focus 2020 graduates.
John Ridder of Paxworks: the Labyrinth Shop created the triune focus design of the Rivoli Park Labyrinth. Logo by Susan Williams Boyles.
The Rivoli Park Labyrinth project brings the international labyrinth movement to an urban neighborhood setting. Our space will be listed in the worldwide labyrinth locator, putting the eastside of Indianapolis on the labyrinth map.
To offset the often solitary nature of walking a labyrinth, this project also includes a healthy dose of community celebrations. For example, on May 3, 2014, we will celebrate World Labyrinth Day. And workdays at the site include a potluck to celebrate our growing community.
Aaron, James and the neighborhood cat moving a young tree to make room for the winding path of the labyrinth.
Many partnerships are arising from this effort to give purpose to a vacant lot. One example of that synergy involves the documentation of the upcoming Oct. 10 workday (part of Indy Do Day). A KI EcoCenter videography intern is mentoring another young man that he met through this project. We can’t wait to see their collaborative videography of the workday, when volunteers will place bricks outlining the labyrinth path.
Meanwhile, the soil needs repairing and we plan to use hugelkultur to do it. We’ll mound soil and compost over woody debris and put our plantings on top of that mass. Permaculture designer Katherine Boyles Ogawa says, “Hugelkultur is an ideal method for urban lots where the soils are usually very compacted and often contaminated with heavy metals.”
Permaculture designer Katherine supervises unloading of logs for hugelkultur.
We hope to eventually make the space into a certified wildlife habitat through the National Wildlife Federation.
Another goal is to display artwork and illustrated quotes along the fence. Panels would be created by special education students at the nearby public school and the art group at Midtown Community Mental Health Center.
Sarah, a fellow Focus 2020 workshop participant, donating paint for the community art wall.
The community art aspect of the project is being funded through this crowdsourcing site.
We would love to have you join us in celebrating a year of this project coming into being on the summer solstice, June 21, 2014.
Like the Rivoli Park Labyrinth Indianapolis Facebook page to see project news. Join the Rivoli Park Labyrinth community group to collaborate with others and be invited to the annual celebration. We will post monthly featurettes and more detailed updates on our blog.
Time for an update on our vertical gardening project. When last I posted about the Garden Tower, everything was growing robustly and looking smart.
I hate to say it, but that was kind of the high point of the season. The plants have not grown as vigorously as I’d hoped since that photo session.
Our Garden Tower in mid-September: Not bad but not great. And this is its good side.
Today there are five tomatoes just about ready to pick, but the plant looks pitiful. I cut off most of the grim stuff a few weeks ago.
Not sure what kind of maters these are; the plant was a sucker from a friend’s tomato patch, and she didn’t label it.
On the bright side, we’ve had several cucumbers, as well as snippings of basil, parsley, and kale. I’ve also harvested a few small beets from the top (with lovely greens)—and more are still growing.
The peppers have produced some sad little specimens, but then again we didn’t expect much, having planted them so late in the summer. I was excited to see peas and green beans, till I realized that the yield was going to be quite lean, barely a handful each. I guess one would need to plant almost a whole tower of legumes to get a “crop.”
Sadly the plants have just not grown very robustly. But the Tower setup isn’t to blame. My mistakes:
Leggy amaranth and kohlrabi
Overcrowded chard
One point of pride: my daily hand picking of cabbage worms at the height of their infestation seems to have saved my kale plants. However, it was too late for the kohlrabi and cabbages, which have not progressed beyond seedling size. I’m told that an application of Bt and some ladybugs would eliminate these little munchers, so we’ll keep that in mind for next year.
It may have been another misstep to mix our compost into the potting soil, given how much trouble we’ve had with diseases in our tomato plants. I hated to see the tomato transplant succumb to the same yellowing and crispy leaves we’ve had the last several years in our regular beds. But: no blossom end rot; the tomatoes themselves are so far looking luscious.
We can’t do anything about the soil, short of dumping it out and starting over, and I’m not willing to do that. But the other issues are all learning points for the next growing season. With gardeners, it’s all about next year!
It’s something we all encounter in life; what do we do with it is what matters.
by Anna Goben, via Flickr Commons
“Your difficulties are not obstacles on the path, they are the path.”
—Zen teacher Ezra Bayda
Yesterday I drove down to Bloomington to spend part of the day with my homeschooling coop friends. These two families use homesteading activities as the basis for their children’s learning, along with traditional math workbooks, writing assignments and the like.
The task of the morning was to prepare cedar limbs to build a spit for cookpots over a campfire. The previous week, the kids had cut branches off the cedar tree, with a goal of being able to climb it. They’d christened it Fort Cicada.
Climbing ropes and nubs of branches make it easier to scale Fort Cicada.
The brushy limbs now needed to be trimmed and the bark removed with a draw knife. The kids coached me on sawing. I can’t remember the last time I sawed something. It’s satisfying to cut right through a branch and have it fall.
Prepping the cedar limbs for use as fence posts and building material
The draw knife was a revelation. I have never experienced the pleasure of skinning a tree branch with a sharp instrument. I wasn’t sure I was qualified for the work, but the kids taught me well.
Using the draw knife
They assured me that they would use a regular knife to shave around the knots where the draw knife caught. Here’s the youngest, working with her knife.
Knife skills
I love how fearless these kids are. I find that my own hands are better suited to a keyboard than a hand tool. Yet, I pulled off a passable job on bark-peeling task.
Not bad for a beginner
After a while it was time for lunch (fresh-baked bread!) and conversation. I asked the four kids what life would be like if they went to a school where they sat at desks all day. They agreed that they wouldn’t have nearly as much fun and flexibility in their lives, and probably not be as fit. Nor would they spend as much time with their families. On the flip side, they have to schedule activities to connect with larger groups, whereas students in school interact with lots of different kids daily.
Asked how their education is preparing them for adulthood, they pointed to skills like gardening, cooking, and researching solutions to problems.
After lunch, it was time to split maple logs and stack wood for the winter’s fuel. This was more fun than I expected. I consider myself something of a pipsqueak—but seeing the kids demonstrate, I thought, why not try?
Demonstrating wood splitting
After numerous tries and tons of pointers from the peanut gallery, I managed to stick the splitting maul in the top of the log. I whapped at it with a mallet till the firewood split with a satisfying crack.
Alas, no one captured the moment on film, but I have the sore muscles to prove it.
All in all it was a great time with lovely people, and felt wonderful to be outside doing real work on a pristine fall day.
Saturday I took part in a local expression of a nationwide day of action, 350.org’s Draw the Line. About 40 of us came out to demonstrate resistance to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.
KI EcoCenter hosted the Indy event in partnership with Earth Charter Indiana. These two stellar groups both work at the intersection of environmental, social, and economic concerns.
Photo by KI EcoCenter
Alvin, one of the organizers, started us off with a wholistic assessment of what we were about: creating a new world, beyond the issue of the pipeline or tar sands or even fossil fuels.
“Keystone XL is a symbol of the past…We’re saying no, we want something different for our world,” Alvin said.
In the ensuing discussion, there was talk of reining in corporate greed, making companies pay the true cost of production, reforming the way election campaigns are financed, and other policy changes.
But many people brought up the need for internal as well as external shifts. How are we making the old reality obsolete by creating a new reality, as Buckminster Fuller advised?
Photo by KI EcoCenter
Some of the insights:
We need to build a united movement that encompasses social justice, because climate change disproportionately affects the poorest of the poor. —Rosemary
We have to shift away from the value we put on money. Companies value money and profits more than our own lives. We have to focus on the intangible side of life, such as happiness that comes from having a healthy place to live. —Keenan
Photo by KI EcoCenter
The problem stems from the idea of separation—that we’re separate from each other, separate from the earth, separate from the animals. But we are one. —Marion
We need to change the definition of the good life. —Tom
We need to take responsibility for what we carry within so we don’t pollute the world with negativity. Anything inside us that fears and hates is that which is in common with what is feared. It’s important to notice—because when you notice things, they lose power. —Phoebe
Photo by KI EcoCenter
At the end of the discussion, we lined up outside the center with signs we had made, and a KI EcoCenter intern drew a black line across to represent our line in the (tar) sands.
Though I much prefer creating the new world to protesting what needs to fall away, I do believe it’s important to stand up and be counted. I’m glad Indy was represented in the movement, however small our number. And we didn’t stand alone. These photos of the line’s reach (into hundreds of cities, drawn by thousands of activists) at 350.org’s flickr stream are inspiring.
There’s a fatal flaw in the traditional definition of sustainability—meeting today’s needs without jeopardizing future generations’ ability to meet their own needs.
The problem? This notion leaves out every species besides homo sapiens.
The truth is, “Human beings don’t sustain shit,” sustainability consultant Brandon Pitcher declares. “Nature sustains us. We fool ourselves into thinking we sustain the planet, but it’s the other way around.”
But Fritjof Capra’s view of sustainability is more integrated:
“A sustainable human community is designed in such a manner that its ways of life, technologies, and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life.”
By Alaricmalabry (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons
Pitcher, a certified practitioner of ZERI (Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives, a global network seeking solutions to world challenges), spoke at the Irvington Green Hour Tuesday night. He gave two scenarios of solutions patterned after nature’s wisdom.
The Power of Shrooms
The first involves using mushrooms to address multiple issues, such as in the case of an invasive species troubling poverty-stricken parts of Zimbabwe. There water hyacinths choke waterways, to the point that people can’t take their boats down the river, jeopardizing their livelihoods in an area already strained by high rates of HIV.
However, once harvested, dried, and sun-sterilized, this invasive species is ideal food for mushrooms. Villagers take the work on, and native mushrooms thrive on this biomass. Reintroducing mushrooms as a food source demonstrates how tasty and nutritious these powerhouses are—and they can provide enough protein to sustain a community in two to three weeks, Pitcher says.
Mushrooms also figure in food security efforts in Colombia, where the coffee plant forms a substrate for edible fungi. Typically 99.8 percent of coffee is thrown away or burned on its way to our morning cuppa. But “waste” is opportunity.
Coffee Plant, by Jo N, via flickr Commons
The Wisdom of Water
Pitcher’s second example is a natural way to treat wastewater.
In Indiana, 92 cities, including my hometown, have antiquated combined sewer overflows (CSOs).
Combined sewer overflow effects, by Christopher Zurcher, via flickr Commons
Never heard of a CSO? You’re lucky. Here whenever it rains a fraction of an inch, raw sewage combines with stormwater runoff and runs straight into waterways. So pathogens and toxic chemicals are dumped into my neighborhood’s Pleasant Run and other sweet little streams.
The remediation plan involves drilling enormous pipes deep underground to hold the excess sewage. To Pitcher, this represents a wasted opportunity—and a sad ignorance about the way water naturally purifies.
“Water does not move in a straight line in nature,” he points out. Its natural flow creates vortexes that clean it. “It’s very ignorant of us to think we can move water through pipes in straight lines and think that water’s going to be healthy.”
An integrated system of rain gardens and wetlands harnesses the power of algae to treat wastewater. In Indy, such a system could have resulted in a decentralized network, providing jobs and clean water in perpetuity, Pitcher believes.
For more information, see the ZERI site, or The Blue Economy—or attend Pitcher’s upcoming sessions at Trade School Indy.
Shawndra Miller 