Tag Archives: Indiana

A Lifesized Lego Set for Farmers and Makers

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I was invited to visit the Indiana Small Farm Conference this past weekend, and was I ever glad I went. I got to reconnect with some farmer friends and make new connections. I learned about the challenges facing the people who grow our food on a small scale. And of course lunch was delicious, as well it should be with food supplied from local farms and prepared by the stellar whole-foods caterer known as The Juniper Spoon.

But the highlight was a session with a representative from Open Source Ecology. This is a group I’ve had my eye on for a while because of the radical way they are working to take back the building blocks of modern life. The goal is nothing less than a modular, low-cost, DIY “Global Village Construction Set” of 50 machines that would meet the major needs of civilization.

The best part? The plans are all open source, allowing anyone, anywhere, to try them out and make improvements.

The 50 machines, from tractor to 3D printer to wind turbine.

The 50 machines, from tractor to 3D printer to wind turbine.

OSE Construction Manager Chris Reinhart, it turns out, lives just an hour away from me. He calls himself a tinkerer and maker, and holds an architecture degree from Ball State. He is developing plans for a micro-house that could be built by a small group of people in a handful of days, using equipment from the GVCS.

He posts his plans on Facebook and logs his work online for all to see. As a writer I shudder at the prospect of having so many eyes on a work-in-progress, but transparency is the name of the game here. Reinhart says the idea is to “tap the hive mind” and constantly iterate improvements.

Another goal is to standardize workflows. Reinhart explained that a group of 16-20 people could break into smaller teams, each take a module (there’s one for plumbing, one for windows, etc.), and work separately until time to put the construction together. He likened the system to a life-sized Lego set that can be snapped together.

The above TED talk by OSE’s founder, Marcin Jakubowski, talks about how lowering the barriers to farming, building, and manufacturing can unleash human potential. An entrepreneur who wants to start a construction company can jump right in. A household can add a DIY wind turbine and sell energy back to the grid. Farmers can be less dependent on manufacturers.

Think of it: That irritating built-in limitation of purchased gadgets, planned obsolescence, would become a thing of the past as people discover how to build and fix their own machines.

“This is a different model, economically and socially,” Reinhart says. In contrast to a top-down command and control ethos, this bottom-up model empowers many people on the ground, all making and innovating and selling to each other. I love the collaborative “do-it-with-others” spirit of these guys. Go DIWO!

OSE is planning an intensive workshop series to teach people to build six of the 16 machines that have been prototyped so far. For more information, check out this Crash Course on OSE.

Correction: The original blog post indicated that six machines have been prototyped; in actual fact 16 are in prototype phase, and the workshops are being offered on the six most mature designs.

Portal to the Wider World

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“An environment-based education movement―at all levels of education―will help students realize that school isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.”

―Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

A few weeks ago I had the chance to stop in on a special activity at Avon’s Hickory Elementary School. Jen Davies from Avon Outdoor Learning Center—a total rock star in the kids’ eyes—had come to talk minerals. By day’s end 120 children would make the connection between minerals and something they encounter every day, toothpaste.

In each hour-long session, Jen touched on Coke cans’ recyclability, Lunchables’ sodium content, Crest’s new products—and the broad appeal of minty-tasting toothpaste.

Discussing the sodium content of common foods.

Discussing the sodium content of common foods.

Throughout, Jen telegraphed the absolute awesomeness of minerals. These third-graders were right there with her.

This time of year, most of Jen’s work takes place in the classroom, but the Outdoor Learning Center is true to its name in every other season (and on some milder winter days).

Jen Davies leads a group of small learners on a winter outing to catch snowflakes and look at their shapes.

Jen Davies leads a group of small learners on a winter outing to catch snowflakes and look at their shapes. Photo courtesy of Avon OLC.

On seven acres belonging to the Avon School Corporation, students encounter the real-world stuff that makes science, math, and history come alive. Over 9,100 students, parents and faculty members visited the OLC in 2012-13, exploring two miles of trails and habitats spanning prairie, woodland, and wetland. A beehive and 7,000-square foot vegetable garden—tended by a garden club of 85 budding gardeners—offer further learning opportunities.

Back at Hickory Elementary, Jen divided the kids into groups and funneled them to one of four tables to make toothpaste. At one table they measured a half teaspoon calcium carbonate with a quarter teaspoon baking soda, according to the recipe. At the next, they could handle crystals, stones, and a Coke can in the “mineral museum.”

Geologist-in-the-making

Geologist-in-the-making

The final two stations were the most exciting: droppers to add the coloring and flavoring of their choice.

Adding flavoring with help from a volunteer.

Adding flavoring with help from a volunteer.

Would it be tutti-frutti, traditional mint, or maybe cherry, coco-lemon, or some other variation? And what color should it be? Tints of cherries, neon green, and ice blue bloomed in the paper cups.

blue

Blue proved to be a popular color.

Wrapping up, Jen told them, “Minerals are really cool—you might decide on a career using this, where you can do something like make toothpaste.”

When I spoke to her afterward about why she’s so passionate about her work, she told me she wants the children “to see themselves as part of this amazing whole.”

“We are all just circles within connections within circles. We need healthy soil and clean water and clean air to be able to thrive. The choices we make on a daily basis affect not only us but everything around us.”

Sadly, Avon OLC faced major budget cuts in 2011. Jen has been raising money and finding grants to pay her own salary. Late last year word went out that funding had dried up—without help, her position would be gone by this month. Since then several thousand dollars have been raised. It’s enough to keep her, for now, until the end of the school year, but the future is uncertain.

As Jen wrote me in an email, “It’s just so innovatively unusual for a public school district to have such a resource, we are giving it all we have to keep going.  When kids bring me their entire piggy bank, how can I not try everything I can think of?”

Several fundraisers are in the works to keep the center going. Visit the center’s site to see how you can help.

Update: After I posted this, Jen was awarded the 2013 Donald H. Lawson Award for Conservation Education from the Hendricks County Soil & Water Conservation District.

Restoring the Land

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Cover page of my Farm Indiana profile of WE Farm

Dr. Lisa Harris remembers well the first conversation with the young man who would come to farm her land—they talked for hours, almost an entire day. “I was so impressed with how deliberate and thoughtful he was,” she told me.

Dr. Harris is Eskenazi Health’s medical director, a vegetarian with a lifelong interest in eating healthy food. As I learned when I wrote about WE Farm for Farm Indiana, she leases her Owen County property to Josh Egenolf and Laura Beth Wayne’s pastured beef cattle, poultry, and pork operation.

“Most people in the United States do eat meat,” she said. “So if I can be part of something that gives people access to meat from animals that have lived well, it seems like a perfect opportunity.”

Like many of us, Dr. Harris tries to live as lightly as possible, and Josh’s plans to make her land productive really spoke to that goal. “What Josh is doing,” she said, “is in every sense helping to improve the land.” WE Farm’s integrated, rotational grazing plan means the animals work in concert with nature to restore pastureland—all the while sequestering carbon and nitrogen in the soil.

The day I visited the farm last November in preparation for my Farm Indiana story, four happy dogs ran in front of the pickup truck as we drove up the lane to tend the livestock. Owen County is picturesque, with wooded hills and deep valleys. Josh showed me the steep woodlot where the hogs are periodically turned loose to forage for acorns and pawpaws. They also help him clear out understory invasives, just by doing what pigs do.

Breeder pigs enjoying their mineral rations on a frosty November morning.

Breeder pigs enjoying their mineral rations on a frosty November morning.

Josh was raised on a farm just a few miles up the road, and he treasures the richness of his a rural childhood. Giving that experience to his own child (and another on the way) is a big reason why he moved back to the area after pursuing his doctorate in ecology at the University of Georgia.

Also, he wanted to be put what he’d learned there into practice. Agriculture, he told me, has enormous potential for creating meaningful environmental change.

He said, “In 2007 I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Before that it never occurred to me that there might be anything troublesome about the way meat was produced, other than animal welfare stuff. That’s very clear to me…you shouldn’t treat your animals poorly. They need to be respected. But it didn’t occur to me that there was a single thing wrong with them eating grain and (even) industrial byproducts.”

He knows that many people still don’t realize the environmental and health issues that accompany feeding grain to meat animals, but a growing customer base tells him how many people value pastured meat. “It’s like an awakening that needs to happen.”

Josh and Laura Beth strive to keep the business as local as possible, keeping close to home in all their dealings. For more on their endeavors, check out my Farm Indiana story and the WE Farm website.

We Can’t Afford Coal

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This week I attended a meeting to learn more about Indianapolis Power and Light’s Harding Street plant, the largest industrial polluter in the city. IPL has no plans to retire this 55-year-old coal plant, even though the EPA says it’s responsible for 88 percent of industrial toxic releases in Marion County. The plant’s smokestacks annually release 130 pounds of mercury into the air.

That has a devastating public health impact. One attendee spoke of being an asthma sufferer. “I know what it’s like to struggle to breathe and have to go to the ER…It breaks my heart to think that our power is the reason children have to go through that.”

Photo by Karl Anderson, via flickr Commons.

Photo by Karl Anderson, via flickr Commons.

As I found while researching an Indiana Living Green story about the Beyond Coal movement, poor children are disproportionately affected by coal because of where they live—resulting in learning disabilities, asthma, autism, and lowered IQs. They’re effectively trapped into a cycle of poverty, suffering lifelong difficulties linked to our state’s over-reliance on coal.

Two city maps made the plant’s impact visible. One showed asthma-related ER visits in Marion County, and the other depicted mercury levels in waterways and soil. In both cases it was clear how the neighborhoods northeast of the plant (including my own) are burdened as the prevailing winds blow the pollution our way.

I myself can trace some of my health struggles to these toxins. I moved to this neighborhood in 1996 from northern Indiana. I noticed that I got sick more often, and for longer periods, than I used to. By 2000 I was dealing with chronic illness. The origins were complex, but tests for heavy metal toxicity showed elevated levels of mercury in my body.

“If you love your lungs, get out of Indianapolis,” says a real estate blog, fingering my beloved city as the unhealthiest in the nation because of its poor air quality.

And then there’s the coal ash ponds. A nationwide 2011 EPA study identified 11 high-hazard coal ash ponds. Two of them are at the Harding Street plant. These unlined, aging pits are right next to the White River. I don’t even want to think about what would happen in the event of a major flood. Or if an ash dike ruptures, as happened in Kingston, TN, in 2008.

Knoxville News Pic

A house sits in the coal ash spill near Kingston, TN in Dec. 2008. Photo by Knoxville News Sentinel.

Apparently IPL doesn’t want to think about it either, even after two coal ash spills at its Martinsville plants sent more than 30 million gallons of toxic coal ash into the White River in 2007 and 2008.

Does it have to be this way? No, it doesn’t. Whether you look at it from a public health perspective, a fossil fuel emission perspective, or even through a financial lens, coal is a bad bet. Rate hikes to retrofit the aging plant are a poor use of our money. For inspiration, we can look to neighboring states. Iowa gets 24 percent of its power from wind—with rates similar to ours and no reliability issues.

The Indiana Beyond Coal campaign is all about making our voice heard. If enough people speak with their city councilmen and -women, write letters to the editor, and engage with IPL’s 20-year energy plan, things can change.

As organizer Megan Anderson said, “It’s as simple as getting together and talking to friends and neighbors.”

A Field to Fork Market

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“In Indiana, we can grow so much of our own food. We really could be sustainable now,” says Kevin Logan, MD. Though we can’t grow mangoes or bananas, he believes we could cultivate everything we need for regional self-sufficiency.

INgredients Field to Fork Market, a new shop he opened in partnership with wife Jacqueline and old friend Tom Wiles, is exerting influence on both supply and demand. To stimulate the market for good clean food, the deli demonstrates how to use local produce like bok choy and spaghetti squash. Meanwhile the proprietors are coordinating with the many farmers and producers capable of feeding our region, in anticipation of the 2014 growing season.

I had the pleasure of talking with the three of them when I wrote this Nuvo piece on the store. It’s located in a refurbished Taco Bell, and full of items grown or produced in Indiana.

Pie pumpkins and gourds from local farmers at INgredients.

Pie pumpkins and gourds from local farmers at INgredients.

“I feel like we’re going to have to get back to community,” Logan says. “And food choices are one way that we do that.”

The trio plan to hold classes on every stage of food growing, storing, cooking, and preserving, to help people gain garden knowhow and kitchen skills. Both fermenting and cheese making classes are in the offing.

All in all this shop is a great addition to community resilience efforts in my town.

Coal: It’s So Yesterday

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I confess that when I was asked to write a story about Indiana’s Beyond Coal movement for Indiana Living Green, part of me was a bit ho-hum at the prospect.

Sure, the two ladies leading the fight (Megan Anderson and Jodi Perras, my two profilees) are amazing specimens of fierce feminine energy, each hailing from a different generation, an interesting duo. And of course, I am totally down with clean energy.

It’s just: I’d rather write about yummy stuff, like food, or farming, or foraging. I am drawn to tales of those remaking the world in intriguing, innovative ways. That new emerging story is what energizes me. And sometimes the hard work of calling a halt to the old story seems so…tired.

By Arnold Paul, via Wikimedia Commons

By Arnold Paul, via Wikimedia Commons

I mean, we all know that coal is bad for the environment and our health. What more is there to say?

So I thought. Then I talked to Megan and Jodi, and got a first-hand glimpse of what’s at stake. I saw that not only are they pushing to retire these decrepit coal plants, they are holding a vision of an Indiana where residents are choosing from an array of clean energy options, even generating their own energy. An Indiana where people have secure jobs that they feel good about, contributing to a cleaner state. An Indiana on the cutting edge.

By Mhassan abdollahi, via Wikimedia Commons

By Mhassan abdollahi, via Wikimedia Commons

Now that’s exciting.

I was moved to hear Jodi talk about the group meditation where she visualized her descendants asking what she did to fix the climate crisis. Isn’t this something we all think about, what kind of world might be next?

I got fired up hearing their passion for righting the injustices wrought by Big Coal. I learned that children who have the misfortune to be born poor are disproportionately impacted by the health effects of coal—resulting in learning disabilities, asthma, autism, and lowered IQs.

How fair is it that poor kids are effectively trapped into a cycle of poverty because of lifelong difficulties linked to our state’s over-reliance on coal?

Then I learned that coal is ever more costly. And it just seems like a no-brainer from there.

Read the piece for the full scoop. You can join the Beyond Coal Indiana movement at the Sierra Club’s website or contact Megan Anderson at megan.anderson@sierraclub.org.