Recycling

I went to a local drop-off for recycling tonight and it was a complete mess! There were boxes and bags full of recyclables that weren't sorted but thrown on the ground and lots of trash as well.

A lady who was sorting her own recycling, started sorting the mess around her and placing the bottles, cans, etc. in their proper compartments. I started helping and another lady came by and started helping as well. We three cleaned up so that all the recyclables were put in the right places and the first lady took the trash back to her own house in a garbage bag.

At first, I felt terrible about humanity and its carelessness, but my feelings turned around by these people helping out, taking 30 minutes after work to make sure recycling is taking place properly.

A Few Farming Points I Didn't Know:

Many, many bees die from constipation because they will not 'soil' their own hive if they can help it. When they can't help it, bees have diarrhea and there are few things that stink as much as a bee hive full of bee diarrhea. Also, when bees are alarmed, they send out a scent that smells like bananas...so if you smell that...RUN.

'Sticking'- is when you open a chicken's beak and stick a knife in there, immediately scrambling it's brain,so that it doesn't 'feel' its imminent death from breaking or cutting it's neck. I've heard it is considered the most humane way to kill a chicken. There will still be reflex actions from the chicken, moving its wings and feet for a couple minutes. Also, chickens don't have a lot of blood but it is best to hang the chicken upside down to drain. As with most animals, the younger hens (1-3 years) are the tenderest for eating.

My time at the farm came to an end on Friday; I was sent off with some horseradish, mustard greens, summer sausage, BBQ beef sticks, rhubarb, eggs, carrot cake, and some honey.

This weekend was spent with Caleb & Daphne in Minneapolis and we had SO much fun!!! I just arrived at Brage and Brian's and have vacay this next week as several other family members come. Lots of Scrabble will be enjoyed!

From Idaho

I forgot that the family sent a few pictures before I came.






Here is the outside and inside of the truck where I'm living. And it does have electricity, I just didn't know it.

The New Clothing Label

Instead of the generic and wildly unhelpful: ¨Made In Indonesia¨ or ¨Assembled in the USA¨, let´s propose a first step towards pricing externalities into the system by having more complete labels.

A shirt could have the following new label:

-100% Organic Cotton (No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, or genetically modified seeds were used) farmed near Baton Rouge, Louisiana using annual crop rotation.
-Picked by machine using biofuel from switchgrass, also farmed on-site.
-Cotton shipped to a Carenco, Louisiana textile factory by rail.
-Patterned and sewn by workers paid a living wage. Only natural plant dyes were used.
-Buy Local: Recommended Retailers in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas.

Biomimicry

My Biomimicry paraphrase: Everything that humans can do, nature already does it better. Or for a person of faith...everything that humans can do, God already does it better through nature.

In the book, Biomimicry, Janine Benyus does a better job of explaining:

¨Biomimicry comes from the Greek ´bios´ which means life and ´mimesis´ or imitation.¨ It is founded on the following 3 principles:

¨1. Nature as model. Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature´s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problem, e.g. a solar cell inspired by a leaf.

2. Nature as measure. Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the ¨rightness¨of our innovations....Nature has learned: What works. What is appropriate. What lasts.

3. Nature as mentor. Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.¨

Hopefully in the next post, I will illustrate a number of different designs in nature that demonstrate the elegance, complexity & simplicity combined, and efficiency in God´s creation both in the individual and in ecosystems.

Permaculture

From a seminar I attended several months ago in Omaha.

"Permaculture Principles are based on close observation of nature, traditional sustainable agriculture systems earth sciences and common sense.

There are 10 primary design principles:

1) Diversity
Aim to integrate a variety of beneficial species of food, plants and animals. This builds a stable and interactive polycultural system which provides for human needs and also the needs of other species.

2) Edge Effect
There is more life on the edge where two systems overlap. Systems can then access the resources of both. Use the edge effect and other natural patterns you observe to create the best effect. There are no straight lines in nature.

3) Energy Planning
Place things in a permaculture design to minimize the use of energy (your own and fossil fuels). Also, utilize the energy and resources you have both on-site and from outside as effectively as possible. This also saves you time, energy and money.

4) Energy Cycling
In a natural system there is no waster or pollution- the output from one natural process is always the resource for another natural process. Recycle and reuse your local resources as many times as possible within your polycultural system.

5) Scale
Create human-scale systems. Choose simple, appropriate and effective technologies. Do as much as you are able. Start small and take achievable steps to reach your goal successfully. Create groups which enable people to feel they can actively participate, be involved in the decision making and feel a connection to and ownership of the process.

6) Biological Resources
Use natural methods and processes to achieve a task. Find things in nature (plants, animals, microbes, etc.) that enjoy doing the task and minimize the inputs required from outside. This creates a healthy system and healthy people.

7) Multiple Elements
Support each vital need and essential function in more than one way.

8) Multiple Functions
Everything has many uses and functions. In permaculture we aim to design so that every element performs at least 3 functions.

9) Natural Succession
Work with nature and the processes of natural systems. Facilitate natural growth and help to accelerate it naturally.

10) Relative Location
Every element is placed in relationship to others so they can benefit each other. Create supportive environments by placing things together which help to develop a self-sustaining system, which replicates a natural ecosystem. From a functional perspective- those things used together, place together. This allows more efficient use of a space and minimisation of your energy in utilising these resources."

"Transition Town"

Tuesday night I was able to attend a seminar about "Transition Towns", towns all across the world committing to local resilience, zero waste, being carbon neutral, fossil fuel independence, local food producers/food security, net-zero energy consumers, etc.

The presenter was Michael Brownlee, who works with Boulder Valley Relocalization. Boulder County is one of the first counties in the US to attempt to become a transition town and reduce their dependence on oil, encourage energy conservation, etc.

The seminar took place in two parts: 1) the bad news and 2) good news if we start to adapt to conditions that will force us to adapt anyway. By adapting early, we can head off some of the worst shocks we will face.

Mr. Brownlee shared about peak oil and global warming. Peak oil, conceptually, is where world oil discovery and production will start to decline in the next few years while world oil demand will continue to rise. This will force oil prices to keep rising. Oil geologists are fairly consistent in their assessment about peak oil coming and coming soon. The new consensus seems to be towards a peak oil year closer to 2010 than 2015 or 2020 which was previously forecasted. After 2010, oil will only get more expensive.

One new problem that I hadn't expected, which we saw in an unrelated field this summer, is hoarding/export stoppages for particular products. When there was a fear this summer of shortages of rice, many countries just stopped exporting rice in order to lessen political pressures within their own countries. There is a real possibility that this will be the case with oil. There is speculation that exports of oil will completely stop 9 years after peak oil. Within the 8 years after peak oil, exports of oil will decline each year until the 9th year, when exports will completely stop.

Mr. Brownlee cited a number of different sources to defend the concept of peak oil, including the commissioning of the Hirsch Report by the Department of Energy in 2005, which immediately suppressed the report. The Oil Drum, an oil think-tank, expects oil to rise to at least $300/barrel in the next 5 years.

Since so much of our economy is based on cheap fuel, we can see facing a number of shocks to our way of life. As a side note: for a good movie documenting the effects of evaporating oil supplies, view The Power of Community to see how Cuba fared after the Soviet Union collapsed. We don't think of all the products that come from oil: plastics, fertilizers, etc.

Cuba was forced to rely on the following:
-neighborhood organic gardens
-utilizing a more vegetarian based meal system
-riding bicycles
-using public transportation
-helping each other in the midst of potential threats to community.


Transition towns hopes to emphasize the following in adapting to the shortage of oil.

-local production of food, energy, and goods
-local development of currency, government, and culture,

To read one town's transition, look at the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan 2021.

More soon....

Wes Jackson and the Land Institute

On Monday, Phileena Heuertz, Daniel Lawse and I were able to travel to Salina, KS to meet with Wes Jackson. Wes Jackson founded the Land Institute in 1976 to revolutionize crop production. He realized the academic institutions he studied and taught in, were part of the problem for long-term soil erosion.

Academia was concerned with greater food output and was happy to throw ever greater amounts of petroleum based fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides on crops but which in the long term, reduced a soil's fertility. It led to soil erosion, demolished root systems, and depleted the soil of natural resources.

Since that time, Wes Jackson has been consumed with converting the world's plant life back from the monocultures of today (almost all arable land is devoted to production of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, etc.), and increasing biodiversity. Interestingly, he is also hoping to cross-bread these crops so that these crops go from being annuals to perennials. By cross-breeding over many (50+) years, they hope to breed a hybrid that produces crops but is a perennial.

For instance, wheat might be bred with a particular grass that is a genetic cousin of wheat. That offspring would be bred again with a similar offspring or even a parent like wheat again. Over enough time, they could produce a grass-like wheat crop that would keep producing food.

Instead of tilling the soil each year and replanting, Wes believes they could get 7-8 years of crops from a hybrid perennial crop. This would eliminate much of the soil erosion because the root systems would stay in the ground. Root systems of some of these early hybrid plants have been 3 feet deep.

Wes is 72 and was working on a 50 year land bill to present to Obama and McCain when we arrived. He gave this task to someone else and talked with us for 4 hours. We received a tour of the Institute and also a history lesson, philosophy, genetics, etc. lesson.

He was gracious to answer our questions and even used some visual aids in his yard to help make a particular point. He invited us into his house and poured us some water. He showed us a small cabin of Leland, a friend of his, that I may mention in a future post. The cabin doesn't have much more than a small bed, a small nightstand, a wood stove, and a bucket that he could pull from underground for his "refrigerated items". Leland passed away 3 years ago.

Being an introvert, I thought I would be overwhelmed. I wasn't. Phileena, Daniel and I talked all 8 hours (4 hours there and 4 hours back) and we were in conversation 4 hours with Wes. It was one of the best days...great company and a fantastic time with Wes Jackson. I can count on two hands the number of speeches/sermons/lessons I've heard that were better. Thank you Wes Jackson (and Phileena for all her work setting up this trip and introducing us to him; she had met him while on her sabbatical at Duke. He was giving a convocation with Wendell Berry).

Simplicity

Last night, I was asked to share for five minutes before John O'Keefe, a theology professor at Creighton University, came to share about "simplicity" as it relates to theology and the environment. His time of sharing was fantastic...weaving beautifully the strands that have contributed to misconceptions surrounding the environment in Christian circles.

I wanted to repost my small contribution to the evening below:

When we talk about simplicity, my feeling is that there seems to be both a healthy need to emphasize the spiritual aspect of simplicity and not let it tread down the path towards legalism, but also feeling that the charge of “legalism” is leveled quickly against the concept of simplicity as soon as the conversation starts. There is also the quick and unfair charge against social justice, asking why we would want to better living conditions for our friends overseas when we want to simplify our own. Shouldn’t we want simplicity for everyone? So to help clarify, simplicity is broken into two categories: voluntary simplicity and involuntary simplicity.

When we in WMF talk about simplicity it references voluntary simplicity and can be likened in one sense to a decluttering of our life. By throwing off some material things, we believe we can remove some hindrances to hearing from God, receiving His love and care and obeying Him. Many spiritual giants of the past have advocated this kind of lifestyle. It becomes part of a package of spiritual disciplines in order to be steered in life by God and not by the world.

What is being added to the idea of ‘simplicity for personal spiritual growth’, is the idea that our ‘simplicity’ has connections to the rest of humanity just as our overconsumption has a connection to the rest of humanity. Simplicity is recognizing the injustice of the world and our small choices towards simplicity help us identify a little bit with the vulnerabilities faced in the rest of the world.

Let’s look at it a different way:
You were born to your parents who were given to you by God, into a particular country, with specific giftings and aptitudes, in a particular time period in history which bears no correlation to your own merit. You had no hand in the circumstances surrounding your birth or even in setting the stage for your own accomplishments in life.

For some, this “the lottery of the womb” means that life should be lived in a way that “does no harm”. For a non-Christian, this lottery means that you could have just as easily been born a medieval maidservant, a soldier in ancient Eqypt, a Mongol tribemember or in modern times a Bangladeshi child who works in a factory 12 hours a day. In a philosophical sense, its like making all your decisions as if you had no idea about your own place in the world. That you would make your all decisions not knowing if you were a middle class American, a Bangladeshi child laborer, a Sierra Leonean child soldier, a woman kidnapped and being forced to prostitute in Italy, or a Chinese farmer. Its another way of saying that we should place ourselves in someone else’s shoes and make decisions accordingly. We might make a different decision about the clothes we buy if we placed ourselves in another context-even placing ourselves into an unknown context, because the repercussions of our decisions can be seen more clearly.

For Christians we usually believe there is a specific purpose in who we were created to be and in the circumstances surrounding our life. But this can quickly/easily morph into a type of religious determinism -- the belief that we deserve all the riches and entrapments of being born in the most economically, politically, and militarily dominant country of our time in a time period when social mobility is possible and where hard work is rewarded. That we deserve having been born healthy with many giftings and aptitudes and being born to loving parents that nurtured us.

What if we see the opportunities that we’ve been given, not for us to use for ourselves but for us to be openhanded? We might, instead, consider that many things that have been given to us are really designed for others…that they were never really ours in the first place. After all, everything we have is God’s.

In WMF, we receive salaries that are needs based so that we are not accruing wealth but receiving what we need to live a healthy and vibrant life. We also allow and encourage participation in a retirement plan. As a community, we even wrestled whether saving for retirement was consistent with a life of simplicity. We finally agreed that staff members could decide this based on their own convictions. However, before staff members are allowed to set aside money, they have to agree to the some of the following affirmations:

As Kingdom citizens, we realize that we own nothing, that everything is God's, and that everything in our possession is to serve as material means for eternal ends (Psalm 24:1; 2 Corinthians 4:18).

As Kingdom citizens, we are committed to ministering in community among the poor, but we realize that we live in a culture emerged in gross individualism and materialism. Our culture tells us to save for our future in order to maintain our standard of living even after we are no longer "economically viable." This projected individualism may taint our choice to invest in a retirement plan. We, however, are committed to being an interdependent community, not surviving as isolated individuals. This means that any retirement plan that we invest in should foster community and continual care for one another into the future (Acts 2:44-45).

We do not minister out of what we have but out of who we are (Acts 3:6).
As a community, we celebrate a lifestyle of simplicity. By investing in a retirement plan, we seek to maintain simple living into the future (Luke 9:3; Matthew 10:9; Luke 18:22). We recognize the difference between taking a vow of poverty and committing to a life of simplicity. While a retirement package is incompatible with a vow of poverty, we desire to make room in our community to include and celebrate those who are called to this commitment.

Though we renounce hoarding wealth for selfish gain and storing up treasures on earth, we recognize the responsibility of good stewardship of what God has given us (Matthew 6:20-21; Matthew 25).

Though we make plans for the future, we recognize that the future is uncertain. Our faith is not in our plans but in that which is certain: the unshakable Kingdom of God (Hebrews 12:28-29).

Each of the paragraphs in this statement refer back to Scripture verses so that we remain grounded in the Word of God.

What we try to continually remind ourselves is that everything is God’s. Everything is God’s, not just in WMF as a Christian organization, but in our personal lives and in your personal lives. We don’t want to get rid of the tension that comes from living in a society that bears little resemblance to the Kingdom of God. We keep the tension because this helps us make better choices.

Simplicity, after all, is a way of connecting us with God and connecting us with humanity.

Green Workshops

I've been attending a "green" workshop each month for the last year and a half.

Its been extremely interesting and fun to participate in these workshops. Over the course of my "green awakening", we've covered energy efficiency, green cleaning, home energy audits, fair trade purchases, water conservation, etc. Next months' topic will be "greening" your lawn-care.

I am still not good to the environment, but I'm trying to make small changes. Over the course of the last couple of years, I've been able to make some improvements at home and at the office.

After all, who doesn't want to be more efficient/ a better steward of the resources we've been given? Its only wise to make the most of everything we've been given.

Home Improvements:

-CFL (compact fluorescent) bulbs replaced incandescent bulbs. (around 24 replaced)

-Energy Audit performed that analyzed energy efficiency of my apartment. My appliances, plugged-in-devices, lights, windows, insulation, heating&A/C sources, etc. were evaluated. (Subsequent caulking done to cut down on an outside draft).

-Aerators installed on shower head, kitchen faucet, and bathroom faucet for water conservation.

-Recycling

-Green cleaning products made and soon to be used.

-Still to be done: I am borrowing a tub and would like to put soil and red worms to quickly compost organic food waste like fruit peelings.

Thankfully, my landlord pays for heat and water. But it also means that I can't have a programmable thermostat (radiated heating) and I can't help him save money and reduce our collective carbon footprint.


Office Improvements:

-CFL bulbs replaced all available incandescent bulbs

-Old, non-functioning refrigerator replaced by a high energy efficient one, saving WMF several hundred dollars in electricity each year.

-Some green purchases made: paper

-Green cleaning products made and soon to be used.

-Recycling


Since last months' workshop was about "greening" your cleaning, I've included the following recipes.

Some recipes for your own green cleaning products:

All-Purpose Cleaner:

Mix 2 1/2 tsp borax; dab of liquid soap, and 2 cups hot water. Mix and shake in a spray bottle for use on counters, etc.

Window Cleaner:

Mix 1/2 tsp liquid detergent, 3T white vinegar, and 2 cups water. Keep in a spray bottle.

Spray the windows and wipe with wadded up newspaper or 100% cotton cloths (old t-shirts, etc.). These newspapers, once used, can still be recycled.

Kudos to OPPD

Thanks to our public power utility OPPD for their recent policy change.

They have changed their summer pricing policy to eliminate the incentive to waste electricity. Previously, pricing was tiered and homeowners paid LESS per Kwh the more electricity they used. OPPD has eliminated this benefit to encourage conservation.

It has a long way to go, because it continues building new coal fired plants and being worse, even against other utilities, in the percentage of renewable energy sources it funds and uses.

But I have heard they are considering hiring someone to be an advocate for energy conservation in Omaha and that is another good start. Hopefully they will hire a team to perform home energy audits in Omaha and this will save the area from needing to build more polluting plants (reference Grand Island plant, not under OPPD, that produces 4 times the mercury allowable under federal standards).