We held our first community farmers market yesterday afternoon.  There are markets in other local communities here in south central NH, but none in our town of under 4000 people (that does jump to 10,000 in the summer, we have lots of lakes with camps).  And we have the best location, Rt. 4, the main road between Portsmouth on the seacoast and the capitol, Concord.  20,000 cars pass through our town (well, that was the last count, before the $4 gas) each day.
You can see pictures from the market, which was at our park and ride, next door to the Masonic Hall, home of the Northwood Theatre Workshop, and across the road from the library here.  

I’d like to invite everyone to take a journey with me over the next year and a half.  It’s a farewell to our beloved farm, and the beginning of a new one.  In the course of it, I hope to give y’all a glimpse into the real life of a farm and the practices of sustainable ranching.  And I'll share a few pictures of our farm, including some adorable baby lambs, along the way.

My husband and I have a small, organic (not-certified) farm just outside of Austin, Texas. I bought this place after I graduated law school ten years ago.   I’ll post about my transition from environmental attorney to farmer another day.  For now, suffice to say that I am a student of holistic management and eco-agriculture.  

This diary is cross posted at
La Vida Locavore

Since diving into the deep end when it comes to energy issues, almost every day sees new fascinating concepts, approaches, and technologies.  Fascinating ... exciting ... even hope inspiring at times.  And, as well, as the passion builds, so many of these are truly Energy COOL.

This is a somewhat different path of discover and discussion when it comes to Energy COOL thinking. This isn't some emergent technology about to blow your mind away nor news of some momentous change in policy, but a window on a movement to communicate better paths forward through our public gardens.

So, join me in my stroll through a garden and, I hope, plan to take your own stroll.

Amid the rush for McMansioning of life, a counter-trend exists, with people looking to micro-homes, often modular homes, and other ways of thinking small about one's home.

A wave of interest in small dwellings — some to serve ... as temporary housing, others to become space-saving dwellings of a more  permanent nature — has prompted designers and manufacturers to offer building  plans, kits and factory-built houses to the growing number of small-thinking  second-home shoppers. Seldom measuring much more than 500 square feet, the  buildings offer sharp contrasts to the rambling houses that are commonplace as  second homes.

I don't know if you've watched a lot of Sunday morning news shows recently, but I just did this morning and, my fucking God, everything is rosier than I could possibly imagine. Unfettered, beneficent oil companies, according the advertising of like all of them, are harnessing the intellectual and technological capital of the nation and the earth and fostering such innovation that they are creating a new energy paradigm even now ushering us unto the midst of Utopia.

They employ brilliant scientists who care about a effecting sustainable future — even if, at a substratum beneath the gloss of advertising, they have spent millions of dollars to bribe congressmen to deny that "sustainability" is necessary to, y'know, sustain things living and stuff. Oil companies are not only not part of the problem, they fully engender the solution! That's what their ads say!

And here I was actually paying attention to news about food riots, pan-European gas-price protests, millionaire former energy executives actually running governments, badly, and the Earth violently rejecting the species.

Fuck that noise. Turns out everything's swell, as is, and verging on a new Golden Age of humankind. Thank you, advertising, for brightening up my Sunday!

Hydrogen is often put forward in ignorance as an alternative to fossil fuels because when burned, the byproduct is water instead of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur dioxides. Hydrogen is viewed as a potential replacement for diesel fuel and gasoline because it can be used in applications - most notably motor vehicles - where electricity alone cannot easily provide a similar level of functionality with existing technology.

Unfortunately, the process of producing hydrogen as currently performed requires large amounts of energy - usually obtained from burning fossil fuels, releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide. The most common feedstock for hydrogen production is also fossil fuels - usually natural gas - and that particular manufacturing process also releases large amounts of carbon dioxide independently of energy production.

However, there exists a method of producing hydrogen that need not involve fossil fuels at any point. The needed energy is obtained from the Sun, and the feedstock is water. And unlike in conventional hydrogen fuel cells, the reaction allows the water byproduct of burning hydrogen to be used to create hydrogen again - almost perfect recycling.

What's the secret ingredient? It's algae.

What a kooky statement this is about a state that staked its entire future on the Auto Industry.  Following the biggest plummet in GM's stock prices in 3 decades, at the moment the Pleasant Penninsula's future may seem even bleaker!

Somewhere between Henry David Thoreau and Paul Ehrlich -- the '70s were a tender time -- I came to intimate knowledge of my inner survivalist. Perhaps it was a dim memory of duck and cover drills, which persisted at least long enough for me to wonder of what possible use they might be. Almost certainly it was Viet Nam combined with the innate pessimism of two parents with hard memories of the depression.

Reading Kunstler's The Long Emergency didn't help any.

But I like to think of myself as a rational pessimist. I have moved to a small town and learned the rudiments of driving my father-in-law's tractor. I have some dim hope of being as useful as a ten- to twelve-year-old farm boy by the end of the summer, but I'll always be many decades of instincts behind. Fair enough.

Sure enough, we have entered, in the words of the obscure bluesman John Brim, "Tough Times." Follow me over to fold to talk about how tough they may be, for there's a story I heard to day I should like to share.

[cross-posted from the Disaster Accountability Project]

Yesterday, the Washington Post timidly reported that floods in Iowa and other Midwestern states may not be "natural" disasters . However, scientists have long warned that worsening floods are the predictable result of human intervention - of floodplains covered with impermeable concrete and stripped of vegetation; of river channels forced up and out of their beds by constricting artificial levees; of sprawling development offering more victims to raging rivers.  The article's thesis is neither new nor controversial, but the story does include a revelation that deserves immediate, national attention.

Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR)...

Note: I wrote the bulk of this diary before I read bonddad's rather senseless call, currently on the rec list, for drilling in ANWR and off the nation's coasts. Some of the data in this diary should suggest reasons why his plan is deeply flawed. America will not produce any lasting economic growth without turning to green jobs and sustainable energy. Turning to more oil drilling will produce ZERO growth.

Crossposted at Calitics

When you drive along Highway 101 near Santa Barbara, or Highway 1 in Huntington Beach, it's hard to miss the many oil rigs on the ocean's horizon. They are relics of a bygone age - not just the 1960s, when they were constructed, but an age in which California believed that cheap oil would always be plentiful and available. We built an entire infrastructure around that and neglected trains, walkable neighborhoods, and lagged behind the rest of the world in developing solar and wind power.

bonddad wrote a thought provoking piece on how to transform the US from a debt to an equity economy, and came up with a four point plan:

1. Balance budget

2. Educate the population

3. Focus on growth industry

4. Open up Alaskan and Coastal resources to a gold rush

However, none of these are likely to take the US Economy out of its long term depression.  Even combined, they do not address the underlying economic realities:

1. We have more people (globally) than can be integrated into the economy

2. Our current energy sources can not sustain continued growth

3. The design of American society is not conducive to sustainability

4. All long term economic projections are fundamentally unsound

Cross posted from my blog at www.changinggearsmovie.com.  Changing Gears is a project between myself and my fiancee to bike from Bloomington, IN to San Francisco to learn about and document sustainability in action.  We're blogging and making a TV show and documentary as we go.  

Open your mind. Doors you don't even know about are waiting to open for you.

We rode today with the trailers for the first time since we got to Madison. We've had 6 days with little riding, except for a few short jaunts around Chicago and Madison, and we were suffering when we hit the road today. The plan was to ride around 40 miles to Spring Green where there are 3 items of interest: Frank Lloyd Wright's home at Taliesen, The House on the Rock, and Timbergreen Forestry, a woodworking practice that takes trees through their whole lifecycle, growing, harvesting, processing and making the final wood products. It's a good area, and I was excited about getting up there.

I have been urging more Mandarin and study abroad programs for Oregon's public schools and universities since the summer of 2006. This 6/12/08 email is the latest in a series of regular emails to all 90 Oregon legislators.

Dear Oregon State Senator / Representative,

Please, I again urge the legislature to hold hearings on changes and economic growth in Asia, especially China, and to pass legislation to increase Mandarin and study abroad programs for our public K-16 students. The world is changing and the Legislature needs to stay informed and think through the implications of these global changes for Oregon, especially for our educational system.

Consider the scale of global change now taking place. We are in the midst of a big historic change. Kishore Mahbubani in his new book "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East" quotes former Harvard President Larry Summers as saying:

Al, we need you!  Your country needs you!  And you are the only person for this job!

Here's the challenge: Imagine that you have enough money to buy all things you will need to survive on your own in a manner as comfortable as possible. But once you've spent the initial money, there won't be any cash coming in, other than what you can generate on your own, selling whatever it is that you sell (even your own labor, assuming that there is enough time in the day for that).

You can spend any reasonable (or even unreasonable) amount of money on land, buildings, farm equipment, seed and plant stock, livestock, vehicles, wind turbines, anything at all.. you name it. But after you have done so, you are as self-reliant as is possible. As much food as you think you'd need, and of the types you'd need, you'll grow it (and process it) yourself.

Any fuel that you use, if you can manage it, should be self-produced. If you drive into town, it should be out of necessity as little as possible. Any of your other needs that you can think of, if you can meet them yourself, you'll do so.

Describe what you'd initially buy, how much you think it would cost, who you'd take with you, where you'd do this, what things you'd still need to purchase and how often, and in total how much cash you'd still need each year to survive (don't forget property tax!).

When people talk about wild flukes of history, they usually mean things like Napoleon, a miniature Frenchman whom the Romantics loved before he was cool and denounced after he crossed over, or the Black Death, which killed lots of people and made life easier for everybody else.

But these weren’t flukes per se, because they weren’t improbable. Stunty despots are one of history's recurring motifs; it shouldn’t surprise us if some of them are good at it. Even lethal epidemic diseases have had stronger innings since the twelfth century. We shouldn’t allow yersinia pestis to use a bombastic name like "Black Death" for itself; go back to Mongolia, you underachieving disease.

No, critics’ lists of favorite flukes of history routinely ignore perhaps the biggest, closest and most catastrophic to all of us. Perhaps it’s so big and so close that it’s difficult to notice, but that’s only because we’ve grown up in the shadow of its enormous girth. I’m speaking of the American postwar economy.

We are entering a period of instability and scarcity affecting our food and energy supplies. Our oil comes from a half dozen countries, and any disruption of the oil supply could lead severe food shortages. Cuba suffered near famine when the Soviets cut their oil supply in 1990, but averted disaster by converting every available space to gardens. Of course, having a fully tropical climate probably helped.

You may be considering a garden next year. You don't have much time, because lots of people will get the gardening bug next year. Even if oil doesn't go over $150, supplies will get more scarce.  Less construction means less topsoil for sale. More expensive animal feed means less manure. I already heard a NPR story last month about steep increases in the price of manure.

My advice is get digging. Dig up that future garden, test the soil, add lime as needed, and work in a bunch of manure and compost. Get it now - it's less than $2 a bag. Don't be shy about ordering more than you think you will ever need. You'll use it.  

Cross posted at Sustainable Walworth

As we all know, GM has announced that Janesville's manufacturing plant will be closed in 2010, thanks to the runup in fuel prices and demand destruction for the guzzling SUVs made by it. Before we gloat and say "I told you so, you should have known it was coming" about GM's short sighted business decisions, we should look at the implications of this closing and an alternative approach below the fold.