Green Bronx Machine

Here's an amazing and inspiring video, showing how all that theory about 'win-win-win' sustainability strategies can look in action. Green Bronx Machine:

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Wheat Grass by DJ CAVEM

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Rural Hip Hop

Hip hop & organic farming... even if it is viral marketing, I can't resist...



Thanks to Climate Denial Crock of the Week where I found this one...

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Food, Inc

Get ready for what looks like a great movie on the food industry - hopefully it will help bring home why it's so important to buy local and organic, and support the development of a safe, resilient food system - so often these reasons are invisible to us, so a movie like this should be a big help and great reminder:



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Biochar & Synergistic Solutions

When dealing in complex systems, and working to create solutions to tough problems, it’s rarely useful to look for a “silver bullet” – one single answer that can solve all the problems. We hear this with regard to the climate crisis quite a bit – we can’t eliminate our net emissions with just one activity or technology. It’s not just efficiency, or better design, or biofuels, or solar, or wind, or geothermal, or changing lifestyles, or new laws that will do it – it’s some combination of all them, plus many more exciting solutions we will create.

However, in complex systems we can (and should) look for synergistic solutions – positive activities that also generate more positive side-effects. We’ve been talking about this with regard to Village Corps, and the possibility of helping to generate some economic activity through animal husbandry, which could provide food and income, and could help the chances of reopening a processing plant which would create jobs, and the animal waste could be used in an anaerobic digester to generate methane for cooking fuel, which is cleaner burning and more healthy than wood fires, and would help stem deforestation in the area, which would help stop erosion and improve agriculture, which would provide more food and jobs, etc. etc.

Well, a similar kind of synergistic solution with tremendously exciting global potential is biochar – essentially charcoal derived from any kind of biomass that acts as a carbon sink for thousands of years. It is essentially a way to lower the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (currently at 387 parts per million) back down to what more and more scientists are sighting as a safe level – 350 ppm. The process of creating it generates carbon neutral electricity (displacing the current common sources like coal, that has a whole host of other negative side effects) and the char itself provides a powerful organic soil amendment (displacing the current common sources of chemical based options that deplete soils over time and pollute oceans and water tables). While the reasons are fully understood (because the complex world of soil science isn’t fully understood), the biochar provides a great habitat, essentially, for the diverse array of soil microorganisms that create healthy, fertile soils.

This article from the Financial Times last month provides a great overview on how this technique was “rediscovered” by studying patches of fertile soil left by ancient peoples of the Amazon: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/67843ec0-020b-11de-8199-000077b07658.html.

There is lots of exciting research and development going on around the world. Our colleague Scott Grierson in Australia has been doing research on the potential of algae feedstocks for biochar. Universities in the US are looking into as well, including Cornell, UGA, and Iowa State.

And there are some young companies looking to commercialize this process and bring it to scale, including Best Energies and Eprida (who we had a chance to see present at Bioneers last year – very exciting results). The International Biochar Initiative is keeping track of the developments in this rapidly growing area and has a lot of great information.

It’s no silver bullet, but estimates for how much CO2 this process could remove from the atmosphere each year range from 2-4 Gigatonnes –that’s a billion tonnes – and a significant percentage of the approximately 8.8 GTs humans emit annually. And with all of the positive ‘side effects’ – like clean renewable energy, and healthy, productive soil gives biochar great potential as a synergistic solution on the path to sustainability.

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Permaculture garden...

Permaculture is a topic I don't write nearly enough about, and one of which people around the world are not nearly aware enough. Below is a quick teaser for a video from the Permaculture Institute of Australia. It just shows an example of a small working permaculture garden, and talks about how massively productive it is - without chemical inputs or fertilizers, and with low-water inputs. Permaculture is extremely compatible with SSD - it is principle-based, meaning that it isn't prescriptive and can be applied anywhere, in harmony with site-specific conditions. It takes a whole-system approach, in that it take into consideration direct and indirect impacts of activities, both now and in the future, and it recognizes the importance of the relationships between components of the system, and not just the components themselves. It's a set of design principles typically applied to small home and food production systems, but are just as relevant at all scales and in all applications. In 1997 I earned a permaculture design certificate in New Zealand and got to see all kinds of amazing applications in practice. Seeing these sustainable systems produce huge outputs with low-inputs, using often simple techniques, and mostly just relying on good design, was incredibly inspiring. It's also been a source of frustration in that most of us here in the US just can't imagine the possibility of producing large amounts of food and energy crops in a sustainable way. From food prices to ethanol debates, the trade-off mentality persists and most in the debate on all sides assume for a fact that increasing outputs means increasing the amount of land under cultivation and the amount of fossil fuel and chemical inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, farm machinery, transportation). There are better ways!




We are working on implementing a permaculture design at our new place - starting off by watching the sun arch through the sky over the year, and standing out in rain storms to see how the water flows. We've started putting in some berms by hand to get the contours right and slow down the water during storms. Another first step was setting up a good composting system to catch all of the nutrients we can that come through our household system. I've started chipping away at the lawn and putting in some 'experimental' crops - a tiny wheat field that is sort of growing... Fruit and nut trees are another short term step that will need a few years before really paying off, but a great way to diversify the harvest and maximize the use of perennial crops. Even a small plot can get overwhelming, but by just immersing yourself and observing, you can learn a lot, and enjoy the experimentation. The beauty of the diversity is that when a few things just flop, you've got a few dozen more things that will probably do well. If we can imagine a world where everyone does this - in their backyards, apartment balconies, and windowsills - and we get creative with public spaces, parks, highway medians, sidewalk plantings, and the like - we can start to imagine significant shifts in the global food system, and the possibility of sustainable production for 9+ billion. Stay going.

Food Links

Local Harvest

Permaculture Research Institute (OZ)

Permaculture Activist

Beer Activist

100 mile diet

The Land Institute

Permaculture Institute (US)

Organic.org