Permaculture & Regenerative Design News

Practical Post Scarcity by Open Source Ecology

2012-02-01T16:51:00.000-05:00

This trio of video treats is re-evolutionary.
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entireeconomies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

Practical Post Scarcity from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Move to Amend - Get Corporate $$ OUT of Politics.

2012-01-17T17:32:00.000-05:00

The movement to amend the U.S. Constitution to get corporate money out of elections is picking up some serious steam.

Tens of thousands of activists across the country have already signed PFAW's petition calling for an amendment ... in November and December, thousands of Americans attended hundreds house parties nationwide -- organized by PFAW, Public Citizen, Move To Amend and other allies, and joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Jim Hightower -- to mobilize and plan for a day of action on the upcoming January 21st second anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate spending in our elections. Organizing meetings are taking place now and our movement was just this week featured on TV on both The Dylan Ratigan Show and The Young Turks.

It's high time YOU got on board!

Please take a moment to add your name to the petition now and help restore Government By the PEOPLE!

TEN bills proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision have been introduced in the current Congress -- including one by Rep. Ted Deutch to expressly exclude for-profit corporations from the rights given to natural persons by the Constitution, prohibit corporate spending in all elections, and affirm the authority of Congress and the States to regulate corporations and to regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures.

Here's just a glimpse of the growing national movement!

In Colorado, the Jamestown Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment establishing that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights and that the First Amendment does not protect unlimited political spending as free speech. And voters in Boulder City passed a ballot measure calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that would state that corporations are not people and reject the legal status of money as free speech.
In California, the city councils of Fort Bragg, Richmond, Marina, Point Arena and Aracata, Oakland and Los Angeles passed resolutions last year supporting an amendment to make sure corporations don't have the same free speech rights as people in elections.
Missoula, Montana voters approved a local ballot referendum urging Congress to propose a constitutional amendment that clearly states that corporations are not people and do not have the same rights as citizens by a three to one margin.
Residents of Monroe, Maine passed a Local Self-Governance Ordinance stating that "no corporation doing business within the Town of Monroe shall be recognized as a ‘natural person’ under the United States or Maine Constitutions or laws of the United States or Maine."

And the councils of Chapel Hill, NC, Duluth, MN, Pueblo County, CO and New York City just recently passed resolutions supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

It's time to add your name to PFAW's petition to Congress calling for constitutional amendment now and help us get from our current number of signers -- 75,000 -- to 100K!

Generations of Americans have come together to force much-needed change by amending the U.S. Constitution to expand democracy and protect fundamental rights. With the voice of the voter being increasingly drowned out by unlimited corporate spending in elections, the need has arisen again. Now, it's our generation's turn.

Please speak out now.

Thank you for standing up against corporate power run amok and for Government By the People

A subversive Plot: How to Grow a Revolution in Your Own Backyard

2011-12-17T15:52:00.000-05:00

Roger Doiron is founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a network of people taking a hands-on approach to re-localizing the global food supply. Doiron is an advocate for new policies, technologies, investments, and fresh thinking about the role of gardens. His successful petition to replant a kitchen garden at the White House attracted broad international recognition. He is also a writer, photographer, and public speaker.

The Gen Y Guide to Collaborative Consumption

2011-12-13T19:35:00.001-05:00

(BTW, all through this story are hyperlinks that are NOT underlined and some may be hard to find. If I knew how to make them more obvious I'd do that. So, use your mouse to find them.)

When our parents graduated from college, the bachelor’s degree was a coveted badge of honor. It gave applicants instant cred (and usually a larger paycheck) no matter what the job. Now, having a bachelor’s degree does nothing to make an applicant stand out from the masses. And if you’re applying for a job well below your skill level because you’re desperate for a paycheck, that B.S. degree will probably get your carefully crafted resume tossed in the trash.

American youth are slowly realizing that the old system is broken, and no longer holds the answer to all their dreams and desires. We’re discovering that stable, satisfying careers can be found outside the offices and factories around which our parents and grandparents built their lives. We’re acknowledging that the pursuit of bigger, better, and faster things have plunged our country into a time of despair and difficulty. We're convinced that business as usual isn’t an option any longer--but what's the alternative?

Together, we’re learning that instead of waiting for politicians and corporations to fix the system, it’s possible to create a better one of our own, right under their noses. A new way of living, in which access is valued over ownership, experience is valued over material possessions, and "mine" becomes “ours” so everyone's needs are met without waste.

If these ideas get your blood pumping, there’s good news: young people all over the world are already making them a reality. It’s called collaborative consumption, (or the sharing economy) and it’s changing the way we work, play, and interact with each other. It’s fueled by the instant connection and communication of the internet, yet it’s manifesting itself in interesting ways offline too.

If you’re ready to connect with people who can help you save money, pursue your passions, and reduce waste, here's a quick-start guide to your sharing experience:

1. Remove all items from the box and assess

Sit down with yourself (or some friends) and talk about what you’ve got, what you need, and what you could live without. Take stock of what you’d be willing to share, rent, or give away. Write down all the things you really need to be productive/happy/connected. Then, cross out all the things that you want just to have them, and highlight all the things that involve a valuable experience. Now you have a list you can tackle through sharing.

2. Connect to the power source

The collaborative consumption movement empowers people to thrive despite economic climate. Instead of looking to the government or corporations to tell us what we want or create a solution for our problems, we take action to meet our own needs in a creative fashion. This is our power source. Start looking for ways to share at school, on community billboards, by asking friends, or use the resources below:

Housing

Roomates.com - A roomate finder and roomates search service which covers thousands of cities nationwide.
How to Start a Housing Co-op - one of the best affordable housing options around, and shared food expenses and cooking can increase your savings.
Guide to Sharing a House - buying a home by yourself may be out of reach in high cost areas, but shared ownership might be the ticket.
Cohousing Directory - Cohousing is homeownership in a neighborhood that shares.
Craigslist - find almost anything including a house or housemate on Craigslist.

Social Food

Grubly, Eat With Me and Housefed are the Airbnb for meals. Use them to find or host a meal in your neighborhood. Never eat alone!
MamaBake - Large batch group cooking saves time and money, not to mention it's fun!
Local Harvest - A massive directory that helps you find farmers' markets, CSA's, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area.
Neighborhood Fruit - find and offer free fruit to your neighbors with this site and iPhone app.
How to Share a Vegetable Garden
How to Start A Farmers' Market
Host a Baby Food Swap

Personal Finance

Lending Club - An online financial community that brings together creditworthy borrowers and savvy investors so that both can benefit financially.
Zopa - Where people get together to lend and borrow money directly with each other, sidestepping the banks for a better deal.
Prosper - A peer-to-peer lending site that allows people to invest in each other in a way that is financially and socially rewarding.
SmartyPig - social savings bank that enables you to save for specific goals and engage friends and family to contribute.
How to Save Money by Sharing

Entrepreneurship / Work

Kickstarter - A crowd-funding site powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.
Profounder - A site that makes it easy for your community to contribute financially to your business, so they're literally invested in your success.
BetterMeans - Use open-source decision-making rules, and self-organizing principles to run your real-world projects.
Task Rabbit - A service that enables you to outsource your tasks and deliveries (Boston and San Francisco Bay area only...for now).
Use the coworking wiki, Loosecubes or Liquidspace to find a friendly place to cowork. Coworking is a flexible and community-oriented workspace option for business travelers, independent workers, and entrepreneurs.
How to Find a Job Using Social Media
The Shareable Job Search Search
How to Start a Coworking Space
A Guide to Casual Coworking - Why not cowork anywhere? Here's the definitive guide.
How to Create Your Own Green Job
How to Make A Franchise Shareable

Travel

CouchSurfing - An international non-profit network that connects travelers with locals in over 230 countries and territories around the world.
AirBnB - Connects people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay, all over the world.
iStopOver - Homeowners worldwide rent out space in their homes to travelers looking for unique accommodations.
Park at myHouse - Provides affordable and fine-free parking by enabling property-owners to rent out their empty driveways, garages, car parks etc. to drivers needing somewhere to park.
Roomorama - An online marketplace for short term rentals all over the world.
Tripping - Tripping enables you to connect safely with locals who will introduce you to their towns, their cultures, their lives and their friends.
How To Swap Cities - a guide on how to swap offices with someone from another city inspired by SwapYourShop.
Submate - a Parisian startup that helps you discover new people and things to do as defined by your regular train and subway commutes.

Land / Gardening

HyperLocavore - Share yards, seeds, tools and good times growing food!
Shared Earth - Get free access to land and grow what you love, share some of the produce with the land owner and keep the rest.
Tool libraries - check out this handy directory of tool libraries.
Landshare - UK-based service that connects those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food.
How to Create Your Own Seed-Lending Library
How to start a Crop Mob - Crop mobs allow you to get and give gardening help.
How to Share a Vegetable Garden

Transportation

Carsharing directory - find carsharing service providers in your area with this international list.
Zimride, GoLoco, eRideShare - Find a ride or offer a ride on these top ridesharing platforms.
ZipCar - the largest fleet-based carsharing service in the world.
RelayRides, Getaround, Just Share It, and Spride - Rent cars to or from neighbors using the leaders of the peer to peer carsharing movement.
Weeels - order cabs and share rides with this smartphone app.
Avego - Avego matches drivers and riders in real time as they travel.
Taxi2 - Matches travelers who are going from the airport to the same or nearby final destination.
How To Share a Car With A Stranger
How To Be a Carfree Family

Media (Books, Movies, Games, Music)

BookMooch - Lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
Swap.com - An online swap marketplace for books, movies, music and games.
Goozex - A unique trading platform for video games and movies.
SwapaDVD - Trade DVDs for free.
Paperback Swap - Trade paperback books for free.
SwapaCD - Trade CDs for free.

Clothing

Check The S.W.A.P. Team, ClothingSwap.com, Swap for Good, and The Swapaholics for clothing swaps near you.
Or host your own swap using this guide, How to Throw a Community Swap Meet.
Use Wear Today Gone Tomorrow or Renttherunway to rent authentic designer clothing for up to 90 percent off retail prices.
Swapstyle.com - An interactive fashion website where members can swap, rather than buy, unlimited designer clothes with each other.
Try Bag Borrow & Steal and Fashionhire - to rent designer handbags and accessories at affordable prices.
And when the time comes to start a family, use ThredUp to swap children's clothing and toys with other parents.

Redistribution Sites (where uneeded stuff finds a loving home)

Freecycle - The original grassroots organization for giving and getting free stuff in your town.
craigslist - The ultimate free classifieds site with categories for free stuff, barters, and shares.
eBay - International online auction that allows you to buy from and sell to other individuals.
ecoSharing - The first sharing website that lets us share what we own with people we know and trust: our friends on facebook.
SpiltStuff - A new site that organizes local communities to buy in bulk and "split" the goods and the cost, thus reducing waste and unnecessary consumerism.

Renting and sharing of general goods where you live

Rentalic, Neighborgoods, Keepio, and SnapGoods are leading peer to peer rental and sharing marketplaces.

Campus

Chegg - Rent expensive textbooks on the cheap.
Better World Books - Save big on used textbooks.
Textbookflix, - A system that lets you rent text books in the same way that you rent movies from Netflix.
Students for Free Culture - An international, chapter-based student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and telecommunications policy.
Bloomsbury College - Crowdsorced learning for the entrepreneurial student.
CafeScribe - A new service that lets you download electronic copies of your textbook, add friends, and share your notes.
Notely - A collection of online tools (including a Facebook app) designed to help busy students organize their hectic lives.
Class Notes - A Facebook app that enables students to share handwritten or printed notes from class.
Free Technology Academy - free college classes on open source technology and standards.
Open Courseware - free college course materials offered by scores of top universities from around the world.

If you don't see the sharing solution you need, check out our huge list of how to share guides on Shareable. Or add resources you know about in comments.

3. Press the power button

Once you discover local opportunities for sharing and collaborating, it’s time to add the power: you. Get involved. Create a profile on sharing/renting/bartering site and actually list some stuff you could trade. Contact the moderator of a local offline sharing group and offer up your goods or services. Collaborative consumption requires a venture into a social world, even if it's only online; you need to get out there.

4. Sync with other devices and enjoy

Ideas like eBay, Netflix, and GameFly are pretty well-known examples of sharing, but it's important to remember that options exist offline as well. Sure, the internet makes it safe for us to share with strangers, but that doesn't mean you should forget about the satisfaction of sharing face-to-face. Coworkingbrings collaboration into your professional life; a local food co-op brings sharing into your pantry, and skill-sharing communities bring comraderie to your weekend hobbies.

Don't be afraid to let sharing/bartering/collaborating go viral in other areas of your life as well. You'll discover, as Rachel Botsman does in What's Mine is Yours, that "over time, these experiences create a deep shift in consumer mindset. Consumption is no longer an asymmetrical activity of endless acquisition but a dynamic push and pull of giving and collaborating in order to get what you want. Along the way, the acts of collaboration and giving become an end in itself."

“Building sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.”

2011-12-07T20:54:00.000-05:00

Thomas Linzey: Turning Defense into Offense: Challenging Corporations & Creating Self-Governance
This excellent video was filmed at the Bioneers Conference in San Francisco. Linzey and his team teach communities to resist the oppression and toxicity of large corporations. See http://www.celdf.org/

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing free and affordable legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, the local economy, and quality of life. Our mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.

Established in 1995, the Legal Defense Fund has now become the principal advisor to community groups and municipal governments struggling to transition from merely regulating corporate harms to stoppingthose harms by asserting local, democratic control directly over corporations.

Through grassroots organizing, public education and outreach, legal assistance, and drafting of ordinances, we have now assisted over 110 municipalities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, and Virginia to draft and adopt new laws with over 350,000 people living under these governing frameworks. These laws address activities such as corporate water withdrawals, longwall coal mining, factory farming, the land application of sewage sludge, and uranium mining.

Thomas Linzey: Turning Defense into Offense: Challenging Corporations & Creating Self-Governance from Spread Knowledge on Vimeo.

Permaculture - A Quiet Revolution

2011-12-07T20:47:00.000-05:00

This video from the 8th International Permaculture Convergence in Brazil is worth rewatching. Hope you will share it.

Permaculture - A Quiet Revolution from Spread Knowledge on Vimeo.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Raise Chickens!

2011-12-07T17:45:00.000-05:00

Our city council tonight is considering removing the 5 chicken limit and eliminating the requirement for getting permission from adjacent neighbors. There would still be a small annual registration fee and inspection. We hope to expand the limits to include other animals, too, overtime.

The impulse of rapid change and shocks to the economy may cause it all to happen much faster as people stop waiting for permission and simply take command of their own local destinies. Do all you can where you are...and take a stand. I guarantee, it WILL be challenged. Find your allies and hold strong.

Meanwhile, where the hell are the leaders who will stand up and say that all citizens must begin to throw off the chains of their dependency on the industrial producers, of food-like substances, that are destroying our soils, air, water and health? Don't wait for them to tell you. BE THE LEADERS! BE the ones we've been waiting for!

This article from Mother Earth News reminds us that once upon a time our government EXPECTED us to raise our own food to demonstrate our patriotism in a time of war (which we've been in for some time now, if you hadn't noticed). Now they want us to be dependent on huge, impersonal, uncaring, greed-motivated industries who produce nutritionally empty, over-processed, over-packaged, over-transported crap that keep us sick and dependent on a bloated industrial drug / insurance monopoly. We, the people, can do better.

Uncle Sam Wants You to Raise Chickens

… Or he did, back in 1918, as this poster illustrates.

Funny how things change, isn’t it? These days, people have to fight and petition and beg and plead in many municipalities to get their government to let them keep a few backyard hens. And even when city leaders permit it, they lay out complicated rules about how many, where and how the birds must be housed. And please! No roosters!

As the poster so rightly points out, two hens per person will keep a family in eggs. The flock will take minimal effort, cost little and provide plenty of enjoyment, because chickens are fun to watch.

Steep Exponential Curves Ahead...Reduce Speed

2011-12-06T19:36:00.000-05:00

Chris Martenson Lecture On Why The Next 20 Years Will Be Marked By The Collapse Of The Exponential Function

In this video courtesy of GoldMoney, Chris Martenson, economic analyst at chrismartenson.com and author of ‘The Crash Course’, explains why he thinks that the coming 20 years are going to look completely unlike the last 20 years. In his presentation he focuses on the so-called three “Es”: Economy, Energy and Environment. He argues that at this point in time it is no longer possible to view either one of those topics separately from one another.

Since all our money is loaned onto existence, our economy has to grow exponentially. Martenson proves this point empirically by showing a 99.9% fit of the actual growth curve of the last 40 years to an exponential curve. If we wanted to continue on this path, our debt load would have to double again over the next 10 years. By continually increasing our debt relative to GDP we are making the assumption that our future will always be wealthier than our past. He believes that this assumption is flawed and that the debt loads are already unmanageable.

Martenson explains how exponential growth works and why it is so scary that our economy is based on it. In an example he illustrates how unimaginably fast things speed up towards the end of an exponential curve. He shows that an exponential chart can be found in every one of the three “E’s” for instance in GDP growth, oil production, water use or species extinction. Due to the natural limitations on resources, Martenson comes to the conclusion that we are facing a serious energy crisis.

This energy predicament is namely that the quantity of oil as well as the quality of oil are in decline. He shows that oil discoveries peaked in 1964 and oil production peaked 40 years later. Martenson also shows how our return on invested energy is rapidly declining – the “cheap and easy” oil fields have already been exploited. In 1930 the energy return for oil was 100:1 or greater. Today it is already down to 3:1 and newer technologies such as corn-based ethanol only provide a 1.5:1 return. Martenson predicts that the time in between oil shocks will get shorter and shorter and that oil prices will go much higher.

Not only oil but also other natural resources are being rapidly used up as well. At the current projected pace of use, known reserves for many metals and minerals will be gone within the next 10 to 20 years. The energy needed to get these non-renewable resources out of the ground is growing exponentially. So we live in a world that must grow, but can’t grow and is subject to depletion. The conclusion out of all this is that our money system is poorly designed and that we need to rethink how we do things as quickly as possible.

After finishing his presentation Chris Martenson answers questions regarding a rise in efficiency, alternative technologies and oil prices. He also responds to questions regarding electricity, shale gas, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, and uranium and the race for global resources.

For more on exponential curves see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=related

DOUBLE DIPPING DANGER

2011-07-28T13:42:00.001-05:00

Want a pesticide factory in your intestines or increase abortions? Eat GMOs or animals that eat them.

DOUBLE DIPPING DANGER from NO GMO on Vimeo.

IT'S TIME FOR A FOOD FIGHT from NO GMO on Vimeo.

$14.3 Trillion

2011-07-16T23:12:00.000-05:00

The US Debt Ceiling is $14.3 Trillion. This video will help you visualize that.

The Story of Cosmetics

2011-07-16T22:53:00.000-05:00

The Story of Cosmetics, released on July 21st, 2010, examines the pervasive use of toxic chemicals in our everyday personal care products, from lipstick to baby shampoo. Produced with Free Range Studios and hosted by Annie Leonard, the seven-minute film by The Story of Stuff Project reveals the implications for consumer and worker health and the environment, and outlines ways we can move the industry away from hazardous chemicals and towards safer alternatives. The film concludes with a call for viewers to support legislation aimed at ensuring the safety of cosmetics and personal care products.

TEDxBloomington -- Keith Johnson -- "Food Security and Resilence"

2011-07-10T13:24:00.003-05:00

I have never prepared more for a 10 minute talk than I did for this TEDx Bloomington event. Even so I was a bit nervous and stumbled over my words but overall I'm pleased with the results. The TED experience was wonderful and I got to play with some fine folks.

Here are the rest of the talks: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD67656A7D72F7D9A

Dr Huber's Warning

2011-05-08T20:58:00.000-05:00

(From Food Democracy Now)

On January 17, internationally recognized plant pathologist Dr. Don Huber, wrote a letter to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack warning of the discovery of a new pathogen and a possible link between Roundup Ready® (GMO) corn and soybeans and severe reproductive problems in livestock as well as widespread crop failure.

Less than 3 weeks later, the Obama administration approved 2 new Roundup Ready® GMO crops, set to be planted this spring... Read on about Dr. Huber's discovery. If it gives you pause, sign the petition to ask Sec. Vilsack to stop these seeds from being planted until further research is done.

In 2010, more than 365 million acres were planted worldwide with genetically engineered (GMO) seeds.

The U.S. leads the world with more than 165 million acres of GMO crops, mostly Roundup Ready® crops.

Monsanto owns patents on the genes of more than 93% of soybeans, 80% of corn, and 95% of sugar beets planted in the U.S. -- all genetically modified to be resistant to the weed killer Roundup.

In 2007, more than 185,000,000 lbs. of Roundup were applied to U.S. crops, the year the Bush administration halted reporting of the herbicide's application rates.

In 1992, U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle announced that GMO foods would not be "hampered by unnecessary regulation", freeing Monsanto of the burden of independent testing or labeling of GMO foods for the American public.

Are you eating GMOs?

Tell the Obama administration to stop the planting of GMO alfalfa & sugar beets

Dr. Huber Explains Science Behind New Organism and Threat from Monsanto's Roundup, GMOs to Disease and Infertility from Food Democracy Now! on Vimeo.

COMMUNITY EVALUATION CRITERIA in the Design Process

2011-04-16T20:03:00.000-05:00

1. Resource Evaluation. Does the pre-design study:

Evaluate the terrain, flow of water, plants and wildlife?
Analyze the climate?
Research the history of the area?

2. Site Design. Does the development/design project:

Preserve fragile ecosystems?
Use natural grades to contain new run-off?
Ensure that a minimum of earth & vegetation are disturbed during development/construction?

3. Circulation. Does the layout:

Minimize distances between points of destination?
Cluster medium and high density areas while leaving other areas undisturbed?
Include non-residential functions within residential areas?
Provide safe paths for self-powered means of transportation?
Include paths that are as direct as or more direct than routes provided for motor vehicles?
Provide the self-powered paths on a separate grade where possible to enhance safety?
Have paths (such as sidewalks) ramped to street level to allow easy access for wheelchair pedestrians and bicyclists?
Provide routes for connecting with the mass transit system and facilities for encouraging ridership?
Provide a way to upgrade nearby road facilities to accommodate self-powered transportation?
Provide the least maintenance to roads by keeping their slope under 11%.

4. Infrastructure. Is your development/design project:

Designing roads and utilities to minimize energy costs?
Using the most efficient types of outdoor lighting only where needed?
Integrating infrastructure into natural habitat?

5. Power. Are you taking an approach that:

Exhausts all biological and non-tech solutions first?
Uses the most energy-efficient method of performing tasks?
When possible, uses renewable energy directly instead of indirectly?
When renewables are not available, uses fuel (eg natural gas) directly instead of through the production of electricity?
Generates power within the development from co-generation or renewable sources?
Contracts for maintenance with a utility or renewable energy equipment specialist?
Minimizes lengths of distribution lines?

6. Building. Is the development/design project being designed to:

Orient streets on an east-west axis so that the predominant sides of buildingsʼ glass areas will face within 20 degrees of north and south?
Incorporate natural ventilation, day-lighting and passive solar heating into building designs?
Situate building so that they do not block solar access to adjacent buildings?
Situate buildings in such a way that they do not block natural ventilation of adjacent units?
Use renewable energy sources for water heating and space heating?
Use architectural guidelines to ensure quality designs instead of imposing minimum square footage requirements?
Minimize the use of incandescent lighting?
Promote wall and roof surfaces that either reflect (in hot climates) or absorb (in cold climates) the majority of the sunʼs heat?
Promote the use of locally available non-toxic materials for building components?
Provide a low-cost method for upgrading to renewables at a later date. were renewable systems are not presently cost-effective?

7. Landscape. Does the design:

Preserve natural landscape and habitats?
Incorporate landscape design that provides shade from the summer sun?
Employ landscape materials that will minimize long-term requirements for maintenance, irrigation, pesticides or herbicides?
Use native vegetation?
Use natural biological controls to reduce pests, avoid toxic chemical use?

8. Water. Do the design and facilities:

Use drought-tolerant plants?
Mandate low-water-use toilets (1.5 gallons/flush or less)?
Reuse water (eg household greywater) for watering landscape?
Where needed, distribute drinking water using solar energy?
Use efficient hydraulic designs and pumps?
Collect rainwater to serve as the water supply?
Use groundwater only in quantities that can be replenished?
Use natural means for water treatment and water disposal?

9. Food. Does the development/design project:

Include food-producing landscapes sufficient to meet the needs of residents?
Integrate tracts of food-producing lands throughout the design that can be gardened or farmed without excessive quantities of polluting machinery?
Provide guidelines to grow crops organically?
Offer methods to use solid and liquid wastes from the sustainable development as fertilizers?

10. Wastes. Does the property and management agreement regulations/guide lines:

Include on-site recycling centers?
Require separation of organic waste from other garbage?
Provide for a community tool and appliance sharing/renting center?
Allow only non-toxic, biodegradable and recyclable items to be sold within the development?
Provide for periodic collection of toxic materials?
Ensure the use of natural biological systems to treat sewage?

11. Education. Does the development/project design sales team:

Offer literature on all aspects of sustainable developments?
Offer “how-to” workshops on projects that enhance the sustainable community?

12. Miscellaneous. Do the regulations:

Impose noise limits on regularly-used equipment and ensure good sound insulation in closelyspaced units?
Permit clotheslines, solar collectors, and other items that reduce energy use?
Encourage the use of natural ponds and lakes a “swimming holes instead of an energy-and chemical-intensive swimming pool”?
Create a neighborhood association to help maintain the quality of development?

Scoring:

Record your score for each characteristic in the Score column, then multiply this score by the weight to get the weighed score. 5 Excellent! ! 4 Good! 3 Average! 2 Mediocre !1 Poor 0 Non-existent

The minimum weighted score points require for a viable permaculture design project/development is 400-420.

Characteristic Weight Score W/Score
Price 10
Water 10
Development ease 10
(include political ease)
Commercial suitability 8
Percent utilization 8
Aspect (Solar) 8
Privacy 8
Natural resources-local 8
Electric power 7
Access 7
Proximity to service facilities 7
Comfort (max/min temps) 7
Size 5
Soil suitability 5
Character (personal taste) 5
Natural features (views) 5
Natural boundaries 5
Wind (good and bad) 4
Tree cover 4
TOTAL:

INGREDIENTS FOR COMMUNITY GLUE
LOVE
Bonding to each other
Bonding to the community
Clear aims of the group
Membership processes
Decisions making protocols
Tolerance and generosity
Forgiveness/ability to let go
Optimis
Attunement
Bonding to the land
Spiritual connectedness
Connections and relationships with the outside world
Structure and processes
Reflection and evaluation
Persistence
FUN!
Clear communication
Clear philosophy
Courage
Conflict
Self-acceptance
Safety and trust
Hope

OMG, GMOs!

2011-03-30T22:09:00.000-05:00

Genetic engineering is a threat to food security, especially in a changing climate. The introduction of genetically manipulated organisms by choice or by accident grossly undermines sustainable agriculture and in so doing, severely limits the choice of food we can eat.

Once GE plants are released into the environment, they are out of control. If anything goes wrong - they are impossible to recall.

GE contamination threatens biodiversity respected as the global heritage of humankind, and one of our world's fundamental keys to survival.

Defining Characteristics

2011-03-28T21:50:00.000-05:00

From the ever useful and information-rich Energy Bulletin

Published Mar 15 2011 by Resilient Homes blog,
Permaculture: Deconstructing a Definition

by Lisa Fernandes

The question “What is permaculture?” is notoriously difficult to answer in one sentence. It defies the “sound bite” culture we live in.

Let’s start with what permaculture is NOT. Seriously, it has nothing to do with permafrost. It is not sheet-mulching, though some may use that as a particular strategy. It is not a variant (or deviant:) of “organic,” though it may use many organic growing strategies. It is not getting a bunch of people together to stomp some mud in a kiddie pool and build a cob oven, though that’s a pretty darn good time in most permaculture circles. Finally, it is not some rarefied ivory tower of secret knowledge that only those who have worshipped at the church of the holy sacred PDC (permaculture design certificate) get to experience.

Permaculture, at its core, is a design process (1) and set of techniques (2) for creating resilient (3) and [truly] sustainable (4) human habitats and healthy ecosystems. (5) Now, I will footnote the daylights out of this definition, which is one of many definitions currently in use, all of which have virtues and drawbacks.

(1) Yes, you have to do design, even if it’s only in your own head, that helps chart a course from where you are today to where you want to be going. Permaculture design, unlike many other design disciplines, is informed by a set of design ethics and principles which are flexible and powerful. Think of the permaculture design as a really, really well-thought out “map” for creating the best possible chance of manifesting a particular vision or set of goals. As with most maps, a printed,visual version of that is often far more helpful (especially in group settings) than that map you keep in your head. And, as with most maps, they only work if you know where you are and can formulate an idea on where you want to go.

(2) The techniques are not the discipline. Sheet mulching, swaling, herb spirals, flowforms, de-paving, renewable energy, cordwood saunas (OK, this list could run into next week, but you get the idea) are NOT permaculture, they are techniques and strategies that we may employ in the service of good design based in real, articulated goals and visions. Those techniques and strategies may be invoked when needed, just like you choose the best tool for the job out of your tool box. Permaculture design is one of the most powerful ways to expand, organize and then intelligently use the toolkit available to you.

(3) Resilient: the ability to withstand shocks or disruptions and the ability to bounce back and/or rebuild with the least possible amount of distress or dysfunction. I would posit that resilience comes in a bunch of flavors: personal, household, neighborhood/community. There are more, but for the purposes of permaculture design, these are the most common types of resilience that need attention and can be enhanced with good design. Creating integrated, healthy, whole ecosystems (within which human habitats are embedded) calls for organizing ourselves in a way that is not beholden to unlimited cheap fossil fuels and not reliant on stable, unchanging climate patterns.

(4) Sustainable as a word gets put in the same bucket as “green” and “eco” for me. It’s like the hackneyed photo of the human hands holding soil and teensy weensy seedling. They are overused, examples of greenwashing and mean many different things to many different people. Technically, it means something that can be continued…what?…. indefinitely? As one of my students said recently, even “dysfunction can be continued indefinitely.” So, is that sustainable? I don’t have the new definition, so I use the word very sparingly and ask others what they mean when they use it.

(5) A sort of core, or common, view among permaculture folks is that humans are a part of, and not separate from, the non-human ecosystems around us. Therefore, our fate is embedded in the fate of the interconnected set of relationships and elements in the broader world. As such, many of us use the term “landscape” to include people, buildings, villages, etc. along with forests, fields and streams. It is one integrated whole and the designs we create do focus on the “landscape” which includes food production, ecosystem health, soil fertility, buildings, energy, waste, economic systems and much more. Permaculture also seeks to learn from and work far more closely with the patterns of organization found in parts of our ecosystems that have evolved over several billion years. So we often model our design work and strategies on “patterns in nature” and encourage something called “pattern literacy.“

Every single one of these footnotes is worthy of complete exploration in its own right, and I may get around to that via this blog and encourage others to do so as well.

And, while this is all very conceptual, one of the powerful things about permaculture is that it tends to attract real roll-up-your-sleeves and let’s-get-this-done kind of people. We do spend time thinking through design and learning new ways of working with and in the world, but almost to a one, permaculturists are actively changing the way we live, right now, starting at our own doorsteps and working out from there.

Editorial Notes

About the author:
Lisa Fernandes is the organizer and founding member of Portland Maine Permaculture and has been a student of permaculture and green design since 1992. She is a certified permaculture designer, team trainer and group facilitator and owned a training & consulting business for several years. She studied political science at Boston College and then environmental studies at The Evergreen State College while designing & implementing municipal waste reduction & recycling programs with a focus on organic waste recycling. Lisa is a gardener, certified Master Composter and has studied medicinal plants for nearly twenty years. She has worked in the public, private and non-profit sectors and currently brings her varied experience to developing & delivering sustainability and resilience-building events and permaculture designs for the local community. She currently serves on the Cape Farm Alliance and provides staff support to the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine (ELFC) and sits on the Southern Maine Partnership for Sustainable Communities. She is a proud member of the Portland Food Coop (Member-Owner #11) and the Slow Food Portland Convivium. Lisa serves on the board of the Permaculture Institute of the Northeast (PINE), helped launch The Pattern Factory design studio at Newforest Institute and is the principle permaculture designer in Resilient Homes, a solar hot water and permaculture design company. Lisa and her family are actively working to convert their 1/3 acre property into a demonstration site for resilient and sustainable “post-carbon” living.

The Second American Revolution Looks Like This

2011-03-17T20:36:00.000-05:00

Democracy School online

Democracy School - Part I from Mari Margil on Vimeo.

The Daniel Pennock Democracy School is a stimulating and illuminating course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.

Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.

Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2006, there are over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, so peruse our list and find a school near you!

The Schools are built around carefully designed readings, clear presentations and group discussions.

* Each School reveals how it came to be that the law enables corporate managers to dictate their values, and impose their projects on communities.
* Includes an intense, comprehensive history of the judicial bestowal of constitutional rights of persons on corporations.
* Learn the secret of how People’s Movements have cut to the essence and won their struggles to be “found” in the constitution.

* The Anti-Federalists
* The Abolitionists
* The Suffragists
* The Populists
* The Labor Movement

* And learn about earlier Movements, including the Levelers and the Diggers.
* Experience the story of Pennsylvania communities, and New England Town Meetings, as well as North Western city battles – in the ongoing struggle to take the power to govern out of the Corporate Boardrooms and put it back in our communities where it belongs.
* For people of all ages, interests and occupations
* Classes consist of small groups of 10-15 people like you.

"If you take no other training this year, do the Democracy School. It is a superlative unfolding revelation of how corporations have hijacked democracy. It meticulously deconstructs the historical arc that brought us to this precipice. But most importantly, it then departs into the highly pragmatic and inspiring work now underway that is slowly turning the tide . . . This Second American Revolution may be the most important political work going on anywhere in the country or the world."

-Kenny Ausubel ‘05, Founder and Co-Executive Director, Bioneers

"Democracy School was a mind-blowing experience. During the School, I was forced to come to grips with the understanding that I really knew very little about the true structure of law that controls our activism. Democracy School is a must for everyone who seeks to be liberated from our defensive, after-the-fact reactive organizing strategies."

Featuring Thomas Linzey Esq. and Mari Margil -- WATCH PARTS II - VI HERE

Nuke the Males (Who Design Solutions Like This)

2011-03-14T20:23:00.000-05:00

TOKYO ELECTRIC TO BUILD US NUCLEAR PLANTS

The no-BS info on Japan's disastrous nuclear operators

by Greg Palast
New York - March 14, 2011

I need to speak to you, not as a reporter, but in my former capacity as lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations.

Texas plants planned by Tokyo Electric. Image:NINA

I don't know the law in Japan, so I can't tell you if Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) can plead insanity to the homicides about to happen.

But what will Obama plead?  The Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas — by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners.  As if the Gulf hasn't suffered enough.

Here are the facts about Tokyo Electric and the industry you haven't heard on CNN:

The failure of emergency systems at Japan's nuclear plants comes as no surprise to those of us who have worked in the field.

Nuclear plants the world over must be certified for what is called "SQ" or "Seismic Qualification."  That is, the owners swear that all components are designed for the maximum conceivable shaking event, be it from an earthquake or an exploding Christmas card from Al Qaeda.

The most inexpensive way to meet your SQ is to lie.  The industry does it all the time. The government team I worked with caught them once, in 1988, at the Shoreham plant in New York.  Correcting the SQ problem at Shoreham would have cost a cool billion, so engineers were told to change the tests from 'failed' to 'passed.'

The company that put in the false safety report?  Stone & Webster, now the nuclear unit of Shaw Construction which will work with Tokyo Electric to build the Texas plant, Lord help us.

There's more.

Last night I heard CNN reporters repeat the official line that the tsunami disabled the pumps needed to cool the reactors, implying that water unexpectedly got into the diesel generators that run the pumps.

These safety back-up systems are the 'EDGs' in nuke-speak: Emergency Diesel Generators.  That they didn't work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn't save a building because "it was on fire."

What dim bulbs designed this system?  One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba.  Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system.

Now be afraid. Obama's $4 billion bail-out-in-the-making is called the South Texas Project.  It's been sold as a red-white-and-blue way to make power domestically with a reactor from Westinghouse, a great American brand.  However, the reactor will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse — Toshiba.

I once had a Toshiba computer.  I only had to send it in once for warranty work.  However, it's kind of hard to mail back a reactor with the warranty slip inside the box if the fuel rods are melted and sinking halfway to the earth's core.

TEPCO and Toshiba don't know what my son learned in 8th grade science class: tsunamis follow Pacific Rim earthquakes. So these companies are real stupid, eh?  Maybe.  More likely is that the diesels and related systems wouldn't have worked on a fine, dry afternoon.

Back in the day, when we checked the emergency back-up diesels in America, a mind-blowing number flunked. At the New York nuke, for example, the builders swore under oath that their three diesel engines were ready for an emergency. They'd been tested.  The tests were faked, the diesels run for just a short time at low speed.  When the diesels were put through a real test under emergency-like conditions, the crankshaft on the first one snapped in about an hour, then the second and third.  We nicknamed the diesels, "Snap, Crackle and Pop."

(Note:  Moments after I wrote that sentence, word came that two of three diesels failed at the Tokai Station as well.)

In the US, we supposedly fixed our diesels after much complaining by the industry. But in Japan, no one tells Tokyo Electric to do anything the Emperor of Electricity doesn't want to do.

I get lots of confidential notes from nuclear industry insiders.  One engineer, a big name in the field, is especially concerned that Obama waved the come-hither check to Toshiba and Tokyo Electric to lure them to America. The US has a long history of whistleblowers willing to put themselves on the line to save the public. In our racketeering case in New York, the government only found out about the seismic test fraud because two courageous engineers, Gordon Dick and John Daly, gave our team the documentary evidence.

In Japan, it's simply not done.  The culture does not allow the salary-men, who work all their their lives for one company, to drop the dime.

Not that US law is a wondrous shield:  both engineers in the New York case were fired and blacklisted by the industry.  Nevertheless, the government (local, state, federal) brought civil racketeering charges against the builders. The jury didn't buy the corporation's excuses and, in the end, the plant was, thankfully, dismantled.

Am I on some kind of xenophobic anti-Nippon crusade?  No.  In fact, I'm far more frightened by the American operators in the South Texas nuclear project, especially Shaw. Stone & Webster, now the Shaw nuclear division, was also the firm that conspired to fake the EDG tests in New York. (The company's other exploits have been exposed by their former consultant, John Perkins, in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.)
If the planet wants to shiver, consider this:  Toshiba and Shaw have recently signed a deal to become world-wide partners in the construction of nuclear stations.

The other characters involved at the South Texas Plant that Obama is backing should also give you the willies.  But as I'm in the middle of investigating the American partners, I'll save that for another day.

So, if we turned to America's own nuclear contractors, would we be safe?  Well, two of the melting Japanese reactors, including the one whose building blew sky high, were built by General Electric of the Good Old US of A.

After Texas, you're next.  The Obama Administration is planning a total of $56 billion in loans for nuclear reactors all over America.

And now, the homicides:

CNN is only interested in body counts, how many workers burnt by radiation, swept away or lost in the explosion.  These plants are now releasing radioactive steam into the atmosphere. Be skeptical about the statements that the "levels are not dangerous."  These are the same people who said these meltdowns could never happen.  Over years, not days, there may be a thousand people, two thousand, ten thousand who will suffer from cancers induced by this radiation.

In my New York investigation, I had the unhappy job of totaling up post-meltdown "morbidity" rates for the county government.   It would be irresponsible for me to estimate the number of cancer deaths that will occur from these releases without further information; but it is just plain criminal for the Tokyo Electric shoguns to say that these releases are not dangerous. Indeed, the fact that residents near the Japanese nuclear plants were not issued iodine pills to keep at the ready shows TEPCO doesn't care who lives and who dies whether in Japan or the USA. The carcinogenic isotopes that are released at Fukushima are already floating to Seattle with effects we simply cannot measure.

Heaven help us.  Because Obama won't.

Feeling Neutered, Guys? Get Monsanto Out Of Your Pants.

2011-03-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

Pesticides wreak havoc on reproductive health in men

Thursday, March 03, 2011 by: T.M. Hartle

(NaturalNews) Reports from European countries have found sub-fertile semen quality in 1 out of 5 young men ages 18 to 25. Research has also shown increasing rates of testicular cancer, un-descended testes in babies, and other hormone-related problems in men. Fertility and reproductive health is declining in men and has been over the last 50 years according to recent reports. The cause of this decline in health is multi-factorial, but research continues to expose agribusiness chemicals as potent hormone disruptors. The evidence of declining male reproductive health in connection with commonly used agricultural chemicals is found in a host of scientific research that has spanned decades.

Research found that men with high levels of three common pesticides in their urine were 10 times as likely to have low sperm quality. The conclusions of the study suggested that common weed killers including alachlor, atrazine and diazinon harm the reproductive health of men, who drink water contaminated with these common chemicals.

Several studies published in late 2010 found that many pesticides and fungicides used on the food supply impaired testosterone synthesis. Despite the evidence that these chemicals have the potential to cause serious reproductive harm no action is being taken. As the scientific literature exposes the dark side of our chemical laden society, the government barely takes notice and the use of these chemicals continues. The evidence from this research deserves the attention of researchers, government regulatory agencies, and the agricultural community.

There is strong evidence that agribusiness chemicals have anti-androgen and hormone disrupting properties, and this certainly is a major contributing factor to the declining reproductive health in men. The declining sperm count and rising reproductive impairment in developed countries has a myriad of causes. There are many contributing factors in food packaging, chemicals used in food production, plastics and a host of other factors in the environment. Despite the reality that there is no simple, one answer solution to the declining reproductive health in men, action should be taken when significant contributing factors are identified.

The use of toxic chemicals is based on increasing profitability, not public health. However, the general public does not have to be at the mercy of agribusiness. Men can take a stand and protect their reproductive health by supporting organic agriculture, avoiding processed foods, drinking only pure water filtered to remove contaminants, or joining the local community supported agriculture. If there is a shift in profitability because of a larger demand for organically produced food, there will be a movement toward safer, organic, and sustainable food production practices in order to follow public demand. The greatest tool for change in food production is in our wallet.

sources:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/pesticides-residue-testosterone-levels
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21117141
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20708073
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101128194013.htm
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/3786.php

About the author

T.M. Hartle has a Bachelors degree in Natural Health Science with a concentration in Clinical Nutrition as well as a Certificate in Plant Based Nutrition from Cornell University. She is a student midwife who teaches pregnancy nutrition courses to midwives and childbirth educators throughout the country. She has a certificate in the Essentials of raw culinary arts from Living Light Culinary Arts Institute and is the Owner and Chef of The Peaceful Kitchen. http://www.thepeacefulkitchen.blogspot.com/
http://www.healthydietplanrecipes.com

Hogs - The High Cost of Greed

2011-02-26T02:32:00.000-05:00

Rollingstone.com, Feb. 14, 2007

Boss Hog
America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history.
Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.
(photo by doveimaging.com)
JEFF TIETZ

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.

Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-towall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying. From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population.

Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat. The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of
which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit. Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

The chairman of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter III, is a funny, jowly, canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a corporate jet and a private yacht. At sixty-seven, he is unrepentant in the face of criticism. He describes himself as a "tough man in a tough business" and his factories as wholly legitimate products of the American free market. He can be sardonic; he likes to mock his critics and rivals. "The animal-rights people," he once said, "want to impose a vegetarian's society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are neurotic." When the Environmental Protection Agency cited Smithfield for thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act, Luter responded by comparing what he claimed were the number of violations the company could theoretically have been charged with (2.5 million, by his calculation) to the number of documented violations up to that point (seventy-four). "A very, very small percent," he said.

Luter grew up butchering hogs in his father's slaughterhouse, in the town of Smithfield, Virginia. When he took over the family business forty years ago, it was a local, marginally profitable meatpacking operation. Under Luter, Smithfield was soon making enough money to begin purchasing neighboring meatpackers. From the beginning, Luter thought monopolistically. He bought out his local competition until he completely dominated the regional pork-processing market.

But Luter was dissatisfied. The company was still buying most of its hogs from local farmers; Luter wanted to create a system, known as "total vertical integration," in which Smithfield controls every stage of production, from the moment a hog is born until the day it passes through the slaughterhouse. So he imposed a new kind of contract on farmers: The company would own the living hogs; the contractors would raise the pigs and be responsible for managing the hog shit and disposing of dead hogs. The system made it impossible for small hog farmers to survive -- those who could not handle thousands and thousands of pigs were driven out of business. "It was a simple matter of economic power," says Eric Tabor, chief of staff for Iowa's attorney general.

Smithfield's expansion was unique in the history of the industry: Between 1990 and 2005, it grew by more than 1,000 percent. In 1997 it was the nation's seventh-largest pork producer; by 1999 it was the largest. Smithfield now kills one of every four pigs sold commercially in the United States. As Smithfield expanded, it consolidated its operations, clustering millions of fattening hogs around its slaughterhouses. Under Luter, the company was turning into a great pollution machine: Smithfield was suddenly producing unheard-of amounts of pig shit laced with drugs and chemicals. According to the EPA, Smithfield's largest farm-slaughterhouse operation -- in Tar Heel, North Carolina -- dumps more toxic waste into the nation's water each year than all but three other industrial facilities in America.

Luter likes to tell this story: An old man and his grandson are walking in a cemetery. They see a tombstone that reads here lies charles w. johnson, a man who had no enemies. "Gee, Granddad," the boy says, "this man must have been a great man. He had no enemies." "Son," the grandfather replies, "if a man didn't have any enemies, he didn't do a damn thing with his life." If Luter were to set this story in Ivy Hill Cemetery in his hometown of Smithfield, it would be an object lesson in how to make enemies. Back when he was growing up, the branches of the cemetery's trees were bent with the weight of scores of buzzards. The waste stream from the Luters' meatpacking plant, with its thickening agents of pig innards and dead fish, flowed nearby.

Luter learned the family trade well. Last year, before he retired as CEO of Smithfield, he took home $10,802,134. He currently holds $19,296,000 in unexercised stock options. One day this fall, a retired Marine Corps colonel and environmental activist named Rick Dove, the former riverkeeper of North Carolina's Neuse River, arranged to have me flown over Smithfield's operation in North Carolina. Dove, a focused guy of sixty-seven years, is unable to talk about corporate hog farming without becoming angry. After he got out of the Marine Corps in 1987, he became a commercial fisherman, which he had wanted to do since he was a kid. He was successful, and his son went into business with him. Then industrial hog farming arrived and killed the fish, and both Dove and his son got seriously ill.

Dove and other activists provide the only effective oversight of corporate hog farming in the area. The industry has long made generous campaign contributions to politicians responsible for regulating hog farms. In 1995, while Smithfield was trying to persuade the state of Virginia to reduce a large fine for the company's pollution, Joseph Luter gave $100,000 to then-governor George Allen's political-action committee. In 1998, corporate hog farms in North Carolina spent $1 million to help defeat state legislators who wanted to clean up open-pit lagoons. The state has consistently failed to employ enough inspectors to ensure that hog farms are complying with environmental standards.

To document violations, Dove and other activists regularly hire private planes to inspect corporate hog operations from the air. The airport Dove uses, in New Bern, North Carolina, is tiny; the plane he uses, a 1975 Cessna single-prop, looks tiny even in the tiny airport. Its cabin has four cracked yellow linoleum seats. It looks like the interior of a 1975 VW bug, but with more dials. The pilot, Joe Corby, is older than I expected him to be. "I have a GPS, so I can kinda guide you," Dove says to Corby while we taxi to the runway. "Oh, you do!" Corby says, apparently unaccustomed to such a luxury. "Well, OK." We take off. "Bunch of turkey buzzards," Dove says, looking out the window. "They're big." "Don't wanna hit them," Corby says. "They would be . . . very destructive."

We climb to 2,000 feet and head toward the densest concentration of hogs in the world. The landscape at first is unsuspiciously pastoral -- fields planted in corn or soybeans or cotton, tree lines staking creeks, a few unincorporated villages of prefab houses. But then we arrive at the global locus of hog farming, and the countryside turns into an immense subdivision for pigs. Hog farms that contract with Smithfield differ slightly in dimension but otherwise look identical: parallel rows of six, eight or twelve one-story hog houses, some nearly the size of a football field, containing as many as 10,000 hogs, and backing onto a single large lagoon. From the air I see that the lagoons come in two shades of pink: dark or Pepto Bismol -- vile, freaky colors in the middle of green farmland.

From the plane, Smithfield's farms replicate one another as far as I can see in every direction. Visibility is about four miles. I count the lagoons. There are 103. That works out to at least 50,000 hogs per square mile. You could fly for an hour, Dove says, and all you would see is corporate hog operations, with little towns of modular homes and a few family farms pinioned amid them.

Studies have shown that lagoons emit hundreds of different volatile gases into the atmosphere, including ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. A single lagoon releases many millions of bacteria into the air per day, some resistant to human antibiotics. Hog farms in North Carolina also emit some 300 tons of nitrogen into the air every day as ammonia gas, much of which falls back to earth and deprives lakes and streams of oxygen, stimulating algal blooms and killing fish.

Looking down from the plane, we watch as several of Smithfield's farmers spray their hog shit straight up into the air as a fine mist: It looks like a public fountain. Lofted and atomized, the shit is blown clear of the company's property. People who breathe the shit-infused air suffer from bronchitis, asthma, heart palpitations, headaches, diarrhea, nosebleeds and brain damage. In 1995, a woman downwind from a corporate hog farm in Olivia, Minnesota, called a poison control center and described her symptoms. "Ma'am," the poison-control officer told her, "the only symptoms of hydrogen-sulfide poisoning you're not experiencing are seizures, convulsions and death. Leave the area immediately." When you fly over eastern North Carolina, you realize that virtually everyone in this part of the state lives close to a lagoon.

Each of the company's lagoons is surrounded by several fields. Pollution control at Smithfield consists of spraying the pig shit from the lagoons onto the fields to fertilize them. The idea is
borrowed from the past: The small hog farmers that Smithfield drove out of business used animal waste to fertilize their crops, which they then fed to the pigs. Smithfield says that this, in essence, is what it does -- its crops absorb every ounce of its pig shit, making the lagoon-sprayfield system a zero-discharge, nonpolluting waste-disposal operation. "If you manage your fields correctly, there should be no runoff, no pollution," says Dennis Treacy, Smithfield's vice president of environmental affairs. "If you're getting runoff, you're doing something wrong."

In fact, Smithfield doesn't grow nearly enough crops to absorb all of its hog weight. The company raises so many pigs in so little space that it actually has to import the majority of their food, which contains large amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus. Those chemicals -- discharged in pig shit and sprayed on fields -- run off into the surrounding ecosystem, causing what Dan Whittle, a former senior policy associate with the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, calls a "mass imbalance." At one point, three hog-raising counties in North Carolina were producing more nitrogen, and eighteen were producing more phosphorus, than all the crops in the state could absorb.

As we fly over the hog farms, I notice that springs and streams and swamplands and lakes are everywhere. Eastern North Carolina is a coastal plain, grooved and tilted towards the sea -- and Smithfield's sprayfields almost always incline toward creeks or creek-fed swamps. Half perforated pipes called irrigation tiles, commonly used in modern farming, run beneath many of the fields; when they become unplugged, the tiles effectively operate as drainpipes, dumping pig waste into surrounding tributaries. Many studies have documented the harm caused by hog-waste runoff; one showed the pig shit raising the level of nitrogen and phosphorus in a receiving river as much as sixfold. In eastern North Carolina, nine rivers and creeks in the Cape Fear and Neuse River basins have been classified by the state as either "negatively impacted" or environmentally "impaired."
Although Smithfield may not have enough crops to absorb its pig shit, its contract farmers do plant plenty of hay. In 1992, when the number of hogs in North Carolina began to skyrocket, so much hay was planted to deal with the fresh volumes of pig shit that the market for hay collapsed. But the hay from hog farms can be so nitrate-heavy that it sickens livestock. For a while, former governor Jim Hunt -- a recipient of hog-industry campaign money -- was feeding hog-farm hay to his cows. Locals say it made the cows sick and irritable, and the animals kicked Hunt several times, seemingly in revenge. It's a popular tale in eastern North Carolina.

To appreciate what this agglomeration of hog production does to the people who live near it, you have to appreciate the smell of industrial-strength pig shit. The ascending stench can nauseate pilots at 3,000 feet. On the day we fly over Smithfield's operation there is little wind to stir up the lagoons or carry the stink, and the region's current drought means that lagoon operators aren't spraying very frequently. It is the best of times. We can smell the farms from the air, but while the smell is foul it is intermittent and not particularly strong.

To get a really good whiff, I drive down a narrow country road of white sand and walk up to a Smithfield lagoon. At the end of the road stands a tractor and some spraying equipment. The fetid white carcass of a hog lies in a dumpster known as a "dead box." Flies cover the hog's snout. Its hooves look like high heels. Millions of factory-farm hogs -- one study puts it at ten percent -- die before they make it to the killing floor. Some are taken to rendering plants, where they are propelled through meat grinders and then fed cannibalistically back to other living hogs. Others are dumped into big open pits called "dead holes," or left in the dumpsters for so long that they swell and explode. The borders of hog farms are littered with dead pigs in all stages of decomposition, including thousands of bleached pig bones. Locals like to say that the bears and buzzards of eastern North Carolina are unusually lazy and fat.

No one seems to be around. It is quiet except for the gigantic exhaust fans affixed to the six hog houses. There is an unwholesome tang in the air, but there is no wind and it isn't hot, so I can't smell the lagoon itself. I walk the few hundred yards over to it. It is covered with a thick film; its edge is a narrow beach of big black flies. Here, its odor is leaking out. I take a deep breath. Concentrated manure is my first thought, but I am fighting an impulse to vomit even as I am thinking it. I've probably smelled stronger odors in my life, but nothing so insidiously and instantaneously nauseating. It takes my mind a second or two to get through the odor's first coat. The smell at its core has a frightening, uniquely enriched putridity, both deep-sweet and highsour. I back away from it and walk back to the car but I remain sick -- it's a shivery, retchy kind of nausea -- for a good five minutes. That's apparently characteristic of industrial pig shit: It keeps making you sick for a good while after you've stopped smelling it. It's an unduly invasive, adhesive smell. Your whole body reacts to it. It's as if something has physically entered your stomach. A little later I am driving and I catch a crosswind stench -- it must have been from a stirred-up lagoon -- and from the moment it hit me a timer in my body started ticking: You can only function for so long in that smell. The memory of it makes you gag.

Unsurprisingly, prolonged exposure to hog-factory stench makes the smell extremely hard to get off. Hog factory workers stink up every store they walk into. I run into a few local guys who had made the mistake of accepting jobs in hog houses, and they tell me that you just have to wait the smell out: You'll eventually grow new hair and skin. If you work in a Smithfield hog house for a year and then quit, you might stink for the next three months.

If the temperature and wind aren't right and the lagoon operators are spraying, people in hog country can't hang laundry or sit on their porches or mow their lawns. Epidemiological studies show that those who live near hog lagoons suffer from abnormally high levels of depression,
tension, anger, fatigue and confusion. "We are used to farm odors," says one local farmer. "These are not farm odors." Sometimes the stink literally knocks people down: They walk out of the house to get something in the yard and become so nauseous they collapse. When they retain consciousness, they crawl back into the house.

That has happened several times to Julian and Charlotte Savage, an elderly couple whose farmland now abuts a Smithfield sprayfield -- one of several meant to absorb the shit of 50,000 hogs. The Savages live in a small, modular kit house. Sitting in the kitchen, Charlotte tells me that she once saw Julian collapse in the yard and ran out and threw a coat over his head and dragged him back inside. Before Smithfield arrived, Julian's family farmed the land for the better part of a century. He raised tobacco, corn, wheat, turkeys and chickens. Now he has respiratory problems and rarely attempts to go outside.

Behind the house, a creek bordering the sprayfield flows into a swamp; the Savages have seen hog waste running right into the creek. Once, during a flood, the Savages found pig shit six inches deep pooled around their house. They had to drain it by digging trenches, which took three weeks. Charlotte has noticed that nitrogen fallout keeps the trees around the house a deep synthetic green. There's a big buzzard population.

The Savages say they can keep the pig-shit smell out of their house by shutting the doors and windows, but to me the walls reek faintly. They have a windbreak -- an eighty-foot-wide strip of forest -- between their house and the fields. They know people who don't, though, and when the smell is bad, those people, like everyone, shut their windows and slam their front doors shut quickly behind them, but their coffee and spaghetti and carrots still smell and taste like pig shit. The Savages have had what seemed to be hog shit in their bath water. Their well water, which was clean before Smithfield arrived, is now suspect. "I try not to drink it," Charlotte says. "We mostly just drink drinks, soda and things." While we talk, Julian spends most of the time on the living room couch; his lungs are particularly bad today. Then he comes into the kitchen. Among other things, he says: I can't breathe it, it'll put you on the ground; you can't walk, you fall down; you breathe you gon' die; you go out and smell it one time and your ass is gone; it's not funny to be around it. It's not funny, honey. He could have said all this somewhat tragicomically, with a thin smile, but instead he cries the whole time.

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of Smithfield's annual sales.

A river that receives a lot of waste from an industrial hog farm begins to die quickly. Toxins and microbes can kill plants and animals outright; the waste itself consumes available oxygen and suffocates fish and aquatic animals; and the nutrients in the pig shit produce algal blooms that also deoxygenate the water. The Pagan River runs by Smithfield's original plant and headquarters in Virginia, which served as Joseph Luter's staging ground for his assault on the pork-raising and processing industries. For several decades, before a spate of regulations, the Pagan had no living marsh grass, a tiny and toxic population of fish and shellfish and a half foot of noxious black mud coating its bed. The hulls of boats winched up out of the river bore inch thick coats of greasy muck. In North Carolina, much of the pig waste from Smithfield's operations makes its way into the Neuse River; in a five-day span in 2003 alone, more than 4 million fish died. Pig-waste runoff has damaged the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound, which is almost as big as the Chesapeake Bay and which provides half the nursery grounds used by fish in the eastern Atlantic.

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions. It's hard to conceive of a fish kill that size. The kill began with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and dying. Then it spread in patches along the entire length and breadth of the river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were mounded wherever the river's contours slowed the current, and the riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a day dead fish completely covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and beached and piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the river with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white bellies -- more fish than the river seemed capable of holding. The smell of rotting fish covered much of the county; the air above the river was chaotic with scavenging birds. There were far more dead fish than the birds could ever eat.

Spills aren't the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers. Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several feet underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide closing over the region's waterways, converging on the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long, well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the land. Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead pig three miles off the North Carolina coast.

From a waste-disposal perspective, Hurricane Floyd was the best thing that had ever happened to corporate hog farming in North Carolina. Smithfield currently has tens of thousands of gallons of open-air waste awaiting more Floyds.

In addition to such impressive disasters, corporate hog farming contributes to another form of environmental havoc: Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe that, in its toxic form, has killed a billion fish and injured dozens of people. Nutrient-rich waste like pig shit creates the ideal environment for Pfiesteria to bloom: The microbe eats fish attracted to algae nourished by the waste. Pfiesteria is invisible and odorless -- you know it by the trail of dead. The microbe degrades a fish's skin, laying bare tissue and blood cells; it then eats its way into the fish's body. After the 1995 spill, millions of fish developed large bleeding sores on their sides and quickly died. Fishermen found that at least one of Pfiesteria's toxins could take flight: Breathing the air above the bloom caused severe respiratory difficulty, headaches, blurry vision and logical impairment. Some fishermen forgot how to get home; laboratory workers exposed to Pfiesteria lost the ability to solve simple math problems and dial phones; they forgot their own names. It could take weeks or months for the brain and lungs to recover.

Smithfield is no longer able to disfigure watersheds quite so obviously as in the past; it can no longer expand and flatten small pig farms quite so easily. Several state legislatures have passed laws prohibiting or limiting the ownership of small farms by pork processors. In some places, new slaughterhouses are required to meet expensive waste-disposal requirements; many are forbidden from using the waste-lagoon system. North Carolina, where pigs now outnumber people, has passed a moratorium on new hog operations and ordered Smithfield to fund research into alternative waste-disposal technologies. South Carolina, having taken a good look at its neighbor's coastal plain, has pronounced the company unwelcome in the state. The federal government and several states have challenged some of Smithfield's recent acquisition deals and, in a few instances, have forced the company to agree to modify its waste-lagoon systems.

These initiatives, of course, come comically late. Industrial hog operations control at least seventy-five percent of the market. Smithfield's market dominance is hardly at risk: Twenty-six percent of the pork processed in this country is Smithfield pork. The company's expansion does not seem to be slowing down: Over the past two years, Smithfield's annual sales grew by $1.5 billion. In September, the company announced that it is merging with Premium Standard Farms, the nation's second-largest hog farmer and sixth-largest pork processor. If the deal goes through, Smithfield will own more pigs than the next eight largest pork producers in the nation combined. The company's market leverage and political clout will allow it to produce ever greater quantities of hog waste.

Smithfield points to the improvements it has made to its waste-disposal systems in recent years. In 2003, Smithfield announced that it was investing $20 million in a program to turn its pig shit in Utah into alternative fuel. It now produces approximately 2,500 gallons a day of biomethanol and has begun building a facility in Texas to produce clean-burning biodiesel fuel.

"We're paying a lot of attention to energy right now," says Treacy, the Smithfield vice president. "We've come such a long way in the last five years." The company, he adds, has undergone a "complete cultural shift on environmental matters."

But cultural shifts, no matter how genuine, cannot counter the unalterable physical reality of Smithfield Foods itself. "All of a sudden we have this 800-pound gorilla in the pork industry," Successful Farming magazine warned -- six years ago. There simply is no regulatory solution to the millions of tons of searingly fetid, toxic effluvium that industrial hog farms discharge and aerosolize on a daily basis. Smithfield alone has sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely would bankrupt the company. According to Dr. Michael Mallin, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who has researched the effects of corporate farming on water quality, the volumes of concentrated pig waste produced by industrial hog farms are plainly not containable in small areas. The land, he says, "just can't absorb everything that comes out of the barns." From the moment that Smithfield attained its current size, its waste-disposal problem became conventionally insoluble.

Joe Luter, like his pig shit, has an innate aversion to being contained in any way. Ever since American regulators and lawmakers started forcing Smithfield to spend more money on waste treatment and attempting to limit the company's expansion, Luter has been looking to do business elsewhere. In recent years, his gaze has fallen on the lucrative and unregulated markets of Poland. In 1999, Luter bought a state-owned company called Animex, one of Poland's biggest hog processors. Then he began doing business through a Polish subsidiary called Prima Farms, acquiring huge moribund Communist-era hog farms and converting them into concentrated feeding operations. Pork prices in Poland were low, so Smithfield's sweeping expansion didn't make strict economic sense, except that it had the virtue of pushing small hog farmers toward bankruptcy. By 2003, Animex was operating six subsidiary companies and seven processing plants, selling nine brands of meat and taking in $338 million annually.

The usual violations occurred. Near one of Smithfield's largest plants, in Byszkowo, an enormous pool of frozen pig shit, pumped into a lagoon in winter, melted and ran into two nearby lakes. The lake water turned brown; residents in local villages got skin rashes and eye infections; the stench made it impossible to eat. A recent report to the Helsinki Commission found that Smithfield's pollution throughout Poland was damaging the country's ecosystems. Overapplication was endemic. Farmers without permits were piping liquid pig shit directly into watersheds that fed into the Baltic Sea.

When Joseph Luter entered Poland, he announced that he planned to turn the country into the "Iowa of Europe." Iowa has always been America's biggest hog producer and remains the nation's chief icon of hog farming. Having subdued Poland, Luter announced this summer that all of Eastern Europe -- "particularly Romania" -- should become the "Iowa of Europe." Seventy-five percent of Romania's hogs currently come from household farms. Over the next five years, Smithfield plans to spend $800 million in Romania to change that.

CAFO's Can Kill You - No Joke.

2011-02-25T17:24:00.000-05:00

Flies and cockroaches carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria from factory farms, study finds

BY Tom Philpott

25 FEB 2011 3:24 PM

A fly's paradise: Near a giant hog factory in North Carolina, downed pigs fester while sprayers spread untreated manure onto fields.Photo: Steve WingWhat sort of antibiotic-resistant pathogens are growing on factory farms, along with all the cheap pork chops and chicken wings? And what level of threat do they pose to our health?

Well, we know that in total, factory-farm animals consume a jaw-dropping four times as many antibiotics as do people in the United States, thanks to diligent reporting by Maryn McKenna andRalph Loglisci and work by Rep. Louise Slaughter(D-N.Y.).

And we know that a kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection called MRSA now kills more people than AIDS -- and infects people who never set foot in a hospital, which is the site where MRSA is thought to have originated. We also know, due to the stellar work of Iowa State University researcher Tara Smith, that pigs in confined animal feedlot operations, and the workers who tend them, routinely carry MRSA strains (her paper can be found here).

We also know that, by the FDA's own reckoning, meat on grocery store shelves is routinely infected by pathogens resistant to multiple antibiotics (again, McKenna's work brought the FDA's perhaps intentionally obscure report to light).

And now we know of yet another means by which antibiotic-resistant nasties can make their way from meat factories into the broader community: through the cockroaches and flies drawn to the titanic amounts of manure produced on factory farms. For a paper published last month in the journal Microbiology, researchers from North Carolina State and Kansas State universities took one for the team -- i.e., the public. They did something few of us would want to do: rounded up common flies and roaches hanging around factory hog farms, and tested them to see what kinds of bacteria they were harboring.

Their finding? More than 90 percent of the insects sampled carried forms of the bacteria Enterococci that are resistant to at least one common antibiotic, and often more than one.

Read the rest here.

Boycott Land O'Lakes - GMO Pushers

2011-02-25T16:29:00.000-05:00

Hay Now — It’s Boycott Time: Land O’Lakes, This Means You!

By Citizens for Safe Food and Feed

Farm Wars

By now you’ve heard how President Obama and his Monsanto Administration have plowed through approvals of three more genetically engineered products, including GE alfalfa. Well, here’s something else you should know:

To produce its Round-Up Ready Alfalfa seeds, Monsanto partnered with a company called Forage Genetics International, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Land O’Lakes dairy co-op. That’s right, Land O’Lakes stands to make a fortune from polluting our food supply with untested and unlabeled GMOs.

To protest, you could sign one of the many petitions going around that will likely just be ignored. But there’s another way to show your disapproval of genetically engineered Round-Up Ready Alfalfa: Boycott all Land O’Lakes products — its butter, cheese, eggs, speads, margarine, seasonings, creams, cocoa and cappuccino mixes, sour cream and milk. All of them.

You have the power to economically punish Land O’Lakes — the owner of Forage Genetics, Monsanto’s partner in crime — for its role in polluting the food chain with untested and unlabeled GMOs, increasing the use of toxic glyphosate herbicide, and potentially destroying the organic beef and dairy feed market by loudly refusing to support Land O’Lakes with your dollars.

Tell all your friends to go to all the supermarkets in their area and let the check-out clerks know that they’re boycotting Land O’Lakes products until they are out of the GMO business, loud enough for other shoppers to hear. And next, stop by the store manager’s desk and tell him about the boycott.

Send Land O’Lakes and other companies a clear message: HAY you — We’re FED UP with GMOs in our food supply!

And to make sure Land O’Lakes knows why its sales are down, contact its president and CEO Chris Policinski and let him know you won’t be buying Land O’Lakes products anymore because you don’t want genetically engineered food or animal feed:

Chris Policinski
President and CEO
Land O’Lakes
4001 Lexington Avenue
Arden Hills, MN 55126-2998
651/481-2222

Spread the word…

ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit

2011-02-23T00:23:00.000-05:00

The Ultimate Urban Permaculture Design Course: Detroit, Michigan

Date: March 27 – April 8, 2011
Location: Detroit, Michigan
Instructors: Larry Santoyo, Keith D. Johnson & Guests
Tuition: $1,400 / Detroit Residents: $1,100 / Teachers: $700
More information & registration

Detroit’s difficult past, it’s vibrant entrepreneurial spirit, under-utilized workforce, abundant water, vacant land, and industrial past all combine to make Detroit the perfect candidate to be the first, large-scale, post-industrial, post-carbon urban area. Partial scholarships available to Detroit residents.

The Smoking Gun That Could Bring Down Monsanto

2011-02-18T20:56:00.004-05:00

Glyphosate (Roundup) or Roundup Ready Crops May Cause Animal Miscarriages

by: Jill Richardson (by way of La Vida Locavore)

Fri Feb 18, 2011 at 14:54:30 PM PST

A bombshell has been quietly dropped on the website of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance. I should disclose, upfront, that the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA) is founded and run by my close friend Judith McGeary. Said bombshell is an open letter written by Dr. Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University, to Tom Vilsack, presenting a finding of a correlation between either glyphosate or Roundup Ready crops and a new, previously unknown organism that may be the cause of animal miscarriages and infertility.As the letter, printed below, notes, this research is still preliminary. However, Huber, who has 40 years experience working as a scientist for "professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks," believes this should be treated as an emergency until more research can confirm or disprove these initial findings.

Needless to say, the recent deregulation of GE alfalfa is something to think about, because that will dramatically increase the use of Roundup on animal feed and the feeding of Roundup Ready crops to our livestock. There is more to be said on this, but I want to tread carefully and stick to facts that I can confirm, so stay tuned.

Dear Secretary Vilsack:A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn-suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup. This organism appears NEW to science!
This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen's source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.
We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does.
For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman's terms, it should be treated as an emergency.
A diverse set of researchers working on this problem have contributed various pieces of the puzzle, which together presents the following disturbing scenario:
Unique Physical Properties
This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000X), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare.
Pathogen Location and Concentration
It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas.
Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease
The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income-sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss' wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines).
Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure
Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting.
The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%.
For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate.
Recommendations
In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA's participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health.
It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data.
I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure.
Sincerely,
COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber
Emeritus Professor, Purdue University
APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS)

Mr Condom Saves Thailand

2011-02-17T01:44:00.000-05:00

At TEDxChange, Thailand's "Mr. Condom," Mechai Viravaidya, walks us through the country's bold plan to raise its standard of living, starting in the 1970s. First step: population control. And that means a lot of frank, funny -- and very effective -- talk about condoms.

Healthy People Bad for Business-As-Usual Say Legislators

2011-01-30T11:18:00.001-05:00

Choosing polluters over children’s health

January 30, 2011

Our guest blogger is Pete Altman, in an NRDC Switchboard repost.

Let’s get straight to the point. When members of Congress choose to support bills that would prevent the EPA from updating Clean Air Act standards, they are making a choice to support polluters over the health of children and adults in America. Some of these bills will increase the amount of mercury, smog-forming, soot, toxic and carbon dioxide pollution that industrial plants will emit compared to if the EPA is allowed to do its job. Some will simply make it a law that we must allow industrial polluters to dump unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.
That’s why NRDC and Health Care Without Harm are teaming up today to make sure that the constituents of the members of Congress that have co-sponsored one or more Bad Air Bill know that their representatives are putting their health at risk:

How serious is the threat to health? Here’s what Brenda Afzel MS, RN, Health Care Without Harm’s Climate Policy Coordinator and member of the Executive Board of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments has to say about it:

“Putting the EPA in a political stranglehold will sentence tens of thousands of people to debilitating, respiratory illnesses such as asthma, adding to the burden of chronic disease in the nation and increasing the financial burden to the health care system. Let’s be clear: If these lawmakers are successful in blocking the EPA from doing its job to cut life-threatening pollution, more asthma sufferers, particularly children, will wind up gasping for breath.”

There are over 7 million kids and over 17 million adults with asthma in the lower 48 states. Since those who suffer from asthma are so vulnerable to air pollution, we thought it would be helpful to show how many kids and adults with asthma live in the counties that are represented by members of Congress who want to block the EPA. Here’s a table of the Bad Air Bill cosponsorswith details on asthma rates in their districts.
Behind the push to stop EPA from updating the Clean Air Act are polluters from the oil, coal and utility industries that don’t think protecting public health is worth the money to invest in cleaning up. So, the table includes polluter campaign contributions to the Bad Air Bill co-sponsors here. Many of these polluting contributors have prioritized blocking the EPA.
Here are the basics on the Bad Air Bills being pushed by members of Congress:

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced a bill (H.R. 97) that would permanently block EPA from limiting carbon pollution.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W. Va., introduced a bill (H.R. 199) that would block EPA from taking any action under the Clean Air Act to limit carbon or methane pollution, for two years.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, introduced a bill (H.R. 153) that would prohibit EPA from developing or enforcing standards to limit carbon pollution.

Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, has a introduced a resolution (H.J. RES. 9) that would permanently block the EPA from reducing the soot, mercury, cancer-causing toxic and smog-forming pollution that cement plants dump into the air.

What’s the link between carbon pollution and asthma? In 2009, EPA scientists determined carbon pollution is a public health risk, including its role in worsening the smog pollution to which asthmatics are particularly vulnerable. Regarding the effects on air quality, agency experts said “The evidence concerning adverse air quality impacts provides strong and clear support for an endangerment finding. Increases in ambient ozone are expected to occur over broad areas of the country, and they are expected to increase serious adverse health effects in large population areas that are and may continue to be in nonattainment. The evaluation of the potential risks associated with increases in ozone in attainment areas also supports such a finding.”
NRDC has also explored the links. My colleague Kim Knowlton has written extensively about the ties between carbon, global warming and health.
In 2004, a multi-disciplinary team of experts showed that warming temperatures will cause more days with unsafe ozone levels. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Climatic Change, from which NRDC produced the report “Heat Advisory” that can be viewed here: http://www.nrdc.org/ globalWarming/ heatadvisory/ heatadvisory.pdf.
The 2007 update to the report can be found here: http://www.nrdc.org/ globalWarming/heatadvisory/ heatadvisory07.pdf.
– Pete Altman, in a Switchboard repost.

Fanning Sparks Into Flame

2011-01-24T23:31:00.000-05:00

51 Ways to Spark a Commons Revolution

What you can do, alone and with others, to share life.

by Jay Walljasper

posted Oct 21, 2010 at Yes Magazine

Personal Life

1. Challenge the myth that all problems have private, individual solutions.

2. Notice how many of life’s pleasures exist outside the marketplace—gardening, fishing, conversing, playing music, playing ball, making love, watching sunsets, and much more.

3. Take time to enjoy what the commons offers. As the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said, “We are bigger than our schedules.”

4. Introduce the children in your life to the commons. Let them see you enjoying it, and working with others to sustain it.

5. Keep in mind that security and satisfaction are more easily acquired from friends than from money.

6. Become a mentor—officially or informally—to people of all ages. Be prepared to learn as much as you teach.

7. Think about living cooperatively with housemates.

8. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

9. Have some fun. The best reason to restore the commons is to enrich our lives.

Community Life

10. Put on a potluck. Throw a block party. Form a community choir, slow-food club, Friday night poker game, May Day festival, or any other excuse for socializing.

11. Walk, bike, or take transit when you can. It’s good for the environment, and for you. You meet very few people while driving your car.

12. Treat commons spaces as if you own them (which, actually, you do). Keep an eye on the place. Tidy things up. Report problems or repair things yourself. Initiate improvement campaigns.

13. Offer a smile or greeting to people you pass. The commons begins with connecting—even in brief, spontaneous ways.

14. Get out of the house and spend some time on the stoop, the front yard, the street—anywhere you can join the river of life.

15. Create or designate a “town square” for your neighborhood—a park, playground, vacant lot, community center, coffee shop, or even a street corner—anywhere folks naturally want to gather.

16. Lobby for more public benches, water fountains, plazas, parks, sidewalks, bike trails, playgrounds, and other crucial commons infrastructure.

17. Conduct an inventory of local commons. Publicize your findings and suggest ways to celebrate and improve these community assets.

18. Organize your neighbors to stop crime and to defuse fear of crime, which can dampen community spirits more than crime itself.

19. Remember streets belong to people, not just automobiles. Drive cautiously and push for traffic calming and other improvements that remind motorists they are not kings of the road.

Money and the Economy
20. Buy from local, independent businesses when possible. (amiba.net, livingeconomies.org).

21. Before buying something online, see if you can find it or order it locally. That keeps some of your money in the community.

22. Investigate how many things you now pay for you could get in more cooperative ways—check out DVDs at the library, quit the health club and form a morning jogging club, etc.

23. Start a neighborhood exchange to share everything from lawn mowers to child care and home repairs to vehicles.

24. Barter. Trade your skill in baking pies with someone who will fix your computer.

25. Look into creating a Time Dollars system (timebanks.org) or locally-based currency. (smallisbeautiful.org).

26. Organize a common security club. You are not on your own when it comes to economic woes. (commonsecurityclubs.org)

27. Watch where your money goes. How do the businesses you patronize harm or help the commons?

28. Purchase fair trade, organic, and locally made goods from small producers as much as you can.

Social Change
29. Oppose cutbacks in public assets like transit, schools, libraries, parks, social services, police and fire, and arts programs.

30. Support activists around the globe working for debt relief, environmental protection, human rights, worker rights, sustainable development, rights of indigenous people, and action on climate change.

31. Take every opportunity to talk with elected officials and local activists about the importance of protecting the commons. Do the same with citizens groups, nonprofit organizations, labor unions, professional societies, and business leaders.

32. Protest private profit from products created with research paid for by taxpayers. Demand that publicly-funded research data be available to everyone on the Internet.

33. Write letters to the editor about the commons, post on local websites, call in to talk radio, tell your friends.

34. Learn from everywhere. What can Germany teach us about health care? India about wellness? Africa about community solidarity? Indigenous nations about the commons itself? What bright ideas can we borrow from a nearby neighborhood or town?

Environment

35. Pick up litter that is not yours.

36. Avoid bottled water. Tap water is generally safer. If you have concerns about your water supply, get a filter, then pressure local officials to clean it up.

37. Become a guerrilla gardener, planting flowers and vegetables on neglected land in your neighborhood.

38. Organize a community garden (communitygarden.org) or local farmers market.

39. Roll up your sleeves to restore a creek, wetland, woods, or grassland, or beautify a vacant lot.

40. Remember that everything that goes down your drain, on your lawn, in your garbage, or into your storm sewer eventually winds up in our water or air.

41. Seek new ways to use less energy and create less waste at home and work.

42. Form a study group to explore what can be done to promote sustainability in your community.

43. Purchase goods—beer to clothing to hardware—made as close to home as possible. Shipping goods long distances stresses the environment.

Information and; Culture

44. Patronize and support your public library.

45. Demand that schoolchildren not become a captive audience for marketing campaigns.

46. Contribute your knowledge to online commons such as Wikipedia, open education projects, and open-access journals. Form your own online community to explore commons issues.

47. Use Creative Commons licenses for your own writing, music, videos, and other creative pursuits.

48. Conceive a public art project for your community.

Commons Consciousness

49. Think of yourself as a commoner and share your enthusiasm. Raise the subject in conversation, art, professional circles, and organizations with which you are involved.

50. Launch a commons discussion group or book club with your neighbors and colleagues, or at your church, synagogue, or temple. (onthecommons.org)

51. Spread some hope around. Explain how commons-based solutions can remedy today’s pressing problems.

Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk

2011-01-17T23:27:00.000-05:00

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

Time for the Unemployed to Start Growing Food.

2011-01-16T21:33:00.000-05:00

Read the whole story at OpEd News...

#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.

#2 Dell Inc., one of America's largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billionover the next decade.

#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.

#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.

#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.

#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.

#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.

#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.

#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul, Minnesota. Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford's new "global" manufacturing strategy.

#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.
#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.
#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.
#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.

#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times largerthan the U.S. economy by the year 2040.
#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.

We Like to Bike...Even More Now.

2011-01-16T21:25:00.000-05:00

Thank you TreeHugger (which should be read regularly) for this news. Let's do this everywhere. We'll have to sooner or later...why not sooner?:

London's Bike Superhighways Bring 70% Increase in Cycling

by Brian Merchant, Brooklyn, New York on 01.14.11

CARS & TRANSPORTATION

Image: Rudi
In other words, London's bike superhighways are incredibly successful, as the front-page GOOD story remarks. According to the findings in study by Transport for London, there were 70% more cyclists out on the streets of London in October of 2010 than there were the previous year.

GOOD has more:

that means that the number of bikers on the streets pre-superhighways was 70 percent lower than it is now that the superhighways have been installed. That's some effective bike promotion, if I've ever seen it ... Will other cities see this information and start doing more for bike lane planning than simply laying them on the side of the street?

That's right -- bike use everywhere jumped, not just on the superhighways. The safe, elegant lanes evidently inspired more folks to dust off their old ten-speeds and hit the roads.
It should also be pointed out that the spike in cycling also coincides with London's bike-share program, which we've written about at length here on TreeHugger.
This development is fantastic -- people want to ride bikes in cities. It's cheap, efficient, and fun. But most of the time, it's terrifying. It's why I don't ride a bike in New York -- no way I'm heading into Manhattan traffic during rush hour. New York is also making strides in its bike lanes, too, however. If they work as well as London's, that's all it will take -- count me in.

How to Boil a Frog - Meet the Filmmaker

2011-01-16T00:25:00.001-05:00

Filmmaker Jon Cooksey is one funny guy, even while presenting the most serious problems facing humanity. In this fast-paced conversation, he gallops all over the map with five big problems, five big solutions, and a playful and heartfelt approach. Wacky, sobering, full of animations, with Jon in dozens of personnas, "How to Boil a Frog" is a film to view and discuss with friends.

Re-design your life, re-envision the world!

2011-01-14T19:52:00.000-05:00

You can join the 100s of thousands who have taken the Permaculture Design Course at any of 100's of locations all over the planet (visit http://permacultureactivist.net/ to learn more).
Here's a short introductory video about the Design Course made by friends / colleagues, Penny Livingston-Stark and James Stark, at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas, CA

The American Dre.....er, Nightmare. Time to Wake Up, eh?

2011-01-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

The AMERICAN DREAM is a 30 minute animated film that shows you how you've been scammed by the most basic elements of our government system. All of us Americans strive for the American Dream, and this film shows you why your dream is getting farther and farther away. Do you know how your money is created? Or how banking works? Why did housing prices skyrocket and then plunge? Do you really know what the Federal Reserve System is and how it affects you every single day? THE AMERICAN DREAM takes an entertaining but hard hitting look at how the problems we have today are nothing new, and why leaders throughout our history have warned us and fought against the current type of financial system we have in America today. You will be challenged to investigate some very entrenched and powerful institutions in this nation, and hopefully encouraged to help get our nation back on track.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE MAKERS OF THIS FILM AND BUY A QUALITY DVD!
http://www.theamericandreamfilm.com/

Permaculture Credit Union accepting applications for CEO

2011-01-11T18:46:00.000-05:00

Permaculture Credit Union

Job Description - President/CEO
Reports To: Board of Directors

About the Permaculture Credit Union
The mission of the Permaculture Credit Union Mission is to pool the financial resources of people who believe in the ethics of Permaculture: care of the Earth, care of people, and reinvestment of surplus. The credit union is a 10 year old, innovative and growing financial institution dedicated to providing affordable financial services that advance sustainability.

Position Description
The CEO is responsible for the planning and oversight of all credit union activities in accordance with credit union regulations, polices and directives as established by the board of directors. Ensures financial stability and member satisfaction commensurate with the best interest of the members, the employees, and the credit union. Develops and maintains organizational structure and effective personnel. Represents the Credit Union to regulatory agencies, trade associations, community and civic organizations, members, and other financial institutions. Provides strategic direction, vision, leadership, and management in all functional areas.

Job is located in Santa Fe, NM

For complete position information refer online at http://pcuonline.org/. Position closes January 31, 2011. Please forward your resume and letter of interest to applications@pcuonline.org no later than January 31, 2011.

Gasland: the video

2011-01-08T20:49:00.000-05:00

http://www.wisevid.com/play?v=8A_xguxqd_99

"The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of "fracking" or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a "Saudia Arabia of natural gas" just beneath us. But is fracking safe? When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown." GASLAND will be broadcast on HBO through 2012. To host a public screening in your community please click here. The DVD went on sale December 2010.

A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice

2011-01-06T15:12:00.000-05:00

The last year or so has seen more scientific papers and presentations that raise the genuine prospect of catastrophe (if we stay on our current emissions path) that I can recall seeing in any other year.
Perhaps the media would have ignored that science anyway, but Climategate appears to be a key reason “less than 10 percent of the news articles written about last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen dealt primarily with the science of climate change, a study showed on Monday.”
But for those interested in the real climate science story of the past year, let’s review a couple dozen studies of the most important findings. Any one of these would be cause for action — and combined they vindicate the final sentence of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”
1. Nature: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”: “Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic.”
If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science. Seth Borenstein of the AP explains, “plant plankton found in the world’s oceans are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world’s oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide.” Boris Worm, a marine biologist and co-author of the study said, “We found that temperature had the best power to explain the changes.” He noted, “If this holds up, something really serious is underway and has been underway for decades. I’ve been trying to think of a biological change that’s bigger than this and I can’t think of one.”
2. Science: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting: NSF issues world a wake-up call: “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”
Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. This research finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrostcarbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearlyperforated, and sedimentary CH₄ [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”
The permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!
The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.
The NSF is normally a very staid organization. If they are worried, everybody should be.
It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.
3. Must-read NCAR analysis warns we risk multiple, devastating global droughts even on moderate emissions path.
Dust-Bowlification may be the impact of human-caused climate change that hits the most people by mid-century, as the figure below suggests (“a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought”):

The PDSI in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here). The National Center for Atmospheric Research notes “By the end of the century, many populated areas, including parts of the United States, could face readings in the range of -8 to -10, and much of the Mediterranean could fall to -15 to -20. Such readings would be almost unprecedented.”

Read the rest at Climate Progress and share it broadly...

"Have you heard about Peak Oil?" (video)

2010-12-31T15:49:00.001-05:00

Well-stated overview of peak oil (using adult language) with knee-jerk conservative talking points undermined logically (imagine that!).

More details:

Open-Source Global Village / Resilient Community Construction Set (in 2 minutes)

2010-12-29T17:00:00.000-05:00

This is excellent! As soon as I saw it I started Facebooking, Tweeting, Redditing, StumbleUponing, and list-serving. Like, like, like. These folks should be winning awards all over the place.
Well-done!

Welcome to the world of Open Source Ecology (OSE) and the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), also known as the Resilient Community Construction Set. See openfarmtech.org/weblog/2010/10/global-village-construction-set-gvcs-in-2-minutes/ for the corresponding update. We used this in our Buckminster Fuller Challenge application. Pass this on to your friends, and encourage them to subscribe to the True Fans - openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=True_Fans .

Vote for them at http://makezine.com/tagyourgreen/?id=95

Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

Waste = Food

2010-12-27T00:02:00.000-05:00

An inspiring documentary on the Cradle to Cradle design concept of the chemist Michael Braungart and the architect William McDonough. Winner of the Silver Dragon at the Beijing International Science Film Festival 2006. OUTLINE: Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in nations like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill.
But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), production and consumption could become beneficial for the planet. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution.
• Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource.
• Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment.
Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braungart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption.

Would Make a Much Better President than Obama

2010-12-26T20:40:00.000-05:00

Ralph Nader's keynote address on Energy & Policy at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil 2010 conference.

Keynote on Energy and Policy: Ralph Nader from ASPO-USA on Vimeo.