There's low tech...& then there's (almost) NO tech.

My friend & fellow permaculture teacher / designer Larry Santoyo writes, 

"One person's trash is another's path to illumination...
Check out these skylights made from plastic water bottles".

L. Santoyo, Director
EarthFlow Design Works
www.earthflow.com

Now, how would YOU apply this concept in a cold climate?

Toby Hemenway - articles

Enjoy these articles by Toby Hemenway, sometime editor of the Permaculture Activist and author of Gaia's Garden...
Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?

Seeing the Garden in the Jungle: Beyond Wilderness

Another Kind of Genocide: Review - Invasion Biology: Critique of a Pseudoscience

Ecological Patterns, Land Use, and Right Livelihood

Learning from the Ecological Engineers: Watershed Wisdom of the Beaver

The Third Ethic of Permaculture: Finding a Sense of Surplus

Urban vs. Rural Sustainability

Cities,Peak Oil and Sustainability

Apocalypse, Not - A Critical Look at Peak Oil Catastrophism

A Zone of One’s Own

Peter Bane - articles

These articles by publisher / editor Peter Bane appeared in the Permaculture Activist magazine over recent years....
Another Kind of Energy or ComPost-Modernism

Designing for Change

Lessons In Village Design

Keystones and Cops: An Eco-Mystery Thriller

Rocky Mountain Magic: High, Dry and Flourishing

Time to Garden the Planet

New! Coppice-with-Standards: New Forestry with Ancient Roots

Permaculture Videos (and Audio)

A while back I spent a bit of time compiling pages of videos related to Permaculture for the Permaculture Activist pages. You can watch them starting here...and then watch some more.... Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7

...Audio, too.

I especially enjoyed Paul Stamets' talk about mycoremediation:

Sealife: Dazed and Confused

Prozac Ocean:
Fish Absorb Our Drugs, and Suffer For It

(from Discover Magazine's Blog)

The fish are acting funny because they’re on Prozac.

In the U.S., more than 200 million prescriptions for antidepressants are given out every year. A lot of the contents of those pills eventually end up in our water supply, either from patients’ excretions or from pills flushed down the toilet. Since water treatment plants aren’t designed to remove pharmaceuticals, we’re effectively medicating our streams and rivers.

Chemists have found that water downstream of water treatment plants holds a veritable medicine cabinet worth of antidepressants, including venlafaxine, bupropion (Wellbutrin), citalopram (Celexa), fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft).

The concentrations of antidepressants in the water—billionths of a gram per liter—aren’t enough to affect larger species, but they are enough to make small fish and fish babies feel woozy. Researcher Meghan McGee tested the effect of antidepressants on young minnows by exposing unhatched and newly-hatched minnows to levels of antidepressants commonly found downstream of water treatment plants. The drugged minnows appeared lethargic and took twice as long to react to stimulus, making them much more vulnerable to predators.

McGee then upped the dosage of antidepressants to see how they would affect fish that feed on minnows, such as hybrid striped bass. When the concentration was increased to several millionths of a gram per liter, the bass spiraled into a drug-induced haze and exhibited some really weird behavior. Some hung around vertically in their tanks, others skimmed the surface with half of their backs exposed in the air (even though they are normally a bottom-dwelling species). They lost their usually voracious appetites and ignored the minnows that swam around them. The males took on feminine characteristics, loosing their masculine facial bumps and growing yolk protein.

In humans, many antidepressants (allegedly) work by altering levels of serotonin in the brain, but some also function like the sex hormone estrogen. It’s not clear how the drugs are working in the fish, but it’s clear all that Prozac isn’t doing them much good. Meanwhile, some communities have begun drug disposal campaigns that collect unused drugs to be incinerated instead of flushed into the water supply.

DIY Energy Independence

Are you handy with tools and enjoy building things? Help yourself to energy independence with 100's of do-it-yourself projects at Build it Solar:

Experimental Solar DIY Projects

Solar and renewable energy ideas and projects that look promising (or at least interesting).

One of the appealing aspects of the solar thermal area is that "garage inventors" can make meaningful advances. Some of the factors that make it possible to keep coming up with new ideas and innovations in this centuries old field are:

• Innovative ways of combining collection, storage, insulation, and distribution of solar energy

• New ways to integrate solar features with architectural features

• Opportunities provided by new materials

• Opportunities provided by increasing prices in conventional energy sources

• Opportunities provided by the pollution consequences of conventional fuels

Garden Helpers: Will Work for Food

Plants That Attract Beneficial Insects
Nature is filled with "good bugs", crawling and flying creatures whose diet consists mainly of the pests that ravage garden plants. Here is a list of those good bugs and the plants that they like to visit for food and shelter. Intersperse these plants among the "problem pest areas" in your yard. Remember, though: Many chemical sprays work on both bad and good bugs. To keep the good bugs in your yard, eliminate insecticide use in the areas where they live and work.

Check out the lists here.

Radio Ecoshock Interviews Dmitri Orlov

http://www.ecoshock.org/downloads/economy/ES_Orlov_2.mp3
which considers...Bailout 2.0 Beta, how to find food, what to do with repatriated troops, where you can stick your money (should you still have any) to avoid being overcome by its putrid smell, and how having one's predictions come true is not necessarily a happy outcome.

Adapt or Die.....REALLY!

Found at Carolyn Baker's Speaking Truth to Power... BEYOND CIVILIZATION: THE BIRTH OF A NEW HUMAN CULTURE, By William Kotke

Wednesday, 26 November 2008

Some think tanks are now calculating that sometime between 2030 and 2050 we will need two planet earths to provide the resources for sustaining the present trends of production and consumption. Though this seems rather sudden, there are people alive today that have seen world population double in their lifetime. We are not going to find another earth to exploit in time to prevent the inevitable explosion. We can see that the growing consumption of finite resources ends with the shattering of civilization and mass die-off (possibly excluding the remaining forager/hunter tribal groups). Some feel the culprit is economics, some say it is politics, but the big picture is a mal-adaptation to the earth. Civilization's problem is biological. We live in a culture that extorts energy from the biological energy flows of the earth without a positive feed-back loop to replenish the source. The food of the earth, sunlight, is consumed by the plant world to build biomass. Leaves, limbs, and other organic debris fall on the earth and are consumed by the millions of entities, both macroscopic and microscopic that make up the soil community. It is the excrement of these beings, that is in solution in the soil, that the plant roots take up for their nutrition. This then funds the drive toward more species diversity. Most plants require moderate to rich topsoil which accumulates at the rate of one inch per 300 to 1,000 years, in optimum ecologies. When the biologically maladapted human cultures of Babylonia and Han China began to "clear the land" six thousand years ago, for agriculture, the biological energy circulation ceased, because there was no longer an ecology on top to feed it. In the Great Plains of the U.S., half the topsoil is already gone, and now the industrial farmer dumps herbicides and pesticides on the land which further kills the soil community. The farmer then replaces the soil fertility with artificial fertilizer generated from fossil fuel which is rapidly running out. This is a small example of how the biological energy flows of the earth are being dismantled through agriculture, deforestation, desertification, pollution and building suburban houses on fertile topsoil. Though humans have been very successful inhabitants of the earth for several million years, six thousand years of the culture that is called civilization has brought us to a catastrophe in which the human species might well become extinct, taking a large part of the life of the earth with it, ultimately by nuclear radiation. We live in a culture that exists and grows by extorting biological energy out of the living planet, without giving anything back. This scenario presents us with choices. We can attempt to "reform" our existing culture or we can take the leap and create a new way of life, we will not have the option of doing nothing. Adaptation to the biological energy flows of the earth is the live or die question for the human species. This is fundamentally the human predicament. A CULTURE OF ADAPTATION Our remote ancestors succeeded for eons of time in their biological adaptation to the life of the earth, and now if the species is to survive, we must create adaptation at the next turn of the spiral. We can't go back to wearing loincloths and eating roots and berries. The game animals are gone and the roots and berries are covered by towns. We will have to create a culture that facilitates the growth of life rather than its extirpation. Human cultures are normally formed over long periods of time by the conditioning of the young through the generations. We do not have that luxury of time. Presently, we have tremendous amounts of information from many cultures which we can synthesize and use for ideas in creating new social institutions. We see over the past centuries a wide diversity of colonies and intentionally created communities that demonstrate creating new human culture is possible. At the beginning of the 21st. Century the choice to live in a self- sufficient community, self- sufficient watershed, and self- sufficient bioregion, is both a survival solution and a choice to create a new reality of cultural and ecological restoration. Given that civilization has seriously overshot its resource base and has no future, we need a new idea. Every member of the species taking biological responsibility for their existence on this planet is a new idea. If humans were becoming more responsible, we collectively could sponsor experimental self-sufficient communities in many of the earth's bioregions. These communities would be experimental in the sense that the central question of "living in balance with nature," would be addressed. We civilized are not skilled at this and experiments by different cultures in different ecological regions would move us forward. These would be legitimate "growth" communities concentrating on the growth of living things rather than the growth of money and power over other people. If groups begin at the top of watersheds, commencing ecological restoration and slowly spread downward the test would be that clean water and air come from those areas. Given the principle of the growth of life, ecological restoration would be the focus. Permaculture, which would grow more food per acre than the industrial system, while restoring the soil, would be used in areas near the habitation. The habitations would be hand-made from local materials. Though this seems a tall order there are seed communities around the planet now doing this successfully (www.gaia.org). At the end of its time the old oak tree begins to disintegrate; as it does, an acorn sprouts. Our task is to encourage the sprout and to allow the old oak its passing. Wm. H. Kötke is widely traveled and published. His most recent book, prior to Planet Garden, was the underground classic, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. He may be contacted at wmkotke@gmail.com