Happy Kwanzaa - Faith/Imani

Trusting and believing with our heart and mind in ourselves, our parents, our teachers, and our leaders and our capacity as a people to make a better world.

As Marianne Williamson says "Creating the world we want is a much more subtle but more powerful mode of operation than destroying the one we don’t."

We have to trust that every day we can create the world we want to live in and leave to our children.

Happy Kwanzaa - Creativity/Kuumba

"Working diligently to continuously enhance our families, neighborhoods and people." from http://kwanzaaguide.com/


There is so much work to do to undo the damage that our consumerist growth based economy has wrought. We must work to cleanse the toxicity left behind by our addiction to fossil fuels, junk food, and the acquisition of unnecessary plastic objects. We must harness the creative genius within us as individuals and a community to create the world we want to live in.



The previous two days have been busy around The Sustainable Living Project and I failed to post the Kwanzaa principles. Here they are;

Cooperative Economics/Ujamaa: "Sharing and pooling our financial resources and goods and services for the common benefit of family and community participants with the goal of building and sustaining cooperative economic enterprises."http://kwanzaaguide.com/

Observing the ways of nature we see that it is cooperative more than competitive. Competition in human endeavour is corrupting while cooperation is character and community building.



Purpose/ NIA - "Fulfilling our duty and obligation to contribute to  the high and morally serious purpose of nation-building, i.e. the quest to recover and restore our people to their traditional greatness" see more at http://kwanzaaguide.com


Nia is crucial for living a meaningful life. In these times, when we face The Long Emergency we must work to create The Long Emergence. It is up to us to create the world we want to live in, with resilience, connectedness, unity, self determination, interdependence upon our neighbors, clean air, clean water, clean food, and clean energy. If we choose to be puppets and ignore the principle of Nia we will end up with the catastrophe that is even now being engineered by the globalized growth at all costs economy.

Happy Kwanzaa Day 3 Ujima- Collective Work and Responsibility

"Collective work and responsibility is a powerful force in the construction of family and community, and in healthy development of children. This principle instructs that we are all responsible for the welfare and success of each other. All adults, for example, are responsible for the welfare of the community and for the nurturing and development of children. Similarly, all adults are responsible and accountable for the success and failure of neighborhood schools and the safety of the community. Neighborhood safety is most definitively grounded in a network of caring adults who monitor the behavior and skills acquisition, i.e., education of children in the neighborhood. Hence, as indicated above, collective work and responsibility is a powerful and transformative value, which if observed by critical mass of neighborhood residents, would have the effect of raising our neighborhoods to a level capable of producing persons of moral, academic, and professional excellence." see more at
http://kwanzaaguide.com/2011/12/kwanzaa-2011-ujimacollective-work-responsibility-day-december-28th/

Ujima gets to the heart of community, exhorting us to look after one another and work together to insure our future, to take responsibility for our actions, resilience.

Happy Kwanzaa Day 2 Kujichagulia

Kujichagulia

"Kujichagulia principle says African Americans, like all people, need shared cultural values, symbols, rituals, and practices in order to give their families and children meaning and value, and identity and community.

The practice of kujichagulia/Self-determination affirms the right and responsibility of African Americans to think, to speak, and to act from their own cultural framework. By doing this, blacks make a contribution to the whole of humanity and thus are confirmed in their human worth. Blacks would do well to remember Mary M. Bethune instruction: “We as blacks must recognized that we are the custodians as well as heirs of a great civilization. We have given something to the world as a race and for this we are proud and fully conscious of our place in the total picture of mankind’s development.” for more see
http://kwanzaaguide.com/2011/12/kwanzaa-2011-kujichaguliaself-determination-day-december-27th/

For me this is about our need as an local culture to assert our self determination, to reclaim our independence from the globalized, corporate controlled economy of destruction. Yesterday I expressed my Umoja, Unity, by attending a local Kwanzaa celebration. Today I will express my Kujichagulia by practicing my drumming, studying resilience, stoking the fire with waste wood to stay free of fossil fuels where I can, eating home cooked food, and doing some Transition planning.

Happy Kwanzaa

Day one
"Unity/Umoja To strive daily to engage in practices which build bonds of affection and attachment to our family members, our school teachers, and our neighbors
Perspective on Unity
Promoting the unity of the human family is the task of the whole family. Unity is action on behalf of the family, calling us to help overcome the divisions among family members, and to strengthen the ties that define and bind us as family members. Unity is the spiritual and social gravity which pulls the family together- husband and wife, parent and children, and family and neighbor. At its core, the principle unity is about attachment- attachment to each others and most importantly to the values which define us as family, as community and as a people. On Unity Day, the family celebrates its togetherness (ingathering), the achievements of family members (the harvest concept of Kwanzaa)."
from http://kwanzaaguide.com/2010/12/december-26-day-one-of-kwanzaa-umoja-day/

The Man Born to Farming by Wendell Berry

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the
gardener, the man born to farming,

whose hands reach into
the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a
divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back
rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and
rise again in the corn. His thought passes along
the row ends like a mole.

What miraculous seed has
he swallowed

that the unending
sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in
the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark? - Wendell Berry

A Wendell Berry quote

"We have been winning, to our inestimable loss, a competition against our own land and our own people. At present, what we have to show for this 'victory' is a surplus of food. But this is a surplus achieved by the ruin of its sources." from Nature As Measure 1989

Personal Sustainability quote of the day

The key is changing our habits and, in particular, the habits of our mind. - Pema Chodron

Transition excitement

We are set to attend the Transition training on the 4th-6th of November in Sautee GA. They've got us a free place to stay that will let us bring Annie the dog and are being extremely helpful. We've also got another awareness raising presentation on the 13th of November and are busy publicising that. Additionally some folks in our neighborhood seem excited about it. WooHoo! At last we are underway with Transtion Hickory or Transition Catawba or whatever it ends up being.

For more info in Transition check out Transition US and or the Transition Network

A personal relationship with Jevons

I listened to a wonderful interview with efficiency guru Amory Lovins on Science Friday recently and was so impressed with Mr. Lovins techno-optimism. With the effects of Peak Oil becoming more obvious on a daily basis we clearly need to pursue energy efficiency at all costs. However we need to do all we can to avoid the pitfalls of the Jevons paradox, whereby the increased energy, money, time etc available to us are not reinvested into pointless consumerism and wasteful energy, money, time etc expenditures, thereby cancelling out the gains from efficiency. Here is the Wikipedia definition of the Jevons paradox:

"In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.^[1] In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.^[2]
The issue has more recently been reexamined by modern economists studying consumption rebound effects from improved energy efficiency. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given use, improved efficiency lowers the relative cost of using a resource, which increases the quantity demanded of the resource, potentially counteracting any savings from increased efficiency. Additionally, increased efficiency accelerates economic growth, further increasing the demand for resources. The Jevons paradox occurs when the effect from increased demand predominates, causing an increase in overall resource use.
The Jevons paradox has been used to argue that energy conservation is futile, as increased efficiency may actually increase fuel use. Nevertheless, increased efficiency can improve material living standards. Further, fuel use declines if increased efficiency is coupled with a green tax that keeps the cost of use the same (or higher).^[3] As the Jevons paradox applies only to technological improvements that increase fuel efficiency, policies that impose conservation standards and increase costs do not display the Jevons paradox."

So as we pursue more sustainable lifestyle choices it is important to reinvest in sustainability rather than consumerism. Examples might be; purchasing rainwater harvesting equipment instead of a new flat screen TV,  going solar instead of going nuclear or fossil (a choice you can make at home), repairing that old car rather than buying a new one (even if it is a more efficient one), choosing to work less for money and thus have more time to grow food or hang out with family (and also pay less taxes),  designing car free days into your schedule to reduce energy use while also encouraging fewer shopping trips, etc, etc.
In short, we need to develop a personal relationship with Jevons.

Check out the second half of the Radio Ecoshock Episode I've posted in the audio above for more on these ideas. Or you can click here for that audio file: http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock11/ES_110629_Show.mp3

The deck takes shape

basic framing, with portal for tank access, step stringers, and some trex installed

cross bracing and notched post attachments

attaching Trex step treads to stringers, note temporary post and insulation 

notching the real post

Getting Annie used to the new surface, the hatch over a tank is just perceivable

The deck over the rainwater tanks is coming along nicely. Due to a problem with supply of quality black locust and the extra expense involved we opted to build the main frame out of treated pine and cover it with Trex, a  95% recycled plastic and wood chip product. The arbor and shade structure will be, hopefully, out of black locust. This deck will not only shade the rainwater tanks but the attached shade structure will shade the southeast facing wall and windows while providing a climbing surface for kiwi's and grapes. It also gives us back our east steps and entrance as well as access to the eastside rainwater diverter and first flush device for clean out.

Transition, cool weather and car free days

It's gotten quite cool here in Hickory, down into the 40s at night and only in the 70s during the day. We even used the wood stove this week, both for heating and cooking. We had a couple of car free days out of the last seven and it's looking like tomorrow will be car free as well. I'm mostly working on the deck, notching and putting in the posts, and I have to get the new porch timbers sealed in preparation for installing the new windows. Jacq has been very busy processing loads of basil into frozen pesto, clearing tomato beds, laying new soil and mulch before planting fall crops, and completing the glazing order. We have to get the windows in before winter. I spent some time today shoving recycled styrofoam all around the back of the rainwater tanks in preparation for freezing temperatures. As they get full sun in the morning, I hope that insulating the backs and tops will keep them from freezing this winter. We have been using a lot of rainwater for washing clothes as well as the garden. I also used it to mix concrete footers for the deck posts.
The really big news this week is that we had our inaugural Transition Hickory awareness raising presentation. The turn out was about 23 folks with limited publicity. Currently there are three more possibilities for talks as well. We hope that soon we will have folks stepping forward to be on the Steering committee. If you'd like to know more about Transition check out Transition US or watch the video above.