PermaKent Permaculture Ideas of J. Kent Hastings

Media star Daryl Hannah is known to geeks mostly as the replicant from Blade Runner and to green activists for her protesting the bulldozing of the South Central Farm by living in a tree on the site until she was removed by the authorities so another warehouse could be built.
I find the natural pest repellent […]

A Homesteading Today thread begins with a post by the self-described “Revolutionary” Ernie, who says:
Gardening is hard work. It’s backbreaking, sweaty, blistering, and monotonous. While I love the alchemy of turning soil, sunshine, and water into calories for my family, I would much rather sit in the shade underneath the old maples and fritter away […]

Here’s a direct link to The Seasteading Institute.
I neglected to include in my previous blog post.
(It was in a draft, but the wrong version got published.)
There’s an Introduction To Seasteading section and a “Captain’s Blog”.

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Paypal founder Peter Thiel is funding The Seasteading Institute to investigate the legal and technical advantages of living offshore in off-grid artificial habitats.
It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn’t playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the […]

Digg links to an article at Remedicated.com about “20 Common Cooking Ingredients That Act As Medicines”.
Find out what turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, garlic, rosemary, honey, chili peppers, olive oil, rice, parsley, onions (and related plants such as chives, shallots, and leeks), lemon, mustard, cloves, apples, kale, licorice, peppermint, horseradish, and avocado can do for you besides […]

Off-Grid tells the story of Steve James and his battle to keep a planning commission from seizing his off-grid home. The Register’s description of the software designer who built his own design for a straw and timber off-grid house is a “cheap and cheerful Scottish ecogaff.”
According to The Register:
A 52-year-old software engineer has built a […]

The Futurist May/June 2008 issue (if you’re reading this after then, check their archives) includes the cover feature article “Draining Our Future: The Growing Shortage of Freshwater” by Lester R. Brown. A free guest article at TreeHugger by Brown covers water shortages worldwide. It seems like the OPEC countries in the Middle East will […]

Richard Reynolds, who appeared in a recent Current TV Guerrilla Gardening video, has a book on the subject available May 27 with a pre-order discount.
 
 
  
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Grow Your Own Pharmacy by Linda Gray, published last year by Findhorn Press, describes in detail the nutrients such as vitamins, minerals and other herbal compounds in various plants. The first chapters cover “Ingredients For A Healthy Body” and “Introduction to Gardening.”
The book gives some history, the conditions and methods of sowing each plant and […]

It’s not quite “Mr. Fusion” as seen at the end of Back To The Future, but EFuel100 does let you pour beer into a distiller that also serves as an ethanol fuel pump.
The cost for processing discarded liquor can run as low as $0.10 per gallon of ethanol produced. A typical bar or restaurant discards […]

Kurzweil AI describes near term WiMax deployment that should have an impact on off-grid phone and internet users. It may bring about free ad-supported phone and internet service such as a theoretical Google “Gphone.” The linked PhysOrg article reports:
WiMAX quickly moves large amounts of digital data such as video or picture files across kilometers, as […]

Site for worldwide guerrilla gardening featured on video from Current TV about an action taken in the UK to enhance neglected public landscape.

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Kurzweil AI describes a surge in the supply of silicon, reported by Technology Review that by itself could make existing solar panel designs cost competitive to electricity rates from our not so beloved grid.
“In areas that get a lot of sun, that will translate to solar electricity costs of about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, […]

A few months ago, John Laumer wrote about Survivalist Green for TreeHugger.
The most prominent face of Survivalist Green is that of the city dweller; the second is of the suburban or exurban dweller. (Covers everything from apartments along the rail line to Mega-Mansions in the exurb zone.)
The third face of SG extends to the house […]