Controversial left libertarian author Kevin Carson takes on the cheerleaders for the “Green Revolution” in a magazine length article at C4SS, “The Green Revolution Saved Lives? A Killer Meme That Just Won’t Die.”
“Recently, in honor of Norman Borlaug’s 95th birthday, Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine posted a quote from his 2000 interview with Borlaug. For […]
Another food contamination scare is in the news–this time it’s pistachio nuts. Wikipedia describes the heart health benefits of pistachios.
“One or two handfuls of the nuts can make a big enough difference to lower the risk of heart disease, say scientists. Volunteers who ate three ounces of pistachios a day for one month lowered their […]
You might expect Mound-Day items to appear on Monday, but who says I’m tied to your planet’s orbital idiosyncrasies, Earthling?
An excerpt from a Chicago Tribune story last week about Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden:
“Friday’s activities are the culmination of a campaign to turn the 16 acres of White House grounds into an ‘edible landscape’. ”
This kind […]
The Albany Democrat-Herald in Oregon published a story about Grease Lightning Delivery, a business that uses biodiesel and recycled vegetable oil as fuel.
“John Knox thinks his 1982 Mazda Truck with a modified engine that runs on biofuel can provide businesses with an economical and environmentally sound means of delivery.”
Small scale recycling of waste vegetable oil […]
“They Sow the Wind, and Reap the Whirlwind”
– Hosea 8:1-14
There are some of you who held down steady jobs or ran businesses, paid your mortgage, invested in America and raised a family. Now you’re unemployed, your retirement investments went bust and your kids will live at home forever because their college money vanished too. Fools! […]
BBC News website’s Environment correspondent, Richard Black, reported an example of a bleak world situation, where “For nearly one billion people, clean drinking water is still a mirage,” in an article titled “Where clean water is a pipedream”.
If you want a graphic demonstration of the health impacts of poor drinking water, look no further than […]
Daily Mail pic detail
A “permaculture” Google Alert brought me a link to this Design Thinking blog post with a transcript of a brief excerpt from a recent BBC2 show, Natural World: A Farm for the Future.
There’s also a link to the programme (UK only, maybe someday they’ll make the program available to the world).
I was […]
A Cory Doctorow Boing Boing post today describes a recent SALT talk by Dmitri Orlov comparing the impact on Russians of the fall of the Soviet Union with what the USA is about to endure. The talk’s title is “Social Collapse Best Practices.”
No doubt the podcast will appear at The Long Now Foundation site any […]
Mother Earth News reports that a DIY homebrew car, “MAX Wins 800-mile Race, without Gas.”
The challenge was to drive from Berkeley to Las Vegas without using petroleum based fuel, and without buying any fuel directly. This is a step in the MAX team’s attempt to win the $10 million automotive X-Prize for a 100 MPG […]
The Los Angeles Times Housing Scene column in their business section is warning readers about con artists selling “insider reports” about supposedly free real property under the Homestead Act. The article says the Homestead Act giveaways stopped over 30 years ago.
“The Homesteading Act of 1862 was repealed in 1976 because all the good agricultural land […]
BioPro automation YouTube
From the Freeways To Fuel website, linked from Green Tech Media coverage of the National Biodiesel Conference in San Francisco this month:
. . .we estimate that 10 million acres of non-traditional agronomic lands are available to grow about 1 billion million gallons of biodiesel feedstock on our country’s rights-of-way.
Daryl Hannah made news at […]
Here’s a direct link to the Instructables page for a thousand watt wind turbine project.
“We built a 1000 watt wind turbine to help charge the battery bank that powers our offgrid home. It’s a permanent magnet alternator, generating 3 phase ac, rectified to dc, and fed to a charge controller. The magnets spin with the […]
“Greenpa” over at Little Blog In The Woods has lived off-grid for over 30 years now. He posted news about his homestead, called the Little House, including the following update:
“. . .the Little House has been approached by Nick Rosen; author of How to Live Off-Grid, for us to be one of the families he’ll […]
Two’s-day is when I post my interpersonal and political items for the week that aren’t directly related to alternative energy, organic gardening or off-grid living.
There were a couple of good reviews posted on the Interblogs about Alongside Night, a novel by J. Neil Schulman that brings agorist philosophy to life more directly than any other […]
Melonie Kennedy wrote this Prepared Family post, about how the online Flash interactive version of the Murray McMurray Hatchery catalog just made her crave getting the paper version even more. So much for the paperless society. She also confesses her wish that live chickens could be mailed. Don’t tell PETA. (Here’s the regular McMurray site […]
Yesterday, there was a Boing Boing post about Leno’s Garage and a video featuring a magnetic levitating wind turbine, which will be delivered to Ed Begley, Jr.’s house. Jay took great pride in his own larger wind turbine. He bragged: “Mine is bigger than Ed Begley’s.”
Oddly enough, perhaps due to the “carbon footprint” needed for […]
I recently posted a comment against the shutting down of tax havens, proposed in an article headlined “Pin Striped Pirates” at the Australia Permaculture Research Institute site.
As the saying goes, “There would be no tax havens if there were no tax hells.” I’ve had my own personal tax troubles in the past, but not […]
Happy New Year! Welcome to all the new laws in effect now, giving me a flashback. I was probably the first victim of the cell phone restrictions in California back in July.
To put it in context, I live in Nevada and was driving to L.A. a day or two earlier, during the time when gas […]
Here’s a searchable directory of bike co-ops from bikecollectives.org. They even had an exhibit in Las Vegas at the bicycle industry’s trade show, Interbike.
One of the listings led me to the following about a Bike Over Borders conflict:
“. . .we learned first hand that the policies of “free trade” are made for corporations, not for […]
Fans of Silent Running will be interested in Art Carden’s latest article for the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, “Should We Be Recycling Paper or Building Battlestar Galactica?”
“Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and […]
A Kurzweil AI post describes the rapid growth of off-grid households.
“Once the preserve of mavericks, hippies and survivalists, there are now approximately 200,000 off-grid households in the US, a figure that has been increasing by a third every year for the past decade.”
The post links to a New Scientist story, How To Unplug From The […]
An Unreasonable.Org post links to an energetic rebuttal of a claim that permaculture is an impractical “hippy dippy, hunter gatherer” farming system.
Quoting permaculturist David Blume on his experience:
“My yields were often 8 times what the USDA claims are possible per square foot. My soil fertility increased dramatically each year so I was not achieving my […]
A Boing Boing post by Mark Frauenfelder links to this instructables article titled “Imitation Alka Seltzer For A Fraction Of The Cost.”
To be precise, the make at home version is probably higher than the manufacturing cost (not including packaging and distribution to markets). But the price of the ingredients is much less than any store […]
Following up the Coffee to Biodiesel story, it seems to me if you could grow your own coffee, as described at home coffee roasting supplier Sweet Maria’s, that would be great. Yeah.
Supposedly, a percentage of already processed (but not roasted) beans can become viable sprouts. After a couple of years a coffee tree can become […]
From the UK’s Isle of Wight comes this Ventnor Permaculture post about making your own Laundry Gloop. The author, Angie, explains why in this excerpt:
“. . .laundry products are often the worst in health terms as they are in constant contact with your skin. I have been making and using Laundry Gloop for years as […]
This Slashdot post links to an American Chemical Society article about a report by researchers here in Nevada, published in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, about the impact of turning waste coffee grounds into biodiesel.
“The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like java — had a major advantage in being more stable […]
This Oregonian article about Ty Adams describes his conversion of a recreational vehicle into a sustainability demonstration.
“It runs on biodiesel, has solar panels for its electricity and hot water, a composting toilet and channels to catch rainwater.”
See Ty’s website at SolTrekker.org or watch his SolTrekker Intro video (also embedded below) and see the Portland TV […]
It’s harvest time!
One of Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder’s recent posts about organic home gardens, War Vegetable Gardening, starts with the following review of a classic book with the same title and continues with an excerpt from the book.
“Daniel Bowman Simon of The Who Farm sent me a link to this scanned book: War Vegetable […]
After reading an article about a new Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) initiative, I thought back to the off-grid Seasteading project, started by one of PayPal’s founders.
In their new book in progress, Seasteading: A Practical Guide to Homesteading the High Seas, by Patri Friedman, Wayne Gramlich, and Andrew House, under a section called “Technological […]
Electricity can make crystals and other materials expand or contract. This is called the piezoelectric effect. I was thinking of that while discussing an idea for “software defined corrective lenses” with J. Neil Schulman recently, and he thought it was worth looking into.
Neil googled terms such as “programmable eyeglasses” and came up with futurist forecasts […]
J. Kent Hastings
Record Your Own
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