ThinkLady

A little star comes to visit

My sister, Keri, and her three girls from Houston are here for a visit and that means plenty of time for my youngest sis, Keri, and I to watch our girls at play. Two of my nieces, Marin and Madison, are 11 and 13 respectively, and my daughter Callie is 12. Together our three girls are like stair steps of pre-adolescent spunk and fun -- a little mouthy, sassy and sweet, all at the same time. Amazingly they love being together ... constantly ... never seem tired of each other.

For a sleepover last night, we made a big, comfy pallet on the floor for the three of them and I thought there might be some complaints about the tight quarters, but nary a complaint did I hear. They seemed totally satisfied to just be together, in the moment -- more giggling, whispering and laughing than I've heard in a long time -- all the way until 1:30 or so in the morning. I went to bed long before then.

I have memories of feeling that way about spending time with cousins too. It's immensely satisfying to watch the cycle repeat itself and flash on those memories of long ago cousin fun.

The real star of this visit though is my newest niece, Mauri, eight-months-old and a bundle full of crawling, trying-to-walk, laughing, sugary joy. She's so engaging she steals the heart of everyone she meets. Thinking Man and I are totally smitten.

Last night sis and I stayed up chatting a bit over a glass of pinot noir and little Mauri played until she dropped, then snuggled up to my sis, and floated off to dreamland. I snagged these pics of our sweet little star with the 3.2 MP camera in my Blackberry Curve.

Off to dreamland Mauri goes.

Sweet dreams little star.

Her right hand was sticking straight up in the air. Totally kissable.

You have two bodies

Bet you didn't know you have two bodies. There's the one you're acquainted with -- the one you feed three times a day, the one that walks your brain around the house, takes you to work, the one that performs thousands of simple and complex tasks each day to keep you alive. This is the body you're most aware of, the one many of us try to keep healthy with thoughtful diet, exercise, rest, good health care.

Your second body gives you water to drink, air to breathe, food to eat and millions and billions of resources. This body isn't yours alone. This body connects you to every other species, human and non-human. This second body is reeling from the effects and impact of so many first bodies. This second body is the earth.

Such is the discourse and unfolding epiphanies in "The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology," by Thich Nhat Hanh, teacher, author, poet, peace activist and Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk. More from Hanh's book:

... I have many other hearts. The sun in the sky is also my heart. If my own heart failed I would die instantly. But if the other heart, the sun, explodes or stops functioning, I will also die right away.

... We're imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of having some comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self.

I've been reading this little book almost daily and find it so rich, so full of meaning, I'm reading only a page or so at a time to meditate fully on the concepts.

Hanh's approach to the meaning of time and wealth, of how chasing after money ensnares us, embodied here, is a useful reminder on navigating the murky waters of a consumerist society where success is often defined by how much money you make:

We have constructed a system we can't control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims. For most of us who want to have a house, a car, a refrigerator, a television, and so on, we must sacrifice our time and our lives in exchange. We are constantly under the pressure of time. In former times, we could afford three hours to drink one cup of tea, enjoying the company of our friends in a serene and spiritual atmosphere. We could organize a party to celebrate the blossoming of one orchid in our garden. But today we can no longer afford these things. We say that time is money. We have created a society in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, and in which we are so caught up in our own immediate problems that we cannot afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth.

Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe published a portion of Hanh's book in their latest newsletter here. Read and enjoy.

Amazing feats of urban farming & volatile oil

Two stories, one from the NY Times magazine yesterday on an amazing urban farmer in Milwaukee, Wis., named Will Allen, and the other, one of the top stories in today’s NY Times, on how unprecedented oil price volatility is hampering economic recovery, illustrate the challenges we face. However, in the urban farming piece we also catch a glimpse of the potential for one positive-change model for our food system, and I think it’s hopeful knowing there are projects with elements of Allen’s work in cities and towns throughout Oklahoma.

The piece on oil price volatility illustrates once again the need for grass-roots localization and making our communities more resilient and less vulnerable to oil prices, supply and demand.

Swings in Price of Oil Hobble Forecasting

By Jad Mouawad

NY Times 

The extreme volatility that has gripped oil markets for the last 18 months has shown no signs of slowing down, with oil prices more than doubling since the beginning of the year despite an exceptionally weak economy.

Highlights:

· “To call this extreme volatility might be an understatement,” said Laura Wright, the chief financial officer at Southwest Airlines, a company that has sought to insure itself against volatile prices by buying long-term oil contracts. “Over the past 15 to 18 months, this has been unprecedented. I don’t think it can be easily rationalized.”

· But to Jeroen van der Veer, who retired as chief executive officer of Royal Dutch Shell last week, prices are increasingly dictated by long-term assessments of supply and demand, rather than current market fundamentals. He advised taking a long-term view of the market.

· “Oil has never been very stable,” Mr. van der Veer said. “If you look at history, you have to expect more volatility.”

Complete article here.

Street Farmer

By Elizabeth Royte

NY Times Magazine

Will Allen, a farmer of Bunyonesque proportions, ascended a berm of wood chips and brewer’s mash and gently probed it with a pitchfork. “Look at this,” he said, pleased with the treasure he unearthed. A writhing mass of red worms dangled from his tines. He bent over, raked another section with his fingers and palmed a few beauties.

And a few highlights:

· With seeds planted at quadruple density and nearly every inch of space maximized to generate exceptional bounty, Growing Power is an agricultural Mumbai, a supercity of upward-thrusting tendrils and duct-taped infrastructure.

· If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.” Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

· Allen, too, has achieved a certain momentum for his efforts to bring the good-food movement to the inner city. In the last several years, he has become a darling of the foundation world. In 2005, he received a $100,000 Ford Foundation leadership grant. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation honored Allen with a $500,000 “genius” award. And in May, the Kellogg Foundation gave Allen $400,000 to create jobs in urban agriculture.

· “We need 50 million more people growing food,” Allen told them, “on porches, in pots, in side yards.” The reasons are simple: as oil prices rise, cities expand and housing developments replace farmland, the ability to grow more food in less space becomes ever more important. As Allen can’t help reminding us, with a mischievous smile, “Chicago has 77,000 vacant lots.” (NOTE: This made me wonder many how vacate lots Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Edmond, Norman, Stillwater, Shawnee, Broken Arrow, Bartlesville, Tahlequah, Woodward, Clinton, etc. might have?)

· “Not everyone can grow food,” Allen acknowledged. But he offers other ways of engaging with the soil: “You bring 30 people out here, bring the kids and give them good food,” he said, “and picking up those rocks is a community event.”

· This nondogmatic approach may be one of Allen’s most appealing qualities. His essential view is that people do the best they can: if they don’t have any better food choices than KFC, well, O.K. But let’s work on changing that. If they don’t know what to do with okra, Growing Power stands ready to help.

· If there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, says Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms, “we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food.”

· … Growing Power isn’t self-sufficient. But neither is industrial agriculture, which relies on price supports and government subsidies. Moreover, industrial farming incurs costs that are paid by society as a whole: the health costs of eating highly processed foods, for example, or water pollution. Nor can Growing Power be compared to other small farms, because it provides so many intangible social benefits to those it reaches. “It’s not operated as a farm,” said Ian Marvy, executive director of Brooklyn’s Added Value farm, which shares many of Growing Power’s core values but produces less food. “It has a social, ecological and economic bottom line.” That said, Marvy says that anyone can replicate Allen’s technical systems — the worm composting and aquaponics — for relatively little money.

· Allen predicts that because of high unemployment and the recent food scares, 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But two million of them will eventually drop out, he said, when the potato bugs arrive or the rain doesn’t cooperate. Still, he was sanguine. “The experience will introduce those folks to what a tomato really tastes like, so next time they’ll buy one at their greenmarket. And when we talk about farm-worker rights, we’ll have more advocates for them.”

Complete article here.

We may have BSF maggots, yah!

This morning my Thinking Man husband went out to plop disintegrating slimy greens from the fridge into the compost bin. Within seconds TM returns breathlessly shouting, "You've got to come see this! Hurry!"

Whoa! My usually flatline-emotioned TM excited about compost? Now this IS a first.

"I don't know if we should be worried, but you've got to see this," he adds breathlessly as we head to the compost bin. We've had snakes and all manner of creepy crawlers in the backyard jungle. Most of the time these turn out to be wild-kingdom moments where we all judiciously observe and actually learn something about the natural world.

Just in case there is something scary there, I cautiously peer into the bin, and wow, there's a writhing mass of brownish and tan maggots all dancing around and waving their little bodies in the hull of a large orange squash we deposited just about an hour or so earlier.

When I attended Heifer Ranch, a sustainable educational center that's part of Heifer International in Perryville, Ark., I saw plenty of maggots in amazingly large compost hills (big-ass hills)  and thought I remembered their experts saying maggots are actually a good thing for composting, but just to make sure, we hop online and cruise around compost land on the Web.

Holy Goddesses of Composting, turns out these may well be the larvae of black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens), often referred to as BSF, a native fly with amazing potential for not only managing the waste of Homo sapiens -- the most wasteful species ever to evolve on the planet -- but to turn it into all manner of beneficial products and processes.

Most informative article we've found so far on BSFs is from Maria Gaura in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"BSFs eat like crazy ... vegetable peels, plate scrapings, the newspapers that lined the compost bucket - about five gallons of waste per week - all were gobbled up so fast that the compost pile began to recede. I tossed in squishy plums and wormy apples from our trees, 5 or 10 gallons at a time. They'd be gone by morning."

They also eat stuff we've been told you're not supposed to put in your compost pile ... cheese, meat scraps, oily foods, bread, etc. Gaura tells of cleaning her fridge and taking the debris to the compost pile, checking back an hour later.

" ... I peeked in and there was a party going on. The maggots were thrashing about in a feeding frenzy. Most arresting was the fate of a fist-size ball of formerly fresh mozzarella. The maggots had tunneled into the cheese, which held its shape but quivered violently. Within a half hour it was gone."

The next section of her article burrows into all the other useful things BSFs do. The usefulness of this native fly is only now being explored but it appears they may well be THE award-winning species for efficiently breaking down food waste, human and non-human poo, and turning it into stuff we can use to create closed loop systems ala William McDonough's food = waste, waste = food. More highlights from the article:

• When kept warm and protected, BSF larvae are probably nature's best composters. They can consume the manure from factory farms, food scraps from homes and restaurants - almost any type of wet and icky organic waste.
• They eat so quickly, microbes can't begin to break down the waste and produce smelly methane gas, one reason why my compost stopped stinking. In addition, the larvae secrete chemicals that kill bacteria, converting even pig poop into a safe, non-smelly soil amendment, according to one study.
• BSF are not attracted to human homes or food and do not spread disease.
• Larvae can also be useful if you have lots of pet feces - including from dogs, cats, pigs and chickens - to dispose of.
• A thriving maggot bin reduces kitchen and restaurant waste by 95 percent, according to research conducted by ESR International. That means 100 pounds of food scraps will produce 5 pounds of soil amendment and 20 pounds of well-fattened larvae, which can then be used to feed chickens or fish. The soil amendment left by BSF can be added to garden beds or fed to captive worms.
• The larvae are nutritious feed for reptiles, pigs and farmed fish, as well as domestic poultry.
• While ESR International's larvae composters may appeal to garden hobbyists in the United States, the company hopes to have a larger environmental impact with large-scale municipal waste-disposal projects in warm-weather developing countries such as Colombia and Vietnam. Using maggots to consume food waste as well as animal and even human waste could greatly decrease the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas
• ERS sent larvae to a researcher in Iowa, and they actually made them into biodiesel," said Craig Sheppard, a retired professor of entomology and an expert on BSF. "If they divert their food waste, any fair-size city could set up a bioconversion plant" turning food scraps into renewable fuel.

A graphic photo of our maggots follows. If you're squeamish, you may want to look away.

Lessons from Transition Boulder County for Oklahoma

Nice story on Transition Boulder County on CNET today by reporter Daniel Terdiman. Overall the article expresses the concept of the transition process and goals very well. Some good insights into how the transition process can work in Oklahoma City and throughout the state.

Highlights:

Because a massive spike in the cost of fossil fuel-based energy would drastically change most of our systems -- food, energy, economy, employment and so on--re-localization imagines a new era in which local communities work to meet their own needs rather than depending on a global infrastructure.

Brownlee explained that although the Transition movement is built around a recognition of the hard realities of fossil fuel depletion, the impact of climate change and likely economic instability, it doesn't spend a lot of time saying that using fossil fuels are a bad idea. Instead, the message is that, in the not too distant future, such energy will not be as easily available or as inexpensive as it is today.

"Communities cannot depend on globalized systems to continue to support them," Brownlee said.

.... until local governments get on board, we won't be able to depend on them to take care of the problems that will come in a post-peak oil world, either, Brownlee argued. That was one of the chief lessons from Hurricane Katrina, he said. "It's going to come from the local level, from the citizen level."

... he's never seen a grass-roots movement spread at the pace he's seen with Transition. While most of the organizations have sprouted in small towns, there are currently efforts under way in cities like Denver and Los Angeles. However, in cities, he said, it is likely that work will have to be done at the community level and coordinated city-wide, rather than be driven by a top-down structure.

Money quote:

"Transition is a social experiment on a grand scale, and we don't know if it will work. But we do know that if we wait for government it will be too little, too late, and if we rely on individuals, it will be too little. But if we come together as communities, it might be just enough, just in time."

Full story here.