Permaculture and water catching earth

Forest Hills farm catches rain for irrigation

Long before they heard the word “permaculture,” Forest Hills residents Terry Jo and Dave Bichell had embraced the tenets of organic gardening to create sustainable spaces on their Old Hickory Boulevard farm. Permaculture gave them the tools to overcome drought and flooding.

“Permaculture is a way of growing that uses the land to soak up and store water,” Terry Jo explained. “You use the natural features of the land and plant trees in such a way to hold water, and use plants to help nourish each other without fertilizers.”

The farm is a remnant of a historic plantation, she said, and the land had been used for pasture by previous owners. She was committed to avoiding pesticides or fertilizers, so she set out to see what could be grown on pasture land without alteration. “We grew a crop of hay for a couple of years, because at that time that was about all we could grow without using irrigation and pesticides.”

Potable water - Filtration and Purification

A report by Peter H. Gleick estimates that if no action is taken to address unmet basic human needs for water, as many as 135 million people will die from water-related diseases by 2020.  Rainwater harvesting is viewed by many, as a partial solution to the problems posed by water scarcity: droughts and desertification, erosion from runoff, over-reliance on depleted aquifers, and the costs of new irrigation, diversion, and water treatment facilities.

 

Can rainwater be made safe to drink? Yes. How safe? As safe as your well or tap water. How do you make it safe for indoor use? By filtering and purifying it. Contaminants in water may include algae, air pollution, bird excrement, and leaves, sand, and dust. Local wells have dealt with these problems for decades. Installation of filtration and purification equipment can remove these contaminants at home as well.

Why does this take so long?

The initial aim of this blog was to attract interest by other teams and collectives to engage in an organized inquiry of how to develop a set of practical solutions material for developing or enhancing an autonomous community anywhere in the world.  But goals sometimes are either set too high to achieve, or take too long to materialize.  In such cases people who may initially share them may loose interest.  The system has altered our internal clocks to work in the rhythms of industrial machinery.  This has been partly our experience here, which we would like to share without the specifics of who, where, when.  Some of us have grown to cleanse our internal clocks and are more patient in watching change take place in human terms, not in capitalistic industrial rhythms.  Some have not been able to do so and are impatient and try to force things.  While doing so what they are forcing are their ideas on other people who are unable to share them or are unable to commit to a process where those ideas can collide, blend, and evolve into a collective product.

Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals

Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process

Ian Sample, science correspondent @ The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013
 

Randy Schekman, centre, at a Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm.

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

Schekman said pressure to publish in "luxury" journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

The Monster is Right on Top of Us

Argentine Protesters vs Monsanto:

By Fabiana Frayssinet Reprint  

MALVINAS ARGENTINAS, Córdoba, Argentina , Dec 2 2013 (IPS) - The people of this working-class suburb of Córdoba in Argentina’s central farming belt stoically put up with the spraying of the weed-killer glyphosate on the fields surrounding their neighbourhood. But the last straw was when U.S. biotech giant Monsanto showed up to build a seed plant.

The creator of glyphosate, whose trademark is Roundup, and one of the world’s leading producers of genetically modified seeds, Monsanto is building one of its biggest plants to process transgenic corn seed in Malvinas Argentinas, this poor community of 15,000 people 17 km east of the capital of the province of Córdoba.

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination

A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout | Op-Ed

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(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy, Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company, he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.