I just completed the first of five, weekend long modules at Hancock Permaculture with Andrew Leslie Phillips. If you are also attending the course, I mentioned the Placement Randomizer Tool, which takes a little digging to find here. Here’s a link to Peak Moment TV- lots of great interviews with Peak Oil as well as Permaculture and other cultural creatives. Also I’ve got a link here to Greeening the Desert.

I’d like to offer this as a place for us to work together virtually, in between and after the training sessions. If anyone is interested in contributing, send me an e-mail and I’ll create an account for you, and give you a little run through on how to write a post.

Finally I want to say a big Thank You to all of you for coming and inspiring me and eachother to move forward with Permaculture. I was looking at an old list of things I would do if I had unlimited time and resources and this training is on the list. Special thanks for the great food, coffee, pie, smoked fish, cheese, and Little Debbie cakes! See you next month.

I just discovered a link to a press release about Rochester’s “Greenprint” which contains a link to the full report (PDF). I would have liked to have attended this event, but I also want to find out about opportunities to plug in after the fact. A friend who is a strawbale building expert said he met with Mayor Duffy a few weeks ago. So there appears to be some reality behind this. The fact that Hillary was behind the whole thing was encouraging.
The report seems to conflate “green” with alternate energy and energy conservation, which I view as a small subsection of green. Nevertheless there are some 12 specific action items, several of which have to do with training, awareness and education. The ethanol activity in the area is apparent. One of my goals is to push at the crop productivity issue of growing sugar beets instead of corn, so this might be a place to start to make some connections.

Just read an article in the Independent by a journalist who visits the Utopia Experiment in self-sufficiency for a month. The site is located just outside Inverness, Scotland. The good news is that people learn quickly, especially when the food is at stake. The less good news is that they haven’t gone a winter yet, with no water or electricity, or faced the “hungry gap” in March.

They must be aware that there’s a similar experiment just 20 miles east of there that’s been running successfully for nearly forty years. I had the good luck to visit Findhorn in my college years, if only for a month. My experience with the learning I can echo, as within a day or two I had adopted what I can only call the rhythm of the place. The pace there seemed much slower, and people rarely blinked. They kept their eyes open. And so did I, once I let go to this energy and let it carry me.

It was there on the Moray Firth that I, too, learned to cook: something for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I learned about working in a bindery, about meditation, about demolition work, about pine trees and the connection between natural resources, sustainability and peace. George Galloway recently had a video piece with David Strahan (hat tip TOD)looking specifically at the recent wars and their connection to resources.

I finally found a Permaculture Certification program that I think I can afford in terms of time and money, through Hancock Permaculture just east of Binghamton. One of the teachers there is Geoff Lawton, who’s project in the Jordan desert I profiled earlier.

The program runs 5 weekends, first weekend of each month, starting in February. Binghamton’s about 2-3 hours from here, but this was definitely better than the every weekend all winter or two-week intensive time investments needed for other nearby programs.

As I was looking for vacant lots I got a call back from the South Wedge NET officer, Peter Saxe, who was very generous with information and ideas. He recommended I get hooked up with Rochester Roots, and one way to do so was to visit the South Wedge Farmers market, which meets Thursday from 4-8 pm, behind Boulder Coffee at S. Clinton and Alexander.

So I went and met Jan McDonald, the director of Rochester Roots School Garden program and told her I was looking for opportunities to do some Permaculture projects and also to connect with established communities and organizations. She told me about the garden project at Clara Barton School near Corn Hill, and I set up an appointment to go meet her there this morning.

More to follow.

After about two years of hemming and hawing, I finally contacted the City about getting access to a vacant lot to do some experimental gardening and urban farming. I hope to find a lot not too far from my studio and start practicing sustainable design there.

I’ve been considering, also for years, whether to take a true Permaculture Certification course. There’s a two week intensive in Ithaca starting in August, or I could do weekends there all winter (ugh!). Or Yankee Permaculture does their e-mail distance learning course over the winter. None of these courses is cheap ($1000 is the lowest I’ve seen) but the certification would give me the right to teach using the Permaculture moniker.

I’m considering opening up Greenerminds to guest posters and eventually to open registration. I want to see if I can attract a core group of local sustainability-minded folks first and get that running. This has been on my mind for some time, but I’m settled enough now in my day job that I can bring some focus to it.

As usual, making a decision, the road rises to meet me. I ran into Dave Vail yesterday and posed the question whether he’d want to participate. He said he’s a terrible typist, but I’m sure we can get around that. He mentioned the Natural Building Colloquium coming up the end of July in Bath, NY, and I started getting excited about the possibilities of attending. Sadly, it’s a Tuesday to Saturday thing, and registration is $400. I might still be able to justify a day or two off and that cost if I can figure out a way to recoup it.

This immediately brings up the question for me on a personal level of how much I’m willing to spend to go green, both monetarily, time-wise and in terms of convenience. I just spent about $550 for a pallet of rock, a yard of topsoil, yard of mulch and 18 lilacs for a hedge. These are capital improvements, so I’d expect to see the return when the house is sold (hopefully not for a long time). A hands-on learning experience seems expensive at $400, but what’s the return and when? I might learn something that could save hundreds in heating next winter, or meet someone which results in a ten thousand dollar idea.

Graduate and Undergraduate student teams: apply for the P3 sustainability prize from the EPA. I know the U of R has a sustainability house that might go for this. Hat tip to TOD. The comments on that one look a little Orwellian-strange to me.

I’m not sure when, but it looks like Eric Massa finally conceded NY-29. I’ll keep my bumper sticker for now because Massa ran such an integrity-based campaign. My thanks to him, Dan Maffei and Jack Davis and all their supporters for helping turn blotchy-red western New York purple, and very nearly blue.

I’ve been visiting Rochester Turning pretty regularly and set up an account there. They’re taking a survey on what to do next.

Picking up on Monday’s post, I built a little design tool that generates random ideas about how to place two elements in relationship to one another.

I mainly used JavaScript to build this and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The tool already suggests a bunch of next features to add: ability for visitors to add their own components, ability to relate more than two things, ability to save placements that seem to make sense and annotate them, adding pictures, flash etc.

One thing I started thinking about is creating each element as an object with inputs and outputs and relationships to its consumers and producers. For example a chicken produces feathers, eggs and fertilizer and consumes seed, grass etc. The lawn produces grass. The garden and lawn needs fertilizer. The house needs pillows which need feathers. By setting rates on all these things, we can start to build very sophisticated models and simulations. But that’s obviously a larger project.

I’m starting to mess around with PHP, and got the left hand navigation bar in davefeasey.net built as a single list that is contextual, meaning it knows what page you’re on and so turns off the link and bolds the text for the current page. I’m learning the ropes on include files and I think I finally have that pegged; the paths are different since I’m in a shared / virtual environment and can’t see all the way up my directory tree. Also had to figure out how to hide the INI file.

Found a link from treehugger.com to the latest national solar homes tour. I went on one of these back in ‘96 or ‘97 and it was inspirational and fun. My friend Chris Schaefer at Solar and Wind FX is organizing the Finger Lakes part of the tour. A list of locations and directions is on his site.

I don’t know most of these folks, but I heard Bill LaBine give an interesting talk a few years ago on making biodiesel from waste vegetable oil. He was on to peak oil before most and just seems like a fascinating guy to talk to. He’s been doing alternative energy for a long time. I’m hoping to interview both Chris and Bill for upcoming posts, so this might be a really good chance for me to touch base with both of them.