The recent unpleasantness in matters economic have led me to study finance, economics and capitalism a little bit. While it would be easy to start developing a response to the mythos of capitalism as criticism, it occurs to me that he Permaculture way is positive. Okay, we know what we don’t want- it’s everywhere. But what do we want? Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” to post-Hayek apologistics is clearly a statement out of another time and place. There must be alternatives to the monopoly of neo-liberalism and it is up to us to create them.

So here’s  a stab at some ideas I’d like to propose instead. Look for further elaboration in posts to come.

1. Small is beautiful
2. Absentee ownership needs constraints
3. Legal and political jurisdictions should be based on watersheds
4. Capital accumulation is a resource like any other and therefore a pollutant in high concentrations (Orlov)
5. All economic activity has its basis in nature
6. Economics as a servant of society and community
7. Fractional reserve banking means capital is the least of the factors of production
8. Externalization of costs should be strictly curtailed by counting them as liabilities
9. Tax extraction, waste and pollution rather than production or consumption
10. Concepts of private property need drastic revision
11. Import replacement and its barriers
12. Return of surplus to Earth and people- surplus, yield, accursed share and profit
13. Human and natural capital as assets rather than expenses
14. Resource-use matrix for costing and taxation
15. why scale matters; human interaction defines scale boundaries
16. development of sustainable economics institutions
17. Design (planning) vs. Freedom
18. Permaculture as a general theory

I’ve been thinking about putting a small pond at the highest point on the property, above the gardens, as an irrigation source and to have some fish. I bought a liner a couple of months ago. Today, some helpers and I finally set to it.

Turns out 9- and 10-year olds will dig for over an hour! You can see that down below the topsoil layer its very shaly chunky rock. I saved the topsoil and re-built a raised bed with it.

First we’d laid out where the pond was going to be located. This was a space I’d raked leaves into a pile last fall, roughly circular. Then from one end of this we built a spillway that would carry overflow into the topmost swale. We found the digging much easier here so decided to put another, deeper pit down that end.

Next, we needed to do something to protect the liner from sharp rocks. I sent the helpers out to find carpet scraps in the neighborhood, which they promptly found (along with 60 beanie babies at a garage sale). I laid the carpet over the various sections and used a box cutter to cut the shapes.

The scale here is the two main pits are about 5′ by 5′ and the spillway is about 6′ by 2′. The top depression is about 16″ deep and the lower one about 28″ deep. I’m hoping this will be deep enough to avoid freezing so fish can overwinter.

Next comes the liner.

The liner’s 15′ long by 10′ wide, and didn’t quite cover the whole spillway, so I needed to cut an additional piece for the spillway. I’m planning to make a constructed wetland in the spillway with sand and gravel, so I still need to find a way to seal the overlap of the two pieces of liner.

Finally, the moment of truth!

And here it is finally filled. Tomorrow after it has settled for a bit, I’ll trim the excess liner, and line the edge with flagstones.

Overview

Recent discussions on The Oil Drum and elsewhere have thrown the question of sustainability into stark relief. What is sustainability? What makes one thing or system sustainable and another not so? Is there a framework or model for comparing relative sustainability? How do we measure and account for all aspects of sustainable systems?

Permaculture offers a set of specific approaches to these questions, although in some cases more detail is needed. For example, the need to perform “careful energy accounting” is recommended (if not required) without any real guidance as to how one would actually go about this. Holmgren and Mollison seem to agree that Howard Odum’s emergy approach to this issue is the best available tool, but even Holmgren admits to never having learned it.

My goal in this article is to sketch out some of the issues that play into a more comprehensive and detailed approach to sustainability, starting from Permaculture approaches with which I’m familiar.

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This week saw the delivery of NOFA’s newspaper Natural Farmer, which is always chock full of amazingly useful information. The paper is quarterly and usually features a pull out section on a particular topic, this one being the topic of Nutrient Density. There’s a fabulous long interview with farmer and consultant Mark Fulford of Teltane Farms in Maine.

In talking about soil nutrients, Fulford offered a very concise useful nugget about soil chemistry, which I’ve tried to capture in the table below.

UPDATE: 20100115: Here’s a better version of the table with original following:

Fulford talks about a lot of things in this lengthy article which I highly recommend. One way to assess soil chemistry is through soil testing of course, but another way is to analyze the weeds growing on a property. For example, dandelions and goldenrod indicate dry conditions, whereas buttercups indicate wet or anaerobic soils. Broadleaf weeds indicate high potassium, low phosphorus. Annual grasses indicate lack of calcium.

Fulford mentions a couple of good books on weeds:

Weeds: Why They Grow, by J. McCaman
Weeds: Control Without Poisons, by Charles Walters

The warm weather in November has got me in a gardening mood, so I decided to build a straw bale cold frame with the windows I found earlier this year. I got 10 straw bales at the local feed store, a couple of 10 foot 2 x 6 and I was ready to go. First I arranged five strawbales in a U shape facing south.

This was across some existing beds, so the soil’s already in good shape. My goal is to grow hardy salad greens in here over the winter: cress, sorrel, spinach, lettuce, chard, chickory. I raked out the mulch a little to create a good seed bed.

I bought a thermometer at the local hardware store to hang inside.

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The Guardian posted an article quoting two anonymous senior IEA officials as saying the agency has systematically overstated oil reserves and capacity under pressure from the U.S. We are, in fact, running out of oil. At ASPO a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Brown indicated that Saudi Arabia is probably past peak.

I’ve been periodically scanning the MSM for cornucopian arguments against Peak Oil and they all rely on the same tired arguments: there’s lots of oil in the ground, we can recover all or most of the oil still left in depleted fields, technology will allow this all to happen, the Tupi field doubles known reserves, etc. which counter none of the peakist arguments. Regardless of all this oil in the ground, we won’t be able to recover more than a tiny fraction. I’d be surprised if any of the Tupi field, under 6000 meters of ocean water and salt, will ever be produced.

35 years ago we had a chance to move to a more sustainable living arrangement in a managed way. Now I fear we can only move there in an unmanaged, chaotic way. In any case, our long term prospects hinge on our ability to live off incoming solar energy, rather than our fossil inheritance. There is no alternative to sustainability.

Started watching 11th Hour which features Kenny Ausubel, founder of Bioneers, then found that Bioneers 20th Anniversary Conference is this coming weekend. Ithaca has a satellite conference, so if you’re free, check this out.

Unfortunately, I’m not available as we are finishing the Permaculture course this weekend. But I did find that Paul Stamets’ talk at NOFA is partly captured on the Bioneers site.

Also going on this weekend is the Biophysical Economics Conference in Syracuse, hosted by Charles Hall. I was badly wanting to go to this, as it is so close, and Nate Hagens and Gail Tverberg would be present, and Joseph Tainter the keynote. But looks like I will not have the bandwidth to go. If by some miracle I’m able to get there, I’ll be live blogging.

BTW, I now have a Twitter account.

I’m thinking 11th Hour is our next film in the Transition Honeoye Falls film series. We showed A Crude Awakening last night at Cibi in Mendon, but I didn’t do a great job of advertising and we only got 8 in attendance.

This is brilliant: http://www.vimeo.com/5460265

How come I never heard of this before? Suddenly, last week, there was a post on EnergyBulletin about Will Self and Ralph Steadman’s eponymous book, about flaneur-ing around a city recording whatever- emotion, memory, history, architecture, geography. So I started reading Psychogeography, where Self records Self’s walk from London to Manhattan by way of Heathrow and JFK.

This is precisely the sort of work that ought to be done in Bull’s Head Neighborhood (BHN) before they raze it and put up Low Income Housing (LIH) prettified by Urban Community Gardens (UCGs). Are the kids in BHN on Twitter? It’s reading the landscape, a la Permaculture, and another way of recording, collecting, observing. Off to do more research.

From a food perspective, this time of year is definitely the high point. Due to the funky weather we’re just getting tomatoes now, but I’ve also got tons of summer squash, basil, peppers, onions, kale, chard, chamomile, calendula and herbs. The giant growth winner is clearly the mullein, now two years old that tops out at about 9′ tall. This is a good thing, as my allergies are kicking in big time and I’ve needed to make several batches of mullein-goldenrod-sage-chamomile tea, which is quite nice with honey.

I whipped up a Claremont Salad yesterday with cabbage, onions, pepper, cucumber, carrot and parsley all home grown. Then today I made a spur of the moment green salsa with extremely local tomatillos, cayenne, garlic, onion and coriander seeds.

Meanwhile I keep re-potting seedlings and putting in new seed. I cleared one of the raised beds last weekend and have stuff sprouting already. I put in soy beans, parsnips, several kinds of lettuce, cress, onion and I forget what else- dill maybe. This polyculture mix has worked well for me over the last two years. I re-potted a bunch of wild flowers the children started, as well as larspur, asters and my new prize, black mulberry.

Couple of weeks ago I discovered a black mulberry down by the old railroad bed and brought a couple ripe fruit home to try and start. Kai and I were talking about how you don’t see a bunch of seedlings under mulberry trees, but I’ve since discovered the reason for this. I frequently walk along the Canal Path east from Pittsford village, and down where Mitchell Road crosses the canal there’s an old mulberry. One day I watched a herd of chipmunks scrounging the fallen berries. Another day it was ducks. So very few berries escape notice long enough to take root. However, the berries I collected and planted sprouted easily and are now growing vigorously. I put 12 into larger pots and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get them through the winter.

I finally set up my first rain barrel, a birthday present from my dad last year. Just need to run the gutter downspout to the top, drill a hole and put in some screen to keep the detritus out.

I should probably strap the barrel to the side of the house. Haven’t filled it up yet to see how the tires handle the weight. The elevation is needed to be able to get enough pressure out to the garden beds.

Wow- what a day.

I got to the conference around 8:30 and was able to get registered and headed toward the first breakout on Small Scale Aquaponics with Craig Hollingsworth, a professor here at UMass. The themes of this talk were start small and learn by doing. But take away the learnings Craig had to offer, like be careful to close any valves you open and don’t pull out the temperature regulation mechanism without putting it back in.

He had three 300 gal. tanks with very simple filter and sump, with PVC to circulate water. Here we see use of a secondary hydroponic plant system to make use of some of the nitrates coming from bacteria on gravel in the long blue containers, which take the fish ammonia (NH3) and convert it to N03. The water is still very high in nitrogen, so the plants tend to be very leafy. The basil seemed to do the best of any. There were numerous pest issues with the plants which I conjecture has to do with this high nitrogen input.

The simplest system was growing Blue and Nile Tilapia. The Blue are hardier but smaller. He’s hybridizing the Blue and Nile, and offspring are almost entirely male and have the hardiness of the Blues but are larger like the Nile. Other tanks had large mouth bass. Interesting comment is that food value always has lowest value in the market- the Bass are recreational, and get a higher price.

Craig mentioned a very successful enterprise in Turners Falls, Australis Aquaculture, which is supplying Barramundi across the country. Some of his tips include having ground faults on all the electrical, and a central floor drain is very helpful. When I asked about costs, he said the basic 300 gal tank system was under $2000 but didn’t have any numbers on energy usage. There seemed to be a lot of energy input in terms of lights for the plants. There’s probably a good hybrid system with fish in the dark and plants in the light. In fact, later Will Allen showed this pattern, where the plants are above the fish water and basically shade out any algae growth.

At lunch I ran into Phil Botwinick who I’ve been dying to connect with since meeting him at last years NE Permaculture Convergence. I told him I was coming to his talk on money: Lifting the Veil and Taking the Gloves off. He’s been behind a series of screenings of the Crash Course, and Chris Martenson will be here tomorrow to talk, which I’m very excited about.

After perhaps the largest, coldest burrito I ever ate and the final cup of coffee served out of the student union food court, I headed over to Isenberg for a talk on Dismantling Legal Barriers to Sustainability, given by Scott Kellogg, formerly of Rhizome Collective in Austin, TX. I was really looking forward to this, and it ended up being a little short on specific tactics. One attendee had the best advice: beg, grovel, moan and make nice with the neighbors and officials. Another take away for me was that there’s a fairly random patchwork of regulation and regulating bodies. In some states the State is hard to deal with, in others, the local public health board. We talked about the usual suspects: greywater, humanure, chickens, compost and rain barrels. Strangely, rain capture is illegal in some western states, where municipalities claim ownership of the rain. Regulations are often used to promote or stop development in a locality. Setting precedents and understanding where local officials are coming from, such as their need to protect public health and not put their necks on the line for something, are keys in getting these practices moved forward.

Phil’s talk was next, with the help of his colleage at Local Energy Solutions, Sharon. Phil donned the tin foil hat and the gloves, which he was to later take off, and slowly, gently led into  this discussion about money. At first I was wondering how he was going to approach it, as there were members of the audience who didn’t know, for example, who Greenspan is. But after the first minutes the discussion sort of shaped itself. Leading off was the concept of how banks create money in a fraction reserve system, which is that they generate it out of thin air. The general agreement between all players seems to be to never call in all the debts, or if they do, to make the US Federal Government (e.g. us) pay for it.

So that all was a bit more rudimentary than I hoped, but the fractional reserve piece is significant. After the talk, Phil, Tom, Sharon and I agreed to meet for breakfast tomorrow.

Finally I had to run home and take a shower and get some real food before Will Allen’s talk on Growing Power. The only thing I can say about his presentation is just the sheer scope of what he’s managing is pretty impressive and throws down the challenge to us all that we are thinking too small. He’s employing up to 100 people, managing thousands of volunteers, and has dozens of projects all running at once, all based on starting with soil creation with massive composting operations. Granted, he’s been doing stuff for 16 years, but he reiterated the play nice theme. He said make yourself an asset to the community and they’ll totally defend you when the City comes down, or whatever. Also, it’s pretty clear he has outstanding organizational skills and has a good team. Many of the volunteers who started as little kids are now running things.

So, I said I was going to take it easy and not pack the whole weekend with stuff, but that was quite a lot for one day. I bought a DVD of the Crash Course, and I’m going to see how much of that I can get through tonight. Nighty night.