Joining the Conversation

I listened to Marcin Jakubowski TED talk. He was a graduate physics student that found that he did not have any really useful skills. He started a farm, and bought a tractor. His tractor broke down, so he got it fixed; it broke down again and he found he was broke.

He went on build his own tractor and other farm machinery. From his farm, he and others have gathered to develop other machinery to power civilization.

Open Source Ecology is a global network dedicated to accelerating the growth of the next economy, an open source economy, that optimizes both production and distribution while promoting social justice and environmental regeneration. We are building the Global Village Construction Set, a high-performance, modular, do-it-yourself, low-cost platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

Here are a group of people, stepping outside the “box”. They are deciding to dedicate their lives, to promote what they think is important. They are participating in life, joining the conversation of what it means to be human and to try and live on this world lightly rather than blindly following the world trashing script the rest of us have been handed.

They are choosing to be citizens rather than mere consumers.

Dying coral after BP -”Cleanup”

The LA Times Reported: A colony of hard coral at a depth of more than 4,000 feet was sloughing off tissue and producing mucus, while a nearby community of soft corals had extensive bare areas. A type of starfish associated with the coral was also in bad shape.

…academic researchers on the federal ship Ronald H. Brown were surveying coral communities they have studied for several years. Most showed no changes from previous visits.

But when the ship crew focused underwater cameras on colonies seven miles southwest of the BP leak, images of stricken corals, covered with a brown substance, popped up on the screen.

Cost of Garbage

Violent clashes persisted Saturday night into Sunday between police and people living on the outskirts of Naples, where the dump near the small town of Terzigno opened last year as a stop-gap solution for rubbish from Italy’s third largest city.

For more than a week, protesters in Terzigno have torched vehicles, burned Italian flags and hurled stones at police, all to protest against the stench and filth at a local dump and plans to open a new one in the Mount Vesuvius national park.

People in Italy are mad about the garbage lining the streets. They are mad because to solve problems of Naples, the government has opened up temporary dump sites near smaller towns. Understandably people there are less than happy about the “temporary” solution.

What is happening in Italy is a complex interaction between government and organized crime. But, this story illustrates disconnection with our actions – We do not realize the true cost of Garbage.

More and more of it is being produced. I don’t seem to remember so much plastic refuse as a kid. Usually if I buy some sort of electronics goods there is a fortress of plastic surrounding a very small amount of material. This seems such a way so much plastic some much cardboard just prevent stealing ? But, there are alternatives – Companies have made efforts towards responsible packaging.4

Wrapping food in plastic seems so nonsensical. I try and pass on plastic boxes – but of course during blueberry or strawberry season it is hard. I like the cardboard boxes you can get at farmer’s markets though. Of course I still put my fruit into the convenient plastic bags. I try and reuse the bags, but that still means I create waste.

I was thinking about getting a new flatscreen television. But, our CRT television works just fine. It seems a shame to get rid of a working television just because I want something a little bit newer. What I gain by upgrading is very little considering how much waste that I produce. I think this obsession with new and cutting-edge or keeping up with fashion is wrong. It’s simply wrong. There is a cost of buying new stuff, there is a cost with creating new garbage. We just don’t realize what this cost is. After listening to “The story of stuff”, the true costs become more real.

This is why the crisis in Italy is so telling. The cost of garbage is apparent. It’s out in the streets stinking, smelling and generally making people unhappy, unhealthy and furious with their government.

But, it does illustrate the true cost of garbage. This stuff has to go somewhere. Either gets burned and goes up in the air or gets buried. Garbage just doesn’t disappear.

When we were living in Goose Bay, there was a garbage strike. Garbage was not picked up for weeks. The garbage left out in bags on the street. Goose Bay is in northern Labrador. There is very little surrounding it except for trees. Bears live in the forest. Well most of time. When there was free garbage available they decided to meander into town and help themselves. The town authorities wisely told us to supervise children and keep pets indoors. We should be trying to head towards a point where we are not creating garbage rather than trying to find more carpet to sweep it under.

“Zero impact” should be our goal. Not only regarding garbage but chemicals, pollutants, carbon dioxide and anything and everything that could possibly hurt us. This may seem like an idealistic goal. But, it is what nature intended . Energy and materials in nature or in a closed system. Everything is used and everything is recycled. This is the kind of cyclic processing that we require in our modern society. It is some sort of unattainable dream? Possibly, the way we live. It is incredibly hard to live a sustainable non-impact lifestyle. But, the cost of doing otherwise is a great deal more catastrophic than we were led to believe. With our garbage hidden away from us we have no idea the cost of our daily business.

Follow-up on Syncrude Duck Deaths

Syncrude has received the verdict for failing to protect wildlife – 1600 ducks died in a poison filled bitumen lake when they landed after a winter storm..

Syncrude face[d] one count under Section 155 of the Alberta Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act for allegedly failing to ensure that hazardous substances directly or indirectly not come into contact or contaminate any animals, plants, food or drink.
It is also charged with one count of violating the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act for depositing or permitting the deposit of a substance harmful to migratory birds in waters or an area frequented by birds.

The original estimate was 500 hundred ducks, but I suspect the company underreported the amount dead in an attempt to control the spin. There were some irregularities at the time of the incident:

The relevant government agencies had to learn about the incident from an anonymous phone call, 2 hours before the company called the incident in.

Gaudet said a company operator first discovered the ducks around 9:30 a.m. Monday. The report was called in to the company’s environmental office, then relayed to the province’s fish and wildlife office by noon. The province had already received an anonymous tip about the ducks by that time and had left a message with Syncrude, Gaudet said.
The company was supposed to call Alberta Environment immediately.
When asked why Alberta Environment wasn’t called right away, Gaudet said the company called the regulators it thought were best suited to handle the situation.
As for the timing of that call, Gaudet said: “Our initial activity is to get out into the field to witness and assess, and then to get to Alberta Environment or Fish and Wildlife or Sustainable Resource Development immediately to report it. I think, in this instance, a couple of hours to verify the numbers, to assess the situation, to get my environmental team on the ground was well worth it. I’d hate to be reporting in an unsubstantiated or a minor event that needs a major response.

I wonder why the anonymous phone call was made. Why was it anonymous ?
1) The secrecy of the call would suggest that this incident had happened before. People do not make anonymous calls the first time an unforeseen tragedy occurs.
2) It was rather serious in nature; if the caller could determine how serious the incident was on his/her initial survey, why did it take the company more than 2 hours to “assess” the situation. I suspect they were assessing the need to admit the truth.
3) The company was planning on not reporting the incident. More importantly, there were serious repercussion for the caller if the company found out

The findings of the trial can be summed:

Provincial Crown prosecutor Susan McRory said in her closing argument Thursday that there was no evidence to support Syncrude’s contention that it was late in deploying the bird deterrents because of a spring snowstorm.
She rejected the argument that the incident was unforeseen, an act of God or beyond the control of Syncrude, noting that two other oilsands companies, Albion Sands and Suncor, both had their bird deterrents deployed well in advance.
**”In contrast to the other companies in the area who had policies and procedures in place to ensure an early deployment, in the year before the alleged offense Syncrude had reduced staff, days of operation and their inventory of equipment.”

Team members later told investigators they were short-staffed and under equipped to do their jobs . The unit that had once boasted 14 members in two, seven-member teams to ensure seven-day-a-week bird deterrent coverage, was down to eight workers due to retirements — and one of them was off with an illness. No one worked April 18th, 19th or 20th.
The reduction of staff was not initially reported to Alberta Fish and Wildlife either.
Matthews told investigators he didn’t think the reduction of his team was a concern.
“We felt we could look after the work that we had to do with the people that we had. Our records for the previous years indicated that we were doing a good job.”

But employees said they had just one truck to use to deploy duck deterrents — down from three they normally had at their disposal — and due to safety rules they could only load five propane-fuelled cannons on the truck at any one time.
“If we had more vehicles, we could have done more,” team member Fred Cardinal told investigators.
If there was to be a race against the clock to get deterrents deployed in advance of the arriving birds, the company was ill-prepared to get the job done, the Crown argued at the subsequent trial.

“In the face of complaints by staff on April 17, 2008, that birds were landing in the tailings pond, Syncrude didn’t assign the problem the priority it deserved, nor did they have the resources to respond,” said provincial Crown prosecutor Susan McRory.
But even those deployments were delayed two days because the bird deployment team ran out of the common, nine-volt batteries that were required to fire the $700 noise cannons. (These small, inexpensive batteries are what most people use in smoke detectors.)
“We were going to set up more cannons, but we ran out of batteries,” team member Gordon Grandjambe told investigators. “We set them up, but we didn’t put the batteries in there. We had no batteries.”

For some time, Syncrude had been operating a boom on the settling basin to contain the bitumen mat, but that practice was curtailed in 2005 or 2006, according to Matthews. Fish and Wildlife was not advised of the change.

Update to Lucy’s Story

Lucy was examined by a third party veterinarian.

Dr. James Oosterhuis, a lead researcher with the Colyer Institute in San Diego, examined Lucy on Thursday along with zoo veterinarian Milton Ness.

“Her [Lucy’s] current respiratory problems preclude any thought of moving her, and, in fact, it would [be] life threatening for her to be placed under that kind of stress,” Oosterhuis said in a letter to the zoo.

An endoscope was used during the examination to look at the elephant’s trunk. It showed Lucy had severe swelling around the trunk and nose, making it hard for her to breathe through her trunk. While she can take in air through the mouth, stressful situations make it harder for her to breathe, according to a news release issued by the city.

On Monday, Zoocheck’s Julie Woodyer said Oosterhuis’ assessment does not settle the issue for them. She points to the case of Maggie, the elephant from the Alaska Zoo, who was moved from Anchorage to a sanctuary in California in 2007.

The zoo consulted 11 experts in making its decision to move Maggie. Oosterhuis was the only expert who said she shouldn’t be moved, Woodyer said.

I think this re-examination stresses the importance of dealing with Lucy’s medical conditions before moving her. The fact that Dr.Oesterhuis did not think that Maggie should have been moved does not negate the seriousness of Lucy sinus infection.

Lucy:Freeing an Edmonton Elephant

Title: Lucy:Freeing an Edmonton Elephant

There has been a lot of recent controversy regarding Lucy, the elephant at the Edmonton valley zoo. Lucy, was brought to the zoo as a one year old orphan in 1976. She had been kept with Samantha, an african elephant from 1989 till 2007. Samatha was then sent to a breeding program leaving Lucy alone.
Elephants are extremely social animals

Green Almonds

I found something new at our local grocery store – green almonds. They were fuzzy, green-grey oval shaped nuts. Nuts came in fuzzy coats ? Apparently a lot of nuts “Nut (fruit) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) do come with an outer shell. Technically these fruits are called drupes.

In botany, a drupe is a fruit in which an outer fleshy part (exocarp, or skin; and mesocarp, or flesh) surrounds a shell (the pit or stone) of hardened endocarp with a seed inside.

Drupes, with their sweet, fleshy outer layer, attract the attention of animals as a food, and the plant population benefits from the resulting dispersal of its seeds. The endocarp (pit or stone) is often swallowed, passing through the digestive tract, and returned to the soil in feces with the seed inside unharmed; sometimes it is dropped after the fleshy part is eaten.

I opened the surprisingly thick shell to find a moist, tender unripe almond inside. The nut was quite soft and fluid filled. It had a subtle, slightly grassy flavour, very unlike the strongly flavoured ripe almonds.

I have been eating almonds for years, but I had no idea what they actually looked like on the tree. If I had been stranded in a grove of almonds I would have starved or at least gone hungry for a long time.

I simply do not have a great idea of what my food really looks like, where it comes from and how it is grown. I consider myself fairly well educated and informed, but the thing about ignorance, is that you are unaware of the depth of it. This is the great illusion of the modern food economy and modern life. As food is made a commodity for our convenience, we lose a visceral connection to the land, and believe in the god-like powers of human ingenuity, forgetting that it all depends on sun, rain and soil.

This is why talk of global warming does not seem to capture the imagination of most people. We are simply ignorant of the consequences of creating desserts of our farmlands. Food comes from the grocery store not farmland. The modern, city dwelling human living in the industrialzied world is so far removed from food production, that the concept of not getting enough food, seems as ureal as entertainment television.

Upgradeitis

“If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it”. This is an interesting article from Macworld. Artist Bob Staake has been using Photoshop 3 since 1994.

The idea of using such outdated software is foreign to many technophiles who, in this era of instant gratification when songs, movies, and software updates are never more than a click away, rarely seem to use programs that are older than a couple of months. So when Staake posted a video of his process for creating the cover of The New Yorker’s recent politics issue, the news that he was using software over a decade old spread faster than celebrity gossip.

Of course, Staake has upgraded some of his equipment over the years, despite his use of Photoshop 3.0 and older versions of Adobe PageMill and FileMaker Pro. “Believe me, I am anything but a technophobe,” he said. “I rarely ever upgrade because I’m usually inundated with work and simply don’t have the time to learn new versions. For me, it is simply a matter of pragmatism.” The 7100 has now been replaced as his workhorse by a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.11, necessitating that he run his beloved Photoshop 3.0 in Mac OS 9.2.1 via the Classic emulation environment (and not, as several blog posts about his New Yorker cover erroneously stated, in System 7).

This is not something that you hear a great deal about in our consumer culture, where new is always better and if you want to remain competitive, beautiful, accepted you’ve got to get with the latest and greatest. This is the great lie of the consumer culture – the constant need to upgrade. Mr.Staake did not fall for the fallacy of needing the constant upgrade to keep producing successfully.

Learning new versions of photoshop might make his work easier or faster. But for this artist, it did not really matter. He tried newer versions and simply found them lacking. He knows his tools inside and out and they do what he wants from them. Knowing the quirks of your tools and the things you need to do to work around them is the productive side of not upgrading. Any perceived adavantage of a novel system is negated by the fiddle time – that is the time it takes to get productive again. I have lost years to fiddle time.

There is nothing wrong with the upgrade or learning something new. But, I think it becomes counter productive when you assume that an upgrade is needed to keep producing or to keep competitive. To fully evaluate an upgrade or product, you need to divorce it from the glamour of “newness”. I am always thinking that the newest version will have that much “needed” feature or just be that much whiz bang better. But, what does the new software or hardware deliver that can not be done now ? Is this ability worth the time and monetary cost ? I find that if I do ask this question I am much less likely to decide to upgrade (unless it is free-then what the heck).

I like learning new systems and I like playing with new toys. I think one can get more creative learning novel systems. But, if the goal is to create and one just keeps learning new tools, is that any different than procrastinating by any other method ? Mr. Staake solved the problem by sticking with his original goal – just making his art.

The Price of Oil:Solutions for Children

Yesterday I saw a news clip about G8 Asian powers urging an oil production hike

AOMORI, Japan (AFP) — Eleven nations that guzzle nearly two-thirds of the world’s energy called Sunday for an urgent hike in global oil production as host Japan warned the world could plunge into recession….
In a joint statement, they called for boosts to their own production and asked major oil producers “to increase investment to keep markets well supplied in response to rising world demand”.
The European Union’s energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs warned that high oil prices were a fact to be reckoned with and that major economies needed to come up with alternative energy.

“The era of cheap energy seems to be over and no economy should gamble on a potential return to low prices,” Piebalgs said.

What incredible wisdom-if there is not enough – ask mom and dad for more. The “end of oil” has been a long time in coming. Peak oil production had been predicted, ridiculed and discovered again. But,none of this wisdom reached politicians or car manufacturers. Standards for emissions were relaxed as the new gas guzzlers (SUVs) came into being.

Dead Ducks:The Envirornment and Making Clean Oil

Title: Dead Ducks: The Environment and Making “Clean” Oil

500 hundred ducks landed in a Syncrude toxic tailings pond 75 km north of Fort McMurry. Only 5 were strong enough to even try saving, of those, 3 have survived. The tailings pond contains water that is used to wash the oil from the tar sands. The contaminated water contains a mixture of heavy metals, sands and residual oil. Birds that land on the pond are quickly coated, loose their waterproofing and drown.