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Most environmentally aware Americans would love a personal organic vegetable garden, but how many people actually have the time to cultivate one?. Thanks to a San Francisco-based company called MyFarm, Bay Area denizens can pay a weekly fee to have a backyard garden designed and maintained by professionals.
Customers choose between a Personal Installation (just enough food for themselves) and an Owner Member Installation (enough food for MyFarm to sell to other members). Owner members receive a discounted membership.
The company leaves no gardening detail ignored. Each garden is tested for toxins and receives a drip irrigation system to automatically water the vegetables. MyFarm even maintains a compost pile and takes care of all pesky weeds that arise.
Oregon: the land of volcanoes, beautiful coastline, forests…and trash? Unfortunately, that might be the case if Hawaii gets its way.
According to the Portland Tribune, Honolulu is quickly running out of space in their main landfill. In order to prevent overflow, the city has hatched a plan to send ships full of garbage up the Columbia River in Oregon, where trash will be put on trucks and trains headed to the Columbia Ridge Landfill.
It may seem strange that Hawaii wants to send its trash to a state known for being so environmentally conscious. Interestingly enough, that’s exactly why they want to do it.
Sure, it’s easy enough for one person to attempt energy self-sufficiency: put a solar panel on your roof, run your car on biodiesel, and you’re halfway there. But how easy is it for an entire town to become self-sufficient?
That’s the question that Reynolds, Indiana has been trying to answer for the past 3 years. In 2005, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels declared the town to be BioTown, USA—a model of energy self-sufficiency for the state.
The town was chosen mainly because of its small size (pop. 547), excellent rail and road access, and proximity to organic waste (within 15 miles of more than 150,000 hogs). According to the BioTown website, the finished project will showcase efficient methods of converting biomass into energy, use bioenergy to fuel homes and businesses throughout the town, promote alternative energies across the United States, and show that agricultural energy is safe, reliable, and consistent.
These are certainly some lofty goals for such a tiny town, and progress on the project has been slow. In fact, external signs of energy independence in Reynolds have been few and far between. So where does the project stand now?
Biodiesel lovers of San Francisco, rejoice. Starting next Winter, you might not have as much competition when you scour the back alleys behind Chinese restaurants trying to get your car fuel fix.
That’s because the city has just received a $1 million dollar grant from the California Energy Commission to build San Francisco’s first grease-to-biodiesel production facility.
Instead of using the more popular “yellow grease”—fryer oil— the production facility will make use of “brown grease”, or pan scrapings and oil residue trapped in grease interceptors under a restaurant sink. In the past, brown grease has been discarded at sewage plants. Now San Francisco wants to make use of the more than 2.5 million gallons of the stuff that’s in the city.
Kids today. You let them play with a LEGO MINDSTORMS kit and what do they do? They build a solar powered AC outlet and 12 volt DC power port. At least, that’s what some enterprising students at New York City’s Little Red School House and Elizabeth Irwin High School did in the courtyard of the Brooklyn Ecoeatery restaurant.
The Off-Grid Outlet has a tracking mechanism to make sure that it always points towards the sun. The outlet’s users can control the solar panel using switches, and can watch the relationship between the panel and the energy captured via embedded displays.
So who will actually get to make use of the roving outlet?
Last week, I posted about the tremendous relocalization efforts of the small town of Willits, CA. Earlier today, I had the chance to speak with Liam UiCearbhaill, the Operational Facilitator for Willits Economic LocaLization (WELL), the Willits relocalization group, about a variety of topics, including WELL’s community involvement, current projects, and future plans.
What is your specific role in the WELL organization?
My title is operational facilitator. I perform a number of functions, but the real focus is to help things happen. We try really hard not to be too possessive of any project. We look around the town and see who is already doing something good in a particular area and find ways to help them, and we look where nobody is doing anything and try to find ways to get things started. By using that approach, a lot has happened. There’s an alliance of groups that gets together to do grant writing, for instance.
How did you get involved in WELL?
I moved to this area about 5 years ago because I could perceive there was a problem [environmentally]. As I looked around, this looked like the most survivable area for this stuff I saw coming down the pipe. I was thinking of the environmental catastrophes I saw coming down the horizon, not necessarily peak oil. When WELL started up, it was pretty obvious to me that this was something I needed to get involved in.
The Transition Town initiative has been a fast-growing movement in the United Kingdom for over a year, with more than 50 towns currently signed up. Now the United States is catching up as Boulder, CO becomes the first official transition town in the country.
The Transition Town movement started in Kinsale, Ireland when permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins started thinking about the possibilities of applying permaculture theories to entire towns, instead of just to individual plots of land. Hopkins’ Energy Descent Action Plan provides a blueprint for towns hoping to transition to a more sustainable way of life.
Boulder County Going Local is an ambitious effort to prepare the area for the ramifications of climate change and peak oil.
A few summers ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time in Willits, CA. This small, progressive town in Mendocino County harbors one of the best relocalization efforts in the United States, if not the world.
“Relocalization” is the idea that communities should produce food, energy, and goods locally. The movement developed in response to peak oil and climate change concerns, and may just be our best hope for surviving our current environmental crises.
The Willits Economic Localization organization (WELL) was founded in 2004 by a concerned local climate scientist named Jason Bradford. While the organization started out by showing the peak oil film “The End of Suburbia” (an excellent film that I highly recommend), it soon expanded its efforts into a number of areas, including business, education, energy, food, and health.
Despite the small size of Willits, WELL has made incredible strides towards its goals in the past few years.
As a recent transplant to the Bay Area, I have noticed that San Francisco and Los Angeles seem worlds away from each other both physically and culturally. Now that a plan to build a high-speed train linking the two cities is moving forward, that distance will become a whole lot smaller—physically, at least.
In case you aren’t familiar with the plan, here are the basics: The California High Speed Rail Authority is in the beginning stages of building an 800-mile long high-speed train system that will serve every major city in California. The trains will be capable of speeds up to 220 miles per hour, and the trip time from San Francisco to L.A. will be only 2 hours and 40 minutes. That’s comparable to the time it takes to travel between the two locations on a plane.
By providing a viable alternative to energy-intensive car and air travel, the rail system will reduce carbon emissions up to 17.6 billion pounds per year and reduce oil consumption up to 22 million barrels per year.
Pretty amazing, right? And now the California High-Speed Rail Authority is going to get a boost with new member Thomas Umberg.
Worldchanging magazine has announced that it is selling the ultimate environmentalist gift for high school and college graduates: carbon offsets for life.
This means that for every donation above a certain level, Worldchanging will buy carbon offsets in the name of the graduate.
But the price of this gift is not cheap—the minimum donation is $6,000 to offset a graduate’s childhood, and the max is $25,000 to offset an entire career. It also raises an important question: what will such a present do to the mindset of the recipient?
