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.

Here’s a YouTube of James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute:

Elsewhere he states that the recent IPCC Report does not factor in the possibility of the South Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets melting, which would raise sea levels as much as 15-35 meters over the course of several centuries. There is geologic data to back this projection which results in what Hansen calls “a different planet.”

I found a carbon footprint calculator at An Inconvenient Truth and am horrified to admit that my family currently comes in well above the national average at 12.35 tons of carbon per person. We’ve made a lot of progress over the last two years, moving from a 4000 sq foot heating oil-based house in the country to a 3000 sq foot natural gas-based house 15 minutes closer to work. We also traded in our 20mpg Subaru and 25mpg Nissan pickup for a 33mpg Matrix and 38mpg Civic. Still there is work to do.

I’ve been reading George Monbiot for some time and a large part of his plan is eliminating air travel. I didn’t really believe air travel had that big an impact, but from the calculator I see that this is true. We barely ever fly, just once a year to California to visit my wife’s parents. This year I made an additional flight to Seattle on business. That’s 10 long flights. If I take those flights out of the equation we go from 12.35 to 7.45, a 40% reduction. 7.5 tons is about the national average. This is of course still way too high, but reducing air travel clearly offers the biggest bang for the buck.

The next step would be to cut my driving in half. Most of my mileage is commute. There’s a bus that goes right by my house, and a friend has offered to carpool.

I posted yesterday about the Colloquium over at Rochester Turning as a comment to the post on Brighton Going Green and looked back at the additional comments this morning. Found this excellent story on the Maple Ridge wind farm on Tug Hill in Lewis County.

From this article there appear to be some key learnings: 1) get someone local interested by 2) emphasizing the income from the turbines ($6,000 minimum per in this case). 3) And maybe most importantly, find a good site. Maple Ridge is at the east end of Lake Ontario (which is very flat ) and so gets pretty constant wind. Seems to me similar conditions would prevail south of Buffalo all the way to Erie, PA. Anyone know of activity in that part of the state?

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.