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.

This is what I want to do for a living- create and publish stories about sustainable culture. Here’s a great example.
Geoff Lawton greens a desert in Jordan

Notice that it’s mostly unscripted voiceover with static pictures, simple transitions and occasional, simple animation.

[updated- 2/4/08]

The link above seems to be slow or gone, so here’s the link to the YouTube version of Greening the Desert.

No, not the Safari browser.

A safari to figure out how to edit the theme. Already you can see that I’ve changed the color of the Annoying Million Pixel Deep Gradient Header Thingy and that my copy is black, not gray.

Did that on my lunch break so it seems pretty straightforward. However, if I try to make the AMPDGHT only 72px, it slides up, and the text of my name (also annoying) stays where it is. The style.css file in the theme has about 2000 lines and a lot of duplication, commenting, etc. Guess I’ll have to become a CSS guru on top of all my other jobs.

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Got Emergence by Steven Johnson out of the library, along with an O’Reily book on PHP. So’s I can edit the theme. It’s all circular, see?

I’m pretty fed up with work so I’m looking for new. My dream job is still creating knowledge systems using rich media, especially around sustainability, systems and permaculture. Y suggested that I stay here and work toward that, start moving to something more heart-centered for me. If you want to know about my current job, see some of the movies on the list below.