Alpaca

While in California at the beginning of the year we also stopped by a neighboring alpaca farm.  These creatures are absolutely fantastic; animated eyes and individual personalities will make your heart melt.

It was very gracious of Sandra and Dave to give us a show of their property.  Thanks!

The alpaca produces a high quality fiber that can keep us very cozy and warm in the cooler months.  Their manure is also a very prized compost.  I am thinking hooded alpaca vests would do great in North Florida. 

Construction Slideshows

Thanks to Mary, the innkeeper at The Farm, for creating the beautiful slideshows.  As a tool for education, videos and pictures do great!

Permaculture 101... Herb Spiral (above)

Bamboo Chicken Tractor (above) acts as a mobile pest control and fertilization unit.

Here we are displaying the garden at the Ecovillage Training Center about two and a half years ago. A lot has happened since then.

Tipping

I'm really enjoying this guy's talks.  He seems to be very grounded and extremely logical.  His well thought out rationale resonates in terms of energy conservation.  Don Tipping.

Jargon

 Maybe It’s Time We Get Back To the Taproot

A lot of the barriers we come across today seem to be our language barriers, more specifically our professional jargon.  Take for instance the term sustainability.  When most of us think sustainability we are probably picturing solar panels, wind turbines, greenhouses, and electric cars.  Now this is all well and good as this type of movement is in the right direction, but words that are synonymous with sustainable are as follows: endurable, tolerable, and maintainable.  The problem with this kind of speaking is that we can’t endure, tolerate, or maintain our infrastructure anymore.  It is unsustainable in its entirety; as a whole it must be re-designed and retrofitted in extremely creative ways.  So in the “green business,” we need to facilitate the evolution of a name change in our industry.  An expression that I think better capsulizes what we are looking for is regeneration, a word that is being used on a regular by people in the so-called “sustainable” industry.   Reclaim, recreate, and reeducate are words that are synonymous with regeneration.  These terms better exemplify what we are trying to do, which is allowing a space for a new way of life to enter, to emerge.    

In order for this to happen, we have to let go of the things that we selfishly cherish for the short term but know aren’t going to do us any good in the future.  Now what these things are seem to still be up for debate amongst many groups.  I think if we get rid of our largest moral hazard first then all the other connections will link up from there.  I also think we can all agree that our most alluring bait that all us humans face is a lavish and endless amount of money.  The ones who are chasing nothing but the dollar signs are doing so at all costs.  When I imagine what the dollar was supposed to buy I go back to the 1950’s and 60’s even though I wasn’t even born yet.  The American Dream was being sold everywhere and most everyone was all in.  The white picket fence, a two-story house on the outside of town, a sporty car in the driveway, and a freshly manicured lawn in front was the investment.  In its purity the idea was revolutionary for community all over the world, but as time went on something went astray.  Our national debt reflects our unhappiness with our collective venture.  We have lost sight of our dream, and thus it is turning into an American Nightmare. 

It’s time we get back to the taproot!  Most all of us are familiar with the term grass roots, and we associate this word with community, spontaneous organization, and locality.  All of those things are heavily welcomed, but we need to decipher the jargon that is keeping us from transcending our cultural border.  It is a struggle within each and every one of us to move on and welcome the new world.  It’s time we regroup and regenerate. 

The lawn was a symbol of wealth and in its infancy could only be maintained by the richest of the rich with indentured servants.  Everywhere we go we see lawns.  It’s become quite complex, in fact one could say that it has become its own complex.  Prisoners maintain our roadsides and children travel for miles in the minivan in order to arrive at a recreational complex where they can participate in structured games that have very strict rules and guidelines.  The energy that goes into sustaining these public fields remains immense.  Rising gas costs, shrinking freshwater supply, and the time it takes in labor to upkeep these lawns cannot be maintained forever.  Not to mention, most of all, is that lawns suppress nature and deplete land fertility.  The Fertile Crescent at one time was extremely lush, but human developments accompanied with destructive agriculture and infrastructure turned the place into a desert.  Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we are doing here.  Old growth forests are begging to thrive again, and will win out in the long run.  Maybe getting back to the grass roots isn’t such a good idea anymore.

The taproot is the main root of a plant that primarily grows straight down in order to get the deepest amount of hydration and minerals.  A more regenerative lifestyle would be one that is rooted deeply into the surrounding environment.  In laymen’s terms we need an environment that is surrounded with more trees, more taproots.  With all that lawn space available maybe we could use it more efficiently as a food forest, a kind of personal Garden of Eden.  Maybe instead of having twenty sport fields all next to each other, we could have one communal field in all neighborhoods that all children could access and participate in random gatherings with other kids without having to pay an umpire or a referee.  Maybe if we just tweaked our dream a little we would dismantle the temptations that are perverting it.  Could it really be as simple as growing food in the spaces that we had pictured as lawns and creating easy to get to communal fields? I think so, and I feel it’s the place to start, the right direction.

So in order to let go of the American Dream that once was we need to let go of the dollar, move on and create new visions.  Just by altering the jargon we use in the green industry a tad we can better illuminate our overall objective.  If we want to sustain the system as is then we need to get back to the grass roots, but if we truly want to regenerate a new system, then we need to get back to the taproots! 

Solar Energy

This kid noticed the pattern in the trees and applied it to his design, very intelligent!

The spiral can be found all throughout nature, and we mimic these patterns in our personal movements daily.  Like our breath we funnel energy in and out.  Below is a low budget commercial advertising solar energy in which I was in.  I would say I was more of a paid apprentice than a "solar expert," but hey that could be up for debate.

You built it!

Give credit where credit is due... ALL OF IT!

"Let's venture out..., We need to downsize..., Let's cut costs!"  No argument here...

The signs are everywhere.

Apalachee

A wise teacher once told me that people name their streets after the trees they cut down... Elm Street, Oak Lane, etc.

The Apalachee were the indigenous people of the region.  This street leads right up to the Florida capitol in Tallahassee.

I still find it hard to believe that no one noticed that this was going to look like a huge penis and testicles... accident???

Bay County Anti-Patterns

An anti-pattern is something that does things wrong, yet is attractive for some reason (profitable or easy in the short term, but dysfunctional, wasteful of resources, unsustainable, unhealthy in the long term). It also keeps re-appearing.

Large scale construction that happened right before, during, or after the real estate bubble should be viewed with a skeptics eye since inflation skews the actual direction of the market and causes poor investments.  The building above (FSU Panama City Campus) exemplifies an anti-pattern.

Deer Point Elementary looks more like a jail than a school, and the surrounding fence is not even in the picture.  I will eventually take a picture on my own that truly captures its punitive facade.

Newly built government buildings make the people entering them feel insignificant.  The Bay County Library and Administration Center look more like the Parthenon.  

Guantanamo of Panama City Beach... The sheer enormity of this building eclipses everything around it.  The design of this condo is all about fitting as many tourists as possible inside of it.  Atrocious!

Above displays the Panama City Beach sprawl right on top of our most precious asset.

Pier Park brought to you by easy credit!  AMERICAN RETAIL...

...currently in distress, I mean progress.  Bought to you by St. Joe Company, Great Northwest, Gulf Power, and Great American Contractors.

Manna Teepee

Below shows a design for a flyer template.

Manna Teepee

Local Movement

While I was working at the Zen Garden some one recorded a short clip of the place.  In the video Joe walks the property and gives a brief explanation on where he sees the place going.

Below is a communal concept of Longleaf preserve north of Grayton Beach.  As of yet the project has been postponed from what I think is due to the banks forestalling on the loans.  I worked on the gardens at both Longleaf and in Ebro.  A lot of soil building took place.

Farmer D acted as the consultant on the farm.

GOT LAND?

The T-Shirt in the beginning of this piece gets the point across. "Got land?" The indigenous in many regions of the world were forced off their land, their livelihoods. As Americans settle in certain areas, a neo-indigenous population is emerging, many of whom are descendants of Anglo-Saxons. But as the natives always said, "You can not kill our spirit. It will remain in the trees and waters around you and shall reappear once again in your children." Just like a clear-cut parcel, it wants to immediately go back to a lush old growth forest.

Tribal roots want to emerge again in new ways, below is an example of a modern family attempting just that.

 

Layers

In this image there are seven layers listed:

The layers have been updated: 1)Overstory 2)Understory 3)Bush 4)Herb 5)Ground Cover 6)Roots 7)Decomposers 8)Climbers

Brief

INFLATION STEALS, REGENERATION HEALS

I've been toiling for some time now with a slogan that could summarize the problem and solution.
This morning while listening to Andrew Faust on the C-Realm I came up with this: "Inflation Steals, Regeneration Heals." My thinking is that our monetary policy is at the forefront of a toxic and pollutant infrastructure, and permaculture is at the forefront of creating a healthy and thriving infrastructure.  Maybe it'll catch on, may be it won't.