Green Your Head

Why Green Your Head?

Why green your head? Because the first requirement of sustainability is to change how we think. We must start by abandoning our fantasies of unlimited growth. Technology can help us, but only if we are conscious of technology's limits. Great life, like great art, only flourishes within constraints. 

Saudi Prince Dictates Fox News Anti-Green Energy Stance

This is a real bombshell. Joseph Romm talks on Climate Progress today about a Saudi Prince owning a large stake in Fox News and correlating that with Fox News attacks on green energy - green energy being the biggest threat to Saudi oil interests. Faux News is also Faux Patriotism. I would even call it treason. Here's the quote:

Although little is known about the extent to which Prince Alwaleed weighs in on Fox content, Fox News dedicates much of its coverage to attacking clean energy legislation that would lead to American energy independence. If clean energy legislation dies, America will continue to be a foreign oil-dependent nation, which would benefit Prince Alwaleed and other members of the Saudi royal family.

Check this out - a bucket of biochar I had sitting in the basement just sprouted two little plants. I don't know what they are, but they seem quite happy growing in this medium of 100% charcoal that had been soaked in urine, then drained and stored in the bucket.

Backyard Biochar Kiln Instructions

I made up this sheet of instructions for the kiln for the Illinois Valley Farm and Garden Festival last fall. Just now getting them up here. I hope they are helpful.Download Backyard_biochar_kiln_instructions

Heritage High School builds the biochar kiln

We got a fun letter the other day at IBI from a teacher, Darlyn Wendlandt, who had her students build and fire the biochar kiln that I have documented on this site. It was hard for me to get all the materials together and build the kiln, so I am very impressed at what these high school students have done. The welding class did the welding work.

Here is a video of the test firing. And the cookie-eating!

21st century farmer comes full circle

This summer we grew a crop of oats - just a few rows as cover crop between our vegetable beds. Today I stripped the seed from the straw so I could use the oat straw for tea and save the seeds for next year's oats. I store the seed in the basement and need to protect if from the mice. I thought it would be ideal to have a sack that I could hang from the ceiling. But where to find a cloth sack?

An old pillow case! I have several that are stained or frayed or just don't match the sheets I use. A linen pillow case to store my grain is really coming full circle from the days when thrifty housewives used coarse flour sacks to make all kinds of household linens and even clothing.

Where would I even find a sack for flour or grain these days? I'd have to make it myself, or even better, pick up a pile of old pillow cases at the Goodwill.

Report: Contraception cheapest way to combat climate change

 A team of British researchers found that it's almost five times cheaper to reduce carbon emissions by encouraging contraception and family planning than it is to invest in green technologies. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfmoms/detail?blogid=46&entry_id=47265

Yep. Just what I've been saying for years. Maybe we can use carbon credits to buy condoms and pills -- or develop new, better methods.

My presentation at North American Biochar conference

The North American Biochar conference was held in Boulder, Colorado from Aug 9-12. A very productive couple of days - it was wonderful to connect names from the far flung biochar community to actual faces!

Below is my contribution to the conference. Mostly it's a report on discussions at the Josephine County Renewable Energy Task Force about biochar.

Backyard Biochar

We have been having a lot of fun making charcoal. Checkout my slideshow:

re-re-thinking nukes

James Hansen got me to re-think nuclear power in light of climate change. I read up on Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and corresponded with some of the enthusiasts. What they said sounded good - but doesn't it always? The most appealing selling point for these reactors was the possibility of using them to help reduce the lethality of existing nuclear waste. Luckily, Energy Bulletin pointed me to this article by Amory Lovins that delves into the topic from a different, but informed view. Still, I don't know which is worse for the planet, nuclear catastrophe or the carbon bomb that could kill the oceans for millions of years.

"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
By Amory B. Lovins

IFRs are often claimed to “burn up nuclear waste” and make its “time of concern . . . less than 500 years” rather than 10,000–100,000 years or more. That’s wrong: most of the radioactivity comes from fission products, including very-long-lived isotopes like iodine-129 and technicium-99, and their mix is broadly similar in any nuclear fuel cycle. IFRs’ wastes may contain less transuranics, but at prohibitive cost and with worse occupational exposures, routine releases, accident and terrorism risks, proliferation, and disposal needs for intermediate- and low-level wastes.

Malthus and Vice

It's taken me awhile to get this up, but here's my latest published piece:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/135518/have_we_hit_the_limits_of_human_population/

It's also at Energy Bulletin under my original title, Malthus and Vice.

Have We Hit the Limits of Human Population?

By Kelpie Wilson, AlterNet. Posted April 10, 2009.

Without growth, there would be no economy as we know it. But modern culture, by and large, doesn't see that it can exist only in the medium of ceaseless growth and expansion, because a fish doesn't see the water it swims in. Only today, in the recent, breathless moments of the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, do we begin to perceive the waters around us.

Slowly, we are coming to realize that the last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed the final reckoning ever forward in time, until the future is now. Slowly, we are coming to realize that Thomas Malthus was right.

It was the warrior cry of the radical environmental movement in the 1980s: "Malthus Was Right!" But Malthus, a mumbling country parson with intellectual ambitions, had been transmogrified by capitalists and communists alike into a fearsome bogeyman possessed of "dangerous" ideas.

Environmentalists who invoked his name were invariably corrected by their progressive friends, who told them that excess consumption by the rich was the problem, not the reproductive profligacy of the poor.

Yet, as we drive deeper into the greenhouse world, with its crazy weather, water shortages and general degradation, more and more of us from across the political spectrum are wondering how on earth we will feed the 3 billion more people projected to arrive by 2050, or even the 6 billion or so we already have.