April 16, 2012. We taped a great conversation in Chico with Joel Salatin, whose Polyface Farm in Virginia actually builds soil, while raising beef, chickens, turkeys for sale. In 2006 we taped Joel’s a full day of presentations (Holy Cows, Hog Heaven). We were totally inspired by his philosophy, his respect for the animals, his innovative farming practice around what nature does. After our taping today, we joined a huge crowd for Joel’s evening performance from his latest book, Folks This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People and a Better World, where he aims his considerable wit and down-home honesty in a scathing critique of the industrial food system. My extensive notes are below. Thanks to Chris Kerston of Chaffin Family Orchards, our tour guide  in “Innovation Bears Fruit for Family Farm” (episode 162), for fitting us into Joel’s tight schedule.Watch or hear our conversation, “The Straight Poop on Sustainable Farming” (episode 211).  Read the rest of this entry »

I put together a quick egg and lemon soup while Robyn photographed snow falling, dusting the evergreen branches. I thought about how local the ingredients were:

Local: eggs, lemon and cilantro, goat meat (Grass Valley and Oroville).

Not local: coconut oil, salt and chicken broth (all west coast of North America, though). In future I’ll make local broth from bones stashed in the freezer — from northern California chicken, beef and goat.

That led me to think of local and indigenous food. The Maidu/Nisenan peoples who once lived in this meadow probably migrated downslope to the Central Valley each winter, packing dried acorns and salmon and venison for the trip. I imagine (but haven’t researched) that in the Valley they’d fish in the Delta, and trap or hunt the sky-darkening flocks of migratory waterfowl and local elk — now mostly gone because civilized humans changed the landscape for agriculture, like building levees which prevent the great flooding of the Valley where the waterfowl wintered over.

The indigenous people used many plants for food, medicine and raw materials. A friend just gave me Living Wild: Gardening, Cooking and Healing with Native Plants of the Sierra Nevada by local authors Alicia Funk of the Living Wild Project and landscape architect Karin Kaufman. This beautifully-designed book shines with loving care and attention to detail. It’s lavishly illustrated with photographs identifying each plant: how to grow it, how it’s used. There are tips on collecting and preserving foods (now I know how to get the wickedly sharp spines off of gooseberries), plus a range of recipes using wild edibles along with familiar ingredients.

The indigenous apothecary is here, too. This contemporary and practical resource preserves native wisdom and entices us to reconnect with the natural beauty and bounty of this unique place on the planet.

So perhaps in fall I’ll make “chocolate marzipan with oak nuts” using freshly-ground acorns. Some ingredients local, some not, just like today’s snowy day soup.

After two months in “civilization”, our return to Lone Bobcat Woods was welcomed by a delicious snowstorm and cold temperatures which kept the ground white for most of a week, here where snow usually melts off the following day. We gave thanks for fossil fuel as the portable propane tanks kept our “little house” cozy, and thanks for several sunny days generating electricity from the solar panels and stored in the “house” batteries.

We spent the two months parked in Janaia’s mom’s driveway in Tracy, California in the San Joaquin valley east of the Bay Area. We easily biked to shopping and errands several times a week. We enjoyed generous family time, including watching Donaldson family home movies from the 1950s of our water-skiing family. We gleaned pomegranates and grapefruits, while eyeing well-laden lemon, orange and persimmon trees planted by early twentieth-century homeowners in the older section of town.

After a pretty stressful fall, we relaxed into luxuries and amenities not available at the edge of the wild…unlimited electricity and internet. We discovered internet radio stations full of beautiful interesting music, and treated ourselves to a small battery-operated Bose speaker whose sound depth and clarity astound us. We relished quite a few internet movies.

And with that unlimited electricity, we dug into editing the most complex show we’ve produced, Sail Power Reborn - Transporting Local Goods by Boat, episode 208. It stretched our process and our time (about 100 hours between us). We’re proud of the results, but it confirmed our preference for the lighter-production bi-weekly conversations. They let us highlight so many more leading-edge people and projects.

But the suburbs were so, well, domesticated — like the semi-feral cats lined up for the five pm feeding by the “cat woman” next door. We were assaulted by the sounds of suburbia: garbage trucks at 5 am, suburban assault vehicles (SUVs) roaring down the street at all hours, sirens, the blast of mowers and leaf-blowers (may they be forever banned!).

And we missed the wild. After catching our breath in the “comforts and elegancies” of which civilization offers so many, we were drawn back to Lone Bobcat Woods. Syncopated Raven greeted us in his/her castanet-like click language, and a pond full of frogs heralded February. Now we’ll return to our regular Peak Moment TV production schedule, and finish homestead projects before turning towards the next Peak Moment tour in summer.

Dear Derrick,

Over the past several months, I’ve read your book Dreams not just once, but twice. It has been more than an intellectual foray. It has been an experiencing, a journeying, a nightly rendezvous for communications from “other sides.” I didn’t want theseopportunities, these openings, to stop.

Each evening I’d climb into our RV’s cabover bed to read before sleeping. Partway through your book, I began reading in parallel Timothy Scott Bennett’s new novel All Of the Above. I’d read some Derrick, then some Timothy. It felt like my tiny space capsule of a bedroom became a container in which those on other sides communicated through both books.  On several goose-bumpish nights, questions you posed were promptly answered by Timothy’s characters — some of whom are aliens, definitely from other sides.

I especially wanted to read Dreams because dreams have long been important in my personal journey. I hadn’t quite thought of them as communications from other beings (rather than just reflective of my inner workings), but I’m trying on your perspective and rather like it.

You got me thinking about my experiences with beings on other sides, even if I didn’t think of them that way. Sometimes while I’m creating art I feel supportive presences whom I call “angels.” Robyn and I feel we’ve entered into a relationship with the local “rain goddess” during our two decades living in the Sierra foothills. She has a trickster-like sense of humor, preferring to sprinkle when clothes are on the line outdoors or the firewood is uncovered.

I like that this isn’t theoretical: “I’m writing [this book] because I don’t believe in other sides, and I don’t trust other people’s beliefs in other sides. I experience other sides, and I do trust (some) people’s conveyed experiences.”

Dreams is a courageous and vulnerable expansion on your previous writings. You take us along in some of your personal encounters with other sides while you wrote the book. We get a sense of your muse, who insisted this long-considered bookbe written now, not later (thank her for me). You introduced your “gambling god”, who may or may not influence your winning small wagers more frequently when you are writing than when you’re not. (Maybe the “gambling god” gets progress reports from your writing muse?)

You speak of many on other sides: the ancestors, animal spirits, plant spirits, spirits of place and of natural phenomena. Whoever responds to our questions of the tarot or I Ching or tea leaves. Whoever sends us strong intuitions. Perhaps othersare the “still small voice,” crop circle makers, extraterrestrials, angels, daemons and demons (I like your term “those who do not wish us well”). I expect the list could be quite long, with so many who’ve been expelled by the highly rational, “scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic, managerial” culture which “devalues and dismisses dreams and, more broadly, connections to other sides.”

Devalued and ignored because they can’t be controlled and manipulated, as the dominant culture does with everything it can get its hands on. You dissect neuroscientist Sam Harris’s assertions about science, including his notion that through science and technology, this culture can make everything on the planet “jump through hoops on command, and … predict what willhappen and when.”

Dreams is not only a journal of experiences. You continue your legacy of deconstructing the premises and practices of this culture that is “murdering the planet.” And it’s fed by your deep love and awe for the “other [natural] communities buzzing with vastly different intelligences, vastly different experiences, vastly different relationships, vastly different voices.”

I was fascinated by research indicating that

“if you deprive a person of both dreams and food, the person will die sooner from a lack of dreams than food. As necessities of life, dreams come third, after air and water.” I valued numerous insights from indigenous cultures, like Iroquois dream theory in which “the dream represented the only divinity.”

Barbara Alice Mann’s speech contrasting Iroquoian Mother-Right with western patriarchy inspires me to read more from her.

My favorite is Dr. Felicitas Goodman’s conclusion after studying five hundred small societies that

“non-consensual reality—that is, the experience of things and events not necessarily perceived by others at the same time and place—is accepted as normal. indeed it is those individuals who are not capable of altering their consciousness to perceive an alternate reality who are considered psychologically defective.”

You inspire me to actively engage in communicating respectfully and humbly with those on other sides, even though many of the traditions for doing so have been destroyed or abandoned. I think it’s a skill worth developing to navigate industrial civilization’s collapse. Those on other sides may provide us an edge, so we’re at the right place at the right time doing what’s needed. Thank you for modeling such a journey and, as you always do, enlarging the space well beyond the narrow blinders of the dominant culture.

[Purchase book from Derrick. For more on Derrick’s work, visit derrickjensen.org.

On Janaia’s Journal: Notes from Derrick Jensen’s Earth at Risk 2011 conference. Above collage by Janaia.]

These pictures complement “Suburban Permaculture with Janet Barocco and Richard Heinberg” taped in May 2007 (episode 100). Photo 1 is the back yard before they began work. Photos 2 and 3 are the backyard as of May 2007 (photo taken from the roof, showing solar panels). Photos 4 and 5 are of the front yard complete with fruit trees and bushes. Photo 6 is a rainwater catchment barrel. Photo 7 are sun ovens baking a delicious casserole, with the solar clothes dryer behind. Photo 8 is a hanging solar dehydrator.    

All quiet on the Peak Moment front during this seasonal inward-going time. We’ve taken an extended holiday to visit family and take advantage of unlimited electricity and internet while churning and upgrading internet, email, phones, and getting an iPad online (an investment for our off-grid energy budget). We’re also editing the next program (far more time- and energy-consuming than usual) while taking a welcome break from infrastructure projects at Lone Bobcat Woods.

When our friends at Undriving™ sent this 26 second NASA video, we stopped and watched it. And watched it again, mesmerized to see global temperature changes since the 1880s. What do YOU see happening, especially since around the year 2000? Hint: hockey stick.

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“YERT - Your Environmental Road Trip” is an entire environmental film festival wrapped up in an absorbing and entertaining, fast-paced two-hour documentary that’s both personal and planetary. Friends Mark, Julie and Ben pack themselves into a Prius to tour all 50 states in 52 weeks while aiming for near-zero garbage.

We view environmental problems like Appalachian mountaintop removal, Alaska permafrost melt, and post-Katrina wetlands habitat destruction, southwest water depletion.

We meet problem-solvers like Wes Jackson restoring perennial prairie grasses, farmer Joel Salatin cycling animals through pasture to build soil, and Will Allen growing plants and fish to feed the city.

We meet creative people building houses inside caves, turning compost into worm poop then packaged in recycled plastic, and developing solar panels roadways to replace asphalt in the post-petroleum era.

These twenty-somethings intersperse a lot of playfulness amidst the serious talk and fascinating tours. Silly, funny, gross, wacky. Ben pushes the Prius down the road on “National Bike and Walk Day.” In their five-day Iowa Corn Challenge, Mark chows down only fresh corn while Ben scarfs packaged foods containing corn products (all that high-fructose corn syrup, yuck!).

The trio lets us glimpse real life on the road, up close and personal: moments of elation, crabbiness, joy. Julie discovers she’s pregnant early on and bails from the vegetarian diet. I won’t spoil the ending, but you’ll find out whether it’s a girl or boy, and just how much garbage the trio accumulated.

This well-produced overview of important environmental issues and sampler of creative responses is optimistic without being pollyanna. We loved it. Smiles amid the serious stuff and the inspiring innovators. A chance to meet some of our heros and watch young people learn lots. We hope to follow in their footsteps and bring Peak Moment TV viewers longer chats with many of YERT’s interviewees.

With five film festival awards (and counting), YERT is an inspiring one-movie environmental film festival for EveryTown. Go to yert.com to watch the trailer and other clips, buy a DVD, find a screening, sign up for their e-mail list. Watch a short video with Mark and Ben at TEDx with innovations featured in their film.

We traveled to Berkeley on November 13, 2011 for Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet in which author Derrick Jensen interviews his invited guests. Below are some quotes and notes from the day. Derrick opened with:

“The only miracle we’re going to get is us. Gather your heart and join up with every living being [to fight back against destruction of the planet.]“

Lierre Keith is co-author with Derrick and Aric McBay of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. She spoke about the problem with civilization: its dependence on agriculture, which destroys topsoil the world over, and signaled the start of militarism (to protect stored food and to steal neighboring lands for expanding populations). Lierre points to the need to build a culture of resistance to industrial civilization, based not on individual lifestyle change but change at the societal level. Videos of her two full-length presentations are on YouTube’s DeepGreenResistance channel.

Political cartoonist Stephanie MacMillan’s Code Green cartoons graced the program and her presentation.  “The only weekly editorial cartoon focused exclusively on the environmental emergency,” they poke at industrial civilization’s hypocrisy and short-sightedness, and its assault on nature with dark and delicious humor.

Aric McBay, co-author of Deep Green Resistance, presented information on creating security culture in both aboveground and belowground groups. He pointed out that in resistance movements, only 2% of the people carry arms. The majority of people are needed to raise awareness, and to provide material and psychological support to those at the front lines - to become a culture that supports resistance. He showed examples of resistance movements that have in the past, and are now, making a difference. Videos of Aric’s two full-length presentations are on YouTube’s DeepGreenResistance channel.

Thomas Linzey is a public interest attorney at Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). He’s doing gutsy groundbreaking work with local communities to pass ordinances preventing corporations from trashing their communities: anti-fracking, anti-big box stores, anti-factory farms. Since we taped his local talk “Reclaiming Democracy: How Communities are Saying “NO” to Corporate Rights” in 2008, he has further pushed the edges in those ordinances: besides placing the rights of communities and nature above those of  corporations, recent ordinances are standing up to states.

We first “met” Waziyatawin in the documentary END:CIV: Resist or Die (entire film is online). A Dakota writer, educator and activist, “Waz” spoke about her culture’s resistance to colonization by westerners, removal from their ancestral lands, and destruction of their cultures. She called for indigenous people to resume their role as first defenders of the land — with support from those in the non-indigenous community. It begins, she said, by decolonizing the mind. This quote spoke to me:

“The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land?”  —Vine DeLoria, Jr. from God is Red: A Native View of Religion.

Arundhati Roy read from two recent books Broken Republic: Three Essays and Walking with the Comrades about visiting forbidding forests in Central India, where tribespeople are taking up arms to protect their people and region from state-backed exploiters. Labeled by the Indian mainstream as “Maoist guerillas,” these indigenous groups are fighting corporate interests like multinational mining companies who are cannibalizing India’s natural resources, supported by Indian government agreements and military.

Derrick closed with this reminder:

“The task of an activist is not to navigate the systems of authority with as much integrity as possible, but to take down those systems.”

Read more about Deep Green Resistance in Beyond Protest: Saving our planet with ‘Deep Green Resistance’ by Rady Ananda of Food Freedom.

“So while DGR [Deep Green Resistance] is about fighting back, in the end this movement is about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love.” — Derrick Jensen

It’s been all quiet on the writing front while Robyn and I have set up our winter encampment site for our “Little House” (motorhome). Enormous ancestral black oaks ring Bearhaven meadow, whispering of the Maidu people whose acorn grinding rocks are not far from the year-round spring. Red-shouldered hawk has been a frequent caller, along with a band of curious ravens frequently circling to check us working on outdoors projects.

For electricity, we are supplementing the RV’s generator and her rooftop solar panels with twelve 20-year-old solar panels from our house’s original set. Robyn installed equipment in the RV to optimize both solar systems (contact us if you want details).

Not finding what we wanted commercially, we designed and built lightweight, portable racks to hold the panels off the ground and at angles adjustable for different seasons.

Such a fun project, just about right for the level of our construction skills and portable tools. We started with drawings and a small foamcore model to think through our design.

Each three-panel rack is made of 2×2’s and held together by bolts. (I always envied my boy cousins’ lincoln logs and erector sets back in 1950s era of gender-specific toys. Now that longing is fulfilled.)

Some shovel work to level the ground for each rack, a long wire run from panels to the RV, voila! Extra juice!
We’re warm and cozy now as the cold winter rains descend upon us, grateful for our sweet corner in this wild country, and welcoming an introspective season.

Chris Martenson, author of The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future of Our Energy, Economy and the Environment book and video course, just gave two engaging presentations to our community. I wanted an update from our Peak Moment Conversation in early 2010 The Crash Course - Exponential Growth Meets Reality (episode 166), so we taped a conversation, “Oil Puts the Squeeze on the Economy” (episode 204).Chris said that what he predicted back then is exactly what we’re seeing now: slowing economy, high unemployment, debts teetering, possible sovereign debt defaults across Europe, record people on food stamps.You have to include energy in the economy story, Chris said. “The economy only functions if and only if you have energy.” And not just energy, but liquid fuels. Not only are oil supplies getting tighter, but it’s costing more energy to get energy (deepwater drilling, tar sands, etc.). An economy dependent on growth is getting squeezed by energy constraints.Chris’s first presentation “Our Predicament” is a capsule version of his “Crash Course” (videos free at chrismartenson.com). Chris is a genius at drawing connections between the three E’s of Energy, Economy and the Environment, showing why the next twenty years will be utterly unlike the last twenty. Bottom line: we’re at the end of growth. Basically, just as population and consumption are exploding exponentially, we’re seeing constraints in oil production and natural resources like minerals, water and topsoil. He calls for a vision of a world worth inheriting, noting the vacuum at the national level, but being tried out in various flavors in communities like ours.Chris’s second presentation “Investing in the Future” offers his beliefs about what’s ahead of us. Here are some highlights:

• The rules will be changed.
• The markets are rigged.
• Events will unfold very rapidly. Black Swans (the impossible) will become the rule (like the Fukushima nuclear and Deepwater Horizon catastrophes)
• Energy will consume a growing proportion of our disposable income, with food prices mirroring oil prices. Peak oil will stifle growth and starve the economy slowly but surely.
• Simplicity is coming. Complex systems like our civilization require more energy, and energy is declining.
• Things will happen from the outside in. Want to see what’s coming? Look at the margins, like marginalized populations or countries at the periphery (like Greece right now).
• There’s nearly universal insolvency, and he predicts debts will not be paid back.
• Anything that is unsustainable will someday stop… like the fiscal situation in our country — a U.S. fiscal crisis is highly likely.

Chris calls himself a “thrivalist.” He encouraged us to get our own house in order well before the cultural tipping point, advising people to invest in energy efficiency in their homes, long-term food storage, buying items your family will need over the next few years. Personally, he’s holding physical gold and silver as alternate currencies.Chris’s website offers a wealth of resources [http://www.chrismartenson.com]. (Photo thanks to Jason Wiskerchen).