The core message in all of this is: We are at a point in time when even the best of good needs to be a little better. We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to future generations who will salute us for veering off the path of slow and creeping decline. They will laud us for digging deeply within ourselves to climb the hill of recovery and betterment. I look forward to working with my new neighbors in a pursuit of better.
[Bob Ferris is the new Executive Director of RE Sources for Sustainable Communites]

21st Century Homesteading: More Families Seek Simple, Sefl-Sufficient, Low Impact Lifestyles by Virginia Smith, The Bellingham Herald

A New Problem with Commercial Compost by Walter Haugen, Transition Whatcom

For those of you who use Smits and Growsource compost, here is some pertinent info from the Whatcom Farmers Listserv. This kind of problem is one of the reasons I don't buy commercial compost anymore (besides the high relative cost). As with buying food, there are four levels of risk in soil amendments (from lowest to highest risk) - 1) make your own compost, 2) buy from a local producer that you trust, 3) use compost that has been tested by a 3rd-party regulatory agency, 4) just buy what's available and don't think about it.

Sent 6/25/10 to the Whatcom Farmers email list from Colleen Burrows:

"In 2009 and 2010, we have seen incidences of damage caused to tomato, pepper, sunflower, beans and other plants most likely caused by aminopyralid residues in dairy derived organic soil amendments. We
are trying to understand the extent of this complex issue and are working with involved parties to determine the best actions to move forward.

WSU Whatcom County Extension has developed a factsheet on this issue. It can be found at: http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/aminopyralid/. New information will be updated to this site as more is understood. If you have any questions, you can contact me or Craig MacConnell at 676-6736.

Sincerely,

Colleen Burrows
WSU Whatcom County Extension"

Many good comments posted in reply to Walter's article above, including the following from Laura Ridenour:
"The product, marketed as "Milestone Herbicide", introduced in 2006 by Dow AgroSciences, aminopyralid, and according to our extension agent, Craig MacConnell, the chemical is active down to parts per trillion. It is highly persistent for years and minute concentrations will have an effect on plants. They don't yet know how long but are guessing it could take up to 10 years to break down in the soil.

In Whatcom it is mostly applied on grass pasture for dairy cows, and applied to corn silage crops for cows via the slurry from manure lagoon. (Although similar broad leaf herbicides are used on barley, wheat, and places that grow a lot of grass, like golf courses). It is a bio-accumulator (plants, like grass and corn take it up and then wherever those plants go or are disposed of, they spread the chemical). It also persists in the ground water, and may have an environmental effect on water species."

Herbicide-Tainted Manure Wilts Organic Crops Across Whatcom County by John Stark, the Bellingham Herald

Whatcom County organic farmers and gardeners are reporting severe crop damage that appears to be linked to herbicide contamination in the manure and compost they obtain from non-organic farms and dairies for use as natural fertilizer... "It's killed off most of our potato crop, our salad crops," said Kirk Hayes, a Whatcom County grower who sells his crops to the Bellingham Community Food Co-op and four other co-ops in the region. "We've contaminated about seven and a half acres, it looks like."
He estimated he has lost about $40,000 worth of sales in the past two months because of the problems...


Organic Panic: Herbicides Damage County Crops, Crop Farmers, by Tim Johnson, Cascadia Weekly (page 8 of this large size pdf file)
..."We have to assume that all manure is tainted unless proven otherwise, whidh is a really unfortunate situation," [Clayton] Burrows said. "Organic growers already have very limited options in how they care for their crops, so if an option is lost, it backs the growers into a very serious corner. The loss of our organic label at the Food Co-op, the largest single buyer of our produce, is very serious."...
 

Please Remember to Vote! by David MacLeod, Transition Whatcom
Transition doesn't support any particular political parties or candidates, but it does recognize the important role government plays. Step 6 of the 12 Steps of Transition tells us to "Build a Bridge to Local Government: ... Whether it is planning issues, funding or networking, you need them on board." With that in mind, I'd like to encourage us all to vote in the WA state primary. I consider educated voting to be the minimum to be expected of an engaged citizen...

Did you know you can add events to our community calendar? We designed this calendar to be a convenient place for community members and organizations to post to and browse for events in Whatcom County related to sustainability and creating a healthy, vibrant community. And when you're planning an event, you can check the calendar to see what else might be happening on that date.

Note: If you don't see all the info you want or need in the email announcement, click on the Event title, which takes you to our online calendar. There you'll find contact info, etc. that doesn't show up in the newsletter.  By the same token, if you're entering an event into our calendar, put your contact info into the body of the announcement as well as the contact fields.  More details on how to enter events here.

Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further -- it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation. ...

UPDATE: It's probably also worth noting this Wall St. Journal article from last month -- with a subheadline warning: "Back to Stone Age" -- which describes how "paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue." Utah is seriously considering eliminating the 12th grade, or making it optional. And it was announced this week that "Camden [New Jersey] is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free."

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability? Anyway, I just wanted to leave everyone with some light and cheerful thoughts as we head into the weekend.

A Friendly Greeting from the Annelids by John Michael Greer, the Archdruid Report
Over the last few weeks, this blog has sketched out the basic outline of a green wizardry rooted in the appropriate tech movement of the Seventies but reshaped to meet the needs of the deindustrial future now taking shape around us. So far that outline has been drawn on a relatively abstract level; that’s useful as a starting point, but the practical dimension has to be addressed if a project like this is to have any impact at all on the profoundly concrete predicament facing the industrial world.

Hardly anything is so common nowadays as abstract enthusiasms that never quite find their way down to the messy realm of action in the world. The peak oil blogosphere is a particularly good place to spot them; just look for the people who insist that fourth-generation fission reactors, or fusion power, or algal biodiesel, or ethanol, or – well, you can fill in the blanks yourself – is going to save us all and permit some version of business as usual to continue indefinitely. I’ve already discussed at some length the many reasons why that isn’t going to happen, but set that aside for a moment; even if one or more of these technologies did happen to be a viable response, what actual contribution to that response is made by posting enthusiastic comments about it on internet sites?

BITTER BREW by Tim Johnson, The Gristle, Cascadia Weekly
Low taxes. Smaller government that listens to the public. Transparency, honesty and predictability in public affairs. In the Gristle’s crude understanding, this is what conservatives want. This is what they say they want; and as a manifesto of how we might manage our public affairs, it is a reasonable and responsible one. As the sponsors of the excellent Bellingham Tea Party candidates forum recently cast it, “We support sustainable, predictable government.”

So… why do conservatives support this County Council? Nothing in the Whatcom County Council’s discussion of urban growth areas last week suggests taxes will be lower; no, taxes will be raised to pay for the increase in government services required for an expanded development base and the conversion of resource land to residential uses. Government will not be smaller; no, it will become bigger and more bureaucratic and cumbersome as it attempts to manage poor land-use decisions. As for transparency, honesty, predictability and listening, council already went through all of this UGA discussion for the past five years...

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE?  by Tim Johnson, The Gristle, Cascadia Weekly
On the eve of their momentous vote to reverse the decision of a more progressive council to limit the size of Whatcom’s cities, the new County Council majority suffered a reversal of their own when two of the remaining three cities left complaining of that earlier decision decided they really didn’t want the council’s help on this issue right now after all. Sumas and Nooksack administrations reviewed comments they’d received—including those delivered in a lengthy County Council session two weeks ago—and decided they wanted no part of the tattered and flimsy ordinance the council was trying to ram through. The cities asked to withdraw from consideration at this time, leaving only Ferndale remaining. Council pulled their crayon-strewn ordinance from this week’s agenda.

Last December, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld a 2005 Growth Management Hearings Board decision that found Whatcom’s urban growth areas were overlarge.…

Closing the Circle by John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
...Last week we talked about energy, and explored the way that the laws of thermodynamics shape what you can and can’t do with the energy that surges through every natural system. It’s easy to make energy interesting, since there’s always the passionate hope we all retain from childhood that something might suddenly blow itself to smithereens. Even when it doesn’t, watching energy make its way down the levels of concentration toward waste heat is exciting, for most of the same reasons that watching the silver ball bouncing off the bumpers of a pinball machine is exciting. This week is different. This week we’re going to talk about matter, the second of the three factors that move through every natural system, and matter appeals to a different childhood passion, one that most of us somehow manage to outgrow: the passion for mud. Matter is muddy. It does not behave itself. It does not do what it’s told...

The Cybernetics of Black Nights by John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
...Fifty years of failed research and a minor masterpiece of giddy British absurdity may not seem to have much to do with each other, much less with information, Gregory Bateson, or a “green wizardry” fitted to the hard limits and pressing needs of the end of the industrial age. Yet the connections are there, and the process of tracing them out will help more than a little to make sense of how information works – and also how it fails to work.

Let’s start with a few basics. Information is the third element of the triad of fundamental principles that flow through whole systems of every kind, and thus need to be understood to build viable appropriate tech systems. We have at least one huge advantage in understanding information that people a century ago didn’t have: a science of information flow in whole systems, variously called cybernetics and systems theory, that was one of the great intellectual adventures of the twentieth century and deserves much more attention than most people give it these days....

Why Permaculture Design? by Rob Avis, VergePermaculture

...Biology is remarkable in its ability to break down and lock up pollutants. Mushrooms have been shown to be effective in breaking down hydrocarbons and even nuclear waste. However, without soil and without forests, we are unable to support the biology required to deal with pollution. We continue deforestation at record rates, which further emphasizes soil loss. In addition, removal of our forests is removing the planets most important energy transducer and climate stabilizer. Without forests we will not have a stable climate. Last year the world lost 83 billion tons of topsoil. Healthy topsoil is the most biodiverse ecosystem we know of. Without it, life could not be sustained on this planet. I like this simplification because many of the other issues are second generation issues to these primary factors. What this exposes is that unfortunately, recycling, biofuels, CO2 sequestration, wind turbines and solar panels aren’t going to cut it unless we deal with soil loss. In the end it really all comes back down to healthy soil.

The good news is that teachers, designers and grass-roots activitists around the world are spreading the word that all our problems: pollution, deforestation and soil loss, can be solved in a garden. This is such an empowering message as we can forget about being paralyzed by fear and focusing energy into negative issues we have no control over (i.e. peak oil, climate change, etc) and we realize that each and everyone of us has the opportunity to profoundly shift the course of humanity with the simple act of stewarding soil...

The Emergence of Localism by Richard Moore, Speaking Truth to Power
...I suggest that this new kind of radicalism comes from a fundamental shift in consciousness on the part of leading-edge activists. That shift is not toward radicalism itself, rather it is a shift from ‘asking government to solve our problems’, to ‘figuring out what we can do for ourselves’. Activists were drawn toward this new consciousness, as it became increasingly clear that governments were simply not facing up to the crisis, and that no amount of political activism was going to wake them up.

As long as activist energy is directed towards influencing governments, only small things will be asked for. In order for initiatives to have any hope of success, they must be framed within the context of overall government policy, and they must not be making ‘unrealistic demands’. Thus stifled in their options, the very imagination of activists ends up being constrained to incremental hopes and proposals.

But once activists turn their attention to grassroots solutions, their imagination, their visions, and their creativity are unleashed. Instead of limiting their thinking to ‘achievable reforms’, they begin to ask, ‘How can the problem actually be solved?’ Once that bold question is asked, sensible people can often find answers, even if governments can’t.

The community is the natural place to pursue grassroots initiatives, and the techniques of sustainability have been pioneered by intentional communities, ecovillages, permaculture farms, etc. This new wave of environmental localism is simply bringing the available tools to bear in a place where they can make a real difference in mainstream society. While governments aren’t listening, communities might be persuaded to pay attention — to ideas that can benefit them. This seems to be a quite sensible strategy for moving toward sustainability, one community at a time.

The Ways of the Force by John Michael Greer
Luke Skywalker had to master the ways of the Force to save the galaxy. We face a similar challenge -- mastering the ways of energy, which are surprisingly counterintuitive to people raised in current ways of thinking -- in order to make use of the limited options still open to us in an age of declining energy supplies.

Our Tails Get in the Way: The Problems and Principles of Energy Descent by Sharon Astyk
Let us imagine human beings climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits - that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers.

Review of the Must Read Book: Merchants of Doubt by John Atcheson, Climate Progress
In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway take us on a fascinating trip down what they call Tobacco Road. Take the journey with them, and you’ll see renowned scientists abandon science, you’ll see environmentalism equated with communism, and you’ll discover the connection between the Cold War and climate denial.

Sailing the Salish Sea: Passenger Service in B.C. by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
Carson Tak has made history as the first known modern-era sail-powered passenger service captain/entrepreneur... Such a life as Carson Tak's is enviable. However, what he's doing for a living is more than just float and gloat. He raises awareness on the world's oil crisis every time he hoists his sails, and on land as well as sea he participates in sustainable economics: utilizing and promoting the gift economy. 

(Reprinted from Futurewise.org: http://futurewise.org/whatcom/advocacy/news_item.2010-07-12.7135989598)

Seeking the Gaianomicon by John Michael Greer, the Archdruid Report
One of the enduring archetypes of popular culture is the quest for some lost tome of ancient and forgotten wisdom. Ironically, books that fit that description tolerably well are among the core resources for a "green wizardry" that could revive the old appropriate technology movement for a world on the far side of Hubbert's peak. The Archdruid explains...

The Spill and You by Hans Noedlner, Entropic Journal
The blogosphere overfloweth with indignation and facts and advice for third-persons regarding the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. So let's get personal instead. Consider for a moment the various ways which WE (that would be you and me) might choose to relate to it. Ready?

Dear Candidate: What Will You Do if Growth is Over? by Nate Hagans, The Oil Drum
To me, one of the most surreal phenomena one encounters these days is that no country, no established economic research institute (that I'm aware of), and no international organization (such as the IMF) publicly discusses scenarios that don't plan for a return to stable economic (GDP) growth. Even Greece's government, after 2012, expects growth, which would allow the country to slowly reduce its monster debt load. Similarly, the U.S. government forecasts annual average (real) growth rates of 4.4% for the years 2012-2014, and 2.4% thereafter until 2020. This theme is globally ubiquitous.

Lighting the Way to a New Economy by David Korten, Yes! Magazine
Listen carefully. This is serious. We seek: Within a generation, a global system of human-scale, interconnected Local Living Economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems, meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life.

Michelle Long: How Locally Owned Businesses are Starting to Change the World - audio by Equal Time Radio
Michelle Long, executive director of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), explains how BALLE communities are using locally owned businesses to create a safe space outside the dominant system for the next economy to develop. She spoke at Shelburne Farms on June 11 at the Inspired by Slow Money conference.

Peak Oil - A Crisis Postponed by Dave Cohen, Decline of the Empire
Making Sense of the Financial Crisis by Stoneleigh at the 2010 Transition Network Conference, Audio
Shaun Chamberlin on Stoneleigh's Peak Oil/Finance Talk, by Shaun Chamberlin, Transition Culture
Reflections on Stoneleigh's Talk (see above) by Rob Hopkins and Peter Lipman, Transition Culture/YouTube Video
Towards a New Economy and a New Politics by Gus Speth, Solutions
BP-style Extreme Energy Nightmares to Come by Michael Klare, TomDispatch.com