Saturday, Feb. 21, 2009, 12 noon-5pm
Center for Expressive Art, 1317 Commercial Street, between Holly & Magnolia (2nd floor, above Uisce).
For beginning & seasoned gardeners With guest speaker Dr. Richard Haard, local botanist and world traveler.

• Hear reflections on Dr. Haard's recent trip to Angatuba, Brazil, a community in pursuit of sustainable solutions.
• Swap seeds and stories with local gardeners.
• Kids activities available!

Please bring:
· Seeds, homegrown or commercial (homegrown can be packaged in recycled envelopes)
· A dish to share & your own bowl/cup/utensils
· Or drop by empty-handed and see what you
learn!

Schedule:
12 noon-12:45pm - Tea & Potluck Social
12:45-1pm - Circle Up: Intro to Seed-Swap Etiquette
1pm-3pm - Seed Exchange & Sale
3pm-4:30pm - Speaker: Dr. Richard Haard, Botanist and Sojourner
4:30pm-5pm - Last call for swapping seeds
Let us know if you'd like to help with set up, clean up, or have a display table at the event!

Free Event Sponsored by Sustainable Bellingham, Food Not Lawns, Center for Local Self Reliance and Village Books
For more information, contact Jeff at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 738-8148

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 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.

Sustainable Bellingham is a proud Village Books affiliate. This means that you can support both a local bookstore and Sustainable Bellingham while buying buying your favorite books! When you purchase a book after following a link to Village Books from our site, we get a small commission. We are a non-profit organization so all money we obtain goes back into our community in the form of hosting guest speakers, film viewings, and similar ways. Support your local independent bookseller, building community one book at a time.

Get the tips and secrets that make bicycling safe, comfortable and fun for getting around town. Learn communication and positioning skills that make traffic or trail riding easy and stress-free. First Gear, part one of the four-part Full Cycle course, is a great introduction for getting back on the bike or a refresher for those already biking.

Please see http://www.everybodybike.com/eventDetail.aspx?id=130 for more information on location etc.

Come and see this important new movie and participate in a discussion of topics presented in the movie afterward.

From the film's website:
"We are now at a point where humanity's demands for natural resources far exceed the earth's capacity to sustain us. The extraction and the use of those resources in the past two centuries have changed our climate and ecosystems so significantly that a new geological era had to be created. Our current paradigm must change. We will have to accept the new reality; the human economy is part of nature and not the other way around. We are faced with great challenges. But unlike the rest of the living world, we have the unique ability to adapt and decide our fate and the fate of most of the biosphere, for better or worse, in order to survive the human project.

The Great Squeeze features: economist Lester Brown, founder of The Earth Policy Institute, Richard Heinberg, world renowned Peak Oil expert, Edward O. Wilson, legendary biologist, Alexandra Cousteau, leading advocate for marine ecosystems, author James Howard Kunstler, paleoclimatologist Jim White and many more."

It's going to be in the Fairhaven College Auditorium, March 2, at 7:30PM with free admission. People can stay after the movie for a discussion on the topics presented (which are many).

The 13th Salmon Summit conference is taking place on March 12th, 2009. This day-long conference focuses on salmon recovery and watershed restoration from 8:00am-3:30pm. The conference is sponsored by the Nooksack Recovery Team (NRT), whose mission is to energize locally driven watershed restoration efforts in Whatcom County through partner coordination, resource mobilization, and public education. The conference is an opportunity for individuals and organizations to come together to hear presentations and participate in discussions about the issues surrounding salmon habitat restoration methods and projects, assessment and monitoring, estuary and nearshore environments, education and community involvement, and watershed recovery in the Nooksack Basin. The keynote speech will feature Dr. Robert Lackey of the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University who will speak on the topic of “Wild Salmon in the Pacific Northwest: Some Recovery Strategies that Just Might Work.” The conference will bring together presenters and participants from across western Washington and British Columbia. The Salmon Summit involves nonprofit organizations, agricultural community members, environmental organizations, tribal members, private industry, government agencies, educators, landowners, students, and the general public.

Based on the overwhelming participation in the conference each year, salmon recovery and watershed restoration is an important issue to community members in Whatcom County. The NRT is pleased to provide a platform for the public to be informed and updated on the various issues currently facing salmon and watersheds in the Nooksack Basin Watershed. The conference will take place at St. Luke’s Community Health Education Center in Bellingham, WA. The cost is $40 before February 23rd or $45 after February 23rd and at the door. There is a $20 student rate and some scholarships are available. Registration fees include lunch and refreshments throughout the day.

Registration and program information is available at www.n-sea.org or by calling the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association at (360) 715-0283.

Members of the Nooksack Recovery Team include: City of Bellingham Environmental Resources, Lummi Nation Natural Resources Department, Nooksack Tribe Natural Resources Department, Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association, NW Ecological Services Inc., Public Utility District #1 of Whatcom County, Puget Sound Energy, Whatcom County Public Works, and Whatcom Land Trust.

Please State the Nature of Your Emergency by Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
...I was speaking to a friend by phone recently who is very active in sustainability efforts where he lives. He's noticed that many of those who were showing interest in cooperating with his efforts last year have now withdrawn into concerns about their own immediate future. The growing economic crisis is concentrating their minds on such questions as: Will I keep my job? Will I be able to afford my house or apartment? What should I do with my savings, especially if they have declined significantly? For those running organizations the most basic question is one of survival. Can my business survive lower sales? Can my nonprofit survive declining donations and grants?

...Here we have the problem of how the nature of the emergency is defined. Because the economic crisis has been labelled primarily a financial crisis and because that type of crisis appears to activate well-worn pathways in the human brain, this interpretation has gained wide acceptance. But if we were to state the nature of the emergency as a sustainability crisis, could such an interpretation gain wide acceptance?...How can the sustainability crisis (of which the current financial crisis is most certainly a symptom) be framed as something that deserves our immediate and ongoing attention? What well-worn, evolutionarily successful pathways of thinking and feeling are available to motivate broader action?

The issue can't be merely that the problems we face in sustainability are too abstract. After all, stock trading is pretty abstract; but, it seems to map nicely to an already available pathway of thinking and acting. Can we find more of these and use them to communicate the sustainability imperative? Clearly, simply stating the nature of the emergency as we have in the past is not enough.

Down the Rabbit Hole by Sharon Astyk, Causabon's Book
...even if we don’t face energy constraints (we do) and ecological constraints (we definitely do), we face capital restraints - much of our current infrastructure, the way of our way of life, was built with other people’s money, invested in the stock market. Who will choose to give their money to corporations to spend? Who will choose to see their health care, housing and education dollars gambled? And that means that our long term recovery prospects must include the reality that the “investing is savings” mantra has been proved to be a lie, and it will be 20 years or more before anyone will come buying that lie again.

Now mixed in with energy and ecological constraints, I think the constraints in investment capital do mean that we must - I don’t mean should, but must, make our plans for the future very carefully, that we must choose now where to put our limited resources and energies, because they may well turn out to be more limited than we thought. Down the rabbit hole we go - and it isn’t very clear what size we’ll be when we stop growing.

Social Collapse Best Practices by Dimitri Orlov, Club Orlov

...Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things don’t work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let’s go through some specifics. We’ll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because they don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can’t unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.

If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing on what is commonly understood as “economic health.” Prior to collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy. After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some television bobble-head said so.

But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly!...

Neighbors Helping Neighbors—to Break Into Vacant Houses
Madeleine Baran, Twin Cities Daily Planet (Minneapolis - St. Paul, Minnesota)
Poverty rights activists broke into at least a dozen vacant Minneapolis buildings this week and helped homeless families move in. "This is the modern underground railroad," said Cheri Honkala, National Organizer for the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, the group organizing the "takeovers." This week's actions are part of a growing national movement to illegally open up thousands of vacant, foreclosed homes to provide housing for the growing number of homeless people. Over 3,000 Minneapolis homes went into foreclosure in 2008. Advocates estimate that over 7,000 Minnesotans are homeless. Most Twin Cities' homeless shelters have been filled to capacity for months.

On a recent afternoon, organizers planned their next takeover while eating cabbage, rice, sausage, and corn bread prepared by Rosemary, a 59-year-old African American woman facing eviction from her home.

The World's Ticking Timebomb: Earth 'will expire by 2050' by Mark Townsend and Jason Burke, The Guardian
Our planet is running out of room and resources. Modern man has plundered so much, a damning report claims this week, that outer space will have to be colonised
Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week. A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on Tuesday, warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. In a damning condemnation of Western society's high consumption levels, it adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted. The report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades.

Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth, the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population. Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now...

The Canadian Oil Boom: Scraping Bottom (Canadian Oil Sands) by Robert Kunzig, National Geographic
...Nowhere on Earth is more earth being moved these days than in the Athabasca Valley. To extract each barrel of oil from a surface mine, the industry must first cut down the forest, then remove an average of two tons of peat and dirt that lie above the oil sands layer, then two tons of the sand itself. It must heat several barrels of water to strip the bitumen from the sand and upgrade it, and afterward it discharges contaminated water into tailings ponds like the one near Mildred Lake. They now cover around 50 square miles. Last April some 500 migrating ducks mistook one of those ponds, at a newer Syncrude mine north of Fort McKay, for a hospitable stopover, landed on its oily surface, and died. The incident stirred international attention—Greenpeace broke into the Syncrude facility and hoisted a banner of a skull over the pipe discharging tailings, along with a sign that read "World's Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands."

Treating the Blues Could Save the Planet by Colin Beavan, WorldChanging
I suffer, at times, from anxiety and depression. Not the worst kind of anxiety and depression. I'm talking about the kind that takes the edge off the gratitude I should be feeling for a good life — a life with kind people in it, a nice place to live, and a career of writing and environmental activism that I really enjoy. ... My problem is that I've been working my tail off night and day for a couple of years now. I ran the No Impact experiment in which my little family tried to live as environmentally as possible. I write a daily blog (NoImpactMan.com). I just finished a book (which comes out next September also under the title No Impact Man). My collaboration in the making of the No Impact Man documentary just wrapped up. It's added up to a lot of work. You know, like working nights. Working weekends. Working like a dog. Working like, well, an American.

Now, we already know that the United States economy wreaks havoc on our environmental well-being, contributing some 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But it turns out that working in that same economy may also wreak havoc on our emotional well-being. Working like an American, some research implies, may be — literally — depressing. ... What I've found over the years, is that I can manage my predisposition to the blues if I rest enough and if I take care of myself. I've found that if I take time to meditate, exercise, sleep sufficiently and joke around with friends, then my tendency to over-think and get down about life actually can transform into an asset: with space, digested worry can become some kind of worthwhile introspection.

Lately, though, I haven't taken the time to decompress — I go back to work after putting my little girl to bed — and my worry has nibbled at my life quality. This leads me to thinking about the connection between my recent, more-stressful-than-usual way of life and my anxiety and, in turn, Americans' long working hours, the associated planetary resource use of our economy, and the fact that nearly 10 percent of Americans suffer from some sort of depressive disorder, according to the World Health Organization.

... Our economy and our culture doesn't cater to lifestyle choice. Here in the United States, our policies are not about making sure we can take care of ourselves in any other way than financially. In some ways, I wonder if that puts us in the ludicrous position of having to take a pill — like Prozac — in order to tolerate the way we live. ... Maybe that we should, as individuals and as a culture, consider working less if we want to be happier. Yeah, but how does this relate to our economy’s use of planetary resources and saving the planet, as I’ve implied?

... We tend to think of using fewer resources for the sake of the environment as some sort of belt tightening, a sort of deprivation. But what if using fewer resources meant needing less money, meant having to work less hard, meant less depression and anxiety? What does such a possibility tell us about how we should live our lives? What does that tell us about the possibility that living environmentally might be better for us as well as for the planet?