Monday, February 22, 2010

Responses & Resilience - Feb 18

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage


Getting Your Family On Board With Food Storage
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon's Book via Science Blogs
Ok, I've convinced you - you need a reserve of food, you want to learn to can and dehydrate, you want to start eating more local foods. But you haven't done anything yet, because, well, the rest of your household isn't on board. Before you go there, you need to convince them. So I offer up this handy guide of answers to common protests about food storage and preservation. I also offer up some suggestions on what not to say, just in case you need them, mostly because that part was fun for me to write .

Protest #1: It will be too expensive! We can't afford extra food.

Bad answer: "But honey, the world is going to come to an end soon, and male life expectancy is going to drop into the 50s, so you won't need your retirement savings anyway. Let's spend it on food so I have something to eat in my old age."

Good answer: "I'm glad you are so concerned about our finances, and I share your concern. I think in the longer term this will save us money, allowing us to buy food at lower bulk prices and when it is at its cheapest and on sale, and thus will insulate us from rising prices. But let's sit down and make a budget for what we think it is appropriate to spend on food storage."

Protest #2: No one has time to can and preserve food anymore! Isn't that a leftover form the bad old days?

Bad answer: "Of course you'll have time to do it, sweetie - can't you get up before the kids do to make pickles? You already get 5 hours of sleep a night, so what's the problem? Here, read this woman's blog and you'll start feeling guilty that you don't love the kids enough to make your own salsa."

Good answer: "What I think will end up happening is that we'll save time later from effort spent now - and we'll know that our food supply is nutritious and safe - I don't feel good giving the kids processed foods with all the recalls and contaminations. But let's definitely start slowly - I'll make some sauerkraut, and then if you think we should, we'll look into plans for a dehydrator. But we'll do it together. ...
(15 February 2010)


The community-owned, timber-framed, self-heating village shop
Maddy Harland, The Ecologist
In an economic climate where village shops are closing, woodsman Ben Law has helped his village open a new shop with a difference

The woodsman, Ben Law, is famous for building a roundwood timber frame house in his own woods in Sussex, getting permission for a new build in a Special Site for Scientific Interest and thereby changing a planning precedent in England. He enthralled millions on Channel 4's Grand Designs programme and his build was voted the best Grand Design ever.

So what does a man do to top that?

He builds a shop for his village for no personal fee, and agrees to underwrite the bill if the funding doesn't appear. Furthermore, he builds the new shop in four months, to budget, entirely from local materials.

A man of his craft

The picturesque village of Lodsworth in West Sussex is where Ben chose to live some years ago. First in a bender, then in a leaky caravan, and now in his woodland house. The woodland house marks the beginning of a new vernacular: roundwood timber framing. Since the original build - a synthesis of a traditional cruck frame with ecological design and materials - Ben has been practising his craft with other buildings in his region and training a team of people to help him. The shop in Lodsworth is his first industrial-scale building, and yet it is as stunning as his home.

Lodsworth had a village shop 15 years ago but, like in many villages across the country, it closed leaving local people with a 15 mile round trip to the nearest town to buy even a pint of milk. The villagers wanted their shop back and were keen that it should support local businesses and suppliers providing local produce.

They wanted a shop that could compete with the nearest supermarket on day-to-day staples, and not just be a pretty but expensive local retail outlet. They wanted it to function as drop-off and collection point for deliveries and be a centre for community information. The building had to have the highest ecological specifications, including generating its own electricity using photovoltaic panels.

In January 2009, with no funding and no acceptable design, let alone a team of builders, Ben was asked to get involved and he offered a design for a roundwood timber frame building, a design that came in at a quarter of the cost of an earlier proposal...
(28 Jan 2010)



Nitrogen for Free
Jason Bradford, Farmland LP blog
As a kid I remember being impressed by a story of several people adrift in a lifeboat in the open ocean. After a few days all their fresh water ran out and, in what is surely an horrific irony, they found themselves thirsty while surrounded by water.

In some ways this lifeboat predicament is akin to the situation of plants. The atmosphere is nearly 80% molecular nitrogen, and yet nitrogen is considered one of the most limiting nutrients in terrestrial ecosystems. How so?

It comes down to a basic chemistry problem. Nitrogen as a free gas is actually a strongly bonded pair of nitrogen molecules that doesn’t react readily with anything. It is perfectly happy to be itself, thank you. But life needs nitrogen to make amino acids, which are the building block of proteins. So some very nifty biochemistry has evolved to pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into a form that living beings can use. This process is called “nitrogen fixation” and certain groups of bacteria are very good at it.

A well known nitrogen fixation pathway is the symbiosis between legume plants (Fabaceae) and species of Rhizobia bacteria. Legumes provide the bacteria with a home and some food within root “nodules” and the bacteria make water soluble forms of nitrogen that the plant can use to grow. A rough rule of thumb in farming is that one good stand of a legume cover crop (meaning it is not allowed to go to seed) is good for a couple good stands of a grain crop such as wheat.

A clover is a kind of legume that associates with bacteria to fix nitrogen. This is how farmers get nitrogen naturally.

Although the legumes and Rhizobia have the most well known symbiosis of this kind, many plants have similar relationships. I was reminded of this recently while walking through a woodland. The understory of a forest is not the kind of place you find dense populations of legumes, so if you want to see where the nitrogen is coming from you need to first look up in the trees.

The leaves have fallen, but the branches are covered with lichens and mosses, many of which make homes for bacteria that fix nitrogen. The winter is their season, as the light is not being captured by tree leaves and the humidity is high. Littering the ground are lichen-laden fallen twigs and scraps from this canopy growth. As these decompose the nitrogen enters the mat of soil humus and eventually makes its way into the massive hulk of the old oaks.

A leafy lichen found on the forest floor, perhaps in the genus Lobaria, brings nitrogen into the ecosystem.

If your curiosity about the nitrogen cycle and agriculture is piqued, I recommend following this series of investigative articles. My position is that nitrogen is abundant and practically free when farms are managed using sound agroecological principals. Know your plants, know your microbes, know your fungal networks, and know how work with these relationships and the ecosystem will provide.
(8 Feb 2010)



Toyota scurries to find a fix as recall expandsThe dark side of nitrogen

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