blogs

New PeakOilDesign member Nika has a fantastic and relatively new blog called peaknix. Nika is a life sciences researcher and has several blogs documenting her organic farming activities, adventures in cooking from the backyard, and liberal homeschooling. I'm very impressed with Nika's insight and all that she has accomplished in improving the way she and her family live their lives. Nika is clearly an asset to this site and the Peak Oil/sustainability communities. Her writing and path reminds me very much of Sharon Astyk and I suspect Nika will soon be widely recognized as another strong voice for sustainability. An excerpt from peaknix.com:

I guess its about waking up.

Part of waking up to peak oil is to realize that our consensus reality has been holding us back. That middle class consensus reality masked the edge-nature of our existence. We chose to believe that we were entitled.

We are not.

– Repeat after me –

We. Are. Entitled. To. Nothing.

Our gift right now is of time but its not really about bunkering down.

Its about releasing the entitlement mentality and embracing change and then understanding resilience and cultivating some level of optimism.

I am a mom of three – last winter, when I GOT peak oil on an intuitive level, the first thing I mourned was peak education.

I had to realize that there is simply no way that I could afford to put even one child through college (I went to school on Pell Grants and scholarships, my parents didn’t pay for the core costs tho they did cover food and dorm – never cheap – don’t know what Pell Grants are? Ask the republicans and Reagan specifically).

I panicked and then did that V-8 head-bonk thing .. I have known this for a long time but was never able to articulate it. It was freeing in some ways to realize that the cost of education has become CRIMINALLY expensive.

Not only do we homeschool, I intend to steer my children into organic farming internships and agricultural sciences. Not so much because that is how we will survive but because those activities will make SENSE. My job .. it doesn’t make SENSE in the transition. That’s ok, I have learned one important thing in grad school – how to learn.

I am not saying that things are peachy or that it’s the apocalypse nor am I saying that you should not prepare.

In speaking of Peak Oil, may people frequently highlight the need for security and self-defense against random aggressors. While it is clear that the security environment in a post-Peak Oil world will be far more volatile, few have given a thorough look at the nature of the threats we will face. Will it be bands of crazed suburbanites, oppressive government regimes, or legions of foreign troops that pose the greatest threat? This writing is intended to provide a thorough and objective look at the future of personal and community defense so as to guide us on the most effective ways to prepare strategies.

In addition to all the veggies in our garden, we are growing a fabulous crop of poison ivy at our rental house. I knew we had a significant infestation after I had to abandon my first compost pile that was overtaken by a field of aggressive poison ivy sprouts. I had also noticed quite a few isolated patches spread throughout the yard. But I didn’t realize just how bad it was until I noticed that what I had thought were two tall, healthy, green trees were actually very dead trees with woody poison ivy monsters climbing their skeletons as high as 30 feet (above).

My plan is to smother the ground patches with mulch and slice into the base of the woody vines. I need to do the smothering without the landlord noticing, as he was concerned about it being “unsightly” (right...where nobody but us would see it?) and preferred we apply poison. While eradicating this plant may be one of the rare exceptions where I could justify pesticides, I prefer to try less destructive -- and probably more effective -- organic options.

As yesterday’s harvest (above) can attest, it’s amazing what you can get out of a garden even if you completely abandon it for more than a month. As I noted in the previous post, we were out-of-state for all of July, with the only garden support being a neighbor watering our hanging baskets. Even after we returned, however, it took us the better part of two weeks before we recuperated enough to spend much time on the garden. I finally found a weekend to get out there and tackle the weeds, spending a total of about four hours yanking them up, which in truth definitely didn’t qualify as “no work”. Actually, I prefer to let the weeds grow as thick as my thumb -- it's so much more sporting that way…

A multitude of events, both for work and home, have kept us unreasonably busy the past couple months. Of course, it was all fun -- among other things, we met face-to-face with Jade herself (keeper of Jaded Vegetarian) and her husband, in Seattle and at their house. The raging waters atop Mount Rainier (above) also captured our attention.

We're going on a trip to Seattle, Iowa, Minnesota, and D.C. over the next 4 weeks, so there won't be much posting. Have a good July...

Last night we attended a mini-workshop presented by students from Oberlin College participating in the One Big Bike Movement. These students are biking from Oberlin, OH to San Francisco this summer, stopping along the way to present strategies for living more sustainably.

Their first stop happened to be here in Yellow Springs, hosted by Living Green (a store about which I’ll be talking quite a bit here in the future) which provided wine, cheese, and fruit for refreshments. They spoke about techniques for using passive solar and cooling, including placement of vegetation, windows, and heatsinks. The students also gave an overview of vermicomposting, including a display of a working bin full of red wrigglers. They even left the bin with C.J. of Living Green to use in the store!

I encourage you to check out their site (onebigbike.blogspot.com) and see if they are heading your way.

Having a non-boring job that doesn’t allow my mind to wander during the day has significantly cut into the time I have to think of items about which to post. I’m still searching for balance (aren’t we all!), but rest assured I fully intend to restore this blog to its former glory...or at least, to the quality it was before the move.

The events in the world of energy over the last few months deserve some comment, as the situation has gone wildly out of control since I last wrote about it. You all know the numbers -- oil at record highs, gas at record highs -- and the boundless rhetoric as to the causes. Is it speculators, OPEC, the oil companies, supply constraints (i.e. Peak Oil), or something else? Honestly, we don’t know, but that’s the whole damn point -- we just don’t know if we hit production limits yet.

I spent some of the last few weeks breaking ground on a garden here in Yellow Spring. Since we’re in a rental, I can’t make the garden quite as big as we would like, but I’m grateful that the owner is flexible enough to let us dig one at all. It should be a great learning experience for gardening in Ohio and prepare us for larger-scale operations when we find a permanent farmstead.

It will also be an experience in growing in soggy soil, the exact opposite issue from what I faced in Florida. It turns out that our yard is not a swamp merely due to the recent heavy rains, but our neighbors informed us that there is a natural spring under our area. It is one of the many springs that gives our village its name, and is already proving to be a bit of a gardening headache.

Wow, moving is hard enough as it is, but for the sustainably-minded it can be torture! The past three months were very fortunate for us -- I got a new job, we moved back to the Midwest, and we sold our house -- yet extremely stressful.

I know I’ve lost quite a few regular readers and I hope to earn them back now that we’re getting settled. So, I’ll get right back into sustainability topics starting with the one at hand, which is the eco-crappy process of moving states! In October, I learned that I was selected for a job with the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- a dream job for me both in terms of the working environment and the location. But first the big news -- the house we found to rent is in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, which many of you may know from the Community Solutions Conference held every year on Peak Oil! The village is by far the closest thing I’ve seen to a sustainable community, and is far better able to weather some of the challenges ahead than anywhere we’ve ever seen. I’ll have much, much more on Yellow Springs as time goes on, but for now I’ll get back to our moving story.