blog (January, 2007)
in chunks
- Made it to work today by bus(es) in just 25 minutes. The Euclid Corridor is quickening.
- A cop pulled me and my bicycle over on Saturday. That's twice this year.
- Felt a new and disconcerting snap in my knee while stretching (improperly) Sunday.
- Wrote WestSoy about the un-recyclability of their aseptic packaging a few weeks ago. They responded with a vacuous letter and coupons, (for more of same product & packaging,) to purchase my silent compliance
- My living room found a couch on a neighbor's curb. There were no back-cushions, but we're making do with replacements.
- Great email today from my supervisor at CleveMed: "I have a goal next year to reduce my needs for commercial software..."
I call them nature band-aids because there's a general idea in American that the remedy for mutilated urbanism is nature. And in fact the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is good urbanism, good buildings. Not just flower beds, not just cartoons of the Sierra Nevada mountains...
-- James Howard Kunstler, The tragedy of suburbia (TED | Talks 2004)
Urban Harvest Garden Tour 2007
Saturday was one of those adventure days I enjoy so much.
I bicycled to eight gardens on the Urban Harvest Garden Tour. Met good people doing good work, transforming (mostly-)urban lots into fertile vegetable gardens, to feed themselves, their families, and their communities.
Re-learning, teaching, growing.
Some (like the Barkwill/Doloff Community Garden, above,) are transformations of once abandoned lots.
The community garden maintainers I spoke with seemed less interested in expanding their own gardens than in suggesting that Clevelanders interested in doing the same:
- find an abandoned lot in their hood,
- ask their councilperson to support its reclamation, and
- get started, with help from Summer Sprout:
Summer Sprout is a collaborative effort between OSU Extension and Cleveland, through the Division of Neighborhood Services, Department of Community Development. Community gardens registered with Summer Sprout receive vegetable seeds and plant starts, soil preparation services such as plowing and rototilling, assistance in getting fire hydrant permits and equipment for watering, and garden fertilizer and leaf humus.
Growers keep their vegetables for themselves or to share. The rest of the produce goes to area hunger centers and agencies.
For details, 216-429-8246.
-- Community gardening sprouting up all the time in the Cleveland area (The Plain Dealer)
To know that Summer Sprout consists of some 170 gardens in Cleveland is inspiring. To see just a few of them and meet the people behind them, even moreso.
I've put all the photos I took in a set on Flickr: Urban Harvest Community Garden Tour 2007. The descriptions list which garden they're from, and each photo's location is geo-tagged; look for the map link.
4415 Euclid recycles
Cleveland Midtown Innovation Center finally has a City recycling dumpster. :)
It was over a year ago that John McGovern referred me to Cassandra Moore, (Project Director for the City of Cleveland's Division of Waste Collection,) to request a city recycling dumpster in my workspace parking lot.
Our building owners and management were open and enthusiastic, (thanks, Michael Fleming, Heartland Developers, 4415 Euclid LLC.) Being publicly accessible 24/7 by Euclid and Chester made our location an easy sell to the City, we just had to wait on the new containers to arrive and be painted. A year of predictions, postponement, recontacting.
I've been collecting recyclables in the CleveMed kitchen for a few years -- in cardboard boxes from the water jugs we'd buy -- and toting them to City dumpsters every couple weeks. Until I'd drive my car to work, the filled boxes would stack to form a wall next to my cube, and the heap in the kitchen would tend toward constant overflow, pissing off the germ-paranoid.
Great, then, to return from California this week and find that our dumpster had finally arrived, and that the company switched from gallon jug shipments to a tap-water purifier.
An opportunity for us to collect more materials. Get some real bins, better publicize, and (hopefully) have the cleaning crew take the recyclables out with the trash. That's less crushing, stacking, and transporting for me.
I've added this to the Cleveland Recycling Locations Map (about).
how I read, online/offline
I've noticed more than a few people that don't usually read magazines in real life like to read them on aeroplanes. (I won't make broad, sweeping generalizations about most being women.)
Maybe it's because the content is bite-size chunky, and they fit well in the seat pocket?
Even if the subject is non-trashy, though, magazines themselves are trashy. Or at best, recycley, which is preceded in preference by reducey.
(I still read books, but) I don't read the newspaper or magazines; I read from the web. I'm not iPhone hip, though, and still rock the off-line, often. I used to print out web-reads for off-line consumption, but I've made another step in paper-less. (The soapbox I'm standing on is 100% post-consumer recycled cardboard.).
My new-school/old-school combo is an aged Palm Pilot with Google Reader and del.icio.us, and Plucker.
Here's my online/offline web-reading strategy:
- Browse the blogs and news feeds I read with Google Reader.
- Kick stuff that looks interesting off to a new (Firefox) tab -- using keystroke
ffwith the Google Reader Quick Links Greasemonkey script (or Better GReader Firefox add-on.) - Mark everything else as Read (keystroke
A,) close Google Reader, and sift through the opened tabs. - Consume what I have time for, and tag longer items for later in del.icio.us as to_read. Using the del.icio.us Bookmarks extension, keystroke
CTRL-D (CMD-D)then typing the tag name does it all. - Use Plucker to grab all of the pages at 1-link depth from my del.icio.us/to_read list, and convert them to a Palm-readable format.
- Sync the Palm
- Read tagged items at leisure, on- or off-line.
No trees, no inks, no waste, no shipping!
No big glossy pictures, either, (yet.)
Peak Suburbia, and Suburbia 2.0
we had better prepare to make other arrangements for living in this country, by which I mean specifically re-localizing, de-globalizing, with an emphasis on local agriculture wherever possible, the emergency restoration of passenger railroad service and related modes of public transit, the rebuilding of local commercial infrastructures, and a radical rethinking of how we inhabit the landscape under New Urbanist lines.
In any case, those who keep wringing their hands over the bulldozers leveling the plots of prairie, or cornfield, or desert -- those distressed folks can direct their anxiety elsewhere. Worry less whether one final strip mall will tilt up out in gloaming, and think harder about how you are going to feed yourself and your family in a couple of years when the stupendous motorized moloch of American life begins to sputter, and the Cheez Doodle shipments can no longer make it to your supermarket shelves, and all that is "normal" melts into air.
-- James Howard Kunstler, Peak Suburbia, (Clusterfuck Nation)
I've been tossing around some ideas for a plant/seed/produce/tool-sharing site to grow a community around local gardeners, (urban, rural, and in-between.)
It seems a nice blend of [my interests in] web, software, ecology, and local community -- helping to build that economy/ecosystem that'll become necessary as our current concoction collapses, (as Kunstler continues to promise.)
I need a good project, but it might be more than I'm up for right now.
city/country nutritional flow
A city could be the home of technical nutrition, and the countryside the home of biological nutrition. And as the city brings in biological nutrition-its food, its natural resources-from the country, it utilizes them to good effect to support its people, and then it returns them to the countryside to rebuild the health of the soil. On the other hand, the city could be the place where we make things, where the industrial producers of cars, tractors, computers and communication devices send beneficial goods out into the world and accepts them back as resources for new products that only cities can make.
-- William McDonough, A New Design for Human Enterprise: Address to China-US Center Meeting, 2002; (emphasis mine)
spreading fecundity
Not only has it been diluted through achieving buzzword status, but sustainability isn't even an adequate objective:
When I won the award from Clinton at the White House, the press all came up and said: "Oh, Mr. Sustainable, what does it all mean?" and I said I'm not that interested in sustainability, really, because if it is just the edge between destruction and regeneration, if sustainability is just a kind of maintenance, is this exciting?
If I were to ask if you were married and you said "yes," and I asked, "What is the relationship to your spouse like," and you said, "Oh, ah, sustainable."
Who cares? What we are looking for is fecundity, sex, children, movement.
-- William McDonough, Designing the Next Industrial Revolution (talk at Bioneers 2000)
I doubt fecundity has the phonemes for memetic procreation, but intending that the world should improve because we're here is a more appropriate ambition.
Mr. Sustainable spoke at the Cleveland Clinic's Ideas for Tomorrow series last week (PD review.) I instructed that others not miss the event, but was crushed (like so much recycled glass) when I found I'd committed myself elsewhere.
steps forward and backward
During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of nongrowth.
-- M. King Hubbert, "Exponential Growth as a Transient Phenomenon in Human History", 1976. (found at Hubbert peak theory on Wikipedia)
I think we will discover (probably painfully) that globalism was a set of transient economic relations made possible by a half century of cheap oil and relative peace between the great powers, and that enterprises that rely on these transient mechanisms -- such Wal-Mart, with its 12,000-mile merchandise supply chain to China, and its "warehouse on wheels" of tractor-trailor trucks circulating incessantly on America's interstate highways -- will be on their knees in a few years as we enter the export crisis phase of post-peak terminal oil depletion and the great powers of the world act with increasing desperation to compete over the remaining supplies.
-- Jim Kunstler, Blowing Green Smoke (Clusterfuck Nation)
Cleveland Recycling Locations Map
I found the City of Cleveland's list and locator pretty poor, so I rolled my own (Google) map of Cleveland Recycling Drop-off Locations. The map shows all of the public bins where city residents may deposit recyclables.
For the bins I wasn't familiar with, (the majority,) I used the address provided, pointing to a spot right on the road instead of their exact locations, which are at times somewhat hidden. If you can help me pinpoint bins you know about, (the Satellite map view helps) I'd appreciate it.
The map is shared for viewing on Google Maps, but I believe I'm the only one that can edit it there. Please export the data and do what you like with it, though.
ripping, lovehate, subsumption
I've been using the scanner at work tonight to rip (-- not rip as in tear, but rip as in analog-to-digital --) old papers.
Payslips, journaling, coffee-infused/stained notes. I'm trying to go paper-less, (-- not less as in free, but less as in less.) Post-rip, I'm shredding (and, if not recycling, not regretting.)
I skim through each file to name it for archival. The last one tonight, now Notes_TalkingMusic_04.gif, has a quote scrawled:
Duckworth: Are you one of those people who thinks that a lot of the technology is a waste of time because it subsumes you?
-- William Duckworth, Talking Music
Maurice Small Meets the Bloggers
I knew from brief encounters at Fresh Stops that Maurice was righteous ripe, just not which flavor. Urban farmer, bearded dready in overalls, quiet riot. Softspoken, some, but unabashed, deliberate, wry.
George opened Meet the Bloggers: Maurice Small posing to each participant a baited question Maurice had previously delivered: what are you eating?
The details aren't important. The key is your connection with your food. It gets juicy when you go beyond traceability. Link with the land, the people involved. Don't just know where it came from, know intimately. It'll taste better in every dimension -- tongue and soul.
(If you are what you eat, and you don't really know what you eat...)
Maurice had some rants prepared, but didn't quite get to finish them. His love is children and growing food, and he's learned to follow his heart. There are kids who think milk comes from jugs, and eggs from cartons -- and he's reconnecting them.
The hour was up too soon for everyone, but I get a sense that any interaction with him would leave a person filled but hungry for more.
cul-de-sac
Grounded myself tonight after work and class, and watched The End of Suburbia: the end of the party, the end of the age of oil, and the American way of life.
The age of the 3000-mile ceasar salad is coming to an end.
-- James Howard Kunstler
Doomsday predictions: not enough time to reverse trends and develop alternatives before things come crashing down; recessions, depression, upheaval.
Think twice, think alternatively, think need-lessly, and get what's needed, locally.
trace your food's past
Asked twice in one day last week why I'm vegetarian, I found that my usual answer -- that I want to be a little more responsible -- might come off as presumptuous. So I'm thinking of adding because I'm lazy to it, to balance it out.
The only (rare) prayer I'll say alone before eating is to contemplate the lifespan of each thing I'm about to consume. Garlic, bean, rice: imagine seeds being spread, fertilizers applied, guy in overalls on tractor, machines grinding and packaging and loading and delivering.
More unknowns and unpleasantries with an animal on the plate (what was it fed, and where did that come from?) stretch contemplation duration while the food cools. I'm a hungry fool.
I'm lazy, and I want to be closer to the source.
take responsibility for [your] food -- no matter what it is -- by tracking its path back to the sun. If you can face the path of your food in full knowledge and be at ease with it, then happy eating!
-- Kevin Kelly, [Review of] The Omnivore's Dilemma (Cool Tools)