Monday, February 23, 2009

inappropriate biotech

Christ, it ain't bad enough we got bird brains on the road, now we gotta roll wit bugs drivin fuckin tanks! This giant cockroach driving a chariot in the lab is acting like yer typical young buck behind the wheel of a vehicle with mag wheels...And they wonder why um scared ta travel...
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Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot:
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine


conceptlab.com/roachbot

...Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. Jeffrey A Lockwood, Oxford University Press (2008)...

...[Q:]Have you noticed the cockroach change its behavior because it's in the machine? How has it adjusted?

[A:] At some moments, it appears as if the cockroach is "adapting in" to the system. In other words, behaving in a way that would indicate that it thinks that the robot control system is "real". There are other times that it appears the cockroach couldn't care less about the lights shining toward it and seems to enjoy driving the robot directly into walls at full speed...
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Sunday, February 22, 2009

human progress

Reminds me of a poem a 94 year old lady named Hazel Harrison I was a live-in companion for in Miami used to recite (don't know if it was hers) that goes:
...and now that this old world is saved
things go on the same
as mean as Cain, as kind as Abel
they play a similar game...
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"We have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability."

~ Howard Zinn

awakeningthedreamer.org/content/view/137/128
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"Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light."
~Helen Keller
awakeningthedreamer.org/content/view/138/127
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larouchepac.com/news/2009/02/19/larouche-murdoch-cartoon-enemy-will-kill.html
...New York Post ran a cartoon, which portrayed the bullet-riddled body of a dead chimpanzee shot by two policemen. One of the policemen says: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." Lyndon LaRouche denounced the cartoon as a threat of assassination to the President,...
...LaRouche emphasized that the President needs to understand that compromises won't work. The enemy will kill. You can't bargain with them. This includes the Bush family. The former President's grandfather was a fascist, who helped put Hitler in power, his father is a fascist and he is a fascist. In fact, the whole Bush family are fascists.
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From
Living on Earth radio
week of 2/20/9
loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=09-P13-00008&segmentID=7
Water contaminated with high concentrations of lead flowed in the nation’s capital for three years...officials insisted residents were safe...The word plumber comes from the Latin: plumbarius - lead worker - a slave who constructed waterways and roofs in ancient Rome using lead. Even back then, the dangers of lead were well known. Yet, recently two scientific studies concluded there were no adverse health effects from drinking Washington DC's tap water, even though it contained the highest level of lead ever recorded in the U.S.
..."...one of the most significant environmental crimes in U.S. history, if you consider the number of children impacted, the known effects of this neurotoxin, lead, the astronomical amounts of lead in D.C. water, and it's all made the more insidious by the fact that the perpetrators of this were the very people who are paid to protect us."...
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Occupational Knowledge International
okinternational.org/lead.html
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Alliance for Healthy Homes
afhh.org/res/res_alert.htm#Stimulus
...A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Science and Technology on Jan. 26 by researchers from Virginia Tech and the Children’s National Medical Center concludes that thousands of young District of Columbia children had elevations in their blood lead levels during a 2 ½ year period between 2001 and 2004 when water lead levels in the City were staggeringly high. The study’s conclusions contradict earlier statements and studies from paid consultants of the DC Water and Sewer Authority (DC WASA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the DC Department of Health...
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dcwasawatch.blogspot.com
...to ensure our drinking water does not expose fetuses, infants, and young children to hazardous levels of lead...
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Center for Environmental Health
ceh.org
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Bird Diversity Helps Protect Humans from West Nile Virus ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2009/2009-02-19-01.asp
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growandmake.com
envirocyclesystems.com
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9/11/1 "bad guys" beat "good guys"
brasschecktv.com/page/567.html
"...'U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged highjackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday's terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990's'..."
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Sustainable Sanitation Alliance
susana.org
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drytoilet.org/links.html
worldtoilet.org/resources.asp?no=1
cityfarmer.org/comptoilet64.html
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Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature
farrside.com
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rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/10/skinny-on-osama.html
trineday.com
centerforinvestigativereporting.org
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collegedrinkingprevention.gov
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hearusnow.org
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topix.com/city/pittsburgh-pa-hazelwood/2009/02/power-plants
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topix.com/science/agriculture
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International Financial Institutions Watch
ifiwatchnet.org
ifiwatch.tv
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compostingwarehouse.com
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community-gardens.suite101.com/article.cfm/community_gardens_thrive_in_urban_neighborhoods
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purefood.org/Organic/boomingfarms.cfm
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friendsoftroychapman.blogspot.com
brasschecktv.com/page/440.html
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panarchy
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6008
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Boston Air Traffic Controller Says 9/11 An Inside Job - December 14th, 2006, 02:46 PM
theologyonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34210
Boston Air Traffic Controller Says 9/11 An Inside Job
Knew people in FAA on day of hijackings who said intercept procedures should have been enacted as normal
Paul Joseph Watson

A former Boston Center air traffic controller has gone public on his assertion that 9/11 was an inside job and that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon tracked three of the four flights from the point of their hijacking to hitting their targets. In an astounding telephone interview, Robin Hordon claims air traffic controllers have been ignored or silenced to protect the true perpetrators of 9/11.

A recording of the phone conversation was posted on Google video late yesterday by the Pilots For 9/11 Truth organization...
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zerozerotwo.org/audio/radiorbitinterview.mp3
radioorbit.com
http://www.cheniere.org/techpapers/index.html
thefreedomfellowship.blogspot.com



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Who killed the US street car system?
brasschecktv.com/page/549.html
General Motors at work
You know, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea if General Motors did go out of business.

What has the destruction of the nation's street car system cost the country? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion dollars?

You'd have to add up all the oil consumed that didn't have to be, all the environmental diseases that didn't need to happen, and all the economic constraints on poor and low income people that didn't need to be. Then there are the quality of life issues which are incalculable.

Go to super-prosperous cities like Basel and Zurich in Switzerland and you'll see they excellent street car systems - just like we used to have in the US.
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Beddington Zero Energy Development Project
www.forestry.gov.uk/srcsite/infd-5jyh78
dialogue-arch.com.tw/old/091/091_e_01.htm
enviroblog.org/2008/08/does-environmental-conservation-imply-austerity.html
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transitionus.org
milkeninstitute.org
bitethebullet.us
http://ww4report.com/links
chycho.com
http://hope2012.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/the-global-war-of-terror-superpowers-prepare-for-wwiii-and-clamp-down-on-humanity/
France strike "dump milk"
Kunstler et al v. New York City

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Saturday, February 14, 2009

Earth in labor

We have to become productive again.
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"The producer names the tune and the consumer has got to dance."
~Gil Scott-Heron
brasschecktv.com/page/562.html
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"...The game is over...When people lose everything, and they have nothing to lose, they lose it..."
~Gerald Celente, Trends Research Institute
trendsresearch.com
informationclearinghouse.info/article21983.htm
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kitchen gardening
olericulture.org
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BioDiversity Research Institute
briloon.org
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calculatedriskblog.com
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Climate change even worse than predicted: expert
Feb 14
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090214/sc_afp/usclimatewarming_20090214150716
...Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.

That could raise temperatures even more and create "a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century."

"We don't want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot," said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.

The amount of carbon that could be released is staggering...
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compostmodern.org/resources/index.php
ecoalign.com
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baselinescenario.com
rabble.ca
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Why Obama's new Tarp will fail to rescue the banks

By Martin Wolf 2/10/9 Financial Times

ft.com/cms/s/0/9ebea1b8-f794-11dd-81f7-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
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green freelancing:
A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss
by Kim Severson 7/22/8
nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html?_r=1&ex=1217390400&en=82b184065dc466bd&ei=5070&emc=eta1
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L.A. Eco-Village
noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/sustainable-living-on-a-community-level.html
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A Move Toward Veggie Power Aloft
by Matthew L. Wald 1/6/9
nytimes.com/2009/01/07/business/07jetfuel.html
Burned by the cost of jet fuel, the aviation industry is trying everything from algae to camelina and jatropha as alternatives, but specialists say that some of the new fuels, which include coal, might simply trade one set of problems for another...
...“Until you have a full-scale producer and consumer market for biofuel, I don’t think you know the price,”...
So far, the volumes are small. Continental’s algae comes from a Hawaiian company called Cyanotech, which raises it as a nutritional supplement...
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shoebush.org
publiceye.org
michaelmoore.com/links
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Mafia millions buoying banks: UN
by Mark Heinrich 2/9/9
calgaryherald.com/news/mafia+millions+buoying+banks/1270095/story.html
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Center for New Community
newcomm.org
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No Tough Love for Wall Street
by Robert Scheer 2/9/9
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090210_no_tough_love_for_wall_street/
...Rising to “a challenge more complex than our financial system has ever faced,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner promised on Tuesday to give trillions more to the very folks who profited from that malignant complexity...
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spiritofchange.org
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Commonwealth Institute
comw.org
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newparadigmpress.com/npplinks.htm
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Don't Burn Food: Biofuel Standards Now!
...Not all biofuels are bad--but without tough global standards, the biofuels boom will further undermine food security and worsen global warming through increased deforestation...
avaaz.org/en/biofuel_standards_now
bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=6305316853
myspace.com/avaazorg
facebook.com/pages/Avaaz/8340223883
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Pentagon trillions missing,...
youtube.com/watch?v=eootfzAhAoU
..."DoD is the number one reason why the government can't balance its checkbook"...
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a JFK assassination theory
brasschecktv.com/page/557.html
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The Fallacy of Seeking to Control Nature With Genetically Engineered Organisms

Haikai Tane

Professor, Watershed Systems
Centre for Catchment Ecology
Mount Cook Street, Twizel NZ

cyberport.net.nz/cfce/controlling_nature.htm
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watershed.net.nz
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amazingcarbon.com
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From the Soil Up
fromthesoilup.com.au
..The salmonella outbreak...Obama says Government regulation must be tightened to contend with centralisation of food production, a flood of imported foods and the growing popularity of prepared meals, all of which have been blamed for outbreaks of salmonella and other ailments. But is centralisation of our food the route of best choice in the first place?...
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Seize the Moment
by Jeff Howard and Kent Hurst
Winter 2008
greens.org/s-r/48/48-08.html
...Not every aspect of modernism has been wrong-headed, but the moment obligates society to begin systematically sorting out the good from the bad...models for reassembling society in a new, healthier, more democratic way as wave after wave of climate chaos creates wave after wave of opportunity for deep rethinking and deep reform...
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"...How can we dance when our earth is turning; how can we sleep while our beds are burning?..."
from Beds are Burning, by Midnight Oil
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beds_Are_Burning
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Alternative Energy and the Americas
Spring 2008
youtube.com/watch?v=2DYxoacwuxg
brasschecktv.com/page/554.html
socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Publications/newsletters/Spring2008/pdf/BRLAS-Spring2008.pdf
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The 2008 Venture Lab Clean Technology Innovation Prize
youtube.com/watch?v=Y7c0ySN7gug&feature=channel
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reopen911.org
youtube.com/watch?v=kwSmFnlwrK0&NR=1
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apprenticeship on-the job training
National Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee
greenjobsconference.org
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International Union for Conservation of Nature
http://cmsdata.iucn.org/downloads/issue3_wc_earth.pdf
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American Friends Service Committee
www.afsc.org/pittsburgh
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plastics in the oceans
algalita.org
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How to Make a Recycled Bottle Herb Garden
sustainlane.com/reviews/how-to-make-a-recycled-bottle-herb-garden/BLYDMO99PNAI7FSDYN2KCW14PSJ4
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pbs.org/journeytoplanetearth
nationalteachin.org
focusthenation.org
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Edison fought progress
electroherbalism.com/Bioelectronics/Tesla/TeslaversusEdison.htm
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"free energy"
icehouse.net/john34
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Grow love.

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To participate in, or to donate seeds, garden tools, other materials, or money to
Hazelwood Harvest, contact
Barbara Williams 412-489-7080
hazelwood.harvest@gmail.com
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To learn more about making good soil, contact me at 412-421-6496 or appropriatebiotech@yahoo.com
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Growing Food With as Little Money and Work as Possible

The worse the economy gets, the more discussion there is about growing food locally. But it's not that simple. Everything is connected in the web of life. And all the plants and animals in a given area have their own agendas, which must be harnessed to our (we humans') benefit. So we start to realize a farmer is more a natural systems manager than simply a food-grower. And we begin to see that the whole community has to participate in order to restore healthy growing conditions - for us people AND for our plants and other animals.

You can't grow on polluted land, for instance, so either the land can't be allowed to be polluted or it's going to have to be cleaned up later. In the case of the soil and air in the Pittsburgh area we've got the latter situation. Our land is already polluted, our soil degraded, and our air continues to carry toxins to our lungs and gardens. You have to be sensitive to the living things you're trying to grow, as they are every bit as fragile as the people you're trying to feed. So, since we're not dealing with the ideal, let's see what we can do with what we have.

Okay, so we have stressed and tired soil that's lost a lot of it's life - the tiny living things that are such a central part of soil fertility. These little critters - earthworms, bugs, molds, etc. - need to be fed the remains of dead plants and animals, which they break down into plant nutrients in forms that are absorbable by plants. And they are needed to help break down and detoxify the pollutants that are everywhere. So we must feed the soil as if it were a living thing, because it IS alive.

An example of organic waste which must be broken down by soil life is plant cellulose. If you take non-color newspaper and cardboard (which are made from trees) and lay it on the soil you have a free mulch, but it won't make the cover of Garden Beautiful because your neighbors may think you're just too lazy to pick up your trash. Being less enlightened and thoughtful, they think that corn comes from the grocery store and cardboard comes from a box factory somewhere. But we whole systems analysts know that a corn plant is way more than just the yellow kernels that get eaten, and every paper bag, cardboard box, and page of newspaper started out as part of a great big plant called a tree somewhere before it got to the paper mill or got made into cardboard. So - just as with sunlight and carbon dioxide - here are some materials free to the grower who knows how to use them. Local organic farmer Don Kretschmann (kretschmannfarm.com) uses cardboard for mulch around his corn plants. It holds in the water, prevents weeds, and eventually degrades into soil. Cardboard or newspaper can be used to line the bottom of plant pots rather than stones, to give air space and water holding capacity - and eventually increased root space - as the material rots down and becomes food for the roots which grow into it.

And a cardboard or newspaper mulch which is thick enough to keep out the weeds is a labor saver. You can lose an entire season if you don't make good plans for not letting the weeds grow in the first place. I know, I've done it...

Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to grow a tree - and then feeding the carbonaceous materials like leaves, grass clippings, cardboard and newspaper back into the soil - strikes me as a beautiful return to our role as stewards of Nature.

Agriculture is low-paying labor only depending on how you look at it. I was never so strong or healthy as when I came back from that family farm in West Virginia. I had eaten better than any city person - farmed and wild meat, raw milk, homemade butter, buttermilk, and fresh-picked fruits and vegetables. I had cleaner water from the wells and springs. I had hard work in fresh air and sun. I came back to Pittsburgh about broke, but I had my health and I'd learned a lot. The muscles were a perk.

I learned about death being a part of life. If you're going to eat meat, you might as well get up close and participate in the death of the animal you intend to eat, be it hog or cow or sheep or deer or whatever. And plants and animals don't care any more about you than you do about caring for or feeding them. Let's not be overly romantic. It's no fun to rope a pig or prod a cow or corral a lamb on their way to slaughter. To the extent we learn to work together with other life forms we can transcend this ancient chain of suffering which extends throughout nature, not just with humanity.

Let's free ourselves up from some stereotypes about farming and country people. Country people are not stupid, Hee Haw jokes aside. When I did farm work in the 70's I had to get some humility - I really didn't have a clue about a lot of things country people learn growing up. Learning the names of the wild plants that I later found out were herbs and edible "weeds," farm machinery operation and repair, landscaping and construction basics, dealing with wildlife - all made me realize that we city people are in a lot of ways dumber than country people.
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Thursday, February 12, 2009

World Revolution 4th of July headlines

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11/12/8 parody issue NY Times
["All the news we hope to print"]

thomasmertoncenter.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/are-the-yes-men-social-sculptors-yes

theyesmen.org

codepink4peace.org

All War Ends

Troops Returning Home Immediately

Humanity Sets its Sights on Sane Economy

Kids, Corn Plants, Dogs Relieved at First Peaceful Independence Day
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Saturday, February 07, 2009

Celebrating Earth at Potato Peel Mountain

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Power Plants

2/5/9

by Adam Fleming afleming@steelcitymedia.com

Pictures by Heather Mull hmull@steelcitymedia.com


Wracked by change, Hazelwood tries to put down new roots.

Hazelwood has been industrialized and de-industrialized. Now its residents hope to create a new future - by returning to an agricultural past.

http://pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A58473

Jim McCue is standing in his kitchen, next to a pair of green buckets filled with brown mush and topped with a few sandwich rolls. He's got a 40-pound bag of dolomitic limestone and a pail full of yard clippings.

"People don't realize you can compost inside," he says. "If you know what you're doing, you don't have to cause a health hazard, and you don't have to cause a smell."

Hazelwood composter Jim McCue

Hazelwood composter Jim McCue at
Potato Peal Mountain
alllifelover
plentyoffish.com/member498447.htm
That's part of what the limestone is for: cutting down on the smell of the discarded food McCue tosses into the pails, where it slowly degrades into a nutrient-rich soil he can later use in a garden outside.

A 56-year-old living on disability, McCue spends much of his time studying microbes and composting techniques. His Hazelwood apartment doubles as his private lab and blog headquarters (bioeverything.blogspot.com).

"I'm blessed because, over the years, I came to realize there's this wonderful ability of soil to clean," he says.

Obviously, McCue encounters skeptics, his landlord not least among them. But McCue says he made a convert even of him, after the landlord -- who has his own garden in Hazelwood -- saw that peppers grown in the compost grew to twice the usual size.

If McCue's kitchen compost system seems quirky, it's nothing compared to his vision for Hazelwood. He talks about clean-manufacturing plants and "a high-tech food-production greenhouse." In some of the city's larger empty sites, he sees room for large-scale compost dumps.

"Walk down Ladora Way," he says, referring to a block where neighbors have taken one step toward a greener future by building a community garden over a vacant lot. "They have the smell of flowers and a little bit of color in the flowers. You'll see people who are doing positive things. Instead of weeds and crack pipes laying around ... there is that freedom."

To the casual observer, it's hard to imagine an agrarian society taking hold in McCue's neighborhood, especially in February. Where houses still stand, they are pinned together, near the emptiness of a former mill site whose legacy still taints the soil.

Richard LeGrande uses gardening to reach Hazelwood's kids.

Richard LeGrande uses gardening to reach Hazelwood's kids.
Heather Mull
And blight has made a mockery of other attempts to pretty up the neighborhood. On a vacant Monongahela Street lot, the posts in one of former Mayor Tom Murphy's "Project Picket Fence" fences have been kicked in.

"Historically, you wouldn't think of a former mill site as an urban farm," concedes Rev. Leslie Boone, of Hazelwood Presbyterian Church. But Boone believes that Hazelwood, having gone through industrial and post-industrial blight, can transform its tarnished reputation by returning to a more rural past.

In fact, a cross-generational urban-farming mindset is growing in Hazelwood -- a belief that farming can heal the land and reconnect the people who live on it.

The mindset, says Boone, is about "getting out of the box and not just thinking, 'Well, you're in the city so we can't have farming.' Back in the day, I learned how to can. I know how to make ketchup. My grandmother taught us." And while farming means "going back into the past, it's also [about] moving into the future."

Already she and her neighbors can envision chicken coops in backyards, abandoned schools transformed into food-processing centers -- even cows grazing on the site of a former coke works.

Can you keep cows in the city?

"That's what we need to find out," Boone says.

It used to be a lot easier to answer that question: For many years, Hazelwood was a prosperous family farm.

Starting in the late 18th century, the prominent Woods family took ownership of much of the densely wooded area, according to S. Kussart's The Early History of the Fifteenth Ward of the City of Pittsburgh. (Hazelwood's name is actually a combination of the Woods' surname and Hazel Hill, an early development.)

Rev. Leslie Boone uses gardening to reach Hazelwood's kids.

Rev. Leslie Boone uses gardening to reach Hazelwood's kids.
Heather Mull
The Woods successfully farmed the land, even establishing a 1,500-tree peach orchard for a time. On a number of occasions, they played host to Stephen Foster, the progenitor of American popular music.

By the close of the 19th century, however, Hazelwood was being transformed. Jones & Laughlin Steel opened a plant along the Monongahela in 1884, and in 1906, the company expanded with a huge coke works.

For 90 years, the coke works -- which converted coal into a hotter-burning fuel used in steel-making -- darkened the land, river and air.

"It was like fire and brimstone," McCue recalls. "People were actually afraid of Hazelwood. That's why they moved to the suburbs."

In fact, according to a Carnegie Mellon Urban Laboratory report from 2007, Hazelwood's population dropped by 80 percent -- from a high of 33,140 to just over 5,000 -- between 1950 and 2005. The departing residents left behind numerous vacant structures, including two former schools: Gladstone Middle School closed in 2001, and Burgwin Elementary followed, in 2006.

Good news from Hazelwood sometimes seems in short supply. In newspaper headlines, it's often the backdrop for crime stories, and last year the city picked Hazelwood for its first demolition "blitz" -- a strategy of clear-cutting abandoned houses, instead of demolishing them one at a time. Almost 60 demolition jobs were ordered in a single contract. Partly as a result, Hazelwood is a city neighborhood that can seem as isolated as a small town.

While Second Avenue connects it directly to Downtown, about three-and-a-half miles away, you wouldn't drive that far along it unless you had good reason. And while it's next door to Greenfield and Squirrel Hill, it's separated from those healthier neighborhoods by a steep stretch of Hazelwood Avenue.

The Ladora Way community garden is bedded down for the winter.

The Ladora Way community garden is bedded down for the winter.
Heather Mull
Redevelopment has been slow to take hold here, in large part because of the Mon-Fayette Expressway, a state toll-road project that has been in limbo for decades. The road would go right through the heart of the former coke works: 178 acres of land just waiting for a developer.

"Not knowing is the hardest part," says Bill Widdoes, of the Regional Industrial Development Corporation, which manages the site. "Just when you think [the road project] is dead, dead, dead ... something came out [in the paper] this week." And while there have been numerous plans to use the old site, "We've had a couple false starts," he admits.

Most recently, the neighborhood has weathered news that Dimperio's Market, Hazelwood's only grocery and one of its few remaining businesses, was closing. There's a deli beneath the public library, but little more than convenience stores on the blocks of Second Avenue surrounding it.

"With Dimperio's closing, the only food options are pizza and snack food," says Sara Dora, who handles teen services at Hazelwood's Carnegie Library branch.

Given the lack of healthy options, Boone asks, "How do you teach your children to not become overweight, artery-clogged adults?"

For someone like Boone, who envisions a more agricultural way of life in her neighborhood, the closing of a market would seem a bad omen. But sometimes, misfortune breeds opportunity.

Last summer, Boone and other community members led a group of youths in planting and harvesting a garden on Ladora Way, below the tracks in Hazelwood. The project included kids from the local YMCA, as well as Boone's vacation Bible school. The land they chose used to hold a set of row houses, which had been knocked down prior to the city's "blitz."

"When the project first started, there was concern that the children are going to tear it up," Boone says. "[But] the kids are probably the greatest guards for that."

"The kids took ownership of the garden. They were guarding it as 'theirs...were to ask some of these 5- and 6-year-olds the process of getting that tomato to making it into spaghetti sauce, they could tell you because that's something that is a hands-on learning experience."

But perhaps the most important seed they planted was learning to work together.

Dimperio's Market, the last grocery store in Hazelwood, is shutting its doors.

Dimperio's Market, the last grocery store in Hazelwood, is shutting its doors.
Heather Mull
Hazelwood is "really divided," says Marva Carter, who's raising four kids in the area. "It's the older people, that's how they lived and now they put it in these kids' heads."

Some of the tension is racial, she says. Among Pittsburgh neighborhoods that are majority-white, Hazelwood has the sixth-highest percentage of black residents, at 34.4 percent, according to the 2000 U.S. Census data.

But often the divisions are based on geography -- marked by neighborhood boundaries no one can even remember setting.

"It's territorial," agrees Boone. "If you go behind us, there's a railroad track that runs there, and the people below the tracks don't really communicate with the people above Second Avenue."

The kids end up identifying with those boundaries, too.

When 12-year-old Gabby Kunak (whose family moved to Hazelwood from New Castle) worked on the garden last summer, she says that "Some of [the other kids] wouldn't get along with me. They didn't like my accent."

Nire Walker, 10, says that "there were cliques when the YMCA [first] came over." But as they tended the garden together, that "just went away."

With no nearby schools, "the guy that lives next door may go to a school in East Liberty, as opposed to a school in Squirrel Hill," says Richard LeGrande, an elder in Hazelwood Presbyterian Church. Gardening "gives [the children] a common place with results, with somebody who they not only know, but they live near."

Hazelwood isn't the only community turning to urban agriculture.

"Given that there is so much vacant land in the city, the traditional model of cutting the grass and picking up the trash doesn't address the systematic problem," says Andrew Butcher, co-founder and CEO of a sustainable redevelopment nonprofit called Growth Through Energy and Community Health. "There is a way of addressing environmental concerns and engaging the community."

Butcher estimates that 10 percent of the city's land mass is vacant and blighted. "The problem with vacancy is no one owns the problem," he says.

Urban farming is not a new concept in Pittsburgh, Butcher notes. GTECH has 12 acres of vacant-land reclamation projects going on in the city, scattered through East Liberty, Lawrenceville, Larimer and Hazelwood. Back in 2007, GTECH planted about five acres of switchgrass and two acres of sunflowers on Hazelwood's mostly empty former mill site. The process helped improve the soil, but it also produced crops that are used as biofuel. (One of GTECH's co-founders, Nathaniel Doyno, is the executive director of Steel City Biofuels, a nonprofit that connects biofuel producers with consumers.)

Pittsburgh is "very much well on its way to being a national leader in this space," Butcher says. "I can tell you that I, not being a Pittsburgh native, have decided to stay and co-found an enterprise to work on [sustainable redevelopment] because I feel it's a unique place in the world to do that."

Butcher's optimism is backed up by the mounting level of interest and activity surrounding clean redevelopment in Pittsburgh. The nonprofit Grow Pittsburgh (www.growpittsburgh.org) provides an online nexus for locals with any level of interesting urban agriculture. And Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's Neighborhood Initiatives program has helped Hazelwood as well, connecting residents with experts at the local branch of the Penn State Cooperative Extension.

The Extension, an educational outreach arm of the university, has collaborated on a number of community projects, including beautification efforts in Larimer and the Hill District.

And a number of people are simply taking up urban agriculture on their own. Greenfield resident Joanna Hohman, for example, installed a chicken coop in her backyard last summer because "eggs got really expensive."

She admits that it may take a while to earn back her investment: She paid $5 per chicken, a discounted rate because the chickens weren't fully grown or egg-producing and took a while to mature.

The five chickens are now producing an average of three eggs a day -- all in a coop penned off in a corner of her yard.

She says her neighbors don't seem to mind the birds -- which is just as well: Aside from animal-cruelty laws, there aren't a lot of rules about raising chickens in the city.

There is a "fowl at large" ordinance, passed in 1992. The law says that if you own -- or "are in charge of" -- any "chickens, geese, ducks, turkeys or other fowl," you must keep them from running "at large upon any public place, unenclosed lands, or the premises of another." (Another city ordinance says that if you're running a "chicken cleanery" without a water meter, you'll be charged $263.94 a year for water, five times what you'd pay for an unmetered washing machine.)

City law on agriculture is "not really restrictive" about planting, says Miriam Manion, executive director of Grow Pittsburgh. She also says it's her understanding that a resident can own up to five chickens provided "you keep them contained. You can have a rooster, although roosters sometimes cause neighborhood problems."

As for Rev. Boone's vision of cattle grazing within city limits, Manion can't say what rules apply to livestock. While the group has pondered bringing goats to Braddock, they "hadn't really explored it in depth."

Urban agriculture faces other unique challenges, too.

"We joke about red brick being the parent rock around here," says Michael Masiuk, the Allegheny County director of the Penn State Cooperative Extension. Many urban plots, including Hazelwood's on Ladora Way, are on land where old houses were demolished. Discarded bricks end up buried, creating soil that is "not the ideal growing medium."

And growing crops on small (or in the case of many urban farms, very small) plots means giving up "economies of scale." A large, industrial-size farm can cover hundreds of acres, making it possible to harvest and sell its produce in bulk.

But to Masiuk, such problems are "an opportunity for creativity": a chance to save their neighborhood and, in some small way, the world.

There are plenty of reasons why growing our food close to home makes sense anywhere -- no matter where your home may be.

It may not seem efficient for Hazelwood kids to be running up and down the block with pails of water. But industrial-scale farming has inefficiencies too. The 2007 report from Carnegie Mellon's Urban Laboratory estimates that "the average American meal travels 1,500 miles before reaching the table" -- even though "most food sources can be found within 100 miles of their demand."

And that can't last forever, some warn.

"Fossil fuels are running out on the planet," says Mindy Schwartz, of Garden Dreams, Inc., a Wilkinsburg company that sells produce and seedlings. At some point, she says, "People aren't going to be able to afford to buy food shipped from far away."

And that means we should be preserving farmland closer to home. "We need to protect the farmland we have," she says. "We're trying to say, 'A lot of people living in cities is a really sustainable solution.'"

Shipping food into the supermarket "is not really cheaper," maintains Don Kretschmann, a member of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture's board of directors. "It's just that we pay for it a different way," primarily through government subsidies.

Kretschmann says that as awareness of that sinks in, there will be "a maturation of our society. ... I think that we're starting to educate our palate."

On the ground in Hazelwood, blogger and composter Jim McCue says he is "hesitant to call anything a mistake ... [but] a lot of the huge facilities and farms and utilities that we have nowadays are not sustainable."

McCue argues that we should all be moving toward a system of food production that is as local as possible. Beyond the economic and environmental factors, he says the sense of optimism local farming creates should not be understated.

"I used to be afraid to go down there. I never was on that end of Ladora," he says. "And now I go down there and [the people are] not totally, completely helpless, victim to whatever hell is going on."

Hope remains even at the old coke-works site, still haunted by vacant mill buildings separated by tracts of disused land. The RIDC's Widdoes says any future development will feature a "green-space corridor" along the river. Already, the soil has been cleaned well enough for non-residential standards -- and could be brought to residential standards where needed.

Some have found homes here already: "Wildlife has come back," says Widdoes. "A lot of rabbits, a lot of deer, a lot of hawks. ... I've seen beaver down here. We've got a lot of blue heron."

But residents say they are no longer waiting to be rescued by the next big development.

"This togetherness that we're seeking has to come from projects like the greening project," says Richard LeGrande. Hazelwood's hope, he says, lies in the fact that "people are coming out and saying, 'We made this together.'"

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Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Because we're stubborn

From time immemorial, we've wanted to have our cake and eat it too. When oil crisis in the 1970's shut mills down in Pittsburgh, some of the smoke cleared and many more stars appeared in a sky of deeper blue...
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"...there is hope in the opportunity to build something different. Just as mammals only inherited the Earth after the dinosaurs were smacked by an extra-terrestrial rock, a sustainable economy might only compete when the old beast no longer roars...given that our world economy is built on consuming land, resources, water and air, a recession helps the Earth..."
~Tom Heap
soulandsoil.com/UserConsole/ViewPost.aspx?Title=The_Stupidity_of_'Saving_the_Planet'_(parts_1_%26_2)&ArticleID=1772
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Sunday, February 01, 2009

Nature is already high-tech.

We who "invented" the hypodermic needle (after the mosquito and bitey-fly...)
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Using sunlight (uv), heat and biodiversity against disease
From
National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service:
Potting Mixes for Sustainable Agriculture Production
attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/potmix.html 2004
...Consider solarizing [exposing to sunlight]...
...In many circumstances, compost can suppress plant disease. Israeli researchers discovered that vegetable and herb seedlings raised in a mix of 40% vermiculite, 30% peat moss, and 30% composted cow manure grew faster, with less incidence of disease, than those raised in a 40% vermiculite/60% peat moss mix. To understand how compost suppresses disease, it is helpful to know how plant substances are broken down during the composting process...temperatures are between 104 and 149°F...destroyed...are plant pathogens and weed seeds...when temperatures begin to fall...some beneficial organisms—like Streptomyces, Gliocladium, and Trichoderma, which serve as biocontrol agents—re-colonize the compost. This re-colonization is somewhat random. For example, composts produced in the open near a forest are more consistently suppressive than those produced in enclosed facilities. The reason appears to be the abundance of microbial species found in the natural environment...
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Beddington Zero Energy Development Project
greenbuildingworldwide.com/index_files/page0026.htm
www.forestry.gov.uk/srcsite/infd-5jyh78
dialogue-arch.com.tw/old/091/091_e_01.htm
enviroblog.org/2008/08/does-environmental-conservation-imply-austerity.html
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