Taking Root in Detroit

Be part of the solution. Join us in Detroit:



ReNew, ReVision, Redesign Detroit - A Permaculture Design Course
April 27 - March 8th, 2011Larry Santoyo and Keith D. Johnson, Instructors

An Invitation to Mutually Assured Succession

The concept for the ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit - Permaculture Design Course is inspired by Detroit's efforts to re-imagine itself after decades of slow, steady decline. In Detroit, real green shoots arise in once-empty lots as individuals and organizations create community and market gardens as ways to beautify, create green spaces, provide fresh, nutritious food to city residents, create or recreate community, and pursue self-reliance as entrepreneurs in the food system. While some pursue food justice via gardens, others pursue racial and economic justice. Some do all three, many of them via a garden, or urban farm.

On some streets a rooster may crow, a goat bleat or a duck quack. Pheasants, raccoons, opossums and deer can be seen in various places. But this is not chaos and ruin, it is edge meeting edge, which is where magic happens. This is nature saying, "Join me. I haven't forgotten you." This is opportunity to design a regenerative, sustainable city. But the city is more than fallow fields and squawking chickens.

Old meets new as the Motor City becomes a city with a growing reputation for attracting entrepreneurs, artists and wanderers looking for niches, and filling them. Some are wary of the new, some embrace them. Tension like the surface tension of a bubble stretches until boundaries burst and edges blend creating magic and conflict. Techno whizzes bring the whiz-bang of new frontiers while social media rides a wave of enthusiasm for ethereal connectedness. Grace Lee Boggs sings a song of resistance to powers tangible and hidden while schools descend into chaos and overcrowding, and a new style of education seeks to rise from the ruins of industrialization.

Into the political crisis following the fall of Kwame Kilpatrick rises Mayor Dave Bing, bringing a new game, far from the basketball court, one where the stakes are very much higher. Assembling a cadre of corporations, experts and advisors, the Mayor and his select group set about the designing a future for Detroit. A Detroit from a corporate, growth-oriented view in which the citizens are engaged in meetings without dialogue and are asked to respond to pre-selected questions out of context and without any data, information or expression of what assumptions they are expected to consider. The claim is transparency, but little is known and less stated openly. The city is told people will be incentivized to move to renewed, walkable neighborhoods, but there is no money to make it happen - and they will be left behind with reduced or absent city services, but may do as they please in these left-behind "green" spaces.

An equal and opposite reaction is the response to every action. Not from the top, but from the bottom. Not behind closed, corporate and governmental doors, but in city squares, school auditoriums and neighborhood meeting places. Not in the name of growth, power and profit, but people, sustainability and community. Perhaps the people populating DetroitWorks can create a Perfect Possible Future, but sound principles of ecological engineering suggest this is ulikely. How can sustainability arise from a profit motive? How does a community grow when torn from its roots and transplanted without them? How can a city be the sum of only some of its parts?

An equal and opposite reaction, this is a call and an invitation to all to engage in a discussion and a deseign process where all are equally empowered and the process is open and interactive. We hope this process can lead to an alternative to the current DetroitWorks process, or help create a realignment and redesign of the DetroitWorks process, that has as its primary concerns community and sustainability.

The ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit PDC will fulfill all content requirements of a PDC, however, it is, possibly, unique in its goal to apply permaculture principles to produce a workable design for a major city as the course Design Project. Detroit's difficult past, it's vibrant entrepreneurial spirit, under-utilized workforce, abundant water, vacant land, and it's industrial past all combine to make Detroit the perfect candidate to be the first large, post-industrial, post-carbon urban area.

Bank Bailouts Explained

The story of the bank bailouts, and what we've gotten so far in return.
by Omid Malekan

Campus Food Lawns....

Thanks to Treehugger (and Rachel Cernansky) for this story:

With Support from Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan, Campus Food Co-op Project Set to Launch Nationwide

by Rachel Cernansky, Boulder, Colorado  on 01.18.11

FOOD & HEALTH

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Image: cofed.org
Thursday marks a big day for the future of food on college campuses around the country. Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, and Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel are part of the launch committee that will help the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, or CoFed, empower students to establish co-ops stocked with ethically-sourced and sustainable food on college campuses nationwide.

CoFed grew out of a campaign that successfully blocked the first fast food chain restaurant from opening on the University of California's Berkeley campus. The Berkeley student food co-op opened instead on November 15th and in 2010 alone, six teams on the west coast began working on doing the same at their own schools, from Santa Barbara to Seattle.
Complete with experts ready to help students with everything from retail and dealing with legal issues and incorporation, CoFed "will train a new generation of leaders with experience creating good, clean, fair food businesses and a new generation of eaters who believe in the power of community," said Josh Viertel.
Bill McKibben, 350.org founder, made this enlightened statement: "Colleges around the country are figuring out that they educate their students three times a day about either good food or bad - about a world where local matters, or where food is just a plate full of calories to get you through class. CoFed has the potential to be a crucial part of that process."
More on sustainable food and colleges
Organic Food Can Feed the World, Maine College Students
New Study Finds College Cafeteria Trays Can Increase Both Dish Use and Food Waste
Campus Kitchens Project: Helping Schools Eliminate Food Waste and Combat Hunger

Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

The American Dre.....er, Nightmare. Time to Wake Up, eh?

The AMERICAN DREAM is a 30 minute animated film that shows you how you've been scammed by the most basic elements of our government system. All of us Americans strive for the American Dream, and this film shows you why your dream is getting farther and farther away. Do you know how your money is created? Or how banking works? Why did housing prices skyrocket and then plunge? Do you really know what the Federal Reserve System is and how it affects you every single day? THE AMERICAN DREAM takes an entertaining but hard hitting look at how the problems we have today are nothing new, and why leaders throughout our history have warned us and fought against the current type of financial system we have in America today. You will be challenged to investigate some very entrenched and powerful institutions in this nation, and hopefully encouraged to help get our nation back on track.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE MAKERS OF THIS FILM AND BUY A QUALITY DVD!
http://www.theamericandreamfilm.com/

Waste = Food

An inspiring documentary on the Cradle to Cradle design concept of the chemist Michael Braungart and the architect William McDonough. Winner of the Silver Dragon at the Beijing International Science Film Festival 2006. OUTLINE: Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill.
But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution.
• Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource.
• Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment.
Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun­gart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption.

Chomsky at Woods Hole, Ma.

Here's three videos that I found on Vimeo
Noam Chomsky (MIT Emeritus Institute Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics) answers ZMI student questions at Woods Hole part 1

Noam Chomsky answers ZMI student questions from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.
Noam Chomsky ZMI student questions part 2

Noam Chomsky ZMI student questions p2 from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.
Genesis to End Times and Everything Between

Chomsky v2: Genesis to End Times and Everything Between from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.

Lieberman's War on the Press and the First Amendment

Constitutional law and national security scholars testified on the constitutionality of prosecuting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act. [The Espionage Act was passed by Congress in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War. It prescribed a $10,000 fine and 20 years' imprisonment for interfering with the recruiting of troops or the disclosure of information dealing with national defense. Additional penalties were included for the refusal to perform military duty. Over the next few months around 900 went to prison under the Espionage Act.] Among the topics addressed were the nature of journalism, the extent of constitutional protections of the press in protecting the divulgence of classified information, and the amount of information that is categorized as classified. Below we have Ralph Nader and Geoffrey Stone, two of a number speakers addressing the House Judiciary Committee. You can watch all of these videos here.

In response to the actions of Julian Assange and his organization, U.S. Senators Joe Lieberman, John Ensign, and Scott Brown "introduced a bill to amend the Espionage Act in order to facilitate the prosecution of folks like Wikileaks." Critics have noted that "leaking [classified] information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers," and that "Lieberman's proposed solution to WikiLeaks could have implications for journalists reporting on some of the more unsavory practices of the intelligence community."Legal analyst Benjamin Wittes has called the proposed legislation "the worst of both worlds," saying:

It leaves intact the current World War I-era Espionage Act provision, 18 U.S.C. 793(e), a law [with] many problems . . . and then takes a currently well-drawn law and expands its scope to the point that it covers a lot more than the most reckless of media excesses. A lot of good journalism would be a crime under this provision; after all, knowingly and willfully publishing material 'concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government' is no small part of what a good newspaper does.

We are fighting for the life of the First Amendment. Thanks to all those who have joined the fight.

Nobody Wastes Like America

Iraq war spending vs. spending on renewable energy. The same amount of money could have been invested to supply 2/3 of of current energy consumption

The Elephant in the Room

See more at http://www.caglecartoons.com/