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Block Repair: Neighborhood-Scale Permaculture for Urban Revitalization
We are currently looking to partner with committed groups of neighbors to engage in Block Repair. This process will assess the challenges and opportunities of food production, rainwater harvesting, and community building on the scale of one to several city blocks. Within this scope we will be able to capitalize on the diversity of community members, ecological niches, and resources not available in any single household. The resulting design will be an integrated blueprint for growing food, relationships, and hope for bright green future.
Whether you are new to the concepts of permaculture and regenerative design, or have long been a part of the choir, we invite you to take the next step in increasing your self-sufficiency, whatever it may be. If you would like to find out more about Block Repair, please email inquiries@barrettecological.com for more information, or to schedule a consultation.
It will take our collective intelligence and creativity to look back on this phase as a time when we successfully transitioned away from oil dependence and curbed climate change. This is both an offering, and a call to action. We look forward to partnering with you, our community and clients, to engage in creating more vibrant and resilient human environments during the coming years, in Portland and beyond.
Be well, and be in touch.
“What is permaculture?!” Watch this video…
Here’s some classic footage of Bill Mollison from 1990.
Cradle-to-…
Here’s a thoughtful article from a longtime permaculture designer…
Forest Stewardship Council: Green Wood, or Greenwashing?
The other day, I was scouring google for images of environmental destruction for a slideshow. To my surprise, I came across a website (FSC-Watch) that aggregates information about the poor practices of forestry operations that have been Forest Stewardship Council certified.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the FSC, it is the largest certifier ’sustainabily harvested’ timber. For the past several years, it has been one of the main ‘Green Features’ touted by the timber industry.
While I’ve always approached lumber marketed as ’sustainably harvested’ with skepticism, I’m finding that the information on FSC-Watch’s website points to significantly greater destruction of ecosystems than I had previously expected from anything with an FSC label.
Measuring Local Organic in ‘Food Feet’
So where’s your next meal coming from? Over the last few years, lots of folks have found out.
In recent memory, we’ve heard about the 500 mile diet and even the 250 mile diet. But now that we’ve come across the the 50 mile diet, things are really starting to get exciting. For those of us who live in urban centers, the concept of a 50 mile diet lends some hope to the oft-mentioned vision of returning to foodsheds characterized by small cities with thriving rural hinterlands. Indeed, for those of us blessed to live in the Willamette Valley, there is much reason to be hopeful.
So what’s next in the quest for ever more local food? ‘Food Feet’!!! Nevermind trying to calculate how far a longhaul trucker might have traveled to deliver your salad greens or eggs, you could be counting the steps from your backdoor.
Change Everything Now
Add another voice to the growing list of fairly conservative environmentalists who are calling for more radical action around the global environmental crisis. In an interview with Orion magazine, Gus Speth (whose list of credentials is longer than this entire post) calls for “a huge mass movement before it’s to late,” and suggests a “transition to a postgrowth society.”
While Gus stops a bit short of outlining exactly what that mass movement looks like, or detailing what exactly we are transitioning to, we’ve been getting involved a concept that does just that.
The Transition Towns movement got its start just two years ago, but already boasts 100 municipalities that have ‘officially’ adopted the initiative, with another 800+ (including Portland) that are working on it! Here’s a little background:
The Transition Initiative is based on the following FOUR KEY ASSUMPTIONS:
1. That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it’s
better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.2. That our communities presently lack the resilience to enable us to weather the
severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil.3. That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now.
4. That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and
proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more
connected, more enriching and that recognize the biological limits of our planet.
One of the things that makes the Transition Town movement really effective (in our humble opinion) is this: focusing most explicitly on peak oil has a significant advantage over organizing around climate change. (Big claim! but the reasoning is very simple…) While climate change clearly has greater implications for the long-term survival of our species, the implications of peak oil us to examine our immediate ability to provide for our basic needs.
Still, the transition concept holds climate change close to its organizational heart. What is needed, the transition concept points out, is a holistic understanding of the relationship between peak oil and climate change. It is the lack of this understanding that had led most conventional approaches to both issues to neglect the other, for example:
Responses to peak oil such as so-called ‘clean coal’ and biofuels contribute further greenhouse gasses.
Top-down models of addressing climate change don’t address the localization that will be increasingly necessary due to increased fuel costs.
Rob Hopkins, provocateur of the whole Transition bit, has just written a book (aptly, the Transition Handbook) outlining all of the above in greater detail, plus much more.
Cosmic Bob’s Plan for Your Life!
Check out this great article from Doug Bullock. It’s good reading for anyone looking to make themself more useful in the coming times.
Speaking of making yourself more useful, in the next 3-6 months we’re going to be offering a few different workshops on various urban permaculture topics. Be on the lookout for a two-day Permaculture for Renters workshop and more.
Hop on the mailing list here if you want to receive emails previewing the classes and other information…
Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’
The BBC reported today that the annual losses, in dollar terms, due to deforestation fall somewhere between 2 trillion and 5 trillion dollars (US) per year. These losses stem from the elimination of services that forests provide such as cleaning air and water, acting as carbon sinks, and the plethora of other functions that forests provide to the global environment.
Dollarizing the destruction really puts the current economic woes in perspective.
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