Forest Gardening

Gardening for lazy people... that's what I need.  The labor and planning is front-loaded: it takes more work to get started than just putting in a basic garden with a few annual veggies.  But the long-term payback is much higher, with much lower ongoing input.  The magic comes from mimicking a young forest to grow a variety of useful perennial plants and trees that are good for food or support the micro-environment of your developing forest garden.  And it can be done on a very small scale or on a much larger plot of land.

Lincoln Smith offers his next forest gardening course in April.  He is passionate and very knowledgeable.

FOREST GARDEN WEEKEND – Registration Open for Spring 2012 - Click to Sign Up
How to grow a forest garden, the best thing you can do with your land. Learn how to 
harmonize your environment and your goals into a garden-ecosystem that is bountiful and 
sustainable. Whether you have square feet or acres, understanding ecosystem science and 
forest garden philosophy will prepare you to grow the most satisfying and sustainable garden 
possible.

This forest gardening weekend includes forest garden tours, lectures, discussions, planting 
demonstrations, and take-home resources.
Topics:-        Understanding forest ecology
-        Forest garden design exercises
-        Uses of forest garden plants
-        Polycultures (plants together)
-        Forest garden care and harvest
Course Fee: $295. Lunches with forest garden ingredients are included.
Time: 2 days, 8:30am – 4:30pm

Cool Resilience-focused website

I'm delighted to see a new Resilient Community website (and perhaps a business serving communities?) by John Robb. Can't wait to see where he takes this.

Tragic Foreshadowing - Global Economy Capsizes

The images have gripped the minds of people around the world: a luxury cruise ship capsized, its captain in disgrace more for cowardice and dereliction of duty than for causing the accident itself.

It seems a potentially apt herald of what is coming for the United States economy and likely for much of Europe. But instead of cowardice, our political 'captains' and their cronies are perhaps more short-sighted and selfish than they are cowardly.

Transition Towns - what does it offer our region?

My friend Hans Peters sent me this. I'm glad that people are working on this. I've found that much of the benefit of this kind of gathering is in building a stronger sense of community and in discovering kindred spirits among neighbors and acquaintances.

Greek Computer Whiz: data-mining for tax evaders?

A very earnest Greek computer scientist offered a plan to catch tax evaders.  But, according to NPR, the local Greek revenue offices are so corrupt that they turn a blind eye, having no interest in his useful tool.

A heart warming effort worthy of a high school civics class... if you believe your state is going to survive and you believe that it has the capacity to use the extra revenue wisely.

I wouldn't put my money on the Greek state regaining it's capacity to meaningfully provide public services to the Greek people.  And given yesterday's Eurozone bond down-grades, Greece is not the only Western country whose rulers are likely to have trouble keeping their promises to their voters.  I wonder how long people's primary loyalties will remain with a formerly 'first world' state absent basic services?

I hope the Greek disease is not contagious, but I bet it is.

Culture of Resilience

How can we cultivate a local culture that promotes the kind of thinking, relationships, and other behaviors that are necessary to thrive in our present time?

What kind of culture will support us in finding ways to prosper and flourish regardless of national or global economic/political upheavals?

Maybe we already have much of this culture latent in our community.  Maybe it's just a matter of awakening our individual resourcefulness, creativity, our friendships and trust networks at a new level. 

DIY Insulin: Biohacking anyone?

Whether you suspect that the U.S. (and/or the global) economy is headed for a deflationary depression or a hyper-inflationary crash (I can't decide which I'd prefer...) where will diabetics get the insulin and diabetic paraphernalia they need to survive if the electronic payments/banking system seizes up for more than a couple weeks?

I don't think of myself as a 'prepper' but this diabetic stuff which affects my immediate extended family, has got me wondering.

Now I'm thinking of DIY biotech and what bio-hackers could do in garage or basement labs.  John Robb has a recent post featuring a Twitter exchange w/ a biohacker that draws an analogy between the growth of hardware hackerspaces and bio hackerspaces.  They suggest that the opportunity is in industrial biotech  due to lower or no regulation, rather than in medicine or food crops.  Maybe someone is developing DIY biotech for diabetic pets...

Diabetes Chic

I'm wrapping up a terrific vacation with my brother-in-law Caleb and sister-in-law Victoria with their two little kids, Cody and Morgan.  Only 6 weeks ago 2 year old Cody was diagnosed with diabetes and their life has changed dramatically. Caleb is also an insulin-dependent diabetic, but he came down with it just a few years ago at age 30.  One of Caleb's older sisters has been a diabetic since age 5.

Caleb and Victoria inspired me with their grace, persistence and total lack of self-pity in managing their toddler's sudden diabetes.  They shared some frustration about the lack of really well-designed diabetic accessories, and Caleb mentioned his preliminary ideas for a combined blood-sugar monitor and insulin pump.  Apparently these devices are available separately but not as a single unit.

A flood of questions and ideas have come to me as I stayed with them over Christmas.  Most importantly, how do we harness the intelligence of the crowd to create resilient, lower-cost access to the daily life-saving medicine and technology that diabetics need?  As I said yesterday:

...I’ll bet there’s a way to build an Open Venture along the lines sketched by John Robb in this talk.  One of Robb’s key insights is to pay the crowd rather than follow a pure volunteer model like Wikipedia.  Robb’s initial effort is MiiU.org the wiki for home and community resilience.

There must be millions of insulin-dependent diabetics in the U.S. alone. (I'll need to find some demographic statistics.)  If even just a few of them, their families, or entrepreneurial types see this as an opportunity we could generate some amazing results that would make life better and more secure for diabetics and their families.

Dog-food Principle: Refine your product/tool by using it yourself!

I liked this from Patri Friedman:

During my 4 years at Google, I learned the “dog-food” principle – a product is better if the development team *uses* that product while developing it. We switched to gmail, to google calendar, and other products as soon as they met our bare minimum needs.

The result was that development was informed by practical experience with the product, not aggregated surveys by marketing firms of random customers. (From A Thousand Nations blog)

 This applies to my work on MiiU.org, the Community Resilience Wiki. I've already started searching MiiU.org when I'm looking for resilience-related information to see if someone has already started a page on that topic. And you, dear reader, could be the one to create or contribute to the next cool MiiU.org page!

Can Eating Local Cost Less?

I want good-for-me food that is affordable and delicious. And I want to be more connected with my food in a local or direct manner. This New Hope 360 Blog post asks some of the same questions I've had:

Can local farmers feed America, including people who make minimum wage and struggle already to put food on the table for their families? Or do we need to rely on mega players such as Walmart to make healthy food affordable? Is organic an “elitist preoccupation” (as one person recently told us)? Who are the leaders in helping to make healthy food affordable for and accessible to all?

I am almost pathologically frugal.  I love that Walmart is making real food affordable. The article also said:

We... explore ways farmers, manufacturers and retailers are working to make healthy food more affordable while also changing consumer perceptions that McDonald’s prices represent the real cost of food.

I am not embarrassed to say that I occasionally take advantage of McDonald's (or Wendy's) Dollar Menu while I'm on the road for work. $1 burgers provide the most calories for my dollar, tasty, and predictably mediocre. I never buy fries, and I drink my own water. I've long suspected that I cost them money, but I appreciate that they provide fast calories, very cheap! And obviously it is either a treat or a stop-gap, and not a routine meal solution. When I buy 'real' food I'm astonished at how much it costs.

In Resilient Communities there can be synergy between local production, human-oriented environments and transportation, and global networks that results in higher quality of life over all, even if some things are relatively more expensive than they would be in a dis-integrated community.  

I'm hoping to spark practical ideas for promoting security at the community level, regardless of state budget upheaval and cuts to public services. Community resilience comes down to finding local solutions while drawing on global networks for ideas, inspiration, tools, and 'how-to'. What can we do in our neighborhoods to take care of each other when it comes to physical security?

Here's the article I started using a Harry Potter analogy, "Dumbledore's Army", on MiiU.org.

Dumbledore's Army

Description

A practical mashup of neighborhood watch + American colonial minutemen/British Home Guard + 4th Generation Warfare + John Robb’s insights re: Global Guerrillas, all in the context of community resilience.

This tongue-in-cheek riff on themes from a wildly popular children’s series is built around an accessible (and fictional) analogy in order to generate a seriously light-hearted discussion about community-level security. Please add your comments and instructive examples of what has worked or is working.

Dumbledore’s Army (see Wikipedia’s description) is taken from J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series. It’s a group of students who are disturbed by a trend toward paranoid tyranny and ham-fisted stupidity by the wizarding government on the one hand, and a rising tide of deadly violence on the other. The majority of grownups don’t admit the problem, lacking understanding of the times and lacking the courage to resist either government over-reach or the insurgent warlord and his thugs. Realizing that they are being fed lies and that the authorities can not actually protect them, the students voluntarily train themselves for self-defense.

They take the name Dumbledore’s Army in honor of their beloved (but politically incorrect) headmaster who is held in suspicion by the inept and heavy-handed wizarding government. Successive government administrations deny the threat posed by the insurgent warlord, initially dismissing the growing violence as random crime and lawlessness, and later blaming the Dumbledore-inspired counter-insurgency, a group calling itself The Order of the Phoenix.

External Links

John Robb's Global Guerrillas blog

William S. Lind on 4th Generation Warfare

Home Guard on Wikipedia

[edit]

Legal System Entrepreneurship vs. State Budget Woes

Time for some legal system entrepreneurship - move the prototypes along the development pipeline so we can quickly bring 'product' to market when demand soars!


That was my first thought when I saw this post by John Robb:

JOURNAL: Legal Decay in a Soviet Style Collapse

Here's a question I got recently:  What happens to the legal system when the US suffers a Soviet style collapse?  Answer:  It will rapidly decay.  

Here's a simple formula for this (it works for both legal systems and government bureaucracies):

Low legitimacy + slashed operating budgets = rampant corruption

Regardless of any decay in the legal system, business will still be conducted.  Small disputes will be resolved through the existing system, with graft tipping the scales or speeding the outcome.  Large disputes involving substantial wealth transfer will be something else entirely.  These disputes will be resolved through the ability of one party or the other to apply the threat of (or actual) violence to the negotiation process.  

These pressures won't only be the result of counterparties that have access or control the large mafias/gangs/militias (or corporate militaries) that will spring up during economic collapse (far larger than we've seen the US to date).  Threats will also be mounted by government/defense/security officials that use their government sanctioned command of violence (police, SWAT, military units, etc.) as a means to personal enrichment.

Published 31 years ago - But More Relevant Today

This little gem by John Pugsley was published in 1980. If you already know that inflation is really caused by increasing the supply of money (in 2011 creating trillions of $$ to bailout the politically-connected) you may prefer to skim the first few chapters. Because the economy didn't melt down in the 1980s (James Grant's work shows that trends and economic bubbles persist long after 'rational' minds expect them to collapse) you could consider Pugsley a hysterical Chicken Little always (erroneously) expecting the sky to fall.

Or maybe he was just ahead of his time. If he is correct about deliberate political and economic manipulation by predatory elites (and I tend to believe it would be sporadic and impossible to coordinate in some movie-style conspiracy), then their efforts are beginning to backfire sharply! Check out Part 2 and consider whether aspects of The Alpha Strategy by John Pugsley could work in the context of community resilience:

The production and savings parts of the Alpha Strategy are plans by which an individual completely avoids conventional investment markets, and instead invests his surplus wealth in real tangible and intangible goods, and stores these goods until he is ready to consume them, or until it is convenient to trade them for goods he wants to consume. Goods to be saved will include (1) the knowledge and skills of his trade, (2) the tools, supplies, and inventory for his business, (3) the regular consumer products he uses in his everyday life, and (4) raw materials and finished products that he can store for later trade with others.

This sounds resilient:

• Invest in Production: your trade, tools, education, marketable skills
• Save Consumables
• Save Real Money

While I haven't entirely severed ties with the world of digital claims on wealth and standard investments, I am looking for ways to thrive in a world where community resilience makes sense.

Note:
As an example of relevance, author John Pugsley could have been writing about the the late 1990s thru 2008 (except people were buying w/ only 5% or nothing down):

Most homeowners saw the equity in their homes soar during the 1970s. Having bought with 10 percent to 20 percent down, and with prices doubling or tripling on single family homes, the homeowner has multiplied his initial capital by five to twenty times, and all this while enjoying occupancy of the house.

This explosion in value has presented many middle-class Americans with the first substantial wealth they have ever had. Residential real estate has been rising so steadily, for so long, that many Americans, especially those under forty, have never experienced a period of declining real estate values, and even most older citizens cannot remember when real estate was not going up.

[I saw this thanks to Al Lowi who shared a note from http://vahramsvalley.blogspot.com/ via Facebook. I love 'the network'.]

Entrepreneurship + Community = Antidote to Gloom&Doom

Lately you've probably noticed a lot of people selling stuff/ideas based on economic gloom & doom. I'm a recovering doom & gloomer myself. (My friends will recall that I was very worried about Y2K!) Instead of buying that doom-gloom, grab onto entrepreneurship in the context of community. Make the world better thru sustainable service.

Thrift Culture

I just need to post this before it slips back into the ether.
http://www.thriftculturenow.com/

We'll take a closer look another day.

My Ideal Place to Live

A thought provoking perspective from David Rauschenbach. I haven't read him enough to know how much of this is tongue-in-cheek, but I take it seriously...with a slight smile. Makes me think of my dear friend Vertis B.

I should like to go to bed, and sleep in perfect peace and security. And if a nuke should go off over my head in the middle of the night, I should think that I might stir a little, while dreaming about the foresight of my community, and with sadness about the ignorance and poverty of others who placed fear-mongers in charge of the whole mess. But then I should like to fall right back to sleep, knowing that my family can easily survive the fallout by taking a fast, if we are in practice, and by living through it like those Japanese nurses who only recently died at a ripe old age, in spite of all the radiation which had no effect on them, apparently for two main reasons. And I would ideally live through such times without any major lifestyle alteration, and especially without giving up any fear offering to anyone, because that would only perpetuate the whole mess, rather than steer a path through it.

Scroll to the end for this gem of a reading list:

• The Only Investment Worth Having (by John Robb)
• SovereignMan.com Notes From The Field — 2-Jul-2010 (Simon Black)
• The Ghost in the Machine (by Allan Nation, editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer)
• Doug Casey on his favorite place in the world [and phyles] (by Doug Casey and Louis James)
• The Ideal Place to Live, Volumes 1 & 2 (by Ray Swangkee)
• The Diamond Age (by Neal Stephenson)
• Living at Nature's Pace (by Gene Logsdon)

PECO Alternatives for electricity in Pennsylvania

I've been at a total loss about where to buy my electricity now that PECO's rates are going up & Pennsylvania allows some competition. This list of suppliers is a terrific head start. 

Thanks to Hugh Hyatt (software & systems engineer) for sharing this with me:

Here are the results of research I [Hugh Hyatt] did on rate code RS (not RH—to see rates for RH look athttp://www.oca.state.pa.us/Industry/Electric/elecomp/pecrh.pdf) electricity suppliers. Ambit Energy, Respond Power and Stream Energy appear to be the winners, based solely on price.  Below are all results in price per kWh, in brief, in alphabetical order:

   Ambit Energy                                8.4-8.9¢
   Anthracite Power & Light                8.69¢
   BlueStar Energy                            8.878-9.348¢
   Champion Energy                          9.78¢
   Commerce Energy                       11.55-11.87¢
   ConEdison Solutions                      8.89-9.09¢
   Direct Energy                                9.42¢
   Dominion                                      8.91-8.99¢
   Energy Coop Assoc of PA               9.28¢
   Energy Plus Holdings                      8.95¢
   Energy Savers                               9.38-9.77¢
   Gateway Energy Services               8.9¢
   GEXA Energy Pennsylvania             9.8-10.4¢
   IDT Energy                                    9.8139¢
   Liberty Power                                 9.178-10.699¢
   MXenergy                                      9.39¢
   North American Power                    8.99¢
   Palmco Power PA                           8.49¢
   PECO                                            9.92-10.06¢
   Public Power                                  9.799¢
   Respond Power                              8.4¢
   Spark Energy                                 8.93¢
   Stream Energy                               8.4¢
   Superior Plus Energy Services         9.42¢
   TriEagle Energy                              9.4¢
   Verde Energy USA                          8.99¢
   Viridian Energy                               9.49¢
   Washington Gas Energy Services      9.6¢

Prices vary according to date of service, contract length, green-ness of energy, how you sign up. Cancellation fees for contracts vary. All pricing is without any promotion codes. It should be easy to find the websites by Googling for supplier names.  Let me know if you want the extra details I have or if you have a promotion code to share with me. :-)

With regard to customer service, PECO says, "Whether you are purchasing your electricity from a competitive electric generation supplier or from PECO, we will continue to safely deliver electricity, provide billing and customer support, and respond to outages and other emergencies for ALL customers."

There are also a couple of competitors to PECO for natural gas, but PECO still has the best rate (prices per thousand cubic feet—Mcf):

   Commerce Energy    $6.82
   PECO                       $6.29
   Shipley Energy         $6.99

Timber REITs - Micro & Urban Forestry coming next?

What about developing micro-forestry projects on 'blighted' urban land, or large suburban lots and industrial/commercial campuses?  I know others have thought of this before, but I've heard that forestry can become a steady, modestly profitable business.  Now that REITs (real estate investment trusts) are entering the timber market, there could be new interest among the investing public and new investment sources for smaller timber/forestry projects.  

Has anyone created a working business model that owns or controls/manages many smaller woodlots (perhaps with quick-growing or high-value trees) that might be transferable to an urban or suburban setting?

In addition to the obvious timber products, a forestry business - especially a visible one in a population center - can 'sell' environmental benefits to the local community (green space, cooling, moisture & runoff retention, parks, wildlife/songbird habitat, carbon sequestration, etc.).  Such an enterprise might also be able to sell carbon-offsets or carbon credits on global financial markets.

Micro-forestry projects could be operated by community groups or community-minded environmental entrepreneurs.  Micro-forestry could be a viable revenue source for non-profits serving local communities -  and would be very interesting if they were catalyzed by land-grants from municipal governments. 

Assisted Living is Relatively Strong

Assisted Living is leading the senior housing pack according to NIC, says Matt Valley 

at NREI Online:  

The occupancy rate at assisted living properties rose to 88.3% in the second quarter, up 50 basis points from the same period a year earlier, according to NIC’s analysis of the nation’s top 31 metropolitan statistical areas. The average monthly rent at assisted living properties rose 0.7% during the same period to $3,525. That follows a 1.4% rent increase in the first quarter.

“The number one point is that the fundamentals in this asset class are holding up much better than a lot of other property sectors,” says Michael Hargrave, vice president of NIC MAP, which tracks key metrics in seniors housing quarterly and provides that data to owners and operators, developers, lenders and other interested parties. Hargrave is referring to the troubled hotel, multifamily, office and retail sectors, where loan delinquencies continue to climb as net operating income contracts.... 

Pent-up demand is a driving force in the assisted living sector today, explains Hargrave. “Assisted living is more needs-based. You can only hold off putting mom into an assisted living facility for so long,” emphasizes Hargrave. “Secondly, over the past few years the assisted living supply, or inventory, hasn’t been growing as fast the independent living inventory.”...

Construction activity across the seniors housing sector has bottomed out, Hargrave says. He anticipates the growth rate of new construction to be about 1% annually for the foreseeable future. 

Geo-location marketing: Strengthen community at neighborhood-level?

Chris Wood's recent article fits with my idea of a location-based Neighborhood Watch platform which I playfully named after Harry Potter's Marauders Map. The audience is multi-family real estate operators and developers.  I can imagine how geo-location marketing could empower real-time connectedness among neighbors and facilitate community resilience (by accident or by design, depending on how the real estate entrepreneurs want to be involved):

We’re not talking about zip code-based direct mail. Geo-location awareness—the science of marketing to consumers by matching up smart phone geographical location with user-identified browsing and purchasing preferences—opens up a virtual door to real-time customer interaction based on a locality.

...While consumers have been fairly open to sharing their geo-location via cell phone, privacy and safety concerns are beginning to push a trend towards more ambiguity in user-allowed geo-locating. And phone owners seem more comfortable reporting their presence in certain neighborhoods. Location vagueness isn’t weakening outreach to those users, however. “Neighborhood boundaries allow you to start drawing much more powerful demographic-type information that you can leverage against retail [and consumer marketing],” Clement says. “If I’m an apartment owner and I want to start driving push ads and I’m in Soho, I’m probably going to get a lot better response from people who are in Soho than people who might be in an adjacent neighborhood even if they are closer by the straight line distance.” 

...“I think local geo-marketing is a really good community relationship building tool, but as an apartment owner I’d be wary of how you deliver your message,” says Elysa Rice, emerging media consultant at Dallas-based multifamily marketing firm Ellipse. “Residents don’t want to feel like they are being constantly advertised to when they really only make a moving decision once a year...[read more]