The Permavegan Archives

Transition 2012

2011-12-21T14:09:00.000-05:00

Bust of Janus at Vatican City (per Wikepedia)

As I close in on my fortieth birthday, I am drawn to honor the December solstice of 2011 as a symbolic gateway between two developmental periods in my life story.

At the same time, I prepare to enter 2012 arm-in-arm with a small but intrepid band of cultural creatives who see in the upcoming year the daybreak of a new era in responsible planetary stewardship.

In order to help internalize both of these transitions, I have decided to shut down The Permavegan at Blogger and start work on a new site at Wordpress. The new site will go live on Thursday, December 22, at 5:30 UTC (12:30 AM EST) with a short post and a modicum of fanfare.

My sincere thanks if you are one of the many fine people who read and/or informed some portion of my work leading up to this point.

May our efforts lead to a good life for all.

My 2011 Veganic Permaculture Microfarming Plan

2011-01-22T22:14:00.022-05:00

Edited 4/16/2011

Saturday is veganic permaculture microfarming day here on The Permavegan, and this week I'm going to present my fourteen-point homestead workplan for 2011. January is the time for annual permaculture planning in my geographic location, and one of my goals in this Saturday posting series is to synchronize my readers to the workflow of a part-time vegan microfarm in the New England-Acadian Forest as it unfolds over the course of a calendar year. I also want to give readers a realistic sense of how long things take in the start-up phase of a minifarm - even at the modest scale I have undertaken on my site.

I am tempted to go backward in this series in order to update links and content on What Are Vegan and Veganic Permaculture? I'm not happy with that post as it stands right now, but in all likelihood I won't get back to it until next year, when I repeat the cycle. Life on the microfarm doesn't allow you to go backward - especially not when you're crazy enough to throw a blogathon into the mix. Fortunately, I think I'll cover most of the things I want to add to that post through my discussion of concrete projects as they unfold in real time.

I've probably already said this somewhere else, but I'm definitely not putting this material into the blogosphere as a master veganic permaculture teacher. Perhaps in another twenty years I will be far enough along to promote myself as an expert. In the meantime, I think there is value in blogging about my veganic permaculture experiments at this stage, if for no other reason than to add to the discussion and networking already taking place in my local ecoregion.

Goal-setting is a dangerous business. As soon as you set a goal for yourself, you create an internal commitment to a course of action, and if you fail to honor that commitment, or to achieve your goal, you experience disappointment. So what do you do? There are two ways to approach this basic reality of life. The first way is to avoid setting goals altogether. The second way is to set goals knowing that conflicts and setbacks are to some degree inevitable.

I am on the latter path. If my third year on the homestead is anything like the first two years, I'll make a serious dent on maybe eight of my fourteen project goals by the end of August. By the end of September, I'll feel so impossibly far behind on my plan I'll fall into a depression that will last until Thanksgiving. This depression will in all likelihood parallel both my local ecosystem's response to the decline in solar energy, and my anger at America's tragic failure to address peak oil, climate change, and the credit crisis. The miracle of grace and family resilience will gradually recharge my batteries in December, and by the time January 2012 rolls around, I'll be ready to take on the world again - another year older and wiser.

I'd like to think this will be a much better year than 2011. Julie and I have learned so much from our experiences thus far, and there are just too many fantastic role models in the world to draw strength from when the going gets tough. Indeed, that's why I'm putting so much energy into blogging. I've received tremendous encouragement from the work of other bloggers, and it's only natural for me to give back to the Web as I find energy and time.

Here are the fourteen microfarm projects I'll be working on this year:

Agroforestry for Wind Protection, Food, Medicine, Fuel, and Wildlife
Compost, Recyclables, and the Landfill
Decluttering (remove old oil tank, furnace, garage clean-out, etc.)
Financial Management
Biointensive Food Production System
Mileage Reduction and Post-Carbon Transport
Permaculture Design Observations and Sketches
Plant Identification
Post-Carbon Snow Removal
Retrofit of House
Saturday Planning Meetings
Seedballs and Scything Trials
Virtual Veganic Permaculture Course
Wardrobe for Cold Temperate Veganic Permaculture

Every Saturday, Julie and I carve out some time to review our minifarm plan and make adjustments to our weekly calendar as needed. The complete flow of materials and energy through our site is captured in the above set of projects, so nothing is left out of our weekly Saturday review.

Over the last two Saturdays, we have looked over all our files and photos from the last two years, and used that information to sketch out our goals for 2011.

The dominant focus of this year's plan is the house retrofit. I took on too much tree planting, scything, and garden work in 2010, and progress on the house suffered as a result. This year's landscape implementation part of the plan consists of a much smaller amount of tree planting and tree care that I'll do mostly in April; a nutrient-recycling compost project that I haven't scheduled yet; seedball trials that I'll start in February and deploy in March, April, and May; some snow scooping through the rest of the winter; and a bit of plant-identification and wild harvesting I'll do in the growing season. Julie plans to tackle a small growing bed, and together we'll continue to develop our long-term biointensive food production plan, but otherwise I won't be spending any time on the landscape except to make some permaculture design observations and sketches.

Most of our financial management work will take place in February, when we do our taxes and review our tiny portfolio. We'll do a big declutter in the spring and summer, when I get several dumpsters delivered and gut the south side of the house. I doubt we'll make much progress on mileage reduction and post-carbon transportation this year, since we've already cut that down quite far, and I have some community organizing to do that will probably push us in the opposite direction, but a regional car-pooling system for emergency fuel conservation is something I hope to at least take a look at. We'll upgrade our wardrobe with better vegan options if time and finances allow, and publish virtual veganic permaculture posts on Saturdays - also as time allows. Meal preparation, house cleaning, and wardrobe care are of course year-round.

If you live in the New England-Acadian Forest - or any cold temperate climate in the northern hemisphere - and you are practicing veganic permaculture, you should now be closing in on a portfolio of goals for your household in 2011. Your list won't have all the same elements as mine, but even if you live in an apartment and have access to just a small amount of growing space, there should still be a good number of similarities in our practice.

Next weekend, I'd like to post on the issue of post-carbon snow removal, which is a design and implementation challenge that extends all the way from our rooflines and dooryards to our driveways, roads, and state-to-local road maintenance systems. From February through April, I hope to focus on scythe-and-seedball lawn conversion, as well as tree planting for windbreak and suntrap design. From May through September, I expect my Saturday blogging will deal almost exclusively with compact farmhouse superinsulation retrofits, and perhaps an occasional post on plant identification, wild harvesting, and site decluttering. I'll catch up on composting and maybe a few other items in the fall, if all goes well. Based on my observations to date, these are some of the conversion issues that rural and suburban households in the New England-Acadian Forest will need to manage as the impacts of peak oil and climate change are increasingly felt.

Permagenda 2011

2011-01-01T23:55:00.011-05:00

A Blogging Marathon

Edited 4/18/2011

Happy New Year, esteemed Permavegan readers, and welcome to the first day of Permagenda 2011. Permagenda 2011 is my resolution to post daily entries in a year-long blogging marathon aimed at accelerated contraction and convergence to a steady-state global economy.

I'll be tracking with Joe Romm on developments in U.S. climate policy; Energy Bulletin on all things net energy; Keith Akers on vegan and vegetarian ethics; Global Commons Institute on contraction and convergence; Portland Maine Permaculture Meetup for the latest wisdom from the local permaculture hive mind; and CASSE on degrowth to a steady-state economy.

To name just a handful of sources that will inform my analysis.

How am I going to maintain this level of productivity without missing out on critical information, on the one hand, or getting paralyzed by information overload, on the other? And how am I going to organize my cyber-advocacy in such a way that it stays relevant for a global audience while simultaneously facilitating on-the-ground emergency degrowth to a fair, stable, and full-employment economy right here in Maine?

I've got four strategies in mind.

Four Strategies

The first strategy is systematic diversification through a seven-day narrative structure that addresses distinct but interrelated readerships. (This seven-level narrative structure is a slight modification of the five-level veganic permaculture model I proposed in Solagaia 2.0.) On Sundays, for example, I'll write to an interfaith readership, and on Thursdays I'll write to a community development readership. Over the course of each week, I'll address all seven levels of eco-psychosocial organization, from the global to the local, in a sensible sequence:

Sunday: Global Interfaith Ethics
Monday: World Citizenship
Tuesday: National Citizenship (was National Security)
Wednesday: State Citizenship (was Steady-State Planning)
Thursday: Regional Citizenship (was Community Development)
Friday: Local Citizenship (was Family Resilience)
Saturday: Veganic Permaculture (was Home Economics)

Mindful of Dubos' maxim to "think globally, act locally," my second strategy is to consistently examine all seven of these levels through the vertically integrated lens of a social welfare cyber-advocacy campaign, focused on local planning long-term economic degrowth.

Adaptation to long-term degrowth may sound excruciatingly dismal at first, but that is only because we have been indoctrinated to worship economic growth, and to mistake the economic highs and lows of our addiction to hydrocarbon energy, animal products, fast money, and garage-loads of stuff (in short, our affluenza) with a reasonable pursuit of happiness.

The literature suggests happiness is not found in this direction, however, but is far more likely to be found on a critical path I will constantly reinforce in my third marathon blogging strategy: the gentler and more soul-satisfying pursuit of a steady-state economy based on renewable biomass energy, plant-based nutrition, public slow money, and simple, low-hydrocarbon living (aka "the good life.")

I do not want readers to mistake this emphasis on degrowth as an attack on economic growth in all times and places. Far from it. In many regions, economic growth is the obvious and urgent prescription. But degrowth is now very much the order of the day in my home state of Maine, as it is throughout the United States and Canada.

Furthermore, in both the over-developed Global North and the under-developed Global South, there is a mutual need for cooperative, open-source research, development, and diffusion of appropriate technologies that can make a good life for all world citizens. We must, in other words, build the case for a steady-state economy using a toolkit of appropriate veganic permaculture technologies that scale well in a planetary civilization of nine-to-ten billion people by 2050. The identification of these technologies is the fourth key strategy I will rely upon as I blog my way forward.

A Leadership Curriculum

I can conserve precious energy in this blogathon by bundling the above four strategies together into an integrated curriculum for world citizenship:

Figure 1. Solagaia World Citizenship Curriculum

These curriculum strands can be understood as levels of "advanced generalist" social work action-research; zones of veganic permaculture design; decks of distributed cognition on spaceship earth; and building blocks of self-organizing command and control in a non-hierarchical, open-source intelligence network for global-to-local governance.

Solagaia

I call the study and practice of this total curriculum Solagaia. The term combines the Roman, masculine "Sol," for sun, with the Greek, feminine "Gaia," for earth, to suggest an art of planetary energy stewardship that draws on multiple streams of the world's wisdom literature, including climate science, ecological economics, and the Hegelian dialectic, to name just three of these streams. The discipline is now entering its second stage of development.

The idea that a healthy civilization of the future will be based on the intelligent management of a renewable biomass economy is a unifying principle of the Solagaia conceptual framework. This is generally consistent with steady-state thinking such as the CASSE briefing on The Trophic Structure of the Economy. However, in contrast to many other analysts, I read the data on limits to growth, peak oil, and U.S. energy consumption to necessitate movement toward a vegan agroforestry economy. I think the following chart, for example, is a fairly clear illustration of the importance of biomass energy in a long-term context:

Figure 2. Composition of U.S. Energy Use (Source: Cutler Cleveland)

I believe the bulk of our future energy and resource throughputs will derive from appropriate technologies applied to closed-loop agricultural production of food, wood, fiber, biofuels, biomass electricity, and biocomposites. I think non-nuclear, green-tech renewable energies will play a vital but ultimately partnership role to this biomass economy, primarily because of scale-up problems related to the scarcity of rare earth metals, as well as constraints on energy storage and distribution in a wind-water-solar milieu.

I will say much more about this hypothesis, and the way it intersects with plant-based nutrition and the carbon sequestration potential of agroforestry, as I proceed through the year. At this juncture, I want to emphasize that a deep, multilevel appreciation for the movement of solar energy (including its embodied hydrocarbon forms) through the cycles of life in one's immediate ecoregion - and throughout the global system as a whole - is central to a more even-handed interaction with these flows of energy and matter, and is our surest route to a steady-state planetary economy.

For this reason, I am anchoring the Solagaia curriculum in some graphical depictions of the movement of solar energy through our planetary system, beginning with a graph of annual temperature highs and lows for the Presque Isle region in Aroostook County, where I live:

Figure 3. Average High and Low Temperature (Fahrenheit)
for Presque Isle, Maine (Source)

The red line of average high temperature and the blue line of average low temperature create a waveform across the anual period. The point of greatest warming occurs late in July, and the point of greatest cooling occurs late in January (in each case about one month behind the summer and winter solstices here in the northern hemisphere, somewhat suggestive of the effect global warming inertia is now expected to have on a planetary scale, i.e., considerable future warming is already in the pipeline.)

Each of the four grid colors in this chart represents a distinct season, and the lines between these colored subdivisions represent the solstices and equinoxes. I am not actually going to blog for the full 365 days of 2011, but plan to take five days off before and after each solstice and equinox. This will give readers a break from my analysis at a time when they may want to be observing these solar energy turning points in other ways. It will also create a calendar of four curricular quarters that are consciously tuned to the seasons, with a goal of helping readers eventually gain a feeling for daylength, insolation, and biomass productivity as these are determined in part by time of year and geographic location.

Again, I simply want to emphasize at this juncture that Solagaia is a ultimately a discipline for the wise and compassionate capture, conversion, and redistribution of solar information and energy through a cybernetic or ecotechnical medium for the benefit of all.

Here are some additional graphics that will start to make this a little more clear. Local variations in daylength, insolation, and temperature over the course of the year are fundamental to steady-state economic planning:

Figure 4. Daylength in Hours by Latitude and Month (Source)

Figure 5. Solar Insolation by Latitude and Month (Source)

Figure 6. NASA Images of Solar Insolation Across the Globe (Source)

The NASA images are illustrative of the reversal in solar insolation that occurs between the northern to the southern hemisphere as our tilted earth completes its orbit around the sun.

A YouTube Illustration of Solagaia

Here is video introduction to the Solagaia concept in musical and metaphorical terms:

Administrative Note

If you subscribe to my blog with a feed, please be patient with me as I occasionally make tag updates to my posts that refresh old content. Also, as I get farther along with my system, I do expect to post shorter articles and get them out early each day. We'll see how that goes.

Happy Fifth Anniversary, My Love

2010-12-30T20:04:00.011-05:00

Thank you for being my wife, Julie. The Permavegan wouldn't be possible, or worth doing at all, without you by my side. You give as much of yourself to this as I do; you are the other half of the partnership spirit that is at the heart of this blog. I can't wait for us to start making it a two-part harmony - maybe in 2011? Your voice is as important as mine to this healing song we are singing.

I have it on reliable word that

"the strength of your marriage bond is represented by the traditional gift of wood for your fifth anniversary. Wood is strong and long-lasting...Ways to Celebrate Your 5th Anniversary: plant a tree together...Remodel your closet so it is cedar-lined...Put together a road map describing a trip to take together where there are forests."

I guess we planted a tree or two together this year, didn't we?

The clothes-closet remodel is coming along,

and God knows this blog is my road map to a place where there are forests.
For us and for them. Take a walk down memory lane with me, Julie.
Take a journey that begins and ends in this little stand of sugar maple heaven
that we like so much up here in the County.

It's a piece of heaven you and I know well,
and it's part of the New England-Acadian Forest ecoregion
that we share with bear, beaver, bobcat, coyote,
deer, eagle, hare, moose, porcupine, racoon
and many other animal species.

Not long after we first fell in love back in the spring of 2003,
I took you on a hike up Buck Mountain,
on the shores of Lake George in northeastern New York.

I told you that I'd spent my childhood summers at Lake George;
that I'd climbed Buck Mountain as a five-year old;
and that I'd never stopped dreaming of a life in the north woods.

You led us north after graduate school,
and five years ago today,
at our first Maine home together in Augusta,
we were joined in marriage.

For our honeymoon, we snowshoed out to the camp your parents built,
where you showed me all the moxie,

heart and beauty of an English-French-Wolastoqiyik lineage
that has loved the New England-Acadian Forest
for more than a hundred generations,
bending each year under the cold winter wind and snow,
but growing ever stronger through the hardship.

We studied global warming in the spring of 2006,

And peak oil in the summer,

before choosing a critical path of energy descent

to an eagle's perch in Aroostook, homeland of the Wolastoqiyik,
"People of the Beautiful River."

There we got the lay of the land

and soaked up some sun;

I did some bonding with your father,

and you showed me the mountain you climbed as a girl
(Katahdin from the north ascent of Pamola).

We took our next big leap together in 2007, when I left my job as a therapist to start
preparing our home economy for the Great Turning. We created an employment
vacancy for someone else; sold the second car; and started looking for a
handyman special - a bikeable, skiable, walkable, and telecommutable
distance from your outpatient office.

We found a place four miles from downtown Presque Isle, on five acres of long-idled
farmland with a gentle slope to the south. We moved in late September of 2008,
and I started the first phase of a veganic permaculture retrofit that same week.
In the process of tearing off the west porch, we learned the house used to be a granary,
and was probably built in the late 1800s - a fairly early structure in Aroostook County.

You took over most of the cooking, started studying plant-based nutrition,
and jumped right in when I needed a little help on the retrofit - even when it meant assistance as I dug out
the north and west foundation walls to lay insulation, drain tile, and gravel.

And remember helping me get the exterior curtain wall insulated and covered with Typar
just as the first really hard winter winds started to blow in?

I began tackling the second story north interior in the spring of 2009,

which originally looked like this;

gutted down to this;

framed back up to this;

and superinsulated to this -

allowing us to get completely off oil this winter, even before we've started work on
the south half and added the sun porch on the east and the greenhouse on the south.

We've still got a lot of work ahead - on the soil, the gardens, the trees, the house,
your clinical practice, our community public health advocacy, and here on The Permavegan.

But my ecstasy is in the laundry,

and beneath the flowering plum;

it's in the views from Haystack Mountain,

the trees of health we plant at home,

and the trees we plant with friends in Aroostook County's
wellness and healthcare community (thanks for the great photo, Katie!)

It's a privilege to be with you on this journey, Julie, through the forests and fields of Aroostook,
where we stand with the trees for the people of Maine
on the eve of the Great Turning.

Happy Fifth Anniversary, My Love. Here's to another incredible five years, and to many more thereafter.