The Demo Site

On the third day (a wonderfully wet Sunday Morning), the Lafayette Bookstore (the bookstore at the conference) graciously let me sign books. One might think a 100-person line at a signing would be impossible for a new author like me, but in fact it actually happened! The catch was that the line was made up of early birds waiting for Jane Goodall.

Oddly, it wasn’t at all surreal to have one of the environmental movement’s founding mothers scheduled to sign books right after me. All of us in the movement seem to be doing the best we can do given our lots and talents. Sure, she’s borderline godhead, but so are YOU! (And she’d probably be the first to admit this.) Plus, when all was said and done, I noticed stacks of Goodall books that were NOT purchased, whereas we came a mere two books shy of selling out of Harvest the Rain!

*from “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens

A longtime Polaroid employee addressing thousands of cutting-edge environmentalists? Sounds like a concoction for conflict, but it turned out to be a fabulously successful experiment yesterday. John Warner told his story about becoming the founding father of Green Chemistry with one part optimism, two parts tale of innocent death, three parts useful information, and four parts humor (ranging from deadpan to verbalized slapstick).

While taking Chem101 merely to fulfill a college requirement, Warner stumbled into extra-credit research because he suddenly found hours of  time on his hands. The drummer of his busy rock band (which he said, “sounded a lot like The Cars—but with better lyrics”) died of Leukemia, and Warner needed something to do. Warner said he would have probably held on to his preconceived notion that science is boring and uncreative if it were not for the death of his friend.

Years later, a more terrible sadness would overcome him. While vaguely pondering his life and his career and his awards and his success at bringing “green chemistry” to industry, he looked up at the ceiling during his two year-old son’s funeral and wondered if something he had touched, some chemical, had caused the birth defect that killed his child.

Mourning the fact that he had never taken any toxicology during all of his years as a chemist, he added an important fact: “Not one college chemistry program in this country requires a course in toxicology.” Fortunately, the chemistry landscape is changing, he said, as more and more young people come in with a desire to use chemistry for sustainable purposes. “You’re no longer laughed at for talking about sustainability,” he said. The industry is slowly turning its focus to green chemistry not only due to societal and market pressures, but also because mimicking nature (as opposed to creating materials that combat nature) tends to work better than the industry previously expected.

Warner’s tale is terribly sad, but his message is ultimately a very entertaining one—filled with a keepable promise to help us save civilization from itself using biomimicry, green chemistry, and intellectual ecology.

Woke up this morning and found two flat tires on the bike I’m borrowing for the conference. The tires had been losing air slowly, but after last night’s goat head attack, the situation was grim. I pumped up the tires got dressed, shaved, called the family, responded to some emails, loaded my computer, bike pump, and books into my back pack, and strapped on my helmet. When I grabbed the bike, I immediately discovered that both tires were miserably soft.

Fortunately, my spirit deflated only for a brief  moment, as I immediately realized I could easily walk to the conference. If John Francis (one of yesterday’s speakers) could walk for 22 years of his life, I could take the half-hour walk from the Sheraton. And I would still make it with plenty of time to catch Andy Lipkis’s incredibly inspiring talk about how he and his colleagues have greened Los Angeles over the last 40 years--turning the city into an ecological example for other major metropolitan areas around the world.

Thanks Andy for you awesome work and for the wonderful blurb that you gave to my book. Here’s what he said about Harvest the Rain over a year before publication:

“This book will not only make you a true believer in the regenerative power of harvesting rain—it will show you how. Harvest the Rain  is full of practical solutions to our water shortages and points the way to a climate-resilient future. If we want thriving landscapes, abundant food, strong communities, and sustainable economies, we should start by treasuring rain.”

Yes, indeed!

After chowing a few-too-many organic sandwich-cookies found on a plate on a table in the media room, I strolled over to the “Leading-Edge Climate Initiative” panel featuring David Orr and four other power-grid whizzes. The biggest threats we face are not technical. It seems they center around our lack of cultural and political will. Meanwhile, the Clinton-era media consolidation, the costs associated with Bush’s Wars, and the Robert’s pro-corporate court all make a difficult situation worse.

For the next few hours, it was hard for me to imagine the critical mass of people necessary for a meaningful revolution, but by the end of the night, it was pretty easy again. I had the honor of introducing a new film called YERT and then emceeing the Q and A with two of the three filmmaker-costars. YERT, which stands for Your Environmental Road Trip, will be complete early next year, and I (who rarely recommends you watch anything on a screen) highly recommend it. It’s funny, heart-wrenching, and very inspiring. In fact, I haven’t seen an audience as jazzed about a movie in 33.3 years. (Do you remember where you were when Luke first blew up the Death Star? I do!)

Seeing my friend Larry Littlebird get the penultimate quote in the screening was a blast, too. Larry’s presence meant that even though the movie-watching experience was completely entertaining, it was also grounded in the spiritual aspects of the movement, the indigenous, regenerative, and extremely powerful part of human nature that will someday thrive in the detritus of composted tea bags.

Can we human persons organize now before it gets much worse? If enough people got to see YERT, it sure would help. Picture a spontaneous and joke-filled “Inconvenient Truth.” This might be just what our culture needs now. Check our www.yert.com for more info.

I must have been about seven years old when my Gramma Adams got together with some friends and they stopped the construction of an interstate highway that would have run across the west side of Connecticut, through Massachusetts, and all the way up to Burlington, Vermont and beyond. The death of the Super 7 project was a great political victory, and I think I’ve been an avid and positively focused environmentalist ever since.

Having evolved from being a mere environmentalist into a practicing permaculturalist-cyclist-activist-water-harvester-in-the-desert, I have to say that I was not expecting the Bioneers conference to be extremely transformative. But within a couple of hours of the three-day conference here in San Rafael, California, it certainly had been more than merely transformative! In fact if there is a word for “ultratransformative,” I’d like to use it.

I was especially moved by Alec Loorz, a 16-year-old activist who is taking climate degradation very seriously. His organization is called Kids vs Global Warming, and his “I Matter March” is scheduled for Mothers’ Day, this May, 2011. Be There!

My younger son goes to a cool school called Little Earth. Tonight they had me as the first speaker in their series of practical talks for parents and educators. I called my presentation “Garden Design with Children in Mind,” and I focused on five garden components that students of all ages love.

1) The Bean Tipi, an edible playhouse made out of scarlet runner beans and five-to-ten long sticks, posts, or poles.

2) The Sunflower House, a playhouse (or tunnel) made out of mostly giant sunflowers, that teaches kids of all ages about microclimates and makes for a nice afternoon snack in the fall.

3) Edible Plants, these are very important in a children’s garden for a wide variety of reasons.

4) Sheet Mulch, an easy way to build soil, suppress weeds, and harvest rain in the soil, it uses cardboard, manure, and straw as its main ingredients,

5) Worm making, no kids garden is complete without a compost pile, and no compost pile is complete without worms.

I plan to elaborate on each of these in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned.

When I was my kids’ age (5 and 7), every child had goals. Highest among them was being on TV. One time my sister and I got on “Wonderama,” a show where kids were picked out of a large audience to be contestants in a quasi game-show. I wasn’t chosen, but I sure relished the one glimpse of my madly waving arms in an ecstatically joyful sea of madly waving arms.

My kids have a different supreme life-achievement: They’d like to be well-behaved enough for their parents to buy a TV. We killed our boob tune when our eldest was about a year old. Sure, the misses misses Leno, and I miss Letterman, but we have loved almost every minute of not having an idiot box in our face, incessantly tempting us with mundane shows, faux news, and ads. This isn’t to say that our children never “watch.” Thanks to the prevalence of computers in modern life, the kids probably get more than their fair (or healthy) share of screen-viewing time, but at least it takes more effort to get a video going than to push a button on a clicker. At least they have to maneuver through a few hoops for something special that they have chosen instead of immediately slugging through the endless process of channel surfing through 98%-pure garbage.

In order to comprehend how the new media has changed the world, one need not look past our family’s plans for today. We’re going to our close friends’ house (Joe and Julya Sembrat’s) to watch some TV, and all 8 (the four of us plus the Sembrats have two kids, too) of us will be on the same show. Called “Bang for Your Buck,” it airs today on the Home and Garden Channel at 3:30pm Eastern and Pacific Time, which I take to mean 1:30pm Mountain. With so many screens everywhere in this new-media era, I think I’m less excited about seeing myself on TV than my children will be excited to get to watch an actual TV.

The concept behind this episode of “Bang for Your Buck” is this. Three Santa Fe couples are chosen to brag on international television about their landscapes. Then, two critics come in and critique each property. Next, each couple is filmed watching (and reacting to) a short version of “the talent’s” criticism.  Finally, the critics choose which couple got the best deal on the retail price of their landscape. All tolled, they take about 15 hours of footage. Including the brief “family roll” (where they filmed us eating an egg breakfast courtesy of our backyard chickens!), editors will squeeze everything into one eight-minute segment.

The reason we will have 16 minutes of fame today as opposed to only eight is that the Sembrats are also our clients. Although they played a huge roll in the design of their property, they let us take a fair amount of the credit for their amazing landscape. Melissa and I are not expecting to win today’s contest, but we won’t be surprised if the Sembrats do.

Although “the talent” loved our place, we put a lot of money into systems that are difficult to see. Some of the best features of our landscape are completely inexpensive (our chicken coop, for example), but other parts are pretty pricey (such as the underground cistern system). We were impressed by how modern television actually decided to promote our yard and all of its permaculture, but we get it. We get the fact that what we do here is not quite ready for primetime—or rather that primetime is not quite ready for us—but that’s okay. We’re thrilled to be able to promote our version of sustainability in any way we can. Plus, we get to be on TV!

Late yesterday, as the sun was beginning to hide behind some tall trees, I became a beekeeper again. I grabbed my box of apicultural supplies, climbed into my bee suit, and fired up the smoker. I would be moving a bee colony from a two-foot long top-bar bee hive into my four-foot long top bar. According to instructions my friend Paul Cooley gave me when I picked up the colony the night before, I was to leave the full hive on top of the empty hive overnight. “Just make sure you move the bees at some point tomorrow,” he cautioned.

It had been a busy day. As I tried unsuccessfully to refire up the smoker (which had gone out by the time I got across the driveway to the hives), I was actually all full of myself for even remembering to move the bees.  With a quick look West, I snapped out of my baleful pride and got to work. The whole job could have squeezed into ten minutes had I not had technical difficulties associated with my smoker, the lighter, the sticks, the newspaper, the shreds of bark. I was even juggling dried balls of rabbit poop because I heard on YouTube that rabbit crap makes great bee-smoker material. Cool, I thought, another use for our bunny! But no. No matter what I tried, my smoker took a full 10 or 12 minutes to finally get cranking.

People have divergent theories as to why dosing a bee colony with smoke makes working in and amongst the colony easier. But the question of why something works is often less important than the questions concerning how to get it to work. Meanwhile, several of the bees were quite obviously unhappy with my presence. As one dove incessantly into my thinly veiled face, I started doubting the whole process.

What am I doing here? Am I too late? With the sun going down, am I placing myself in an unduly precarious position as my colony of busy, already-disoriented commuters tries to make it home to eat, sleep, and do it all over again? Why can’t I just buy honey at the store like any normal person? Do 100 bee stings hurt 100 times more than one bee sting? If they start chasing me, where is the safest place to run?

But before I knew it, the job was done, and for the third time in my life I became a beekeeper. I’m psyched because beekeeping is a real, fascinating, and fun buzz to catch. It’s real because of the very rare but ever-present possibility of being stung that permeates the extremely important work of increasing bee populations worldwide. It’s fascinating because the bee universe is so bizarre and so difficult to predict, but it’s clearly well organized and highly efficient. It’s fun because you get to enjoy the pride of your own precious and exquisitely delicious, homegrown honey!

August, 2010

                TUESDAY, AUGUST 17 (AFTER MIDNIGHT), HARVEST THE RAIN IS AVAILABLE! Nate releases Harvest the Rain: How to Enrich Your Life by Seeing Every Storm as a Resource at www.harvesttherain.com
                SATURDAY, AUGUST 28 (3:30 PM e/p), HGTV'S BANG FOR YOUR BUCK FEARTURES NATE & MELISSA Nate Downey and Melissa McDonald's Backyard Institute is featured on the popular cable TV show. Somewhere between game show, educational documentary, and an episode of pro wrestling, this will surely be fun to watch...What will mainstream television think of our cistern, greywater system, chickens, fake lawn, and edible garden? Tune in to find out! The same episode will also feature the gardens of some landscape-design clients who've turned out to be two of our great friends in Santa Fe, Joe and Julya Sembrat.

• September, 2010

• October, 2010

                MONDAY - WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4 - 6, WORKSHOP/PRESENTATIONS at the ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE AMERICAN RAINWATER CATCHMENT SYSTEMS ASSOCIATION (ARCSA) AT THE AT&T CONFERENCE CENTER, AUSTIN, TEXAS. Nate will be presenting twice during the fabulous conference for anyone interested in water issues and how to improve the situation in your community. One of his talks is called "Landscape Design with Catchment in Mind." The other is titled, "Water, Soils, and Abundance: A Permacultural Approach to Water Harvesting."

 

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14, THRU MONDAY, OCTOBER 18, BIONEERS CONFERENCE Nate is hoping to set up a book-signing event at the conference and plans to attend a number of inspiring events including eco-movement greats like Jane Goodall, James Hansen, Andy Lipkis, and many more!

• November, 2010

Golden currant berries are not golden. They’re a deep, dark purple-blue bordering on black. I suppose we call them “golden” because of the bright yellow flower that if boasts in the the spring, but maybe it’s the golden-red hue that some of the bushes get when they head toward bed in autumn. This year, when I bite into the ones in our backyard that are nice and plump thanks to all of the rain that we have caught in our cistern system, they taste like something exquisitely powerful, like gold. A little on the sour side of the spectrum, golden currants are not the favorite of mega-store food buyers, but they can be a surprising favorite in in any year’s crop of fruit. Ripening well after the strawberries and just ahead of the pears and apples, this rare gem is one of the most drought tolerant of all fruit-bearing bushes. Truly, currants are an element of our backyard that we cherish much like Wall Street portfolio managers cherish gold. It’s not the snazziest of investments, but it’s an old stand by that can come in handy when times are tough and resources are not flowing as much as they once did.

Just had a wonderful surprise visit from my friends Greg and Patty, the owners of Camino de Paz School and Farm. They had to drop something off on their way to dinner, but next thing we knew we were all making dinner right out of the garden. Ironically, I start at their booth every Saturday at the farmers’ market. As a member of the Montessori-based school’s board, it’s the least I can do. Feeding these farmer fiends from my own garden was a total treat—I need a happier version of the word “surreal” to describe it…(Anyone?)

Anyway, as soon as we decided on our almost-all-garden dinner plans, they got right on it! Patty made the most deliciously sweet salsa with tomatoes, mint, onions, parsley, and plums (from Tuesday’s market). Greg hopped on harvesting kale and the first pumpkin of the season. While getting things going in the kitchen, out of the fridge I grabbed a box of tofu (the only seriously foreign dinner ingredient) and some yummy leftover chive-and-oyster-mushroom* dish. By simply slicing the squash and sautéing it in a little oil along with the kale, dinner couldn’t have been much more local and quick. (What a fun dinner it was, too…full of lively, happy, and productive conversation!)

But was it tasty, you ask? Tasty isn’t a good enough word for the fantastic fresh flavors that we crave all year long. I think it’s the mint that’s lingering most. Over an hour later, its tingle soon reminds me of dinner in ALL of its savory essences. Each flavor is NOW popping back out of my taste buds for a triumphant refrain that blares like a tight and proud marching band as the home team scores the winning touchdown, or maybe an “Uncle John’s Band” encore circa November 30, 1980, or…insert your favorite happy song here.

The tune itself is irrelevant; it’s a mood were after here, and it’s summed up thusly: These are the moments we really live for. We can say we like the other seasons, and I’m sure we do, but harvest time really, really, really rocks—plain and simple. Please make sure you enjoy it as much as you possibly can this year! (More info about Camino de Paz, an awesome school for girls and boys in middle school can be found www.caminodepaz.net.)

*NOTE: Sadly, Danny, the shroom dude at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market, will be soon no longer selling mushrooms, but he wants to teach others how to grow oysters, lion’s mane, and other fabulous fungi in the comfort of one’s own home, and I might just have to take him up on that! (Let me know if you want his contact info, but I’ll try to remember to post his it when I have his card in hand….)

Yesterday, my 10 minutes of gradual greening occurred when I walked down to New Mexico Bike and Sport to pick up my new “xtracycle.” A simple bike extension, called the “FreeRadical(TM),” hooks onto the back of almost any bike to quickly create what Xtracycle, Inc., calls  “the world’s first S.U.B.” That’s right, friends, I’m now the proud owner of a “Sport Utility Bicycle.” And why shouldn’t I be proud? According to company literature, my xtracycle can haul 200 pounds, and the manual shows an illustration of an xtracycle handling what looks like an 8’ or 10’ ladder. With the help of an accessory called an “H-rack,” long loads like “ladders, flagpoles, kayaks, or lumber,” can be delivered.

One of my many plans is to haul 50 lbs. bags of lay pellets for our six backyard chickens. Coincidentally, having run out of food, I had to drive my truck down to the feed store on Saturday for what I hope was my last time wasting gas to buy lay pellets for our hens who are now, quite wisely, fast asleep.