The Demo Site

Most people do not know the difference between banks and credit unions, but the gap between them is deep and wide. During these times of economic and political crisis, it is important to understand the distinction because it provides obvious solutions: One way to help save our democracy is to support the credit union of your choice. One way to help our economy is to build it up with democratically controlled financial institutions.

Banks are to oligarchies as credit unions are to democracies. Like oligarchies, banks benefit the few. They make decisions quickly, but their goals are narrow and selfish. Like democracies, credit unions benefit the many. Decision making is often slow, but that’s because the goal is to reach acceptable compromise.

My buddy Wesley Roe and I joined the PCU board nine years ago. I left at the end of my first term (having chaired it and hired its CEO, Donald Sarich, who is still around doing amazing work!). Wes stayed on and continued to dedicate countless hours to the slow, steady growth of what is now a very healthy financial institution. Wes credits the union’s success with the dedication of its members. “In the very few cases where people have gotten into financial trouble,” he says, “our members make such an effort to pay. Even in these hard times, there’s a real effort that shows a real dedication to the values at the core of the Permaculture Credit Union.”

The PCU has a wealth of values (care of the earth, care of people, and reinvest surplus in the system), but it also had a valuable sense of wealth. When someone invests in solar panels, an energy efficient vehicle, or a cistern, this indicates something more than numbers on a spread sheet. It indicates a caring level of consciousness synonymous with stability. It’s a perspective on the world that commercial bankers would not typically understand.

For more info, please ask a question here or visit www.pcuonline.org . And if you are in Santa Fe, please come down to the Santa Fe Convention Center on Thursday, May 6, from 6pm to 9pm. Gunter Pauli (www.zeri.com) is the featured speaker, and his work is as inspiring as any in the green movement.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PERMACULTURE CREDIT UNION!

With the crew from Bang for Your Buck* soon to arrive at the Backyard Institute, last week I realized that I needed to make a call. When I first started my infamous double-digging project, Home and Garden Television’s (HGTV) primetime Friday-night show hadn’t contacted us, so I planned the size of the job based on the belief that I had plenty of time to get all of my ambitious beds dug before veggie-planting time—Santa Fe’s last frost date (May 15). But now, with my five-stops-in-six-days speaking tour complete, and with a handful of very enthusiastic clients wanting all kinds of work done as quickly as possible, it became a choice between making the call to Carlos to see if he wanted to do a little digging in the backyard or blowing off my future brother-in-law’s bachelor party six hours north of here. So I made the call. By no means could I blow off Josh and his crazy friends, yet the yard HAD to be ready.

Fortunately, Carlos was available, and we got the digging done the day before yesterday, on the nice-and-holy 7th day. Yesterday, I finished building the raised beds that also function as mini greenhouses. Based on what I learned from Ken Kuhne (See blog post, “What We Need is Here.”), I was able to salvage a couple of old cold frames and built a slightly less sturdy version of Kuhne’s super-durable product. Not counting the found lumber, the materials for each 4’ X 8’ raised-bed-cold-frame combo, came out to $35 each. This includes the rebar I drove into the ground, the 1/2” CPVC pushed over the rebar and hooping over the bed, the cold-defeating, light-permitting row-cover material, and the large binder clips used to connect the row cover to the CPVC frame.

I watched Bang for Your Buck for the first time last week at a friend’s house. From what I garnered, it’s one part reality TV, one part game show, and two parts professional wrestling. It should be interesting to see how such a mainstream show handles the cold-frame-raised beds that may resemble a mini-HAZMAT site more than anything ever seen on HGTV.

My friend Jeremiah Kidd and I tagged teamed today during a morning presentation at Santa Fe’s Water Summit. He owns San Isidro Permaculture and I own Santa Fe Permaculture, so one might think that there would be at least an undertone of competition between us. Fortunately, one of permaculture’s first principles reflects the “cooperation, not competition, is the driving force of nature” theory, so we had a great time trading bits of knowledge, experience, advice, and perhaps even a smidgen of myth. Not only did we learn a thing or two from each other, it seemed that folks in the audience were able to get a lot of burning questions answered in a short period of time.

Since much of the conference was about cistern systems, we focused mostly on passive water-harvesting techniques like pumice wicks, French drains, swales, bale swales, book swales, gabions, check dams, and the importance of mulching. We even dove into the way in which microclimates play an undeniable role in both water conservation and water harvesting: Windbreaks and shade prevent evaporation. Rocks, heated during the day and suddenly chilled by the desert night, can release a significant amount of precipitation—making it relatively easy to squeeze water from a stone. It’s one of the ways that the native people here survived for centuries, and it’s one that most people in our modern culture almost never consider and rarely employ in a conscious manner.

At the Water and Energy Expo today in downtown Santa Fe, there was a plethora of booths with lots of helpful information. In addition to all of the for-profit businesses touting cisterns, water-filtration systems, ecological landscapes, and photovoltaic panels, there were many non-profit organizations promoting their particular way to save the world. The Santa Fe Watershed Association was there, so I renewed our lapsed membership in the one group dedicated keeping at least a little water in the river that runs straight through the oldest capitol city in the U.S. There was also a new group called The Climate Change Leadership Institute. My friend Robb Hirsch is one of the motivating forces behind the group’s “Lead Your Revolution” campaign, which reminds me of the Gradual Greening system often discussed on this blog and in Harvest the Rain.

On Monday and Tuesday, there will be plenty more water and energy action at the Hilton as the pre-summit winds down and the actual summit starts up. There will be presentations about water harvesting (one of which will be by me, another by my friend Brad Lancaster), alternative energy, water and energy policy, and much more. For information visit, http://water2conserve.com/water_energy.html# .

Had a great day presenting at both Camino de Paz School and Farm and the Santa Fe Master Gardeners’ Fair. I concluded the CdP talk with a perfectly apropos poem.

What We Need Is Here

by Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

Later in the day, after my fast-paced talk for the master gardeners, I was able to take a look at all of the great booths full of awesome garden stuff. My favorite was the “Grow Y’own” booth. There, I found my friend Jeff Carbine working with the company’s founder, Ken Kuhne. They sell various sizes of of affordable raised-bed hoop houses that protect annual vegetables from too much sun in the summer and too much cold in the winter. Check out www.growyown.com for more info.

If more of us used systems like Kuhne’s, I think we’d find that Wendell Berry is right!

As Earth Day winds down, I thought I’d share a quick taste of what I’ll be speaking about at the Food for Thought Brunch at Camino de Paz School and Farm on Saturday. My goal is to honor the students, thank the teachers and parents, and bless the awesome place and its powerful visionaries, Patty Pantano and Greg Nussbaum.

While preparing my remarks for the Montessori-based middle school’s annual fundraiser (where 95% of the food will come from campus!), I realized that the kind of team work I see at the school is different from the kind one sees on a 7th-grade sports field. Rather than attempting to create teamwork in a competitive setting, the farm/school grows teamwork by means of the notion that cooperation, not competition, is the most basic force of nature. I’m not saying I’m against sports. It’s just that I think working on a farm is far superior for brain development than trying incessantly to beat the opposition at a meaningless game.

Please join me at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market tonight at 7pm. After the a short film about bees and a longer flick, Mad City Chickens, I’ll be talking briefly and fielding questions about my adventures in backyard chickendom. For many years Melissa and I have owned various flocks of chickens, turkeys, and Guinea hens. Although neither one of us is an expert, we’ve eaten thousands of our homegrown eggs, and harvested some of the birds for meat.

Raising chickens isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It’s not a hassle and not just for farmers with bibs, overalls and rubber boots for walking through the bird dung. Chickens take very little time and energy, the poops really not much of a problem (you can wear tennis shoes) and our birds have always provided incredible eggs, delicious meat, and nitrogen-rich excrement (which sounds better than poop or dung or scatterings and crap). Our chickens don’t have names but they provide more than a few funny stories! Come down to the film screening and ask a chicken question or two or type your favorite why’d the chicken cross the road joke here: