The Demo Site

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!