What’s Your Personal Food Policy?

...chizophrenic food policies, I thought the Thanksgiving holiday would be an appropriate moment to define my own personal food policy. But as I started to write down my personal food policy I discovered so many contradictions and exceptions that I just stopped. My own personal food policy, when considered honestly, was almost as tangled as the USDA’s. Yes, sometimes we manage to grow all of our greens, but other times bugs/bad soil/forgetfulness in...

Read…

Post Petroleum Lecture – a reminder

...Series. Here’s the announcement again: Albert Bates is a permaculture and appropriate technology instructor at the Eco village Training Center at The Farm community in Summertown, Tennessee, inventor of solar cars, pedal flour sifters and cylindrical tofu presses, and author of eleven books, including Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial (1979) and Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (1990). His Post-Petroleum Survival Guide a...

Read…

A Tensegrity Table

...ld make a similar table, only out of scavenged materials (scavenging seems appropriate in these crummy economic times!). To make your own tensegrity table, molecular biomechanics professor Dr. William H. Guilford has some very nice step-by-step instructions here. My version is slightly different, but frankly Guilford’s design is probably more stable. I used some electrical conduit tubing left over from remodeling the house, some rope and a stop si...

Read…

It’s official: I’m a Ham

...gled with math less had I had a hobby to motivate studying. My interest in appropriate technology was another reason. There is a ham I met online who is constructing a website that will be of interest to readers of this blog–he was inspired by John Michael Greer’s writing on ham radio. I’ll share that website when it’s ready to go public. Passing the test was easy, but I’ve got a lot of work to do. I have no radio, nor do I have any experience usi...

Read…