How to Get Skunks Out of Your Basement and Yard

Basements and crawl spaces under houses make idea dens for urban critters. If we could charge rent for all the skunks, raccoons and feral cats that have taken up residence under the house we’d have paid off the mortgage by now. Our particular crawl space critter B&B was opened by virtue of a flimsy access door. Some animal, most likely a raccoon, pried it open. The problem with this situation is that you can’t just close up the door. Some poor cr...

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Saturday Linkages: Logs, Invasives and Italian Veggies

...http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=17209#.Ut8epeX8ggE.twitter … Urban Nature: How to Foster Biodiversity in World’s Cities by Richard Conniff: Yale Environment 360 from @YaleE360 http://e360.yale.edu/feature/urban_nature_how_to_foster_biodiversity_in_worlds_cities/2725/#.Ut78MbYkqKk.twitter … Building With Logs – 1957 USDA Government Pamphlet http://feedly.com/e/SggnDsK7 Milky The Marvelous Milking Cow toy (1977) – Boing Boing http://bo...

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24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

...Our beat on this blog has been appropriate technology, gardening and urban homesteading (whatever that means!). Ironically, Kelly and I have had to spend a lot of time in front of screens researching and writing about these very analog subjects that, for the most part, involve an off-line engagement with the natural world. We’ve done this at a time of the explosive growth of social media. Early on there was a line of thought that social media coul...

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Cycling in the US from a Dutch perspective

...and it gathered widespread support among mainstream commentators and young urban political activists. In Amsterdam in the early 1970s, there were already organisations with the aims of demotorising cities, improving public transport, preventing the bulldozing of heritage sites and controlling pollution. These campaigners opposed the statist interventions of the Left and the laissez-faire economics of the Right, both of which they felt threatened t...

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Rainwater Harvesting with Joe Linton

...lage’s website. This workshop is part of a continuing series in “hands-on” urban permaculture and includes: An overview presentation on Los Angeles water issues, including local multi-benefit watershed management efforts. A tour of Los Angeles Eco-Village stormwater harvesting landscape features, including the Bimini Slough Nature Park. A hands-on workshop to build terraced swales to detain and infiltrate storm water This workshop focuses on build...

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