127 Apocalypse Now with Father Mark Kowalewski

...t, seem off-topic. But I think it’s safe to say that within the DNA of the urban homesteading, permaculture and ecological movements is a concern with how the world might end and the possibility of either hastening, postponing or avoiding the collapse of human civilization. Then there’s the fact that a significant portion of U.S. government officials believe in some form of a “rapture.” Of course there are many divergent opinions on the nature of...

Read…

Food Storage Revisited

...e a big vegetable garden you will need a larger pantry or basement. We are urban dwellers with, at best, a tiny vegetable garden (which has been neglected this year while I work on the house). That said there are some big differences between the kitchens of the 1920s and the kitchens of today that present new challenges. Some of those changes: We have a lot more kitchen gadgets and consumer electronics. With the ascendancy of the personal automobi...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Screens, Model Villages and Walkable Cities

...nterested in the @ucce_la Master Gardener Program? Come out to @OpenSilo‘s Urban Ag Happy Hour next Tuesday, 10/30, from 6-9 to talk gardening and learn about the program! Join us at the Highland Park Brewery, 1220 North Spring Street, Chinatown. pic.twitter.com/HcFwyn8J2F — Rachel Surls (@RachelSurls) October 22, 2018 In the walkable city, people gather in a piazza, square, or plaza. In the automobile city, it’s called an intersection. (And nobod...

Read…

Worst of NextDoor

...nity is somehow more “open minded” than other parts of the country or that urban people are more progressive than rural people. These are stereotypes that I’ve been guilty of harboring in the past. We are all, myself included, easily sucked into the sort of hateful trolling that Silicon Valley has found a way to monetize on social media. How do you keep people glued to a website like NextDoor? Just offer the spectacle of your elder neighbors teari...

Read…

Weekend Linkages: AI, That Damn Metaverse, Living Pantries and Compressed Air

...Image from the deep internets. The stupidity of AI Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland. No, Cities Aren’t Doomed Because of Remote Work Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon ‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy...

Read…