Free Introduction to Permaculture

...as the basis for designing integrated systems of food, shelter, renewable energy and community. Permaculture is the perfect solution for creating sustainable lifestyles in the city. Learn how to cope with peak oil and the energy descent society of the future. Become the solution! Learn how LA can be a model for sustainable cities. This Free Introduction to Permaculture Class is an outline of the science and art of Permaculture. It will define the...

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Essential System #4 – Illumination

...very American replaced one bulb with a compact fluorescent it would be the energy equivalent of taking 1.3 million cars off the road. But back to LEDs. For emergency purposes it might be wise to have a Forever Flashlight that requires no batteries. You shake the thing back and forth to run the light, with no batteries ever needed – the device’s only real disadvantage in fact is that the charging gesture, which uses Faraday’s principle of electroma...

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That Time I Got Deplatformed

...ithm when the company rejected an ad he had taken out for his blog post on energy security. Energy security article again censored by Facebook. They forbid me to boost the post: fake news. Because Facebook obliges me (and other publishers) to boost posts in order to reach all subscribers, this means roughly 9,000 followers won’t see it cause FB decides so. — lowtechmagazine (@lowtechmagazine) December 14, 2018 This incident combines the idiocy of...

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Airing Our Dirty Laundry

...ng hot sun of Los Angeles, it makes perfect sense to use our region’s free solar power. So why air dry? Let’s do the math. Assuming our (gas powered) dryer uses an average of .22 therms of natural gas per load at our gas company Sempra Energy’s August rate of 59 cents per therm, by using our clothes line we achieve the admittedly not too impressive savings of 17 cents per load. If we had an electric dryer we figure that the cost would be about 44...

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Journal of the New Alchemists

“Six-Pack” Backyard Solar Greenhouse, 1975. Image: Journal of the New Alchemy. After reading an article by Paul Ehrlich, “Eco-Catastrophe!,” Nancy Todd turned to her husband John and said, “We must do something.” The year was 1969 and the Todds along with Bill McLarney went on to found the New Alchemy Institute. History repeats itself. What the New Alchemists did, in response to the 1970s era energy crisis and political instability, sounds a lot...

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