Ozearth Blog

Good news:

Kiva is providing peer to peer microlending to alleviate poverty.  What’s really interesting about this is that your money goes to the borrower with no cut taken by Kiva – Kiva is funded by donation, which keeps where your money goes entirely transparent. The borrower pays the money back over time (the rate of successful payback is something over 98%), freeing your money up to fund another borrower.  This way you can create your own “revolving fund” for making a genuine difference in people’s lives, and the size of that fund is up to you – because it’s a crowd funding system, every little bit helps.

Less good news:

there appears to be no focus on lending which promotes sustainability. Kiva promises, at some point in the future, some way to  measure the people care and earth care of the businesses which are being funded, but there isn’t anything like that yet.

Good news:

there are, however, “lending teams” which do focus on sustainability.  Two of these are pictured below; click on the links to check them out.

These lending teams each have a message board, where, when the members find green initiatives, they can post them.

Less good news:

unfortunately for the lazy user (read: me!), there is no way to sign up for a feed of these messages that will go through to a reader or your email.  The only feed that seems to be up on the Kiva site is one of _all_ the loans that come up for fundraising.  That’s a lot of traffic each day, and, for OzEarth’s purposes, a lot of noise to signal.

… as I wrote “noise to signal”, I found myself feeling oddly guilty. The thing is, I spent about an hour surfing Kiva’s site today, and managed to find only two loans in the fundraising stage that I felt we as Permaculturists could get behind.

I find myself in a strange place: it is a very bad thing that so many people are living in poverty.  Like most people, I want a world where everyone lives in abundance, rather than a system like the current one, where some people have abundance to the detriment of other people.  I also want abundance for everyone without destroying the Earth.

(Warning: this paragraph contains a lot of scarequotes; sorry.) I see too many developing world “entrepreneurs” on Kiva who are looking to create abundance for themselves and their families by attempting to reproduce the Western norm of wealth – a norm which is earthkilling, exploitative and unsustainable (being based on a growth economy) to its core.  Again and again, you see descriptions of borrowers wanting to “grow their business” and being a good repayment risk because they “know how to get ahead”. It sits badly with me to fund struggling people in “developing” nations in their efforts to buy or produce deleterious products, or to perpetuate unsustainable land use practices, in order to resell to other struggling people, who presumably need to engage in similar practices in order to “get ahead”.
But perhaps the thing that makes me most uncomfortable of all is this: I myself live in (relative) luxury, quite a bit of which has been purchased with exactly this coin: exploiting the earth, my fellow humans or both.  I am uncomfortably aware, as I sit in my large (if ramshackle, and shared between up to 10 people) home, with my computer and my central heating and my internet and my electricity and my hot and cold running water and my disgustingly wasteful, needlessly polluting flush toilet, my fridge full of shamefully non-organic food, surrounded by plastic white goods, plastic black goods, clothed in plastic clothing, eating from plastic packaging, that I am not currently walking my talk here.  So how dare I sit in judgement of anyone for wanting what I have?

Perhaps it’s because _I_ don’t want what I have.  I am extremely grateful that I have enough to eat, that I’m adequately sheltered from the elements, that I have access to clean fresh water, adequate health care, sources for learning, light after dark, that (at least in the company I choose to keep) I can expect to be treated like a capable and valuable person, femaleness, lesbianism and all.  I hope that I will always have these things.

But this fails to take into account the darker side of the Western paradigm:

• existing cheek by jowl with neighbours I neither know, like, nor share any values with;
• living day-to-day with vehicle smoke in my air and heavy metal poisoning in my soil (our home sits on a former industrial waste dump);
• having no escape from traffic noise;
• being unable to see the stars at night for light pollution;
• trying to cope with the seeming inescapability of advertising and consumerist paraphernalia;
• constantly struggling against a tide of government and corporate red tape and boomerang errands;
• wrestling with the tendency to remain in thrall to such underhand, consumer-duping concepts as “my ideal weight”, “boosting my productivity”, or “getting a real job” in order to “pamper myself” because “I’m worth it” (there: a veritable cascade of scarequotes!).

The bottom line: in my current situation, I am out of alignment.  I get my power, my water, my heat, the cloth for my clothes, the flour for my bread (not to mention most of my other food) from a third party.  I have virtually nothing in the way of skills to meet my own basic needs (thus far: looking to address this, soonest).  And the fact that I’m not in control of the life cycles of my basic needs is not just irresponsible for my own sake: it also more than likely feeds into systems which exploit the Earth and my fellow humans.

And there are millions of people who want this? Are they nuts?  Surely it would be better to try and create the securities, comforts and freedoms of abundance without replicating the pitfalls of the corporate-controlled paradigm?  Because it can be done.  Permaculturists all over the world are doing it.  And in the long run, nobody, rich or poor, can afford not to do it: any approach other than a stable-state, radically sustainable one will, sooner or later, cost the Earth.

Hi Earth-Lovers!

Today on our OzEarth Facebook page, we were delighted to be asked the following question about building an Earthships in the tropics:

Hey OzEarth, Most of the earthships seem to be placed in northern temperate climates or in arid desert situations with temperature extremes, like the american southwest. What would be their application in the humid tropics or subtropics where the needs for heating and cooling are be different? Traditional architecture in the tropics tends be be quite different alllowing for open air flow throughout the structure.Do you have any examples of earthships in the humid tropics? How might they be different?

Great question. At the start of my Earthship/ Cal-Earth odyssey, I wondered exactly this too. How can an Earthship work in a completely different climate from the scorching summer heat and freezing winter snow of Taos, New Mexico?

How would it work where the climate is hot, humid and wet every day of the year? If you build a standard Earthship in the tropics, are you going to bake as if in a big clay oven all day, every day; or is your Earthship going to resemble a moldy wet sponge after a year?

Earthships are starting to appear in the tropics – as in Nicaragua, where the lovely images below are from:-

So, as long you make several modifications, these buildings are proving to be perfectly successful in the tropics.

(I’d like to add a note about open-sourcing experience and wisdom. In the early developmental days, Mike Reynolds got sued by people who were not fully satisfied with aspects of their Earthships; like experiencing leaky roofs, being too hot, or too cold, or having a smell for the first six months of the botanical cells as they matured. To sue over grievences is to ‘forget’ that Earthships were then and still are experimental buildings. As earth-leaders and builders, we are together hurtling along an exciting learning curve. There are going to be bruises and bumps. We need to grow up: to evolve past infantile thought-processes and stop suing earth-leaders when the solutions they offer are not utterly perfect!

These homes are a zillion times more perfect than any standard home in earth-care, in people-care. The fact is, these and types of dwellings like them, are some of the best, most beautiful eco-homes yet made available – with water and power integrated like essential functioning organs in our bodies. Reynolds had to waste a decade and every cent of his resources to fight for the right to experiment in natural building (see the documentary ‘Garbage Warrior‘). Now he seeks out ‘Pockets of Freedom’ – places where natural building is not halted by the insanities of red-tape, building codes and personal-spinelessness on the part of elected community leaders.

Sign up to living authentically like this and we believe you have also signed up to open sourcing all your wisdom and learning. If you have a bright idea, share it. If you innovate, help everyone benefit. Share the love – the earth is dying for it. Using the law to gain personally does not help us, as a global community, get the freedoms we need to build ecologically sound homes.)

Ok, back to the question of tropical Earthships. It’s true that Earthships first developed at 37ºN latitude, at 7000 feet, with a temperature range of -34ºC (-30ºF) below(!) to 38ºc (100ºF) high: yet because of the self-regulating characteristics (utilising thermal movement into and radiating from the earth mass wrapping, with the sun providing the heat-energy) of the building, inner temps remain constant between 18-24ºC (65-75ºF), all year round. In this way, the massed earth in the tyres and earth berm function like a gigantic warm battery, storing all that sun-heat, letting it out steadily as you need it into your cosy home.

This heat-energy capture and storage has to do with the latitude, the earth’s tilt, its orbit and the angle/duration in hours per day of the sun. Worldwide, an Earthship’s glazing always faces the sun (or toward the equator). In the N, the glass faces south and it tilts at about 60º to perpendicular – if the sun is at 30º at noon on the coldest day! According to your latitude, you make wee minor adjustments to the angle of your glass front, to always get the best solar gain.

Now, if you are on or very near the equator – as all tropical areas are, then

the first modification you make is the angle of the glass front: you place it perpendicular, allowing less or no sun to fall into the building. Very large roof-overhangs stop both too much sun and too much water hitting the front face. That stops too much solar gain superheating the house all year round (you do this because in the tropics there is no seasonal fluctuation in daylight hours of sun/and its orbit: it belts down the same almost all year. Plus there are no changing seasons – it’s always hot!

Therefore, the critical factor for a tropical Earthship is cooling and evaporation – ventilation! You can use a low-mass attic, with through ventilation, thus cooling the whole Earthship. Heating and cooling is a constant in an Earthship, because of the massive mass of earthen ‘wrap’ – which utilises the earth’s thermal constant – which is 13-15.5ºC (55-60ºF). In the North, this taps into the earth’s own natural wave pattern of summer and winter heat, using the temperature of the earth itself to keep internal temperatures constant. In some cases, you can dig down a little further (in Northern hemispheres, below the frostline – also helps with ‘heaving’.)

In Southern hemispheres, the earth berm helps to keep the home cooler. The earth’s temperature remains constantly cooler than the sticky air temperature, helping to keep the Earthship cool when you need coolness. Another change for a tropical Earthship is to bury long cooling tubes in the earth, to be used as cold air vents.

You bury piping a few feet deep and say 100 meters long: this pipe is open at one end (with a mesh to stop mice or insects using it) and leads from outside to the interior of the Earthship: warm daytime air is drawn into the pipe and the cold earth itself supercools the air as it is sucked along the pipe toward the warmer air inside the earth ship. Opening vent-skylights in the ceilings of the Earthship interior allows you to have a completely controllable stream of air from low under the windows (or even pouring up from grilles in the floor) to high up in the ceiling and on outside. Warm air always rises, so you get a cooling system for free – no petroleum used to be comfortably cool, when outside is super hot and sticky.

To further enhance cooling, lush interior pools of water near the incoming air vents cause evaporative cooling, making the home even more pleasant.

You can also build a tall ‘chimney’ painted dark on the outside. The sun heats this dark column, causing air to be sucked up and out of the Earthship, enhancing cooling. Then at night, the stored heat in this stack radiates back into the home.

Trees/vegetation can be also used to shade the Earthship in tropical climates. In Northern latitudes, you never plant in front of the South-facing glass wall, as it cuts out your solar-gain. In the tropics, lovely lush vegetation shading the Earthship helps stop the sun beating down on the home: so your permaculture food-forest plays another key and free role!

Also, of course, with all Earthships, you choose your site carefully – thinking especially of water: where it pools, where it flows, how to capture, contain and use it. In Northern climes, you sink the Earthship, in Southern, you make sure your feet are dry!

Ok, that is all I can think of for now! More modifications for tropical Earthships will of course be known or will evolve – if you know some I’ve forgotten, please post them in the comments. ‘Earthship’ Volume 1 has diagrams galore and all the sciencey bits to explain all the gunwales of an Earthship in great depth. Then you will be hungry for Mike’s other books too! For now, happy planning!

Much love, C.

Hi everyone!

My last post was about growing soil; nice new, healthy rich humus, to sequester carbon and to  work against the trend regular farming has of losing 83 billion tonnes of arable soil per year.

This week, I’ve been reading more Bill Mollison (bedtime book) in the form of Permaculture One. Here are a couple of his thoughts on soil:

Soils are the subject of much discussion, research and dogma.  Their improvement, creation and destruction has been instrumental in the rise and fall of cultures throughout the world.’ p72

Being part of the biosphere, soils are complex ecologies, rather than non-living systems.‘ p72

Of course, tilling or ploughing the soil weakens it, and upsets the ecology of it, equaling a more and more impoverished soil, far more prone to erosion. In just the same way, pesticides and herbicides wipe-out the living element in the soil: this is akin to ripping the engine out of a car – leaving you going no-where.

The life forms in the soil do all the soil-making work. For example,  worm mucus binds particles of soil, adds enzymes and holds water. As they move along, eating, the passages they leave allow roots to zoom along behind them, and let oxygen into the soil.

You can find out great stuff about the ecology of soil in  the Growing Power Youtube videos and on Dr. Caroline Jone’s Amazing Carbon site, to start you off. If you have information you’d like to share, please tell us in the comments!

Some more Mollison on site and soil (this was heartening to me, considering the  impoverished, shaley, rocky, sandy soil of soil we have on our Cygnet mountainside),

In site planning, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the soils. However, soils are not considered to be the limiting factor that many people seem to think. Although the physical character of soils may be a reasonably long-term aspect of the land, the soil ecology which supports plant life is readily changed and improved.’ p61

At Growing Power, they import 80,000 kilos of food waste a WEEK: it includes scraps from local restaurants and offices, fruit and veg in boxes never sold at markets, the cardboard boxes from anything and everything, brewery waste, mildewed hay, coffee grounds from local cafes, eggshells, and woodchips to name a few. This they compost in massive piles, or in windrows, or in large wormeries. Worms are the key to making this otherwise ‘landfill’ into rich, valuable soil. First and foremost the CEO Will Allen says, Growing Power is in the business of growing soil (and that’s Will below on one of his compost mountains!)

Allen says:

The simple truth is that it all starts with the soil.  Without good soil, crops don’t get enough of the nutrients they need to survive and when plants are stressed, they are more prone to disease and pest problems.  That’s why we grow our own compost and vermicompost – 6 million tons of it a year.  That compost goes onto every growing bed we raise crops on.  Because we know what goes in to the compost, we aren’t worried that the soil is contaminated with lead or other chemicals that humans just shouldn’t eat.’

A vermiculture business in Australia adds animal manures (cow, sheep, chicken) as well as animal parts from the slaughter business. They compost this with hundreds of thousands of kilos of spoiled hay, all manner of vegetable farm ‘waste’ (like straw, rotted crops, brewery hops, coconut husks, cocoa shells etc etc). Yuk, you might think, about the animal parts – but we’ve all used ‘blood and bone’ and this is just a  ground-up, dried, refined granule form of the same thing – animal bodies.  To compost the remains seems better than any alternative (where their bodies are incinerated and wasted).

So, all the ‘waste’ we produce can be turned, by worms and bacteria and enzymes (a workforce of billions who ask no wage) back into top quality, life-giving soil.  Bring it on!  Give us a little time  to get to OzEarth HQ and we will be doing a similar collection of any local goodies we can get our hands on in the Huon Valley, in Tassie, and turning it into the black gold! (We have a tractor and a 10 tonne truck already, which helps!)

OK, I shall stop waxing lyrical about the planet-saving characteristics of growing soil and bid you a great day!

Love

C

Ps. You can click on the ‘links’ and the pictures, to take you to the pages they were pinched from!! oxoxo

Word has it that, as a planet, we are allowing 83 billion tonnes of arable soil to erode or blow away a year.  Ploughing is the main culprit.  As the soil washes away, we keep reproducing like a virus. Whilst eating up resources like voracious locusts. It doesn’t take much imagination to see where we’re headed…

Of course, it doesn’t have to go that way at all.  The earth can be healed, and the soil can capture umpteen times more carbon than can forests.  At OzEarth, that strikes us as amazingly good news!  Soil need not take  hundreds of years to build up a couple of inches;  organically teeming, super-fertile soil can be created in a couple of years. Then your food-growing activities can enrich it year in, year out. With just a little know-how. Equestrian Peter Andrews (a total hero) through a system called Natural Sequence Farming has built up one meter of soil per flood event on his land in Australia and totally rehydrated his farm into a green, lush oasis – see his gut-crunching, soul-singing epsiode on Australian Story – awesome!

Bill Mollison, in his  Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual and the Permaculture Research Institute offer detailed, practical and gloriously hopeful methods of growing soil. (You can get huge doses of Bill on Youtube for free, as well, explaining lots of his methods…)  Mycologist Paul Stamets has a wealth of info on how to harness mushroom ‘Mycelium Running’ to super-boost health soil formation too. Check out his fab soil-constructing mushrooms at Fungi Perfecti.

Each of us can do a lot to turn this potentially suicidal situation into a super-soil success story.  You can make soil – see next paragraph.  If you have no land, no garden at all, not even a balcony, you can still make soil:  by buying organic; composting your food scraps;  and by buying locally from producers who are farming the soil as a number one priority (it has to be organic – all those chemicals obliterate all the good bacteria in soil). You have ‘Pound-Power’ – you can vote with your wallet. Add all our shopping baskets up, and that will make millions of tonnes of new soil – a vast difference.

Reproduce worms, by giving them great places to live, with lots of kitchen scraps to chow down on.  A kilo of worms needs a kilo of food a day, according to Will Allen, at Growing Power. They have a stable of seven super-soil-producing worms, and you can read his stuff to get the champion worm names. Check out his astonishing NGO set-up in Milwaukee (and Chicago) via the link above. You can also Youtube his videos: including lectures, aquaponics (fish and greens), bees, eggs, veggies,  composting, and of course the vermiculture. I have applied to do a 3 months intership with Growing Power and am in negotiations now – please cross all fingers and toes for me!!!

Last year, Helen and I got muddy up to the oxsters bagging up an amazing number of wonderful soil-building worms together with very well rotted horse poo.  We shovelled about 80 bags of it into feedsacks – exhausting!  Bagged it, carried it across two fields to a van, then trundled around to our back garden and turfed it onto a bed of hay, in raised beds. We had GUNS to die for!  Wormy horse manure gave us the best veggies ever. The three nice horses live about 2 km from our house – but it still was a commitment in energy to get their droppings to our garden!

An interesting article here on soil building. You might also like to look at the cool stuff Dr. Caroline Jones is doing at AmazingCarbon: she is an extremely diligent, knowledgable grassland ecologist and has proven ways of making denuded, ruined grazing land yield better results, whilst regaining its health.

I am now collecting weird worm facts… like worms love bananas, I discovered from Will Allen. Rotten, black squishy ones. Our local magpies are smart little buggers & now daily dig up all the spoilt bananas I get from the end of the local market, because they gorge on the hundreds of baby worms squirming around in the sweet decay.  If you have vermiculture know-how, I’m dying to pick your brains.

Now I have that children’s song repeating in my head:

‘The worms crawl in,

the worms crawl out,

they crawl in thin

and they crawl out stout…’

So, that is my little wrigglers post.  Every time I move a pot, or pull back a handful of soil, I see them and it makes my heart sing!

Love
C

PS: H says ‘Gross!’ but she doesn’t mean it – she loves them too.