The Convergence of Commodities

As a commodities trader, he said, he wasn't concerned with who was producing something, or why. He was interested in demand, and there are, in his world, only four demands:

1. the creation of transportation,
2. the generation of heating and power,
3. the manufacture of materials and
4. the provision of sustenance through food and water.

“Historically, these four demands never used to talk to one another – they were silent,” he said. That is, they lived in different worlds of pricing, depending on the amount of energy they could produce per dollar spent.

"[Now] ....We don't care what commodity you buy. We called it a bushels-to-barrels-to-BTUs convergence. Take corn:
• It can now create heating and transportation; it's actually very good for burning to generate electricity.
• It can create plastic or cardboard, so it's a source of materials.
• And finally, you can eat it if you want. It can meet any of these demands. And you can use petroleum to create plastics, or to create fertilizer to grow food – suddenly, we are indifferent to what commodity we are buying to meet our demands.”



http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081024.wreckoning1024/BNStory/International/home?cid=al_gam_mostemail
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116 million people have heard of the MDG

Though I'm not sure how many of them live in Asheville.
The MDG are the Millenium Development Goals, a UN-coordinated set of goals and
targets to improve the life of the poorest on this planet. More info on MDG at

And to hear about the 116 million people campaigning for the MDG, read more below



http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44421


DEVELOPMENT:
Now Sit Up and Listen
Analysis by Sanjay Suri
Inter Press Service News Agency

LONDON, Oct 23 (IPS) - For every one in 50 people around the world to make a point of standing up somewhere on the planet to say the same kind of thing adds up to a lot of people. More than any mass mobilisation on any issue ever before.
And now that they have, it should follow for leaders, if only for their own sake, to sit up and listen.

The official figure for the campaign to 'Stand Up and Take Action against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals' Oct. 17-19 has been declared at 116,993,629. The call came from the Global Call for Action Against Poverty (GCAP), an alliance of about 100 social movements, non-government organisations and community and faith groups.

This was considerably more than the 43 million recorded last year.

But the actual number is almost certainly higher than this official figure, says Salil Shetty, director of the U.N. Millennium Campaign. The official total was announced while results, after due verification, were still coming in, he said, adding that the number that actually stood up would be about twice the 67 million estimated before the weekend event. Organisers say two percent of the world population physically stood up to make a point against poverty.

Actions ranged from standing up to deliver petitions to presidents or at local events where city mayors and other officials were invited to listen, to protest marches and meetings where everyone stood up to make a point. The protest gave quite vivid truth to the old cliché about local actions, carried out globally -- this time about similar matters, simultaneously.

The added support for the campaign against poverty might just have been provoked by the global financial crisis, that has seen thousands of billions of dollars go into financial institutions brought down by dubious dabblers, after the leaders who sanctioned this money denied a fraction of that to feed the world's hungry.

"If the rich countries kept their promise of 0.7 percent of their GNP for aid, that would generate more than 200 billion dollars, more than enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and is still much, much less than we've seen available for the banking bailout," Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights declared as the results came in Wednesday.

"The money is there. But it's the political will. Leaders must listen to more than 116 million people," she said. "We have shattered all previous records for mass mobilisation. People really want to stand up against poverty, and say we need change."

The highest number of people who stood up, 73 million, was recorded in Asia, with 13 million reported in Bangladesh alone. Africa recorded about 24.5 million, and less expectedly, what was declared the 'Arab region' recorded close to 18 million.

Europe recorded close to a million, but Latin America only about 211,000. North America seems not to have drawn a significant response at all -- though the movement was led and coordinated from New York.

The initiative is not just about numbers, but a way to make protest possible. "We've created an opportunity for ordinary people to have a voice and to participate and to feel that they are not just objects of change but really the drivers of change," said Kumi Naidoo, co-chair of GCAP and honorary president of CIVICUS, a leading global NGO campaigning for rights and development.

"We've created a global event which is fundamentally local in nature," he said at a press conference after the attendance count. "My sense of why there was such an overwhelming turnout is that there is deep concern that the global economic crisis must not detract from meeting the MDGs, and exceeding them."

The attention to the money market crisis rather than to the MDGs clearly spurred a good deal of the protest action.

For the food crisis the leaders struggled to pledge eight billion dollars, for the financial crisis they found 3,000 billion dollars, said Sylvia Borren, former head of Oxfam Novib and co-chair of Worldconnectors, an NGO building links among people. "There is an ethical question here. If we had used that money at the bottom of the pyramid we would have achieved the MDGs by now." In this protest, "the urgency is the message."

The participation in the protest, she said, is "a democratic challenge for local governments, for national governments, but particularly also for the global governance we have, that says we the people do not understand that this kind of money can be spent on the Wall Street problem when children are dying every three seconds and women are dying at childbirth unnecessarily every minute."

The message coming across, Borren said, was that money was being spent "on financial institutions, on wars, it's being spent on all sorts of things we don't want; we want it spent on education, on water, on health, on food."

But between the delivery of a message and its receipt there still lies a wide gap. World leaders are meeting soon, not to end poverty or to find ways of providing everyone affordable food, but to make sure that the rich continue to buy, and that their market continues to flourish. (END/2008)



Click Here to Read More..

The Imelda Marcos Shoe Pile

From an article in the New York Times:
In “Schooled,” Anisha Lakhani’s acidic narrative about an Upper East Side private school, swarms of seventh graders at a party kick off their high heels before descending on the dance floor. The narrator, who is their English teacher, regards the pile of footwear with a mixture of censure and awe: “Hard to believe, but there they lay, Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, Giuseppe Zanottis and Christian Louboutins — the abandoned shoes of 12-year-old girls.”

This reminds me of a visit to Manhattan I had a few weeks ago.


***

I was at a diner at 96th and Columbus Ave. 2-4 thirteen year old girls were at the table next to me (5th grade? 7th? something like that) talking about maids, vacation homes, shopping. It was utterly surreal and obscene. I half expected them to share corrupt hedge fund tricks that they learned from their daddies.

Of course, I am rather out of touch.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/fashion/23privilege.html
Click Here to Read More..

A new book about "human waste"

Excerpt from the new book
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters,
by Rose George

I need the bathroom. I assume there is one, though I'm at a spartan restaurant in the Ivory Coast, in a small town filled with refugees from next-door Liberia, where water comes in buckets and you can buy towels second-hand. The waiter, a young Liberian man, only nods when I ask. He takes me off into the darkness to a one-room building, switches on the light, and leaves. There's a white tiled floor, white tiled walls, and that's it. No toilet, no hole, no clue. I go outside to find him again and ask whether he's sent me to the right place. He smiles with sarcasm. Refugees don't have much fun, but he's having some now. "Do it on the floor. What do you expect? This isn't America!" I feel foolish. I say I'm happy to use the bushes; it's not that I'm fussy. But he's already gone, laughing into the darkness.


I need the bathroom. I leave the reading room of the British Library in central London and find a "ladies" a few yards away. If I prefer, there's another one on the far side of the same floor, and more on the other six floors. By 6 p.m., after thousands of people have entered and exited the library and the toilets, the stalls are still clean. The doors still lock. There is warm water in the clean sinks. I do what I have to do, then flush the toilet and forget it immediately, because I can, and because all my life I have done no differently.

This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.

This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.

It must be, when 2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. I don't mean that they have no toilet in their house and must use a public one with queues and fees. Or that they have an outhouse or a rickety shack that empties into a filthy drain or pigsty. All that counts as sanitation, though not a safe variety. The people who have those are the fortunate ones. But four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. Nothing. Instead, they defecate by train tracks and in forests. They do it in plastic bags and fling them through the air in narrow slum alleyways. If they are women, they get up at 4 a.m. to be able to do their business under cover of darkness for reasons of modesty, risking rape and snakebites. Four in ten people live in situations in which they are surrounded by human excrement, because it is in the bushes outside the village or in their city yards, left by children outside the back door. It is tramped back in on their feet, carried on fingers onto clothes and into food and drinking water.

The disease toll of this is stunning. Eighty percent of the world's illness is caused by fecal matter. A gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 worm eggs. Bacteria can be beneficial: the human body needs bacteria to function, and only 10 percent of cells in our body are actually human. Plenty are not. Small fecal particles can then contaminate water, food, cutlery, and shoes—and be ingested, drunk, or unwittingly eaten. One sanitation specialist has estimated that people who live in areas with inadequate sanitation ingest 10 grams of fecal matter every day.

Diarrhea—usually caused by feces-contaminated food or water—kills a child every fifteen seconds. That means more people dead of diarrhea than all the people killed in conflict since the Second World War. Diarrhea, says the UN children's agency UNICEF, is the largest hurdle a small child in a developing country has to overcome. Larger than AIDS, or TB, or malaria. 2.2 million people—mostly children—die from an affliction that to most westerners is the result of bad takeout. Public health professionals talk about water-related diseases, but that is a euphemism for the truth. These are shit-related diseases.

I'm often asked why I wrote The Big Necessity.

http://www.slate.com/id/2201466/entry/2201467

(No more at "Read More")

Click Here to Read More..

In Search of the Fabled Permaculture Chicken/Greenhouse

By Rob Hopkins
http://transitionculture.org/2008/10/20/in-search-of-the-fabled-permaculture-chickengreenhouse

For many years I have taught permaculture courses, and like many who do so, I start my courses with the Tale of Two Chickens. This is a very useful way of looking at inputs, outputs, and the science of maximising beneficial relationships, and it concludes with describing one of permaculture’s Holy Grails, The Chicken/Greenhouse. However, now, as I stand on the verge of actually trying to make a chicken greenhouse, I am finding it very difficult to find actual working examples of chicken/greenhouses. Might I have spent years unwittingly promoting a permaculture urban myth?

The idea is straightforward and works brilliantly on paper. Patrick Whitefield in ‘Permaculture in a Nutshell’ sets it out very clearly (you can read it here), and you can read the thinking behind the Chicken/Greenhouse here. The picture below is taken from ‘In a Nutshell’, and captures the essential idea, which is that by placing the 2 elements of chickenhouse and greenhouse together with the proper orientation, you enable, via. good design, interactions to take place that otherwise would not take place and would require energy inputs to make happen. For example, the warmth from the chickens keeps the greenhouse free of frost, the carbon dioxide from the hens benefits the plants, and so on.

Visit full article at
http://transitionculture.org/2008/10/20/in-search-of-the-fabled-permaculture-chickengreenhouse
Click link to learn more Click Here to Read More..

Asheville Transit- 3 Steps to Enlightenment

Event: 'ADC Forum - 3 Steps To Transportation Enlightenment.'

Public Events
Public Asheville Design Center Events

Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 At 06:00:00 PM
Duration: 1 Hour

The City of Asheville’s Transit Division will make an introduction to how multi-modal approaches can help you become automobile-free. Join us and learn about how to be involved in our evolving transportation programs, such as the upcoming Transit Master Plan, Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan and the TDM program.
http://www.ashevilledesigncenter.org/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=38&extmode=view&extid=71

(Nothing more at Read More) Click Here to Read More..

Building a Food Pantry- the first steps

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/17/friday-food-storage-not-quite-so-quickie-5-week-beginner-food-storage/

I hope you will never have an emergency, but even if you don’t, you will
always feel a more secure with (at least) one month’s food on hand. This is
definitely worth the little bit of work and expense it requires.

I cannot think of any food storage plan (than the one below) that would be cheaper, and yet have
the following features:

1. The food must all be nutritious.
2. It must all keep a long time without refrigeration.
3. You must be able to eat it uncooked if necessary.
4. It must all fit into a normal diet.

If you do this, I absolutely guarantee that you’ll be glad, and that it
will give you a very good feeling of security.

****************
The ANYWAY, Very Cheap, System of Food Storage for
Emergencies and/or Inflation for People Who Think They Cannot Afford Food
Storage

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/17/friday-food-storage-not-quite-so-quickie-5-week-beginner-food-storage/
Click Here to Read More..

HomeGrown: a film about a 21st century family farm in the middle of the city

A Documentary About Modern Day Urban Homesteaders
(www.homegrown-film.com)
For screening venue information visit
http://homegrownfilm.blogspot.com

HOMEGROWN (2008) follows the Dervaes family who run a small organic farm in
the heart of urban Pasadena, California. While 'living off the grid’, they
harvest over 6,000 pounds of produce on less than a quarter of an acre, make
their own bio diesel, power their computers with the help of solar panels,
and maintain a website that gets 4,000 hits a day. The film is an intimate
human portrait of what it’s like to live like ‘Little House on the Prairie’
in the 21st Century.

**********
Director's Statement

"Many people are becoming aware of the environment. We may have gone to see
‘An Inconvenient Truth’, changed our light bulbs, or started to recycle
more. But how many of us are really walking the walk’ I know I’m not.

When I heard about the Dervaes family, I sensed that there was a human story
behind the headlines about global warming or buying organic produce. I
wanted to find out what it takes to live the life of an environmental
pioneer. I don’t wish to simply glorify or romanticize their way of life,
however. I want to show that along with the positive benefits there are also
sacrifices. Truly living by your ideals can have costs. I believe that
recognizing the hardships the Dervaes have faced makes their work all the
more inspiring.

HOMEGROWN is ultimately a family story. It’s about what lead them to where
they are today, what changed them and what keeps them together. Perhaps by
learning of their journey to a sustainable life style, we might be inspired
to take our own first steps."

About Robert McFalls

Early in his career he was an associate editor on ‘American Dream’, the
Barbara Kopple documentary, which won the Academy Award in 1990. That
experience helped him to see what a broad reach a well-crafted documentary
could have. He recently edited a documentary feature on the Dalai Lama,
which is now screening at festivals around the world.

Music

The beautiful music for this documentary was performed by our great American
homegrown musicians Jay Unger & Molly Mason.

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason are best known for their haunting composition
Ashokan Farewell in Ken Burns’ hit PBS series ‘The Civil War’’. The
soundtrack won a Grammy and Ashokan Farewell was nominated for an Emmy.
They’ve garnered legions of fans through their appearances on ‘Great
Performances’, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’, their own public radio specials,
and work on film soundtracks such as ‘Brother’s Keeper’, ‘Legends of the
Fall’, and a host of Ken Burns documentaries.

About the Family

The Dervaes Family (Jules, Ana’s, Justin & Jordanne)

Since the mid 1980s, Jules Dervaes and his family have steadily worked at
transforming an ordinary residential lot in Pasadena, California into a
verdant oasis in the midst of the city. On their small fifth of an acre they
are striving to be a self-sustaining urban homestead complete with bio
diesel power, solar energy, and wastewater management. These eco-pioneers
grow much of their own food and raise a menagerie of chickens, ducks, goats,
and an occasional cat. They have been the subject of numerous articles in
newspapers around the country, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles
Times and were recently featured on ABC’s Nightline. You can learn more
about them at their website: www.pathtofreedom.com


Click Here to Read More..

More Neighbors = Less Theft

October 17, 2008

Breaking down fences makes good neighbors
Towns encourage residents to get to know one another
By Lisa Black |Chicago Tribune reporter

Connie Peyer barely knew the family who lived across the street, so she was shocked when her neighbor came over, upset, saying her home had been burglarized in broad daylight and no one bothered to call police.

Neighbors had watched as men loaded a truck with a television and appliances.
"Everyone thought, 'Oh, they're moving out,' " Peyer said.

The burglary taught Peyer a lesson about community isolation. So she was quick to volunteer when she learned that Skokie, where she had since moved, was sponsoring a program to help residents do what used to come naturally: get to know the Joneses next door.

28 years ago, I lived in central Cambridge, MA, when I heard that there was an attempted rape down the street. The woman cried out for help, and neighbors streamed out on the street of two and three story rowhouses. Afterwards, the neighbors held a block party to celbrate the power of community.

But when I moved onto that portion of the street a few months later, that all seemed a distant memory. So my housemates and I held a Neighborhood CrimeWatch meeting, and a police officer came by to talk about safety, and tagging possessions with ID numbers that would make them harder to pawn.

A few months later, our house got a call from the house across the street (we exchanged phone numbers). Did someone just steal one of our bikes?

Indeed they had. Even though we had hardly ever talked socially, the neighbor had a vague sense of who lived and visited our 7 person house.and thought it strange for someone to be removing a bike in the snowy dead of winter. It wasn't my first bike theft, nor my last; and the warning didn't come in time; but it did show the power of neighborhood.

(So I'm glad my neighborhood formed an association last Sunday night.)
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Bio-Intensive Workshop in Virginia

As far as I can decipher, this workshop would cost $400, not including lodging and most meals .

John Jeavons is famous for dropping out of his corporate systems analyst work after Earth Day 1970 to apply the insights to farming, so as to get the most calories out of a patch of land. (Activist Bill Moyer followed a similar path with the American peace movement, and helped to transform it).

If anyone goes to this, I'd be interested in hearing what they learn.
-- Jim Barton
smithmillcreek.blogspot.com
**********************************************


Food and Our Future:
Hope and Solutions through Biointensive Farming
A Workshop with John Jeavons
October 23 through 25, 2008
8:00-5:00 in Dayton, Virginia:
Woodment of the World Hall
3045 John Wayland Hwy
http://www.johnjeavons.info/workshop-locations.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/13/HO126062.DTL

http://www.johnjeavons.info/register.html



All of life on Earth…depends on six-inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains!
The soil is a living organism that must be fed and nurtured to keep it feeding us. This
basic understanding is not a major focus of most current forms of conventional
agriculture. In this workshop John will share eight essential aspects of GROW
BIOINTENSIVE including: Deep Soil Preparation, Raised Beds, Composting, Intensive
Planting, Companion Planting, Carbon Farming, Calorie Farming, The Use of Open-
Pollinated Seeds, and A Whole-System Farming Method. John will also provide time for
questions and answers concerning northwest small-scale farming, long-term sustainable
soil fertility, and specific crops.

John Jeavons has directed Ecology Action’s Mini-Farming program since 1972.
He is the author of How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains
and Other Crops…, the textbook of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE (GB) Sustainable
Mini-Farming system, as well as being author, co-author and/or editor of over 30
other Ecology Action publications.

His major responsibilities include directing field
and library research and education in GB food raising. He advises biologically-
intensive projects in Mexico, Kenya, Ecuador, Russia, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan
as well as all corners of the U.S. Jeavons holds a B.A. in Political Science from
Yale University. Before coming to Ecology Action in 1971, he worked as a systems
analyst in business, government and university settings. He has received the Boise
Peace Quilt, Santa Fe Living Treasure, Giraffe, and Steward of Sustainable
Agriculture awards for public service. Click Here to Read More..