Category Archives: Ron

Class 9: Improving Our Ways about Water

Posted on by
Reply

Class notes by Ron S.

Rainwater harvesting and Greywater.  What a resource that is mostly wasted. I used to live in southern California and all my norcal friends would complain about how they go to socal and everyone is washing their cars and watering their lawns in summertime while up north everyone is on rations because they are selling the water to Socal. I would ride my bike in the paved over riverbeds all over orange county.  They have all this resource and they flush it out to sea…with all the fertilizers from their lawns.  Half the time I wanted to go to the beach there would be a red tide so we couldn’t go in.  There has got to be a better way.  Culturally socal is messed up too.  There was a plan to reclaim waste greywater to recharge the Huntington Beach aquifer that got turned down because people couldn’t get their heads around drinking reclaimed wastewater.  It would have been much cleaner than the water that came from norcal but no….There are so many reasons to do this it isn’t even funny.  It seems that mostly the reason people don’t do this is that they don’t know or it is too inconvenient.  Even southern CA gets enough rain in the winter to store a good chunk of it in the ground.  If you have the room store some of it in catchment containers.  Greywater, a little more tricky.  Such a resource of water though.  With a little bit of thought as to what is going down the drain, you could harvest all of that resource…showers, washing machine loads, bathroom sinks.  I’m already thinking of what I can do even as a renter.  I’m excited!

Class 8: Adapt to an Urban Setting

Posted on by
Reply

Class notes by Ron S.

We are rapidly heading toward the conclusion of this course. Let’s see..climate. Kind of a broad overview of this with the direction to say pay attention to this. That’s fine. Most people are generally aware of their climate. If you live anywhere in the bay area you should be intimately aware of micro-climates as well. Tropical food forests were pretty cool although I don’t know if too many of us will get the chance to experience this on more than a vacation level. Banana guilds and coconut guilds, who knew that palms were a super dynamic accumulator..?

Green building with Dan Antonioli. Very cool. I have seen some of the very same things that he was talking about coming from a solar construction background. Even though the product was green the process was standard construction practices. Lots of waste. I actually did set up a huge recycling program for our facilities and our job-sites. It’s a start. I keep getting reminded that permaculture doesn’t mean moving to the woods and having a homestead to build food forests and raise your own sustainable agriculture. Most people are going to have to adapt some of these philosophies into an urban setting.

There seem to be so many resources for this to happen. Just keep the green building principles in mind while thinking Permie! Conserve Natural Resources, Increase Energy Efficiency, Improve Air Quality!

BYA. We built a cob bench. I could go build cob tomorrow. No worries. I get the basic principles and I tried to have a hand in a bit of all of the design processes with cob at BYA. I did not however get my feet in the mud. Maybe next time.

Inner Ecology. This kind of scared me because I don’t believe that my inner ecology is all that healthy. It seemed like a lot of good information that I may never access. I may look into the book ‘True Purpose’. Once again, great day!

Class 10: People Working Hard

Posted on by
Reply

Class notes by Ron S.

Kevin Danaher. This guy came on strong and I thought “This is what we need. Someone to go after and force some responsible change.” This guy gave in a few hours more reason for people to change than the entire class. I have more information about what sites to go to learn and to teach people reasons than I know what to do with. It seems that he and Global Exchange are very effective as well. It still seems that that is one front that we have and there still exists a need to engage with industry to understand WHY they should change. By law they are beholden to stockholders to get them the best return. Kevin addressed this by talking about the need for ‘Life values vs. Money cycle or values’. I guess that is where the education needs to keep happening. That’s where the grassroots and activism comes in. I particularly liked when Kevin gave examples of environmental thinking that makes money. One, I would like to make enough to survive in the world. Two, I think that one of the ways to change the current ‘Market Economy’ paradigm is to show that caring about the ‘Triple bottom line’ can make money and not create more problems.

Kevin Bayuk, another fountain of information that makes me realize that there are people working their asses off to make these concrete changes in the world. Kevin’s talk really made me look inward as opposed to the other Kevin’s talk making me look at the world.

“Know your usage”. Know your impact. It seems odd to me that this surprised me. That this should be step one. Duh! Once again, more resources than I will get to in a week.

Kaseja Wilder. Heart of Now. This stuff seems to be a little bit of my edge. It does feel good to go through this practice though. I’ve never realized how hard most people including myself work at not being present. I’ve learned some good lessons here. Thank you!

Class 11: Old Dog. New Trick.

Posted on by
Reply

Class notes by Ron S.

Holy crap!! Design presentations. We have so much more work to do. I never thought to include budgets. We will get it done.

Joe Kennedy. Natural building and then some. My God! So much information again. I’m going to need a month after this course just to research and dig into the information I have access to now. And I’m going to! Joe started out by giving us a very cool history of what he has been involved in and the trials and accomplishments of working here and abroad. Natural buildings in Pakistan with ‘Air catchers and natural air conditioning’ .

How freaking cool is human ingenuity? The idea of village scale really takes on the whole western marketing idea that we need more, bigger, consume. Post WW2 has really changed a whole generation or two’s ideas of just what we need. It seems that the only ones benefiting have been the corporations selling the consumable items we need to fulfill this goal. It seems that in our current times living ‘within our means’ is anathema to the American way. Marketing doesn’t show you the consequences. It just moves the shell around on the board and says “Pick one”. I found myself listening to Joe and at one point started writing a list of goals ‘Post Design Course’.

Inner Ecology. Christopher and Lauren. When I hear the word’s inner ecology, I think “Oh no!” My ecology isn’t gonna fair so well. I don’t want to look to closely at this and they turned it on it’s ear. I can look at this from a totally different angle. I can apply permie tools that I am currently learning to embody. I can objectify and not sink into subjective feelings around this. I like this. It gives you more room to move around your ‘issues’ without judgment. Old dog. New trick. I like.

StarHawk. Our opening circle meditation blew me away. I felt a true resonance. It had been a long day and I still got a lot out of the presentation. Really a refesher on what permie has meant to us these last couple of months and what it can mean in a social context. It really felt like she was saying ” Remember, this isn’t just about sticking your hands in the soil. We are the soil too.” I guess it also felt a little like a blessing.

Thank you Starhawk and thank you Common Circle.

Class 7: Excited and Motivated

Posted on by
Reply

Class notes by Ron S.

The first thing that I noticed is that the class seems to be shrinking. The other thing I noticed is the people who keep showing up are excited, motivated. I love being in a learning environment like this. There is no one here who is just going through the motions.

So, we have an excited class for our Plant guild, food forest, agroforestry, plant propogation day. Good thing because I don’t think I’ve met anyone more excited about plants than our guest speaker John Valenzuela. We went over what a food forest is and the layers of a food forest. And we talked a bit about Agroforestry which sounds a bit like agricultural forestry. I may have to do a bit more research on this one. Food forests I get. It seems like an amazing idea. It is a long term commitment. Living in this world where people don’t live anywhere for more than five years seems a bit daunting to make that kind of commitment to the future. I’m speaking from the point of view of someone who doesn’t own a home. I do believe that any open space that has a lawn on it ought to be made into a food forest. Jay, Sage and John went over plant guilds. I love this idea and am already employing it in my garden design this year. I can’t wait to see the difference from this year to the last. I dig learning something new about my garden and that seems like everytime I walk out there. A quick lunch and we are at Brigid House again. A really good primer from John regarding what to put in your garden and what questions to ask and what info you should seek out about your area. A bit about clonal propogation and a grafting demonstration. Now we got to really dig in and do some work at Brigid house. Sheet mulching, planting starts and a tree or two. Very cool.

Pm and it is time for our Earthen building presentation. Super cool, just scratched the surface I’m sure. I am going to try and get on some projects so that I can get my own hands in it. This class is rapidly moving toward it’s conlusion. I need to get working on my design project.

Class 6: Build it, and they will come

Posted on by
Reply
Class 6 notes by Ron S.
Soil day actually began by picking our design projects.  I went with Brigid House.  I feel like it is something that I can really get my hands on right now.  I also think that the residential home is something that I will be able to make an impact on right away when I am done with this course.
It seems crazy that our government keeps letting big agricorp keep doing what it is doing to our topsoil.  Not only with the topsoil degrading but the poisonous pesticide run-off.  Crazy.  I must have known instinctively that by being lazy and not pulling the weeds in the garden this winter that it would act as a cover mulch and keep my soil right where it is.
Let’s see…what else did we cover?  Deforestation, soil erosion, soil characteristics, soil structures, ph, and the structure of humus.  Lots of good info.  So how do we get there?
Grow healthy soil.  Create the environment for a healthy soil food web…ie..”build it and they will come”. Mulching, yea!  Sheet and living mulch and chop and drop. It all works.
I think I am going to plant vetch and fava’s in my tomato beds this winter.
Fun times at the BYA talking bout animals.  Nice performance Zoe!  Finally some dirt on my hands.  We got a little practice doing compost piles and cover mulching.  Very cool.
I learned that I really need to have a worm bin in my yard now!  I hope to have one set up by the end of this week.
The tough part of the class for me.  Improv.  I am really glad that I did stay and push my own edge.  Thanks Zoe!  Thanks everyone!

Class 5: A-HA!!

Posted on by
Reply

Class 5 notes by Ron S.

Berkeley Youth Alternatives garden is way cool. Just walking around that site is educational for me. I can see ideas for my garden already. Mapping. I’m gonna need some work on this one. How much do you need to do? Do you map what is there and what isn’t there yet? Before and after? I will spend some more time on this outside of class. I want to map my back yard but I don’t know if anything can come of it since I am a renter. I’m pretty sure that my landlord won’t allow me to tear out the lawn. I think I will still map it. The group mapping exercises we did for different sets of information really helped get a sense of the why to do it. Landform and water kind of make sense for a landscape right off the bat. My group did Access and people flows and after we did it I guess it did make a bit more sense since we have to be considered in the equation. There is no apart! My A-HA!! moment came when we were doing triangulation. I was having a bit of trouble with using the calipers and how this was getting the right place on the map and Sage said “well your just doing a radius” and I got it. Cool.

Brigid House. We did a cool exercise around creatively using what’s at hand. This really felt right at home because I kind of live like that. My raised beds are constructed of everything I could find in the yard and garage that would hold dirt. Very cool. The Input/Output exercise was cool but much more useful was the twine exercise tying one projects output to another projects input. Not to sound too corny but it was a powerful and visceral realization and affirmation of why I want to do this whole Permaculture thing!
The information on meetings was useful. I have heard most of it in some form or another before.

Then we discussed design projects. I really want to do the Brigid House for a number of reasons.
First, I think that we can come up with a design that will be usefull. Second, the house I live in is very similar to the Brigid house and may be able to utiilize some of the solutions at home as well. Lastly, I think that doing the residential work like that is something that I can accomplish in the short term with people I know who have homes and would be open to me doing this kind of work. Once again, I seem to have a whole lot more stuff I am going to spend the week on learning.

Class 4: Fired Up About Water

Posted on by
Reply

Class 4 notes by Ron S.
Our first water day…Yea! And it was wet outside and my head was killing me. But, I am glad I dragged myself out of the house. kind of a lot of information all at once. I’ve been keeping a list of things or people i want to research for each day. This day had the biggest list.
“Sol Viva”
Brad Lancaster
Flowforms
Hugel culture/ hugel beds
Arcata marsh
Sepp Holzer
Permeable parking lots
Geoff Lawton
John Todd, Oberland college living machines
Aquaponics

Ok, so I was only there for the morning because of a massive headache (due to an old neck injury). I got fired up about water. Oddly enough, I know about swales but naturally occuring ones in nature. It kinda seems like the next thing our world will be fighting over will be water. Seems only right to be treating it like a valuable resource and learning as much as we can about it. I’m amazed at some of the things that were accomplished by people like Sepp Holzer and especially Geoff Lawton. Greening the Desert. That’s what we need to be doing in these countries we can’t seem to stay out of…instead of beating them into becomng new markets for our consumer goods.

I felt better on Sunday and went looking for more information on aquaponics. Wow!! This sounds amazing. Living in northern California, I can get fresh local seasonal vegies all year round at the farmers market. When I worked in Solar and would receive a delivery from the East coast, those ‘refer’ trucks would always stop in Sacramento or Salinas to take back vegies. You could wipe out a whole oil laden pipeline and grow vegies back there. Plenty of questions did come up..temp control? Pest control? Diversity? I feel like I have a whole lot of homework this week because there are too many things that I only got a taste of that I want to know more about. I plan on looking some of them up as soon as I’m done here.

Class 3: Integrating Information

Posted on by
Reply

Class 3 notes by Ron S.

A lot of information today.  First, Holmgren’s Principles.  Ok, it’s been a while since I was in school, but I think I need flash cards to randomly look at during my days.  I think that I may try and pick the definitions I can assimilate best from each of the different principles lists.  Mollison’s vs. Holmgren’s.  I also need to get my printer up and running so I can print out the info that we are getting from the class.  I am already feeling a little bit overwhelmed.  I need to keep looking at this info and find some ways to assimilate it.  It’s  time to start looking at the back yard garden.

We were introduced to Jon Young’s core routines for nature awareness.  I think I am split down the middle as to some of them I actively do and understand firsthand; sit spot, journaling, wandering, curiosity for example.  The other ones I believe I at least understand intellectually.  Once again, how to bring these routines into practice….?

We spent a good amount of  time on nature’s patterns.  It felt like I  didn’t know how to connect this information somehow.  I haven’t gotten too deep into Gaia’s Garden so maybe time to delve a bit deeper, maybe find some of the connections to this informatioin that is coming at me.

Thanks for the great day to walk to the community house that we went to. Great people.  Super gracious.  The scale of permaculture site analysis kind of brought a lot of what we have been talking about home.  I am going to get started on my  own backyard.  I do want to plant stuff this year but I am also going to try and watch the property overthe course of the year to gather what information that I can.  Hopefully, by the time Ive gathered up this info I will know what to do with it.  I am very interested in mapping site analysis on a social permaculture model as well.  Now I have to figure out where.  A great day…again.

Class 2: There is no apart.

Posted on by
Reply

Class 2 notes by Ron S.

I had a horrible cold and I wasn’t quite sure that I was going to make it to the second class of our permaculture design course.  I really am glad that that is not how my day  ended up.  Having been exposed to the first week’s transformative vibe, I think that a lot of people in this course (myself included) were really eager to see where this idea of (Social) Permaculture can take us.

We started in with the ethics of Permaculture.  I didn’t have time to take notes on them but was assured that all of this information was going to be made available to us.  My first sense of these ethics was that it is a pretty basic compassionate view of our relationship to the world.  As we discussed it I could see in my own experience how we don’t really live in that space for mainly a lot of selfish and silly reasons.  We don’t take the time to understand the impacts made by our decisions.  Our frustrations keep us from acting with compassion in all of our interactions and relationships.  The goofy thing is that all of this should be pretty easy to do and benefits both ends of the relationships.  You simply have to be present with that information/experience/belief.  Sure is a good thing that being present was one of the ‘ethics’ .  It’s something that I think our broader culture sure needs a lot of work on.  I really enjoy a lot of the ‘active listening’ exercises that we have been doing and I think it helps re-enforce the idea of coming from a place of compassion.

In trying to come up with our own principles of permaculture and then the best case scenarios of what could come of this, I kept trying to seperate the idea of ‘Social Permaculture’ from ‘Permaculture’ .   We were introduced to the Principles and we started in on some exercises and the Permaculture charades game and right before the dinner break it kind of dawned on me that one isn’t apart from the other.  Kind of like we aren’t apart from nature, or that community, over there….There is no apart!  Thanks!!

Class 1: Wow!

Posted on by
Reply

Wow!  What a powerful experience right out of the gate.  What a great way to start learning about sustainability but to focus on the why of it instead of the how.

I had been looking for a permaculture experience since I got laid off in November.  I applied, unsuccessfully, to an internship at one Permacultre Homestead in Washington.  I figured I would jump off the limb instead of merely putting myself out there.  Well, as they say, these things happen for a reason.  I started looking closer to home in the SF bay area where I live.  Common Circle was about the third course that I had looked at.  All of these courses offer what I had assumed that I wanted out of a permaculture design course; hands-on learning of  skillsets to help me create a sustainable lifestyle for myself and my community.  The line that stuck out for me on the detail regarding the Sub/Urban Permaculture Design Course was ‘Creating Sustainable Economies and Sustainable Communities’.   What a novel idea, hell radical idea…creating a local economy that sustains itself and it’s community.  This is a personal goal for myself as I had spent over twenty years in sales and distribution putting primarily crap into the  world.  So I signed up!

The “Awakening the Dreamer/Changing the Dream Symposium” is something that I am going to try and get everyone I know to experience.  Two of the most powerful and poignant messages that resonate inside me from that experience are, “There is no away”, and “What did you do, once you knew?” .  It sure seems hard to do nothing once you know.

I can honestly say that I had no idea that I was going to get what I did out of that first day with Common Circle.  A gentle, supportive, shaking and waking of my own subdued consciousness. Without knowing it I found the place that I needed to be.  I’m not just here to learn how to create a sustainable life anymore.  I’m learning to understand why this is what we need to do.  I’m ready!  Let’s go!  Thank you!

- Ron S.