23:59:59

Yesterday I finished watching "The 11th Hour", a documentary about our environmental situation shot in 2007. It is professionally produced and broadcasts the ideas of many people dedicated to resolving our environmental challenges. It has the right mix of a positive approach, frugality, respect, humility, technology as a piece of the solution, and sustainable thinking in everything we do. I liked the video and recommend it. The official sites are The 11th Hour Movie and 11th Hour Action.

Building and Construction

This topic is way above my head. I am an absolute beginner, have no experience and have no immediate plans to do any building or construction myself. Still several times I stumbled across some information that I found interesting or intriguing. Take everything with a grain of salt.

There are many concepts for ecologic building materials and construction methods. Many of them try to reduce heating cost and use natural products as material. Compressed earth, in the form of bricks or filled into used tires make good walls. Compressed earth can also be combined with wood logs or bottles. A lighter combination is straw mixed with mud or straw squared covered on the outside with mud. Of course plain old wood is a common material.

Most buildings face south to absorb the maximum of sun and many use earth mass to absorb and store this free energy for heating and cooling. Some suggest a house-inside-a-house, a house with an outer shell with lots of windows and glass, again for the purpose of free/reduced heating. Buildings with grass and small vegetation growing on the roof caught my eye. Looks fantastic.

On the inside both heat storage and insulation are key concepts. Wood is a medium insulator as well as a medium heat store. Earth is both, a good store and a good insulator. Rocks are a great storage medium but a poor insulator, similar for cement. On the insulator side there are further materials like: hemp and cork. There are also special volcanic bricks that are a good insulator (similar heat resistance as wood) and hold up to pressure and weights. Furthermore there are special bricks that trap the air better and force the air to take long paths through the brick, thereby increasing drastically the insulating effect of the brick. There is a lot to think about and consider when trying to build eco-friendly.

Here are some sites to look at to grab ideas. www.earthship.net, www.enertia.com, Sustainable Build, a Green Building Source book, and the Open Village Construction Set (Open Source Ecology). And there is even a Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies book. A friend of mine has the book Building Green by Snell and Callahan which I found appealing.

It is such a vast topic. One will have to do lots of research before getting seriously into it.

Edible Foods

Over Easter friends shared some of their edible food recipes. One was a nettle soup with potatoes and nettle tea. Nettles have other uses as well as you can read in this article on weeds. Another recipe I could try was honey from dandelion. Tasty! These recipes are from the book "Sauvages et comestibles - Herbes, fleurs et petites salades" (Wild and edible) by Marie-Claude Paume. "Sauvages et medicinales" (Wild and medicinal) is another book by the same author. I could not find an English translation of these French books, but there is a different book available at Amazon. "Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places" by Steve Brill. Bon apetit!

Obama on Energy

Today for Earth Day president Obama gave a speech on energy. Here is the presidential energy speech transcript. The speech is directed towards the emotional side and tries to be inspiring, it is a motivational talk. It provides a few facts for proposed legislative and tax changes, most but not all of which are good, but ... He hides the size of the energy issue we are facing and he is silent on the implications.

The government will provide funding of $15 billion each year for ten years to develop clean energy including wind power, solar power, geothermal energy, and clean coal technology. Compare that to the cost of the current bail out of the collapsing financial system that some experts estimate at $15 trillion. The government spends 0.1% on new energy in comparison to rescuing the financial sector. That says something about the importance of energy in the government strategy. It is not crucial if it is 0.1% or 1%, the point is that it is vastly out of proportion.

In the second part he negates that current US politics are broken. In my opinion he is wrong on this. Our society and economy is first of all in a structural collapse, not a financial one. And the structural collapse just like the financial one were permitted and induced by past and recent politics. Politics is broken.

We need a change in energy production/consumption and above all in politics.

Chia

I just ran across this edible plant: chia. The official name is Salvia Hispanica. Never heard of it before, but it sounds worth while a closer look. Read more about the wonderful characteristics of chia on PRI and GardenGuides.com. Got time and opportunity? Put a few seeds in a pot and see what happens. Here are some chia recipes.

Commodities

www.marketskeptics.com has an interesting article on commodities (and that includes oil, precious metals, food). The article uses a report from the UN on commodity trading to point out the facts that investors and above all large institutional investors distort the commodity prices, create artificial swings and drive the prices away from real value. Artificially driving up the prices for the purpose of profit taking on basic food (wheat, rice) is questionably moral as the welfare and health of millions of people depend on them. Furthermore the volume of commodity trading has increased drastically and with 95% being done in derivatives, namely futures, it is clear that commodities have become a tool for speculation rather than a tool for distributing and arbitrating food producers and consumers. Once again we have moved away from providing a meaningful, responsible process to a misuse of the system with no value (but a lot of damage) for the general community.

Option contracts have grown 5-fold in the last 10 years. Notional amount of outstanding OTC commodity derivatives went from $1 trillion in 2004 to over $13 trillion in 2008, making them a bubble. More data on www.nowandfutures.com. Personally I moved away from equities to commodities in the hope of reducing risk and exposure. But now after reading this article it became clear that the risk has traveled a lot faster than me. Risk has arrived at the commodity market some 5 years ago as it became a profit-taking playground for big investors. Artificially manipulated price and intrinsic value of commodities have been separated.

The Crash of 2010

"El crash del 2010" ("The Crash of 2010") is the title of the book by Santiago Niño Becerra. We are in a structural crisis, a crisis of our system, a crisis of capitalism. He foresees that we are going through a crash in slow motion and that the principal crash is yet to come, according to him in 2010. Between 2010 and 2015 we will see the biggest impact and changes to our lives. For the individual he recommends to cancel all credits, pay back all debts and as a profession to do something one truly loves and is passionate about; to work in a field that makes sense and that provides real value to the society. He foresees that concepts like "usefulness", "efficiency" together with "coordination" and "co-operation" will become key to our daily lives. Individuals must pick up and carry their responsibilities.

I like his back to basics vision. I agree that we all must re-think and re-evaluate to assure that what we do provides value to the core necessities of society. I see so many jobs that provide no value to society, they only serve to fill one's own pockets and there are also many jobs that serve society but at a very peripherical way, not at its core. The times of luxury have passed, we must focus on the essential, the core necessities.

An interview in Spanish is here.

Oil Price

The PRI had an article on oil price. There are many factors influencing the price: exploration cost, market supply and demand, political decisions, and speculation. I thought the article quite interesting and the author to be correct on many issues. The US will be the country most impacted by high oil prices. Producers will soon satisfy their domestic needs and reduce export. For the next years while we are going through the current structural crisis, oil price will not be a crucial issue. We are heading equally fast into the peak oil situation but oil price is unlikely to go up drastically during the next 2 years and hence oil, oil prices, and peak oil will not be on the political radar even though it should be. Current politics is always a step behind. Our society is always dealing with the past problem, the one that just happened; it is never willing (to face and) to deal with the upcoming problem showing up on the horizon, no matter how big it is.

Permaculture Videos

I downloaded the following videos on permaculture. I am fascinated by the food forests. I really am. It is so simple, so back-to-basics, so anti-high-tech, so in tune with nature and it delivers fantastic results. A feast for the eyes, the nose and the taste buds. This is one of the things I want to get into and remain into during the next decade.

Establish Eden (Food Forest) With Love was produced in 2008 by Geoff Lawton in cooperation with the Australian Permaculture Research Institute. Wouldn't you want to have this in your backyard? It looks enriching. Just watching makes me feel good. Let's see how doing will make me feel. It gives a good introduction and explains how to build a food forest and how long it takes for the forest to take shape. After watching the video also check out the PRI site.

Permaculture - Synergistic Garden was produced by Emilia Hazelip in 1995. 1995! Wow, quite forward thinking. While watching I took many mental notes on practical tips for home gardening.

Permaculture Trio: Forest Gardening, Edible Landscaping and Urban Permaculture was produced by Iota Pictures in 2007. I especially liked the third part that showcases how a tiny backyard in an urban environment can be transformed to produce about 20% of a families food intake. Even in a city this concept shows success.

Permaculture - Harvesting Water with Love is from 2008. It is another video by Geoff Lawton. This time he focuses on how to build a dam or swale to use water to your advantage in synergy with nature.

Permaculture Visionaries - Small Solutions to enormously large Problems produced by 220Productions in 1989 for television. It discusses the basic concepts at a high level and refers to food and environmental issues in various countries. It is a little less practical but shows that most countries around the world, first or third world countries, can benefit from the permaculture concepts.

Permaculture in Practice is from Iota Pictures and from 2007. I haven't seen it yet, but the title sounds promising.

We need to get permaculture in sync and integrated with the high-tech proposal from Zeitgeist and the Venus Project. Permaculture is available and working here and today. In my opinion it must form a corner stone of future solutions, even if other aspects of live are high-tech. While communication systems (phone, internet, etc.), transportation (trains, cars, etc.), energy creation (biothermal, solar, wind, etc.) might be based on the latest technology, I'd rather live in a wooden log cabin with a wooden desk next to my garden than in the titanium-glass building of the 21st century as presented by the Venus Project.

I guess in summary I believe that anything should be as low-tech as possible, but not any more low-tech than necessary. Food production and water management as seen in these videos can achieve incredible results while being very low-tech.

Khaleeji

Today in this TOD article I read for the first time about the planned new middle-eastern currency, the Khaleeji. I also heard the name "Petro" in similar discussions. It is a discussed as a regional currency like the Euro, but created and controlled by the oil producing Gulf states.

The www.gulfcurrency.org web site suggests a G as a sign, but I do not take them too serious. The web site owner seems to be a design company trying to sell us a symbol; like somebody registering a web domain to later cash in if the term becomes attractive. But the truth is that there are talks underway that discuss the possibility of the Khaleeji/Petro/Gulf currency creation.

Everybody is doing their bit to reduce the dependence on the dollar. The Chinese do currency swaps to bypass the dollar and as it seems the Gulf states might be quoting the oil price in Khaleeji soon.

Arcane Secrets of Political Power

The Occult Technology of Power, subtitled the "Arcane Secrets of Political Power," is an anonymous booklet describing the nature of power, the nature of rule, and the nature of oligarchy. The style chosen to present the thoughts is a fictional dialog between a powerful father and his son. The 52-page article written in 1974 eloquently outlines the deceiving means of power and control. It is certainly food for thought with so much between the lines. And it was way ahead of its times. 35 years have past and what has changed? Nothing, we are in the same struggle for self control and liberties. Also makes me think of George Orwell's 1984.