Dec 31, 2011

2011: The Year I Learned to Hate College Football | The Nation

Dave Zirin on December 31, 2011

In a decade of sports writing, I’ve always used a very basic framework: don’t reject sports, reclaim it. In other words, no matter how greedy, hateful, or ugly sports become, you fight for it to change. No matter how many publicly funded stadiums or Redskin logos, or how much sexist doggerel is expectorated by the athletic industrial complex, you remember what you love about sports. You stand your ground and never forget the fun, fellowship and artistry these games have the potential to produce. That’s been my framework, until now. This weekend marks the pinnacle of the college football season. For more than twenty-five years, since a young Ohio State wide receiver named Cris Carter broke every Rose Bowl record, I’ve tuned in.

But not this weekend, and barring a major change, I’m never watching again. It’s not just because the bowl season has turned into an orgy of commercial branding that would shame a NASCAR event. It’s not the crass commercialism of “Chic-fil-A Bowl”, “The GODADDY.com Bowl” or “The Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas.” It’s not the ugly use of football to sell the business of war, with this year’s “Military Bowl Presented by Northrop Grumman” or “The Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl” coming to a television screen near you (these are not made up). It’s not the fact that today seventy teams, including fourteen 6-6 teams, get to play in bowls, making it about as special as a Cracker Jack prize. It’s not even everyone’s favorite complaint: the absence of a real playoff system to crown an actual national champion.

This year I was broken by just how disgusting the institution of college football has become. It started with the scandals at Ohio State and the University of Miami. Both showcased just exactly how hypocritical the system is, as athletes are pilloried in the public square for violating NCAA rules that deny them even modest compensation. But those problems seem positively quaint after the happenings at Penn State and the way the economic, social and cultural imperatives of big-time college football were put ahead of the safety and welfare of small children.

But the straw that snapped my back was seeing free agent head coach Urban Meyer get a $24 million, six-year contract at Ohio State University. Fresh off scandal, the Buckeyes were back in business. There were two things about this that made me physically ill. First was the fact that this money for Meyer is guaranteed, unlike a Ohio State player’s four-year scholarship, which can be rescinded at year’s end by Coach Meyer if that player falls out of athletic favor. This is the rule of the land at every school, and it gives lie to the idea that “players might not get paid but they get to go to school for free!” Then there’s that number: $4 million a year. Legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes at the peak of his prominence made slightly more than $40,000 a year. That was just thirty-five years ago.

The money has metastasized dramatically, and as Emerson said, “Money often costs too much.” Athletic departments have now become a moral dead zone. For winning college football programs, the amount of cash flowing in the system is staggering. For mediocre and losing college football programs, the sport is bankrupting athletic departments, but they spend more with the hope that a winning team will cover all losses. Our schools are being sold on margin right under our noses, and I’m done with it. Until the criminal cartel that is the NCAA is finally made a relic of history, until the rancid BCS system is no more, until coaches are no longer the highest paid and most powerful people on campus, until the NFL funds its own damn minor league and stops outsourcing this task to our universities, until all of these things happen, I’m done, and I hope I’m not alone. Unless we boycott sham amateurism and indentured servitude masquerading as sport, we will never reclaim sports.

I am with you Dave... Did watch my Illini win at the Hunger Bowl which seemed to have a better theme than most...  Monte

Buckminster Fuller - Everything I Know - “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller and his wife


An amazing man with a genius mind ...!
A comprehensivist, not a specialist...!
A man endorsed by Einstein as understanding his principles...!
I highly recommend viewing the videos  "Everything I Know" to fully understand the principles of the universe / nature / politics / economics ...! 
It is amazing how appropiate and accurate it is today...!
Best educational and most inspiring lecturer I have ever seen and heard in my lifetime (65 years)...!
Monte Hines


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Uploaded by GnosticMedia on May 26, 2011
This is a recompiled and edited version of the Bucky videos on Google Video from the website https://conversationswithbucky.pbworks.com/w/page/16447435/FrontPage - the videos on that site being too disorganized and poorly edited for my liking. Here all of the blank screens at the end of each tape segment have been removed, and I've recompiled the tape segments back into their original order by session and date.

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Buckminster Fuller - Final Message - 2 weeks before his death
Produced and Recorded by Shari Morgan and Roger Kotila of EarthStar Radio. Based an interview by Americ Azevedo with Buckminster Fuller two weeks before his death.


The engineer Buckminster Fuller is often cited for his use of trim tabs as a metaphor for leadership and personal empowerment. In the February 1972 issue of Playboy, Fuller said: Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.So I said, call me Trim Tab.
—Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) of the Universe.
Written and directed by D.W. Jacobs. From the life, work, and writings of R. Buckminster Fuller. Performed by Thomas Derrah.



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Other shorter video clips... 


A one hour conversations with renowned "Comprehensivist" Polymath Buckminter Fuller at his "World Game" offices in Philadelphia. Much time is given to asserting his "synergetic" major premise that in terms of mankinds collective technological augmented advancement through time we had reached a point - in terms of our collective capabliity to provvide "life suport" to the people of "Spaceship Earth" - within a correct assumption there were more "haves" than "have nots" for the first time in human history and that by utilizing "Anticapatory Design Scince" we could beginning serious modeiling the premise we had transcended material scarcity and we had reached that "Critical Point" in the year 1970.

The Fuller World. Design Scientist. (NET Series F-155, no. 1)
Ann Arbor, Michigan: National Educational Television.
December 1963



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Some Richard Buckminster Fuller quotes:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.”

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but
when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”

“I'm not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.”

“Dare to be naive.”

“Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

“I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.”

"I seem to be a verb"

“I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.”

“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”

“Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.”

“I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.”

“Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering”

“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”

“If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”

“I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.”

“I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.” 

“It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”

“When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I've been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That's a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we're in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”

“Either war is obsolete or men are. ”

“Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.”

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
Bucky coined the term "synergy", as represented by the picture above, to demonstrate how the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the individuals. Through the synergy of the inventive mind and generous hearts of humanity we can turn "Spaceship Earth" around. He understood that we have all the technology and resources necessary to foster Earth as an integrated regenerative system.

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"The Grunch of giants consists of the corporately interlocked owners of a vast empire of airwaves, satellites, skyscraper clusters, factories, research laboratories. It controls the financial system of credit and the with-all for large mass production and distribution. It monopolizes the vast theoretical know-how with universities."

"Bucky" says that there are enough resources and know-how to give every human a good standard of living, without fossil fuels or nuclear power.

"the great majority of "savvy," well-to do individuals... are convinced that there exists an inherent inadequacy of life-support on planet Earth, and therefore that their own successful survival as well as that of those whom they cherish depends upon their cleverly learning more and more about how to be legally selfish and thereby to accomplish personal economic advantage by anticipatory depriving others in directly undetectable ways. These ways are legally and socially accepted practices of deceiving and cheating the public."

On-line version Grunch of Giants:
http://www.futurehi.net/docs/Bucky_Grunch_of_Giants.html

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David McConville is the President of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and co-founder of The Elumenati, a design and engineering firm that creates custom installations for clients from art festivals to space agencies. In this capacity, he also serves as creative director of the Worldviews Network, a NOAA-funded collaboration of scientists, artists, and educators at science centers across the United States re-imagining
the big picture of humanity's home in the cosmos. ......
Wer are the 100%. Integrity, to Buckminster Fuller, represented the degree to which any design or system actively enhances the regenerative processes that support life on Earth. Thirty years ago,
he wrote the cautionary tale Grunch of Giants to warn of the immediate dangers posed by the lack of integrity within the "invisible, abstract, and completely ruthless" empire of corporations that control the world's finances. Dubbing this corrupt system the Gross Universal Cash Heist (GRUNCH), he argued that, as a non-living entity, it was incapable of
recognizing how its legal mandate to maximize monetary gains by socializing risks and privatizing profits were in direct opposition to the long-term requirements for human survival.
The expanding occupations and protests around the world directed towards the global economic system testify to the prescience of Fuller's critique concerning the lack of integrity within manufactured scarcity. The myriad of issues driving unrest reflects a rising awareness that the challenges facing humanity cannot be effectively addressed in isolation. They are in fact interconnected symptoms of a dominant socio economic environment that is not designed to adequately support 100% of humanity.
Fuller argued that we must begin to transform this dysfunctional system by recognizing that it confuses money with wealth. He maintained that money is "a medium of exchange and a cash accounting system," while wealth is the "organized technological capability to protect, nurture, educate, and accommodate the forward days of humans" that arises from supporting the integrity of living systems. Based on his calculations of world resources, human trends and needs, he demonstrated that it would be possible to support all of humanity at a better standard of living than ever before if the production capacity and technical know-how of global society were properly applied. Instead of fighting to tear down the existing system, he sought to harness its technological and economic forces to shift "from weaponry to livingry" through the problem-solving approach he called comprehensive anticipatory design science.......

In precessional partnership,
David McConville

President, The Buckminster Fuller Institute
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Uploaded by NoelMurphyTV on Jan 25, 2012
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Buckminster Fuller explains E=mc² in a single telegram

Transcript

WESTERN UNION

Isamu Noguchi Care Greenwood 66 Calle Republica Coumbia Mexico City

EINSTEINS FORMULA DETERMINATION INDIVIDUAL SPECIFICS RELATIVITY READS QUOTE ENERGY EQUALS MASS TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT SQUARED UNQUOTE SPEED OF LIGHT IDENTICAL SPEED ALL RADIATION COSMIC GAMMA X ULTRA VIOLET INFRA RED RAYS ETCETERA ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY SIX THOUSAND MILES PER SECOND WHICH SQUARED IS TOP OR PERFECT SPEED GIVING SCIENCE A FINITE VALUE FOR BASIC FACTOR IN MOTION UNIVERSE STOP

SPEED OF RADIANT ENERGY BEING DIRECTIONAL OUTWARD ALL DIRECTIONS EXPANDING WAVE SURFACE DIAMETRIC POLAR SPEED AWAY FROM SELF IS TWICE SPEED IN ONE DIRECTION AND SPEED OF VOLUME INCREASE IS SQUARE OF SPEED IN ONE DIRECTION APPROXIMATELY THIRTY FIVE BILLION VOLUMETRIC MILES PER SECOND STOP

FORMULA IS WRITTEN QUOTE LETTER E FOLLOWED BY EQUATION MARK FOLLOWED BY LETTER M FOLLOWED BY LETTER C FOLLOWED CLOSELY BY ELEVATED SMALL FIGURE TWO SYMBOL OF SQUARING UNQUOTE ONLY VARIABLE IN FORMULA IS SPECIFIC MASS SPEED IS A UNIT OF RATE WHICH IS AN INTEGRATED RATIO OF BOTH TIME AND SPACE AND NO GREATER RATE OF SPEED THAN THAT PROVIDED BY ITS CAUSE WHICH IS PURE ENERGY LATENT OR RADIANT IS ATTAINABLE STOP

THE FORMULA THEREFORE PROVIDES A UNIT AND A RATE OF PERFECTION TO WHICH THE RELATIVE IMPERFECTION OF INEFFICIENCY OF ENERGY RELEASE IN RADIANT OR CONFINED DIRECTION OF ALL TEMPORAL SPACE PHENOMENA MAY BE COMPARED BY ACTUAL CALCULATION STOP

SIGNIFICANCE STOP

SPECIFIC QUALITY OF ANIMATES IS CONTROL WILLFUL OR OTHERWISE OF RATE AND DIRECTION ENERGY RELEASE AND APPLICATION NOT ONLY OF SELF MECHANISM BUT OF FROM SELF MACHINE DIVIDED MECHANISMS AND RELATIVITY OF ALL ANIMATES AND INANIMATES IS POTENTIAL OF ESTABLISHMENT THROUGH EINSTEIN FORMULA

BUCKY
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One of our favorite Bucky quotes:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
I think this the best way to change our world... 
Our goal is to help show modern "monoculture" farming is obsolete compared to "polyculture" farming...

Monte & Eileen Hines
Hines Farm Blog
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Related:

Dec 30, 2011

Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee


Elevation Partners Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee from The Paley Center For Media on FORA.tv

Stunning information if Roger is right...! Monte

Roger McNamee notices a precipitous decline in Google's search business as a result of the iPhone and other mobile devices, which use apps to access the internet instead of the world wide web. "Because search is falling, I believe that we're being liberated," says McNamee.
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Roger McNamee is a managing director and co-founder of Elevation Partners. Prior to Elevation, Roger was a co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, the leading private equity fund focused on technology and related growth industries. He was a member of Silver Lake's Investment Committee and was involved in all aspects of that partnership. Prior to Silver Lake, Roger was a co-founder of Integral Capital Partners. Integral is a leading technology investor in late-stage venture and public company investments. Founded in 1991 by Roger, John A. Powell, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Integral pioneered the crossover investment strategy, which seeks maximum capital appreciation by making investments in expansion-stage private companies and growth-stage public companies in the technology and life science industries.

Dec 29, 2011

Back to the Garden, Flower Power Comes Full Circle

Back to the Garden - Video

Director: Kevin Tomlinson | Producer: Kevin Tomlinson & Judy Kaplan Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2009

Synopsis: 

In 1988, director Kevin Tomlinson interviewed a group of back-to-the-land hippies at a “healing gathering” in rural Washington state, practicing peace and love. 

Now, in this poignant examination of this community over time, he tracks down those original interviewees and their children twenty years later to find out what the glories and sufferings of living out of the mainstream and off the grid might really look like.

Worth a watch... Monte

Portable Rocket Stove Heater Build


Rocket stove heater build.







One of the best portable rocket stove builds I have seem... Monte

Prophet Mike and the Jerusalem Artichoke - YouTube

Jerusalem Artichoke Prophet Mike Repkin teaches us all about this amazing vegetable! From its health benefits, to its possibilities for fuel and fiber sources, this root-plant is a one hit wonder!

Bugs may be resistant to genetically modified corn - Quad Cities Online

Article - Quad Cities Online
Canary in the coal mine... Time to wake up and stop believing all the propaganda we are feed by Monsanto and others... Just because Monsanto sponsors your nightly news and builds buildings at your state universities does not mean that their ethics are beyond approach and they are looking out for "our" interest... Monte

Dec 28, 2011

BBC News - Less is more: Simple living in small spaces

Video Link

Log-cabins, beach shacks, and yes, even treehouses have long been considered places to go for a quiet escape. But pint-sized dwellings of all shapes and sizes are slowly becoming more of a primary residence.

For many Americans who feel the economic pressures of a recession with no end in sight, tiny homes provide some relief from high rents and big mortgages.

For others, living smaller is simply a personal preference. Many of these fully-functioning miniature homes can be found in Northern California where the mild weather agrees with a lifestyle spent mostly outdoors.

Jay Schafer of Graton, California, is the owner of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. He says the key to living in a tiny home is smart design and attention to detail.

But aesthetics aside, Mr Schafer believes people can discover a sense of freedom in living with less.

Great little short video... Monte

Thomas Malthus and Population Growth


Thomas Malthus's views on population. Malthusian limits.

Very interesting...  See comments on YouTube about this Khan video... Monte

Dec 27, 2011

4 stroke gasoline to air / steam - YouTube






For only a couple dollars, you can modify the crankshaft of any four stroke and turn it into a steam engine. This should produce a tremendous amount of torque, as there is one power stroke per revolution, as opposed to one in every four.

Airgunman is an innovative guy. Appears he is on to making an inexpensive steam engine... Watch his series of videos... I can visualize a generator hooked up to his engine to produce on site power...Monte

Energy Inputs for Tilling a Hectare of Land


Thinking about energy consumption for tilling land

Khan Academy

Appears we might have more interesting data / ammunition on why poly-culture / permaculture is more efficient use of resources...  Monte

Land Productivity Limiting Human Population


Thinking about how we get Calories from the land limits human population densities.

khanacademy.org  - great video, very educational

MY BRAINSTORM COMMENTS...

Nature requires a balance of species , including humans...

Sustainability becomes a question... Living in harmony with nature becomes a question...

Challenge is to educate grassroots to realize the problems with the present agriculture methods...

With an educated grassroots then local solutions can be generated around the world...

If the educated locals realize population is too great, you would hope that they would self correct.

BASIC PROBLEM is education of masses... Buy-in to permaculture / polyculture mindset to find solutions...

Maybe Khan's education methods / YouTube videos could be applied to permaculture education of young and old...

Permaculture university . org ... Lots and lots of short videos over time.... Might speed education of the masses and permaculture solutions world wide.

What do you think?

Monte
 

Impact Investing: Saving Capitalism from Itself

Complete video at:http://fora.tv/2011/11/30/Best_Practices_in_Impact_Investing

Mitchell Kapor, founder of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, calls for investing with an eye toward creating a more sustainable form of capitalism. He explains that despite growing anger from groups like Occupy Wall Street, not enough action is being taken to reform the system that brought the economy to the brink of collapse.
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The Social Innovation Summit brings together top executives and thought leaders from around the globe to discuss opportunities for leveraging technology & innovation to affect social change. Attendees will discuss philanthropic trends, analyze innovative approaches for problem solving and build lasting partnerships that enable them and their organizations to discover new means of engaging with social challenges.

Mitch Kapor is an entrepreneur, startup investor, and philanthropist. He founded Lotus Development Corporation in 1982 and designed Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer app" which made the PC ubiquitous in business. In 1997, he established the Mitchell Kapor Foundation (www.mkf.org), a private foundation that works to ensure fairness and equity, particularly for low-income communities of color. Mitch is a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the Firefox web browser; and the founding Chair of Linden Lab, maker of Second Life, the leading online virtual world. He is also a Trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute and Managing Partner at Kapor Capital, which invests in seed stage IT startups. Mitch serves on the advisory Boards of Generation Investment Management (sustainable, long-term investing), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights on the Internet), the Sunlight Foundation (improving access to government information), and the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia and other free content projects).

Dec 26, 2011

Hines Farm - Homemade - DIY - Band Saw Milling Sled


Pipe clamp band saw sled mill.


Pipe clamp band saw sled mill, right end.


Pipe clamp band saw sled mill, left end.


36" log held by sled


3 completed slabs, 36" x 2 1/2" x 8"

Big shootout and thanks to Timberframe-tools.com for their post on their making a Bandsaw Milling Sled !!!

With modifications to suit my needs, I made a similar sled.

I utilized  4' x 16" x 3/4" plywood to mount 3/4" x 3/8" x 4' aluminium miter slide on underside.

I added a piece of 3/4" x 5' black pipe, with a deep reach pipe clamp set. I added a 13" x 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" steel angle attached to each clamp end with a set screw shaft collar (1-1/8" ID, 1-3/4" OD). To hold the pipe, I used 4 pipe clamp saddles.

The sled can mill logs up to 54" long and produce slabs, up to 12" wide by various thicknesses.

Related links:

Permaculture Song - Permaculture Ethics - Permaculture Design Principles


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYIBYQY-h1Q

Wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Permaculture ethics
  1. Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. 
  2. Care of People: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence. 
  3. Setting Limits to Population and Consumption: By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles.[7]

Permaculture 12 design principles:
  1. Observe and interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation. 
  2. Catch and store energy: By developing systems that collect resources at peak abundance, we can use them in times of need. 
  3. Obtain a yield: Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing. 
  4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well. 
  5. Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature's abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources. 
  6. Produce no waste: By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste. 
  7. Design from patterns to details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go. 
  8. Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other. 
  9. Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes. 
  10. Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides. 
  11. Use edges and value the marginal: The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system. 
  12. Creatively use and respond to change: We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.[8]

Love the song..., but I am not trading tractors for horses... Permaculture ethics and design principals work for me... and a growing number of people who see the present paradigm of modern agriculture as not sustainable... Nice 'pictorial walk through for beginners' at Permaculture - Beginners Guide... 
Monte

Dec 25, 2011

Permaculture in Winter

By Jason Akers

I'll be the first to admit that I hate winter. People can try to convince me all they like about the cycles or death and life. Yeah I understand the cycles I just don't care for winter. So I've spent several of them trying to reconcile my desire to make progress on my homestead while essentially most of the "fun" activities are off limits just due to the harshness of the weather or its ability to completely block my efforts on some accounts.

Almost a year ago I wrote an article for BackHome Magazine and did a subsequent podcast on conducting permaculture activities in winter (you can find the podcast here: http://theselfsufficientgardener.com/episode-48-winter-permaculture). It was a good way for me to put in words my efforts to ignore winter and just go about my business making my homestead into what I wanted it to be.

So what can you do in the winter?

*Observing – Observe and Interact is one of the key permaculture principles (there are 12 total). This principle posits that the best thoughts and designs come from just simply observing nature and even your own systems to see how they are working and what can be improved. So why do this in the winter? Well for one, many things become quite obvious.

For one thing, a good deal of the vegetation will be gone, allowing mostly unobstructed views of your property. You can clearly see how contours run and judge spacing more accurately.

For another you see the actual patterns that occur in winter. If you aren't actually out there during the harsh times you might not realize how harsh they can be on your plants or livestock. Its important to get an idea of the big pictures.

Lots of things change in winter - wind patterns, precipitation types, sun angles. You need to know these things.

*Clearing – The absolute best time to cut trees is in the winter. If you are going to leave them lay and you want them to rot quickly you need to do it before this in early fall. But in winter sap is dormant which means less chance of disease in trees and less stress on root systems for coppicing or pruning. Plus there are fewer worries about poison ivy or venomous snakes - both are prevalent in my area!

*Learning – Curl up with a seed catalog or good book (hear which book I recommend wholeheartedly). A garden plan never survives contact with the actual garden. So this is the ultimate time to plan and replan and then plan some more. You probably aren't planting much so this will both quench your thirst for garden activities and it will make the resulting garden a better one.

*Building – All the equity and none of the sweat equity. I love to build in the winter. No insects landing on me and stinging or biting and I can concentrate. When there's too much green I get distracted. There's little else to do so why not utilize the time to build structures so you can avoid the heat in summer?

That's my list. I'm sure there are more things I'm forgetting. What's on your winter activity list?

Check out my other stuff at www.theselfsufficientgardener.com

Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/the-happy-homesteader/permaculture-in-winter.aspx#ixzz1hZt4LTOs