So this installment will be more of an introductory one. I just arrived at the Navdanya Organic Farm Institute in Uttarakhand India. The institute was founded by former Nuclear Physicist and now seed saver and eco-feminist, Vandana Shiva. The goal of the institute is to save varieties of seeds that are aggressively being patented by AgroBusiness seed companies, and to retrain farmers on how to use organic methods. It’s a sad state, but in just forty years of Agrabusiness here in India, they went from natural production of almost everything being produced in country, to an import dependent system with heavily polluted land.

So this project is not only amazing, but it’s imperative. And I’m learning some amazing things. I just sat for two hours, cleaning tumeric and listening to an elderly village woman speak, who is now one of the main seed savers here at Navdanya. Thirty years ago she was just a peasant woman trying to hold on to the quickly disappearing traditional methods she was taught as a girl. Now she’s part of an international farming movement and has even won three Slow Food awards at the annual Terra Madre conference in Italy.

So I’m extremely excited and fortunate to be here. It’s initially good because I’m finally figuring out the growing season of a country that can grow Mangoes in places thousands of miles and a totally different climate away from each other. I leaned that I’m in the transition between their winter and summer, so all the cold stuff is coming out of the ground, and hot stuff is going in.

But by the end of the week here I hope to have a better understanding of how they maintain their seed bank of over 2,000 varieties, the obstacles they face to get farmers to transition to organic, and hopefully a ton of success stories. Not to mention the perspective of the twenty or so international people who are all staying on campus with me, and how they are making sustainability happen in their countries. So expect a longer email next week.

Until then, this is the note from the Urban homestead.

Hello friends. Writing a little bit early to you as I’m about to head out to a camp in the desert. But I just had to get in a note before I took off. I’m in the north now, where it’s a bit colder and the desert isn’t so fertile. It’s nothing like the fruit paradise I just left in Kerela where banans are in season all year round.

But I was very inspired today after visiting a grass roots program in Jaipur India called Ladli. The organization is part of a larger NGO called i-india. The program takes in 3,000 street children, out of the 300,000 in Jaipur alone, and provides health care, shelter and most importantly job training.

Since the biggest industry in Jaipur is textiles and gems, Ladli provides the resources for young girls and boys to learn the trade of jelewry making and clothes making. And everything that is made on site is then sold on the market and all profits go into bank accounts that are in the names of the young people who have no families. This money also supplies a good trust for when they turn 18 and are by law on their own.

Aside from the initial importance of getting these kids off the streets and out of prostitution, crime and abuse, this project is also a great example of sustainability. It reminded me a lot of what I’m trying to do at the Walnut Hill Project. Not only are we trying to improve the environment and food security, but as we learned little difference can be made if people can’t incorporate these concepts into their lives. And we’ve found no better way than to provide jobs.

So in the same way, Ladli is not only helping these kids today, but ensuring their futures by giving them skills that will help their lives in the future. The project is even looking to buy its own shop space so these kids can actually be competitive when they get older in this very cut throat tourist retail market in India. This way, they can advertise their better products, and even more importantly give the girls jobs without facing harrassment.

I can’t tell you how personally enriching it was to not only meet the children and support them by buying something, but also to talk with the directors and see the passion with which they struggle. Because just like in the States, they too face lack of funding and lack of understanding of the importance of their work on behalf of the corporate and government sector.

So even though I hope you all are out there, buying Hoots and Hellouth concert tickets and merchandise, the reason why I work with this band is because they care just as much about the community around them as they do their own music. So I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if I threw this website out there to help support an even broader community. So if you have the time and a can spare little bit of money, it will go a very long way. If you care to help, please check out www.ladli.org. These people are doing some of the best and most honest work that I’ve seen in India.

So thanks for reading and by next week, I’ll be at Navdanya. But until then, this is the note from the Urban Homestead.

So this week’s installment will deal with something that I’ve written about before on this blog, and that Hoots and Hellmouth has been tiredlessly campaigning for years. And that’s the use of plastic water bottles. I know this may seem obvious to those of you who have your own metal water bottles, but as I always say, the most sustainable things are usually the most obvious. So for those of you who still use disposable water bottles, please let this scenario from India be your inspiration to change.

In India, the water is either so polluted, or full of bacteria, that for many people, not just foreigners, they can’t drink the water. So everyone uses plastic. But because there are not systems set up for trash collection, let alone recycling, the plastic bottles are either thrown off the side of the cliff and washed into the ocean, or they are burning in heaps that blow smoke into your face.

It’s really a horrible situation on many levels. The first is the pollution and trashing of this beautiful country. But it leads to so many other issues. The first is that since people are just accepting the use of bottled water, it is doing nothing to force the government to take greater strides to clean up the water supply. So remember that everytime you drink bottled water, you’re just giving the private sector more capital to take over the water supply and less need for the government to keep it clean.

Also, by people taking care of the trash in their own way, they are actually taking the power out of their hands. Many people decry government regulation as intrusion or the reason people are lazy, but that’s a fallacy as I’ve come to see. Since there is no regulation, people litter without a care and burn plastics without worry. There are a few people on the beach here who advertise that their restaurants refuse to sell plastic bottles and provide refill stations for your own bottle, but these people are suffering alone. I hope that their collective action leads to more widespread change, but as it stands now, they have little impact because there is no oversight to stop the businesses who don’t care about this issue.

This is a great example of why environmental regulation is not only a positive, but also a necessity. But in America, we have a different situation. If you don’t support these laws with your action, then there seems to be less of a need and the laws are laxed until another huge catasrophe hits. So please, take this preemptive precaution and do your best everyday to stop using bottled water. I know it may be a little obvious, and maybe you were expecting something a bit more mind blowing from my Indian travels, but let’s start small and hopefully get a bit more technical.

Until then, this is the note from the urban homestead.

This is my third week in India and I can say for sure that this experience is certainly putting a new spin on the whole “act local, think global” mantra. Before I came here I think that I put entirely too much emphasis on the local part, with more of an abstract nod to the global. I noticed this during a conversation with Revi, my host at the Wayanad Wildlife Preserve.

As I explained in the last email, he really put the effects of climate change in perspective when he explained the inconsistent rains his region has been receiving that has almost totally wiped out their mango harvest. This is a global problem I’ve been very aware of in my study of sustainability and have tried to counteract with buying local to stop climate change. But as we talked, he took my mind to aspects I admit I barely considered.

As I lamented the mango loss, he commented that this will not affect me at all. He explained that in America we escape these price fluctuations because American corporations do everything they can to control prices by always maintaining excess storage of goods and multiple trade deals. So by thinking that far into the future, they safeguard our economy from taking the hit that a country like India would feel instantly. India takes this hit for two reasons. The first is that they are the ones exporting these crops. However, the larger reason is that Indian economy is still based on that agrarian system of short term transaction, meaning that when India produces a product, it is sold locally and fresh within a few days. This is the buy fresh buy local economy that the sustainable community in America has been advocating so strongly. And it’s a mentality that is causing suffering in India as these damaging weather fluctuations are ruining crops that would otherwise go to market.

As I said, I always thought that it would help for our country to totally get back to this agrarian culture. However, there’s a catch to this. While we strive to produce everything in America, there is still the problem of developing world economies that are completely dependent on export to our country for their goods. It would be great to solve all of these problems over night and get everyonbe back on the agrarian economy, but that’s not the world we live in. And if I know anything about sustainability, it’s that it’s a process, not a quick solution.

So here’s what I can offer. Try your best to buy local products at farmers markets or from local artisans, this is the local part. But to satisfy the global, try your best to find products that are fair trade. As I admitted before, concepts like fair trade just seemed like the abstract good will of the think global mentality. But it most certainly has an impact on world sustainability. By buying fair trade, you’re supporting global enterprise that currently needs our business to survive. But also, you are supporting businesses that are making better decisions for global commerce and resources. So when the time progresses where we have no choice to get back to an agrarian buy local system, these peoples will be better positioned to do so. To just buy local now will create an American isolationism that will create a developing world job loss that will be worse that our current system.

So please consider these thoughts when making your next purchase of a product you just can’t get where you live, and I’ll keep traveling and keeping the updates coming. So enjoy, and until next time, this is the note from the Urban Homestead.

Today I write to you from the beautiful state of Kerela in India. I’m staying on a homestead that is a fair trade coffee plantation. The area is controlled by the communist party and the workers are treated quite fairly. All of the coffee grown here and the tea in the plantation next door are not completely organic, I think they use pesticide spray to keep the bugs off. However, all of the rice, bananas, mango, and other frutis and veggies on our homestead is completely organic. Everything we’ve been eating, and we’ve been eating alot, is grown right here. It’s been great to sit down with the people here and talk. They showed me their worm composting system and how they catch methane gas from a PVC tube that runs underneath the cow dung pit where it’s produced and up into a burner in the kitchen. The communist party has even begun putting solar panels on the thatched roofs of the tribal huts of the plantation workers. It has been amazing to see these things and to sit and talk with the homestead owner, Revi, a sixty year old wealthy man who has no doubt that climate change is affecting his land. As I said, he doesn’t need convincing like the wealthy in our country, he watches it everyday as his water recedes an unpredictable weather  patterns destroy the crops, like the mangoes that flowered too early and now got rain out of season. He said it’s going to be a bad year for mangoes.

It’s this mindset of sustianability and the planet’s health that has most been on my mind since being here. For as I’ve learned it’s the mindset and education of sustainbility that is the most important. I’ll give two examples. The first is personal. I can’t tell you how negative and horrible I felt while I was in Delhi, breathing in all of that toxic, smog filled air. It astounded me to think that people live like this everyday to no affect. But then as I  looked to the streets and saw how so many people, from every class littered without a thought, I noticed how important a clean and beautiful environment is for sustainabilities survival in any place. I admit that I came here with the most idelaistic view of spiritual, Ghandi like Indian society. But those words mean nothing if they aren’t continually supported with action. Basically, there are no absoultes when it comes to mindset. You need to work on it everyday.

And that’s what they are doing in Kerela, my second example. The socialist goverment is trying hard to bring all of the cultures into this conversation and to give them the resources to do it, both the tribal poor and the wealthy land owners. Many prominent Indians tout their country’s explosion onto the world economic scene. But they will never be able to compete with the west while so much of their country is being polluted everyday by lax or no regulation. I’ll implore any American who thinks regulation is destorying American society to come to Delhi for the day and try to breathe the air.  They’ll be running to the socialist beauty of Kerela mighty quickly.

 For many who read this blog, you either work in some kind of sustainable field, or it’s important in your life. For now all I can say is that maintaining that mindest and trying your best to spread it everyday is the most important thing you can do. I know it’s a basic start, but I’veonly been in this country for week. Hopefully by the end I’ll have plenty of more stories of Indians who are trying to spread this consciousness too.

Until then, this is the note from the Urban Homestead, India style.

Happy New Year my friends. As some of you know, I am writing this message from an internet cafe in New Delhi. I’ll be here until Feb 25th, enjoying a few months of reflection and travel, but also taking some time to see where sustainability stands on the other side of the globe.

This is an exciting opportunity because being in India is being on the doorstep of one of the most exciting experiments in sustainability in the world. Imagine a country that is going through the three industrial revolutions (Industrial, Manufacturing, and IT) America went through over 200 years all in about twenty years.

Indians are trying to solve the problem of supplying energy, resources and wealth to its 1.2 billion citizens and they’re trying to do so with corporate responsibility and environmental laws.

So for the next two months, this weekly blog is going to take you all on a journey of how I see this being done. I’ll be traveling to many different parts of the country and staying in many different surroundings to gain this perspective. And I hope I do the topic justice.

For now, I can only comment on the two places I’ve seen thus far. The first may be a bit skewed, being that I only have the perspective from the airplane. But after connecting in Moscow, I can say that they have such an interesting dichotomy of development. On one hand, I’d never seen such a dense forest surrounding a city before. It was amazing to see the layout of very minimal logging and dense forest cover for the miles and miles we covered before we landed. However, as I walked through the Chanel and Armani boutiques that blocked the entrance to my terminal, the allure of that old world forest surrounding the city palled in comparison to how much wealth and industry is concentrated there.

I thought India would be different, but the ride from the airport revealed just as much development. Although I’ve barely seen any of this city, and the pollution, trash and poverty on the streets is quite evident, it’s still amazing to drive through the opulent suburbs and well planned roads on the way to the city. It is true that Indians drive at all times like everyone is fleeing the city. But in all that chaos, I’ve been very surprised by the standard of their development and feel that the India that was described to me by people who have been here only a few years ago will be completely different for me.

So here’s to my journey and finding out of this is true. Until then, this is the note from the Urban Homestead.

What’s going on in sustainability:

Hello friends. So last installment I left you all with a bit of a cliffhanger regarding some big announcement. Please don’t worry, Notes From the Urban Homestead will not be going anywhere. However, it’s setting will be. Starting January 3rd and ending February 25th, I will be traveling to India for a personal and educational journey. It has been two long years of being completely rooted in Philly. And aside from a few short winter and fall trips, I’ve not been able to take a step back from my work and broaden my view of the world.

That’s why I’m overwhelmed by how lucky I will be to take this opportunity and explore one of the most populated, fastest growing democracies in the world. Over the next two months, every two weeks, please join me on my travels through the cities, farms and community movements of this amazing land. A different locale, but same message as the work Hoots and Hellmouth and I do in this city.

So before I go, as always, I like to look back on the year, and take stock of what we accomplished this year.

I attended PASA with Hoots and Hellmouth and  made some great contacts while they set the stage for their harvest tour. This year the concept was a bit more refined, and after some great press on WHYY and Grid magazine, we hope to make it even more expansive. It also spawned other ideas like the local living expo at the World Cafe Live show and I see it further developing into more outreach.

I founded Philly Rooted with Erica Smith. Together in just one growing season we took a vacant, trash filled lot and turned it into a functioning community garden and farm. We created a Grower’s Cooperative the fosters entrepreneurial growing among West Philly urban youth, installed a solar water system, piloted a neighborhood CSA and built a hoop house we plant to use for community education. Check out the farm at phillyrooted.org.

And finally, I’ve finished the rough draft of my novel Seeds of Discent. Just as Hoots and Hellmouth use their art to further the consciousness of this natural living farming movement, I’ll do so in this fiction of four West Philly urban homesteaders trying to take over a vacant lot from the city. Look for its release in April 2011.

Needless to say, this has been an exciting year, and these three examples are just the surface of all the amazing work Hoots and Hellmouth and I have been doing to promote this sustainability movement in Philadelphia and beyond. It shows how the power of art and community can come together to create something amazing, and I look forward to continuing this work in 2011.

So before I go, I’d be remiss to leave you without one final sustainable tip for 2010. After having a Holiday party at out homestead last week, I was once again so impressed by our system for consumption. By making it a potluck, using all washable dishes and silverware, and sharing the workload, we woke up in the morning to a relatively clean house, a few bins full of recycling and half a bag of trash. I’ve written about this before, but it is so important around this time of year to not let the stress of the season overcome your sustainable mindset. I know it may be hard, but please, do your best to use reusable, recyclable material at your Holiday parties. Consider it your gift to the Earth.

So that’s all I have, please enjoy your holiday and New Year and the next time we talk it will be from an internet cafe in Delhi. But until then, this is the note from the urban homestead.

What’s going on in sustainability:

Last night I had the pleasure of going to the Green 2015 Presentation at the Urban Sustainability Forum at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The presentation laid out the Mayor’s and the Department of Parks and Rec’s plan to increase the green spaces of Philly by 500 acres in the next five years. This will meet the mayor’s goal of everyone in Philadelphia having green spaces within a ten minute walk of their homes and to increase the tree canopy by almost 300,00 trees by 2015. These goals seem a bit too ambitious, especially for a cash strapped city like Philly. But this plan is unlike any other plan being put forth in other cities, and the hope is that it will serve as a model.

The first innovative step they took was not to fight the private sector on trying to take over vacant parcels. The city looked into their own coffers and realized the vast concrete jungle of school block tops and rec centers that have no green space. It was amazing to see the Penn Praxis plan take an existing picture of one of these sites, and then overlay it with a picture of a porous (Water can drain through the surface) basketball court that is surrounded by a meadow, fruiting trees and  walking trails.

It was also amazing to see how they are then going to connect all of these spaces through dedicated greenways that make it easier for people to access these new parks, all the while creating tree lined streets. The hope is that they can then move into the private an publicly vacant land and do the same type of projects, dedicating some of the land to urban gardening and farming, some to rec centers, and even retaining some for future development. Because unlike our federal government that can’t seem to convince the people that investing $700 billion in our infrastructure is good while they can justify $900 in tax cuts, Philly knows it needs to make these investments if it wants to progress as a great city.

And I apologize if this blog reads like an advertisement article. But I have no shame in cheerleading this great initiative. Especially since the city government is also putting a lot of this work into the hands of the grass roots organizations who’ve been struggling to do this for years. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to sit in the room and not only dream of what Philly will look like in 5 years, but also how we can realistically get there, in true Philly style. Not by spending tons of money and resources, but by building on the history, good people, and great energy of our neighborhoods. So please get involved in this great project. There has been no better time to be an eco minded person in Philly than right now.

For now, I’m going to enjoy the cold and keep on working to better this city. Please tune in next installment to see my end of the year wrap up and my big announcement.

Until then, this is the note from the urban homestead.

What’s going on in sustainability:

I’ve been hanging around a few farmer friends at a few thanksgiving celebrations, and even though many of them have been giving thanks for a great season and some great harvests, they sure are happy it’s all coming to an end and are looking forward to a winter of lighting the fire and digging into the cans of preserves they’ve been collecting all fall. And even though I have too much to be thankful for to even fit into this blog, I still was a bit saddened that my harvest didn’t last quite as long because of our lack of water resources at the Walnut Hill Farm. Well next season, that will not be an issue.

Last weekend, myself and my good friend Jim Zeppieri completed the last step of my crazy scheme to catch water off of Septa’s 46th St. Station. After much negotiation, Septa has agreed to let us catch their roof water and even diverted a pipe out of their industrial drain system, around their building, and into an eleven hundred gallon cistern. But with as exciting as that was, we still needed to get the water up the hill.

So Jim and I did some research and found a great solar water pump system. Basically, we run a hose out of a nozzle attachment on the bottom of the cistern. Gravity pushes the water through into a mechanical pump, which sucks the water through and then pushes the water into an irrigation line that runs to a nozzle on the top of our hill. The nozzle attaches to an irrigation hose system on site between our rows, and there we have it.

Now you may ask yourself, how is the electric for the pump supplied. So, we bought a 15 watt solar panel that hooks up to a car battery through an amperage meter and an inverter with a plug that you connect the pump to. We should be able to store enough juice to run the pump on the sunny days when we need it.

So this year, rather than a dry, depressing harvest, we’ll have the bounty we need for our growers co-op well into the Fall and ready for next years thanksgiving. But that’s not to say we didn’t feed people. We have fed six families up until this week with our Neighborhood CSA pilot program. But with this water hookup, hopefully we’ll be feeding sixty.

But until then, give plenty of thanks tomorrow, eat plenty of food, and this is the note from the Urban Homestead.

What’s in the ground:

So as some of you may have noticed, this blog is being posted every two weeks as the season slows down. It’s funny, because I find it easier to write when I’m out in the garden everyday, and I actually feel like I have less time now. But that’s this trick of any good gardener. The winter is not to turn the mind off, but to focus on it more, reflect, and start mapping out the building projects you can do this winter to get your garden going for the next season. So expect to see that on this blog for the winter. But for now I’ll leave you with one last little tip as you look upon your hopefully farbric covered plants and cover cropped rows. It’s totally cool to let those root veggies like potatoes, beets, carrots, ect. just sit in the soil until the first frosts come. And even for a little after. What you don’t want is for them to freeze in the soil, but a little frost won’t hurt. If you don’t have a root cellar, then I wouldn’t suggest pulling them out. Leave them in this natural refrigerator, have a little bit more fun, and we’ll pick up on it next season.

What’s going on in sustainability:

So with that farewell, I’ll take up just a bit more of your time with an announcement. I am the proud owner of a waste veggie oil powered 1981 VW rabbit pick up. Aside from this being such a cool little truck, it also gets about 50 miles to the gallon on veggie oil or bio diesel. On the inaugural ride from the shop, Mr. Rob Berliner switched the tank to veggie and cruised all the way from Coatesville from where we purchased it over at our good friends at Waste Oil Recyclers.

The truck needs a little bit of work, but as it goes with most sustainable things, they often do. As I say, we don’t do these things because they’re easy, we do them because know-how is worth more than convenience. But the system is very cool. Basically I have a tank in the back of the truck for veggie oil that is hooked to fuel lines to my engine. I have to start the truck with bio diesel and then switch over to veggie oil once the engine is hot enough. You can’t start a car on veggie oil. But I’m in luck, because right down the street from me is the community metal shop where they are brewing b-100 bio diesel and I plan to get my grease from the Vietnamese restaurant across the street.

Once I get it on the road I will certainly be giving fun little updates of my adventures with this type of vehicle, but I’m really excited to have it. Even though research is still being done on the effects of emissions from these vehicles, I can finally use a car and not feel guilty about burning gas that has been determined to cause greenhouse gases and is putting a strain on this world to produce. Just another step towards sustainability.

Also, please check out this month’s GRID if you missed the Harvest Tour. I got a good article in it about the boys. Until then, this is the note from the Urban Homestead.